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Front
cover of Between Starshine and Clay
Renowned
US-based writer Sarah Ladipo Manyika’s non-fiction volume Between Starshine and Clay: Conversations from the African Diaspora (2022,
Footnote Press) is a celebration of
twelve black global celebrities in different fields. Among these great men and
women is Zimbabwean civil rights activist Pastor Evan Mawarire of the
unforgettable #ThisFlag movement.
As
multi-layered as the book is, it is however the author’s continued search for
what home really means to the Africans in Africa and in the diaspora.
Between Starshine and Clay’s
portrayal of these much sought-after, high-profile people carries its own
historical exclusivity enhanced by the author’s patient observation and
research, resulting in these detailed, enlightening conversations.
Poet
Claudia Rankine, documentary film-maker Xoliswa Sithole, Nobel Laureates Toni
Morrison and Wole Soyinka, feature in the first section ‘The Creators’ while
the second section, tagged ‘The Curators’, features historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr, publisher Margaret
Busby, Mrs Willard Harris, and actor and playwright Anna Deavere. They are ‘the
curators’ who somehow have been on a mission “to find and gather our stories
and histories, record them and make them accessible”. These individuals have, in their different
capacities, archived and told the usually under-told story of Africa and its
diaspora, of women and children.
The
third and last section, ‘The Changemakers’, features Michelle Obama who was the
first Black American First Lady and an author too, parliamentarian Lord Michael
Hastings, who has done great work in the United Kingdom to address the plight
of the poor, the disadvantaged, and those in prison, civil rights activist
Pastor Evan Mawarire who became a voice for the voiceless Zimbabweans during
the late former president Robert Mugabe’s reign, and US Senator Cory Booker, a
champion of equality and justice.
Manyika’s
detailed personal story ‘Notes of a Native Daughter’ which follows the insightful Foreword by Bernardine
Evaristo makes a testament of its own,
an exploration of what being an African
means when looked from different
windows.
Having
had the unusual opportunity to talk to her and review her books in the past few
years, I am sure others agree she is a very passionate author devoted to probing
the multi-dimensional meaning of home especially with regard to those of
African descent wherever they may be.
The
twelve greats in the new book have their life experiences, ideas and
convictions, whether political or literary or artistic, captured with
liveliness which has now become the mark of the author.
In
my past review of her debut novel In-Dependence (Weaver Press, 2014), I
noted how the main character Tayo, a university African student in Britain, falls in love and subsequently falls into a different kind of ‘home’ where he learns to
explore his emotions more deeply. The
aspect of ‘home’ is very interesting. Reading Manyika’s non-fiction book is the
same as viewing different dimensions which the meaning of ‘home’ has in the
minds of black people scattered across the world. The magnitude of her inquiry
into how it feels to be black or of African descent in a different society is
heart-deep. No wonder Between Starshine
and Clay starts out with this Hurston quote:
‘Sometimes, I feel
discriminated against, but it does not make me
angry. It merely
astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the
pleasure of my company?
It’s beyond me.’
–
Zora Neale Hurston, How it Feels to be
Colored Me
Some
of the conversations are sub-divided into two parts, ‘On Meeting’ and ‘In
Conversation’, others are singularly ‘In Conversation’ which are one-on-one
interviews but still one gets enamoured by the openness, depth of emotion, the
knowledge exchange between the interviewer and interviewee. The ‘On Meeting’
pieces show us Manyika at pleasure to observe, relate and describe outdoor and
indoor particulars of her subject.
In
fact, she acknowledges, “This book has emerged from multiple interactions with
its twelve main subjects. Some pieces are essays, others are conversations. ‘On
Meetings’ grew from encounters with the person featured, and their works, over
time. ‘In Conversations’, as captured here, represent a single conversation,
lightly edited for flow – a snapshot, in most cases, of many more conversations
we have had over the years.”
With
the ‘On Meeting’ essays, Manyika walks you into Toni Morrison’s house and into
the great writer’s restroom where there are writers’ photos and literary
letters pasted on the walls, she lets you hear the humor echoing from Toni’s
study and you wish you could stay just a few more hours in the house. Through
her expert descriptive writing, she takes you closer to the endeared Obamas,
into the People’s House (White House), to the San Jose’s SAP arena where
Michelle Obama and Michele Norris are having an illuminating open talk. Oh I am
one of those who did not know that Michelle Obama is the author of the family
memoir Becoming which Manyika also analyzes.
And if you want more, Manyika is with you on the pages when she gets to a book
launch inside the Paul Webley Wing of London University’s School of Oriental
Studies (SOAS) where you meet various great and inspiring women, including
Margaret Busby, to whose house in Clerkenwell you are later transported. Margaret
is the celebrated ‘doyenne of Black British publishing’.
I
once described Manyika’s second novel Like
A Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun in my review as ‘…a courageous investigation
into the joys and vagaries of age, and at the same time, a subtle unveiling of
the racial battle running beneath multi-cultural American society’.
Thus
the three books carry the author’s tireless clamour for a free and happy world
in which people are not judged on the basis of skin colour, a world in which
different political views are permitted, a world free from poverty and hunger.
This may sound too generalised an overall embrace of the three books but it
serves well to understand the author.
Manyika’s
latest book no doubt bursts from this deep source inside her, a powerful spring
that never runs dry, always giving out the divine water, the words for a global
garden of togetherness. To celebrate the courage and achievement of black
people in the global village is to celebrate universal legacy. However, the
conversations in the book turn personal each time the author puts across a
question about race or being black. This is a very sensitive issue.
