i have my mother's hands though cancer claimed my mother's body decades ago inola's reincarnation remains within me a deeply treasured and unerring auditor— an inquisitive, music loving child with eyes wide bright and earth brown whose trusting reach upthrusting to clasp a helping man's hand unclenches the maleness of my fist and continually causes my essence to cup the strength of masculine fingers into the soft of a flesh spoon emulating and saluting the feminine gesture of giving unconditionally —kalamu ya salaam
photo by Alex Lear
It’s Hard
The back of his hand was peeling off. He grabbed a plastic bottle of lotion to slather on.
“What’s that?” I ask.
He looks at his wrinkled fingers, huge flaps of top skin hanging loosely, and then looks up into my eyes.
I don’t look away.
I’ve seen his artist hands at work for over three decades: working wood, canvas, and paper; wielding knives, brushes, and pencils. I remember us laughing about the nicks, cuts, stains and bruises; that was just part of the cost of being the type of artist he was.
Walking through the arches in Congo Square at Jazzfest, Africa-inspired images sticking up thirty feet in the air; that was Doug’s art. The Tamborine & Fan flyers from the seventies. The design of Ashe Cultural Center in the new millennium. All of that, Doug’s artwork. From drawings to drums, flyers to architectural designs, all graceful examples of his artistic efforts.
A squeamish part of me wanted to avoid confronting Doug’s deformed hands but I didn’t turn away because, well, because this was one moment when he needed me to look without embarrassment. He was sick. I was well. If he could look, I should be able to also. But it wasn’t easy. Observing a man weakened and suffering is difficult.
Doug was always slim, but now he is almost skeletal. And those black gloves with white stripes that looked like bones that Doug wears to cover the raw patches disfiguring his hands don’t help.
“What?” he asks.
I answer immediately, “I was asking what that lotion was.”
I could not help but think back a couple of weeks to when I was holding Doug, his hands shaking uncontrollably, his head toppling over and going down to the table top. As I had embraced him, I felt the retching wracking his body, but there had been nothing left to throw up. My left arm all the way around him, I used my right hand, thumb to ear and little finger next to my mouth, to motion for Carol to call the ambulance.
“Talk to me, Doug,” I implored but he was near unconscious. “Talk to me.”
When he mumbled a few words I breathed a bit easier. Eventually, with both my arms around him, he was able to stand and we had inched over to the sofa and he lay down.
I ran downstairs to make sure when the medics arrived they would be able to get into the locked bottom floor door, onto the elevator and up to #314. As I sat outside hearing a siren draw closer, I was thinking and thinking and thinking. And hurting. A month or so ago, Doug had had a seizure. The subsequent diagnosis was brain tumors. And lung cancer. Radiation treatment for tumors and now chemotherapy for cancer.
Doug had weathered the radiation, but the cost had been high. First they cut his locks. Soon the short hair disappeared, and then the scalp wrinkled leaving mini-hills and valleys rutting his skull, with only a small, horizontal tuff of hair remaining at the base where the back of the head hits the shoulders. Morbidly I wondered were those ridges solid or soft, but I had been neither brave nor invasive enough to reach out and finger the bumps.
After checking his vital signs (which were strong), the EMS techs assured us the reactions Carol and I were struggling to deal with were normal for chemo patients.
That’s life in New Orleans post-Katrina: everybody is valiantly trying to keep it together, everybody is dealing with some kind of trauma. Every extended family has someone ill who needs care, or someone who needs shelter, or someone who needs… there are so many needs. We just have to keep pushing.
I exhale, look over and smile at Doug standing there cupping a hand full of light-colored goo. “Yeah, that cocoa butter is good for your hands,” I said quietly.
Doug sat on the sofa and vigorously rubbed in the lotion. I sat up in the straight back chair. We were spending another of beaucoup hours with each other.
I pull the night shift and make sure that Doug takes his medication at 9pm. It’s hard. Hard for Doug to take the handful of pills, some of them the size of lozenges. His tongue has lost its normal taste, no food has an agreeable flavor. Something in the treatment has made his throat raw, even a tiny pill hurts to swallow. Radiation and chemo are killing good cells while trying to wipe out bad cells. To get well, Doug has to get sick.
It’s hard.
As hard as it is for him, it’s also emotionally taxing for me. I gather myself everyday and take the elevator to the third floor to spend hours with my friend. I’ve been following this regime for over a month now. The routine will go on for who knows how long—I psyche myself up to share energy with Doug. Day in, day out. Over and over.
It’s hard but it’s beautiful.
As tired as I be when I drag home at night and force myself to work for another hour or so, getting to bed usually between midnight and 1am, no matter, I’m always ready for the next day, renewed by the goodness of sharing life and love with a man I love.
_____________________________________
The Last Redd Light!
(a eulogy of sorts for Douglas Redd, December 1947 – July 2007)
1.
What would you do if you knew
You were going to die tomorrow, or maybe
Just had a vague feeling that the knocking
At the door was a death rattle, or maybe
You just ached real bad and instead of words,
Moans slobbered sideways out your mouth? What
Would you do if your hand wasn’t working and
You couldn’t control your bladder
And just had to lay in whatever…, you know
What I’m saying?…
Life sometimes asks us some tough unanswerable questions like
What would you do if you failed the ultimate survival test?
2.
His flesh was still soft.
I looked down on the calm of his face,
The peaceful repose was the… I can’t make it pretty,
I mean I could describe it with pretty words but
It would still be fucked up.
A man with whom I have spent most midnights
Over the last three hundred and some days,
I was in his presence even when he was too sick
To appreciate that I was there, now, his corpse
Was laying there, unmoving, untwisted, unhacked
By coughs and phlegm. He looked better
Than I’ve seen him for weeks. You know
It’s bad when a cadaver looks better
Than a fitfully breathing body.
3.
When you say someone you love is dead
What do you mean?
Outside the sun was shining, inside,
All inside of me the sky was crying. I was standing
At the last Redd light.
__________________________
EUOLGY:
THE ART AND LOVE OF DOUG
Art is the armor of the sensitive. A creative statement that gives to us (actually "gifts" to us) a vision of our environment not just as our neighborhoods and communities are (or were) but also the wonderfulness we might shape our world to become if we are brave enough to give birth to beauty.
Those iconic images Doug drew: we can be that. Walk the beauty walk. Live with our arms embracing each other. Uplifting the young. Beating back evil. Firm standing, deeply rooted people trees. Lovers of music and gesture, righteousness and each other.
Hundreds of thousands of us have gazed in astonishment upon the images Doug created. At Jazzfest we stepped through the spirit gates; thirty feet of elevated African presence, freestanding miraculously on an open field. We second-lined the city’s avenues waving a Doug designed rod, staff, basket or sash. Many of us have cards and letterheads that daily network our dreams and aspirations because Doug knew how to use a line or two or three to accurately convey the business that we hoped to be about doing.
God gave Noah the rainbow sign. God gave New Orleans Douglas Redd.
Beneath the bridge Doug hung banners to announce our revival. His signage proclaimed the profoundness of our dancing. We can not only say Ashe, we can see and assemble, fellowship and worship at Ashe because Doug understood the necessity of creating sacred, self-determined space. He was not only about adornment, he was also intimate with crafting essence circles.
Downtown in Treme where he learned to fly, there is Congo Square. Uptown in Central City where his tree fruited and flowered, there is Ashe Cultural Center. Everywhere there is beauty thanks to Douglas Redd.
Even when the butcher cuts down a mighty tree, as long as the fruit contains seeds that are planted into fertile earth, then the wood will continue to live.
Drawn onto paper, carved into driftwood, sculpted out of metal and bone, there is Doug. His hands. His eyes. His craft. His vision. But beyond all the things that man and woman, child and animal can see, beyond what is evident, there is an internal image indelibly hieroglyphed on our hearts. There. Inside us, beating red as our blood he is named after. There is where the true art of Douglas Redd resides. There, inside us all, there, will always be the art and love of Doug.
