The Salt Roads
The Salt Roads is a novel by Canadian-Jamaican writer Nalo Hopkinson, published in 2003. It has been categorized as historical fiction, speculative fiction, science fiction, magical realism; the novel was called "a fabulous, inventive novel... a fine celebration of African heritage" by Jewell Parker Rhodes. Though it has been said that the novel "may have left its sci-fi/fantasy roots behind", it was nonetheless warmly received as a work, quintessentially "Hopkinson" in many respects, not the least of, its "re-creation of independent Black space". Hopkinson has been lauded for embracing uncommon vernaculars in her narratives, as well as melding many mythologies and cultural roots into her stories. High expectations surrounded the release of The Salt Roads after the book was identified by Warner Books as having significant crossover appeal beyond the science fiction genre, Hopkinson went on a tour of ten cities to promote the novel. Across the restrictions of time and space, the goddess Lasirén experiences and aids the struggles for freedom of the Ginen, the enslaved African people.
The story is told through the eyes of Lasirén and the main three women whose lives become intertwined with her consciousness: Mer, an 18th-century slave and respected healer on a plantation in St. Domingue, Jeanne Duval, the 19th century Haitian actress/dancer and mistress to the French poet Baudelaire, Thais, the fourth century prostitute-turned-saint; each of the women is on her own life journey, the goddess interweaves and influences their sexual and religious experiences. When Mer and Georgine go to the river to bury Georgine's stillborn child, their cries induce the'birth' of Lasirén; as told by the goddess, she is “born from song and prayer". On, Lasiren will speak to Mer on the banks of the same river, will ask Mer to find out why the salt roads are blocked; as told by Mer: "The sea roads, they're drying up." "The sea is drying up?" "Not this sea, Stupid child!" Her tail slapped, sent up a fountain and drenching me. "The sea in the minds of my Ginen. The sea roads, the salt roads, and the sweet ones, too.
Can't follow them to their sources any more. You must fix it, Mer"; the subject of salt roads reappears throughout the novel. By extension, the drying up of the salt roads represents the loss of connection between the enslaved Africans and their heritage. Mer struggles throughout the novel to understand how she can fix these salt roads, it is understood that freeing the Ginen depends upon the preservation of their roots via maintenance of the salt roads. If The Salt Roads is a story of freeing, in one interpretation or another, the Ginen, its title represents the key to that struggle; the Salt Roads tells a story of Lasirén. Lasirén moves through the physical space of humans, she does the latter by possession of the bodies of other characters females. While inhabiting them for varying periods of time, Lasirén helps the three main human characters find their place in the world, she influences their lives and the outcomes of their decisions through direct and indirect means; the novel weaves together the stories of the three women with the common thread of Lasirén's consciousness and her efforts to help the Ginen's struggle for freedom.
The novel begins with the introduction of Mer, a slave and healer on a sugar plantation in St. Domingue. In the opening chapter and her helper/lover Tipingee deliver the stillborn child of a slave woman named Georgine; the three women bury the body at the edge of a nearby river, their songs and prayers deliver Lasirén into being. Lasirén subsequently appears to Mer to inform her that the salt roads are drying up, tasks Mer with clearing them; this task underpins the majority of Mer's story - her struggles to both understand and undertake the work of clearing Lasirén's path to the minds of the Ginen drive the progression and development of the novel's plot during her lifetime. As the Haitian slaves around her, called to violent revolution by the demagogue Makandal, begin to rally against the "backra", Mer struggles for a more peaceful path to freedom, her service to Lasirén puts Mer at odds with Makandal's method of obtaining freedom, Mer's eventual possession by Lasirén at a key point in the story results in the failure of Makandal's revolution, the killing of Makandal, the loss of Mer's tongue.
