After a truly enlightening Watson conference in steamy Tennessee and ten days in the breezy, buggy North Woods of Minnesota, I am home. Worcester hasn't changed a bit. People tell me I look the same, but I know that on the inside hidden parts I am not.
In a week, I am moving to a house in New Haven, CT, which I will share with Andy, who will start in the Forestry and Divinity schools at Yale in September; a geophysics doctoral candidate who played the baritone horn in the opening ceremonies in Beijing; a retired history professor and his librarian wife. My job search continues.
This blog will go on, I think. I'm taking suggestions for new titles.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Friday, July 18, 2008
Sometimes you can't make it on your own
Sometimes I don't blog because I feel like there's nothing new. Well, here's some news for you:
Last night, between the hours of midnight and 10 a.m., some individual or group of persons stole the carburetor, air cleaner, spark plugs, and metal plates (parts together valued at approximately $500) from the engine of my Beetle. Now, I am trying to appreciate the absurdity of the situation, but it hurts to laugh. I feel poor, powerless, and absolutely furious. I would go home early, but I don't have the money. Funny.
12 days.
Last night, between the hours of midnight and 10 a.m., some individual or group of persons stole the carburetor, air cleaner, spark plugs, and metal plates (parts together valued at approximately $500) from the engine of my Beetle. Now, I am trying to appreciate the absurdity of the situation, but it hurts to laugh. I feel poor, powerless, and absolutely furious. I would go home early, but I don't have the money. Funny.
12 days.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
One of these mornings I'm gonna rise up singing
I broke out of my funk last week and took a bus out to Grahamstown for the National Arts Festival. I was really impressed. The sheer quantity, not to mention diversity, of events was overwhelming. I mostly hung out around the jazz festival and associated jam sessions, but I also checked out photography exhibitions, street theater, dance shows, spoken-word poetry, and lectures. Then there was the atmosphere. Walk around the streets and you are confronted at every corner with little boys standing stock still, faces smattered with white dust, waiting for - what? A tip? A touch? The Spirit? Marimba music moves the ground from early morning to late night. Campers in the courtyard trade herbs and secrets. Overheard: "I think I tried that the last time I was in Ethiopia." "Chew this, it will bring you strength and good things." Strength for what? To keep from falling of the edge? From losing your grip? Or will it push you over instead, to fall, only to be caught again?
I went to Grahamstown to see three things: Jo'burg avant-garde bassist Carlo Mombelli leading his group Prisoners of Strange, Mark Fransman's newly composed Suite, and the Kouga Jazz Band from Port Elizabeth. Prisoners of Strange was certainly refreshing, especially in the haunting vocals of trombonist Siya Makuzeni. Mombelli is a remarkable composer - so confident, so creative, and so good at what he does. There is nothing standard about this group. They performed a piece scored for six squeaky toys and a kazoo. All of the musicians make frequent use of loops and effects, but always with the determined aim of surprising and creating something new. I interviewed Mombelli, who told me he does think his music is South Africa, as it came out of this environment, although that does not necessarily include township jazz. But he said he prefers to think "intergalactically," rather than nationally.
But the highlight of my festival experience was Mark Fransman's Suite. The concert was advertised as jazz plus a classical string quartet and two bassists with nods to Bartok and Shostakovich, but what actually transpired was much more unusual: an hour of music of heartbreaking beauty. Perhaps it was Fransman's choice of subjects that made the pieces so moving; he dedicated one to Martin Luther King, Jr., another to his mother, and one to his first-born daughter, "At First Sight." Fransman did use two bassists, one plucking bass lines, the other playing harmony with the bow. And the string quartet provided swelling, closely-written harmonies of strange simplicity and beauty, though the avant was not explicitly in evidence. Fransman actually only performed one movement - "North" - from his Suite, a title appropriate for the first movement of a work in progress, indicating very little but the certainty of direction and perhaps the urge to travel.
But my words cannot tell you what it was like to experience this concert. How could you write with such passion, such love, such control? It gets to the heart of matter: people's lives are full of real extremes of emotion - longing, disaster, hope, triumph. Not necessarily always so dramatic, but we are human in these moments. Fransman's pieces stared this reality in the face and screamed and moaned for it. Cried out in passion. I left the hall exhausted, having reached every height and depth of love and pain, any objectivity blown wide open. I want to write music like that.
