Rashidah Ismaili

Last updated

Rashidah Ismaili, also known as Rashidah Ismaili AbuBakr (born 1941), [1] is a poet, fiction writer, essayist and playwright who was born in Cotonou, Benin, West Africa, and in the 1950s migrated to the US, where she still lives in Harlem, New York City. She was part of the Black Arts Movement in New York in the 1960s. She is also an arts and culture critic and taught literature by French- and English-speaking African writers in higher education institutes for more than 30 years. [2]

Contents

Biography

Early years and education

Rashidah Ismaili was born and raised in Cotonou, Benin (formerly known as Dahomey), in West Africa. Her mother was from Benin but her father was from Kano in Northern Nigeria. Ismaili studied at her grandfather’s Koran School and at a Catholic missionary school, and after her mother’s death was sent to a boarding school in France, remaining there for six years. [3] She was married at the age of 15 to a Nigerian who was studying in New York, where she joined him in 1956/57 [4] after he got a scholarship. [5]

Initially hoping to become an opera singer, she studied at New York College of Music, where she earned a BFA in voice, [4] and she also studied musical theatre at Mannes School of Music, before going on to obtain a master's degree in social psychology at the New School for Social Research, and later a PhD in Psychology from the State University of New York (SUNY). [3] After separation from her husband, Ismaili worked at the same time as undertaking graduate studies so as to support herself and her son, as well as writing. [3] She participated in the Black Arts Movement in New York City in the 1960s, [1] and was a member of the Umbra collective of young black writers. [4] [6]

Career: creative work and activism

She worked as a professor, psychologist, counselor in various universities for over 30 years, before retiring in 2000. [5] She was associate director of the Higher Education Opportunity Program at Pratt Institute for 15 years, and a faculty member of Wilkes University's Creative Writing MA Program, [7] [2] and she now conducts workshops, writing seminars and lectures when not writing. [8] She is the author of collections of poetry, essays, novels, plays and short stories, [5] and her work has been published in many journals and anthologies, including Bomb , [9] The Black Scholar , [10] and The Heinemann Book of African Women’s Poetry (edited by Stella and Frank Chipasula, 1995). [3]

In February 2004, she was a Visiting Scholar/Artist at the University of Ghana, Legon, and conducted seminars on Diaspora Literature with an emphasis on James Baldwin. [2] An executive board member of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA), [11] an NGO co-founded in 1991 by Jayne Cortez and Ama Ata Aidoo "for the purpose of establishing links between professional African women writers", [12] [13] Ismaili helped plan and participated in the conference "Yari-Yari Pamberi" held in October 2004 at New York University and the Schomburg Center. [2]

In 2005 an opera based on a collection of her poetry, Elegies for the Fallen with a score by composer Joyce Solomon-Moorman, was performed at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, [2] and in 2006 a staged reading of Ismaili's play, Rice Keepers, was held at the American Museum. [1]

About her 2014 book, Autobiography of the Lower East Side: A novel in stories, David Henderson said: "This well established poet makes a brilliant debut in fiction with these complex, poetically detailed, interrelated stories of Blacks from Africa, the Caribbean and the USA who converge and form an artistic community in the early 1960s in the most easterly regions of Alphabet City." [14] Reviewing the book in the Huffington Post , Melody Breyer-Grell wrote: "Autobiography of the Lower East Side enveloped this reader to such an extent that every other task was put on hold until its completion. The book, a set of tales; both complete in themselves, but intertwined skillfully, pours forth with an economic lyricism; where metaphors and similes are used sparingly, leaving the story and setting to enter the reader’s consciousness. Richer for that, we are engulfed in the sights, smells, and colors of this neighborhood, finding the beauty through prose, even though the reality might have sometimes been grim." [15]

Ismaili regularly hosts a gathering of national and international artists and scholars at her home in Harlem, known as "Salon d’ Afrique. [2] [16] She is First Vice President of Pen & Brush, an "international nonprofit organization providing a platform to showcase the work of professional emerging and mid-career female artists and writers", [17] founded in 1894. [18]

She contributed to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa , edited by Margaret Busby. [19]

Awards

Ismaili has received recognition and awards including from PEN America, Dramatist League, Kennedy Center, Miami International Book Fair, Zimbabwe International Book Fair, the Puffin Travel Award and the Sojourner Truth Meritorious Award. [20]

Selected bibliography

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maya Angelou</span> American poet, author, and civil rights activist (1928–2014)

Maya Angelou was an American memoirist, popular poet, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.

Sekou Sundiata was an African-American poet and performer, as well as a teacher at The New School in New York City. Famous students include musicians Ani DiFranco and Mike Doughty. His plays include The Circle Unbroken is a Hard Bop, The Mystery of Love, Udu, and The 51st Dream State. He also released several albums, including Longstoryshort and The Blue Oneness of Dreams. The Blue Oneness of Dreams was nominated for a Grammy Award. In 2000 Sundiata received the Creative Capital Performing Arts Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ann Petry</span> American novelist

Ann Petry was an American writer of novels, short stories, children's books and journalism. Her 1946 debut novel The Street became the first novel by an African-American woman to sell more than a million copies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gloria Naylor</span> American novelist (1950–2016)

Gloria Naylor was an American novelist, known for novels including The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985) and Mama Day (1988).

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of slave narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African-American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.

Gwendolyn B. Bennett American writer and journalist

Gwendolyn B. Bennett was an American artist, writer, and journalist who contributed to Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, which chronicled cultural advancements during the Harlem Renaissance. Though often overlooked, she herself made considerable accomplishments in art, poetry, and prose. She is perhaps best known for her short story "Wedding Day", which was published in the magazine Fire!! and explores how gender, race, and class dynamics shape an interracial relationship. Bennett was a dedicated and self-preserving woman, respectfully known for being a strong influencer of African-American women rights during the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout her dedication and perseverance, Bennett raised the bar when it came to women's literature and education. One of her contributions to the Harlem Renaissance was her literary acclaimed short novel Poets Evening; it helped the understanding within the African-American communities, resulting in many African Americans coming to terms with identifying and accepting themselves.

Dorothy West American novelist

Dorothy West was an American storyteller and short story writer during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. She is best known for her 1948 novel The Living Is Easy, as well as many other short stories and essays, about the life of an upper-class black family.

Jayne Cortez was an African-American poet, activist, small press publisher and spoken-word performance artist whose voice is celebrated for its political, surrealistic and dynamic innovations in lyricism and visceral sound. Her writing is part of the canon of the Black Arts Movement. She was married to jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman (1954–64), and their son is jazz drummer Denardo Coleman. In 1975 Cortez married painter, sculptor, and printmaker Melvin Edwards, and they lived in Dakar, Senegal, and New York City.

Umbra was a collective of young black writers based in Manhattan's Lower East Side that was founded in 1962.

<i>The Heart of a Woman</i> Book by Maya Angelou

The Heart of a Woman (1981) is an autobiography by American writer Maya Angelou. The book is the fourth installment in Angelou's series of seven autobiographies. The Heart of a Woman recounts events in Angelou's life between 1957 and 1962 and follows her travels to California, New York City, Cairo, and Ghana as she raises her teenage son, becomes a published author, becomes active in the civil rights movement, and becomes romantically involved with a South African anti-apartheid fighter. One of the most important themes of The Heart of a Woman is motherhood, as Angelou continues to raise her son. The book ends with her son leaving for college and Angelou looking forward to newfound independence and freedom.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Georgia Douglas Johnson</span> American poet

Georgia Blanche Douglas Camp Johnson, better known as Georgia Douglas Johnson, was a poet. She was one of the earliest female African American playwrights, and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

Anne Spencer Poet, librarian and civil rights activist

Anne Bethel Spencer was an American poet, teacher, civil rights activist, librarian, and gardener. While a librarian at the all-black Dunbar High School, a position she held for 20 years, she supplemented the original three books by bringing others from her own collection at home. Though she lived outside New York City, the recognized center of the Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, she was an important member of this group of intellectuals. She met Edward Spencer while attending Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg, Virginia. Following their marriage in 1901, the couple moved into a house he built at 1313 Pierce Street, where they raised a family and lived for the remainder of their lives.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Langston Hughes</span> American writer and social activist (1901–1967)

James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue."