Though she is given the chance to escape her own enslavement, Mer chooses to stay with the slaves on the plantation. It is understood that Mer embodies one of Lasirén's aspects - her duty will be to heal the Ginen, to fight for their freedom by preserving their heritage and thus keeping the salt roads clear for Lasirén; the second main human character in The Salt Roads is Jeanne Duval known as Lemer and Prosper. She is a Haitian actress and singer in Paris who becomes the mistress of the author and poet, Charles Baudelaire. Jeanne's story is a struggle for economic freedom, she seeks joy and comfort, not only for herself but for her ailing mother. Jeanne's relationship with Charles is tumultuous, Lasirén's influence varies over the course of Jeanne's lifetime; as wealth comes and goes for Jeanne, the novel explores the importance of love and money, as well as their relationship to one another. Despite a long life of physical and economic detriment, Jeanne finds herself loved and content at the end of her life as a result of Lasirén's influence.
If Mer's life is
Black people
Black people is a term used in certain countries in based systems of racial classification or of ethnicity, to describe persons who are perceived to be dark-skinned compared to other populations. As such, the meaning of the expression varies both between and within societies, depends on context. For many other individuals and countries, "black" is perceived as a derogatory, reductive or otherwise unrepresentative label, as a result is neither used nor defined. Different societies apply differing criteria regarding, classified as "black", these social constructs have changed over time. In a number of countries, societal variables affect classification as much as skin color, the social criteria for "blackness" vary. In the United Kingdom, "black" was equivalent with "person of color", a general term for non-European peoples. In South Africa and Latin America, mixed-race people are not classified as "black". In other regions such as Australasia, settlers applied the term "black" or it was used by local populations with different histories and ancestral backgrounds.
The Romans interacted with and conquered parts of Mauretania, an early state that covered modern Morocco, western Algeria, the Spanish cities Ceuta and Melilla during the classical period. The people of the region were noted in Classical literature as Mauri, subsequently rendered as Moors in English. Numerous communities of dark-skinned peoples are present in North Africa, some dating from prehistoric communities. Others are descendants of the historical Trans-Saharan trade in peoples and/or, after the Arab invasions of North Africa in the 7th century, descendants of slaves from the Arab Slave Trade in North Africa. In the 18th century, the Moroccan Sultan Moulay Ismail "the Warrior King" raised a corps of 150,000 black soldiers, called his Black Guard. According to Carlos Moore, resident scholar at Brazil's University of the State of Bahia, in the 21st century Afro-multiracials in the Arab world, including Arabs in North Africa, self-identify in ways that resemble multi-racials in Latin America.
He claims that black-looking Arabs, much like black-looking Latin Americans, consider themselves white because they have some distant white ancestry. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had a mother, a dark-skinned Nubian Sudanese woman and a father, a lighter-skinned Egyptian. In response to an advertisement for an acting position, as a young man he said, "I am not white but I am not black either. My blackness is tending to reddish". Due to the patriarchal nature of Arab society, Arab men, including during the slave trade in North Africa, enslaved more black women than men, they used more black female slaves in domestic agriculture than males. The men interpreted the Qur'an to permit sexual relations between a male master and his female slave outside of marriage, leading to many mixed-race children; when an enslaved woman became pregnant with her Arab master's child, she was considered as umm walad or "mother of a child", a status that granted her privileged rights. The child was given rights of inheritance to the father's property, so mixed-race children could share in any wealth of the father.
Because the society was patrilineal, the children took their fathers' social status at birth and were born free. Some succeeded their fathers as rulers, such as Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur, who ruled Morocco from 1578 to 1608, he was not technically considered as a mixed-race child of a slave. In early 1991, non-Arabs of the Zaghawa tribe of Sudan attested that they were victims of an intensifying Arab apartheid campaign, segregating Arabs and non-Arabs. Sudanese Arabs, who controlled the government, were referred to as practicing apartheid against Sudan's non-Arab citizens; the government was accused of "deftly manipulat Arab solidarity" to carry out policies of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. American University economist George Ayittey accused the Arab government of Sudan of practicing acts of racism against black citizens. According to Ayittey, "In Sudan... the Arabs monopolized power and excluded blacks – Arab apartheid." Many African commentators joined Ayittey in accusing Sudan of practising Arab apartheid.
