TAN – The Afro News

Performer Kisseke held the audience captive at Lougheed Town Center BHM Photo By KMG

By Djami Diallo ,The Afro News Burnaby : It was a rainy, cold and gray day typical of Vancouver, but on Saturday, February 27, patrons of Lougheed Town Centre were treated to an exciting celebration of African and Caribbean culture that brought the sunshine in honor of Black History Month. Read the full story

Lesley Lokko’s Novel Sundowners

By Djami Diallo, The Afro News Burnaby  : Rianne, Gabby, Nathalie and Charmaine form an unlikely foursome in Lesley Lokko’s novel Sundowners. Rianne, the daughter of the infamous Marius de Zoete, heiress to the huge de Zoete fortune, is a spoiled brat at best. Read the full story

Dayo Forster’s Reading the Ceiling

By Djami Diallo The Afro News Burnaby

If I had to pick only one word to describe Dayo Forster’s novel, I could not do it. That’s because Reading the Ceiling is not just one thing. It is bold, it is wittingly laugh-out loud, it is smart, realistic, deep, riveting and heart-rending. What grabbed me initially was the fact that this was a story about a young African girl on the verge of womanhood who decided to take her life into her own hands. And not just with an impulsive act of teenage rebellion, but with a decision to find ‘the One’ among a host of three very different characters with whom to transition into womanhood. There’s Reuben, Yuan and Frederick. Read the full story

Dionne Brand’s The Puzzle of Humanity: What We All Long For

Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For

By Djami Diallo The Afro Vancouver

It is essentially the same question we ask ourselves as the clock strikes midnight to announce a new year. What do we wish for? Each year we make resolutions to get fit, be better friends, have more fun, work harder, get better job satisfaction, make more time for the things and the people we love. And each year, well, somehow we come up short despite our best efforts and vow to try again next year. Dionne Brand’s latest novel, What We All Long For gets right at the heart of this very question. She creates a colorful cast of characters in Quy, Tuyen, Carla, Jackie and Oku, whose stories she tells in a cyclical turn. The book opens with a description of the city taken with the passing of the seasons: winter, spring and weekday mornings on a subway train. Mundane scenes abound in this novel, but it is Brand’s eye for the detail of the everyday which we often miss that makes these scenes so real. We first find Tuyen, Oku and Carla in the ever familiar setting of the subway on a quiet weekday morning. The spotlight is on them in this city, the noisy, laughing, defiant, random trio at the back of the subway. Read the full story

By Djami Diallo The Afro News Burnaby

The last contribution to the literary world that the late Bebe Moore Campbell

 72 Hour Hold. The last contribution to the literary world that the late Bebe Moore Campbell, who lost her battle with brain cancer in 2006, made to the world. I did the one thing we are taught never to do when it comes to literature: I judged a book by its cover. But the book cover donned the image of a young Black girl with her eyes cast partly on the reader and partly in the shadows. Her face with its striking features was captivating to me, but I could also tell it held secrets. If the story was about her, than I wanted to know it. The only way to access this girl’s story however, was through her mother’s own.

Keri Whitmore’s daughter Trina is perfect by her mother’s own admission: her beauty is striking and her standing as a straight-A student would make her the envy of any parent. Keri, who tells Trina’s story is taken with her daughter’s beauty and surprised by the fact that it could not suffice to ease Trina’s way in the world. Keri’s assumption that physical beauty should lead to happiness and perhaps even perfection, is something that makes her immediately realistic to the reader, human. However, she shatters all expectations that this is the story she is going to tell. The moment we meet Keri, we get a sense that her fairytale has long ended. She is walking on eggshells, because her perfect daughter has bipolar disorder. Because at the moment we meet her asleep in her mother’s bed, recalling an earlier angelic version of herself, Trina is a ticking time bomb. One of the indications of this to Keri is Trina’s babyish voice, a red flag that keeps Keri hanging on to her daily routine, to her sense of peace by a thread.

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By Djami Diallo The Afro News Burnaby

Helon Habila’s Measuring Time

His first novel Waiting for an Angel, which was originally published as a collection of short stories won the already accomplished poet and prose fiction writer Helon vingHabila praise and recognition as a contemporary African writer whom, according to the London Times, was able to “filter the political through the personal with such grace”, giving readers a perspective so new it could be compared to a breath of fresh air. Now out with his second novel, Habila has kept in the same vein delivering something that is highly politicized, but equally charming, dramatic, humorous and altogether captivating. Measuring Time takes us to Nigeria where we meet Mamo and LaMamo, mischievous twin boys whose single goal is to make their father pay for his apparent indifference toward them. The book opens with a flashback to the father’s playboy ways and to the night of the twins’ birth. Habila paints the scene perfectly of the stormy winter night and right away we get a sense of the foreboding gloom that is going to follow us as the story unfolds. But if this provokes a shiver of fright in some readers, then others are bound to get hooked to Habila’s storytelling style, not to mention the memorable characters he creates in Mamo and LaMamo, the duo whom we fall in love with from the outset.

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