Survey:

Nigerians Most Educated

in the U.S.

Analysis of U.S. Census data and other surveys show Nigerian immigrants and their descendants score highest when it comes to earning degrees.

By Naeesa Aziz

Posted: 03/20/2012

Nigerian Americans have long been known for their community’s intense cultural emphasis on education, and now an analysis of Census data coupled with several local surveys shows that Nigerians don't just value education, but surpass all other U.S. ethnic groups when it comes to obtaining degrees.

"Being Black, you are already at a disadvantage," Oluyinka Olutoye, an associate professor of pediatric surgery at Baylor College of Medicine, told the Houston Chronicle. "You really need to excel far above if you want to be considered for anything in this country."

According to 2006 census data, 37 percent of Nigerians in the U.S. had bachelor's degrees, 17 percent held master's degrees and 4 percent had doctorates. In contrast, the same census data showed only 19 percent of white Americans had bachelor’s degrees, 8 percent held master’s degrees and only 1 percent held doctorates, the paper reports.

The census data was bolstered by an independent analysis of 13 annual Houston-area surveys conducted by Rice University and commissioned by the Chronicle.

"These are higher levels of educational attainment than were found in any other...community," Stephen Klineberg, a sociologist at Rice University who conducts the annual Houston Area Survey, told the paper.

However, despite the strides in education made by many African immigrants, including Nigerian-Americans, discrimination still colors their prospects for employment. A study of 2010 employment data by the Economic Policy Institute showed that, across nationalities and ethnic groups, Black immigrants carried the highest unemployment rate of all foreign-born workers.

In addition to cultural expectations about obtaining higher education, the paper reports that many African immigrants are more likely to pursue higher education as a means of maintaining their immigrant status in the U.S.

"In a way, it's a Catch-22 — because of immigration laws you are forced to remain in school, but then the funny thing is you end up getting your doctorate at the age of 29," Amadu Jacky Kaba, an associate professor at Seton Hall University in South Orange, NJ, told the paper. "If you stay in school, immigration will leave you alone."

(Photo: Getty Images)

The First Decoration Day.

The people’s history of Memorial Day.

By David W. Blight

1865 view of the Union soldiers graves at Washington Racecourse. Library of Congress.

Americans understand that Memorial Day, or “Decoration Day,” as my parents called it, has something to do with honoring the nation’s war dead. It is also a day devoted to picnics, road races, commencements, and double-headers. But where did it begin, who created it, and why?

As a nation we are at war now, but for most Americans the scale of death and suffering in this seemingly endless wartime belongs to other people far away, or to people in other neighborhoods. Collectively, we are not even allowed to see our war dead today. That was not the case in 1865.

At the end of the Civil War the dead were everywhere, some in half buried coffins and some visible only as unidentified bones strewn on the killing fields of Virginia or Georgia. Americans, north and south, faced an enormous spiritual and logistical challenge of memorialization. The dead were visible by their massive absence. Approximately 620,000 soldiers died in the war. American deaths in all other wars combined through the Korean conflict totaled 606,000. If the same number of Americans per capita had died in Vietnam as died in the Civil War, 4 million names would be on the Vietnam Memorial. The most immediate legacy of the Civil War was its slaughter and how remember it.

War kills people and destroys human creation; but as though mocking war’s devastation, flowers inevitably bloom through its ruins. After a long siege, a prolonged bombardment for months from all around the harbor, and numerous fires, the beautiful port city of Charleston, South Carolina, where the war had begun in April, 1861, lay in ruin by the spring of 1865. The city was largely abandoned by white residents by late February. Among the first troops to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the Twenty First U. S. Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the formal surrender of the city.

Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters’ horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders’ race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy’s horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople. A New York Tribune correspondent witnessed the event, describing “a procession of friends and mourners as South Carolina and the United States never saw before.”

At 9 am on May 1, the procession stepped off led by three thousand black schoolchildren carrying arm loads of roses and singing “John Brown’s Body.” The children were followed by several hundred black women with baskets of flowers, wreaths and crosses. Then came black men marching in cadence, followed by contingents of Union infantry and other black and white citizens. As many as possible gathering in the cemetery enclosure; a childrens’ choir sang “We’ll Rally around the Flag,” the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and several spirituals before several black ministers read from scripture. No record survives of which biblical passages rung out in the warm spring air, but the spirit of Leviticus 25 was surely present at those burial rites: “for it is the jubilee; it shall be holy unto you… in the year of this jubilee he shall return every man unto his own possession.”

Soldiers of the 4th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, E Company, pose for a photograph at Fort Lincoln, Md., one of several fortifications ringing Washington, D.C., during the Civil War.
Library of Congress

Following the solemn dedication the crowd dispersed into the infield and did what many of us do on Memorial Day: they enjoyed picnics, listened to speeches, and watched soldiers drill. Among the full brigade of Union infantry participating was the famous 54th Massachusetts and the 34th and 104th U.S. Colored Troops, who performed a special double-columned march around the gravesite. The war was over, and Decoration Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been all about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders’ republic, and not about state rights, defense of home, nor merely soldiers’ valor and sacrifice.

According to a reminiscence written long after the fact, “several slight disturbances” occurred during the ceremonies on this first Decoration Day, as well as “much harsh talk about the event locally afterward.” But a measure of how white Charlestonians suppressed from memory this founding in favor of their own creation of the practice later came fifty-one years afterward, when the president of the Ladies Memorial Association of Charleston received an inquiry about the May 1, 1865 parade. A United Daughters of the Confederacy official from New Orleans wanted to know if it was true that blacks had engaged in such a burial rite. Mrs. S. C. Beckwith responded tersely: “I regret that I was unable to gather any official information in answer to this.” In the struggle over memory and meaning in any society, some stories just get lost while others attain mainstream dominance.

Officially, as a national holiday, Memorial Day emerged in 1868 when General John A. Logan, commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union veterans organization, called on all former northern soldiers and their communities to conduct ceremonies and decorate graves of their dead comrades. On May 30, 1868, when flowers were plentiful, funereal ceremonies were attended by thousands of people in 183 cemeteries in twenty-seven states. The following year, some 336 cities and towns in thirty-one states, including the South, arranged parades and orations. The observance grew manifold with time. In the South Confederate Memorial Day took shape on three different dates: on April 26 in many deep South states, the anniversary of General Joseph Johnston’s final surrender to General William T. Sherman; on May 10 in South and North Carolina, the birthday of Stonewall Jackson; and on June 3 in Virginia, the birthday of Jefferson Davis.

