WORDSMITH, SPEAKER, & STORYTELLER

 

Farika Berhane brings stories from the mystic Blue Mountains of Jamaica, the wildly beautiful Cockpit country known as The Land of Look Behind and poetry to the beat of Nyahbinghi drums, the sound of the abeng through her culture’s nommo – power of the word.  She is an accomplished writer and performer of fiction, poetry and plays a folklorist, oral historian and storyteller with a background in journalism.

 

Farika has performed and read her work at universities, cultural institution schools, festivals and community forums across the nation as well as in Europe and Africa.  Her work is known in the ghettos of Jamaica and the United States particularly among Pan African circles, over hills and valleys and mountains in the Caribbean, at Nyahbinghi campsites and in the Maroon territories. She has opened for such well-known personalities as Gil Scott Heron and reggae icons The Wailing Souls and Freddie McGregor. She shared stage with murdered dub poet Mikey Smith and with Mutabaruka.

 

Her poetry, short fiction and articles are published in England, Germany, France, the Caribbean and the United States.  Her stories for children were used in the Jamaica elementary school system as readers in the Language Power series published by McGraw Hill and Kingston Publishers.  She has done numerous interviews on radio and television stations about Maroon and Rastafari culture as well as on her art.