Sarah's Psalm - Hardcover

Ladd, Florence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684804107 ISBN 13: 9780684804101

Publisher: Scribner, 1996

Synopsis

In this searing first novel, author Florence Ladd tells the story of Sarah Stewart, a young black Harvard graduate whose growing interest in Africa and declining interest in her failing marriage lead her down a path of self-discovery, love, and the choice between loyalty and truth.It is the 1960s and AMerica is in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, to which Sarah's husband, Lincoln, is dedicated. Sarah decides to travel to Senegal to study and work with Ibrahim Mangane, a Senegalese writer and filmmaker whose passion for his work and his country intrigue her. This is a lifelong dream come true for Sarah, but not without a price. While Lincoln remains passionate about the movement at home, she longs for the beauty and mystery of Africa.This is at once a story of the emerging American Civil Rights Movement and the beginning of Afrocentrism. It is also the story of love and a woman's coming of age. Lyrical in style, Sarah's Psalm tells of one young black woman's captivation with Africa and all things African, her husbands concurrent obsession with the American Civil Rights Movement, and the rift it creates between them.

About this title

About the Author

Florence Ladd is the director of Radcliffe College's Bunting Institute.

Reviews

Like many first novels, Ladd's, about an African American Harvard doctoral student who moves to Senegal to study?and eventually marry?the writer about whom she wrote her dissertation, exhibits the best of intentions. Earnest but didactic, it chronicles Sarah Thompson's search for a purpose in life, as played out against the backdrop of the 1960s, when the civil rights movement and the newly gained independence of African nations staked often conflicting claims on the imaginations of America's black elite. But with stereotyped characters, a fairy-tale setting and a melodramatic plot, this is essentially a romantic potboiler with a PC veneer. Sarah's husband, Lincoln, is such a pinched soul from the get-go, such a caricature of mid-century male black bourgeois caution, that Sarah's desire to leave him?for anything or anywhere?seems a no-brainer. Certainly Ladd, director of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, makes some trenchant points about black solidarity in the diaspora and white ethnocentrism, but they are stiff and preachy. And while narrator Sarah claims to be moved by major events back in the States?the assassinations of the Kennedys, King, Malcolm X?the book treats these events as items that need to be checked off a list in a cursory tour of the years from 1962 to 1980. Readers, like both Sarah's mother and her academic mentor, may remain unconvinced that an urban, intellectual American career woman can be truly happy as secretary and wife to a venerated African novelist.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An elegantly written first novel by Ladd, director of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, offers a feminist journey toward self-discovery, drawing its strength from its unique insight into the Pan-African consciousness of the post-colonial era. Sarah Stewart, a child of the black bourgeoisie, has dreamed of Senegal ever since her uncle George brought back tales of African adventure in her youth. After Wellesley, and marriage to a suitable Dartmouth grad, Sarah begins her graduate studies at Harvard, where she pursues her interest in Francophone African writers, particularly Ibrahim Mangane, whom she visits in the summer of 1963. With her supposedly perfect marriage falling apart, Sarah becomes colleague and muse to Mangane, whose wife, Mariama, welcomes her into their childless family. Sarah admires more than Ibrahim's ``liberated cultural consciousness''; she believes that she has at last discovered her ``authentic self'' in Senegal. Back in Cambridge, Sarah divorces, finishes her degree, begins teaching at Boston University but is soon summoned back to Africa by Ibrahim. After Mariama's death in childbirth, Sarah marries Ibrahim and leads the fairy-tale life of an African princess: She collaborates with Ibrahim on his work, bears him another son, and watches as her husband's reputation grows, helped by her book about his work. Sarah's incipient feminism, however, makes her increasingly restive, and she begins to pursue her own work with the poor women of Africa. Ibrahim wins the Nobel Prize, but their happiness is short lived--his older son, now an Islamic fundamentalist who believes that his father's work is not in the best interests of the faith, dies with Ibrahim when a bomb he has planted explodes. Sarah finds solace in her other son, and in her creation of a Pan-African center for women's issues. Vivid, stylish, but too breathless in its uncritical political views: Ladd's debut is intermittently persuasive but seems at times uncomfortably like Afrocentric chic with a heavy dollop of conventional romance. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Sarah is a beautiful black woman, a brilliant graduate student at Harvard, and a conventional wife. It is the Sixties, and Sarah's husband is committed to the emerging Civil Rights movement. But Sarah is oblivious, having become obsessed with a prominent Senegalese writer named Ibrahim Mangane. Her obsession leads to divorce, and, against all advice, she gives up her promising academic career and moves to Senegal to study with Mangane, eventually marrying him after his first wife dies in childbirth. Sarah has a wonderful life, living in a beautiful house with servants, raising their two sons in a country she loves. However, when Sarah's interest in women's rights influences her husband, to the chagrin of traditional Islamic groups, her world is shaken by violence. Although Ladd's didactic tone sometimes stops the narrative flow, the mixture of ideology and romance is nicely reminiscent of Doris Lessing. Recommended, especially for women's history and multicultural collections.
-?Patricia Ross, Westerville P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In 1962, the interests of Harvard doctoral student Sarah Thompson and her husband, Lincoln, are diverging, his toward political action and the civil rights movement and hers toward African literature, specifically the work of Senegalese writer and filmmaker Ibrahim Mangane. After three months in Dakar--as Mangane's assistant, biographer, muse, and, finally, lover--Sarah returns to Boston where she divorces Lincoln, gets her degree, and starts her academic career, only to be summoned by Mangane during a family crisis. Mangane's wife, critically ill after delivering their first child, dies as Sarah arrives, and within months, Sarah is Madame Mangane, living a life of privilege. But her own career waits as she raises children and slips into the shadow of her increasingly famous husband. Joy and tragedy lie ahead before Sarah's own interests and talents are reawakened. This first novel suffers from stilted prose and improbable plot devices, but the story moves briskly and the diverse cultures and settings add unusual richness and substance. Michele Leber