Over time several American towns, north and south, claimed to be the birthplace of Memorial Day. But all of them commemorate cemetery decoration events from 1866. Pride of place as the first large scale ritual of Decoration Day, therefore, goes to African Americans in Charleston. By their labor, their words, their songs, and their solemn parade of flowers and marching feet on their former owners’ race course, they created for themselves, and for us, the Independence Day of the Second American Revolution.

The old race track is still there — an oval roadway in Hampton Park in Charleston, named for Wade Hampton, former Confederate general and the white supremacist Redeemer governor of South Carolina after the end of Reconstruction. The lovely park sits adjacent to the Citadel, the military academy of South Carolina, and cadets can be seen jogging on the old track any day of the week. The old gravesite dedicated to the “Martyrs of the Race Course” is gone; those Union dead were reinterred in the 1880s to a national cemetery in Beaufort, South Carolina. Some stories endure, some disappear, some are rediscovered in dusty archives, the pages of old newspapers, and in oral history. All such stories as the First Decoration Day are but prelude to future reckonings. All memory is prelude.

Posted at the Zinn Education Project website with permission of the author from The First Decoration Day.

Blight is the author of American Oracle and many other books.

__________________________

Tiny Desk Concert:

Chuck Brown

 

by Frannie Kelley

 

Credit: Michael Katzif, Bob Boilen, Jennifer Noll (cameras); edited by Michael Katzif; photo by Abby Verbosky/NPR

Download chuck_brown.mp3

Set List

"Senorita"

"Chuck Baby"

"Wind Me Up!" / "Bustin' Loose"

"Run Joe" / "It Don't Mean A Thing"

 

May 16, 2012

Chuck Brown, the Godfather of Go-Go music, died Wednesday. In 2010, he brought his full band to the NPR Music office — and put on a party like no one else.

The name Chuck Brown might not mean a whole lot to people outside the Washington, D.C., area. That would be their loss. In D.C., Brown is widely known, even revered, as the Godfather of Go-Go, a title he's held since the late '70s. Though he started out as a jazz guitarist, Brown invented go-go, a style that incorporates funk, jazz, R&B, hip-hop and dancehall, and has mostly stuck with it ever since.

No one in D.C. can really explain why go-go hasn't traveled beyond the city's environs — we love it here, it's all over our commercial R&B and hip-hop radio stations and, at least when I was in high school, a go-go in a school's gym was the most packed party of the weekend. Chuck Brown is a local hero. A few days after he played our offices, Brown and his whole band played at the Redskins' stadium for the halftime show.

So to have Brown play a corner of our office — not a 90,000-capacity football stadium — was like a dream come true for a lot of NPR staffers. Sweat started pouring immediately, between the 11 musicians (that's congas and a stripped-down kit; saxophone, trumpet and trombone; two backup singers and a rapper) and all the go-go-heads in our building.

It's not like the band was going to slow down, though. It played "Bustin' Loose," which got everyone singing the refrain: "Gimmethebridgenow, gimmethebridgenow." The song has been a hit in D.C. since 1979, so nobody was standing still. The crowd was yelling out requests, too: "Chuck Baby" and "Run Joe," a go-go cover of the Louis Jordan song. Go-go is based on a syncopated beat and the use of congas in addition to drums. A lot of it is call-and-response, some of which was led by Brown (his web address is in fact windmeupchuck.com).

Go-go is mostly about the groove, though, and Chuck Brown just settles in and leans back. He showed up looking like a million bucks in a vest, Dior shades and his signature hat, and then he did what he does best — get the crowd on his side and hand its members something to dance to.

This story originally ran on Sept. 28, 2010.

Tiny Desk Concert:

Novalima

Download novalima.mp3

April 12, 2012 Novalima infuses traditional Peruvian music with new life by adding electronic sounds to create songs that sound both familiar and new. In this performance at the NPR Music offices, the band plays in a lean, funky configuration that gets the room grooving along.

by Felix Contreras

Something about tradition inspires reverence and creativity. Throughout Latin America and parts of the U.S., musicians are exhuming centuries-old musical cultures and infusing them with new life to create songs that sound both familiar and new. Peru's Novalima is doing just that with Afro-Peruvian music.

Over the course of three superb albums, the group has addressed the legacy of slavery in Peru in the form of the traditional lando, a dance rhythm with roots in West Africa. The slow, deliberate beats are played out on a variety of traditional instruments — most notably the cajon, a big rectangular box that drummers hit before drawing sounds out with their palms and fingers. The result can be as deep as a bass drum, but can also hit the high-pitched pops of finely tuned bongos or Middle Eastern dumbeks.

Novalima also adds electronic sounds to those beats and arrangements. Initially, the group's core members crafted their songs by trading files over the Internet, layering their own ideas over traditional rhythms. It's now a full-time working band, and while the electronica persists, it's not layered over samples, but over the work of two talented percussionists. In fact, the playing zigzags between Afro-Peruvian grooves and more familiar Afro-Cuban rhythms associated with salsa.

For this Tiny Desk Concert at the NPR Music offices, Novalima played in a lean, mean, funky configuration. The beats are pounded out by hand — not with sticks — and the singing recalls tradition while feeling here and now. Before too long, Novalima had the room grooving, and made many of us reluctant to get back to our cubicles.

Set List:

• "Karimba"
• "Guayabo"
• "Festejo"

Credits:

Producer: Felix Contreras; Editor and Videographer: Michael Katzif; Audio Engineer: Kevin Wait; photo by Doriane Raiman/NPR

2012 RAYMOND CARVER

SHORT STORY CONTEST

 

 Bridget Boland, author of the forthcoming book The DoulaCarve is pleased to announced Bridget Boland as this year’s guest judge for the 13th annual Raymond Carver Short Story Contest.

Bridget Boland is a Dallas-based writer whose work has appeared in Conde Nast Women’s Sports and Fitness, YogaChicago, and The Essential Chicago. Her debut novel, The Doula, will be published by Simon and Schuster in September 2012.

Ms. Boland teaches writing classes on fiction and memoir, coaches other writers, and offers seminars on yoga, energetics and writing as life process tools. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a JD from Loyola University of Chicago, and is the recipient of five residencies at The Ragdale Foundation for Writers and Artists.

 

FROM THE EDITOR

The Editor is blogging about the contest: check out all the Raymond Carver contest posts and learn more about the contest, past winners, and what makes a winning story stand out.

