Description
Small World Publishing, Published 1990. Paperback, 207 pp.; 18 cm; illustrated with black-and-white street maps of Carson, California and Lagos Island, Nigeria, and a portrait of the author.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
17
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Very Good condition. Illustrated paper covers show light bumping to edges and corners, mild shelf wear, and light toning overall, with staining from price sticker residue on back cover. Cover illustration by Masa Lau shows three stylized faces gathered around an AFRICA signpost. Street map fragments of Carson and Lagos Island run as a decorative motif along the foot of the text pages. Binding tight. Interior unmarked. [From back cover] One Man's African is Another's Alien . . . Cecelia Freedom, the young, feisty, free-spirited African-American heroine of Homeward Bound, wears her hair in a dreadlock fashion. A political statement that doubles as an expression of her African ancestry. Corrine Freedom, a successful African-American woman of Creole background and mother of Cecelia, is the maker of Freedom Relaxer, a product whose social symbol (especially in the Black community) puts mother and daughter in seperate political camps. Prince Ita is gentle, and African. He is Cecelia's love interest. But he is also spoiled and financially, he's in a mess. Richard Krueger is a white surfer-cop type, who still carries a torch for Cecelia, and disclaims any ancestral ties to Africa, even though he was born and bred in Zimbabwe. These characters are all going to the same place. Africa. Nigeria, to be exact. Each on his own agenda. First novel by Uko-Bendi Udo, born and raised in Nigeria and resident in the United States. He was a pre-med student at California State University, Long Beach when he began writing on subjects he felt campus newspapers were ignoring, and was working with inner-city youngsters in Compton, adjacent to Carson, where this book was published. Two decades later Udo returned to print in African speculative fiction: his story "The Foreigner" appeared in AfroSF: Science Fiction by African Writers (2012), the first anthology of science fiction drawn solely from African writers, alongside Nnedi Okorafor, Sarah Lotz and Tade Thompson, and was reprinted in The Apex Book of World SF 3. This novel predates that work by more than twenty years.