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Sarah's Psalm

By Florence Ladd

Scribner Book Company

Copyright © 1996 Florence Ladd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780684804101

From Chapter One

I changed my mind somewhere between Paris and Dakar. Had I been driving overland in the notorious Paris-Dakar race, I would have stopped the car in the desert, dropped out of the race. I had the urge to signal the steward on the Air France flight and demand that the pilot turn back. I heard my mother's plea: "Sarah, please don't go. Don't meddle in that marriage. Don't do something that you'll regret." And my father's question: "I'd really like to know why you have to move to Dakar?" Antonia Dale, my friend and colleague at Boston University, had said adamantly, "I wouldn't go. I'd send a cable -- ask him for more information about the circumstances. But I definitely wouldn't go."

Although I had tried to persuade everyone that Dakar was a place where I could do my best work and assist Ibrahim Mangane with his projects, I had convinced no one, not even myself. Still, I had bought a one-way ticket to an uncertain future and had left Ibrahim's post office box number as my forwarding address.

I closed my eyes. The gyration of the plane rocked me to sleep. Startled by the grinding of the landing gear, I woke up, looked down and saw the beckoning finger of a peninsula in the Atlantic. Dakar. I reached into the seat pocket for an airsickness bag and emptied my ambivalent stomach.

Born in a country and social set that seemed alien to me, I knew at an early age that I was meant to exist elsewhere. Juvenile fantasies about a Senegalese girlhood evolved into a fascination with Senegal and my future study of Senegal's major writer, Ibrahim Mangane. I fell in love with his books, his characters, and their lives in Senegal's cities and villages. His works invaded my dreams, evoked my prayers.

I was not religious, but devoutly I prayed to go to Senegal. I was neither unstable nor possessed, but Senegal was constantly on my mind. I closed my eyes and imagined myself a character in a Mangane novel amid throngs of women, draped in cloth of many colors, ambling through crowded markets where women farmers and their children sold mangoes and coconuts, red peppers and peanuts, sacks of rice and beans yielded by their sometimes meager, sometimes abundant harvests. A flock of pelicans in flight flapped overhead. I heard a "riot whisper tales about an ancient village in a language I did not understand to a circle of children, mesmerized by his words, squatting in the sand.

I daydreamed about walking at night with Ibrahim Mangane along endless beaches lit by a forever full moon. Scenes from his novels flashed continuously on the screen of my mind. Ideas from his works invaded my imagination. Ibrahim Mangane, a man I had never met, made a place I had never seen more vivid than the everyday reality of my life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and more engaging than my marriage to Abraham Lincoln Thompson.

