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Books by Manthia
Diawara
Black-American Cinema /
African Cinema /
We Won't Budge
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We Won't
Budge
An African Exile in the World
By Manthia Diawara
Reviews
France, which once
scolded the United States about its racism, encourages police
actions against African immigrants that remind one of the
policies of a typical 1960s Mississippi sheriff. this is one of
the many issues covered by professor Manthia Diawara's superb
book
We Won't Budge. Part autobiography, part social
commentary, it's a powerful and insightful look at the situation
of border intellectuals at the beginning of the 21st century.
While fortunes are being made from "tough love" books
aimed at blacks, exclusively, this "tough love" book
is aimed at European civilization, which is beginning to reap
what it sowed.
--Ishmael Reed, author of Another
Day at the Front
In measured, lyrical prose, We
Won't Budge takes us under the skin of some African immigrant's
anxious, conflicted and romantic feelings towards Black American
culture, French egalité and displaced African
fellowship. . . . One of the wisest, wryest takes on the trials
of that star-crossed, nomadic figure, the Black diasporic
intellectual--a figure ripe for uprooting everywhere but in the
country of the mind
--Greg Tate, author of Flyboy in the
Buttermilk, and editor of Everything but the Burden:
What White People Are Thinking from Black Culture
Manthia Diawara has a voice which
speaks straight to the soul. It carries our dreams, hopes, and
frustrations as well as our hearts, torn between our past and
future.
--Maryse Condé, author of Segu and
I Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
A moving memoir with subtle
analytic bite,
We Won't Budge is one of the most nuanced
accounts of migration and the complexities of globalization
available. It is also a thoroughly engaging story.
--Craig Calhoun, President of the Social
Science Research Council
When Manthia Diawara was in high school, he
would pray to Allah to let him get out of Mali, study in Europe,
and live happily at least until age fifty. To ask for anything
more, he thought, would be tempting fate. Thirty years after
leaving his native West Africa, he has a home and career in new
York City, and more than a few acclaimed books and films to his
name. Still, he cannot shake the memories of his country of
birth--or of his first place of self-imposed exile: the streets of
1970s Paris.
In this searing and bittersweet memoir, Diawara
revisits his early years as an African emigrant in love with
Swedish girls and American rock and roll. Taking us from the
nightclubs of his hometown Bamako, to the cafes of Boulevard
Montparnasse, to the black neighborhoods of 1970s Washington D.C.,
Diawara brings to life the generation of Africans who were drawn
to the promise of western equality and prosperity in the heady
days of the international student movement.
Now able to look at the assimilation process
from a more nuanced perspective, he confronts the prejudices of
those who assume he is simply another unwanted illegal immigrant,
and yet watches his fifteen-year-old son walk around Paris free of
the suspicion that can haunt young black men in New York. But he
is also brought back to his life-altering decision to "move
on" to the United States, as well as the broken dreams of
those who returned to Africa, driven either by homsesickness or
the immigration department.
Taking his title
We Won't Budge --Nous
Pas Bouger--from the Malian song that has become an
international African protest anthem against human rights
violations, Diawara puts a human face on the problems of
immigration and racism in a globalized world. By turns humorous
and a harrowing--whether he is recounting less than useful
friendly advice on how to handle racist Parisian cops, or
entreaties from his extended family in Mali to help them get to
the U.S.--he shatters many cherished notions about what it means
to live strangled by the traditions of the place that is left
behind.
At the same time,
the stories of friends like Johnny, who was dragged by deportation
authorities from a restaurant kitchen in Washington, D.C., or the
cousins in Paris who rely on their shaman for protection from the
French police, expose the harsh reality that the world's great
colonizing powers are fast closing their doors to the Africans and
Arabs who leave home, as Diawara once did, in search of a dream of
opportunity that is slipping away. We leave this haunting story
exhilarated by Diawara's personal triumph and humbled by his
humanity.
-- Publisher, Book Cover
Contact: Publisher,
Basic Civitas / 387 Park Avenue South / New York, NY 100016 / 212-340-8100
/ Joanna Pinsker, Publicity Manager / 212-340-8163 /
pinsker@perseusbooks.com
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posted 4 November 2007 |
