Looking Back to Move Forward

by Kelvin De'Marcus Allen
Publisher: AuthorHouse™
ISBN: 1-4259-2659-2

A biopic look at a life in poverty-stricken racist-era Durham ? riddled with hard realism and devotion to a defiant mother

(DURHAM) - While attending a press conference at Yale University for filmmaker Spike Lee and actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, author Kelvin De'Marcus Allen was fascinated by Lee's response to a question from one of the reporters. When Lee was asked what inspires the topics he chooses for his films, Lee avoided answering the question directly. Instead, he responded to the reporter's question by pointing out that he was only "one of millions of black people who have stories to tell." It was an epiphany of sorts, Allen recalls.

The recently published Looking Back to Move Forward is Allen's debut title inspired by the seed planted by Spike Lee. Awakening an always-quiet voice in Allen, the autobiographical text is his struggle for self-expression ? the struggle for healing. Conscious of the shaping power of sharing (and shedding) familial histories, Looking Back to Move Forward is an authenticating attempt to meaningfully gauge effects of the past upon the present. In his unique exploration of selfhood, Allen risks it all as he divulges his family origins and breaks a socially-imposed silence with true stories that are oftentimes painful, heart wrenching and haunting. Looking Back to Move Forward is a straight-from-the-belly exercise in purging.

The distinct collection of select episodes spans 25 years of Allen's life -- starting in Jim Crow-era 1964. As the youngest of seven siblings growing up in Durham, North Carolina's sprawling Hayti District (pronounced HAY-teye), an area lauded as the Mecca for African Americans, Kelvin's view of the world was from the window of a broken-down wood-framed shack. The story touches on the fragile childhood of a "bastard child" and his feeble relationship with an eternally distant father ("the man I called daddy") -- and a sage mother, who despite being a "scorned woman" -- was by all accounts a woman of substance. Uneducated, and a product of abusive and adulterous relationships, she nevertheless provided a sturdy family core -- bravely pushing her offspring to do better.