I realized that, before coming to the festival, I had begun to believe what mainstream society wants you to believe - that works of art are acts of personal expression only, not avenues for serious employment, and certainly not anything worth getting all tingly about. While listening to Fransman's Suite, I found myself reacting to the sounds and images in a way I have not in a long time; I think it is fair to say that it renewed my faith. I was reminded with a jolt that expression is always a two-way street; the music goes out and actually affects people's lives.
The group most directly related to my project was the Kouga Jazz Band, which takes traditional Xhosa music from the Eastern Cape and combines it with jazz, certainly not the first group to do such a thing, but maybe one of the first in the generation of South Africans considering itself "Born Free." The music itself is evolving, the various elements are still finding their place in their compositions. I talked to trumpeter and leader Xolani Faku, nephew of Feya Faku, who, along with Abdullah Ibrahim, was part of the Xhosa-jazz fusion during the African Renaissance back in the day. The younger Faku started out playing jazz in Port Elizabeth, but was also exposed to the music of the traditional Xhosa cultures in the Eastern Cape, especially along the Wild Coast. I asked him about his piece "Ntsikane," written for a Xhosa warrior who was also a gospel composer. Does Faku see his music as political? "We cannot detach ourselves from our environment. As a performer, you have to reflect the situation of the time," he said. "We are more like prophets. The struggle is still on. And music is the only language we have to express these things."
I began to understand that for people like Faku, the jazz-traditional fusion is as much about the urban-rural dynamic as about any politics. He is from the city, but, like many young South Africans, harbors a certain nostalgia for rural life and culture. He explained that he sees a real need for his music to be connected with the revitalization of African culture and its roots. "Detaching ourselves from Africa creates a problem," he said. "By doing this, we could even detach ourselves from who we are." The invasion of homogenized Western culture has been responsible for some of the erasure, he said, but jazz is a bridge - something that links Africa with the diaspora, and should be part of the conversation.
It's easy to forget that, under apartheid, black South Africans were essentially forced to conceive their identity as cut off from the rest of Africa. This mentality has left some ugly scars below the surface. Though the new South Africa is supposedly founded on the principles of ubuntu - that the individual exists because of, for, and in cooperation with the larger group - that "I am because we are" - recent events like the xenophobic attacks reveal that this message sounds deafly to the mindset that accompanies ongoing, debilitating poverty. Can South Africa really be a part of the African community if its leadership continues to operate on a level of increasing materialism and self-preservation?
Sitting in the International Library of African Music, listening to the strange, bluesy sounds of '50s era Zimbabwean guitarists, my research questions suddenly take on a very political tone. To ask about South Africa's relationship with the African diaspora is to breach a subject with its tendrils buried deep in the fabric of this country. There have been actual efforts, conscious or no, to wipe out the evidence of what once existed here. Excavating these roots is nearly impossible, and there are a fair number of musicologists here who are knee-deep in the Sysiphan process. Who was here first? Even the San, Xhosa, and Zulus migrated to South Africa shortly before the first European explorers arrived. Here, at what has begun to feel like the end of the world, claims to land and identity have been contested for hundreds of years.
The natural process for reconciling these differences is through syncretized culture. As Vincent Kolbe told me, "This whole mess got started with culture, and I think that will have to be the way it ends, too." To separate and divide is a colonial mindset. I am beginning to see my project for what it is: a study in post-colonialism. It is about music, yes, but it is really about globalization, about identity in a world that grows ever-smaller, in a world full of multiplying copies and fading originals. It is about how to live on earth.
Now I am back in Cape Town, staring in disbelief as one rainy day follows impossibly after the next. Doesn't globalization capture the essence of my journey? I trip, I fall onto the stage as a global citizen, and only with time am I able to grasp the largeness of what goes on around me. I am older than before, tired, harder, thinner. To go out is one thing, but to come back, changed, to effect changes, is quite another. Is this what I wanted, to grow up? I have a real urge to redress my experience, to rewrite the rules, to own myself. I long to transform, to build myself a cocoon and emerge clothed in radiant color. Though my wings are wet and heavy now, the time is coming when I will learn how to use them.
