Through a single descendant’s voice that speaks to the Sámi diaspora, this collection of poems is a journey through colonialism, transgenerational trauma, and identity. Many have heard of the Sámi reindeer herders brought to Alaska by Sheldon Jackson in the 1800s, but not much is known about the Sámi diaspora experiences in the state and beyond. The poems in Old Woman with Berries in Her Lap use the North Sámi language as well as graphics and various types of poetry to tell these stories of migration and diaspora. Vivian Faith Prescott’s use of language is both a celebration of the richness of the Sámi languages and a mourning of the loss of language that occurs when a population is displaced and forced to exist in a totally foreign language space. According to Sámilinguist, professor, and politician Ole Henrik Magga, the Sámi languages have “very easily . . . one thousand lexemes with connections to snow, ice, freezing, and melting.” These lexemes frame many of Prescott’s poems, introducing ideas and feelings around the loss of language and culture. A compelling insight into the Sámi culture from a contemporary poet’s eye, Old Woman with Berries in Her Lap juxtaposes past and present in an act of reclamation.
Thirteen anthropologists, including Claude Levi-Strauss, Dell Hymes, and Edmund R. Leach, examine myths, rituals, fold dramas, folk tales, riddles, and folk songs, all in the context of the cultures in which they occur.
"I think Peter Dickinson is hands down the best stylist as a writer and the most interesting storyteller in my genre." —Sara Paretsky, author of Breakdown Praise for The Poison Oracle: "I have no idea if any of this talk and ac-tion is authentic, and I don't care. Either way it's marvellous."—Rex Stout "Intelligent, elegantly written . . . a thoroughly enjoyable read."—Sunday Times Praise for Peter Dickinson's mysteries: "He is the true original, a superb writer who revitalises the traditions of the mystery genre . . . incapable of writing a trite or inelegant sentence . . . a mas-ter."—P. D. James "Consummate storytelling skill."—Peter Lovesey Take a medieval Arab kingdom, add a ruler who wants to update the kingdom's educational facilities, include an English research psycholinguist (an Oxford classmate of the ruler) invited to pursue his work on animal communication, and then add a touch of chaos in Dinah, a chimpanzee who has begun to learn to form coherent sentences with plastic symbols. When a murder is committed in the oil-rich marshes, Dinah is the only witness, and Morris has to go into the marshes to dis-cover the truth. The Poison Oracle is a novel of its time that exposes in the everyday language people use humanity's thinking and unthinking cruelties to one another and to the animals with whom we share this earth. Peter Dickinson has twice received the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger. His novels include Death of a Unicorn, A Summer in the Twenties, and many more. He lives in England and is married to the novelist Robin McKinley.
Collection of short stories written over the entire span of Kawabata's career. These stories, he felt, represented the essence of his art and reflect his abiding interest in the miniature, the wisp of plot reduced to the essential. --Adapted from publisher description.
By his own reckoning, John Kneubuhl was "the world's greatest Swiss/Welsh/Samoan playwright." The son of a Samoan mother and an American father, Kneubuhl's multicultural heritage produced a distinctive artistic vision that formed the basis of his most powerful dramatic work. Born and raised in Samoa, Kneubuhl attended school in Honolulu and studied under Thornton Wilder at Yale. Returning to Hawai'i in the mid-1940s, Kneubuhl won acclaim as a playwright with the Honolulu Community Theater, then moved on to Los Angeles to write for television. Twenty years later he was back in Samoa, lecturing on Polynesian history and culture and writing plays, including the trilogy offered here. Unlike much of Kneubuhl's earlier work, these plays are touchingly personal in their exploration of alienation and cultural identity. Think of a Garden, the first play of the trilogy and the last written before the playwright's death in 1992, has been called the most Samoan of Kneubuhl's plays--a candid look at the writer's bicultural upbringing that artfully weaves together family memory, history, and mysticism. Think of a Garden makes the work of one of the Pacific's preeminent playwrights available for the first time to a wide audience of theatre enthusiasts, literature specialists, and others interested in Pacific themes.
The greatest need of the primary school to-day is some positive content or subject matter of instruction. The popular conception of such a school is that its main function is to teach the young child to read, write, and cipher. That is, that it has to do mainly with the formal aspects of language and numbers. So long as a certain amount of facility is gained in these formal arts, there is little disposition to demand anything more. Even so great an authority as the Committee of Fifteen has championed this view, and has given as its deliberate judgment that the first four years of school life should be devoted to the mastery of the formal phases of instruction. While it may be contended that it is not meant to exclude the giving of a positive subject matter, still it is interpreted as sanctioning the present obvious over-emphasis of the formal side of language in our primary schools. A strict conformity to this formal program would mean that the first four years of school life, the most impressionable[6] period in the pupil's school career, are to be empty of any real subject matter. The mastery of written and printed forms is to be set up as an end in itself, losing sight of the fact that they are but means for conveying the thought, feelings, experiences, and aspirations of the race from one generation to another. When we consider what the child at the age of six or seven really is; when we consider his love of story, his hunger for the concrete material of knowledge, his deep interest in the widening of his experience,—it is evident that such a course is out of all harmony with his real nature. It is the giving of stones when the cry is for bread. It is even worse than the proverbial making of bricks without straw. It is attempting to make bricks with straw alone.
