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Showing posts from April, 2020

HOW DO YOU FEEL. . . .?

A little over a month ago, after watching an episode of Bob Hearts Abishola, my older daughter and I went into a conversation about Generation 1.5 of African immigrants in the US, that is, those whose parents (the .5) were born in another country. (By the way, the show is worth watching for the generally sensitive way--Uncle and Aunti often come close to the edge--it makes fun of the pressure of alienation, assimilation, and other matters of precarious immigrant life. The Yorùbá code-mixing is consistently good, and the same goes for the English subtitling. The near total exclusion of racism is troubling, I must admit. But this is not a full review of Bob Hearts Abishola.) The episode I am referring to here deals with the unnoticed considerable stress that the very young Délé (Travis Wolfe, Jr) suffers internally from the extent he goes to conceal his talents and interests in choreography from his mother who seems hell bent on shoehorning the boy’s future into a life ...