[Rosa Guy]'s personal life odyssey has been a major influence on the scope and tone of her writing. Upon arriving in the United States with her parents in the early 1930's and moving to Harlem at the age of eight, Rosa became a prolific observer of African-American culture and the forces that shape its existence in American society. Guy's novels have explored the stifling consequences of poverty in settings as far away as the Caribbean, or as near as New York's Harlem. Once it is published, her newest novel from Dutton Press, The Sun, The Sea, A Touch of the Wind will join an impressive body of literary material authored by Ms. Guy that include: Bird At My Window; A Measure of Time; And Then She Heard A Bird Sing; Edith Jackson; Ruby; Children of the Longing; and Music of Summer.
Portuguese and Spanish slavers supplied the Americas with "los Negros," the Blacks. Only those young and strong, impervious to European disease and able to withstand months of torturous living packed in the cruel quarters of slave shipholds survived the middle passage. Those who arrived, stunned and malnourished, lost in a foreign land, were easy prey to the slavers. Removed from a world that had nourished them, left to the mercy of those whose own lack of humanity prevented the recognition of theirs, they were utterly dependent and at the mercy of their captors. Vestiges of racism threaten to dismantle further progress in South America, as they do here. The prophecies of Willie Lynch, a slave owner who created a divisive plan to keep Blacks separate by fostering dissent among them, are coming true. Lynch outlined the differences in physical characteristics among the slaves-skin shade, hair texture, height, etc. By playing up these differences, Lynch promised, "The Black slave, after receiving this indoctrination, shall carry on and will become self-refueling and self-generating for hundreds of years, maybe thousands." Throughout North and South America, Lynch's plan lives on. Color lines rule, with the predominantly European strains remaining in power, and those of darker skin and crisper hair texture continue to be oppressed. It is a chilling reality that echoes down from the brutal suppression of the native peoples of Chiapas to the continued repression of Mexicans here and in their own country, to the harsh discrimination shown the Blacks of Brazil and America.
Danticat,Edwidge (Author) and New York (Series Editor)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1995
Published:
Vintage Books
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from the impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York to be reunited with her mother, where she gains a legacy of shame that only be healed when she returns to Haiti, to the woman who first reared her., 234 p
Seven members of the Congressional Black Caucus, along with a prominent Central American political leader, have nominated Haitian Pres Jean-Bertrand Aristide for the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize.
iscusses the interpretations of both contemporaries and historians on the amendment presented by Jean Francois Reubell on 15 May 1791 which gave civil and political rights to free men of color living on Santo Domingo
