Distant Drum Research Articles

Distant Drums

In this extract from Emanuel Derman�s memoir, Brief Hours and Weeks: My Life as a Capetonian, the author recalls plotting resonances, programming a computer to write poems, the serendipity of acne, and mystic teachers.

Manohar Malgonkar as a Feminist

This research paper illustrates the concept of female characters in the novels of Manohar Malgonkar. Branded as an entertainer and story teller, the deeper qualities of his fiction have been neglected or unperceived by many. The various articles by commentators do not seem to bring out the merits of the author as a significant Indo-English novelist. The few researchers who have taken up his novels seem to have failed to highlight his exceptional command over the English language. A casual reading of his novels may make the reader fall in line with the biased comments made by earlier critics. It is also intended to bring out a balanced view of the greatness of the author. Succumbing to this temptation also, this attempt to study the concept of women versus tradition in Malgonkar’s novels is made here. In this study I have taken up his five full-fledged and mature novels to explain Malgonkar as a feminist - Distant Drum, Combat of Shadows, The Princess, A Bend in the Ganges, and The Devil’s Wind. Key words: Traditions, Inferiority complex, Anglo-Indian, Orthodox, Reminiscence, Relationship, and Domination, Feminism etc.

Stylistic analysis of Tivisms in select Nigerian novels

The culture of a given people is reflected in their literature and language is a medium through which such a culture is expressed. Stylistic analysis of Tange’s The Legitimate Candidate, Shija’s Whispers of Distant Drums, Gar’s The Blood of the Ram, Kwaghchimin’s A Star of Hope, Tijah’s Slow Men at Work and Norya’s The Luminous Flame resonates with unique expressions which express Tivness. The study investigates the significance of semantic devices in the select novels using Style as a Manner of Expression Model. Methodologically, this study used primary and secondary sources of data. The data for analysis are Tivisms in the select novels. Tivisms refer to Tiv words, expressions, exclamations or interjections, phrases and sentences, unique narrative, dramatic and poetic techniques that are used in literary works talk about Tiv people, culture and language. The study shows that Tivisms serve the following purposes: identity construction, multimodality, beautification, speech flavour and local colour. The paper contributes the literature on language use in Nigerian or African literature.

Lexico-Semantic and Pragmatic Stylistic Devices in the Select Novels

Previous studies on the select novels under study examined the linguistic roles of surrogate language, stylistic analysis of Tivism (local colours literary artists incorporated in their works from Tiv cosmology), among others. None of the studies specifically focused on lexico-semantic and pragmatic stylistic devices in these novels. This study investigates the relevance of lexico-semantic and pragmatic devices for meaning realisation in Shija’s Whispers of Distant Drums (2005), Gar’s The Blood of the Ram (2009), Kwaghchimin’s A Star of Hope (2010), Tijah’s Slow Men at Work (2012) and Norya’s The Luminous Flame (2014), works possessing very rich graphological and phonological stylistic devices. This study has adopted Leech’s (1969) model of foregrounding because it properly accounts for the use of parallelisms (repetitions) and deviations in the novels. This study uses the above five select novels as primary sources and textbooks, journal articles and theses as documentary sources. As for data presentation and analysis, the authors examined the select novels by reading between the lines, selecting lexes, picking semantic and pragmatic devices as well as grouping these under lexis, semantics and pragmatics and relating them to their stylistic uses. It was discovered that lexical items used in the texts portray Tiv culture. It was also learnt that both denotative and connotative meanings have been used in the novels. The effective use of linguistic stylistic features enhances meaning realisation and character depiction in the texts under study, the paper concludes.

Echoes and glimpses of a distant drum

Echoes and glimpses of a distant drum

MANOHAR MALGONKAR - “THE INDIAN KIPLING”

Manohar Malgonkar a versatile Indian fictional writer represents the life of pre independent and of post independent India that has left heavy memories of events which changed our nation’s history and society in the most profound ways. His novels “ Distant Drum” (1960), “Combat of Shadows “(1962),” The Princes” (1963), “A Bend in the Ganges” (1964), and “The Devil's Wind” (1972) witness a wonderful knock of weaving plots of singular originality. His themes such as the army life, the aristocracy, commonality, partition of India, violence, sex, hunting, betrayal and revenge actually provides scope to find out the depth of Human relationships.“There is no exaggeration in calling him “INDIAN KIPLING”.
 Malgonkar has similarities with R.K. Narayan. Both are contemporary Indian fiction writers in English and have experimented with the English language. He finds India under the pressures of modern education and industrialization changing its virtues and reminds us to overcome the evil factors. As a contemporary of writers such as Mulk Raj Anand and Khushwant Singh, it is a fact that Malgonkar’s contribution to the genre we refer to today as Indian Writing in English remains largely unacknowledged.