 

GUIDELINES

Dates, Fees, and Prizes

Submission Dates: May 1-June 30, 2012.

Winners announced September 1, 2012.

Entry Fees: $17 online / $15 mailed, per entry.

Prizes: Top 3 prizes determined by guest judge. 2 Editor’s Choice determined by Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor.

1st place - $1000
2nd place - $750
3rd place - $500
Two Editor’s Choice - $250 each

All winners published in the Fall 2012 issue on September 15, 2012. All winners are considered for representation by the Rees Literary Agency.

Eligibility

Open to U.S. and international, but stories must be in English.

No genre fiction; literary fiction only.

There is no limit to the number of entries one may submit.

Stories must be previously unpublished. Simultaneous submissions accepted if notified promptly that story is accepted elsewhere.

We ask that winners of the previous year’s Raymond Carver Short Story Contest do not enter.

Formatting

Word count limit: no minimum, max 6000.

Please do your best to format submissions as follows:

-double spaced
-at least 1” margins
-ONLY story title and page numbers (no author info) in header

Cover Letter/Page

If submitting online: no cover page in the uploaded document; Submishmash provides a place for cover letters/bios in a form that is blind to readers and editors until the completion of readings.

If submitting by mail: cover page with ONLY story title, name, address, phone number, email, and word count. This will be removed and catalogued before stories are given to readers and editors.

 

For additional questions about the contest, please email the editor at contest@carvezine.com.

 

SUBMIT NOW

Submit online or mail with check or money order (payable to Carve Magazine) to:

Carve Magazine
Raymond Carver Contest
PO Box 701510
Dallas, TX 75370

 

RECOMMEND OR SHARE

Know someone with a great short story that you think they should submit? Let them know now and don’t let them make any excuses.

2012 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award

Book Award

$3000 Award

Deadline: August 31, 2012
Final Judge: Katharine Coles

Established in 1998, in honor of the poet Benjamin Saltman (1927-1999), this award is for a previously unpublished original collection of poetry. Awarded collection is selected through an annual competition which is open to all poets. This year’s final judge will be Katharine Coles.

 

Award is $3000 and publication of the awarded collection by Red Hen Press. Entry fee is $25.00. Name on cover sheet only, 48 page minimum. Send SASE for notification. Entries must be postmarked by August 31.

Guidelines

Eligibility: The award is open to all writers with the following exceptions:

A) Authors who have had a full length work published by Red Hen Press, or a full length work currently under consideration by Red Hen Press;
B) Employees, interns, or contractors of Red Hen Press;
C) Relatives of employees or members of the executive board of directors;
D) Relatives or individuals having a personal or professional relationship with any of the final judges where they have taken any part whatsoever in shaping the manuscript, or where, for whatever reason, selecting a particular manuscript might have the appearance of impropriety.

Procedures and Ethical Considerations

To be certain that every manuscript finalist receives the fairest evaluation, all manuscripts shall be submitted to the judges without any identifying material.

Bios, acknowledgments, and other identifying material shall be removed from judged manuscripts until the conclusion of the competition.

Red Hen Press shall not use students or interns as readers at any stage of its competitions.

Red Hen Press is committed to maintaining the utmost integrity of our awards. Judges shall recuse themselves from considering any manuscript where they recognize the work. In the event of recusal, a manuscript score previously assigned by the managing editor of the press will be substituted.

Please submit materials to:

Attn: Benjamin Saltman Award
Red Hen Press
P.O. Box 40820
Pasadena, CA 91114
www.redhen.org

Red Hen Press will only accept submissions that have been mailed to the above address; please no email attachments or faxes.

Previous BSA Winners

Brynn Saito, Bright Power, Dark Peace; Lillian Yvonne-Bertram, But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise; Steve Kistulentz, Luckless Age; Rachel Contreni Flynn, Tongue; Erinn Batykeffer, Allegheny, Monongahela; Tony Barnstone, Golem of Los Angeles; Mariko Nakai, Histories of Bodies; Charles Harper Webb, Amplified Dog; Maggie Smith, Lamp of the Body; Susan Thomas, State of Blessed Gluttony; Jim Peterson, The Owning Stone; Gaylord Brewer, Devilfish

Deadline June 1 |

SI Leeds Literary Prize Award

for Unpublished Fiction

by Black and Asian Women (UK)

Deadline: 1 June 2012

The SI Leeds Literary Prize is a new prize for unpublished fiction by Black and Asian women resident in the UK aged 18 years and over.

The prize aims to act as a loudspeaker for Black and Asian women’s voices, enabling fresh and original literary voices from a group disproportionately under-represented in mainstream literary culture to reach new audiences.

The inaugural prize will be awarded in October 2012, and will consist of:

• £2,000 to the winner
• £750 to the runner-up
• £250 as a third prize

In addition to the cash awards Peepal Tree Press will offer the winning, runner-up and third placed authors two 1:1 consultancy sessions in professional development support through its Inscribe programme. With the winner’s consent, the winning manuscript will be given serious consideration for publication by Peepal Tree Press. In addition, the winner, 2nd and 3rd prize winners will be invited to read short extracts from their work at the 2012 Ilkley Literature Festival.

HOW TO ENTER

The prize is open to Black and Asian women writers aged 18 or over, based in the UK and writing fiction in English. Only unpublished original work is eligible for the prize. The fee per entry is £15. To find out if you are eligible to enter, please check the eligibility section.

All entries must be made by post using the entry form and cover sheet, and have to be submitted before the closing deadline of 1 June 2012. All submissions must be made following the format set out in the rules, so please read these carefully before you apply. If you have any queries about the format or timescale for the prize, please contact us.

AM I ELIGIBLE TO ENTER?

The Award is open to published and unpublished women writers, over the age of 18, of Black or Asian descent who are resident in the UK. Ethnicity will be self-defined by entrants. As a guideline, Black or Asian descent in the context of the Award signifies any Black background.

The Award is open to unpublished novels and/or collections of short stories of any genre of no less than 30,000 words. Manuscripts that have been previously published will not be eligible. However, whilst the main body of the novel or collection of short stories should comprise unpublished work, submissions will be accepted where no more than 25% of the work has been previously published. Manuscripts currently available for sale online, either in full or in significant proportion (i.e. more than 50% of the total manuscript) will be ineligible. Manuscripts either partially or wholly available online for no charge will be eligible.

Memoirs, biographies and autobiographies are not eligible.

