Word: ishmael
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...fact is they got their signals all so together, that it's not necessary. But we don't. We need to clean up some of this garbage and verbiage that has been built up between the black generations. We need to explain to ourselves our own writers. Explain that Ishmael Reed is a fantastic satirist as well as brilliantly knowledgeable of all facets of black people. That Bill Kelley has finally come around. . . . The publicity made it appear to be so impossible that young guys like Kelley and Reed could ever get together; because Kelley went to Feilston School...
...story is told through the mind of Avinga, a kind of Eskimo Ishmael who finally finds himself alone after the disintegration of his community. To Avinga and his fellow Eskimos, the rescued white men are almost fascinatingly ugly. They refer to them as kalunait (literally, "people with the heavy eyebrows"), the legendary offspring of a wayward Eskimo girl and a sled dog. Yet they tolerate the white men's minor barbarities and breaches of courtesy with indulgent understanding...
...appreciate his achievement, it is desirable, but not necessary, to have read the novel. By cultural osmosis, even the nonreader knows the basic story. The opening line, "Call me Ishmael," sounds a ghostly summoning bell on everyman's ship, Pequod, "a noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy...
...after the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and in the Diaspora most Jews were ultimately scattered. The Bible notes that Palestine had been promised to the "seed of Abraham." This properly applies to Arabs as well as Jews, since Abraham's first son, Ishmael, was born of the Egyptian concubine Hagar and is thus the father of the Arabs. Though Arabs did not conquer Palestine until A.D. 634, they have remained ever since, first as rulers and later as the subjects of an Ottoman hegemony that ended after the British captured Jerusalem...
...much a rejection of the U.S. as a kind of psychic statelessness. Says one American writer now living near Grasse in the south of France: "I will never feel that I fit in. Perhaps the definition of an expatriate is just that-one who doesn't fit, an Ishmael of momentarily fixed address. But I would never again fit into the States either...