__________________________
FROM THE OTHER SIDE
(To & From Brother Doug)
I speak to you from the other side, hear me
I speak through wind, through rain, sunshine is my smile
Sunset is my daily name, are you with me
I am with you, I am in you, I am you
When you gift a beggar with a dollar
When you build whatever needs building
You do not have to draw or paint to be me
Just do all of whatever you can do
I did me and when you do you
Then we be we, which means as long
As you stand strong we will never die
I come to you from the other side
The place where bullshit is not acceptable
Where backbiting is not tolerated
Where lies are never uttered
A place where love is not ashamed to love
Where love is never a weakness
A place where we are so beautiful
Precisely because we are always ourselves
And never someone else
Touch the other sides of our selves
The rainbow ride of our selves
The soft embrace protected by a proud fist of our selves
The my way is but one of many ways of our selves
The it is more important that your kiss be genuine
Than any concern about what consenting other you kiss
They never asked about sexual orientation
When they enslaved us and we had better not obsess
About sexual orientation if we are going to get truly free
The real question is are we honest about who we are
The real question is can each of us deal with honesty
Live honestly
I come to you from the other side
I advise you not to be afraid
I remind you that you can be both black and red
Be what you are and as beautiful as you want to be
Life is in your hands now
Love life, Use life, Live life, Be life
And pray that you will understand
That you will not fear struggle
That you will make your ancestors proud
That you will make your future beautiful
That you will stand up today, embrace the now
And be everything good you ever saw in me
I speak to you from the other side
Speak to me, I am listening
—kalamu ya salaam
Wounded All five of our children were sitting, their big eyes furtively looking around, each one both anxious and fearful to hear what I had to say. Tayari, her voice steely and cold, had told me I had to be the one to tell Asante, Mtume, Kiini, Tuta and Tiaji. And now the time had come. The usually active siblings were silently, even sullenly, bunched at one end of the table, occasionally fidgeting, resentful like kids waiting for a whipping they all would receive because of something that only one of them had done. Tayari did not look up or at me. I sucked up some air, screwed up my courage, and proceeded to make the dreaded announcement. The whole house on Tennessee Street had been holding its breath waiting on Kalamu’s proclamation, a statement that would signal permission to exhale. I don’t remember what I said, nor who spoke up when I half-heartedly asked if anyone had a question or something they wanted to say. None of us knew what all was going to happen next nor what this rearrangement would bode for the immediate future. After years and years of getting along, including all of us weathering and reconstituting ourselves following Tayari’s brain aneurism operation, no one at the table, surely not Tayari nor the oldest of the young quintet, Asante, now suffering through her sweet sixteen year, but also and paradoxically not even the man whose steadfast daddy had set the example for him of what it meant to be a husband and father, none of the attentive ears really wanted to hear Kalamu say that he and mama were breaking up and that he was leaving home. When I uttered whatever fate-filled words I spoke I was determined not to go back on my declaration. I really can’t recall the specific syllables I muttered, but regardless of the haziness of my memory, what still shakes me is the repulsive feeling of self mutilation, even though at that time I rationalized my actions as corrective surgery. Cutting loose was something I knew how to do. At various moments in my life, I have not hesitated when I decided to sever ties. I have become acclimated to dealing with the freedom of uncertainty even as I am certain that I will continue to push forward notwithstanding that too often my moving forward means leaving others behind. Although six other people were present and feeling their own pain, none of them was aware of what I was really doing. I had pulled out the ever rigid knife of my pig-iron-strong willfulness, unsentimentally pressed the edge to my nostrils and proceeded to chop away at my big-ass nose all because I had come to the conclusion that my marriage had run into the wailing wall and had posted a big, red stop sign displaying a one word curse. Divorce. I was pulling the plug. Tayari and I were separating. It’s over a quarter century later and the emotional wound still aches a bit whenever I place my finger on that unraveling. Once you cut it off, your nose never grows back the same way it was before you amputated it in a vain bid to save face. Was living my life the way I wanted really worth breaking up our family? Regardless of the answer—an answer that varied from time to time over the last thirty years or so—regardless, the deed was done and never rescinded. I do not like to think about that day but sometimes like a hurricane that unexpectedly turns or doubles-back, the awfulness of that day engulfs me in a flood of harsh, unforgettable recollections, forcing me to recognize just how deeply I wounded myself. —kalamu ya salaam
photo by Alex Lear
photo by Alex Lear
THE HAIRCUT
I never cared too much about haircuts, I mean about styling my hair. Just cut it off. My younger brother used to brush his hair for hours until waves appeared atop his closely cropped scalp. He used to say he wanted to make the girls seasick just by bowing his head in front of them. I’d smile and laugh silently to myself; he did have a lot of waves, plus he had deep dimples and a charming smile. I on the other hand wore glasses, scowled more than I smiled and was most content when my nose was stuck in a book or I was laying in the backyard contemplating a leaf, oh, except for that summer Geneva—at least I think it was Geneva—was staying with a family that lived on the next street over and our back yards were separated by a small empty lot from the side street and she would come outside sometimes and play in the wading pool the neighbors had in their back yard and she would be in a bathing suit and, why is it young boys freshly moving through puberty have voyeuristic tendencies, anyway I could contemplate a blade of grass for ten or fifteen minutes and not get bored. Who needed to spend hours brushing one’s hair?
Our barber was a friend of the family named Mr. Loomis who ran an unofficial barbershop out of the front room of his home. He had a steady clientele and since most of his customers knew each other and all lived in the isolated part of the city below the Industrial Canal, there was always a jovial atmosphere. People joked, discussed the latest needs, gossiped about the last predicaments of particular individuals—yes, men gossip, except it’s usually in the form of giving advice to the fool who was present about what said fool should have done about so-and-so situation or so-and-so acquaintance.
I walked in the barbershop with my lip stuck out. My father behind me. I’m sure both of my brothers were present but I don’t really remember. What I remember is my father had whipped me and then made me go with him to get my hair cut. The whipping had not dissuaded me. I am generally immune to punishment. If I decide I want to do something or not do something, punishment is not going to be a deterrent. But as determined as I was, my father was even stronger than I. I could deal with his belt but then after the whipping he had the power to direct my behavior.
My father made me walk back out Mr. Loomis’ door and come back in and this time speak to everyone in the room. To this day, regardless of what is happening with me personally, I can carry on with the task at hand. Thanks, daddy.
—kalamu ya salaam
PAIN My body is scarred. A thirty-eight bullet blotch on my left knee. A twenty-five-cent, quarter-sized, raised, keloid on the back of my left shoulder from falling out of a tree when I was a pre-teen and a piece of cut branch pierced deep into my flesh. An eight-inch-long appendectomy line diagonally crosses my lower abdomen. Plus, there are other scarifications I’ve picked up along the sixty-three-year life-way I’ve traveled. And, of course, a series of stories accompanies each mark. I could narrate my autobiography just by relating the tales of how each wound came to be. For example, there is a cut on my left hand. I was fighting with my brother when we were both young. If I remember correctly we were in junior high school. The two of us were tussling over one knife. He grabbed the handle, I ended up with the blade. You can guess what happened. You know the skin between your thumb and your pointing finger, that elastic part? That’s where I was sliced. I remember I could see the flesh inside my hand. Although it hurt, I was really fascinated by examining the inner workings. That altercation happened over fifty-some years ago. Although the physical scar is still there, the slicing did not produce any psychological scars. I am not afraid of knives or fights. I don’t hate my brother, nor did I hold a grudge against him. Although my body reveals the violence I have encountered, my deepest scars are not visible. Indeed, one of those invisible markings runs the length of my mental and will never disappear. I will never forget how seriously I stabbed myself, severing my budding self-esteem. I was standing in the Manhattan street holding down a parking spot. A car came up. The horn blew. I ignored the sound. The driver blew again. I remained steadfast. The driver lowered his window and shouted for me to move. I didn’t respond nor did I move. This was in the seventies, four or five of us were headed to The Beacon Theatre to experience a double-bill of Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi group and Pharaoh Sanders. As we drove around looking for parking spots, the brother who was driving spotted one on the other side of the street. He told me to get out and go stand in the spot until he could turn the corner and double back. I did as I was requested but I didn’t feel good about doing so. I had tried to assuage my guilt by rationalizing: maybe that was the way they did things up in New York. I hoped no one would come along before my friend got back. The night was warm. New York City. Anything could happen. How would I handle it if the police came along? Suppose someone jumped out and wanted to fight—not that I was afraid—but as I stood guard the myriad of possible scenarios playing on the screen of my consciousness was interrupted when that young black man drove up. After I ignored him, he pulled up next to where I was standing and talked to me through his window. It wasn’t a long speech, nor was he cursing at me or even shouting. He was calm and accurate with his words, “Alright, brother, but you know you wrong.” Those words scalpeled deeply. He was right. I was wrong; so wrong that I could barely enjoy the music because I continually questioned myself: why had I done something I knew was wrong? That happened close to forty years ago but it indelibly mottled my memory, resulting in a sort of psychic scar. Ever since, whenever I’m asked to do something I know is wrong I don’t just go along with the situation just because it’s a good friend making a seemingly innocuous request, nor do I swallow my moral sense and do a jig because the outcome would be of some immediate benefit to me. With me, the outcome really doesn’t matter as much as does the process. What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Especially, why am I committing an action I know is wrong? Sure, we enjoy pleasure. We like getting things, consuming things. Let me be specific: we men like sex, crave power, being in charge, in control, but I constantly ask myself: at what price? Can I—my sense of being a man, an honorable human being—can I afford to be the boss if the cost of attaining power is knowingly doing wrong? Physical pain rarely deters me but the psychic pain of doing wrong terrifies me. That is the pain I learn from; not just on a Manhattan street blocking a parking space but every day of my life, I do my best to avoid the pain of doing wrong. So, although I have a high tolerance for pain, I have a low threshold when it comes to my personal behavior. Regardless of what anyone else may think of what I do or don’t do, what I think of myself is my compass. What’s ok for them, may be anathema for me. The scars on my body, hey, that’s life. Life is a knife. Or a gun. An accident, a fall. Hot grease burning the skin in a cooking accident. The unanticipated pain of a hand slammed in a car door. The tooth chipped by a baseball unintentionally thrown in your face. The residue of childhood chickenpox or an allergy to a food you didn’t know would cause severe rashes. Life, in all its complexities. Life, the myriad of petite disasters that challenge our personal morality and leave behind indelible indications of each encounter. While we cannot avoid the inevitable markings of life, we don’t need to tattoo our souls with self-inflicted graffiti. My body may be scarred, but I try to keep my soul unblemished. Regardless of the scars you may or may not see when you look at me, what you don’t and can’t see: my internal moral wall—that is where is posted the most important lessons of my life. Inside of me is all that I have learned. And I guess you can say that I’ve studied myself deeply and tried my best to take note of and respond to both the pleasures and pains of my life. That New Yorker taught me a key lesson when he told me, brother, you know you wrong. Even after over 350,000 hours of living, that wound remains tender. Knowingly doing wrong is one pain I just can’t stand. —kalamu ya salaam