Entries must be in English.

TERMS & CONDITIONS

1. THE AWARDS

1.1 All entries will be read to create a long list of 12 titles for the judges. The best entries will be forwarded to the judges who will compile a shortlist of 6 outstanding works of fiction submitted for the SI Leeds Literary Prize 2012 (“the Award”), from which they will select a winner, a runner-up and a third placed entry.

1.2 The winning award is £2,000 and this will be presented to the author of the best
eligible novel or collection of short stories in the opinion of the judges.

1.3 There will be a runner-up award of £750 for the second placed novel or collection of short stories.

1.4 There will be a third place award of £250 for the remaining shortlisted novel or
collection of short stories.

1.5 In addition to the cash awards Peepal Tree Press will offer the winning, runner-up and third placed authors 2 one-to-one consultancy sessions in professional development support through its Inscribe programme. With the winner’s consent, the winning manuscript will be given serious consideration for publication by Peepal Tree Press.

1.6 In addition the winner, 2nd and 3rd prize winners will be invited to read short
extracts from their work at the 2012 Ilkley Literature Festival.

2. ELIGIBILITY

2.1 The Award is open to published and unpublished women writers, over the age of 18,
of Black or Asian descent who are resident in the UK. Ethnicity will be self-defined by entrants. As a guideline, Black or Asian descent in the context of the Award signifies

- any Black background, including:-
- Black African
- Black Caribbean
- any other Black background
- any Asian background, including
- Bangladeshi
- Indian
- Pakistani
- Thai
- Malay
- Philippine
- Vietnamese
- Chinese
- Japanese
- countries in the Middle East
- any other Asian background
- any mixed background, including
- Asian and White
- Black and White
- Any other background from more than one ethnic group.

Under the terms of Positive Action in the Equality Act 2010, these eligibility criteria are justified on the following grounds:

• That the Award Partners reasonably think that Black and Asian women writers suffer a disadvantage linked to their race and gender, and have a disproportionately low level of participation in the UK writing industry and bestseller lists

• That the action taken by the Award Partners encourages this group to overcome this disadvantage and encourages participation

• That the prize is a proportionate response to the issue.

2.2 The Award is open to unpublished* novels and/or collections of short stories of any genre of no less than 30,000 words.

2.3 *Manuscripts that have been previously published will not be eligible. However, whilst the main body of the novel or collection of short stories should comprise unpublished work, submissions will be accepted where no more than 25% of the work has been previously published. Manuscripts currently available for sale online, either in full or in significant proportion (i.e. more than 50% of the total manuscript) will be ineligible. Manuscripts either partially or wholly available online for no charge will be eligible.

2.4 Entrants must warrant that the entry is a complete original work of fiction and is entirely the author's own work; that it does not infringe any existing copyright, moral or other rights of any third party, contains nothing obscene, libellous, unlawful or defamatory of any living person or corporate body.

2.5 Memoirs, biographies and autobiographies are not eligible.

2.6 Entries must be in English.

2.7 Authors may submit more than one novel or collection of stories. An additional entry fee for each submission is required (see HOW TO ENTER below).

2.8 The Award is not open to employees of Peepal Tree Press, Ilkley Literature Festival and members of SI Leeds (the Award Partners) or anyone connected with the Award or their direct family members.

2.9 Entries that are submitted posthumously will not be eligible for the Award.

3. COPYRIGHT AND TERMS OF USE

3.1 By submitting a novel or collection of short stories to the Award the entrant acknowledges and agrees that excerpts (chosen by the Award Partners) of the winning, or other short-listed, novel or collection of stories may be read out or reproduced as part of the Award Partners’ promotion and documentation of the Award, including Award Partners’ marketing and publicity literature, events, and websites and as a feature of the 2012 Ilkley Literature Festival free of any fees or royalty payments.

3.2 The Award Partners undertake to ensure that copyright of all manuscripts entered for the Award is protected. Non short-listed manuscripts will be shredded.

4. JUDGING

4.1 The SI Leeds Literary Prize will be looking for the most original and engaging writing and will consider all entries on the basis of quality of prose and narrative voice. The Award aims to support and award excellence, creativity and originality.

4.2 Manuscripts will be judged anonymously, i.e. without knowledge of the author’s name, age or background. (Please see HOW TO ENTER below)

4.3 Judging of the Award will be as follows:

Stage 1: All entries will be read by a team of readers and will be sifted in accordance with the Award criteria. A long list of no more than 12 novels/collections of short stories will be put forward to the judging panel.

Stage 2: The judging panel will read all long-listed entries and will select a Short List of 6 outstanding novels/collections of short stories submitted for the Award.

Stage 3: The judging panel will further discuss and agree the winning, runner-up and third placed entries.

4.4 Shortlisted authors will be contacted personally by email or telephone.

4.5 The Judges’ decision is final and no correspondence can be entered into.

4.6 The judging will be fair and independent. The judging panel will be appointed by the Award Partners and will include a distinguished and experienced literary professional as its chair.

4.7 Any permitted reference to the Award by the shortlisted writers will be advised by the Award Partners.

5. HOW TO ENTER

5.1 Manuscripts must be sent by post together with the completed entry forms and entry fee. Manuscripts arriving by post without the completed entry forms or entry fee will not be eligible.

5.2 Manuscripts should be sent in their entirety, i.e. as a finished novel or a finished collection of short stories. Incomplete works are not eligible. Authors may not add to or alter their manuscript after it has been entered for the Award.

5.3 Manuscripts must be submitted printed in double-spaced lines of 12 point font on single-sided A4 paper. Pages must be numbered.

5.4 The author’s name should not appear on the manuscript. Use the form provided to enter your name, title of novel or collection of short stories and contact details. Your manuscript will be logged against your name but will be judged anonymously.

5.5 Manuscripts will not be returned. Authors requiring an acknowledgement of receipt of their manuscript should enclose a stamped addressed envelope marked SI Leeds Literary Prize Acknowledgement. Proof of sending is not proof of receipt.

5.6 The Entry Fee for each manuscript submitted is £15.00 payable by cheque to SI Leeds.

5.7 Entries must arrive by Friday 1st June 2012. Late entries will not be eligible.

5.8 The Award Partners reserve the right to cancel the Award at any stage, if deemed necessary in its opinion, or if circumstances arise outside of its control. If cancelled, the entry fee would be refunded.

