Navratri celebrations came to an end this Friday, but as always, endings brings with them a bittersweet-ness of sorts. You know, the one where you don’t want things to end, but they have to get back to normal since your whole house and life too had been rearranged to accommodate the festivities! Then again, the whole getting back to normal scenario has been totally overplayed for the past couple of years! So as Saturday reaches its end, I am seriously considering letting the dolls have a couple more days in the light of day before they get packed away in tissue and bubble wrap and put away in storage. When I do get to the putting things away in storage for the year, I know they will be part of making beautiful memories in endings and beginnings as well.

Addendum: It is Sunday already and I am reaching the end of Sunday actually. The putting away of things has been done, and a semblance of normalcy restored for now (I am not thinking about the garage where I still need to put things that I put away in the right place!!).

Poetic Sundays: The Kwansaba Poetic Form

October 17th is Black Poetry Day, and to honor it, I picked the Kwansaba poetic form. For me, picking this form today is apt for so many reasons, including the:

• fact that the Navratri festival – where numbers play an important role – just came to an end
• number seven, an integral part of the kwansaba is significant in cultures all over the world, including my own
• point already stated, that it is Black Poetry Day
• upcoming blog tour stop on my blog on the 19th of October that will be featuring the wonderful book titled African Icons

The Kwansaba helps highlight and bring together all these things for me in a wonderful culmination of words. This form not only helps celebrate African-American culture, but also reminds us all that there is cultural, literary, and other richness everywhere. We just need to look, and then enrich ourselves once we find it.

Eugene Redmond, East St. Louis Poet Laureate, created the form in 1995 in honor of the Kwanzaa celebration. The Kwansaba form incorporates within it the number 7 which is from the seven principles of Kwanzaa and the concept of the African praise poem.

The Kwansaba

The Kwansaba is a simple, straightforward praise poetic form. It is all about the number seven. Seven lines with seven words in each, and no more than seven letters in any word.

So the kwansaba form’s elements are that at its most basic, it is:

• stanzaic: seven line poem
• word based: seven words in each line with no word longer than seven letters
• the etcs: a praise poem

My Example

My first attempt is in praise of the African Icons I am reading about in the similarly titled book that I will be featuring as part of the book’s blog tour on the 19th. So it is kind of a sneak peak into the book, and to my review as well!!

African Icons
From Aesop to Imhotep, Menes to Terence,
here is to them! May we learn,
may we know how each of them
shaped lives, their own and ours too,
how these great African icons, every one
of them played a part in history.
Here is to their everlasting grand story!
~Vidya Tiru @ LadyInReadWrites

References, h/t, and Further Reading

• Kwansaba – Birth of a Poetry Form (RiehLife)
• Read this wonderful article in praise of the kwansaba here (that is its title as well)
• Read about poetic forms in honor of Black Poetry day – check out the Bop here and the Eintou here.

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So here are the posts since (and including) my last scribblings….

• 10 Favorite Fictional Pets, or Wonderful Bookish Pets!
• Sunday Scribblings #79: The Wonderful Navratri Golu and a Doha For It

And the Homefront: The Navratri Golu

Like I mentioned at the start of this post, the Navratri festivities ended Friday though the display still remains as dismantling it means a) we no longer have the display there to enjoy, and b) well, it means some work on my side as I have to carefully wrap each doll in tissue or bubble wrap, pack them all in boxes, and stow them in the garage, and then restore the house to what it was before. I will post a before/after next week so you can see!

Addendum: I am actually done with the restoring of the house (well, the living areas at least) so you will see all the pics here itself.

My son did not want to miss out on the festivities so he hopped on a bus Friday evening to spend Saturday with us. He left Sunday but it was really great we could spend time together.

This festival is our chance to invite friends and family so they can enjoy the display as well as some home-made snacks and delicacies before they head on to the next golu display at another home. While this year’s festivities were subdued compared to pre-COVID ones (let us not talk about the missing year.. aka 2020), it was wonderful to meet people once again – with masks, and a few at a time maybe, but still wonderful!