photo by Alex Lear
photo by Alex Lear
DREAMS ARE REALLY REAL
Dreams are not just what we imagine at night, nor simply mental movies we passively watch in our sleep. Dreams are really pieces of everything we’ve ever felt, every reaction to every idea that’s ever crossed our mind, not just our sacred ideals but also all the unmentionables our tongues never say, the secrets repeated over and over to no one but ourselves and as such, dreams can be disconcerting. At night we are a bright forest of feelings clawing at whatever containers cage our desires, hacking away at the behavioral tethers that hold us accountable to social authorities. Dreaming is not only subversive, sometimes dreams also awaken us to our real and deepest feelings. Dreaming of Tom, I saw myself crying. I was neither shocked nor embarrassed. As we say, quoting or paraphrasing a well known Richard Pryor routine, ‘what had happened was’ I was talking to someone and felt the presence of someone else off to the side. I turned my attention to see who it was. Tom Dent Though I had never known him in his youth, I was sure. It was Tom, a young Tom. I turned back to the person with whom I had been conversing and started crying. I thought Tom was dead. I remember just before I embarked to Germany for a second time, I went to Tom’s hospital bedside. A few days later I was in Munich and found myself visiting Dachau concentration camp. The austere, wooden buildings were clean. There was no lingering smell of death but hard and horrible memories hung in the air, especially by the barbed-wire fences on the perimeter. I inspected faded photographs, my myopic eyes pressed nearly nose-length away from the glass-enclosed exhibits, squinting to make a closer examination of the gaunt prisoners who were literally the walking dead. Just a few days earlier I had forced myself not to turn away from looking at my friend laying sick in a hospital bed. I had had the horrible premonition that he was going to die while I was gone. He did. I never thought I would have dug Germany, been comfortable there, learned so much there. America had taught me to think of Germans as “whites,” not people. On race and other matters Tom had constantly and sharply interrogated me, albeit with great affection. Rather than say I told you so, when I responded talking about what I learned or how I unexpectedly enjoyed some new or foreign experience, Tom would just pithily reply, “good.” I loved our conversations. When I visited, if he was hard at work on a piece of writing, he would tell me so and I would ask my question and leave, but usually he paused for me and patiently listened to me babble. After a while he would ask had I considered such and such, or read so and so, or he’d point to the overstuffed book shelves and tell me to check out some guy from Uganda or an old article in Freedomways. Every dwelling Tom had was open to me, including a couple to which he gave me a key. In my sixth decade, as I turn corners in my life, my life has become one of Tom’s ancestral homes. Concepts he taught or exemplified in his own being are now resurrected in me. Is that what friends are for? My intellectual and spiritual flesh has grown out of what I learned from him, from people he introduced to me, from ideas he shared with me, places we frequented together, like: driving deserted, country byways in the heat of the Mississippi night on our way to a poetry reading or for me to sit in on one of Tom’s classes in the oxymoronically named town of “West Point,” which was located on the northeast edge of the state; or conducting the business of planning what we wanted to write or get published while we sat in Levatas Seafood House, he with oysters, I with shrimp; or the soirees with Danny Barker on Sere Street, the old musician schooling our young heads—Tom was older than me but we were both youngsters compared to Danny, whose eyes literally twinkled as he dropped witty one-liners and well-polished griot tales of early New Orleans life and the formative years of jazz; or the many beautiful midnight blue nights soaking up the blues moan and being cut to the bone by the razor-sharp guitar of Walter Wolfman Washington; and weekday evenings crowded into The Glass House enjoying not only the buckjump music of the Dirty Dozen Brass Band but also the entire ambiance, dancers, food, casual conversations, the guy at the door collecting dollars, the forty-year-old woman out-shaking the teenagers, all of that. Had Tom not taught me, had he not shared himself with me, given me access to the New Orleans treasures he had intimately mined, would I, could I have ever become who I am? The old folks always asked: who your people—not just your blood family, but those whom you chose to love, to emulate, to run with and respect. The wise ones knew: your people are who you become, and if not become, they are the human forces that deeply influence your becoming. Suddenly my emotional fog lifted. At that moment his absence overwhelmed me. I retched. The cathartic urge was irrepressible, except this nausea was not released through my mouth but rather through my eyes. In my dream I wept, openly. But crying was not what disturbed me. What really caused unease was a psychic jab that literally shocked open my eyes and propelled me out of bed. For the first time in over a decade since his death, I recognized a reality I had neither fully realized nor acknowledged. I miss Tom terribly. Given our thirty year friendship and his mentorship, it should have been obvious, especially to me, but then most men are reluctant to publicly admit how much they miss another man. —kalamu ya salaam
photo by Alex Lear
UNFORGETTABLE
That day was circa 1962, a Sunday like most Sundays of my adolescence—or so the early afternoon initially appeared. Our hours-long church service had ended almost a half-hour earlier. Anxious to be gone, we had eagerly piled into the sedan; as best I can remember, Reverend Copelin had a long, large Oldsmobile. The founding pastor of the church, my grandfather usually was among the last to leave. We waited for him with the windows rolled down, fidgeting as youngsters do when forced to sit still in a parked automobile.
My mother, my two brothers and I were scrunched into the back seat. At four-foot eleven and weighing less than a hundred pounds, my mother was the smallest member of our family. Back then my brothers and I were referred to as Mrs. Ferdinand’s three strapping boys. We were fit to play the front line on anybody’s football team.
My grandmother, Theresa Copelin, the church matriarch, was in the front seat talking to one of the church sisters who was squeezed in next to grand ma. They were talking about some young man who attended service for the first time after a lengthy absence. My grandmother launched into one of her characteristic stories whose message you did well to decipher and heed.
After all this is the woman who could send you to get a switch from the whipping tree and you would not dare bring back anything less than at least a three-foot long, limber instrument of instant torture that whistled when flicked across your backside.
As young teenagers we most need instruction at exactly the time in our lives when we, on the threshold of adulthood, are generally least disposed to respond to elder advice and admonitions.
In post-fifties America, technology and other factors were radically changing society so that the latest fashion was far removed from yesterday’s norms. Moreover, each generation experienced faster and more liberal conditions than the immediately previous generation, which inevitably contributed to youth believing that grown folks were hopelessly out of touch.
When we are teenagers we certainly don’t think we know all the answers to life’s questions, however we are nonetheless equally, or should I say more certain that adults don’t understand present conditions. Hell, the average adult was dumber than the smart phone the adult doesn’t know how to fully utilize. Or if, for example, using the tv remote was too complicated, what could a middle-aged person possibly know to tell a teenager about negotiating modern life?
Moreover, in my particular case I was affected by a social conflict that at the time I didn’t even realize was playing out in our home. My mother, the Sunday school teacher and back-up pianist, was the eldest of three daughters. Her only male sibling was a slightly older brother who had married a seventh ward woman. My uncle Sherman’s two children were being reared as Catholics even though our grandfather was a prominent Baptist minister who founded a church in the city: Greater Liberty Baptist church located at 1230 Desire Street, outside of which we were waiting; and also founded an earlier church down in St. Bernard Parish in Violet, Louisiana.
On the paternal branch of my family tree, my country-bred, Donaldsonville, Louisiana-born father only occasionally attended church and rarely (as in once in a blue moon) contributed his melodious baritone to the church liturgy.
Consumed with my own fantasies, sublimated desires, and budding aspirations, I paid absolutely no attention to what must have been a major and ongoing family conflict about the role and requirement of religion in the lives of our family members.
I can imagine my soft spoken mother making quiet but persistent requests of my father, not to mention the more likely cutting asides, tsks-tsks, and whispered innuendos from older members of our close knit church community.
Two of Rev’s children had married Catholic, a third daughter was divorced, and here was my mother married to a man who didn’t regularly attend church. That was not the way the spiritual leader’s children were supposed to turn out.
I never directly heard any criticism addressed to me or even within my earshot, nor, once I left the church, did I ever feel any kind of major parental pressure to return to the fold. While I never gave it much thought back in the tumultuous times of the early sixties, nonetheless the abdication of Reverend Copelin’s grandson and star understudy had to have caused some consternation among the congregation and also caused far from negligible discomfort for my dear mother.
Although I never felt any heat, as an apostate who abandoned the teachings of his upbringing I must have left a good portion of the church members wondering what the devil had gotten into my mother’s eldest son, the same young man who seemed pre-ordained to build on the foundation laid down by his grandfather.
Not surprisingly, at the time I didn’t fully understand myself. I don’t remember what impelled me to flee from the cross. Although obviously I must have had some motives, I actually don’t remember embracing any particular philosophical beliefs that led me to reject the church.
Perhaps it was the Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones and Richard Wright books I was voraciously consuming. I can see the pattern now: Hughes’ sharply satirical short fiction that skewered church leaders; Baldwin a former child evangelist who not only left the church but also proclaimed his homosexuality; from a Christian perspective Jones was absolutely hopeless; and Richard Wright was writing godless, existential novels. At the time I didn’t believe what my writing mentors believed but in unconsciously following them, I was also unconsciously turning my back on people who loved me and were dismayed by the choices I made.