5.9 The Award Partners reserve the right to refuse entry to the Award for any reason at its absolute discretion.

5.10 By submitting a manuscript the entrant agrees to attend the Award ceremony in the event of being shortlisted for the Award and also, in the event of winning the Award, to undertake a mutually acceptable limited programme of activities to promote the Award. Entrants are responsible for all reasonable costs associated with attending the Award ceremony.

5.11 The entrant agrees that she will contribute where possible to press and publicity activities for the Award and hereby grant the Award Partners all necessary rights in her contribution for press/publicity activities for the Award

Download entry form >>

Download cover sheet >>

CONTACT INFORMATION:

For inquiries: click here

Website: http://sileedsliteraryprize.wordpress.com/

 

Rita Hayworth

One of the defining silver screen sex symbols, Rita Hayworth was born with the much less American-sounding name, Margarita Carmen Cansino.

She was raised in a Spanish dance family, and spent much of her childhood dancing in bars (see? It's totally a legitimate way to raise a kid.) After Hayworth, er, Cansino's father moved the family to Hollywood, the 16-year-old signed with Fox studios. She tried a few minor roles, but never got her big break. Fox studios decided not to renew her option.

The Metamorphosis:

Columbia Pictures came along and, not being much for political correctness, pretty much told Cansino that her lack of success was due to her being way too Spanish-y. So, Cansino agreed to go along with a few surgical processes, such as:

A. Painful Hairline Electrolysis

Cansino had a low hairline, which pegged her as a Latina. This is the same discrimination which kept Vega out of the World Warrior tournament, until he wore a mask to conceal his hairline.

Cansino submitted to getting electric shocks to kill her follicles and stop them from growing. Keep in mind this is the 1930s, when "anaesthesiology" usually meant "stroking your hand while you chugged from a flask of bourbon." Next time you have a hot hair curler or a live wire, poke yourself in the forehead with it several hundred times. Now you're as pretty as Rita Hayworth... well, not yet, you still need some...

B. Skin Lightening

Now that you've got fresh shock marks on your forehead, scrub them with this bleach solution. That's exactly what Cansino did, all over her entire body. Skin lightening is a dangerously unregulated practice even now, but it was significantly worse 70 years ago. But, Cansino wasn't done yet, before she signed with Columbia, she also had to have a...

C. Hair Color and Name Change

Carmen Cansino became Rita Hayworth. Her dark hair was died auburn. The transformation complete, Rita Hayworth now looked Saltine enough for Columbia:

The Payoff:

Not five years before, the young immigrant's daughter was dancing in smoky bars for coins. After her "honky-fication," she became the hottest thing in sanctioned Armed Forces self-pleasure. A picture of her kneeling on a bed in a nightgown sold 5 million copies. Her likeness was fashioned on the side of atomic bombs.

Columbia starred Hayworth in many successful pictures, most notably, Gilda. Rita Hayworth found herself dancing with stars like Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. Eventually, she settled down and married a prince.

The next time somebody tells you the path to success is "just be yourself," tell them Rita's inspirational story. It's all about skin-bleaching.

Well, not always...

“The film’s scope is staggering, including its detailed outlining of BP’s origins and fingerprints across decades of unrest in Iran. By doing smart, covert reporting that shames our news media, by interviewing uncensored journalists, by speaking with locals whose health has been destroyed, and by interviewing scientists who haven’t been bought by BP (many have, as the film illustrates), Fix stretches into a mandatory-viewing critique of widespread government corruption, with one of the film’s talking heads remarking, “I don’t have any long-term hope for us [as a country] unless we find a way to control campaign financing.” And yes, the Koch brothers are major players in the fuckery.” - The Village Voice

Official Trailer for "The Big Fix" a Green Planet Production by Josh and Rebecca Tickell

Please visit www.thebigfixmovie.com for more info.

The Big Fix:

Documentary Exposes BP,

US Government

on Gulf Disaster

Sunday, 20 May 2012 14:41 Written by  britney By Jan Lundberg, Culture Change | Interview

(Image: Green Planet Productions)

 

One of the world's biggest environmental crimes has been more or less forgotten. This is part of our collective guilt as the world's ecosystem continues its accelerated collapse. But the new documentary film The Big Fix takes a detailed, daring look at what happened in the Gulf of Mexico with BP's Macondo offshore oil drilling rig. The story and facts that emerge are more than disturbing.

The movie is soon getting its major national release in theaters and on Netflix. Viewers will be made to recall the unsettling images of oil slicks, fouled fowl, suddenly unemployed fisher folk, and empty assurances by BP and the Feds.

The partially U.S.-owned British oil company has its origins in geopolitical skullduggery in Iran, explained in the film's narration and images. The history makes more convincing the subsequent telling of the corporation's and the U.S. government's going to great pains to lie that all was being done that could be done to minimize the blowout's damage and to clean up the mess.

But there was even more going on, undisclosed to the public, such as the extent and effects of massive application of toxic Corexit. This amounted to a double assault on the Gulf, done deliberately. Those who believe that the whole episode from start to finish was an accident, and that industry and government did their best with a bad situation, are sadly ignorant. Or, they wish to simply keep driving and consuming petroleum in other ways, because deep change is inconvenient or frightening.

 

Corexit, a dispersant banned in the UK, was immediately employed by BP soon after the blowout, and was ordered stopped by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. But BP kept on openly using it, and then secretly so, as The Big Fix tells us.

Even more outrageous was that when the undersea oil well was capped, and scrutiny by the average news-consumer slacked off, people were soon misled by corrupt spokespersons that the oil was benignly disappearing. There were contradictory reports of remaining oil pollution that flew in the face of U.S. and industry claims that the oil was 75% gone. It certainly was not gone, and the bulk of it remains today -- perhaps in part from additional ocean floor oil leaks. The oil has slowly been moving into the Atlantic, and may damage the Eastern U.S. seaboard.

What to do? The activist response

Some environmental activists during the crisis' height did more than hand-wringing and crying out for a clean energy economy some day. We instead called for an immediate step-down in U.S. oil consumption to compensate for what the BP blowout was spewing. Our coalition, World Oil Reduction for the Gulf, was gathering steam when the blowout was capped, but everything naturally went back to business as usual.

