"I say that I'm Haitian first, and then we go from there," said Patrick Marcelin, the U.S.-born son of Haitian immigrants who raps in Creole and English as "Mecca a.k.a. Grimo." "I just happened to be born in America, but really I'm a Haitian brother. And Haiti is the direct daughter of Africa." The Black History Months he remembers studying never mentioned Haiti's history, even though Haiti was a destination for Black Americans searching for their cultural roots. Marcelin now also teaches in the Haitian Heritage Museum's school outreach program, exposing students to the American history he never learned. For example, when talking about writers from the Harlem Renaissance, Marcelin points out that [Zora Neale Hurston] wrote her novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God" in Haiti in the 1930s, and the poet [Langston Hughes] wrote admiringly of the Haitian peasants who walked down mountain roads barefoot, balancing baskets on their heads, to sell their wares. "They should have been teaching this in school, that soldiers from Haiti came to fight in the American Revolution," Marcelin said. "I read about [Frederick Douglass] in the history books but I don't remember anything about him being the ambassador to Haiti. Or that the founder of Chicago was a Haitian brother."
"While plotting out the journeys that paved the way for their creative and innovative work in Afro-Cuban and African American ethnography, this study will address their bifocal vision as insider-outsiders within the minority cultures they represent in folktales and within the 'foreign' cultures to which they traveled. Cabrera's and Hurston's roles as 'native ethnographers' will also be considered. In creating alternatives to traditional ethnographies, such as Franz Boas's Bella Bella Tales (1932), their collections can be understood as early examples of experimental and feminist ethnography." (author)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
371 p, Reconstructs the events, relationships, and achievements that marked the life of the black novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist, assessing her important works and commitment to the black folk tradition. Includes chapter "Voodoo gods and biblical men."
Glassman,Steve (Editor) and Seidel,Kathryn Lee (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
1991
Published:
Orlando, FL: University of Central Florida Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
197 p, Zora in Florida focuses on the place that nurtured and inspired her work, the frontier wilderness of central Florida and the all-black town of Eatonville. Two chapters are devoted to her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, set almost entirely in Florida. Includes Barbara Speisman's "Voodoo as symbol in Jonah's gourd vine." Also treats Hurston's lesser-known works such as Tell My Horse, her first-person account of fieldwork in Haiti.