Sometimes you can be in worldly waters swimming for your life and not fully realize how wet you are, how out of it, how unconnected on a conscious level to the benevolent social forces around you. Perhaps that is a perfect description of what it means to be young and headstrong, moving on the ideas in our heads thinking that we know what we’re doing when in truth we are oblivious to critical concerns swirling all around us.
What a paradox: how wrong we can be in our self-assessments as we grow into full adulthood. We really think we know what we are doing and by the time we reach fifty we look back and, in amazement, wonder at how we survived our own naivete. We especially focus on how we came to be whoever we have become, and not infrequently linger as we self-examine our relationship with our parents and elder kin and acquaintances and their impact on our own individual personalities, beliefs, habits and ways of being in the world.
Although my mother had a deep-going and obvious affect on my development, and although she and I talked often and intimately about life experiences, nevertheless when she died I was counter-intuitively at peace with what church folk call “her home-going.” Conversely when we three sons nodded our consent for the medical people to pull the plug on my father who lay comatose a day and a half after falling into a fatal unconscious state of undetermined origin, whether because of all the uncertainty about the cause of his death or the bewildering swiftness of his unforeseen demise, I found myself all adrift emotionally, hopelessly unmoored, treading in a suffocating swamp, fighting for breath in a morass of feelings for which I had no name and very little understanding of why I was in so much pain.
Back when I was fifteen, I didn’t know I was hurting people. I thought I was simply a lone individual finding my own way in a hard, cruel world, a world about which I had only an abstract understanding of just how hard and how cruel was the road that lay ahead of me as I eagerly stepped into my tomorrows. Oh, the mistaken self-confidence of youth.
Of course, I had heard the saying “no man is an island” but I never realized that the lives of each of us is actually a country peopled by many others who are connected to us in diverse ways and to differing degrees of intimacy. Indeed and paradoxically, the great lesson I missed then but fully embrace now is that our individual identity is actually a social construct. Despite the conventional wisdom, who any of us is, is not simply a sui generis identity, not really a solipsism, not an unconnected unique individual but rather a conglomerate specific of various and diverse social influences, connections, and intersections.
Now that I have matured, I can really, really hear and understand what the old folks meant when they would ask: who that boy peoples is? Each of us is composed of all the people in us. No matter how we individually manifest our internal social multitudes, none of us are a simple individual. Both physically in our DNA and bodily makeup as well as socially in our beliefs, habits and tastes, all of us are complex combinations of other people and their influence on us.
My father’s people were country folk: raccoon and possum eaters, consumer’s of blackstrap molasses out of tin, one-gallon cans rather then maple syrup from small, store-bought, 12-ounce glass bottles. The elder members of Big Val’s extended clan all talked like they had mouths full of turkey stuffing. They gave us kids suffocating hugs you had to endure if you wanted to get at those lemon-coconut cakes and pans of yams with melted dollops of real butter or warm, deliciously gooey sweet-potato pone. Those relatives always called my father June, I didn’t know why. It never occurred to me, who was named Vallery Ferdinand III, that June might have been a familial, country-style contraction of Junior, which was of course how my farther was known to his close family.
Inherent in being city-bred was a dangerous disparaging of country ways. My formal education was teaching me to be ashamed of my social antecedents. Don’t talk like them, don’t dress like them, don’t eat like them, don’t be like them. And not unlike Chinua Achebe describes in his Things Fall Apart trilogy, I was completely unaware of the social dissonance my formal education, or should I say social indoctrination, was engendering in me. By becoming an eager student I became complicit in the tearing apart and destruction of black traditions. Had it not been for my parents encouraging us to be active in the Civil Rights movement there is no telling how socially irrelevant and alienated I may have grown to be.
However, what I could not discern while encased in the fog of my coming of age, the elders surrounding me keenly spied and accurately identified, i.e. my quickly growing alienation, even in its early stages, was obvious to the unlettered and untutored Black people from whom I sprang. So there I sat, resentful of having to go to church even as I knew that as the oldest, Baptist-reared grandson I was fully expected to carry on the word of God. But being a young, budding militant, politically what we would later call “a neophyte,” I had no time for embracing old and out-moded ways. My future was in the future not the past, or so I thought, once again not realizing just how short-sighted was my thinking that my future was unconnected to my past.
I completely ignored that both my grandfathers were preachers, my mother’s father formally as a respected minister, and my father’s father informally as what was called a “jackleg” preacher. I didn’t understand that for most of the long and terrible history of being Black in America, preaching had been a profession that a colored brother could legally pursue, that delivering the word of god was a leadership position the formally uneducated could attain, that pastoring a church was one of the few socially honored positions available to the average black man. Even though I thought I was smart enough to figure stuff out for myself, in reality I was too dumb to know how ignorant I was. For example, as obvious as it may be, many years passed before I realized that my mother’s first name, Inola, came from the abbreviation of New Orleans, Louisiana.
So on that fateful Sunday I will always remember, on what might metaphorically be identified as my great getting up morning, I sat on the car seat completely oblivious that I was at a major turning point in my life. My grandmother cleared her throat and calmly declaimed a narrative about a man who resisted his calling. As the story unfolded the distinct impression gradually dawned upon me that the unnamed protagonist of my grandmother’s parable was the same young person who was so good at reading bible verse in the pulpit and seemed so gifted an orator whenever he led the church in conducting the order of service. Even though she was looking at the sister sitting to her right, a voice inside my head was asking a startling question: was grand ma really talking about me?
I don’t remember the details of her story but I will never forget the gist and ultimate meaning. Seems as though there was a young church goer who loudly and proudly proclaimed that he was called to be a preacher and announced that he planned to attend the seminary. However, after going off for religious study, he returned to church un-ordained.
As she paused for dramatic effect, I wondered but did not ask, what happened.
Grand ma now turned slightly sideways and spoke a little louder, so we in the back could clearly hear her. “I asked him what happened. Didn’t he say God had called him to preach.” she said he said yes. “Well,” she continued, “when God calls, you’re supposed to answer.”
“I did,” the young man had told her, “but when I got there and asked the Lord, what did he want of me, the Lord said ‘never mind!’.
My grandmother was not only looking at me who many thought would follow in my grandfather’s foot steps, I felt that my grandmother was also looking deeply into the me who was intent on walking his own path.
A strange but welcomed calm seeped through me, as warmly comforting as a hot shower on a winter day. I felt free at last.
—kalamu ya salaam
photo by kalamu
A WOMAN CALLED KEISHA
She had recently cut her hair. Opting for a style of convenience rather than of flair.
My first memory of her is the briefest of flashes. She was sitting on my son’s bed when I walked in the room, her back against the wall, or was she sitting Indian-style? There was a pause, no one said anything. My son looked in my direction. She looked up at me then over to Tuta and then away from us both before staring straight ahead. And I simply said, “hey,” backed out the room and went on to do whatever I was doing. And did not give the encounter a second, third or even a months-later-remembered thought.
I’m like that: what doesn’t concern me, doesn’t arouse my attention. Of course I know that everything and every one is connected, but connections can become entanglements, especially when, out of idle curiosity or just plain juicy inquisitiveness, we want to know intimate details and have no intention of doing anything constructive with the knowledge. So much of our lives are too often filled with amassing personal specifics we never use except to make judgments about people when we aren’t even sitting in the jury box.
Twenty years ago in 1990, a strong, wide, silent smile was her response to my curt, one-syllable hello. Today, she still smiles strongly, still continues to flash a quiet grin that is so alluring.
I’ve seen her pregnant. Tuta was still in engineering school at Georgia Tech. Eventually, he dropped out to be first a father and then a husband, and even though he can be a boisterous hothead, he expertly shouldered both tasks that required him to care about someone else more than thinking only of himself.
Over the years three more pregnancies followed.
They’ve gone through a long march together: young and no money, high school sweethearts now evolved like black swans into mates for life. You should see them: season Saints ticket holders traveling to at least one away-game a year, or the humorous dance of housework and cooking they do in the post-Katrina kitchen of their now remolded Gentilly home. Every time I am there, I think of Tennessee Street in the Lower Ninth Ward and how Tuta and his four siblings were reared in the tight confines of a home that seemed one-room too small but worked out fine.
I remember what I went through struggling to stand amidst constant motion, and after sixteen years failing to go on further. I know what Tuta has dealt with financially but most of all emotionally as a young man staying on the road to becoming a mature husband. And through remembering my past and knowing Tutashinda’s realities, I can vividly imagine the zigs and zags, the “too much of this and not enough of that” that Keisha has successfully juggled.
I told her she must be a saint. She just flashed her regular trademark: a quick smile and a quiet laugh. She knows I’m not religious in the Christian sense but she also knows the seriousness behind my playful banter. Her full lips, curved into a mute, upturned crescent, needed no sound to say an unmistakable “thank you.”
It’s sometimes so hard and lonely being a mother of four children and one husband. And not only hard, and not simply lonely, but increasingly in this new millennium, staying the course as a woman, a mother and a wife accompanied by one partner who crosses the finish line with you has actually become un-normal. Today, most of us can not and do not complete such social marathons.
But if you successfully hold on til death do you part (howsoever one might define “success”), and the children grow and go out into the world on their own without returning to stay in the nest; and the husband does not leave, lighting out for other parts, or should we say other arms, unknown; when beneath the bludgeoning of choice and circumstance you have withstood it all and the “you” is also a second person plural and not just a lonely, embittered, divorcee turned second-personal-singular head of household, then that doing is genuinely remarkable.