But some activists, such as Josh and Rebecca Tickell, were just getting heated up. They could not keep their muckraking lens away from the Gulf, and be like almost everyone else who just moved on in their minds and ignored the plight of the Gulf. The BP blowout and subsequent reports of persistent damage to wildlife and human health were enough to draw the filmmakers to the New Orleans region, Josh Tickell's boyhood home, to check out the whole situation in 2011. Along for the ride with the Tickells on their rolling headquarters-bus was Peter Fonda, friend to the sea and bait for star-struck Cajuns. The Big Fix's first dramatic device was to show footage of Fonda in Easy Rider, synced with Steppenwolf's Born to Be Wild hard-rock tune.

The film crew easily established that all was certainly not well in the Gulf, with medical problems afflicting thousands of people, stemming from both toxic oil and the even more toxic Corexit. Corexit served to disperse the oil, making impossible any assessment or gathering of the bulk of the oil at sea. Corexit was to rain down on the entire region and cause respiratory and skin disorders. But because BP, as the film pointed out, was fined only on the amount of oil found in the environment, dispersing it was essential for them to minimize the fine. Most of the oil from the 5 million gallons that escaped from the Macondo well is actually far under the surface in great plumes, in addition to forming a solid coating on the ocean floor. No wonder that sea life is turning up dead and deformed.

It is surprising how big the oil spill was allowed to get, creating in weeks the biggest environmental disaster in U.S. history. Although it did appear to be out of control, there was, in effect, permission for the whole debacle from "our" soft-on-Big-Oil federal government. As we are also forced to suspect that the oil is mostly still there, spreading inland still from the sad coast, hatred breeds in the sensitive viewer of The Big Fix for both BP and the U.S. government. Corruption of academic oil experts and state environmental officials is rampant, according to The Big Fix, and many of their statements about the disaster are shown to mainly deception. In contrast, featured in the film as a critic of the clean-up at the well-head source was Matt Simmons, petroleum industry investment banker. He was extremely vocal but soon died somewhat mysteriously, as the film narrates.

A number of solid, well-known journalists and academics round out the sleuthing done by the filmmakers, exposing the specific corruption in dollar amounts that swayed the public about the disaster. Louisiana is shown for its oily politics as a colonial region for exploitation. For this film Josh and his wife Rebecca Tickell found living, homegrown heroes and villains, as well as many a victim of oil and Corexit. Sadly, Rebecca turned out to be one as a result of her curiosity and diligence for The Big Fix. In the film it does not say how she made out, but this reviewer is glad to report she appears today to be in very good health.

One anti-oil activist voiced criticism of the film after a pre-release screening in April. He supports the film's excellent aspects, but he was disappointed that "the film wound up with the message of 'Go out and protest!' -- then to see little else was suggested for action when at the end of the movie the two filmmakers are just riding their bus and burning fuel off into the sunset." This was incongruent, the activist said, "because oil is horrible and the filmmakers were being wasteful instead of catching trains." I heard the bus is outfitted for using ethanol, but maybe the availability of E85 fuel was poor for the trip. The ethanol aspect was not shown in the movie.

All motor vehicles depend on a vast, toxic petroleum infrastructure and in some way or another emit carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. As a bicycle activist who published the Auto-Free Times (now Culture Change) and managed the Alliance for a Paving Moratorium, I can say that bike activists have such concerns daily. Fortunately, despite any apparent differences, we have more in common with truth-seekers such as Josh and Rebecca Tickell than many environmentalists trying to prop up the status quo with green consuming (e.g., the Sierra Club with its electric car campaign and history of taking millions of dollars from frackers). So to make common cause with the Tickells, we asked them some questions about what we thought were omissions in The Big Fix:

Culture Change: The Big Fix nails BP and the collusion the U.S. gov't has with corporate megapollution. But isn't the solution to do more than punish BP or prevent more disasters?  Oil consumption would continue -- a slower way of destroying the environment.  We can support renewable energy, but this mainly provides electricity which is only one of the features of petroleum.

Josh Tickell: Yes. The solution is simple: stop using oil. Everything else will be a band-aid. But I am a personal zealot for innovation. Moore's law [that the number of components that can be placed on a computer chip doubles every 18 months] is now active with solar panel efficiency and price reduction as well as peak oil. We live in a time of inherent transition and change. We forget that we are where we are (both in good and bad ways) because of exponents. The key with energy is to focus on where we (as a species) wish to be and take a little step in that direction. Six or seven little steps may see a one hundred fold increase in solutions.

Culture Change: So, what do you and Rebecca think of a life-style-change approach to oil addiction and corruption, to kick Big Oil where it hurts? Do you endorse bicycling, walking, sailing, living car-free, and boycotting petroleum?

Josh Tickell: Yes to all of the above. It is inevitable that our future will hold both opportunities for us to travel more sanely (in bikes vs. hummers because of safe community re-design) and at the same time much faster (through high speed rail etc.). Again, the first move is ours. Social exponential growth means we don't have to take too many steps before we - billions of us - suddenly arrive.

Culture Change: what's the latest on developments such as Netflix, awards for TBF, and the Lionsgate release date?

Josh Tickell: All formats will release on June 19th including digital, dvd, pay per view (cable tv) and a few select theaters.

The Big Fix could be an unprecedented tool for anti-oil activists to rally around for systemic change. It won't do much good to boycott one oil company. But the images of the film with its insight can serve to get the average American to question oil dependence as never before. We'll know this is happening when shoppers, for example, are offered plastic packaging or products, and they say, "No thanks, don't you think that's like BP crap?"

 

Deeper background on the horizon

This reviewer tried each day during BP's Gulf blowout to bring up the bigger picture on oil. For example, this message went from Culture Change to commentators and journalists doing superficial coverage over the bad-guy BP:

At this point of global oil extraction's peaking, approximately now, there is no comparable, scalable substitute for petroleum and its high energy content or flexibility of application. The cheap oil is gone, but the modern industrial infrastructure is completely oriented toward oil. Moreover, modern society obtains its food almost entirely via cheap (now much subsidized) petroleum, while this only adds to greenhouse gas emissions. The BP disaster in the Gulf on its own may soon seem like a minor event compared to what's in "the pipeline."

The message of changing culture -- instead of chasing the Holy Gail of techno-perfection for continued mastery over nature -- is what Culture Change has promoted for over two decades. It is all well and good to react with outrage and sadness over BP's and the U.S. government's irresponsibility and warped value system. Protest in the streets, Occupy, and Facebook activism are cool. But lifestyle change is key, for it deals with the tricky question of how hard the regulators are trying to secure smoother and quieter oil extraction. We believe we're making progress on fundamental change overall. It is hard to tell. We do know that when one spends too much time pointing the figure at this bad actor, then that villain, and lamenting this or that failed policy, it is time to look deeper. The dominant critique, that has a hard enough time as it is trying to break through the corporate media, needs to address the system we live under, the culture, and Western Civilization itself.

