The Jive Talker: An Artist's Genesis by Samson Kambalu

From the Publisher

What do you do when it looks like the odds were stacked against you before you were even born, when you're having trouble feeding a family that just keeps growing, when you've got a little too much of an affection for Carlsberg Brown and when the life president of your country, Malawi, keeps shuffling around the public health system that employs you, forcing you and your family into perpetual nomadism? You catch up on your reading, adding I'm OK, You're OK and Nietzsche to the bathroom library. Holding on to your dignity, you keep dressing up in threadbare three-piece suits you ordered from London back when you could afford them. You raise your head high like a giraffe and call yourself a philosopher, not a civil servant. With a bottle of beer in hand you philosophize before your mystified kids at night — on anything from football to Shakespeare — and you look to the future with boundless optimism. In short, and most important, you talk jive.

The father of Samson Kambalu is the "Jive Talker" of this vivacious and warm, bristling and hilarious memoir. Kambalu Senior died of AIDS in 1995, bequeathing to his son a passion for words and an imagination that transcended all limitations. Described by The Guardian newspaper as "one of the artists to color the future," Samson Kambalu is one of the most successful young conceptual artists on the contemporary art scene: he has been featured in Bloomberg New Contemporaries and he has won a Decibel Award; he has exhibited around the world, including at the Liverpool Biennial with Yoko Ono and the FIFA World Cup in Germany in 2006. He is currently on a five-year artist residency funded by the Arts CouncilEngland.

In this utterly original, often subversive book, Samson Kambalu introduces us to his country of birth, Malawi, an impoverished nation in which no dissent is tolerated, where political opponents are "disappeared" and where a portrait of Life President Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda is always guaranteed to be watching. It's also a place in which a little boy obsessed with Michael Jackson, Footloose, Nietzsche, girls, fashion and football can move beyond his station to become a rising star in international pop culture, creating a life-affirming expressionist philosophy, "Holyballism," along the way.

Narrated with sass and charisma, The Jive Talker is a love letter to an Africa that is hardly understood, and it's a coming-of-age story that takes its place among the finest work by Tobias Wolff, Mary Karr and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Publishers Weekly

A Malawi artist now living in England, Kambalu delivers a wickedly dry memoir that reflects as much the coming-of-age of his impoverished, tiny African country as it does himself. Born in 1975 into a Christian family of eight-an Ngoni mother and a Chewa father with a missionary education-Kambalu spent a peripatetic childhood moving among remote villages at the whim of his father's work as a medical assistant, which provided the family starvation wages. Early memories of being plagued by parasites, malaria, jiggers and various evangelical sects coincide with a growing awareness of his father's temperamental outbursts-fed by alcohol, the "Jive Talker" of the title spewed snippets from Nietzsche and other philosophers to his wary children. By age 12 Kambalu was "Born Again," then invented his own religion he called "Holyballism," and eventually secured a much coveted spot at Kamuzu Academy, subsidized by Malawi dictator Banda and modeled on the best British public schools down to its brutal initiation rites. Kambalu's memoir comprises brief, ironical anecdotes and hilarious cameos of "raving eccentrics," especially during his six-year tenure at Kamuzu. (Sept.)

Kirkus Reviews

London-based visual artist Kambalu turns in a lively, funny memoir of growing up alternately poor and privileged in Africa. Born in 1975 in Malawi, a time when the president-for-life's government was turning ugly, Kambalu grew up under the tutelage of his father, a nattily dressed clinician who read Nietzsche on the toilet and dispensed philosophy along with pills. "We had called him the Jive Talker," Kambalu writes, "not because he lied or talked jive, but because he liked to keep us awake on random nights and inflict his Nietzsche and personal affirmations on us in drunken performances, which he called jive, named after his favourite beer, Carlsberg Brown, which he also called jive." The Jive Talker earned a good living, but the belt tightened when he was reassigned to a desk job away from the medicine cabinet. Meanwhile, young Kambalu, a superman in the making with an almost preternatural calmness about him-his birth name, after all, translates to "Don't worry, be happy," which disposed him to a liking for spiritual master Meher Baba-enjoyed a sentimental education with the Jive Talker before being carted off to prep school. There he added more whimsy to his arsenal, for, as he writes, "Most of [the] teachers were raving eccentrics but I guess you had to be out of your mind to teach in Malawi." Convinced that he is owed a future as a rock star, Kambalu insinuated himself into a band, learned to play some guitar chords and crafted a fine sound, at least to his own satisfaction. Once old enough to do so, he crossed the border into a South Africa newly liberated from apartheid, where he attempted to convince record-company agents that he was the next big hit. As we leave him, returned toa finally democratic Malawi, we know that he won't be his country's answer to Michael Jackson, as he had hoped-but we also know that good things are going to happen to him. A pleasure to read, and just the thing to give to a disaffected teenager of a creative bent.

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