And beyond remarkable such successful survival means… well, it means a lot to all of us. Although I or some others of us might not achieve it, their example proves that actualizing a strong relationship is possible, even over the long haul of starting out by going steady in high school.
And, hey, as certain as sunshine and as deep as midnight, no doubt on the mundane day-to-day basis, this human miracle is usually and majorly due to great effort, sacrifice, and steadfastness by the female partner. Typically, as a mother within a patriarchal society, the female has less options to leave as well as less desire to leave everything and everyone behind than does her male partner. Ultimately, the success of any traditional marriage is due to and sustained by the great beauty, great, great beauty offered by the woman.
I am not ignoring the men who hold up their half of the family sky, but regardless of whether the man does his part, for most of our families, ultimately our women are the ones who keep our skies from falling.
Keisha always laughs when we hug and affectionately refers to me by the Swahili appellation “baba,” which simply meets father. We spend very, very little time together but her image stays with me. A woman called Keisha who has cut her hair short and is resplendent, her head surrounded by an incandescent aura of glory.
—kalamu ya salaam
photo by Alex Lear
THE GLOBAL IMPACT
AND SIGNIFICANCE OF
AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSIC
AS AN EXTENSION
OF AFRICAN CULTURE
MUSIC IS THE MAJOR CONTRIBUTION OF AFRICAN AMERICANS TO WORLD culture and is also the major contribution of the United States of America to world culture. Most of what we know as American music is either directly African American music or the music is derived from and emulative, if not an outright imitation, of African American music.
My thesis is in two parts. First, because of technical and political reasons in addition to its intrinsic aesthetic value, African American music has had a significant global impact. Second, although alignment with American commerce and political might has helped spread the music, African American music itself can only survive and develop as an extension of self-determined African culture.
At the same time I argue that our music is African, I also recognize that up until the last four or five years, for various reasons, some of which we will discuss in this paper, most African American musicians have been either unwilling or unable to recognize that the music they made was a direct extension of African culture and that the future of the music is secure only in an African controlled space.
THE HISTORICAL REALITY.
Our music developed simultaneous with the technology of the recording. African American music was the first Black music to be recorded and disseminated around the world immediately as a result of World War I.
The economic importance of recording the music was twofold. First, the fact that the capitalist record companies could make major money from selling so called “race records” was an incentive to record the music. Were it not for the considerable money to be made selling blues and jazz recordings to captive Black audiences as well as, in the case of jazz, to a significant white audience, the prevailing social climate of racism in the form of Jim Crow segregation would have dictated that the music not be recorded at all.
Second, the economic stimulus also meant that the musicians were elevated as a position of status within the community. The entertainer became a major focus of economy activity both inside of the segregated African American community and outside of the community. Musicians as a class commanded more material resources than any other class of Black professionals in the early 20th century.
On an aesthetical level, the development of the recording is most significant because without an audio recording of some sort, African derived musics can not be disseminated. One must be able to hear the music to enjoy it and learn it. One can not learn to play African music from reading notes on a written score. There is no written notation that can capture the complexities and subtleties of African musics. But the recording made it possible for this music to be passed on.
Perhaps if the recording had come from England, then maybe some of the African derived musics of the Caribbean and of West Africa may have had a similar world impact. I think, however, that the expansion of the American economy and American military prowess added significantly to the spread of this new technology. Even if another country had the technology, without the economic and political clout, that technology might simply have withered and the country may not have been successful at spreading its culture worldwide.
I do not believe that there is anything exceptional about African American music versus Caribbean music or traditional and/or contemporary musics from Africa. I believe the difference is the context within which the music was made, i.e. historic dynamism of the host country in which the music was born and developed.
If it were simply a case of raw world power, then European classical music would have been able to stave off the encroachment of (African) American music. Were it simply a case of aesthetic considerations, than why not music from Ghana or South Africa. No, I believe, more than the particular form of African music, the question is the context within which the music operates.
African Americans were influential because on the one hand they exhibited the dynamism of African cultural expression and on the other hand because they were part and parcel of the most powerful political, economic and technological country of the 20th century.
The combination of African American cultural dynamism and national political, economic and technological power was not matched in any other parts of the African world. As a result of being in America, even though the country was and remains racist to the core, African American musicians were enabled to travel the world exporting not just the music but also exporting specific cultural and economic values.
African culture at root is based on participatory democracy, even if the participation is circumscribed by caste and class considerations. Because of its location in the United States, the African expression of adaptation and accommodation was mated with the political expression of democracy. This is not the opportunity to investigate these aesthetical concerns, so suffice it to say that the dynamism of the music reflects not only the African desire for self-determination (which I shall discuss shortly) but also the American ideals of democracy. These aesthetical values were another reason that the music was so popular worldwide. African American music sounded like freedom. (An extensive treatment of this particular theme is found in my essay, “The Social Significance, Political Impact and Economic Potential of African American Music” contained in a forthcoming issue of the African American Review.)
The Fisk Jubilee Spiritual Singers were among the first African American musicians to attract European attention. Later there was the James Reese Europe Orchestra. After World War II this influence would also be felt in Africa at a major level. For example, Louis Armstrong performed here in Ghana during independence celebrations and also donated a trumpet to a school in South Africa where Hugh Masekela learned to play music.
Essentially, African American musicians and entertainers were the first Blacks to make a major impact on the world stage. As a group, they were the first people of African descent to travel around the world in the 20th century. Because they were the first they not only opened doors, they also served as inspiration for other people of African descent most of whom were still living in de facto slavery or at the poorest levels without immediate access to international travel.
The influence of African American musicians was also gigantic in the dominant culture societies of America and Europe. In Europe, African American musicians sometimes performed for heads of state. Even though they were more likely to be viewed as entertainment rather than “serious” or “high art”, nevertheless their impact was felt profoundly throughout world culture.
The ascendancy of African American musicians took place within the context of the phenomenal rise of American political and economic influence in general. America’s military and industrial dominance was signaled by the victorious rise to colonial status as a result of land seized after the so called Mexican American War. This led to the establishment of the manifest doctrine in the Western Hemisphere which further consolidated America’s international clout. Everywhere in the world that America dominated, African American music followed. Thus, after the Allied victory in WW1, the sphere of American cultural domination was expanded and then consolidated.
Culturally this impact was so great that it led not only to the celebration of what is now called the “Jazz Age,” but indeed this hot new music “jazz” even had a profound impact on European musical culture. European classical composers began using jazz motifs and themes. Germa n cabaret music, French cafe music, and English popular theater music, all evidenced the influence of jazz. In all of these countries and more, not only was the music itself popular via recordings, but also, African American troops from the U.S. and African American entertainers began to take up residence in exile, thereby deepening the influence of the music on various European cultures.
From a political and aesthetical point of view, it is important to keep in mind that the Jazz Age was an era that contained the Harlem Renaissance. This Renaissance was an unprecedented, major development of African American culture and politics.
But we must be careful to note that the Jazz Age and the Harlem Renaissance was not just a period of singing and dancing. This is the time period of the Marcus Garvey movement which was the largest organization of people of African descent ever. Garvey’s newspaper was distributed throughout the United States and the Caribbean, as well as in parts of Central and South America, and most important of all, in Africa. The fact that Garvey reached Africa gave hope to Africa during a period of colonial strangulation that appeared as though it was impregnable.
The 1920s was also the period of DuBois’ beginning thrusts at hooking into the Caribbean initiated concept of Pan Africanism. The Pan African Congresses sponsored by Padmore, DuBois and their colleagues from the continent of Africa planned the seed of the liberation movements which directly led to the African Independence movements which reached fruition first in Ghana in 1957. The dynamism of the period between 1920 and 1960 directly paralleled the development of African American music.
This is a period when Black people all over the world were seeking self-determination and the vitality of African American music captured this yearning to create a new world, a political, economic and social world as dynamic as was the music. A music that kept renewing itself and politically grew bolder and bolder.
From Louis Armstrong singing “Black and Blue” in Ghana, to Duke Ellington writing suites such as Black, Brown and Beige, to Dizzy Gillespie composing “A Night In Tunisia,” on to the revolutionary developments of the 60s and 70s, African American music directly reflected worldwide African efforts for self determination, and this political outlook in turned informed the aesthetics of the culture of this era.
People of African descent worldwide loved African American music because it reflected their political aspirations and set an example that it was possible not only to achieve self determination, but indeed to inform and even decisively influence European, as well as, world musical culture. If we could do so in music, could we not do so in politics and economics, in sports and technology? The music made us think like that.
At the same time that overt African American music was influencing the world, American music in general was also taking the world by storm. This was really nothing more than the second wave of African American music except at this point it is presented by Euro-American musicians and entertainers. So now the world really embraced our music because whites were performing it even though most of those whites never acknowledged their cultural debt to people of African descent.
Almost every popular 20th century American recording and broadcast artist was directly influenced by African American music, especially in the 20s and 30s up through WW2. Many of the recognized cultural icons from that period, vocalists such as Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra carried African American music around the world, although they generally called it simply “American” music. This led to the amazing situation of African aesthetic dominance through African American music being looked at worldwide as a “white phenomenon” simply because white Americans such as Benny Goodman and Glen Miller were performing the music.