The Big Fix blames not just the Gulf disaster but the whole problem of Big Oil's influence and government corruption on the top few in society. The Big Fix also implies that putting up solar panels is the best answer to oil spills. But solar panels can't actually go very far in replacing oil. The film's writer, Johnny O'Hara, may not have intended to simplify so much. But an interview with a favorite shrimper in the film who sings the praises of solar panels contributed much to the film's message.

The film mentions that the U.S. and the world are running out of oil, and that collapse is the endgame (David Korten's on-camera statement). But what we do about it for long-term sustainability is not the film's strong point. These weaknesses may be minor, for The Big Fix is beautifully produced and will open many eyes.

Putting our Earth first will be our salvation. If we can soon shut down fossil fuel extraction and burning the world over, and plant trees as one people united to save our climate from the greenhouse hell we have unleashed, we might continue to thrive on a post-petroleum, post-industrial planet. We have to share it with all fellow species. If we get there, and can overcome overpopulation safely and in a just fashion, we will then also find ourselves liberated from modern slavery (for often meaningless jobs) and again relate to each other as equals in our new-found universal culture of community.

Watch The Big Fix official trailer.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license.

19th New York African Film Festival:

“The Education of

Auma Obama”

April 13, 2012 By Sean Jacobs 2 Comments

Republican Party propaganda wants to paint President Barack Obama’s Kenyan family as alien to America.  In this propaganda Kenyans are reduced to anti-American zealots. The propaganda especially play up refer to his father Barack Hussein Obama Snr’s supposed “anti-colonial” and left-wing biases. (What is conveniently forgotten is that Obama Snr. is a product of elite American education–he studied economics at Harvard.) Yet the strongest impression one gets from the Obama family in director Branwen Okpako’s beautiful, and substantive documentary of Obama’s half sister, Auma Obama, is how familiar and American (including some of the values Republicans proffer of hard work and guile), the Obamas are. At the same time it is clear that Obama’s strengths–his intellectual sharpness, charisma and drive, can be traced to this branch of his family. These qualities seem present especially in Obama’s father and sister Auma. (Barack and Auma Obama’s grandfather Hussein Onyango, a colonial cook, freedom fighter and oral historian, also emerges as a key influence.)

 

Auma is no stranger to media as she has been profiled by countless journalists seeking information on the American president’s African roots. Obama himself has credited Auma for reconnecting him with his African relatives. But those profiles and reporting never go beyond the mundane and soundbyte. Auma it turns out has built an impressive life herself. She left Kenya after high school–she did not tell her father–to study linguistics, dance and film (some of the footage in the film is hers) in Germany. There she also built a career as a public intellectual (she was a regular pundit on German TV; the scenes of her sparring with German pundits are great to watch). Back in Kenya she runs a foundation and works with young people.

“The Education of Auma Obama” situates itself in 2008 when Okpako traveled with Auma Obama (they met in film school in Germany in the early 1990s), to her grandmother’s house in Kogelo and where both Obama’s father and grandfather are buried. There Branwen, Auma and the rest of her family, well-wishes, locals and the media, await the result of the elections. We know the result of that contest (Barack Obama would become the first person of African descent to become president of the United States). The Kenyans celebrate Obama’s victory lustily. When a news reader announces the win, Obama’s relatives walk to where his father is buried on the property and break into song about “going to the White House.”

Auma Obama emerges as a compelling figure. Her father’s absences and complicated personal life had a profound impact on her–he had been married three times (sometimes polygamously) before he died in a car accident (his sister alleges it was an assassination) in 1982. “My father was not the best father … in planning for his family.”  Her youth life comprised multiple movings and boarding school. Auma speaks with affection and regret of Obama snr.’s second wife, Ruth Obama (an American) who taught her to be more assertive. But her relationship with her father also include tender moments. Barack Obama snr. loved classical music and spent hours listening to Chopin, sometimes inviting his daughter along. The film also suggests that leaving Kenya–implied as very socially conservative and predictable existence for its middle class–allowed Auma to grow into her own.

American viewers will be looking for Barack Obama sightings. But that would miss the point of the film, though Barack Obama makes multiple appearances; it was after all Auma who contacted him first about their father’s death (when Barack Obama writes back, Auma notices that “he writes just like my father”). We see him in photographs as Auma visit him in Chicago in the late 1980s where he worked as a community organizer (she describe heated political debates between Obama and her friends). Barack Obama then traveled to Kenya (Auma films a goateed Obama sitting on a porch talking about how “family draws you” and about belonging). In 1991 he brings his fiancee Michelle Robinson. Auma Obama made a short film about that visit. In clips from the film (which I now want to see more of), she explores, among others, what she deemed the different ways in which she and brother’s who is fundamentally a visitor/tourist–to Kenya, viewed or experience the country (especially tourism).

Given the kinds of falsehoods and half truths that are out there about the Obama family–especially its African branch–this film serves as a welcome corrective. But more importantly this is a film about a post-colonial generation of Africans (the “born frees” of the post-1960s independence era in Auma’s case) who want to forge their own futures on their own terms) but who are also shaped by the struggles of their parents. I strongly recommend it.

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AND THEN LIFE HAPPENS

A Memoir

Auma Obama; Translated by Ross Benjamin

St. Martin's Press

While her younger brother Barack grew up in the U.S. and Indonesia, Auma Obama’s childhood played out at the other end of the world in a remote village in Kenya, the birthplace of the siblings’ shared father. Barack and Auma met for the first time in the 1980s, and they built a lasting relationship which lead to travels together in Kenya, research into their family history and finally Auma’s support for her brother’s political career and eventual bid for the U.S. presidency.

Auma spent sixteen years studying and living in Germany, moved to England for love, and gave birth to a daughter there. The tension between her original and chosen worlds and cultures was a constant challenge, and eventually Auma returned to Africa and worked to support young men and women in shaping their futures.

In And Then Life Happens, her candid and emotional memoir, Auma shares her own story as well as recollections of and experiences with her famous brother, who says about their first encounter: “I hugged her, we looked at each other, and laughed. I knew right then that I loved her.”