In
her recent interview with Open Country Magazine, she describes her book Between
Starshine and Clay as ‘…conversations that speak to what we endlessly
aspire or strive towards — the idea of progress, of a fairer more equitable
society, of a better world for future generations. They are conversations that
touch on stories that are a reflection of all of us (any of us) and speak to
certain truths and universal human experiences.’
In
the book, through attentive description, some things speak for themselves. For
Toni (she told Manyika she prefers ‘Toni’), Africa lives in her house. Her
‘home’s furnishings… with accents from Africa’ and ‘a small Shona sculpture’
tell of the pride she takes in being African (American). Manyika rightfully
writes about the house that it embodies ‘Harare, Lagos, Accra, Kingston’. Truly,
a home of cultural pride.
Mario
Kaiser, who is accompanying Manyika when she meets Toni Morrison, asks: …Why
can skin color still make or break people in this country?
In
Kaiser’s question, ‘this country’ refers to America. And Toni’s response is
rooted in history. She openly denounces white-skin supremacy or such labels as
‘I am a white Swede’ in America.
‘On
Meeting’ Michelle Obama from a distance, Manyika is curious to ask the former
First Lady certain questions she had always wanted to ask, including “Did the
White House felt like a home, a fortress, or a prison?”
Home,
what did Manyika want to know?
However,
she never gets to ask this question when the two finally meet.
Michael Hastings, parliamentarian and also a
wide reader with pan-African roots
stretching from India to in Angola. He now lives in the UK. He
talks about ‘changing the narrative’ when he is asked what he thinks about the
African Diaspora.
Hastings
understanding is that Africans in the Diaspora must not be viewed simply as
just “great cultural bearers of heritage from another continent, but actually
as phenomenally intelligent academics, economists, medical experts, people who
are innovators, technicians, creators, drivers of wealth, supporters of
community and hospital workers.” He calls for “the wider world out there to
give us the time and the dignity to be heard.”
It
all echoes the fact that the African Diaspora is no stranger in the world but a
human community deserving respect. And respect is what Hastings wishes could be
given to any member of society without the biases of gender, race, etc.
At
some point in time, when home becomes a place of strife, not actually of racial
disaster but a place of extreme economic and political disaster, the patriot feels
the need for change. Manyika vividly
captures the evening when in his church office, weighed down by the prevailing
economic stress, Pastor Evan Mawarire started what would become the #ThisFlag
movement that inspired positive action and touched many a heart in Zimbabwe and
the world.
Manyika’s
‘On Meeting’ with Mawarire outlines how much this change-maker suffered – the
arrests, the imprisonment, the threats – but also she celebrates the courage he
had/has in his fight for a better
Zimbabwe, a better home.
Apart
from clarifying his friendship with fellow Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison and
many other issues in his conversation with Manyika, the guru Wole Soyinka
passionately views Africa as “not just a continent”. Soyinka displays his deep love
for African culture, and this love led him to be part of a team that travelled
to Brazil and London in a bid to recover a piece of art ‘stolen’ by the
colonialists from a Nigerian museum.
In
the conversations with Soyinka and Mawarire, albeit these two having different
backgrounds, there is a shared lesson that Africa should promptly recover the
missing dimensions which once identified it originally as a thriving, peaceful
continent, that Africans must rise to defend the motherland against looters of
its cultural art and freedom.
Soyinka
says, “I grew up with this history. These are the precipitates of a people’s
spirituality. In the process, that meant that even the spiritual network that
bound the Black people together was just being shredded to pieces. So, this was
beyond just a piece of work to be admired. This piece of work, incidentally,
was the image on one of the Nigerian stamps for a long while. And to see this
being advertised around the whole world as what the African genius had
produced, it hurt. I’m explaining why there was no hesitation about my going on
that recovery mission.”
Claudia
Rankine, a multi-award winning poet and playwright also talks about anti-blackness,
about the right to vote as an American citizen. Rankine says among her influences
is Fanon: “Fanon…for me, being maybe the most crucial in the way his work
addresses the psychological ramifications of anti-Blackness within a society.”
Award-winning
film-maker Xoliswa Sithole’s story of the difficulties faced by women in the
film industry echo those of Zimbabwean film-maker and writer Tsitsi Dangarembga
and others. In the conversation, Sithole says she loves making documentaries
that tell the untold stories of women and children especially, as Manyika puts
it, “in the context of pandemics, war and poverty”.
Yet,
much to Sithole’s disappointment, funding is difficult to source because she is
a woman. She outlines the need to fight against the “erasure of women out of
history”.
The
closing chapter ‘A White Continent’ is Manyika’s recollection of her exciting,
informative and yet a little dangerous expedition to Antarctica’s South Pole in
January 2022. However, through this journey she makes new discoveries which she
shares in this chapter, like climate change, women explorers, and interestingly
about how thoughts of skin colour diminish in Antarctica, an extremely cold
continent almost entirely below the Antarctic Circle; covered by an ice cap up
to 13,000 feet deep. To survive the cold, you have to be dressed up in layers
and layers of clothing.
“One
of the things about being bundled up in layers of polar clothing and gear is
that when outside you rarely see a person’s skin color. The body is so covered
up it’s hard to recognize who’s who. All that is clear is that a figure is
human – not Black, not white, just human.”
All
the black people featured in Between
Starshine and Clay are heroes and heroines whose experiences have important
lessons for the world. They are but only a segment and Manyika admits that
“from such a vast continent and its diaspora, there are many inspiring voices
that could be included in a book like this”.
This
book is of great relevance to everyone, for it carries real-life stories from
the African diaspora, stories which the media had seemingly been parsimonious
about. It is a classic that will break boundaries.
***