Oral tales establish relationships between storytellers and their listeners. Yet most printed collections of folktales contain only stories, stripped of the human contexts in which they are told. If storytellers are mentioned at all, they are rarely consulted about what meanings they see in their tales. In this innovative book, Indian-American anthropologist Kirin Narayan reproduces twenty-one folktales narrated in a mountain dialect by a middle-aged Indian village woman, Urmila Devi Sood, or "Urmilaji." The tales are set within the larger story of Kirin Narayan's research in the Himalayan foothill region of Kangra, and of her growing friendship with Urmilaji Sood. In turn, Urmilaji Sood supplements her tales with interpretations of the wisdom that she discerns in their plots. At a moment when the mass-media is flooding through rural India, Urmilaji Sood asserts the value of her tales which have been told and retold across generations. As she says, "Television can't teach you these things." These tales serve as both moral instruction and as beguiling entertainment. The first set of tales, focussing on women's domestic rituals, lays out guidelines for female devotion and virtue. Here are tales of a pious washerwoman who brings the dead to life, a female weevil observing fasts for a better rebirth, a barren woman who adopts a frog and lights ritual oil lamps, and a queen who remains with her husband through twelve arduous years of affliction. The women performing these rituals and listening to the accompanying stories are thought to bring good fortune to their marriages, and long life to their relatives. The second set of tales, associated with passing the time around the fire through long winter nights, are magical adventure tales. Urmilaji Sood tells of a matchmaker who marries a princess off to a lion, God splitting a boy claimed by two families into two selves, a prince's journey to the land of the demons, and a girl transformed into a bird by her stepmother. In an increasingly interconnected world, anthropologists' authority to depict and theorize about distant people's lives is under fire. Kirin Narayan seeks solutions to this crisis in anthropology by locating the exchange of knowledge in a respectful, affectionate collaboration. Through the medium of oral narratives, Urmilaji Sood describes her own life and lives around her, and through the medium of ethnography Kirin Narayan shows how broader conclusions emerge from specific, spirited interactions. Set evocatively amid the changing seasons in a Himalayan foothill village, this pathbreaking book draws a moving portrait of an accomplished woman storyteller. Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon offers a window into the joys and sorrows of women's changing lives in rural India, and reveals the significance of oral storytelling in nurturing human ties.
Somewhere in the foothills of the Himalayas, a sixty-two-year-old English painter falls off his sketching stool. Overweight, asthmatic and prone to attacks of epilepsy, Edward Lear is nevertheless on a mission – to paint the mighty Kanchenjunga for his patron, the Viceroy of India. Lear is an oddity, an outsider, simultaneously fascinated and repelled by the world the British have built in India. Even as he battles the fatigue of travelling on pony carts, jampans and trains, Lear reflects on those who run the vast machinery of the Empire – administrators and missionaries, kitmutgars and kamsamahs. Duelling pompous British officers with his wry humour, Lear turns his ear to the polyphony of local languages to compose nonsense poetry with a uniquely Indian flavour. Woven into this vivid account are flashes from Lear's own life – deep-seated fears stemming from an unhappy childhood and the memory of unfulfilled adult relationships. Inspired by the journals of this celebrated artist and poet, Anindyo Roy brings to life Lear's little-known Indian sojourns. In lyrical prose, and occasional verse, The Viceroy's Artist paints a picture of an exceptional man who inspires by his unhindered imagination, curiosity and compassion for the world.
Pages In Read Ink: Mysteries ofThen and Nowchallenges mystery lovers to beat the author to the punch! "The Hunt for the Gray Ghost" challenges a theory that is hard to dispute: Was Abraham Lincoln the victim of a Confederate conspiracy or was he the victim of a cabinet member's passion to succeed him as president? Even heroes can be turned to conspiracy,fellows can becomeenemies,and adversaries become comrades. Can a former legacy of Las Vegas divas ("To Be Too Rather than Too") find the killer of a high-powered divorce attorney when so many would pawn their limos and diamonds for a share in a hitman? In "The Problem with the Monsignor"Patricia McGuire, Sister of (Show 'em No) Mercy keeps the police on task as they investigate the assault to commit murder on the Head Master of a school for over-privilged boys. A "Motion to Dismiss?" could be taken from the headlines of the nightly news cable station. Does a departed soul take $30,000 worth of plastic surgery and a martyr's death to heaven in "Is This Don Giovanni or Is It Really Hell?" Pages In Read Ink touches every period of history and every profession. I have found victims and felons from the best stations of life. But the lives of murderers, extortionists, and homicide police make much better company than saints.
