diaspora dialogue
This message came a few days ago–so exciting to know the web really is world-wide! Here’s something to add to our earlier conversation about neo-slave narratives:
Hi Zetta,
I have Google Alerts set to ‘Slave Trade, Fiction’ and that led me to your thoughtful recent blog piece on neo-slave narratives and then to your website. I’ve been invited to join a panel at a conference at the University of Toronto, 20-23 May. The conference title is Tales of Slavery: Narratives of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Enslavement in Africa. Our panel has been asked to discuss How Novelists Recreate Past Slaveries. I’ll be joining Lawrence Hill, Yvette Christiansë (perhaps) and U. of Toronto historian Natalie Davis (Slaves on Screen) with Ato Quayson, Director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto in the chair. The conference website is at http://www.yorku.ca/tubman/ConferencesWorkshops/Talesofslavery_En/slaverytales/index.html
I plan to talk about two out-of-print novels, Judith Gleason’s Agõtime, Her Legend and Harold Courlander’s The African, as well as my own novel, Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Kofi Anyidoho, Professor of English at the University of Ghana, will talk about Ama in an earlier session.
Maybe you know about all this already. Either way I hope we’ll have a chance to say hallo.
Best wishes,
Manu Herbstein
Accra, Ghana
“I am a human being; I am a woman; I am a black woman; I am an African. Once I was free; then I was captured and became a slave; but inside me, I have never been a slave, inside me here and here, I am still a free woman.” In the course of four hundred years some twelve million Africans were forcibly transported across the Atlantic to serve European settlers and their descendants. Only the barest fragments of their stories have survived. Manu Herbstein’s ambitious, meticulously researched and moving novel sets out to recreate one of these lives, following Ama, its eponymous heroine, from her home in the Sahel, through Kumase at the height of Asante power, and Elmina, centre of the Dutch slave trade, to a sugar plantation in Brazil. “This is story telling on a grand scale,” writes Tony Simões da Silva. “In Ama, Herbstein creates a work of literature that celebrates the resilience of human beings while denouncing the inscrutable nature of their cruelty. By focusing on the brutalisation of Ama’s body, and on the psychological scars of her experiences, Herbstein dramatises the collective trauma of slavery through the story of a single African woman. Ama echoes the views of writers, historians and philosophers of the African diaspora who have argued that the phenomenon of slavery is inextricable from the deepest foundations of contemporary western civilisation.”
The novel’s companion website, www.ama.africatoday.com
won the SABC’s Award for Innovative Use of New Media at the 2003 Highway Africa conference.
Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade by Manu Herbstein
paperback – 375 pages; published by Picador Africa; ISBN: 1770100032
Winner of the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book
www.commonwealthwriters.com
Nominated for the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Companion web-site: www.ama.africatoday.com
2003 Highway Africa/SABC Award for Innovative Use of New Media
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