Black Mamba Boy

Black Mamba Boy PDF Author: Nadifa Mohamed
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429979798
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Yemen, 1935. Jama is a "market boy," a half-feral child scavenging with his friends in the dusty streets of a great seaport. For Jama, life is a thrilling carnival, at least when he can fill his belly. When his mother—alternately raging and loving—dies young, she leaves him only an amulet stuffed with one hundred rupees. Jama decides to spend her life's meager savings on a search for his never-seen father; the rumors that travel along clan lines report that he is a driver for the British somewhere in the north. So begins Jama's extraordinary journey of more than a thousand miles north all the way to Egypt, by camel, by truck, by train, but mostly on foot. He slings himself from one perilous city to another, fiercely enjoying life on the road and relying on his vast clan network to shelter him and point the way to his father, who always seems just a day or two out of reach. In his travels, Jama will witness scenes of great humanity and brutality; he will be caught up in the indifferent, grinding machine of war; he will crisscross the Red Sea in search of working papers and a ship. Bursting with life and a rough joyfulness, Black Mamba Boy is debut novelist Nadifa Mohamed's vibrant, moving celebration of her family's own history.

Black Mamba Boy

Black Mamba Boy PDF Author: Nadifa Mohamed
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429979798
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Get Book Here

Book Description
Yemen, 1935. Jama is a "market boy," a half-feral child scavenging with his friends in the dusty streets of a great seaport. For Jama, life is a thrilling carnival, at least when he can fill his belly. When his mother—alternately raging and loving—dies young, she leaves him only an amulet stuffed with one hundred rupees. Jama decides to spend her life's meager savings on a search for his never-seen father; the rumors that travel along clan lines report that he is a driver for the British somewhere in the north. So begins Jama's extraordinary journey of more than a thousand miles north all the way to Egypt, by camel, by truck, by train, but mostly on foot. He slings himself from one perilous city to another, fiercely enjoying life on the road and relying on his vast clan network to shelter him and point the way to his father, who always seems just a day or two out of reach. In his travels, Jama will witness scenes of great humanity and brutality; he will be caught up in the indifferent, grinding machine of war; he will crisscross the Red Sea in search of working papers and a ship. Bursting with life and a rough joyfulness, Black Mamba Boy is debut novelist Nadifa Mohamed's vibrant, moving celebration of her family's own history.

The Orchard of Lost Souls

The Orchard of Lost Souls PDF Author: Nadifa Mohamed
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374709920
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
From one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists comes The Orchard of Lost Souls, a stunning novel illuminating Somalia's tragic civil war. It is 1987 and Hargeisa waits. Whispers of revolution travel on the dry winds, but still the dictatorship remains secure. Soon, through the eyes of three women, we will see Somalia fall. Nine-year-old Deqo has left the vast refugee camp where she was born, lured to the city by the promise of her first pair of shoes. Kawsar, a solitary widow, is trapped in her little house with its garden clawed from the desert, confined to her bed after a savage beating in the local police station. Filsan, a young female soldier, has moved from Mogadishu to suppress the rebellion growing in the north. As the country is unraveled by a civil war that will shock the world, the fates of these three women are twisted irrevocably together. Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargeisa and was exiled before the outbreak of war. In The Orchard of Lost Souls, she returns to Hargeisa in her imagination. Intimate, frank, brimming with beauty and fierce love, this novel is an unforgettable account of ordinary lives lived in extraordinary times.

Mamba Point

Mamba Point PDF Author: Kurtis Scaletta
Publisher: Yearling Books
ISBN: 037585472X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
After moving with his family to Liberia, twelve-year-old Linus discovers that he and the deadly black mamba have a mystical connection, which he is told will give him some of the snake's characteristics.

The Fortune Men

The Fortune Men PDF Author: Nadifa Mohamed
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0593534360
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • Based on a true event, this novel is “a blues song cut straight from the heart ... about the unjust death of an innocent Black man caught up in a corrupt system” (Walter Mosley, best-selling author of Devil in a Blue Dress). In Cardiff, Wales in 1952, Mahmood Mattan, a young Somali sailor, is accused of a crime he did not commit: the brutal killing of Violet Volacki, a shopkeeper from Tiger Bay. At first, Mahmood believes he can ignore the fingers pointing his way; he may be a gambler and a petty thief, but he is no murderer. He is a father of three, secure in his innocence and his belief in British justice. But as the trial draws closer, his prospect for freedom dwindles. Now, Mahmood must stage a terrifying fight for his life, with all the chips stacked against him: a shoddy investigation, an inhumane legal system, and, most evidently, pervasive and deep-rooted racism at every step. Under the shadow of the hangman's noose, Mahmood begins to realize that even the truth may not be enough to save him. A haunting tale of miscarried justice, this book offers a chilling look at the dark corners of our humanity.

Gorilla Dawn

Gorilla Dawn PDF Author: Gill Lewis
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1481486578
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
-Originally published in Great Britain in 2015 by Oxford University Press.---Verso.