An example of how ludicrous the “white wash” of African American music can be projected under the title of “American” music is Nat King Cole. Nat King Cole was an extremely dark skinned man -- he must have been Ghanaian or maybe Senegalese. In any case he was the first African American to have a nationally broadcast television program. His music was very, very popular with African Americans and with white Americans. His singing style was cool and smooth. He enunciated his words clearly and he was never very loud. Although he eventually became known as a popular musician, he started out as a jazz pianist, and then became a jazz vocalist before switching to popular music. As his popularity grew, people around the world became influenced by his music. He recorded an album in Spanish that was very influential throughout South America and the Caribbean. But let me illustrate the whitewash.
When Nat King Cole’s records were imported into apartheid South Africa, the government would not let them be sold with a Black man’s face on the cover. So the recordings were sold with pictures of white people on them. According to Hugh Masekela, who told me of this in an interview, most Black South Africans thought that Nat King Cole was a white American who was a great musician. They loved his music but had no idea that he was African American. So you see, the whitewash of our culture has even happened when the musicians were visibly Black.
I believe that any real evaluation of African contributions to world culture must also include those contributions which were masked in “white face” by performers of European descent who did not bother to make sure that the African influences were acknowledged. There is no American musical culture that is not African at a significant level.
Thus we see that America had developed as a military power and thus had political influence. America had developed as an industrial power specializing in technological breakthroughs, the most significant of which from the perspective of musical culture, was recording technology. Finally, through the efforts of African American performers directly, and white performers indirectly, America also dominated popular musical culture worldwide, and even going so far as to influence European classical music. This is the context.
Too often, those who make a critical evaluation of culture, decontextualize cultural from the social and political thrusts of the era and never take into consideration the technological developments of the period.
THE CONTEMPORARY SCENE.
In the 1990s African American music remains popular but it no longer is the most dominant form of African derived music worldwide. Reggae, for example, is just as popular in many African countries. In Brazil their local musics, samba especially, are more popular and have even influenced African American music. We are witnessing the waning of African American musical dominance and the rise of other African derived musics, including popular music from African artists such as Youssou N’Dour, Miriam Makeba, Baaba Maal, Hugh Masekela, Fela Kuti and Angelique Kidjo. This is a direct reflection of the diminishing of American power in the world which is concurrent with the development of African and Diasporic nation states.
The music can not be separated from the real world. The music can not be studied in isolation if we are to understand its influences. Above all, culture must be contextualized to be understood. The close of the 20th century is fundamentally different from the opening of the 20th century. Not only is American industrial and economic might on the decline, but also America is no longer the technological leader of the world, especially with respect to recording. In fact, there has been a serious revolution in the recording industry resulting in what I call the “democratization of technology.”
By this term I mean that high levels of technical achievement and technical equipment are available for relatively modest sums of money and do not require a college education to master. Hence, peoples all over the world, even peoples who are illiterate can own and operate state of the art recording equipment. The advent of DAT digital recording equipment and compact discs in particular are exceedingly important developments.
Digital recording of broadcast quality can now be done with battery operated, portable equipment. This means that it is possible to literally go among our people to record music in the context within which the music is made. We no longer have to severely disturb the ambience or environment where the music is being made just to document the music. We no longer have to be a world power and have air conditioned studios to record. The equipment is not as sensitive to atmospheric conditions. The equipment is highly portable and very lightweight. All of this is important when we are talking about developing countries and developing peoples competing with established industrial powers.
Moreover, this accessible equipment produces the same quality audio as the big boys with their million dollar budgets. The results are also broadcast quality. This means that a recording made in Ghana or Tobago can be of the same audio quality as New York or London. Which in turn means that we are now able to compete on the level of the quality of the music. Plus we are now able to do it ourselves and are no longer dependent on western technology and western technicians. I suppose that it is important to note that DAT technology was developed not in the west in Europe or America, but in the east in Japan. The state of the art recording equipment does not even come from the western powers. We must pay attention to these developments because they hold great implications for developing countries and peoples. These implications far exceed the realms of music culture and the arts in general.
Additionally, although the cassette is very popular in developing countries, the CD, or compact disc, is the minimum level one has to attain in order to compete in the international arena. Of particular note with respect to CDs is that they are much more durable in southern climes than recordings were. They are easier to transport and ship, more convenient to use, and wear much better than vinyl recordings. This means that developing areas where resources must often be shared and recycled will get more use from a CD than from a vinyl recording. Finally, because of the world acceptance of this technology, the end cost to the user has also dropped to levels that are within the reach of developing communities.
On an aesthetic level, African American music is in a serious decline because the overall development of African Americans is in decline. This may not seem obvious at first glance, especially to those people of African descent who live in developing countries and are inspired by what they see of African Americans on television. The difference is quite simply one of perspective and of relative direction with respect to self-development.
Initially, African American music was a spur to the attainment of democracy and independence. But after achieving independence and then struggling through neo-colonialism, most developing peoples are now working desperately to achieve true economic self-sufficiency. Thus, developing countries and communities want to own their own industries in all areas of development, including within the cultural sphere of music production. However, within the United States, most African Americans were bought off by an effort to integrate into the so called American mainstream.
During the last 20 years rather than an increase in self-development, what we have actually suffered is a decrease. African Americans own less land in the United States today than they did 20 years ago. African Americans own a smaller number of businesses than they did 20 years ago. Moreover, many of the businesses that African Americans do own are service adjuncts to multinational corporations and not retailers and distributors to African American people.
For example, a major company might make janitorial products or offer a janitorial service but all of its clients are white companies. Such a company is directly dependent on the good will of white companies to hire them and such companies will therefore operate in a manner acceptable to those corporations regardless of whether such “acceptable manners” contributes to the overall development of African Americans specifically or African people in general.
Within the musical sphere, African American artists sell more records than at any time in the history of recordings, and yet we have less independent development than ever before. We no longer own even one major popular recording company. Why don’t we have a Motown or an active Solar Records? The answer is because African Americans gave up on independent economic development. This surrendering of our economic potential is reflective of placing individual aggrandizement far above group development.
In general African American artists, regardless of how conscious they say they are, focus most of their attention on developing their individual careers and thus do not band together to form collectives and organizations whose goal would be the development of a community, even if it were limited to a community of musicians. This lack of group identity is not specific only to musicians. My critique of this cultural reality is the same for all levels of professional activity in the contemporary United States. The focus on individual advancement and the lack of organized activity means that even those musicians who are relatively conscious find that there is very little they can do because the majority of their peers do not want to work on collective projects.
I believe that this attitude of individual aggrandizement is reflective of the neo-colonial national bourgeoisie attitude with which developing countries are very, very familiar. Clearly, such people are not prepared to make the commitment and sacrifice that development requires. But more than their economic capitulation, there is the question of their political role and their aesthetic role as cultural workers.
On a political level, contemporary African American artists, for the most part, have been coopted by the commercial pressures of cultural commodification. In order to sell recordings, the artist must appeal to the masses of Americans. The tastes of popular audiences in the United States have been cultivated on appeals to sex and violence. The artist who wants to sell a million records had better take this into consideration.
This leads to aesthetic decline. The music is no longer dynamic and expressive of group ideals and aspirations, instead it is designed to appeal to a voyeur consumer mentality. The music is no longer to serve as a spur to action and inspiration upon reflection. The music no longer looks to accomplishments in the future. The focus is on instant gratification in the here and now. Thus, the appeal of the music is based on fads and trends, rather than long term collective development. Moreover, the aesthetic also reflects a fascination with youth culture to the exclusion of adults and elders. Thus, even if those adults who try to get with contemporary music find themselves forced to act like youth.
Look at major artists who have been recording for over ten years. Listen to their latest releases and you will see that they are trying to act and sound like teenagers. By doing this, these artists give up their function as teachers and mentors, and thus become incapable of offering the leadership and wisdom that adults and elders traditionally offer to any society. This is especially the case within popular music with its emphasis on youth culture.
So first there is a minimum of collective development, second there is an emphasis on sex and violence, and third there is an almost exclusive focus on youth culture. This is precisely a recipe for failure at long term, collective self-development as a people or nation. Within this context, we must criticize most contemporary African American music not only as aesthetically empty but also as politically regressive and even negatively counter-productive from a developmental perspective.
In the world context, where African Americans previously played a major role in inspiring peoples of color and developing peoples and nations, the music today is seldom anything other than advertisements for conspicuous consumption and moral decadence -- conspicuous consumption because the images of the music focus on products to be bought, and moral decadence because the violence and sex are pushed strictly within a context of individual gratification with only token lip service to the development of the people.
Contemporary African American music is particularly decadent precisely because the music, for all its posturing to the contrary, generally represents the views and interests of individuals rather than of a community. In fact, the values put forward are actually impediments and injurious to the material and moral development of communities and nations. But beyond that, most of these images are deliberate exaggerations and falsifications of our collective reality. The majority of our people do not live like what one sees in popular music videos.
Most commercial videos are self indulgent fantasies at best and intentionally are divorced from day to day reality but these same videos are beamed around the world via CNN and other cable networks. Multinationals consciously use this videos to expand the demand for products whose only purpose is to make the manufacturer rich.
Much of this decadent music is defended by saying that it reflects reality and that it gives the people what they want. Essentially this is the argument of professional puppets who exist simply as mouthpieces for multinational corporations. When our reality is that we are at the bottom of economic development and nearly impotent in terms of political power wherever our people are found, then what we need to do is change reality and not simply reflect it. When our people have been corrupted by constant exposure to chemical and psychological drugs, we need to advocate drug free environments.