I went to Grahamstown to see three things: Jo'burg avant-garde bassist Carlo Mombelli leading his group Prisoners of Strange, Mark Fransman's newly composed Suite, and the Kouga Jazz Band from Port Elizabeth. Prisoners of Strange was certainly refreshing, especially in the haunting vocals of trombonist Siya Makuzeni. Mombelli is a remarkable composer - so confident, so creative, and so good at what he does. There is nothing standard about this group. They performed a piece scored for six squeaky toys and a kazoo. All of the musicians make frequent use of loops and effects, but always with the determined aim of surprising and creating something new. I interviewed Mombelli, who told me he does think his music is South Africa, as it came out of this environment, although that does not necessarily include township jazz. But he said he prefers to think "intergalactically," rather than nationally.
But the highlight of my festival experience was Mark Fransman's Suite. The concert was advertised as jazz plus a classical string quartet and two bassists with nods to Bartok and Shostakovich, but what actually transpired was much more unusual: an hour of music of heartbreaking beauty. Perhaps it was Fransman's choice of subjects that made the pieces so moving; he dedicated one to Martin Luther King, Jr., another to his mother, and one to his first-born daughter, "At First Sight." Fransman did use two bassists, one plucking bass lines, the other playing harmony with the bow. And the string quartet provided swelling, closely-written harmonies of strange simplicity and beauty, though the avant was not explicitly in evidence. Fransman actually only performed one movement - "North" - from his Suite, a title appropriate for the first movement of a work in progress, indicating very little but the certainty of direction and perhaps the urge to travel.
But my words cannot tell you what it was like to experience this concert. How could you write with such passion, such love, such control? It gets to the heart of matter: people's lives are full of real extremes of emotion - longing, disaster, hope, triumph. Not necessarily always so dramatic, but we are human in these moments. Fransman's pieces stared this reality in the face and screamed and moaned for it. Cried out in passion. I left the hall exhausted, having reached every height and depth of love and pain, any objectivity blown wide open. I want to write music like that.
I realized that, before coming to the festival, I had begun to believe what mainstream society wants you to believe - that works of art are acts of personal expression only, not avenues for serious employment, and certainly not anything worth getting all tingly about. While listening to Fransman's Suite, I found myself reacting to the sounds and images in a way I have not in a long time; I think it is fair to say that it renewed my faith. I was reminded with a jolt that expression is always a two-way street; the music goes out and actually affects people's lives.
The group most directly related to my project was the Kouga Jazz Band, which takes traditional Xhosa music from the Eastern Cape and combines it with jazz, certainly not the first group to do such a thing, but maybe one of the first in the generation of South Africans considering itself "Born Free." The music itself is evolving, the various elements are still finding their place in their compositions. I talked to trumpeter and leader Xolani Faku, nephew of Feya Faku, who, along with Abdullah Ibrahim, was part of the Xhosa-jazz fusion during the African Renaissance back in the day. The younger Faku started out playing jazz in Port Elizabeth, but was also exposed to the music of the traditional Xhosa cultures in the Eastern Cape, especially along the Wild Coast. I asked him about his piece "Ntsikane," written for a Xhosa warrior who was also a gospel composer. Does Faku see his music as political? "We cannot detach ourselves from our environment. As a performer, you have to reflect the situation of the time," he said. "We are more like prophets. The struggle is still on. And music is the only language we have to express these things."
I began to understand that for people like Faku, the jazz-traditional fusion is as much about the urban-rural dynamic as about any politics. He is from the city, but, like many young South Africans, harbors a certain nostalgia for rural life and culture. He explained that he sees a real need for his music to be connected with the revitalization of African culture and its roots. "Detaching ourselves from Africa creates a problem," he said. "By doing this, we could even detach ourselves from who we are." The invasion of homogenized Western culture has been responsible for some of the erasure, he said, but jazz is a bridge - something that links Africa with the diaspora, and should be part of the conversation.
It's easy to forget that, under apartheid, black South Africans were essentially forced to conceive their identity as cut off from the rest of Africa. This mentality has left some ugly scars below the surface. Though the new South Africa is supposedly founded on the principles of ubuntu - that the individual exists because of, for, and in cooperation with the larger group - that "I am because we are" - recent events like the xenophobic attacks reveal that this message sounds deafly to the mindset that accompanies ongoing, debilitating poverty. Can South Africa really be a part of the African community if its leadership continues to operate on a level of increasing materialism and self-preservation?
