Chewed Water: A Memoir

By Aishah Rahman

Playwright Aishah Rahman, born Virginia Hughes, has written a poignant account of events marking her first eighteen years growing up in Harlem as the foster child of a troubled woman. Chewed Water... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1584651431
• ISBN13: 9781584651437
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Univ Pr of New England
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.0" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

I loved this book

This book took me by surprise, drew me in and made me feel like I was IN the authors life, watching her grow up. I could hardly put it down. Growing up in Harlem in the 1940s and 50s, full of the stubborn pride and determination that carried her up and out. Beautifully written.

Chewed Water

Chewed Water is a book that stayed with me long after I read it. It's the story of,Virgina, a foster child growing up in Harlem in the 1950's. Though the book is labeled a memoir it has a novelistic quality that sets it apart from other memoirs that I have read. Rahman's language is rich and lyrical and she beautifully evokes a place and time that we do not hear much about, especially from the perspective of a young African-American girl. I found myself immersed in Rahman's world where colorful characters, musical rhythms and the politics of the day, make-up the vivid background of a heart-wrenching coming of age story. But the book rises above the tell-all tale of painful youth and through Virigina's eyes we enter a world that is sometimes cruel, often humorous and always fascinating. Rahman wickedly comments on the world around her as she shares her story of growing up, longing for the mother that she doesn't have and surviving the one that she does have. I laughed out loud reading this book and it also brought tears to my eyes. I highly recommend it.

This book is a must read!

Chewed Water is just that and more. It is smooth, it is rough it will make you swallow and leave you thirsting. It will quench that voice of recognition way down deep. It will reverberate -- vibrate as water does - long after the read is through. Aishah Rahman lifts her prophetic voice to tell the haltingly human story depicting the mythical angst of a young girl, growing up in Harlem in the forties and fifties. It is a breathtaking tale of her long and winding journey to herself. Chewed Water is a telling social commentary told without compromising the artist's aesthetics which are indisputably unshakeable. Aishah Rahman's joy/sorrow-stricken prose liltingly lifts us out of the depths of our unknowing, porting us into the world of the protagonists -- mixing our hues with the blue, black and brown of her characters. This memoir, masterfully woven, is apopros given the turbulent time in our world. The birth of a son to a young, unwed mother echoes the historical forces sweeping the nation. Cycles of violence, dispossession, disinheritance are relived in three generations of lives, in the neighborhoods of Harlem, and in African descended homes from Barbados to North Carolina. We can learn, re-learn, un-learn deep lessons by reflecting on these forces. We must take the time to ruminate as Virginia come Aishah does, the source of her disrepair. And most important, lessons on how she came to embrace the bitter and the sweet in a loving reclamation of herself. Chewed Water is an evocative Poetics of the Survival of the Human Spirit. The ultimate message: all is not lost. Where there is life, there is the will to live. This is the gift that grandmother passed to mother passed to daughter passed to son. Despite the unknowing, the unseen, the unheard. Despite the condition of a family, a multitude of families, scattered all across the landscape of the American dream - separated by economic constraints, lack of opportunity, the search for a better life - separated. Despite the demise of the Black family, the demise of the Black father who is not able or not present to care for his wife and children, the demise of the Black mother who knows that her child will have a better chance in an institution than in the bosom of her undoing. Despite these inimical forces, the message is one of survival. Where there is one individual, there is an army of Ancestors standing by - seen or unseen, spoken or unspoken -- they are there. They live. They live! We are never alone in this world and never forgotten especially by those who live through us. Thank you Aishah Rahman for writing your memoir, in so doing, you have unlocked a masterful, moving work of art.