DuEwa Frazier is an American writer, performer, and educator.

Nancy Mercado Puerto Rico writer

Nancy Mercado Ph.D. is an American writer, editor, educator and activist; her work focuses on issues of injustice, the environment, and the Puerto Rican and Latino experience in the United States. She forms part of the Nuyorican Movement, a literary genre which arose from the Beat Movement.

<i>A Song Flung Up to Heaven</i> Maya Angelous sixth autobiography book

A Song Flung Up to Heaven is the sixth book in author Maya Angelou's series of autobiographies. Set between 1965 and 1968, it begins where Angelou's previous book All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes ends, with Angelou's trip from Accra, Ghana, where she had lived for the past four years, back to the United States. Two "calamitous events" frame the beginning and end of the book—the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Angelou describes how she dealt with these events and the sweeping changes in both the country and in her personal life, and how she coped with her return home to the U.S. The book ends with Angelou at "the threshold of her literary career", writing the opening lines to her first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Louise Meriwether is an American novelist, essayist, journalist and activist, as well as a writer of biographies of historically important African Americans for children. She is best known for her first novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner (1970), which draws on autobiographical elements about growing up in Harlem during the Depression and in the era after the Harlem Renaissance.

The Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA) is an organization for women writers in Africa. Founded in 1991, the OWWA aims to promote the oral and written literature of African women, and address issues concerning publishing, censorship and human progress.

Flo Anthony

Florence "Flo" Anthony is a gossip columnist, syndicated radio host, TV contributor and author. She is an African-American reporter who writes for the gossip page of the Philadelphia Sun. Anthony resides in the East Harlem section of New York City.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Rashidah Ismaili", Poetry Foundation.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Rashidah Ismaili", aalbc.com.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "African Writer Profile: Rashidah Ismaili Abubakr", The Woyingi Blog, September 19, 2010.
  4. 1 2 3 "#100AFRICANWOMENWRITERS: 8. RASHIDAH ISMAILI ABUBAKR", Bookshy, April 2017.
  5. 1 2 3 Akouavi Assogba Migan, Interview with Rashidah Ismaili, Amina 428 (December 2005), p. XLVIII.
  6. ↑ Rashidah Ismaili-Abu-Bakr, "Slightly Autobiographical: The 1960s on the Lower East Side", Humanities Underground, October 26, 2011.
  7. ↑ "Rashidah Ismaili Abubakr" at Wilkes University.
  8. ↑ "About the Author". Africa World Press.
  9. ↑ "Three Poems by Rashidah Ismaili", Bomb 28, Summer 1989.
  10. ↑ Search results at JSTOR.
  11. ↑ The Organization of Women Writers of Africa, Inc. Facebook page.
  12. ↑ "OWWA's First 20 Years".
  13. ↑ "'Yari Yari Ntoaso: Continuing the Dialogue'—OWWA Conference Features Caribbean Writers", Repeating Islands, January 29, 2013.
  14. ↑ Edison McDaniels, "Ismaili is an internationally-renowned poet, and her mastery of language shows!", Neurosurgery101—TheBlog, June 6, 2014.
  15. ↑ Melody Breyer-Grell, "Autobiography of the Lower East Side" (review), HuffPost Blog, July 8, 2016; updated July 9, 2017.
  16. ↑ "KGB: At The Inkwell" – biographical note, KGB Bar Calendar, May 11, 2016.
  17. ↑ "About Pen + Brush".
  18. ↑ Lori Zimmer, "Pen and Brush", Art Nerd New York, October 16, 2017.
  19. ↑ Ladee Hubbard, "Power to define yourself: The diaspora of female black voices", TLS , May 10, 2019.
  20. ↑ Rashidah Ismaili biography at Home Slice.
  21. ↑ "RICE KEEPERS: A Play, by Rashidah Ismaili", Africa World Press.
  22. ↑ "Autobiography of the Lower East Side: A Novel in Short Stories", Northampton House Press, 2014; via Google Books.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.