Wanda's Picks Radio Show, Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2012

2012 marks the 20th anniversary of Audre Lorde’s passing, the acclaimed Black lesbian feminist poet and activist. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Lorde’s incisive writings and speeches defined and inspired the women of color, feminist and LGBT social justice movements in the United States.
AUDRE LORDE - THE BERLIN YEARS 1984 TO 1992 explores a little-known chapter of the writer’s prolific life, a period in which she helped ignite the Afro-German Movement and made lasting contributions to the German political and cultural scene before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the German reunification. Lorde mentored and encouraged Black German women to write and publish as a way of asserting their identities, rights and culture in a society that isolated and silenced them, while challenging white German women to acknowledge their white privilege. As Lorde wrote in her book Our Dead Behind Us: Poems, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”

AUDRE LORDE - THE BERLIN YEARS 1984 TO 1992 contains previously unreleased audiovisual material from director Dagmar Schultz’s personal archive, showing Lorde on and off stage. With testimony from Lorde’s colleagues, students and friends, this film documents Lorde’s lasting legacy in Germany.

We speak to the director, Dagmar Schultz about her film and the screening, Sat., Sept. 29, 2012, 2 p.m. at the Berlin & Beyond Film Festival in San Francisco at the Castro Theatre. The screening is proceeded by a reading with Afro-German writer, Ika Hügel-Marshallat 1 p.m. from Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in German. Tickets are $10-$12 for Reading & Film. Visit Visit http://www.goethe.de/ins/us/saf/prj/bby/edu/rea/enindex.htm
and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mPEkqykAik&feature=youtu.be

Ika Hügel-Marshall was born in a small German town in 1947 to a white German mother and an Afro-American father. Initially, she grew up with her mother, but from her sixth to her fifteenth year of life she was raised – as many Afro-German children of her generation – in a children’s home. Only at the age of 39 she met other Afro-Germans and was involved in setting up the “Initiative of Black Germans” (ISD). In 1993, she found her father in Chicago and met him and his family – a most profound experience.Hügel-Marshall was the recipient of the Audre Lorde Literary Award, which enabled her to write this critically acclaimed work. Hügel-Marshall also appears in Schultz’s film following the reading and was a close personal friend of Lorde.

Our next guest Ayodele WordSlanger Nzinga has been called a renaissance woman. She is a director, playwright, poet, performance artist, artist-educator, and a scholar-activist. Ishmael Reed describes her as tour de force. Marvin X says her performances are orgasmic and she is one of the best in the Bay. The late Pri Thomas called her one of the best poets of our time.

Nzinga is the founding director of The Lower Bottom Playaz and The Sister Thea Bowman Memorial Theater, 920 Peralta Street (in the yard behind the Prescott Joseph Center). The theater located in West Oakland has provided Oakland with 11 Theater Seasons and her troupe is the life behind the footlights in the theater the press describes as one of Oakland's treasures.

She is currently directing August Wilson's The Piano Lesson which will open October 5 in Oakland. She is also taking a work by William Crossman, Rag Doll Lullaby to the San Francisco Theater Festival September 30, 2012, where she will perform her own work, North American Griot as well. The Theatre Festival starts is11:30 AM to 4 PM. I recommend the North of Market Tenderloin Community Benefit District, 134 Golden Gate Ave., San Francisco: http://sftheaterfestival.org/files/2012/09/2012-SFTF-Program_inside.pdf

Sat., Sept. 29, 2012 is a fundraiser for the theatre at its Oakland location.

Ms. Nzinga holds an MA and MFA in Writing and Consciousness and a Ph.D. in Transformative Education and Change.

Her motto is: I create therefore I am. Visit http://www.lowerbottomplayaz.com/

We close with an interview with Professor Manu Ampim and Ammnah Babikir about the flooding of pyramids in Sudan. The classical African civilizations of ancient Kush and Nubia are in jeopardy of being permanently flooded by a series of dams along the Nile River in northern and central Sudan. Time is limited for Prof. Manu Ampim and his research team to document the remaining archaeological evidence before the flooding begins. The mission will require $50,000 to complete and help convince UNESCO to begin protection of the sites.

Ancient Kush & Nubia Under Threat, Saturday, October 13, 2012 from 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM (PDT) at the LINEN LIFE GALLERY, 770 E 14th Street, San Leandro, CA 94577. Visit http://www.savenubia.org/index.php/about-us/who-we-are

Ammnah Babikir, a Sudanese and African American woman, brings insight about this region where she lived for over a year with her paternal family. Ms. Babikir is also a poet, violence intervention/mediation intern and survivor of sexual and domestic violence.

Professor Manu Ampim is an historian and primary (first-hand) researcher specializing in African and African American history and culture. He earned a Masters of Arts degree in History & African American Studies from Morgan State University in 1989. He has taught in the Department of History at Morgan State University (Baltimore, MD), and at San Francisco State University in the Department of Ethnic Studies. Also, Ampim has studied at Oxford University in England, and collaborated on a NASA-sponsored research project, which examined the ancient climate and migration patterns in Africa. Currently, Prof. Ampim teaches history at Contra Costa College (San Pablo, CA), and a Africana Studies/Study Abroad course at Merritt College in Oakland, CA. He also teaches a pioneering 7-Step Primary Research Methodology Course at Advancing The Research.
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Show link: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/wandas-picks/2012/09/26/wandas-picks-radio-show