Reading Arc for International Center Members

As an outgrowth of my literature class at the International Center in New York, my students, professor Carlisle Yearwood, and I have embarked on a reading project. We will read, and then meet to discuss, the books presented below. The authors are all from "colonized" nations or peoples and write in English, the colonizer's language. The sequence of the authors describes an arc swooping from England to Ireland, down to West Africa, across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, and finally up into the Southwest United States. The authors in question are Irish, Nigerian, Jamaican, Saint Lucian, and Kiowan.

These are the books that compose the "reading arc":

1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian author of Igbo descent.

Chinua Achebe (born 1930)

The title of Achebe's book, Things Fall Apart, is a quote from the third line of "The Second Coming", a poem by Irish writer William Butler Yeats. Here is the text of the poem:

THE SECOND COMING

          Turning and turning in the widening gyre
          The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
          Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
          Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
          The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
          The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
          The best lack all conviction, while the worst
          Are full of passionate intensity.

          Surely some revelation is at hand;
          Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
          The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
          When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
          Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
          A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
          A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
          Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
          Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
          The darkness drops again; but now I know
          That twenty centuries of stony sleep
          Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
          And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
          Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[first published 1920]

William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939)

2. The second book in the reading arc will be West Indian Folk Tales, by Sir Philip Sherlock, a Jamaican scholar, teacher, and writer. [This book seems to be out of print; the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library appear to have one copy each, but the Queens Borough Public Library has eight copies. There are used copies at the Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Borders Web sites. I might have to make copies of one or two of the tales that seem representative for us to proceed. I will inform those interested if I find a bookstore with copies in stock.]

Sir Philip Sherlock (1902 - 2000)

3. The third book in the arc will be Omeros by West Indian poet, playwright, painter, and teacher Derek Walcott. Derek Walcott is from the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia.

Derek Walcott (born 1930)

4. The last book in the arc will be The Way to Rainy Mountain by the Native American (Kiowan) novelist, poet, painter, and teacher, N. Scott Momaday.

N. Scott Momaday (born 1934)