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February is
Black History Month
Month
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Sunday February 19
 |
K. R. Meera (b. 1970) – Indian novelist, screenwriter, journalist |
Read about K.R. Meera here and here
K R Meera is a famous novelist in my language, Malayalam. She doesn’t write in English (as far as I know), neither may she be known outside our humble frontiers. Kerala is a small, really small region in the face of the earth, at the bottom-most of India—God’s Own Country, as it (Kerala) is known.
The novelette was named ‘Meerasadhu’ (of course not! with no connection to novelist’s name)—the term applied to the wretched woman-devotees of Lord Krishna flocking Vrindaban (north Indian town of shrines devoted to Krishna). Meerasadhus, poor, dismal, miserable lot, living on 20 or 30 cents a day, with the only job of chanting of Lord Krishna’s name the whole day in the temple, are hundreds in number. They have clean-shaved heads hooded by their cheap dirty sarees, emaciated weak bodies, sunken eyes, and dry dark skins. They are the most pitiful lot, many of whom abandoned by their husbands, children, or relatives. And according to Meera, “the sweethearts of Lord Krishna.”
They always carry veenas (with smaller heads and thin wooden handles devoid of frets), as sign of their worship. They chant—it is the only thing they do and they need to—recite the Lord Krishna’s kirtans loudly by rote.
[from "K. R. Meera Kept Me Allured" - CuteWriting blog April 3, 2008]
Read an excerpt from Meera’s novel Aaraachaar here
Suddenly, from behind, sliding under my arms, two hands crawled in and groped my breasts. The stink of paan and sweat was too familiar to ignore; it was Maruti Prasad, Anjaneya’s son. I slowly turned and looked into his eyes. Instead of being gripped by fear or panic, I found it funny. I kept the writing board aside and got up from the chair. Like most of the Gridha Mullick descendants, I’m tall and strong and have large eyes. When I stood straight, it seemed like he was two inches shorter than me. I slowly took my dupatta off. He was ogling at my cleavage hungrily. Before the blink of an eye I whirled a knot and, with a smile, hung it around his neck like a garland. Before he could pull me closer, I swiftly pulled the other end of the dupatta through the window pane and jerked the noose tight.
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Born February 19
Monday February 20
| Mike Leigh (b. 1943) – U.K. filmmaker, playwright |
Read about Mike Leigh here and here
It was while working in the theater in the 1960s that Leigh devised his uncommon scriptwriting method. After he had sufficient funding for a project, he asked his actors to create characters they wished to play, then worked with each actor individually on developing that character’s entire life history. While Leigh had an idea of where he wanted the story to go, it was during rehearsals and improv that the whole script came together. Leigh refined this method while working in television and film later in his career.
Much of Leigh’s work for stage and television in the 1970s and early to mid-1980s featured themes and character types he would go on to explore in his later films. Many of his works of this period focus on the working and lower middle classes and concern unemployment and family life.
Perhaps ironically, while Leigh often focused on left-leaning issues in his television movies and stage productions, he was not popular with British socialists and others of the political left because of his negative depiction of working-class people and their issues.
[From answers.com compilation about Mike Leigh]
Mike Leigh talks about “that other kind of film” here
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Born February 20
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Tuesday February 21
| Nina Simone (b. 1933) – U.S. singer/songwriter |
Read about Nina Simone here and here and here
By the early 1960s, Simone’s music began to more directly echo the tenor of the times. Once the darling of the supper club set, Simone was more and more likely to be found performing at a Civil Rights fundraiser. Simone was brought into the movement at the behest of her good friend, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun). It was because of her experiences with the movement that Simone wrote and recorded her most potent critique of American racism. As she recounts in her autobiography I Put a Spell on You, she was dramatically moved by the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four little Black girls. Simone restrained her own rage … and transformed that rage into the scathing political tome “Mississippi Goddam”. The song was recorded live at Carnegie Hall in March of 1964. Simone’s career her access to the super club set—would be radically altered by the recording.
The brilliance of the song lies in the way she initially destabilized the immediate reception of the song, by placing the song’s lyrics on top of a swinging show tune beat. It was as if the song was performed to the music of the “Sambo Shuffle” — that moment when Sambo decides to stop “shuckin’ and jivin’” and actually starts to speak “truth to power.” … Simone rips into America’s race policy, simmering as she sings “don’t tell me, I tell you / Me and my people just about due / I’ve been there so I know / You keep on saying go slow,” a reference, in part, to the Brown vs. The Board of Education (Topeka, Kansas) Supreme Court decision which urged the desegregation of American public schools with the oxymoronic notion of “all deliberate speed”.
[From New Black Man blog by Mark Anthony Neal, February 21, 2011]
Watch Nina Simone perform “Mississippi Goddamn”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYh61VBTVuw
Listen to Nina Simone perform “My Baby Just Cares for Me” and “I Loves You Porgy”
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Born February 21
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Wednesday February 22
| Arif Babayev (b. 1938) – Azerbaijani singer of Mugham style |  |
Read about Arif Babayev here
Watch Arif Babayev perform here
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Also born on February 22
| Annie LaPorte Diggs (b. 1848 or 1853) – U.S. (Canada-born) activist, journalist |  |
Read about Annie Diggs here and here and here
Annie LaPorte Diggs was thirty-seven in 1890. She had come to Kansas in the early 1870s, married a man who worked in the post office in Lawrence and raised three children. Her political activism began in the Unitarian church. She had been trying to change the economic system for a decade as an advocate of temperance and woman suffrage. She published a newspaper, the Kansas Liberal, during the 1880s in which she denounced the inequities of the existing political order.
As the farmers’ movement gained strength, Diggs turned to more visible political journalism in a newspaper column for a major state newspaper. She also took her opinions to the alliance rallies and meetings that dominated state politics in 1890. Her conversational style proved effective on the stump as she argued that “monopoly, the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few and the increasing poverty, degradation and helplessness of the many are the near evils which threaten the life of the Republic.”
[from American Passages, Volume 2: A History of the United States Since 1865
by Edward L. Ayers, et al.]
Annie Diggs first ventured into reform activities in 1877 as a poll watcher in a local prohibitionist campaign in Lawrence. Soon she was involved in temperance meetings, suffrage campaigns. lay preaching in the Unitarian church, and occasional writing in local and New York newspapers. In August 1881 she helped establish the Kansas Liberal Union, a nonpolitical association of “spiritualists, materialists, Unitarians, Universalists, Free Religionists, Socialists, and agnostics.”
During her stay in the East [Boston] she investigated the conditions of the poor and became convinced that the reforms she sought “were after all economical rather than moral questions. There was little hope in the East because the wage earners were afraid to say their souls were their own. But if the farmers could become interested,” she thought, “there was some promise of success.” She returned to Kansas in February 1882, determined to enlighten the farmers.
[from Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary]
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Born February 22
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Also born on February 22
| Jules Renard (b. 1864) – French novelist, journal writer, playwright |
Read about Jules Renard here
“Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.”
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Thursday February 23
| Leevi Lehto (b. 1951) Finnish poet, translator |
Read about Leevi Lehto here and here and here
Visit Leevi Lehto’s website
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Born February 23
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Friday February 24
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Born February 24
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Saturday February 25
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Born February 25
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