Sitting in the International Library of African Music, listening to the strange, bluesy sounds of '50s era Zimbabwean guitarists, my research questions suddenly take on a very political tone. To ask about South Africa's relationship with the African diaspora is to breach a subject with its tendrils buried deep in the fabric of this country. There have been actual efforts, conscious or no, to wipe out the evidence of what once existed here. Excavating these roots is nearly impossible, and there are a fair number of musicologists here who are knee-deep in the Sysiphan process. Who was here first? Even the San, Xhosa, and Zulus migrated to South Africa shortly before the first European explorers arrived. Here, at what has begun to feel like the end of the world, claims to land and identity have been contested for hundreds of years.
The natural process for reconciling these differences is through syncretized culture. As Vincent Kolbe told me, "This whole mess got started with culture, and I think that will have to be the way it ends, too." To separate and divide is a colonial mindset. I am beginning to see my project for what it is: a study in post-colonialism. It is about music, yes, but it is really about globalization, about identity in a world that grows ever-smaller, in a world full of multiplying copies and fading originals. It is about how to live on earth.
Now I am back in Cape Town, staring in disbelief as one rainy day follows impossibly after the next. Doesn't globalization capture the essence of my journey? I trip, I fall onto the stage as a global citizen, and only with time am I able to grasp the largeness of what goes on around me. I am older than before, tired, harder, thinner. To go out is one thing, but to come back, changed, to effect changes, is quite another. Is this what I wanted, to grow up? I have a real urge to redress my experience, to rewrite the rules, to own myself. I long to transform, to build myself a cocoon and emerge clothed in radiant color. Though my wings are wet and heavy now, the time is coming when I will learn how to use them.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Sometimes We're Not Prepared for Adversity
Some nights, this incredible mist creeps in over the ocean and fills Cape Town with such thick fog that you can barely see six feet in front of you. It clears a bit when you climb a hill, but you are immediately plunged back into it as soon as you head for lower ground. This was the situation as I was driving home from seeing Mark Fransman's band Strait and Narrow play at the Green Dolphin. The show was great; Mark laid down his soul-styled vocals and socially-conscious raps, and the horns filled in with vintage hard bop lines, harmonized to maximum cool. This week, they are playing at the Grahamstown National Arts Festival - a ten-day extravaganza of progressive, risk-taking music, theater, film, and dance. I am going, to play, to conduct interviews, and to keep my ears wide open.
In other news, I had a large amount of cash disappear from my room last week. After searching the whole place several times, emptying shelves, replacing things, and emptying them again, I have decided that it is not there. Robbed? Again? The house has not been broken into, and I live with only two other people, a Xhosa woman and her 14-year-old son. They offer no information. Thoughts of going home early preoccupied me until recently. No, not now. Yes, now! But in the end, to leave is to lose more than to stay, and there has been quite enough loss already. It is nice to know that I don't have to stay here, but I can choose to stay here - to make of it what I will. And I will make something of it. I am poised to enter a phase of fast-moving festivity, ending the period of hibernation which has preceded it.
What else? I hang out in the UCT music library on any of our frequent rainy days. A gem: That music is tied up with identity should not surprise us. Identity is, in every context, a performative activity. So music, through "performative identifying," can allow us to express a politics, which is essentially an identification with one given group or another. I hang out with church people and talk about the problems and contradictions in the Bible. I teach brass lessons to teenagers at the Athlone Academy of Music. Athalie and I are starting to rearrange some of Bertold Brecht's work with an eye to Capetonian culture. Mac and I are putting together an album, bit by bit.
I like the way laundry looks when it hangs on the line. It has nothing to prove. Not trying to be anything it isn't.
In other news, I had a large amount of cash disappear from my room last week. After searching the whole place several times, emptying shelves, replacing things, and emptying them again, I have decided that it is not there. Robbed? Again? The house has not been broken into, and I live with only two other people, a Xhosa woman and her 14-year-old son. They offer no information. Thoughts of going home early preoccupied me until recently. No, not now. Yes, now! But in the end, to leave is to lose more than to stay, and there has been quite enough loss already. It is nice to know that I don't have to stay here, but I can choose to stay here - to make of it what I will. And I will make something of it. I am poised to enter a phase of fast-moving festivity, ending the period of hibernation which has preceded it.
What else? I hang out in the UCT music library on any of our frequent rainy days. A gem: That music is tied up with identity should not surprise us. Identity is, in every context, a performative activity. So music, through "performative identifying," can allow us to express a politics, which is essentially an identification with one given group or another. I hang out with church people and talk about the problems and contradictions in the Bible. I teach brass lessons to teenagers at the Athlone Academy of Music. Athalie and I are starting to rearrange some of Bertold Brecht's work with an eye to Capetonian culture. Mac and I are putting together an album, bit by bit.
I like the way laundry looks when it hangs on the line. It has nothing to prove. Not trying to be anything it isn't.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Such a long time to be gone and a short time to be here
Somebody told me today, "Ah, but you only have a month left," as a way of saying, regretfully, that this was not enough time to accomplish a certain task. This stopped me in my tracks. Someone, somewhere, thinks that the time I have left is short? Not long enough? Besides, I don't have a month left, I have 47 days left.
I have been spending more time with Vincent. His is tired and easily irritated but seems to enjoy my company so we get on all right. He has referred me to a number of articles on Cape Town music and the creolization of culture that have spurred me on (see previous post). Sometimes Athalie (a lovely singer-friend) and I go over to his house in the morning and play some music and take him to church and maybe go out to lunch. Vincent is full of stories. He says we are all Atlanticos, which is a word he invented to mean a kind of seafaring creole that travels the ocean without a home, picking up some things at one port, carrying them to the next, leaving some parts of himself behind. We played a concert at the hospice where Vincent is a patient and each went home with flowers and olive plants in return.
Mac has found us a recording studio. I don't know how, but it is in Muizenberg in a neighborhood very close to the beach with little, tiny, winding streets that remind me of St. Louis in Senegal. There are a lot of immigrants in this neighborhood, so the whole place has a kind of charged feel about it. Mac has been encouraging me to compose more and more. This is so hard, but I really enjoy it when I can just sit and do it. Today we recorded his "Tango" and my "They Stare Because You're Beautiful" with a string section. It was so incredible to hear these harmonies that I wrote played so beautifully and so strangely. I sat with my mouth open, hardly believing it. I wrote another tune yesterday which I think I will call "Djeligoema."
Most days I struggle to be present here at all. I want the next thing - a job, a schedule, a trajectory; I want to know what it is and that everything's going to work out and there's a shape and an arc and a meaning to it all. And if not a destination I would at least like to have somewhere to point on the horizon or an interim landmark of some kind, not as proof really but just as a small kindness that will get me through today and tomorrow and the day after that.
This is the longest I've stayed anywhere. It's been good for precisely two reasons. First, I have built up a community of friends and musicians and contacts and feel relatively well taken care of. Second, I have had a chance to see what loneliness does without the escape of indulged restlessness. Before, when I started to feel too empty in a place, I would move on. I planned it this way, but in a certain sense, I've got nowhere else to go; I've run to the edge of the map. Now all that's left to do is turn around and go back.
I have been spending more time with Vincent. His is tired and easily irritated but seems to enjoy my company so we get on all right. He has referred me to a number of articles on Cape Town music and the creolization of culture that have spurred me on (see previous post). Sometimes Athalie (a lovely singer-friend) and I go over to his house in the morning and play some music and take him to church and maybe go out to lunch. Vincent is full of stories. He says we are all Atlanticos, which is a word he invented to mean a kind of seafaring creole that travels the ocean without a home, picking up some things at one port, carrying them to the next, leaving some parts of himself behind. We played a concert at the hospice where Vincent is a patient and each went home with flowers and olive plants in return.
Mac has found us a recording studio. I don't know how, but it is in Muizenberg in a neighborhood very close to the beach with little, tiny, winding streets that remind me of St. Louis in Senegal. There are a lot of immigrants in this neighborhood, so the whole place has a kind of charged feel about it. Mac has been encouraging me to compose more and more. This is so hard, but I really enjoy it when I can just sit and do it. Today we recorded his "Tango" and my "They Stare Because You're Beautiful" with a string section. It was so incredible to hear these harmonies that I wrote played so beautifully and so strangely. I sat with my mouth open, hardly believing it. I wrote another tune yesterday which I think I will call "Djeligoema."
