Light-skinned-ed Girl

Heidi Durrow Wins Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change

Remember that little post back in January about celebrating the in-between?  Well today, I am celebrating BIG TIME!  (The) Barbara Kingsolver  called me to say that I have won the Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change.  My novel, Light-skinned-ed Girl, will be published by Algonquin Books Fall 2009.  Yeah buddy!  Whoo-hoo!  Whoo-hoo!  I am doing the happy muppet dance!  I can’t stop smiling.  I am so happy and so grateful.

The Bellwether Prize is awarded in even-numbered years to an unpublished first novel of social importance.  This is what Barbara Kingsolver says about the Prize:

“Fiction has a unique capacity to bring difficult issues to a broad readership on a personal level, creating empathy in a reader’s heart for the theoretical stranger. Its capacity for invoking moral and social responsibility is enormous. Throughout history, every movement toward a more peaceful and humane world has begun with those who imagined the possibilities. The Bellwether Prize seeks to support the imagination of humane possibilities."

Many of you may have heard recently about Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan, the 2006 winner of the Bellwether Prize.  I urge you to read it.  It’s a beautifully written book.  I’ve also just picked up and am enjoying The Book of Dead Birds by Gayle Brandeis.  The other Bellwether Prize books are: Kissing the Virgin's Mouth, by Donna Gershten, and Correcting the Landscape, by Marjorie Kowalski Cole.  I am eager to read those books too.

Of course, I will keep you posted on MY book’s publication progress.  And of course, I hope you will all be eager to buy it as well!  I’ve got books to sell folks!  But for now, a glass of champagne.  And a toast.  To dreams coming true.  Skoal!  (If you'd like to hear a little bit of the story, visit my website where you can download the audio of my University of Copenhagen reading.)

Photo by Gaetan Lee.

Mixed Experience History Month 2008 Recap

We’ve come to the end of the 2^nd Annual Mixed Experience History Month.  I hope you found some worthwhile bit of information in this month’s profiles.  If you're just tuning in now, here are some of the month's highlights: naturalist John James Audubon; sculptor Isamu Noguchi; wife/activist Mildred Loving; and artist Wifredo Lam.  In sum, there are 20 people profiles and one of a place.  Check it out!

 

I’m happily exhausted from all of the homework this project required.  Many of the subjects were new to me too.  Also, the research proved more difficult than I expected, in large part because, the subjects’ mixedness had often been erased.  In many instances, people were described as African-American, but with a father of Swedish descent or some other Nordic country.  I took that to mean they had a white father—though of course, I KNOW that is changing—vive la change!  Or the subject might be described as Japanese-American with a white mother.  Sounds mixed to me.

 

I can imagine that many may feel uneasy that I am claiming these great minority historical figures as Mixed rather than Asian-American or African-American.  In response I can only say: I am not hoping to wrestle great historical figures from African-American, Native American, Hispanic American or Asian-American history.  My hope is to simply show that we have long been a nation of multiracial individuals—multiracial and multicultural individuals of achievement (not tragic mulattoes).  Multiracial folks didn’t just show up in the 1960s in an age of Free Love! 

The importance of “knowing your history” is widely accepted.  It should be true for multiracial and multicultural people too.  Most importantly, I hope to show through these portraits that our history—as one people—is very much a common one.

Finally, my apologies to those of you who nominated someone for inclusion in the profiles who didn't.  One nomination did not qualify because the subject is still alive and kicking—novelist: Jackie Kay.  But Kay deserves a mention because her work is extraordinary.  Make sure to read her book Trumpet!  The other nominations I will save for next year.  And oh yeah, what about the name for the month?  Mixed Experience History Month isn’t very catchy.  Suggestions?

Rosina Downs & Rebecca Huger, "white" slaves: Mixed Experience History Month

Abolitionists used appearances by white-looking slaves to press the cause for the slaves' freedom.  Rosina Downs, known as Rosa, was one of five children and three adults freed at the city of New Orleans by Union Major General N.P. Banks in 1863. Downs and other white-looking slave children were photographed and were taken to northern cities for appearances. The children's appearance troubled notions of racial difference and fostered an unease laced with fascination among white, northern viewers.  Cartes de visite of slave Rebecca Huger, an 11-year-old who by all appearances seems white, were a reminder to people that the slave laws might at some point enslave "whites" as well.  You can read more about the ways in which Rebecca and others like her were used by abolitionists to promote freedom for all here.

Carl Van Vechten, author & photographer: Mixed Experience History Month

Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) was a journalist, novelist and important promoter of Harlem Renaissance authors.  Van Vechten moved to New York City in 1906 and worked as an assistant music critic at the New York Times.  In 1909, he became the first American modern dance critic.  He published his first novel, Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works, in 1922.  Van Vechten played a central role in promoting Harlem Renaissance writers including Nella Larsen and Langston Hughes.  Van Vechten received much criticism from the black community when he published Nigger Heaven in 1926.  His detractors considered the book exploitative of the Harlem community that had welcomed him and the title was considered offensive.  Among his supporters, however, were many prominient African-Americans including James Weldon Johnson who wrote that Van Vechten had “taken the material [Harlem] had offered him and achieved the most revealing, significant and powerful novel based on Negro life yet written.”  In the 1930s, Van Vechten took up photography.  He photographed the most famous people of his day including Eugene O’Neill and Tallulah Bankhead, and dozens of important Harlem Renaissance figures.  Van Vechten died in 1964 leaving behind a rich collection of writing and photographs for future study.

