Mema

Offering a vivid portrayal of time and place, Breakfast at Mema's shares a collection of author Van Carroll Temple's boyhood adventures. The humorous, poignant stories hail from the 60s in Ruston, a small college town nestled in the tree-covered hills of north Louisiana. In Southern storytelling style, the interconnected vignettes portray a unique time and place when Temple's world was the outdoors and the landline telephone was the only personal communication device. His parents taught him and his siblings to treat others as they'd like to be treated and then set them free to figure out the rest. He shares how his days were packed with play and work-climbing trees, riding bikes, working in the garden, poking around in the woods, hunting, fishing, mowing yards, Boy Scout outings, reading books, and girls. This collection narrates how assassinations, abortions, and Vietnam interrupted the idyllic life, revealing a bigger, more complicated world and signaling the beginning of childhood's end. Praise for Breakfast at Mema's "... Van Temple's gentle memoir, Breakfast at Mema's, serves up a bit of indulgent nostalgia. But, there's so much more. At first blush, the stories are a potpourri of childhood vignettes-more Andy of Mayberry than the edgier tell-all stories of dysfunction we have more or less come to expect. They progress, not unexpectedly, up to and over the precipice of a few of those moments that signaled for each of us the end' of childhood. ..." -Nancy McBride, Middle School Social Studies Teacher, Alexandria, Virginia

Mema's house is in the poor barrio Nezahualcoyotl, a crowded urban space on the outskirts of Mexico City where people survive with the help of family, neighbors, and friends. This house is a sanctuary for a group of young, homosexual men who meet to do what they can't do openly at home. They chat, flirt, listen to music, and smoke marijuana. Among the group are sex workers and transvestites with high heels, short skirts, heavy make-up, and voluminous hairstyles; and their partners, young, bisexual men, wearing T-shirts and worn jeans, short hair, and maybe a mustache. Mema, an AIDS educator and the leader of this gang of homosexual men, invited Annick Prieur, a European sociologist, to meet the community and to conduct her fieldwork at his house. Prieur lived there for six months between 1988 and 1991, and she has kept in touch for more than eight years. As Prieur follows the transvestites in their daily activities—at their work as prostitutes or as hairdressers, at night having fun in the streets and in discos—on visits with their families and even in prisons, a fascinating story unfolds of love, violence, and deceit. She analyzes the complicated relations between the effeminate homosexuals, most of them transvestites, and their partners, the masculine-looking bisexual men, ultimately asking why these particular gender constructions exist in the Mexican working classes and how they can be so widespread in a male-dominated society—the very society from which the term machismo stems. Expertly weaving empirical research with theory, Prieur presents new analytical angles on several concepts: family, class, domination, the role of the body, and the production of differences among men. A riveting account of heroes and moral dilemmas, community gossip and intrigue, Mema's House, Mexico's City offers a rich story of a hitherto unfamiliar culture and lifestyle.

A book about the magic that happens in MeMa's backyard

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In this debut novella, Daniel Mengara captures the incredible story of a Gabonese mother who resists the unjust pressures of her village. At its core, Mema is an unforgettable tale about resilience and a culture in transition. Told through the eyes of her son, Mema's story is an unforgettable one. A powerful woman in her village, her sharp tongue and stubborn principles frequently provoke outrage. So when the unthinkable happens and her husband turns violent, her neighbours choose to blame her. Matters take a turn for the worse when her husband is unexpectedly found dead – and Mema is the main suspect. It quickly becomes clear that she must fight to be believed or she risks losing custody over her children for good. In this profound and touching tale, Daniel Mengara brings to life the changing customs and beliefs of a rural Gabonese village, interweaving prose with traditional oral storytelling.