Go There To Know There

Born Elaine Potter in St. John's Antigua, to a homemaker and carpenter, Jamaica Kincaid was the oldest child of four children and the only daughter. Having had her mother to herself for the first nine years of her life, Kincaid reportedly felt 'abandoned' by her mother by the time her three brothers came along (1). The author was educated in the British Colonial system, Antigua having remained a British colony until 1981. According to one source, Kincaid's traditional parents forbade her to pursue a career in writing--her chosen vocation, and at the age of seventeen, she was sent to the U.S. to work as an au pair. It was at this time in her life that she began to write professionally. William Shawn of the New Yorker hired her as a staff writer in 1976. She would leave the New Yorker in 1996, when the magazine became less literary and more focused on celebrities.  Though critics observe that Kincaid's writing has been labeled "angry," Kincaid herself regard...

    Ralph Ellison 1914-1994 Born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1914, Ralph Ellison was still just a young child when the Harlem Renaissance began to emerge on the national scene, and a teenager when the era had begun to dwindle; however, he was a Renaissance Man in quite another sense--as Gates points out. While still a child he became interested in music, learning to play the trumpet among other instruments. Ellison's artistic interests expanded at Tuskegee Institute, where he discovered a love of literature and applied art. However, his time at Tuskegee was cut short, Gates adds, due to funding, and the fact that Ellison became disillusioned by Tuskegee and found it "anti-intellectual and overly accommodationist." He soon found new horizons in New York, where he was introduced to author Richard Wright. The two writers became friends immediately, and several of Ellison's work was published with Wright's encouragement" (Gates, et al. 1535). Though E...

During Spring Break, 2017, from March 5th until March 12th, I had the rare privilege of visiting Havana, Cuba. Through the International Studies program at Southwest Tennessee Community College and that of the University of Memphis, I accompanied my five students and a colleague to the little island in the Caribbean, where, depending where you look, time has virtually stopped. Only recently, in the last few years of Fidel Castro's reign, were educators, doctors, and politicians from the United States permitted to visit there. The island of Cuba is gradually opening itself up to commercial tourism with a wary eye. Perhaps one of the most fascinating and memorable experiences I had on this week-long odyssey was my introduction to Santeria, Cuba's national religion. Santeria, like other syncretic religions (Obeah, Pokemania, Myal, and Vodu) synthesizes Catholic elements with those of primarily West Afric...