In the case specifically of violence, as long as Blacks are killing Blacks in America it is perfectly acceptable for rap groups to advocate and glorify violent behavior. However, if there was a liberation movement going on and white corporate stock holders were being systematically shot down, then the recording companies would take a moral stand against records which advocate violence. The question is not violence, but rather the nature of the violence.
Finally, when an artist is trying to make a hit record rather than trying to reflect the hopes and aspirations of their community then it is impossible for the aesthetics to develop precisely because aesthetics are more than the taste of one or two people. Aesthetics represent the sentiments of the community as a whole, the judgments of value and beauty. If the community is underdeveloped, the aesthetic sense will also be underdeveloped. If the community is mired in negativity, the aesthetics will be the same. The only exception is those aesthetics which reflect a willful effort to bring about revolutionary change.
At every previous juncture in the history of African American music, the music has changed not simply to sell, but rather to reflect the aspirations of our people to better themselves. Even if the artists are not overt in their political articulations and sentiments, their aspirations will be to own their own companies, to garner fair fees, to reach out to people all around the world. Their music will reflect themes and styles which inspire the audience toward those general objectives. In the case of those artists who are overtly political, their work will be critical of the status quo in both content and style, and will advocate substantial collective change.
The musics of revolutionary artists will always incorporate the traditions of the people even as it makes use of the latest technology of the day. You will be able to recognize revolutionary music because it will be both people based and technologically advanced. This is the only way liberation forces succeed, and even within the sphere of music we have revolutionaries.
Revolutionary aesthetics differs greatly from national bourgeoisie aesthetics, even though the national bourgeoisie will often mouth slogans that seem to be revolutionary. They will decry racism but not advocate collective development. They will appeal to “color consciousness”, i.e. vote for me because I am Black, buy my music because it is really Black, but they will not advocate moral development. Moreover, rather than bring new ideas and new technological developments to their audiences, the musical national bourgeoisie will revel in displays of ostentatious extravagance: the biggest light shows, the loudest speakers, smoke and mirrors but no substance.
African American artists must decide which road they want to travel, but this decision will be made not by the artists themselves, rather it will be made by the community. To the degree that there is a social movement for self development, to that same extent, the community will produce artists who will celebrate the traditions of the people and simultaneously inspire the people to move to higher levels of technological and moral development. In order to be truly revolutionary in this period of worldwide cultural commodification, artists will have to present their music as an extension of a collective, if not national, effort for development.
Baaba Maal’s new release “Firin’ In Fouta” exemplies this development. Using the most modern of equipment, he recorded the traditional sounds of his village and integrated those sounds into the fabric of the music. Women pounding grain establish a specific sounding beat and a rhythm on one track. Children playing are part of the chorus of another song. I believe that all revolutionaries, in whatever sphere, whether political, economic or artistic, inevitably, in the immortal words of Amilcar Cabral, return to the source of their people and bring with them a push for technological development.
There is no such thing as a revolutionary who is out only for him or her self. Especially when they win, you will notice that the alleged revolutionaries immediately turn into tyrants and dictators who mouth slogans while they make themselves rich and do nothing or very little to increase the general productive forces and standards of living for the masses.
This is why benefit performances alone are a sham if the artist is not doing something to develop community. Charity and handouts are inadequate substitutes for development and self reliance. The major problem for African American artists is that once they become popular and successful they immediately remove themselves from day to day contact with their communities and live among the upper echelons of mainstream American entertainers. Thus, they can not reflect their community because they no longer have a community.
But I do not want to get mired down in negativity. Let us look toward the future impact of African American music as an extension of African culture.
SELF DEVELOPMENT AND SELF RELIANCE ARE THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE.
Clearly, wherever we find African people, whether on the continent or in the diaspora, there is a major need for development in all spheres of life but especially so in the area of economic self reliance. Thus, our reality establishes our agenda.
From my critique of African Americans, some may conclude that I despair about their will and ability to contribute to African development. The truth is just the opposite. I believe that African Americans are undergoing a crisis and a rebellion. We have a crisis because after all of our achievements specifically in the area of desegregation of the American society, our crisis is that we are materially and morally worse off as a people. While many of our artists have sold out, an equally large number are very, very concerned about what can be done.
In fact, even among those who have sold out, as they grow older -- and in this case “old” is thirty years old -- they realize that the system does not want them and that both as a representative of their people and as an individual they are rejected by the consumer, youth oriented culture. These artists will not simply disappear.
While we are faced with a crisis, we are also in a period of rebellion because the masses are suffer greater deprivation than anytime in the last two decades. People in the United States are reacting violently and rebelling against authority. While rebellion in and of itself is brief and sometimes even counterproductive if not harnessed, rebellion does establish fertile ground for revoltionary developments.
What is required is cultural liberation movements attached to national development projects. In this regard, I do not think that artists take the lead. As contradictory as it may sound, I believe that a close inspection of our realities will show that revolutionary artists develop out of the demands of revolutionary times. Only when there is ferment in the political, economic and technological spheres will there be revolutionary activity in the artistic sphere. There is no exceptionalism for artists.
Of course there will always be exceptional individuals who can perceive and focus on the revolutionary potential of a situation even when it is underdeveloped. And of course there will always be exceptional individuals who respond to the requirements of the moment in exemplary and innovative ways. But even these individuals can not exist apart from history.
These are my suggestions and recommendations for the revolutionary development of African American music, and by extension, African music in general.
1. The current trend in economic development is multinational. We all know that the biggest problem that African people face is that there are no African nations on the continent and that the nations of the Caribbean are political, economic and technological dwarfs without the indigenous resources to sustain themselves.
At this point it is important to digress to explain what I mean when I say that there are no African nations on the continent. The boundaries for all of the present nation states were drawn by European powers in the interest of Europe. Those of ourselves who consider ourselves Pan Africanists have long saw this as a problem. In trying to come up with solutions to this problem we have traditionally thought like Europeans. By that I mean we have always thought about changing the boundaries, redrawing the boundaries. Well perhaps their is an African solution.
We all know that along many of the borders of African states the people, without benefit of passport or diplomatic recognition, go back and forth between states. Perhaps the easiest way to develop Pan Africanism is not to do away with boundaries in the physical sense but rather in the diplomatic sense. This will of course find immediate objection among the national bourgeoisie and the sitting governments who will fear the loss of power should their opposition flood into their countries. Well, I suggest that the first step be the repatriation of the African diaspora.
African countries should offer dual citizenship to any and all members of the diaspora who are currently citizens of a non-continental African country. (Please bear with me and I will explain how this impacts the music.) This would mean that people in the United States, England, Jamaica, Trinidad, etc. could apply for and achieve dual citizenship simply by buying land and paying a small repatriation annual tax. Unless the person took up residence, the repatriation would offer limited citizenship, excluding the right to vote, but after a period of residence, perhaps a year or two, the dual citizenship could include the right to vote.
The fact of the matter is that what most states are looking for skills and venture capital. Dual citizenship for the diaspora would offer both without tampering with the difficult question of Pan Africanism on the continent. In the diaspora, U.S.$50,000 is an insignificant amount of money to invest into a capital project, but invested in Africa that same U.S.$50,000 would be a major investment. Venture capital is relative to the context within which the capital is to be used. The appeal to the diaspora does not have to be altruistic. There is the opportunity for diaspora individuals to profit at the same time that they contribute to national economic development.
In the sphere of music production, this offer of dual citizenship could provide tax incentives and contractual incentives for artists who are currently constrained by U.S. taxes and American based company restrictions. Additionally, this offer would give diaspora artists access to new audiences and new markets. Finally, these artists could also represent their adopted country in international competition and conferences, significantly expanding the national clout of the host country. Of course, this example applies in the all other fields including sports, scientific and technological areas. But specifically within the sphere of musical production, the host country would be able to compete in the international arena and the diaspora artist would gain a home base and expanded market.
2. Cultural interaction is a fundable project for both artists and governments. Just as PANAFEST received support from AT&T, the American government and other international concerns, that support could be increased with the participation of diasporan artists who establish dual citizenship. The increase could be not only in the area of greater funds for PANAFEST, but also in the area of funding for developmental projects which could make use of the aesthetic and technical expertise of diasporan artists.
Artists could be invited to do collaborative projects and long term residencies which would include going throughout the countryside and not simply be limited to the capital city. The Ford, Rockerfeller and other foundations would be very interested in such projects especially if these projects were a joint initiative between diaspora artists and continental governments.
On the aesthetic level along the cross fertilization would offer a fantastic boost to the aesthetic development of the music. The nation state artist would benefit from working with mature diasporan artists and the diaspora artists would benefit by being introduce to traditional African cultures. Again, we are speaking about projects that require commitment at a level beyond cultural commodification for sale by multinational corporations.
3. At the most basic level, linkages can be established to facilitate cultural production. For example, I work with a small, independent recording company in New Orleans. We produce compact discs for approximately U.S.$2.50 to U.S.$3.00 per disc. The disc retail for U.S.$15.00 and wholesale for U.S.$9.00. At the very least, we could be facilitating the production of compact discs. All that would be required is a compact recorder which are currently available in the U.S.$1200 range.
On a national level, the government of various countries could establish national CD manufacturing plants which would offer services to citizens and make it possible for nationals to compete in the international market.
