Tag: Les payne

Nonfiction November #1

On By carryabigbookIn Book Reviews, Reading Challenges4 Comments

The Dead Are Arising by Les & Tamara Payne

The Dead Are Arising is the collaborative effort of Les Payne and his daughter Tamara. For the heralded columnist this is his opus, a thirty year labor of love. For Tamara Payne it is a testament to her father as much as it is to Malcolm.

This past Friday I had the pleasure of seeing Tamara Payne interviewed on Politics and Prose. In discussing the direction of The Dead Are Arising she explained how our love for the man clouds our vision of him. That we tend to see him in a vacuum. He is this myth of a man and we forget that he is a man who had a family. These extensions of himself that are still grounded here. His legacy lives on in them and although we as a public want to claim him, he really isn’t ours to own. In expressing these sentiments she could have been talking about Malcolm or her father Les Payne. In completing this book, one of Payne’s chief aims was to be true to her father’s voice. As his daughter, this book was her gift to the rest of his family; her hope that they would hear his voice as they read its pages.

The Dead Are Arising is the culmination of hundreds of interviews with the people who knew Malcolm best. While reading the book I found it hard not to compare it to The Autobiography of Malcolm X. This was in part because I read it directly before delving into this work, but also because the authors refer to it throughout. As a scientist, I considered this a natural part of being a researcher where your role is to verify the validity of the data presented to you. In some cases The Autobiography is supported. In others it is refuted.

Within its pages we get a new perspective of his early life and family dynamics. The previous claim that Malcolm’s father was murdered by the Klan is challenged. More attention is paid to the structure and the founding of the Nation of Islam. Most revelatory for me was the passages that detailed Malcolm’s meeting with the Ku Klux Klan in 1961 and the coverage of his assassination.

Payne is very protective of her subject. In fact fans of Marable’s book have criticized The Dead Are Arising for being too generous towards Malcolm’s legacy. His criminal activities are not as extensive or terrible as they appear in his autobiography. Miss Payne accounts for this difference by claiming that the purpose of exaggerating Malcolm’s street life in The Autobiography sets the stage for his origin myth. The more despicable a picture you paint of your past, the greater the redemptive value of your religious conversion.

The Dead Are Arising was an engrossing read. A vivid portrait, it gives insight into Malcolm Little, the child and El Hajj Malik Shabazz, the man. I believe Tamara Payne has done what she set out to do – amplify the voices of both her father and Malcolm.

WWW Wednesdays

On By carryabigbookIn memes, WWW Wednesdays14 Comments

Hello and Welcome to WWW Wednesday! This meme was created by Miz B formerly of shouldbereading and currently hosted by Sam at Taking on a World of Words. Just answer the three questions below and leave a link to your post in the comments for others to look at. No blog? No problem! Just leave a comment with your responses. Please, take some time to visit the other participants and see what others are reading. So, let’s get to it!

The Three Ws are:

  • What are you currently reading?
  • What did you recently finish reading?
  • What do you think you’ll read next?

What I’ve Read

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Set back 100 years in time – 1920s Georgia – this world feels eerily like the world that we are in now. The historical references embedded into the novel provide a framework that makes it seem more realistic. The world building was so carefully crafted and the imagery so intense that I was immediately sucked into the book. I did not put it down until I was finished. I really appreciated P. Djeli Clark’s nod to the Gullah tradition as that is part of my family history. Especially since the women were so loyal and exuded such power and wisdom. Watching them come together and slay these demons was so exhilarating. I literally shed both tears of joy and sadness.

My full review of Ring Shout can be found on my GoodReads page.

What I am Reading

What would you do if you were offered 10 million dollars to walk away from your life for a year?

There is no need to worry about explaining yourself to family and friends as a clone will be living life in your place. In this sci-fi thriller, Jane Gilmartin has us look at the moral implications of human cloning.

I snatched this edition of The Autobiography of Malcolm X up as soon as I saw that Laurence Fishburne was narrating. Although this is a reread for me I am picking up so much more this second time around. As an adult I am seeing things quite differently and am more critical in my analysis of the work. I am hoping to gain a fresh perspective before reading my next book The Dead Are Arising which also follows the life of Malcolm X.

What I Will Read Next

Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X. He died before he achieved that mission. Picking up the mantle of what would be her father’s opus Tamara Payne completed the biography. Where this volume fits in the annals of time and how it speaks to Malcolm X’s legacy has yet to be determined. But I am certainly looking forward to reading this work and excited by all of the starred reviews it has received.