In the Sahara, the native Tuareg Berber populations kept "Negro" slaves. Most of these captives were of Nilotic extraction, were either purchased by the Tuareg nobles from slave markets in the Western Sudan or taken during raids, their origin is denoted via the Ahaggar Berber word Ibenheren, which alludes to slaves that only speak a Nilo-Saharan language. These slaves were sometimes known by the borrowed Songhay term Bella; the Sahrawi autochthones of the Western Sahara observed a class system consisting of high castes and low castes. Outside of these traditional tribal boundaries were "Negro" slaves, who were drawn from the surrounding areas. In parts of the Horn of Africa, the local Afroasiatic speaking populations have long adhered to a construct similar to that of the Sahara and Maghreb. In Ethiopia and Somalia, the slave classes consisted of individuals of Nilotic and Bantu origin who were collectively known as Shanqella and Adone; these captives and others of analogous morphology were distinguished as tsalim barya in contrast with the Afroasiatic-speaking nobles or saba qayh.
The earliest representation of this tradition dates from a seventh or eighth century BC inscription belonging to the Kingdom of Damat. In South Africa, the period of colonization resulted in many unions and marriages between European men and Bantu and Kho
Black Venus (short story collection)
Black Venus is a collection of short fiction by Angela Carter. It was first published in the United Kingdom in 1985 by Chatto & Windus Ltd. and contains eight stories, the majority of which are concerned with re-imagining the lives of certain figures in history, with a particular emphasis on some well known through literature. The "Black Venus" of the title story is the lover of poet Charles Baudelaire; the anthology's contents are reprinted in the volume Burning Your Boats, which features all of Carter's short fiction. “Black Venus” “The Kiss” “Our Lady of the Massacre” “The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe” “Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream” “Peter and the Wolf” “The Kitchen Child” “The Fall River Axe Murders”
Maud Sulter
Maud Sulter was a Scottish contemporary fine artist, photographer and curator of Ghanaian heritage. She is survived by two daughters and a son. Born in Glasgow to a Scots mother and a Ghanaian father, Maud Sulter attained a master's degree in Photographic Studies from the University of Derby. Sulter's photographic practice included contemporary montage, her work referenced historical and mythical subjects. Her photography was exhibited in across the UK and internationally, including at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1987, she received a number of awards and residencies, including the British Telecom New Contemporaries Award 1990 and the Momart Fellowship at Tate Liverpool in 1990. She worked with Lubaina Himid, including on the book Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity, published by Urban Fox Press in 1990; as well as writing about art history and curating many exhibitions, Sulter was a poet and playwright, whose works include the collections As a Blackwoman. She wrote a play inspired by the background of former Ghana head of state Jerry Rawlings, entitled Service to Empire.
Maud Sulter's work is held in a number of collections, including the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Arts Council Collection, the British Council, the Scottish Arts Council and the Scottish Parliament Collection. In 2011–12, her work was shown at Tate Britain, London, in the exhibition Thin Black Line, a re-staging of the seminal 1986 exhibition The Thin Black Line at the ICA. In 2017, her Muses, two portraits were put on show in the Walker Gallery as part of the largest LGBTQ+ art exhibition in the UK, Coming Out: Sexuality and Identity. 2015 Passion. 2005 Sekhmet. Dumfries: Gracefield Arts Centre 2004 About Face. Organised by the Scottish Poetry Library, Scottish tour 2003 Jeanne Duval: A Melodrama. Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery 2003 A Dozen Kisses. Edinburgh. Dundas Street Gallery 2003 Scots Poets. St Andrews: Stanza at the Byre Theatre 2000 Plantation. Preston: Centre for Contemporary Art, University of Central Lancashire 1999 My Father's House.