I am prepared to facilitate suggestion number three immediately and would like to take up specific discussion of suggestions one and two. I have intentionally made these suggestions very broad so that there is room for refinement that is necessary in implementation.
I do not think that international cooperation should be left exclusively to the multinational corporations. I believe that the nation states of Africa have a resource available to them whose potential is almost unimaginable. The African diaspora needs Africa in order to provide a national base for collective development and African states need the skills and access to technology and venture capital which the diaspora possesses. I believe that in order for African American music to become a world power again it must do precisely what it did initially and that is present itself to the world incorporated into the political economy of a developing nation. I am suggesting that African American music can become a true representative of African culture, not by extension and in the abstract, but by repatriation in the concrete.
The unification and development of Africa will not happen overnight, nor will it come about based on a European model. It seems to me that the development of African people worldwide requires the reintegration and unification of African productive forces. We must expand the nation state concept at the very same time that we strengthen the political and economic independence and self reliance of all people of African descent. The future belongs to those who unify and work together to change their current realities of under development into a future of cooperative development. One people. One aim. One destiny.
Thank you.
—Kalamu ya Salaam
PANAFEST, UNIVERSITY OF CAPE COAST, GHANA
13 December 1994
THE MYTH OF SOLITUDE:
NO WRITER IS AN ISLAND
>>No writer is an island.<< No writer creates alone. Even those who withdraw from human contact -- the Salingers and O'Toole's of literature -- are actually shaped by their social development, or more precisely, in the cases just cited, by their social deficiencies. No matter how technically brilliant such writers may be, unless under-girded by social exchange and observations thereon, their writing will not stand the ultimate test of greatness: is the work relevant across time and across cultures?
In order to achieve both linear (across generations) and lateral (across cultures) greatness, writers must be both immersed in a specific era/culture and conscious of that era's relationship to other eras and other cultures. It is not enough to report on or even analyze the news of the day. The ultimate meanings of human existence transcend the specifics of any given moment.
In practice achieving greatness means moving beyond topicality, requires that we insightfully deal with how and why humans are shaped by social and environmental forces, and deal with how we respond to our specific shaping processes.
>>As writers, our goal is the expert use of words<< to convey ideas and information, emotions and experiences, dreams and visions. On the one hand we must study, and study hard, the development of our craft, but, on the other hand, we must never forget that craft without content is meaningless. Beyond the craft/content argument is the more important question of writing for whom? Who is our audience? Are we connected to others?
An audience is the single greatest determinant of the shape and relevance of one's craft. How is this so? This is so because as writers our whole craft is based on communication and, quiet as it is too often kept, communication requires an audience.
Some of us insist that we write to please no one but ourselves. But does that mean we write for an audience of one? No, it does not. When we write only with ourselves in mind, we are implicitly trying to communicate with the social elements that shaped our being. Indeed, who does not want to be understood by their parents, their children, their siblings and peers? Besides, if we were writing literally only for ourselves as an audience of one, we would have no need to share our writing, no need to publish or recite our writings.
In the contemporary United States, "audience" has been collapsed into the concept of consumers, people who literally buy whatever is marketed. That is ultimately a very cynical approach to determining who is one's audience. To write for and about a specific audience does not necessarily mean writing to sell to that audience. What it does mean is using the culture of the intended audience as the starting point (and hopefully an ending point) for our work.
Writing well in English presupposes that we deal with the history of English-language literature, a significant part of which includes use as a tool in the historic process of colonizing people of color. As able a craftsperson as Ralph Ellison was, craft is not what distinguishes "Invisible Man." Rather, Ellison's insightful handling of an investigation of the anti-humanist effects of exploitation and oppression on those who are victimized by a dominant and dominating society is the significance of that novel.
Ellison, understands at a depth few others have so thoroughly presented in the novel format, that both those who fight against their subjugation and those who are not even conscious of their condition are twisted by social forces. However, Ellison's novel is not merely a political screed because Ellison is more concerned with the range of human responses to social conditions than he is with advocating a specific social order. Moreover, far more than many books that on the surface seem to be more political, Ellison's novel is grounded in the cultural mores, the folklore, of mid-20th century African American life. Invisible Man can not be fully appreciated without an appreciation of Black culture.
A horrible truth is that too many of us are unprepared to write significant literature because we have no real appreciation of our audience as fellow human beings, as cultural creatures. We know neither history nor contemporary conditions. We talk about "keeping it real" but have no factual knowledge of reality. Thus, we glibly bandy generalizations, utter hip clichés as though they were timeless wisdom, and inevitably offer instant snapshots of the social facade as though they were in-depth investigations of the structure and nature of our social reality -- in short, we lie and fantasize.
Moreover, unless we consciously deal with our conditions, we end up replicating our oppression in our literature. When we are poor we write admiringly of being rich -- when we get some money, we write guiltily about poverty. What is this madness? This is the psychology of the oppressed captivated by their own oppression.
If this analysis sounds extreme, run the litmus test of examining works of popular literature and see if this is not the case. Look at the rap videos, notice the lifestyles portrayed. Look at the movies. At some point, we need to be aware that videos, movies, televisions, all of those media employ scripts -- these scripts are our popular literature. The absence and/or low level of craft in popular literature, both in publishing and in electronic, broadcast and video mediums, points to one of our real problems -- many of the people who are scripting for the media, can't or don't write well.
Moreover, I understand that the majority of scriptwriters for Black-oriented projects are not Black writers, however, the lack of Black writers in the dominant and dominating mainstream media underscores rather than invalidates my premise. A major part of our problem has nothing to do with craft and everything to do with consciousness — our consciousness and the consciousness of our fellow humans in the United States of America.
Our daily lives are shaped by our social conditions and the consciousness that emerges from those conditions. A significant percentage of writers who are craft conscious are also writers who are psychologically alienated from their own culture. Indeed, for the person of color, the act of acquiring education and expertise typically is also an act of alienation. It is unfortunately generally true that mainstream training in craft is simultaneously a directive to distance one's self from the culture and consciousness of our Black communities. Explicitly, to become professional means to emulate the other and eschew the Black self, the working class self, and, for women, to an even greater degree than many may realize, becoming a professional also means eschewing the self-actualized female self.
Thus, it is no surprise that once we become professionals, we insist on the right to be seen as autonomous and self-defined individuals who desire to live beyond the restrictions of race, class and/or gender. Indeed, we are often proud as peacocks strutting around glorying in our individuality -- look at the beauty of my butt feathers! We disdain groups, assert that organizations stifle our creativity. Meanwhile, people who are organized control the production and distribution of our creative work.
The status quo system loves those of us who think we can make it as individuals precisely because individuals are dependent on the status quo for life support. When you don't have a community of friends and comrades, you end up going to your enemy for supper and shelter, both literally and metaphorically.
>>The challenge for conscious and self-identified writers is both external and internal.<< External to the individual, we must build community by working with and achieving an understanding of the people with whom we identify. Internally there is the individual quest to develop a craft that reflects and projects our individual feelings and ideas about ourselves as well as about the world we live in. This struggle for social and artistic development is not an abstract concern. In practical terms such development requires that we who identify ourselves as Black writers:
1. Study Black music and Black history.
Music because Black music is our mother tongue -- the language through which the deepest and most honest emotions of our people have been expressed in the rawest and most "unmediated" manner. More than in any other sphere of social activity, African Americans have determined our own musical expressions and have communicated with the world through that form of expression.
History because if you don't know yourself you will inevitably end up betraying yourself.
Is it possible to write without a working knowledge of Black music and history? Of course it is. Is it possible to produce great literature without such knowledge? Probably not, and certainly none that would be considered Black literature. Ultimately, all literature is a product of culture, whether that culture is one's indigenous culture or an adopted culture.
2. Study the craft of writing.
One certainly would not claim to be a carpenter without learning how to build, nor a farmer and be unable to raise crops. Moreover, we also need to tackle the development of our own approaches and the development of a theoretical foundation.
During the Black Arts Movement, this process was called the Black aesthetic -- the development of an aesthetic is still needed. Craft is the concrete manifestation of philosophical aesthetics. If we don't consciously shape our own aesthetics, our craft will invariably and often in a contradictory and conflicted manner reflect someone else's aesthetic, generally the aesthetics of the dominant social order.
3. Join with like-minded colleagues.
We should join writers associations, guilds, organizations, both formal and informal. Workshops are important in one's formative years. As one develops, peer associations become extremely helpful both in terms of career development and in terms of craft development. We literally find out what's going on by being in touch with others. We become inspired and get ideas from interacting with others.
The internet is a major source of community activity for young writers today. There are on-line workshops, resource web sites, informational web sites and specifically, a number of Black oriented literary web sites. A young writer who is not on-line is literally "out of it" -- outside of the ebb and flow of ideas and information. With the advent of public access through libraries, arts organizations, schools, and relatively inexpensive commercial services, there is no excuse for not being on-line.
>>Writing is not just the words on the page.<< Writing is documentation of social praxis. There is both an art and a science to writing, a feeling and a thought.
Not only is no writer an island, it is up to each one of us to develop as social creatures (i.e. men and women) and as professionals. For our ancestors, for our selves, for our children and those yet unborn, let us as writers come together and create a literature that is as persistent and profound as our people who outlived centuries of chattel slavery, segregation and degradation, and who stand now on the verge of creating a new definition of what it means to be a free, proud and productive people.
—kalamu ya salaam