>via: http://us.macmillan.com/andthenlifehappens/AumaObama

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Black World Cinema:

The Education of Auma Obama

by Floyd Webb PLUS 

Branwen Okpako's "The Education of Auma Obama" is a captivating and intimate portrait of the U.S. president's older half-sister, who embodies a post-colonial, feminist identity. An academic overachiever, she studied linguistics and contemporary dance in Heidelberg, Germany, before enrolling in film school in Berlin, where she met Nigerian-born director Okpako in the nineties.

After living in the United Kingdom for a short period, Auma Obama eventually moved back to Kenya to mentor a young generation of community activists, social workers and other ambitious young men and women who lacked her privileged education and training, but were nonetheless determined to make a positive contribution to their society.

Okpako has always been interested in questions of identity, affiliation and belonging. Although she frames her film as a biographical portrait of Obama, she goes much further, providing a layered historical context and discussions of postcolonial African identity from a feminist perspective. Okpako collects testimonies almost exclusively from women, echoing the African tradition of women as chroniclers of oral history. When coupled with these accounts, Okpako's use of archival footage — filmed during colonization for an entirely different purpose — offers a new reading of history and the present. Obama is also the daughter of a charismatic man who fought for the liberation of his country and participated in the shaping of the first years of independence. She witnessed his hopefulness and rise as well as his disillusionment and demise, coming into adulthood as her country — and continent — fell prey to despotism, corruption and poverty.

The Education of Auma Obama is also a film about a generation of politically and socially engaged Africans whose aspirations are informed by their parents' experiences, and whose ambition to forge a better future for their communities starts from the ground up.

>via: https://vimeo.com/35778144

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The Story of Obama's Kenyan Sister

A documentarian discusses

The Education

of Auma Obama

and how families

shape our identities.

• By: Akoto Ofori-Atta | Posted: April 18, 2012 

• 
  

Branwen Okpako (Courtesy of Branwen Okpako); Auma Obama
(Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

 

"I don't know if he's seen it, but I do know that he's requested a copy and that it was delivered to the White House and received," said Nigerian-born filmmaker Branwen Okpako on whether or not the president has seen her most recent film, The Education of Auma Obama, about his older half sister.

Auma, whom Okpako describes as "mellow, enlightened and insightful," is a brilliant scholar who studied linguistics and contemporary dance in Heidelberg, Germany, before enrolling in film school in Berlin in 1992, where she first met Okpako. Auma eventually moved back to Kenya to help young Kenyans develop into community activists.

The film is an intimate portrait of her life -- her education, beliefs and politics, as well as her relationship with both her father and her half brother. But it is also about the complex histories that make us who we are; the traits that we inherit from our families that shape our identities, beliefs and desires.

Director Branwen Okpako speaks at "The Education Of Auma Obama" Premiere at AMC Yonge & Dundas 24 theater during the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2011 in Toronto, Canada.

(September 8, 2011 - Source: Joe Scarnici/Getty Images North America)

 

After a screening at the African Film Festival in New York earlier this month, The Root spoke with Okpako about her project, what it was like to film her friend and what she wants people to know about the Obamas.

The Root: How did this movie come about? What made you decide to do a documentary on Auma Obama?

Branwen Okpako: My films are all personal to my own experiences. I've made both documentaries and fiction films about identity, place, belonging, representation and visibility. These themes were always present in my films because of being Nigerian, going to school in Germany and having a mother from Wales.

The whole multicultural experience has very much been part of my life, and I tried to put that in my films. So I had a three-picture deal with a TV station in Germany and had already done two films. They asked, "Why don't you do a portrait about Barack Obama?"

There are so many aspects of his life that were of great interest to me. But with him, I would miss the personal thing because I don't know him, and he's such a public figure. I thought that better suited to me would be the story of Auma. Knowing the kind of understanding that she has, and her dynamism as a protagonist, I thought it would make a great film.

TR: Auma and President Obama's father, his life and his legacy, are featured prominently in the film. How do you see the three of them connected?

BO: I think that they, the Obamas, as a family have a specific characteristic. Every family has a characteristic. What is important to us in our family? What are the themes we push? What do we represent? And I think that with [the Obamas] this idea of civic responsibility, this idea of adventure and curiosity, are all present. It was even there with Barack Sr.'s father.

My father is a pharmacologist. He studied abroad and was a professor in the U.K. and got his Ph.D. He came back [to Nigeria]. He's an old man now, but he always says, "We have all these herbs and all these ways of healing ourselves, and we went away to get answers when the answers are all right here."

Who do they tell all of these things to? Us, their children. So we go on and take up the responsibility and say we have to do this, we have to do it better and live up to the expectations of our parents. And that's why we are the way we are. And that's why Auma is the way she is. That voice, her father's voice, is there in her ear, you know.

TR: What did you learn about your friend Auma while filming the documentary?

BO: I didn't know her life story. We had always talked about our politics and our ideas, but it was through making this film that I got to know her story. Her friends are like family to her. Her aunts are important to her. I learned of one of Auma's aunts, who is younger than Auma because her grandfather married a younger woman. She is the one who told the story of Barack Sr.'s death [in the film]. I learned so many things that you can't anticipate.

Even though I talk to mostly women in the film, her father's presence is there. I hadn't read President Obama's book until after I did the film, but look at the title: Dreams of My Father. There is something about the aspirations of our fathers. Anyone whose father was young at the beginning of the independence of African countries knows this.

Those guys were taught at a young age that they could take charge of their countries. The torch wasn't given to the old or to the experienced. It was given to the young. They were in their 30s when they took over their countries. They were full of dynamic ideas, and then of course the disappointment comes, the reality of politics and the global situation and so forth. And who gets to hear about how [disappointment] feels? It's the kids. It's us.

TR: Disappointment comes up quite a bit. What were you trying to convey to your audience about being let down?

BO: I don't see disappointment as a main theme. The main theme is empowerment. You can change the world. It doesn't have to be in some lofty position. Right in your backyard, with your friends, colleagues and young people around you -- just sharing ideas and treating each other with respect and listening to each other and just trying to understand yourself. It's all a contribution to making [the] world a better place.

And Auma's story is all about a simple woman, a simple family. Even if you are president, you're just a simple person. Everyone is. Nobody is more than anybody else. No one is more important than anybody else. I feel strongly about this. Some people live in a village, but they are royalty in their own way. And there is nothing disappointing about that. That is wonderful.

Akoto Ofori-Atta is The Root's assistant editor. Follow her on Twitter.

Like The Root on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter.

>via: http://www.theroot.com/views/obamas-kenyan-sister?page=0,0

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