Carolivia Herron

Asenath and Our Song of Songs

carolivia@carolivia.org

Asenath and Our Song of Songs is an elaborate comic novel celebrating African and Judaic sources of epic song. It is inspired by African American music, the Biblical Song of Songs, and Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers.

Asenath is the Egyptian woman who married Joseph in ancient Egypt, and this novel interconnects their wedding song with the Biblical Song of Songs, the freedom song of the departure of the Hebrews from Egypt, and freedom songs of all human communities throughout history.

Asenath and Our Song of Songs is also an academic novel, dramatizing the joy of intellectual life through the tribulations of a graduate student CarolOH!, at the University of Penn Forest, who cannot complete her doctoral dissertation. CarolOH! has a special gift that allows her life to intersect with that of Asenath — CarolOH! has the nappiest hair in the world. In fact, the children's book Nappy Hair was extracted from Asenath and Our Song of Songs.

Asenath helps CarolOH! by bringing along many of the great ones of history (John Milton, Chaka the Great, Phillis Wheatley, the Four Tops) who write her dissertation for her.

The text of Asenath and Our Song of Songs is complete and under contract to Random House. It is currently being programmed as a hypertext multimedia novel. Carolivia hopes to publish the traditional text and hypertext versions at the same time.

As mentioned above, the children’s book Nappy Hair is extracted from the Asenath and Our Song of Songs whose motif of the "Garden of Converging Paths" is the source of many of Herron’s multimedia educational projects. Please see her Function at the Junction (general title for her interconnecting multimedia educational projects), and The Drum of Anansi (Herron’s story and multimedia project specifically for children) for additional descriptions of her multimedia work.