Identities: A Short Story Collection, Available on Amazon
A book by Dr. Yabome Gilpin-Jackson
Also available in French on Amazon
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A. Bame Nsamenang
The stories in this collection evoke the lived experiences of Africans of diverse backgrounds, races, ethnicities and identities.
It explores everyday identity concerns of diasporan Africans such as experiences of being asked where are you from?, immigrant and refugee integration, personal vs. ascribed social standing, remittance responsibilities, traditional vs. contemporary cultural values and many others.
This collection is ultimately about the experiences of bridging, balancing and weaving together the multiple strands that form contemporary African Identities on and off the continent.
Book Yabome for an Identity Talk
A talk/dialogue/workshop on global African identities as well as the growing world diversity and what it means for how we understand each other. In a Story Circle, participants will share identity stories of their own inspired by readings from the book, Identities.
Stories included in the collection are titled:
1. Where are you from?
-A young woman experiences and describes frequent encounters of being asked: Where are you from?
2. Too much water in the garri
-First generation Canadian siblings take their first journey to Sierra Leone, West Africa, orchestrated by their parents.
3. Once upon a time at Fourah Bay College
-A student describes the carefree campus life that is interrupted by war and unexpectedly propels a group of friends far and wide into the diaspora.
4. The Rainbow
-A mother contends with explaining to her adopted daughter, who is an Ebola survivor, why bad things happen to children.
5. Back to the beginning
-The story of the struggle of one of the young couples from Fourah Bay College affected by the Sierra Leone war, to adjust to life and immigration to Gambia and Canada afterwards, told through the lens of the wife’s postpartum depression experience.
6. The day Aunty Amie died
-A young man’s experience in Canada on the day his once formidable Aunt dies back in Sierra Leone, that ends in a serendipitous encounter.
7. The Conference
-A scholar and her best friend struggle to reconcile the ongoing discrepancies and complexities of a conference community working for social change in Africa.
8. Standing in the rain
-A group of students of diverse African backgrounds and descent form a life-long community support group.
9. When I became a Black man
-A young man describes his first police encounter with racial profiling.
10.The Wedding
-The journey of a Canadian university administrator and an African graduate student to their wedding in Freetown, Sierra Leone that takes them back into the history and connection between the black American loyalists that settled in Nova Scotia, Canada and the Creole Peoples of Sierra Leone.