Makeda

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Makeda (eBook) Pub. Date: 8/29/2011 Publisher: Akashic Books
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Makeda Pub. Date: 8/30/2011 Publisher: Akashic Books

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Editorial Reviews
Product Details
Meet the Author

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Overview

"Makeda teases, provokes, challenges, and illuminates the complex, painful, and joyous personal and collective journeys in search of family, identity, love, and place that define us. Like the protagonist Makeda’s many incarnations, this haunting novel of return reminds us that we are all part of something far greater than ourselves, or this moment."
—Jill Nelson, author of the New York Times best seller Volunteer Slavery

"Randall Robinson is not only a legendary freedom fighter, but also a towering public intellectual and powerful novelist. His fascinating new work, Makeda, has great mind, heart, and soul!"
—Cornel West, author of Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir

"Makeda is brilliant and path-breaking, filled with passion and compassion. It took hold in my heart and wouldn’t let go. A scholar and a poet uncompromisingly committed to justice, Randall Robinson is a rare and exquisite writer. This novel will burn in your brain long after you have left its haunting pages."
—Susan L. Taylor, former editor in chief of Essence magazine

"Makeda is a soaring, wrenching, and ultimately revealing glimpse into the roles within a powerful matriarchal family . . . A must read for anyone who wants to appreciate history, the role of women, and the significance of transferring ideas, goals, and ambitions from one generation to the next."
—Charles J. Ogletree Jr., author of The Presumption of Guilt

"Luminous and magical; in Makeda, Robinson has created a brilliant and well-imagined work."
—Bernice L. McFadden, award-winning author of Glorious

Editorial Reviews

Library Journal

Gray Marsh is close to his blind grandmother, who entrusts him with stories of past lives she experiences in dreams. Her vivid dreams of a childhood in Africa include many facts that should be unknown to her, including customs, geographical features, and astronomical observations made by the Dogon people. Gray investigates these claims as he grows older and establishes himself in the academic community, and he comes to see himself and his grandmother as exceptionally connected to an African past. A journey to Mali predictably confirms not only the mystical details of his grandmother's visions but also the narrator's growing belief that he has been educationally shortchanged by the Western canon. VERDICT Robinson (The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks) attempts to craft a unique coming-of-age novel set in a racially divided America, but his story is flawed by repetitive and didactic passages that veer frequently into polemic. A controversial novel on history and race that may interest readers of African and African American history.—John R. Cecil, Austin, TX

Kirkus Reviews

Through his grandmother Makeda, narrator Gray March finds much to love about his African—and his African-American—heritage.

For a time Gray has only known his blind and loving grandmother in her persona as Mattie March, a laundress for white families in Richmond, Va., but it turns out she has great depth to her soul. For one thing, her real name turns out to be Makeda, reflecting an African heritage that goes back generations. For another, she has dream-visions of past life experiences, one of the most notable being her memory as thedaughter of Ongnonlou, a 14th-century Dogon priest from Mali. Mattie/Makeda accepts these dreams as a matter of course, and as she spins out her past history to 15-year-old Gray, he becomes fascinated and writes down the details of her life as a Dogon girl. Most startlingly, the Dogon people are skilled astronomers who worship Sirius as well as some smaller, satellite stars...whose existence wasn't confirmed by astronomers until the late 20th century. (According to Robinson's postscript, this detailed astronomical knowledge of the Dogon is a mystery that has yet to be resolved.) Gray's fascination with his grandmother's story eventually leads him to Mali, and his research confirms the existence of Ongnonlou as well as geographical details of the landscape of which Makeda could obviously have no firsthand knowledge. Makeda also channels other past lives, in one of which she was a Jew and in another a Muslim, but her experience of having been raised Dogon over 500 years before dominates both her life and her grandson's.

Robinson writes with erudition about strange and wonderful matters.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781617750229
Publisher: Akashic Books
Publication date: 8/30/2011
Pages: 350
Sales rank: 44,162
Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author

Randall Robinson is the author of An Unbroken Agony and the national best sellers The Debt, The Reckoning, and Defending the Spirit. He is also founder and past president of TransAfrica, the African-American organization he established to promote enlightened, constructive U.S. policies toward Africa and the Caribbean. In 1984, Robinson established the Free South Africa Movement, which pushed successfully for the imposition of sanctions against apartheid South Africa; and in 1994, his public advocacy, including a 27-day hunger strike, led to the UN multinational operation that restored Haiti's first democratically elected government to power. Mr. Robinson lives with his wife and daughter in St. Kitts.

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revmelonymcgant

Posted September 20, 2011

Please read celebrated TransAfrica founder and Civil Rights Icon, Randall Robinson's MAKEDA!!!!!!

Please read celebrated TransAfrica founder and Civil Rights Icon, Randall Robinson's MAKEDA!!!!!! MAKEDA is riveting; a blessing and affirmation of my heart and a calling for US All to Re-Member the Truth of our Greatness! Circumstances do not define who we are in our hearts! I especially liked the cover and feel of the pages! Mr. Randall Robinson's eloquent truth is presented in an equally eloquent, magnificent package! I read all night and this book is simply captivating! I honor you for your vision Mr. Robinson! MAKEDA is truly is a soul awakening Masterpiece! With loving respect! Rev. Melony McGant

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