Most days I struggle to be present here at all. I want the next thing - a job, a schedule, a trajectory; I want to know what it is and that everything's going to work out and there's a shape and an arc and a meaning to it all. And if not a destination I would at least like to have somewhere to point on the horizon or an interim landmark of some kind, not as proof really but just as a small kindness that will get me through today and tomorrow and the day after that.
This is the longest I've stayed anywhere. It's been good for precisely two reasons. First, I have built up a community of friends and musicians and contacts and feel relatively well taken care of. Second, I have had a chance to see what loneliness does without the escape of indulged restlessness. Before, when I started to feel too empty in a place, I would move on. I planned it this way, but in a certain sense, I've got nowhere else to go; I've run to the edge of the map. Now all that's left to do is turn around and go back.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Diversions
The conception of creolization proposed by Glissant, and developed by other West Indian thinkers, converges with Paul Gilroy's contention that identity is more a process of movement and mediation than a question of roots and rootedness.
From Denis-Constant Martin: Africa, Brazil, and the Construction of Trans-Atlantic Black Identities
From Denis-Constant Martin: Africa, Brazil, and the Construction of Trans-Atlantic Black Identities
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Flyover
This morning I went hiking with some folks from church. It was cold and it almost rained, and we read the map wrong and got turned around. But it was beautiful. Beautiful to swap life stories and ambitions. Beautiful to have company. Beautiful to have a path to walk and the mountain ahead and behind and below. We had lunch at a farm stall and ate potato bread and organic licorice.
I then went to a last-minute rehearsal at Mac's for our concert for Vincent Kolbe on Sunday. Kurt Diedericks, this young piano player we've been working with, brought along his friend Galina, who plays violin. We'd been working with two string players all week and not getting the results we wanted, but this clicked and was so satisfying to hear the parts that I'd written played with technique and passion. We joked and yelled and cavorted while Mac's girlfriend Renata made vegetable pie and we ate this soon afterward.
So I rushed out of that homey place to the Africa Day film festival, where I saw Return to Goree, a documentary about Senegalese pop star Youssou N'Dour's musical journey from Dakar to America via Europe. This brought up so many new and old emotions for me, combining all of my homesickness as the film traveled through Atlanta, New Orleans, and New York with all my longing for friends left behind as they went through the streets of Dakar and the island of Goree. Every one of those places has a level of personal meaning to me, and to see them contextualized in the story of the African diaspora was pretty powerful.
For a film that seems to so easily encapsulate the reasons and philosophies behind my project this year, I was afraid that seeing it might make my journey seem cliche or overdone in retrospect. But the film is better than that. N'Dour's experience working with musicians in America is not always seamless; he seems to wrestle with some internal conflict the entire time, not sure what to do with himself. There is a struggle to relate to a society that seems so different, speaks another language, has learned to do things in different ways. This is part of my story: the ambiguity of putting such disparate cultures in contact with one another, but ultimately realizing that there is something very basic and very human held in common. Still, this realization comes out of a story of a lot of pain, and a lot of loneliness and alienation that it is difficult to relate without having experienced. What do you say in the face of this saga that has changed the face of the world so dramatically and so tragically? How can one feel but overwhelmed?
Amiri Baraka plays a big part in the film's section in New York; he performs a piece of poetry with atmospheric drumming: "It might take you hundreds and hundreds of years... to get out. To get out. To get out." His lips push into the microphone, enclosing the vowels and sending shivers down my back. When the music does start to come together, one cannot help but surrender a small smile, even sitting alone in a movie theater. Then, out of the struggle, you can begin to feel and to share the joy. Reunion, wholeness, understanding, empathy, communality. There is a passage with Mardi Gras Indians that made me want to up and pack my bags for New Orleans tonight. Hey Pocky Way.
A word on Africa Day. The big news this week has been the xenophobic attacks against African refugees in South Africa, starting in Alexandra, a township outside of Johannesburg. I felt the tide rising all week as I followed the headlines. Friday I learned that there had been copycat attacks on Somalians living in Cape Town's outer suburbs. Then, yesterday afternoon, there was a non-violent protest outside Parliament against the attacks attended by several hundred whiteys, hippies, and black South Africans. The protest didn't make TV news or the papers. The crews were too busy covering the bad stuff elsewhere.
