A Drop of Midnight: A Memoir

Posted in Autobiography, Biography, Books, Europe, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Slavery on 2022-02-26 21:15Z by Steven

A Drop of Midnight: A Memoir

Amazon Crossing
2020-03-01
304 pages
5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1542017077
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1542016704
Audio CD ISBN: 978-1799726296

Jason Diakité

Rachel Willson-Broyles (Translator)

World-renowned hip-hop artist Jason “Timbuktu” Diakité’s vivid and intimate journey through his own and his family’s history―from South Carolina slavery to twenty-first-century Sweden.

Born to interracial American parents in Sweden, Jason Diakité grew up between worlds―part Swedish, American, black, white, Cherokee, Slovak, and German, riding a delicate cultural and racial divide. It was a no-man’s-land that left him in constant search of self. Even after his hip-hop career took off, Jason fought to unify a complex system of family roots that branched across continents, ethnicities, classes, colors, and eras to find a sense of belonging.

In A Drop of Midnight, Jason draws on conversations with his parents, personal experiences, long-lost letters, and pilgrimages to South Carolina and New York to paint a vivid picture of race, discrimination, family, and ambition. His ancestors’ origins as slaves in the antebellum South, his parents’ struggles as an interracial couple, and his own world-expanding connection to hip-hop helped him fashion a strong black identity in Sweden.

What unfolds in Jason’s remarkable voyage of discovery is a complex and unflinching look at not only his own history but also that of generations affected by the trauma of the African diaspora, then and now.

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A Storm Blew in from Paradise

Posted in Africa, Biography, Books, Media Archive, Novels on 2020-01-27 02:05Z by Steven

A Storm Blew in from Paradise

World Editions
2019-11-05
252 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-64286-044-3
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-64286-051-1

Johannes Anyuru
Translated by: Rachel Willson-Broyles

A storm blew in from paradise. That storm was life.’

P’s greatest dream is to fly. While training to become a Ugandan fighter pilot in an academy outside Athens, the 1971 Idi Amin coup in his homeland, Uganda, disrupts his plans. He defects and becomes a man on the run. In this extraordinary novel based on his own father’s fate, Anyuru evokes P’s struggles in gorgeous, vivid prose. As a refugee, as a military-camp prisoner, and as an exile, P never gives up hope and continues to dream of a life as a pilot. Told across two generations in a language that simmers with lyrical longing, this search for identity and purpose soars from a world in which nowhere is home.

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