Lincoln and I had been married two years when he began to view my study of African novels and films as an obsession, and I began to question the nature of our marriage. I was a graduate student in comparative literature at Harvard. He was studying engineering at MIT. We lived on Trowbridge Street in a second story studio apartment with an alcove for a kitchen and an ancient bathroom.

Furnishings were bought at thrift shops or gathered the night before trash collection on prosperous Francis Avenue. Selected from heaps of tastefully worn, discarded household items: a mustard-colored convertible sofa bed, a mud-brown overstuffed chair, a red metal kitchen table, four kitchen chairs?each with a different design and provenance, a desk with the initials of previous owners scratched in a drawer.

Lincoln bought a hi-fi set. We stacked our records and books on shelves of boards and cinder bricks that stood on a dirt cheap, cocoa-colored carpet. The apartment looked like a stage set for a drama about a drab student marriage in a university town.

Schedules of classes and seminars, reading assignments, and examinations regulated the rhythm of our lives. Up early on weekday mornings, scanning our notebooks over cornflakes and coffee, we had few words for each other. "Pass the milk." "Your turn to do the laundry this week." "Please turn off the radio -- I can't concentrate." At eight o'clock, Lincoln left for MIT. I read at the kitchen table until it was time to go to a seminar from ten until noon on Mondays. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings, I attended lectures on non-Western literature; and on Fridays, I met with undergraduates to discuss the lectures and readings. Friday afternoons found me engaged in sherry hour repartee about Camus, Sartre, and Wittgenstein in Brattle Street book-lined living rooms of uncommonly homely professors. Saturday mornings were for errands, and Sunday mornings for the New York Times. Most evenings Lincoln was at his MIT laboratory and I was in Widener Library.

Our marriage was like many student marriages. The apartment that we called "home" was a place to store books and papers, share an occasional meal, play chess, scan the newspapers, watch television, make love in haste and detachment, then fitfully fall asleep.

In the fantasies of our parents, whose mortgaged Washington, D.C., rooftops sheltered wall-to-wall carpets, china closets, Duncan Phyfe copies of chairs and tables, and black bourgeois dreams, Lincoln and I floated in the air against a star-studded Cambridge sky like a Chagall-painted bride and groom. They thought of us as the ideally matched couple living happily ever after in the perfect college town. Our marriage had made our parents' favorite dreams come true.

We had known each other since childhood. The Stewarts and the Thompsons lived in the same neighborhood, shopped in the same stores, worshiped at Calvary AME Zion Church. Lincoln and I had attended the same high school where he was two years my senior. I knew him from a distance, not as a classmate, but rather as an older boy whom I very much admired. He was tall, handsome, athletic, intelligent, and well mannered. He stood when adults entered a room, opened doors for girls, and tipped his snap-brim tweed cap to my father when they passed on the street. When he walked me home, he insisted on carrying my books and tennis racquet. He asked me out on my first date -- a Saturday afternoon movie at the Booker T. Washington Theater. We ate a jumbo box of buttered popcorn, held greasy hands in the steamy dark balcony, stole glances at each other, and looked occasionally at the screen illuminated by Audrey Hepburn's amble through Breakfast at Tiffany's.

When I was a Wellesley College freshman, Lincoln was a junior at Dartmouth. Parties, football games, tennis matches, and holiday festivities brought us together at black college student events in Boston, New York, and Washington.

I enjoyed being seen with stately, handsome Lincoln Thompson. His features had irregularities: one eye slightly larger than the other and a slightly crooked mustache, which accentuated the near perfection in his six-foot-two model of lean masculinity. We reveled in the company and conversation that whirled about us when we entered parties -- I in my ruby velvet strapless sheath and Lincoln in a tuxedo with a ruby bow tie and cummerbund. That people fell in love with the image of us made us feel that we had fallen in love with each other.

Our wedding, an important social benchmark for our families, afforded public recognition of their accomplishments and ours. In the wedding album, our parents, Lincoln, and I were Kodachromed in the traditional poses of the grinning wedding party. Between plastic leaves in the back of the album we kept clippings from Jet and The Washington Afro-American.

Copyright© 1996 by Florence Ladd

Continues...

Excerpted from Sarah's Psalmby Florence Ladd Copyright © 1996 by Florence Ladd. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684804107
• ISBN 13: 9780684804101
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320