I find this frustrating, and frightening. The painful irony of it is that tomorrow is Africa Day - a day for African unity. I can appreciate the mentality of a desperate, impoverished South African who is less than thrilled with the waves of refugees entering the country from troubled Zimbabwe. But that does nothing to justify his violence. Africa has had many sins perpetrated against it; for one, it has been cut up on colonial rather than cultural lines, a recipe for what seems to be continuous political unrest. What mystifies me is this sense of entitlement, the idea that because someone is of a certain color, ethnicity, or nationality, that they deserve more or less of the joy of being alive.
I am personally so thankful this week for my own joys: a safe place to stay, contact with people I love, good music and friends - and that my freedom is a freedom to rather than a freedom from.
I then went to a last-minute rehearsal at Mac's for our concert for Vincent Kolbe on Sunday. Kurt Diedericks, this young piano player we've been working with, brought along his friend Galina, who plays violin. We'd been working with two string players all week and not getting the results we wanted, but this clicked and was so satisfying to hear the parts that I'd written played with technique and passion. We joked and yelled and cavorted while Mac's girlfriend Renata made vegetable pie and we ate this soon afterward.
So I rushed out of that homey place to the Africa Day film festival, where I saw Return to Goree, a documentary about Senegalese pop star Youssou N'Dour's musical journey from Dakar to America via Europe. This brought up so many new and old emotions for me, combining all of my homesickness as the film traveled through Atlanta, New Orleans, and New York with all my longing for friends left behind as they went through the streets of Dakar and the island of Goree. Every one of those places has a level of personal meaning to me, and to see them contextualized in the story of the African diaspora was pretty powerful.
For a film that seems to so easily encapsulate the reasons and philosophies behind my project this year, I was afraid that seeing it might make my journey seem cliche or overdone in retrospect. But the film is better than that. N'Dour's experience working with musicians in America is not always seamless; he seems to wrestle with some internal conflict the entire time, not sure what to do with himself. There is a struggle to relate to a society that seems so different, speaks another language, has learned to do things in different ways. This is part of my story: the ambiguity of putting such disparate cultures in contact with one another, but ultimately realizing that there is something very basic and very human held in common. Still, this realization comes out of a story of a lot of pain, and a lot of loneliness and alienation that it is difficult to relate without having experienced. What do you say in the face of this saga that has changed the face of the world so dramatically and so tragically? How can one feel but overwhelmed?
Amiri Baraka plays a big part in the film's section in New York; he performs a piece of poetry with atmospheric drumming: "It might take you hundreds and hundreds of years... to get out. To get out. To get out." His lips push into the microphone, enclosing the vowels and sending shivers down my back. When the music does start to come together, one cannot help but surrender a small smile, even sitting alone in a movie theater. Then, out of the struggle, you can begin to feel and to share the joy. Reunion, wholeness, understanding, empathy, communality. There is a passage with Mardi Gras Indians that made me want to up and pack my bags for New Orleans tonight. Hey Pocky Way.
A word on Africa Day. The big news this week has been the xenophobic attacks against African refugees in South Africa, starting in Alexandra, a township outside of Johannesburg. I felt the tide rising all week as I followed the headlines. Friday I learned that there had been copycat attacks on Somalians living in Cape Town's outer suburbs. Then, yesterday afternoon, there was a non-violent protest outside Parliament against the attacks attended by several hundred whiteys, hippies, and black South Africans. The protest didn't make TV news or the papers. The crews were too busy covering the bad stuff elsewhere.
I find this frustrating, and frightening. The painful irony of it is that tomorrow is Africa Day - a day for African unity. I can appreciate the mentality of a desperate, impoverished South African who is less than thrilled with the waves of refugees entering the country from troubled Zimbabwe. But that does nothing to justify his violence. Africa has had many sins perpetrated against it; for one, it has been cut up on colonial rather than cultural lines, a recipe for what seems to be continuous political unrest. What mystifies me is this sense of entitlement, the idea that because someone is of a certain color, ethnicity, or nationality, that they deserve more or less of the joy of being alive.
I am personally so thankful this week for my own joys: a safe place to stay, contact with people I love, good music and friends - and that my freedom is a freedom to rather than a freedom from.
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