Brooklyn Author's Novel Spans Centuries, Dimensions - with Passion

NEW YORK, NY, May 29, 2013 (Press-News.org) When Brooklyn-based author Cathie Wright-Lewis counts off her influences, talents as diverse as sci-fi genius Octavia Butler, TV pioneer Rod Serling and writer Alice Walker of "Color Purple" fame are invoked.

In her latest soon-to-be-published novel, Passion's Pride: Return to the Dawning (PROPHECY), Wright-Lewis sends a Brooklyn high school teacher named Mecca Freeman, who is transfigured by existential angst in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on a grand tour of the ages and dimensions, where she witnesses and relives acts of survival and defiance in the person of her African slave ancestor Mariah, who is also rescued by the time-traveling spirit of Mecca's MIA military-intelligence lieutenant husband, Wisdom Divine.

Adding to the phantasmagorical tour de force are the spirits of the Ancients who watch over the mortals, who guide them and protect them without the explicit knowledge of those whose fates they influence. "Mecca's life changes forever," writes Wright-Lewis, "once she becomes obsessed by the desecrated African spirits uncovered in Lower Manhattan's African Burial Ground."

In the process, Mecca relives the last agonizing days in bondage endured by her ancestor Mariah, who, since her abduction in West Africa eight years before, has been kept as a sexual slave by Captain Gourmand, the debauched lord of the evil slave ship The Zelfist - which is unearthed many years later near Ground Zero in Manhattan, close to the site where Mariah/Mecca escaped being sold at auction in 1741.

Questing to learn her purpose on earth, and as a visionary "agent of change" through the ages, Mecca is also transported back to the troubled days of 1968 in her home neighborhood of Brownsville, huge sections of which were leveled during protests and riots after the assassination the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Mecca watches her young self being encouraged to join in peaceful protests, but she also witnesses acts of violence and destruction committed both by and against members of her own family.

Dramatically, it is revealed to Mecca that she is blessed as an eternal and recurring Agent of Peace on Earth ... But it is a journey of centuries, dimensions and ages that we share with Mecca on her way to accepting her divinely predestined role.

Writer and educator Cathie Wright-Lewis, author of the 2001 novel Maurya's Seed: Why Hope Lives Behind Project Walls, is a visionary whose literary style shares much in common with the magic-realist school of writers originating in South America, as well as with the best authors in the speculative-fiction genre. In 1993, Wright-Lewis experienced a troubling premonitory nightmare of the destruction of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, recounted in a poetic evocation of the dream, titled "Terror at the Towers." Wright-Lewis' belief that the scope of the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan extends into post-9/11 Ground Zero contributes a major theme to the action of Passion's Pride.

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