The Color of Madness: The Far-Reaching Impact of Racial Oppression on the Black Female Psyche - Softcover

Black, Krystal

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1524645680 ISBN 13: 9781524645687

Verlag: AuthorHouse, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

The Color of Madness is the true story of my eldest sister, Ciska, second of nine offspring. Some may recognize themselves or a loved one or an acquaintance in this individual, who watches the horizon of her hopes recede as she grows older and becomes more aware of her world. After winning a much-coveted scholarship at the age of eleven, Ciska’s future promises to be as bright as the firework hurled over the fence into the backyard by neighbors eager to congratulate her and the family. However, like a shooting star, she very briefly lights up the world around her with her brilliance before disintegrating into oblivion. Indeed, her inability to adapt to absurd racial biases will plunge her loved ones into daily havoc and challenge her sanity. Consequently, Ciska repudiates a world that rejects her and seeks refuge among the insane in an attempt to preserve her sanity.

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The Color of Madness

The Far-Reaching Impact of Racial Oppression on the Black Female Psyche

By Krystal Black

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2016 Krystal Black
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-5246-4568-7

Contents

Foreword, vii, 
Dedication, ix, 
Acknowledgments, xi, 
Chapter I Childhood Years, 1, 
Chapter II Pre and Early Teen-Years, 13, 
Chapter III The Shooting Star, 31, 
Chapter IV Superimposed Pathologies, 39, 
Chapter V Downward Spiral, 43, 
Chapter VI Cracking the Mold, 48, 
Chapter VII Remission, 59, 
Chapter VIII Turbulent Years, 62, 
Chapter IX Shadow-Boxing, 69, 
Chapter X The Mantra, 87, 
Chapter XI Obsession, 94, 
Chapter XII Life-Buoy, 111, 
Chapter XIII Staying Connected, 116, 
Chapter XIV Relapse, 125, 
Chapter XV Eye of the Cyclone, 130, 
Chapter XVI The Last Straw, 138, 
Chapter XVII Self-Preservation, 143, 
Chapter XVIII Messiah, 148, 
Chapter XIX Too Lucid to be Insane, 153, 
Chapter XX Epilogue, 157, 
Retreat from Madness, 163, 

CHAPTER 1

Childhood Years

The Omen

Françoise Hardy, Françoise Sagan, Françoise Dorléac. What do these three women have in common? I mean, besides the obvious: sharing a seemingly popular first name.

They are house-hold names in France and across much of the francophone world. But more importantly, as it pertains to this narrative, they were role-models to my eldest sister who, when she was a teenager, kept newspaper and magazine clippings of those celebrities in a giant white notebook. Especially of Françoise Hardy who had a hit pop-song in 1964 and became an overnight teen sensation at 17. My sister, a melomaniac, never tired of singing Françoise Hardy's melancholic love songs. Françoise Sagan wrote her first best-selling novel at the age of 19 and Françoise Dorléac was a budding actress whose career was curtailed by a fatal car crash. What my eldest sister admired most about her three idols, besides their talent, was the symbolic meaning of their first name and the personality traits it's rumored to connote: pride and free spirit.

My eldest sister, whose first name also connotes pride and a free spirit, had some idea that she was named after my father. However I doubt if she realized, as I did much later, that she was possibly perpertuating a tradition that required the eldest daughter to be named after the father. I had noticed that naming pattern among several relatives and had concluded that it must be one of those African traditions that had miraculously survived the enslavement of African peoples by Europeans and remained imprinted in the subconscious. Indeed I know of three female relatives, two of them my seniors by more than a decade who, as first daughters, have been named after their fathers.

My eldest sister took great pride in her first name, to the extent that it gave her a special status within the family unit and something in common with those three celebrities. She never missed an opportunity to gloat about it, going as far as hinting at a possible personal renown in the future, like her three idols.

My eldest sister, Ciska, entered this world with a split forehead, a forehead split in two by a frown, a frown that shortened her eyebrows, even while she slept. My mother pointed to that frown often, every time the family browsed over the few faded family photos. In her opinion that frown was an omen.

In those good old days of no radio and no television in the average household, family gatherings were a frequent occurrence on lazy rainy Sunday afternoons, at our home anyway. The gatherings usually consisted of my mother surrounded by the steadily growing number of my siblings, and me. We never reached the soccer-team number of eleven, as planned by my father, but came pretty close. Indeed, after two miscarriages, the symbolic figure nine was reached and my mother announced her retirement from childbearing.

A couple of us hovered over my mother's shoulders. The younger ones were perched on the arms of her bamboo armchair or sat at her feet. We passed the photos around, marveling at pictures of elders we never knew and at those of younger versions of my mother and father. Whom was mom trying to fool? No way those slim, trim, smiling youngsters and our parents were the same people. They may bear some resemblance to our parents, but that's about it. The younger siblings, especially, were in total disbelief. They remained unconvinced that their parents had a first life.

We did not own a photo-album in those days, a luxury. Such items were not even to be found in most shops. Why it never occurred to any one of us to explore our innate creativity and to attempt to invent our own crude homemade album, I'll never understand. A photo-album has to be bought, not made, to have any value. This must be a third-world thing: Consuming as opposed to producing.

Anything imported was generally held in higher regards than anything local. While it was true that many imported items such as dairy products and leather goods were in fact of better quality than their local counterparts, this predilection for anything imported had been extended to include such items as canned meat, canned fruits and canned milk. Hosts would proudly serve their honored guests tea, with condensed, as opposed to fresh, milk. In those days, local dairy farmers would make daily home-deliveries of their unpasteurized milk which had to be boiled by the consumers. As the milkman would measure and pour the milk in my mother's bowl, the aroma of fresh raw cow's milk was strong enough to attract all the stray cats in the neighborhood. When boiled, the milk would yield a thick, rich, velvety cream that rose to the top and attested to the freshness of the product. In that same spirit of reverence for anything imported, canned peaches would make their way to the dining table on special occasions only, which, in retrospect, was not a bad thing. For Christmas and on New Year's, the odorless slices of canned peaches (which, by the way, were less affordable than fresh fruits) soaked in their syrup alongside fragrant and succulent fresh mangoes, lychees and pineapples.

Other displays of such third-world mindset never ceased to amaze me later on in life. For example, while visiting the family after seven years of living abroad, I once watched my sister as she swept the floors. Instead of collecting the trash on a piece of cardboard (in the absence of an official made-in-China dustpan) and throwing it in the trash-can, she pushed it outside in the yard, then proceeded to sweep the yard later, thus creating double work for herself!

Then there was the clothe-line issue! My Afro-American mother-in-law first brought it to my attention one day while I was hanging some clothes on her clothe-line. The way I operated was archaic, and I fully agreed. Why, before securing it with pins, fold the laundered item in half over the line, the way it was done during the pre-clothe-pin era? Why not have it hang fully spread out, for faster drying? Is such mind-set a remnant of our age-old attachment to tradition as inherited from our African ancestors? Tradition over practicality? I obtained the response to that conjecture a few months later.

While pursuing graduate studies and residing in the married student housing complex, I once observed a neighbor, the wife of a fellow-student, as she hung out clothes in the above-described manner. When questioned, ignoring my suggestions, she replied: "That's the way it's done at home. I...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: AuthorHouse
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1524645680
• ISBN 13: 9781524645687
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 178
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland