The Jive Talker: An Artist's Genesis [Hardcover]

Samson Kambalu (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 12, 2008

What do you do when it looks like the odds were stacked against you before you were even born, when you're having trouble feeding a family that just keeps growing, when you've got a little too much of an affection for Carlsberg Brown and when the life president of your country, Malawi, keeps shuffling around the public health system that employs you, forcing you and your family into perpetual nomadism? You catch up on your reading, adding I'm OK, You're OK and Nietzsche to the bathroom library. Holding on to your dignity, you keep dressing up in threadbare three-piece suits you ordered from London back when you could afford them. You raise your head high like a giraffe and call yourself a philosopher, not a civil servant. With a bottle of beer in hand you philosophize before your mystified kids at night -- on anything from football to Shakespeare -- and you look to the future with boundless optimism. In short, and most important, you talk jive.

The father of Samson Kambalu is the "Jive Talker" of this vivacious and warm, bristling and hilarious memoir. Kambalu Senior died of AIDS in 1995, bequeathing to his son a passion for words and an imagination that transcended all limitations. Described by The Guardian newspaper as "one of the artists to color the future," Samson Kambalu is one of the most successful young conceptual artists on the contemporary art scene: he has been featured in Bloomberg New Contemporaries and he has won a Decibel Award; he has exhibited around the world, including at the Liverpool Biennial with Yoko Ono and the FIFA World Cup in Germany in 2006. He is currently on a five-year artist residency funded by the Arts Council England.

In this utterly original, often subversive book, Samson Kambalu introduces us to his country of birth, Malawi, an impoverished nation in which no dissent is tolerated, where political opponents are "disappeared" and where a portrait of Life President Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda is always guaranteed to be watching. It's also a place in which a little boy obsessed with Michael Jackson, Footloose, Nietzsche, girls, fashion and football can move beyond his station to become a rising star in international pop culture, creating a life-affirming expressionist philosophy, "Holyballism," along the way.

Narrated with sass and charisma, The Jive Talker is a love letter to an Africa that is hardly understood, and it's a coming-of-age story that takes its place among the finest work by Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A Malawi artist now living in England, Kambalu delivers a wickedly dry memoir that reflects as much the coming-of-age of his impoverished, tiny African country as it does himself. Born in 1975 into a Christian family of eight—an Ngoni mother and a Chewa father with a missionary education—Kambalu spent a peripatetic childhood moving among remote villages at the whim of his father's work as a medical assistant, which provided the family starvation wages. Early memories of being plagued by parasites, malaria, jiggers and various evangelical sects coincide with a growing awareness of his father's temperamental outbursts—fed by alcohol, the Jive Talker of the title spewed snippets from Nietzsche and other philosophers to his wary children. By age 12 Kambalu was Born Again, then invented his own religion he called Holyballism, and eventually secured a much coveted spot at Kamuzu Academy, subsidized by Malawi dictator Banda and modeled on the best British public schools down to its brutal initiation rites. Kambalu's memoir comprises brief, ironical anecdotes and hilarious cameos of raving eccentrics, especially during his six-year tenure at Kamuzu. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

A lesser one of the New American Cinema directors who surfaced in the 1970s, Demme proved to have staying power, though his most recent projects have been decidedly low-profile. After making B movies for producer Roger Corman, Demme caught critics’ eyes with such quirky fare as Melvin and Howard and Something Wild before moving to the mainstream with hits like Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. Since then, he has devoted much of his attention to low-budget documentaries and concert films. Occasionally, he pursues such odd projects as his remakes of the 1960s favorites Charade and The Manchurian Candidate. The 23 interviews here hail from film journals, newspapers, alternative weeklies, and other sources including public broadcasting (conversations with Charlie Rose and Terry Gross) and an excessively condensed colloquy with critic Pauline Kael, an early champion of Demme’s work. Demme’s current feature, Rachel Getting Married, has been acclaimed his best work in a decade, which likely will boost interest in this first-person survey of his career. --Gordon Flagg

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (August 12, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416559310
• ISBN-13: 978-1416559313
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,432,422 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)