According to Sandy

Reminder: Los Angeles will host its popular Black Book Expo again this year on Saturday 8/21 at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel. This one day event will offer “authors, storytellers, spoken word and poetry performances, musicians, exhibitors, children’s book authors, emerging writers, publishers, booksellers, panel discussions, editors, book reviewers…”

The Los Angeles Black Book Expo (LABBX)* August 21st * 11:00-5:00

“I Paint My House” by Margaret Courtney-Clarke is a collection of photographs of African women decorating their homes. In addition to pottery and textiles, there is a South and West African tradition of painting the outside of the house with bold shapes and bright colors. The women not only express themselves, but also document family history through their art and design.

Ms Courtney-Clarke has also produced coffee table sized books filled with her photographs of the bright geometric designs of Berber and Ghanaian women such as “African Canvas: The Art of West African Women”.

BTW: “I Paint My House” is actually a book of postcards. But, the murals and decorations are so vibrant and alive, I haven’t mailed any. (I don’t want to tear any of the cards out.)

Lura sings the music of Cape Verde, an island off the west coast of Africa which declared independence from Portugal in 1975.

Singing both in Portuguese, and in the language of her small country, she mixes some of the musical traditions, like “Morna”, with a more contemporary, urban sound.  Different from the better known tragic, emotional Portuguese “Fado” songs, the music from the Cape Verde interior catches you up in its smooth, jazz-like rhythms.

“Di Kopu ku Alma” (Of Body & Soul)

Writer, story teller and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, 1891 – 1960, started to publish right after the height of the Harlem Renaissance.  The ability to support oneself with art that explored the African-American experience waned with the onset of the depression and she fell into obscurity until re discovered by Alice Walker (“The Color Purple”).

Her work gained attention again with the introduction of college Black literature classes during the 70”s.  She was found and embraced by a whole new generation (including me). Her novels, short stories and poetry are now also taught in women’s studies and general literature courses.

Ms Hurston studied cultural anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University.  As a “folklorist”, she wrote and sang in the rural style and dialect of the people she remembered from the all black town of Eaton, FL where she was born and of the folks she met while traveling across the south.

Perhaps her most famous book, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, 1937, is about “Janie”, who managed to make her way thru life and find love during a time and in a place very difficult for a woman’s survival. (This was made into a TV movie a few years ago with Halle Berry)

This past January, there was a  “Zora” Festival in her hometown of Eatonville, Florida. Zora Neale Hurston’s life and work were celebrated with readings, panel discussions, local refreshments and a concert – folks being folks (she would have liked that).

“I Bring What I Love” – is a documentary film about Youssou N’Dour, the pop music superstar from Senegal, West Africa.

N’ Dour is revered all across Africa for his “remarkable range and poise and for his prodigious musical intelligence as a writer, bandleader and producer. He absorbs the entire Senegalese musical spectrum in his work, often filtering it through the lens of genre-defying rock or pop music from outside his culture. N’Dour has made “mbalax”—a blend of Senegal’s traditional griot percussion and praise-singing with Afro-Cuban music—famous throughout the world during more than 20 years of recording and touring outside of Senegal with his band, The Super Étoile”.

The director of  “I Bring What I Love”,  Elizabeth Chai Vasahelyi, followed the singer for 2 years through Africa, Europe and the U.S. to bring us a picture of this super talented and complex man that spread  the music and rhythms of his homeland worldwide.