London: Rich Women of Zurich 1995 Syrcas at Africus. Africus: Johannesburg Biennale. Johannesburg: Greater Johannesburg Transitional Metropolitan Council 1995 Alba. Glasgow: Centre for Contemporary Art. Wrexham: Wrexham Library Art Centre and tour 1994 Plantation. Winnipeg: Plug In. New York: Steinbaum Krauss Gallery 1993 Akwaba. Vancouver: Artspeak Gallery 2002 Speak English. Glasgow: Glasgow School of Art 1995 Word not Found. Trier: Galerie Palais Walderdorff 1990 Treatise on the Sublime: Maud Sulter, Lubaina Himid. California State University 1989 Blackwoman Song. London: Sisterwrite Gallery 1988 Gold Blooded Warrior. London: Tom Allen Centre 1987 A Room for MaSHULAN, in Lubaina Himid: New Robes for MaShulan. Rochdale: Rochdale Art Gallery 2017 Coming Out: Sexuality and Identity. Walker Gallery, Liverpool. 2013 Looking in: Photographic Portraits by Maud Sulter and Chan-Hyo Bae. London: Ben Uri Gallery 2012 Seduced by Art, Photography Past and Present. London: National Gallery. Glasgow: Centre for Contemporary Art 2011 Thin Black Line.
London: Tate Britain 2008 Black Womanhood, Images and Ideologies of the African Body. Dartmouth: Hood Museum of Art, Davis Museum and Cultural Centre and San Diego Museum of Art 2006 Reading the Image: Poetics of the Black Diaspora. Chatham: Thames Art Gallery and tour 2002 Encontros Da Imagem. Braga As a Blackwoman - poetry Zabat: Poetics of a Family Tree Passion Discourses On Blackwomen's Creativity, Urban Fox Press. ISBN 1872124305. ISBN 9781872124063 Echo: Works by Women Artists, 1850-1940, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978-1854370815 Service to Empire, ISBN 978-0954330200 Sekhmet: A Decade or So of Poems and Galloway Cultural Services. ISBN 978-0946280698 Deborah Cherry, Maud Sulter: Passion, Altitude Editions, 2015, ISBN 978-1-906908-36-2 Deborah Cherry, "The Ghost Begins by Coming Back: Revenants and Returns in Maud Sulter's Photomontages", in A. Lepine, M. Lodder, R. McKever, Memories, Utopias. London: Courtauld Books Online, 2015 "Passion - Blackwomen's Creativity: an interview with Maud Sulter", Spare Rib, Issue 220, February 1991 Works from the Zabat series at the V&A Maud Sulter on ScottishPoetryLibrary.org List of 1996 Johannesburg Biennial artists "Maud Sulter - Passion", Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, 25 April 2015 – 21 June 2015 "Maud Sulter - About Face", Hillhead Library, Glasgow, 17 April 2015 – 28 June 2015 "Revisiting'Two Invisible Case Studies': Maud Sulter & Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé", Malmö Konsthall, 29 July - 7 August 2013
Paris
Paris is the capital and most populous city of France, with an area of 105 square kilometres and an official estimated population of 2,140,526 residents as of 1 January 2019. Since the 17th century, Paris has been one of Europe's major centres of finance, commerce, fashion and the arts; the City of Paris is the centre and seat of government of the Île-de-France, or Paris Region, which has an estimated official 2019 population of 12,213,364, or about 18 percent of the population of France. The Paris Region had a GDP of €681 billion in 2016, accounting for 31 percent of the GDP of France, was the 5th largest region by GDP in the world. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit Worldwide Cost of Living Survey in 2018, Paris was the second most expensive city in the world, after Singapore, ahead of Zurich, Hong Kong and Geneva. Another source ranked Paris as most expensive, on a par with Singapore and Hong-Kong, in 2018; the city is a major rail and air-transport hub served by two international airports: Paris-Charles de Gaulle and Paris-Orly.