Brave Music of a Distant Drum by M. Herbstein

Herbstein, Manu. Brave Music of a Distant Drum. Red Deer, AB: Red Deer Press. 2012. Print. A young African-American man, Zachariah Wiliams, comes to visit his mother, who has been enslaved all her adult life. He, too, is a slave, but views his Brazilian owners as benevolent Christians, who have taught him how to read and write, gave him some pay for his bookkeeping work, and have promised to set him free in the coming years. He is reticent to meet with his mother who has never converted to Christianity, and with whom he is not close; she calls him by the name Kwame Zumbi, and she is uninterested in his successes working for his owners. She has asked him to smuggle some paper from his office, for she is going to tell a story she wishes him to write down for his own daughter to read when she is older.Ama's story is brutal in a way that is familiar to many readers, but not predictable. She tells of a failed rebellion on the slave ship, the beatings and sexual assaults that were a part of her everyday life, and of her love for Tomba, Zacharias' father. She writes of her intimacy with the daughter of her owners, emphasizing the strangeness of a girl who attempts to treat Ama well as a slave, but who does not truly want Ama to have her freedom. Although Ama has some momentary victories against people involved in the slave trade, she is never ultimately free. The novel does not attempt to fulfill a reader's hope for Ama's emancipation, and in this way, is more realistic than some fictional narratives of slavery in the Americas; it also avoids 'containing' the issue of slavery by ending with an individual's escape. This makes for a difficult, but strong novel.This young adult novel is based on author Herbstein's earlier historical novel for adults, Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Herbstein has made an unusual move here, revising the original novel for a younger audience, and has made thoughtful choices in doing so. He has shortened the story significantly, skimming over much of Ama's experiences that take place between her kidnapping in her village, and her forced placement on a slave ship headed for Brazil. (He skillfully explains this change as the limited amount of paper that Zachariah been able to procure; Ama wishes to retain only the details of her brutal enslavement in Brazil.) Herbstein's use of shifting first-person perspective, alternating between Ama and Zacharias, efficiently conveys Ama's blunt telling with her son's change from disbelief to anger at the injustice she has endured—an injustice that implicates his Brazilian owners. Brave Music of a Distant Drum is a brutal, thoughtful, well-written book that would be excellent for teenage readers.Recommended: 4 out of 4 starsReviewer: Allison SivakAllison Sivak is the Public Services Librarian at the University of Alberta Libraries. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Library and Information Studies and Elementary Education, focusing on how the aesthetics of information design influence young people’s trust in the credibility of information content.

GOING ABROAD FOR TREATMENT

The idea of travelling great distances for treatment to obtain “cures” and “Aabe Hayat” is not new. There are many reasons, real and imaginary that prompt a patient to undertake ardous and expensive journeys for treatment. We will discount the small minoiity which goes abroad for reasons of prestige or because they are extremely wealthy and except for coming to Pakistan to collect their incomes or oversee their estates have no feelings for this country other than contempt. The majority of people who go abroad do so for two main groups of problems. Philosophically speaking the grass always appears greener on the other side and the distant drum sounds sweeter. This coupled to the fact that the high and might run abroad for treatment ever time they sneeze makes the public all the more suspicious of local facilities! Remember, people get sick, crippled, remain incurable and die even in the Unites States.