Black Boy [Seventy-fifth Anniversary Edition]

Black Boy [Seventy-fifth Anniversary Edition] PDF Author: Richard Wright
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006302859X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
A special 75th anniversary edition of Richard Wright's powerful and unforgettable memoir, with a new foreword by John Edgar Wideman and an afterword by Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson. When it exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, Black Boy was both praised and condemned. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that “if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy.” Yet from 1975 to 1978, Black Boy was banned in schools throughout the United States for “obscenity” and “instigating hatred between the races.” Wright’s once controversial, now celebrated autobiography measures the raw brutality of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive as a Black boy. Enduring poverty, hunger, fear, abuse, and hatred while growing up in the woods of Mississippi, Wright lied, stole, and raged at those around him—whites indifferent, pitying, or cruel and Blacks resentful of anyone trying to rise above their circumstances. Desperate for a different way of life, he headed north, eventually arriving in Chicago, where he forged a new path and began his career as a writer. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to “hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo.” Seventy-five years later, his words continue to reverberate. “To read Black Boy is to stare into the heart of darkness,” John Edgar Wideman writes in his foreword. “Not the dark heart Conrad searched for in Congo jungles but the beating heart I bear.” One of the great American memoirs, Wright’s account is a poignant record of struggle and endurance—a seminal literary work that illuminates our own time.

Steve Backshall's Deadly 60

Steve Backshall's Deadly 60 PDF Author: Steve Backshall
Publisher: Bloomsbury Wildlife
ISBN: 1472965191
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Steve Backshall embarks on his most daring adventure yet. He has just six months to travel to six continents and find 60 of the deadliest creatures on the planet for the 26-part Children's BBC series of the same name. From lethal beauties to killer beasts, from the unseen to the unexpected, the one thing these creatures have in common is that they are all deadly to other animals. Steve's encounters range from famous killers such as the Black Mamba and the North American Grizzly Bear to less well known but no less deadly animals. He introduces the surreal Pink River Dolphin of Amazonia and captures Australia's elusive Ghost Bat for a closer look. Learn about the ingenious techniques and extraordinary weapons that some of our most dangerous animals are armed with. Including the renowned, the unexpected and the downright bizarre, this companion book to Steve Backshall's high adrenaline tour of the world's most deadly is not to be missed.

Conscripts of Migration

Conscripts of Migration PDF Author: Christopher Ian Foster
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496824237
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
In Conscripts of Migration: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and the Literature of New African Diasporas, author Christopher Ian Foster analyzes increasingly urgent questions regarding crises of global immigration by redefining migration in terms of conscription and by studying contemporary literature. Reporting on immigration, whether liberal or conservative, popular or scholarly, leaves out the history in which the Global North helped create outward migration in the Global South. From histories of racial capitalism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and imperialism to contemporary neoliberal globalization and the resurgence of xenophobic nationalism, countries in the Global North continue to devastate and destabilize the Global South. Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, in different ways, police the effects of their own global policies at their borders. Foster provides a substantial study of a new body of contemporary African diasporic literature called migritude literature. Migritude indicates the work and ideas of a disparate yet distinct group of younger African authors born after independence in the 1960s. Most often migritude authors have lived both in and outside Africa and narrate the experiences of migration under the pressures of globalization. They also emphasize that immigration itself and stereotypes of the immigrant are entangled with the history of colonialism. Authors like Fatou Diome, Shailja Patel, Abdourahman Waberi, Cristina Ali Farah, and others confront critical issues of migrancy, diaspora, departure, return, racism, identity, gender, sexuality, and postcoloniality.

Gendered Violence and Human Rights in Black World Literature and Film

Gendered Violence and Human Rights in Black World Literature and Film PDF Author: Naomi Nkealah
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000367762
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
This book investigates how the intersection between gendered violence and human rights is depicted and engaged with in Africana literature and films. The rich and multifarious range of film and literature emanating from Africa and the diaspora provides a fascinating lens through which we can understand the complex consequences of gendered violence on the lives of women, children and minorities. Contributors to this volume examine the many ways in which gendered violence mirrors, expresses, projects and articulates the larger phenomenon of human rights violations in Africa and the African diaspora and how, in turn, the discourse of human rights informs the ways in which we articulate, interrogate, conceptualise and interpret gendered violence in literature and film. The book also shines a light on the linguistic contradictions and ambiguities in the articulation of gendered violence in private spaces and war. This book will be essential reading for scholars, critics, feminists, teachers and students seeking solid grounding in exploring gendered violence and human rights in theory and practice.

Postcolonial Poetics

Postcolonial Poetics PDF Author: Elleke Boehmer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319903411
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Postcolonial Poetics is about how we read postcolonial and world literatures today, and about how the structures of that writing shape our reading. The book’s eight chapters explore the ways in which postcolonial writing in English from various 21st-century contexts, including southern and West Africa, and Black and Asian Britain, interacts with our imaginative understanding of the world. Throughout, the focus is on reading practices, where reading is taken as an inventive, border-traversing activity, one that postcolonial writing with its interests in margins, intersections, subversions, and crossings specifically encourages. This close, sustained focus on reading, reception, and literariness is an outstanding feature of the study, as is its wide generic range, embracing poetry, essays, and life-writing, as well as fiction. The field-defining scholar Elleke Boehmer holds that literature has the capacity to keep reimagining and refreshing how we understand ourselves in relation to the world and to some of the most pressing questions of our time, including resistance, reconciliation, survival after terror, and migration.