Opened in 1900, the city's subway system, the Paris Métro, serves 5.23 million passengers daily, is the second busiest metro system in Europe after Moscow Metro. Gare du Nord is the 24th busiest railway station in the world, the first located outside Japan, with 262 million passengers in 2015. Paris is known for its museums and architectural landmarks: the Louvre was the most visited art museum in the world in 2018, with 10.2 million visitors. The Musée d'Orsay and Musée de l'Orangerie are noted for their collections of French Impressionist art, the Pompidou Centre Musée National d'Art Moderne has the largest collection of modern and contemporary art in Europe; the historical district along the Seine in the city centre is classified as a UNESCO Heritage Site. Popular landmarks in the centre of the city include the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris and the Gothic royal chapel of Sainte-Chapelle, both on the Île de la Cité. Paris received 23 million visitors in 2017, measured by hotel stays, with the largest numbers of foreign visitors coming from the United States, the UK, Germany and China.
It was ranked as the third most visited travel destination in the world in 2017, after Bangkok and London. The football club Paris Saint-Germain and the rugby union club Stade Français are based in Paris; the 80,000-seat Stade de France, built for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, is located just north of Paris in the neighbouring commune of Saint-Denis. Paris hosts the annual French Open Grand Slam tennis tournament on the red clay of Roland Garros. Paris will host the 2024 Summer Olympics; the 1938 and 1998 FIFA World Cups, the 2007 Rugby World Cup, the 1960, 1984, 2016 UEFA European Championships were held in the city and, every July, the Tour de France bicycle race finishes there. The name "Paris" is derived from the Celtic Parisii tribe; the city's name is not related to the Paris of Greek mythology. Paris is referred to as the City of Light, both because of its leading role during the Age of Enlightenment and more because Paris was one of the first large European cities to use gas street lighting on a grand scale on its boulevards and monuments.
Gas lights were installed on the Place du Carousel, Rue de Rivoli and Place Vendome in 1829. By 1857, the Grand boulevards were lit. By the 1860s, the boulevards and streets of Paris were illuminated by 56,000 gas lamps. Since the late 19th century, Paris has been known as Panam in French slang. Inhabitants are known in French as Parisiens, they are pejoratively called Parigots. The Parisii, a sub-tribe of the Celtic Senones, inhabited the Paris area from around the middle of the 3rd century BC. One of the area's major north–south trade routes crossed the Seine on the île de la Cité; the Parisii minted their own coins for that purpose. The Romans began their settlement on Paris' Left Bank; the Roman town was called Lutetia. It became a prosperous city with a forum, temples, an amphitheatre. By the end of the Western Roman Empire, the town was known as Parisius, a Latin name that would become Paris in French. Christianity was introduced in the middle of the 3rd century AD by Saint Denis, the first Bishop of Paris: according to legend, when he refused to renounce his faith before the Roman occupiers, he was beheaded on the hill which became known as Mons Martyrum "Montmartre", from where he walked headless to the north of the city.
Clovis the Frank, the first king of the Merovingian dynasty, made the city his capital from 508. As the Frankish domination of Gaul began, there was a gradual immigration by the Franks to Paris and the Parisian Francien dialects were born. Fortification of the Île-de-la-Citie failed to avert sacking by Vikings in 845, but Paris' strategic importance—with its bridges prevent
Virtual International Authority File
The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. Discussion about having a common international authority started in the late 1990s. After a series of failed attempts to come up with a unique common authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities; this would present all the benefits of a common file without requiring a large investment of time and expense in the process. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library and the OCLC on August 6, 2003; the Bibliothèque nationale de France joined the project on October 5, 2007. The project transitioned to being a service of the OCLC on April 4, 2012; the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary "see" and "see also" records from the original records, refers to the original authority records.