Brave Music of a Distant Drum (review)

Reviewed by: Brave Music of a Distant Drum Hope Morrison Herbstein, Manu . Brave Music of a Distant Drum. Red Deer, 2012. 179p. Paper ed. ISBN 978-0-88995-470-0 $12.95 R Gr. 10 up. Ama is an aging African slave living and working on an eighteenth-century Brazilian sugar plantation; her son left the plantation years ago to be raised as a Christian and now takes down the life story of the mother he barely remembers. Ama's tale is a tragic one: she was kidnapped from her African village, repeatedly raped, imprisoned, and eventually sold into slavery and shipped across the Atlantic, with any respite from horror and abuse along the way proving only temporary. The narrative shifts seamlessly and with perfect timing between Ama's story and interjections by her son, Zacharias, and Josef, another slave. Ama's story is brutally fascinating in its own right, and for the most part the framing story serves to add depth and context. Much of Zacharias' narrative is dedicated to criticizing his mother's pagan ways, insisting that her story has nothing to do with him, and consistently protecting and defending his mistress; his sudden shift to broader understanding is abrupt, but the different understandings add tension. Ultimately, this is a complex and carefully developed examination of the transatlantic slave trade as seen through the lens of one woman's experience, and young people who may not have considered slavery's impact on the New World outside of North America will have their eyes opened. A detailed character list precedes the story, and a glossary is appended. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Brave Music of a Distant Drum by M. Herbstein

Herbstein, Manu. Brave Music of a Distant Drum. Markham, ON: Red Deer Press, 2011. Print. This is a powerful and thought-provoking novel, which offers remarkable insights into one of the darkest chapters in human history. South African author Manu Herbstein was awarded the 2002 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, and in Brave Music of a Distant Drum, Herbstein re-imagines Ama’s story for a younger, North American audience. The novel chronicles the meeting between an elderly woman at the end of her life and the son who does not remember or understand her. It soon becomes clear that the divide which separates mother and son cannot be overcome until he listens to her story. Kidnapped as a teenager by Bedagbam slave raiders, young Ama was traded several times by powerful slave owners in Africa before she found herself on a slave ship bound for South America. Now elderly and blind, Ama needs her son to write her history down so that it will not be drowned “in the swamp of lost memories.” It is a heart-breaking story, but one that is filled with courageous acts of resistance and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of hope. Following in the tradition of Alex Haley’s Roots (1976) and Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negros (2007), it is apparent that Ama’s son needs to understand his parents’ history before he can make sense of his own life in the present. This novel is recommended for young adults (16+), and this is an important guideline for two reasons. First, readers who lack sufficient literary and historical knowledge will have trouble interpreting the clues that reveal that the novel is set in eighteenth-century Brazil. More importantly, although the novel’s realistic depictions of horrific violence serve an important purpose, this violence is challenging for even a mature reader. Recommended: Four stars out of fourReviewer: Linda QuirkLinda is Assistant Special Collections Librarian at the Bruce Peel Special Collections Library at the University of Alberta.

Ashley Jackson. Distant Drums: The Role of Colonies in British Imperial Warfare. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2010. Pp 368. $74.95 (cloth); $39.50 (paper).

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Distant drums: the role of colonies in British imperial warfare

Distant drums: the role of colonies in British imperial warfare

Distant Drums: The Unsung Contribution of African-Jamaican Percussion to Popular Music at Home and Abroad

OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS, have been seeking out and interviewing as many of Jamaica's professional session drummers and percussionists as could find.1 In 2005, finally succeeded in tracking down Alvin Patterson, better known as Seeco. During the years when Bob Marley took reggae music to the international stage, Seeco was main percussionist. While we were discussing the foundations of Jamaican popular music, Seeco made a comment that was particularly interesting to me. is the whole build-up of the reggae, he told me. I know long time it is coming from the drum. The whole music come from the drum. Drum come like the first music. Drum is the first music, you know. So think produced the reggae. It's a sound.2If this is so - if reggae is a drum sound, as Seeco insists - then why is it that we come across so little about drumming and drummers when we read about the history of Jamaican popular music? More specifically, why do we hear so little about hand drummers and percussionists and their role in the creation of Jamaica's phenomenal soundscape? True, the fundamental role of and bass in reggae is widely recognised. And aficionados of Jamaican music can certainly name some of the key studio drummers in the history of recorded Jamaican music. Many will know, for instance, of Lloyd Knibb, Carlton Barrett, Leroy Horsemouth Wallace, or Lowell Sly Dunbar. Those who have dug deeper may also be able to cite other important players such as Drumbago (Arkland Parks), Winston Grennan, Joe Isaacs, Hector Bunny Williams, Hugh Malcolm, Fil Callender, Lloyd Tinleg Adams, Paul Douglas, Michael Mikey Boo Richards, Carlton Santa Davis, or Lincoln Style Scott. AU of these session drummers - and others have not named here - deserve much more credit than they have yet to receive for the tremendous role they have played in shaping Jamaican popular music.Yet, as important as they are, do not intend to focus in this article on such noteworthy set players. would like to direct attention, rather, to some of Jamaica's rhythm specialists who have received even less credit - namely, the hand drummers and percussionists who bridge the country's older African-Jamaican musical heritage and the newer urban sounds for which Jamaica has become famous.If one figure stands out among this latter group, it is undoubtedly Oswald Williams, better known as Count Ossie. Count Ossie deservedly achieved fame during lifetime as one of the earliest players and certainly the leading promoter of the Rastafarian genre of drumming that came to be known as Nyabinghi.3 By the time of tragic death in a road accident in 1976, Count Ossie was so revered in Jamaica that he was almost immediately memorialised in a reggae song by the Trinidadian-Jamaican calypsonian Lord Laro. Though he is gone, Laro reminded mourners, his music still lingers on . . . Count Ossie lives in every beat of the Congo drum.4 There is indeed little doubt that Count Ossie's name will live on. But Count Ossie is not the only important or talented hand drummer or percussionist in the history of Jamaican music.How many students of Jamaican music have heard of Babu Bryan? Very few, would venture to guess. Yet, according to some, Babu Bryan is the greatest Jamaican drummer who ever lived. Unfortunately, playing was never recorded, and very few details are known about life. Babu, also known as Matthias, was born in the nineteenth century and lived into the mid-twentieth century. He spent a good portion of life in the small community of Leith Hall, near Morant Bay in St Thomas parish. Although few Jamaicans have heard of this great drummer, name lives on among Kumina practitioners in St Thomas even today. Not only skill as a drummer but also tremendous spiritual power remain legendary. Babu, it is said, could play the Kumina drums with such force and beauty that he could draw the spirits of deceased drummers to the world of the living, where they could be heard, but not seen, playing the drums alongside him. …

Marching to a Distant Drum: Music Is Universal but Playing It Isn't

Marching to a Distant Drum: Music Is Universal but Playing It Isn't

Distant Bugles, Distant Drums: The Union Response to the Confederate Invasion of New Mexico

Distant Bugles, Distant Drums: The Union Response to the Confederate Invasion of New Mexico

Distant Bugles, Distant Drums: The Union Response to the Confederate Invasion of New Mexico

This book brings to life the epic march of 1,000 men recruited from Colorado's towns, farms, and mining camps to fight 3,000 Confederate soldiers in New Mexico. Drawing on a host of previously overlooked diaries, letters, and contemporary newspaper accounts, military historian Flint Whitlock, tells the stories of Union heroes such as Colorado governor William Gilpin and Colonels John Slough, John Chivington, Kit Carson, and Edward Canby, along with average soldiers - men on both sides who marched, fought, and overcame immense distances and privations.On their way to Colorado's rich mines in search of gold and silver for the Confederacy's dwindling coffers, Confederate leader Henry Hopkins Sibley and his 3,000 Texans won a series of engagements with Union troops along the Rio Grande until they were turned back by the ragtag, hastily assembled Coloradans in an epic conflict at Glorieta Pass, just east of Santa Fe. The western theatre shaped the fate of the West and of the nation, and its story is a powerful one of miners, farmers, and peacetime officers turning themselves overnight into soldiers and combat leaders.

