{"product_id":"maafa-9781944380236","title":"Maafa","description":"Maafa is Swahili for catastrophe or holocaust. It echoes and transambulates the Hebrew word Shoah. Without a word for a traumatic event, its erasure is always in progress, without a system of naming our history, we become addicted to its ghosts of familiarity. Names are angels of mercy. The project of this work is to unleash this word and its healing components from obscurity. The erasure of trauma and the erasure of black femininity are happening simultaneously. This book seeks to unknot that through the writing of a black female epic hero. Maafa has no relatives, one explicit black female epic hero in the western canon. We have characters, lots of tragic ones, lively ones, beautiful transcendent ones with heroic tendencies, but no black female hero in poetics who is as deliberately cast as Odysseus. This book sets out to write her, whose name is Maafa. She killed her father in the barracoons because the sight of him in captivity beside her was too much to bear. Now she is on her hero's journey which is filled with efforts to shake the sense of shame and longing and forgetting something that haunts her in her pursuit of freedom. The crime chases her into all manners of light and darkness. The book begins in Duat, or what the Egyptian Book of the Dead calls 'the boat that carries the sun' and moves toward 'A Paradise of Ruins, ' where our tragicomedic black female hero dances a series of poems as gestures, everything from the cut pitch of a single drum lick to the frenzied but detached look on memed faces to the way a dancer waves while walking backwards. Through the existential absurdity of the accumulation of these images she exorcises her own haunts, and Maafa is healed into complete being. Maafa is a book of poems about a rebirth of feminine consciousness and cultural consciousness that was trapped in patriarchy and erasure.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Holiday, Harmony\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 12\/07\/2021\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Fence Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781944380236","brand":"Harmony Holiday","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":39514566557771,"sku":"9781944380236","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0021\/1697\/6715\/products\/img_248011e3-6dd7-4757-be60-e27d1c612915.jpg?v=1631638784","url":"https:\/\/blackbookstore.com\/products\/maafa-9781944380236","provider":"Black Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}