Native in a Strange Land: Trials & Tremors [Paperback]

Wanda Coleman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1996

In this collection of articles, essays, interviews and columns, Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles' noted satirist, poet, and journalist, recounts three decades of the growth of her city and herself. Gleaned from the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, The Free Press and other publications, Coleman says that these pieces offer "a tour through the restless emotional topography of Los Angeles as glimpsed through the scattered fragments of my living memory."

We find the author--who is African-American, laboring as waitress, bartender, editor of a sleazy men's magazine--caught up in militant revolutionary politics and witnessing even more violent social upheaval in the form of the Watts and Rodney King riots.

While Coleman's life has been one of unique accomplishment, Publisher's Weekly notes, "Her extraordinary eye for detail and personal perspective universalizes her experience and makes her observations both trenchant and reliable." In short, this book is a must-read for any student of the American condition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

I first "met" Coleman when she was featured on a PBS special. She read some of her poems, and I was floored by their power. In this prose collection, I got to know her even better, through her essays and her interviews of artists Nikki Giovanni and Bob Marley. Her essays are crystalline insights on a world gone careless and L.A. in crisis. Within these short reflections are folks you know and others you'll want to meet. Coleman speaks of the facts and foibles of being human, of difference and of just getting through the day. She talks the talk!

From Publishers Weekly

Satire and journalism are alive and well in L.A., at least when poet Coleman (African Sleeping Sickness) is doing the biting and reporting. Her collection of articles, essays, columns and interviews is more than a paean to her birthplace. She gives us L.A. as a microcosm of what America is today and where it is heading. The picture is not always hopeful. She describes the suicide of a friend as a "failed struggle in a metropolis gone mad, where the only politics is survival and success is measured in multiples of zero." Hers is a sociology of stories, anecdotes and observations, but her extraordinary eye for detail and personal perspective universalizes her experience and makes her observations both trenchant and reliable. She has a progressive agenda that is insistent but reasonably argued. And, even though she describes herself as "hard boiled, quiet, dismally realistic," she has a wry sense of humor. One of her Swiftian solutions to the plight of inner cities is to start schools for wanna-be thugstas. "How about a school that teaches the well-heeled the ins and outs of hard-core urban warfare?" She reasons that the schools would give employment to gangstas, ex-cons and rehab program internees. Attendees would come from the ranks of novelists, Hollywood directors, talk-show hosts, scriptwriters and amateur slummers. Although she is sardonic when it comes to politics and groups, she is tender and hopeful when it comes to individuals. In a letter to the late Hakim A. Jamal, who was her first mentor after Watts in the summer of 1965, she writes: "I will do my level best to clothe those bone-cold statistics in human flesh." "I have kept The Faith, Jamal," she concludes, "but it hasn't kept me."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 292 pages
• Publisher: Black Sparrow Press (September 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1574230220
• ISBN-13: 978-1574230222
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #223,602 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.