Distant Bugles, Distant Drums: The Union Response to the Confederate Invasion of New Mexico (review)

Distant Bugles, Distant Drums: The Union Response to the Confederate Invasion of New Mexico (review)

The Vietnam War on Campus: Other Voices, More Distant Drums (review)

The Vietnam War on Campus: Other Voices, More Distant Drums (review)

Libretto

Libretto Gregory Pardlo (bio) Mister Softee plays the olio while my flesh Bears the strap of the folding chair. Forearms visor evening short as field lights luff And crisp from stanchions cropped and humming Softly on high. Someone's brought along the old Chagrin, sent it up like a signal flare triggering Someone else's cousin to read its portent, but who As yet has not? The living's been easy, the fish are Battered and fried and we drink malt liquor where The shuttlecock lands at our feet. Each mother's Daughter is a gospel floating on hips and I ache Like hands mining cooler ice in this town of how Many cavaliers. In this way we feed ourselves To coolers until they are empty. Feed me seltzer And the sun-stained egg salad. Lay me in the long Shade of the scoreboard, fraught and labile, Soon to rise in the distant drum of a car Stereo, rib-sauce still staining my lips. Gregory Pardlo Gregory Pardlo, who teaches at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York, has published poems in a number of periodicals and anthologies, including Seneca Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Hawaii Review, and Callaloo. He received the MFA in poetry from New York University. Copyright © 2004 Charles H. Rowell

"The 'Eighth o' Style": Black Nationalism, the New Deal, and The Emperor Jones

ANNA SIOMOPOULOS "The 'Eighth o' Style": Black Nationalism, the New Deal, and The Emperor Jones Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, journalists and intellectuals asserted that Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones was a scathing critique of the black nationalist movement in the U.S., and that the play's corrupt ruler was inspired by Marcus Garvey.1 Like Garvey , Jones embodies a charisma lacking in the more traditional African American leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois, and, like Garvey, who was often introduced as "His Highness, the Potentate," Jones's character fashions himself and his followers as members of a new black aristocracy (Draper 51).2 Garvey himself denounced the play for its implication that he was a political opportunist who used his nationalistic political organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, for his own financial gain.' By the time the film version of The Emperor Jones appeared in 1933, however, Garvey had been deported for alleged financial misdeeds and no longer occupied a central place in African American politics. This essay will argue that, in relation to the 1933 film, it is not Garvey, Du Bois, or any other historically significant black nationalist who provides a relevant reference point for Jones's character while he holds his regal title, but rather Franklin Delano Roosevelt, insofar as FDR represented a new kind of imperial president, and the welfare state represented a new kind of feudalism to millions of African Americans. The changes to the play evident in the film encourage the implicit comparison between the U.S. president and the island dictator , and between the racism of the New Deal in the U.S. and the tyranArizona Quarterly Volume 58, Number 3, Autumn 2002 Copyright © 2002 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1610 58Anna Siomopoulos nical reign ofJones on the island, a comparison validated by letters that African Americans sent to the White House during the early years of the Depression. In addition, this essay will contend that the film version of The Emperor Jones differs from the play insofar as it places the weight of black national sentiments not on the character ofJones, but on the islanders who overthrow him. In the 1933 film, Jones's fall and the native rule that replaces him represent a historical shift in the thought and practice of black nationalism during the Depression. By the 1930s, black nationalism was associated not with the Napoleonic costumes and regal persona of Garvey, but with grass-roots activism and the political philosophy of Du Bois, who had begun to promote the idea of self-segregation . Following Du Bois's political thought, the film suggests that Jones comes to represent the black nationalist principles of racial solidarity and self-determination only after he has abandoned the trappings of royalty and provided the context for the natives to reclaim control of their island. By the end of the film, Jones becomes a symbol of popular sovereignty and the exemplary representative of his race that he was previously only pretending to be, a transformation encouraged by the lead performance of Paul Robeson. As portrayed by Robeson, an icon of both African American mass culture and radical politics, Jones symbolizes both the failings of a discriminatory welfare state, and, after he has disavowed his oppressive rule, the hopes for a new kind of mass democratic black nationalism. The protagonist of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones is Brutus Jones, a pullman porter who becomes ruler of a West Indian island by convincing the natives that he has supernatural powers. The play begins when Jones awakens one morning to the sound of distant drums and discovers that the islanders have abandoned his palace to conduct the rituals that they believe will help them hunt him down. While attempting to flee the island, Jones becomes lost in the jungle, where he meets and fires his pistol at a number of supernatural phenomena, including forest spirits that O'Neill describes as "the little formless fears," as well as apparitions of both a friend he had murdered for cheating at a dice game, and the prison guard that he had killed to escape jail. Jones also encounters and shoots...