The data are available for research and data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol; the file numbers are being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAF's clustering algorithm is run every month; as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records. Authority control Faceted Application of Subject Terminology Integrated Authority File International Standard Authority Data Number International Standard Name Identifier Wikipedia's authority control template for articles Official website VIAF at OCLC
Nalo Hopkinson
Nalo Hopkinson is a Jamaican-born Canadian speculative fiction writer and editor. She lives and teaches in Riverside, California, her novels and short stories such as those in her collection Skin Folk draw on Caribbean history and language, its traditions of oral and written storytelling. Hopkinson has edited two fiction anthologies, she was the co-editor with Uppinder Mehan for the anthology So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future, with Geoff Ryman for Tesseracts 9. Hopkinson defended George Elliott Clarke's novel Whylah Falls on the CBC's Canada Reads 2002, she was the curator of Six Impossible Things, an audio series of Canadian fantastical fiction on CBC Radio One. Nalo Hopkinson was born 20 December 1960 in Kingston, Jamaica, to Freda and Muhammed Abdur-Rahman Slade Hopkinson, she grew up in Guyana and Canada. She was raised in a literary environment. By virtue of this upbringing, Hopkinson had access to writers like Derek Walcott during her formative years, could read Kurt Vonnegut’s works by the age of six.
Hopkinson’s writing is influenced by the fairy and folk tales she read at a young age, which included Afro-Caribbean stories like Anansi, as well as Western works like Gulliver’s Travels, the Iliad, the Odyssey. Though she lived in Connecticut during her father’s tenure at Yale University, Hopkinson has said that the culture shock from her move to Toronto from Guyana at the age of 16 was something “to which still not reconciled”, she lived in Toronto from 1977 to 2011 before moving to Riverside, California where she accepted a position as Professor of Creative Writing at University of California Riverside. Hopkinson has a Masters of Arts degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University, where she studied with her mentor and instructor, science fiction writer James Morrow, she has learning disabilities. Hopkinson held jobs in libraries, worked as a government culture research officer, held the position of grants officer at the Toronto Arts Council, she has taught writing at various programs around the world, including stints as writer-in-residence at Clarion East, Clarion West and Clarion South.
Publishing and writing was stopped for six years due to a serious illness that prevented her from working. Severe anemia, caused by fibroids as well as a vitamin D deficiency, led to financial difficulties and homelessness for two years prior to being hired by UC Riverside. Since 2011, Hopkinson has been an associate professor in creative writing with an emphasis on science fiction and magical realism at University of California, Riverside; as an author, Hopkinson uses themes of Caribbean folklore, Afro-Caribbean culture, feminism. She is conscious and uses knowledge from growing up in Caribbean communities in her writing, including the use of Creole and character backgrounds from Caribbean countries including Trinidad and Jamaica. In addition, Hopkinson writes about subjects including race and sexuality. Through her work in Midnight Robber, Hopkinson addresses differences in cultures as well as social issues such as child and sexual abuse. Hopkinson has been a key guest of honor at multiple science fiction conventions.
She serves on the board. Hopkinson’s favorite writers include Samuel R. Delany, Tobias S. Buckell, Charles Saunders. In addition, inspiration for her novels comes from songs or poems with Christina Rossetti’s poem "Goblin Market" serving as the inspiration for Sister Mine. Personal hobbies include sewing, cooking and fabric design. Hopkinson designs fabrics based on historical illustrations. Hopkinson was the recipient of the 1999 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the Ontario Arts Council Foundation Award for Emerging Writers. Brown Girl in the Ring was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award in 1998, received the Locus Award for Best First Novel. In 2008 it was a finalist in Canada Reads, produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Midnight Robber was shortlisted for the James R. Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award in 2000 and nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2001. Skin Folk received the World Fantasy Award and the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic in 2003.
The Salt Roads received the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for positive exploration of queer issues in speculative fiction for 2004, presented at the 2005 Gaylaxicon. In 2008, The New Moon's Arms received the Prix Aurora Award and the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, making her the first author to receive the Sunburst Award twice; this book was nominated for the 2007 Nebula Award for Best Novel. Brown Girl in the Ring Midnight Robber The Salt Roads The New Moon's Arms The Chaos Sister Mine Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction Skin Folk Mojo: Conjure Stories So Long Been Dreaming Report From Planet Midnight Falling in Love With Hominids "Slow Cold Chick" in anthology Northern Frights 5 "A Habit of Waste" in anthology Women of Other Worlds: Excursions through Science Fict
