ON OCTOBER 3, 2008, THE ICWT screened U-Carmen Ekhayelitsha, an adaptation of Bizet’s Carmen, set in South Africa in Xhosa with English, subtitles in Winifred Smith Hall, Claire Trevor School of the Arts. We were fortunate to have present for the screening, Pauline Malefane, who plays Carmen, “a sensual, all-powerful femme fatale who drags a chain of smitten lovers in her wake, but who is lured into an affair with one man with the willpower to resist her charms: an officer of the law.” After the film, David Theo Goldberg, Director of UCHRI, moderated a q&a session in which Malefane talked about her training as an opera singer and actress, the excitement of filming “U-Carmen” in Ekhayelitsha as well as the challenges of singing the opera – both finding the right words and using translations to do it – in Xhosa.
The screening was presented in conjunction with the Conference on African and Afro-Caribbean Performance hosted by UC Berkeley in September 2008, and was co-sponsored by the Consortium for the Arts at UC Berkeley and the UC Institute for Research in the Arts.
Top row: Film screening poster; actress Pauline Malefane;
David Theo Goldberg and Pauline Malefane during q&a; still from U-Carmen
Second row: Malefane answers questions from the audience; still from U-Carmen;
audience members, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Malefane
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U-CARMEN EKHAYELITSHA
2005
Directed by Mark Dornford-May
Produced by Koch Lorber Films
Winner of the 2005 GOLDEN BEAR AWARD FOR BEST FILM at the Berlin Film Festival
Click here to purchase U-Carmen at Amazon.com
HARDHEADED WEATHER
PUTNAM ADULT, 2008
The selected poems draw from Eady’s excellent body of work, including his astonishing unpublished manuscript The Modern World. From the outset, he has written about race, family, jazz, and even poetry itself with a voice that is uniquely his own: intelligent and elegant yet informed by street idiom, angry but never didactic. The way he weaves together these subtle juxtapositions with his signature inventiveness, honesty, and verve once again proves Kirkus Reviews’ declaration that “Eady’s touch is masterly.” These poems present the best of his work, and, taken as a whole, form a moving—and sometimes searing—testament to the power of poetry. (SOURCE: BLUE FLOWER ARTS, LLC)
Click here to purchase a copy at Penguin.com
Click here to listen to Cornelius Eady on NPR.org
(National Public Radio)
ABOUT THE WRITER
Christina Kapucija is a fourth-year English major at UCI.
BLACK WRITERS SERIES
www.humanities.uci.edu/icwt/bws
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You run in an/ Old story, now you learn/ Your name. “The Wrong Street”
He wants to give you/ The weight he has built, penny/ By penny. “Thrift”
This/ Is his only way out:/ To decode/ What nags/ At his breath,/ To have his tongue/ Own the name/ Of what it chases. “The Sheets of Sound”
From The Gathering of my Name
CORNELIUS EADY'S VISIT on November 17 was the inaugural event of the Black Writers Series, which features accomplished poets, fiction, and non-fiction writers. Eady has published seven books of poetry in the past 28 years, including: Kartunes, (Warthog Press, 1980), Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, (Ommation Press, 1986), The Gathering of My Name, (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1991), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, You Don’t Miss Your Water, (Henry Holt and Co., 1995), The Autobiography of a Jukebox (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1997), and Brutal Imagination (Putnam, 2001), finalist for the National Book Award in poetry, and most recently, Hardheaded Weather (Putnam Adult, 2008).
Eady’s poetry explores facets of human life within the environment we have constructed. Our stories are told through our homes, our possessions, the buildings we frequent, and the things we produce. The objects in Eady’s poems take on human significance because they constitute the myth of human worth and purpose. They mediate our relationship to the “natural” world and, since they are shaped by human hands, contribute to the sense that we are overseers of the world, manufacturers of meaning. These objects become a language through which we tell our stories. Eady’s earlier poetry, The Gathering of my Name, in particular, focuses on the human need to shape our environment to ourselves, to carve out a space and to name it. The poetry in this collection has a musical quality and draws on musicians like John Coltrane and Hank Mobley; Eady emphasizes the connection between music and the body, the way a guitar or a trumpet seems to take on the life of the musician in a “conversation/ Of fingers and tongues” (“Muddy Waters and the Chicago Blues”). His later work, like Hardheaded Weather, sheds light on the resemblances between people; though at some point we all want to assert our individuality, to call attention to our differences, we all engage in the myth-making process of mapping our lives through our environment.
At the Monday event, Eady read primarily from Brutal Imagination, the first part of which is built on a rhetorical dialogue between Susan Smith, the mother who accused a “black man” of kidnapping her children, satisfying, in Eady’s words, the human “mythical need” to create a scapegoat, and the speaker, who we are invited to identify with the poet. He read the poems in a theatrical, storytelling way, with the aim of communicating their emotional and intellectual weight. After the reading, when asked about his writing process Eady said that “we all need to be alert to what happens in the world” and to get that down; whatever crosses our path, we must “get that story down.” Eady argued that he feels an obligation to his community and to his parents because they are a part of his story. We all have a story to tell, shaped by our social and racial position. Though other people will try to assert their voices over yours, you must “negotiate a space for writing,” even act like a “jerk” to assert your space to write. And Eady has been helping to create space for other writers for years. In 1996, Cornelius Eady, along with Toi Derricotte, founded Cave Canem, an organization for young black poets that offers summer retreats, regional workshops, readings and events throughout the country designed to support young black poets as they develop their craft, and get their voices out.
This event was supported by the UCI School of Humanities and Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant from The James Irvine Foundation. Co-sponsored by the UCI Department of English and UCI Bookstore.
Third row: Cornelius Eady reads from his new collection of poems; Reading audience at the introduction; Eady; book signing
Fourth row: Eady; reading audience; Eady signs a copy of his Brutal Imagination; Moderator Frank B. Wilderson, III |
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