Bronzeville/Little Tokyo--Mixed Experience History Month

Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo was once a thriving African-American neighborhood.  Bronzeville, as it was called during World War II, became home to hundreds of African-Americans when, in the Spring of 1942, the United States government forcibly put people of Japanese descent into concentration camps.  Restrictive covenants prevented the new black Los Angelenos from living in white areas, but Little Tokyo welcomed them.  According to a Nichi Bei Times article, today “[n]o trace remains of the Finale Club where Charlie Parker showed off his musical talents, nor of Shepp’s Playhouse where Judy Garland, Gene Kelly and others from white Hollywood hobnobbed with the likes of Herb Jeffries, Eddie Heywood and Coleman Hawkins.”

 

One African-American who lived in Bronzeville as a child remembered clearing out the family garage in order to store the belongings of their incarcerated Japanese-American friends during the war.

 

The great influx of African-Americans made the area population swell from 30,000 to 80,000 causing overcrowding and slum conditions.  After the war, Japanese Americans returned to the area and bought businesses from the African-American owners.  Slowly, the face of Bronzeville changed again.  More information is available at www.bronzeville-LA.com.

George Schuyler, journalist and author: Mixed Experience History Month

George Schuyler (1895-1977) was an African-American journalist and author.  He began his journalism career at the Pittsburgh Courier in 1924 writing a weekly column.  Two years later he became the newspaper's chief editorial writer.  In 1927, he married a wealthy white heiress, Josephine Cogdell.  Schuyler published his first book, Black No More, in 1931.  The satiric story of a black scientist who has created a method to make black people white skewered both black uplift groups as well as white supremacists for obsessing over race.  Schuyler also published his autobiography in 1966 titled Black and Conservative.  In it he wrote: "At best, race is a superstition.  There will be no color war here if we will and work not to have one, although some kind of color line there may always be, as there is elsewhere in the world.  We do not need to share the wealth as much as we need to share our heritage so that all may proudly claim ownership in it.  We need to strive to become one people in our resolution, determination, and achievement instead of two peoples, colored and white."  Schuyler was the father of Philippa Schuyler, a biracial piano prodigy and journalist.  (Alicia Keys is set to star in a movie about Philippa's life.)

Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival June 12-14, 2008 Los Angeles

We, at Mixed Chicks Chat, are counting down the days to what will be an historic event.  We are hosting the first-ever Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival June 12-14, 2008, at the Japanese American National Museum, 369 East First Street.  All the events are FREE.

This Festival is inclusive: We are celebrating ALL the stories of the Mixed experience. 

Meet the artists and organizers on our Festival blog.  You don't want to miss this event. 

Pre-registration is strongly encouraged at www.mixedrootsfilmandliteraryfestival.org.  We're looking forward to seeing you there!

On Loving

"Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary.  What we need is to love without getting tired." -Mother Teresa

Alexandre Dumas, author: Mixed Experience History Month

A nod to Undercover Black Man who nominated the subject of today's Mixed Experience History Month. 

Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) was the acclaimed author of The Three Musketeers, and The Count of Monte Cristo, among many other timeless novels and plays.  Dumas was the grandson of a French nobleman and an Afro-Carribbean former slave.  Raised by his widowed mother, Dumas grew up in poverty.  He developed a love for reading and books as a child despite his poor education.  At 20, Dumas moved to Paris and began writing plays.  He met great success as a playwright and soon began writing novels.  In 1843, Dumas addressed issues of mixed-race identity in a novella, Georges.  Of his own Mixed experience, he reportedly said:  "It is true. My father was a mulatto, my grandmother was a negress, and my great-grandparents were monkeys. In short, sir, my pedigree begins where yours ends."

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis: Mixed Experience History Month

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) is regarded as Brazil's greatest novelist.  He was the son of a mulatto house painter and a Portugese woman, and the grandson of freed slaves.  Raised by his step-mother, a mulatto cook, Machado received little formal education.  It was during the years he worked as a salesman and proofreader, he started writing stories, poems and novels.  In his twenties, he began to gain fame as a poet.  In total, he wrote nine novels, eight short-story collections, four volumes of poetry, 13 plays and many critical essays.  His 1881 novel Posthumous Reminiscences of Bras Cuba in which the narrator tells the story of his life after his death was a break from his previous work and now the kind of writing for which he is most known.  "His use of an unreliable first-person narrator, multiple perspectives, philosophical speculations, self-consciousness, and other experimentations with literary techniques also anticipated the 20th-century avant-garde."  His writing which has been called "sceptical, ironic, comedic [and] ultimately pessimistic" became a major influence on writers such as Nobel Winner Jose Saramago, and Carlos Fuentes.  Machado died in 1908.