My Before/After Pics

Upcoming

On My Blog and Home Front

It will be a much quieter week on the home front (except that one last step on our bathroom remodel, I know I did not mention it in all the other craziness of life these past few days but it was an ongoing thing too). I hope to make the best use of the slightly less busier upcoming week by clearing up the garage some (sort of a fall cleaning).

As far as the blog, I hope to feature some books that I am reading for the Cybils (more below) as well as one for a blog tour.

The Cybils

Another thing I am looking forward to is the Cybils Awards. I have my nominations in for most of the categories, and we have 70+ books at this time for the YA fiction category with more rolling in over the next few days! My job, as a round one Cybils judge for this category is to devour these books, relish them, review them, and simply do what I love doing most – read them!! I hope to review books as I read them without showing any favoritism whatsoever (hopefully, unless a book turns out to be one that wows me or simply not for me in which case it might be tough.. but I will try).

This Week’s Celebrations

Literary Celebrations (close-to-it also!)

• Literary birthdays this week include Amish Tripathi on 18th October; John le Carre on the 19th; Nikki Grimes on October 20th; Samuel Taylor Coleridge on 21st October; Ann Rule, Deepak Chopra, and Doris Lessing on October 22nd; Aravind Adiga and Michael Crichton on October 23rd; and Emma Donoghue on October 24th.
• Every year, the third week of October is celebrated as Teen Read Week as well as National Friends of Libraries Week so let us support our local libraries in every way we can, this week, and every other week of the year too.
• And of course this month is also National Book Month, Children’s Magazine Month, National Reading Group Month, National Cookbook Month
• October 20th has been celebrated as the National Day on Writing since 2017. It was established by the National Council of Teachers of English. You can download a toolkit to help celebrate the day here on their website.

Foodie Celebrations

• The week begins with National Chocolate Cupcake Day on the 18th of October
• October 21st brings with it International Nacho Day and it is pumpkin galore after all, so we also celebrate National Pumpkin Cheesecake Day on this date!
• 23rd October is delish, for it is National Boston Cream Pie Day
• Well, it looks like celebrating every possible individual food we eat is not enough! We have National Food Day coming up on October 24th!!

Other Celebrations

• October 20th happens to be International Day of the Air Traffic Controller
• And the 22nd is National Color Day
• The 23rd of October is National Make A Difference Day – Fourth Saturday in October
• It is United Nations Day on October 24th

Multi-day Celebrations

The third full week of October marks a few week long events, including

• National Collegiate Alcohol Awareness Week. This one comes more to the forefront now as my son started college this fall and has been away from home for about a month today. He tells me of ambulances arriving to some of the other dorms to treat kids for alcohol poisoning and such. It is a sad truth indeed. We can inform our kids and teach them the best we can, and hope they grow to be aware and make responsible decisions. I am fortunate to have responsible kids, well, one of them is an adult now at 18!

Related Books and Reads

Suggestions related to various aspects of today’s blog

• Black Girl, Call Home by Jasmine Mans (my thoughts of this powerful read here)
• One Last Word by Nikki Grimes (Read my review of this now-beloved read here)
• The Tradition by Jericho Brown (I am currently reading this one too, so expect to see my review/thoughts on it here soon)
• Nacho’s Nachos: The Story Behind the World’s Favorite Snack by Sandra Nickel (perfect for International Nachos Day on October 21st. Read my review here)
• Amish Tripathi’s Shiva Trilogy (my review here)
• Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and Last Man in Tower (my review of these are here and here, in order)

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Wrapping up my Sunday Scribblings

There are so many endings and beginnings here. The festival of Navratri ended while my readathon for the Cybils is just beginning. My son is still in the beginnings stage of the next phase of his life as he started off at college just over a month ago. Our master bathroom went through the end-phase of its previous version and now undergoing the transition to a whole new look soon.

So dear reader, this was it for this post. As always, appreciate and totally welcome your thoughts, comments, and suggestions on these scribblings on Sunday! And which of these days in this wonderful week do you plan to celebrate?

Linking this to the Sunday Post over at the Caffeinated Reviewer and the Sunday Salon