Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 617

'Days of Fire'

"Too much politics and the clang of commerce" is staining 9/11 commemorations here in New York City today. So it also makes sense that we look somewhere else for music that articulates how some of us feel. Thanks to Neelika for suggesting the song "Days of Fire" by Nitin Sawhney, featuring singer Natty, as an appropriate music break today. I agree. Performed in 2008 with the London Undersound Orchestra the song is based on Natty's experiences of the July 2007 train bombings in London and its aftermath.

We also remember the other September 11.

Music Break / Beirut

I've had this on repeat. New Mexico band Beirut's mesh of Balkan and "world music" (I know isn't that the same thing and aren't all music, world music?) with their 2006 hit "Gulag Orkestar."

Typecasting Binyavanga Wainaina

By Caitlin Chandler

How do you write about a place that occupies a mythic place in the imagination of outsiders? And how do you write about national and personal identity when identity does not obey the neat idea of nation states and borders?

American novelist William Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional Southern community, wrapping his stories in a fragmented language, trying to protect the towns and people he described from being recognizable and known. To write about the American South, which in Faulkner's time and our own comes wrapped up for non-residents in a set of tropes, produced in Faulker an anxiety of representation he could only remedy through producing an imaginary geography.

Binyavanga Wainaina instead delivers a memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place, rooted firmly in the real landscapes of his home.

 Born to a Kenyan father and a Ugandan mother, Wainaina grows up in Nakuru, Kenya and spends time in South Africa for college. He travels near Kisoro, Uganda, for a family reunion, and looks out to the borders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Later, Wainaina hops around the world as his writing career opens up opportunities in other countries. Constantly, he is faced with the individual and political question, of, who are you? And who, exactly, is Kenyan?

… Brewing inside this space, from fifty or so ethnic histories and angles, is Kenya – a thing still unclear, picking here, marrying across, choosing there; stealing here and there – disemboweling that which came before, remaking it. Sometimes moving. Sometimes not. Some say all we do is turn, like rotisserie chicken, on the whims of our imperial presidents …

Some reviewers have noted the beginning of the book does not play like a typical memoir. It is not a straightforward read. But neither is recounting a life. In utilizing a non-linear plot, Binyavanga mimics how memory constructs our lives from scraps of events and the people we remember. He dares the reader to easily imagine him, or the lives of his family. He knows being called the new African writer! and the numerous other accolades thrown his way since he won the Cain Prize carry enough condescension and projection to sink us all. And so he seeks to try and un-do these labels, these niches and clichés, through stories without neat beginnings or endings. The literary magazine he helps launch is called Kwani!; its title translates as, "So what?"

In One Day I Will Write About This Place, Wainaina deftly blends details about coming of age against a backdrop of 'development', a nascent religious movement, the rise of global pop culture, and Kenya's shifting political landscape. Through it all, we are guided by the witty voice of the narrator. "Bob Geldof. Wherever he is people fall, twist, writhe, lose language skills, accumulate insects around their eyes, and then die on BBC." Wainaina is adept at describing how larger political and international movements affect individuals. "The project to make people like us is ending. Now those who have, grow, and those who don't stay behind."

Wainaina's language is often lyrical and playful. In one of several passages about singer Brenda Fassie, who floats through the South Africa chapters signifying that new nation's moods, Wainaina writes, "It's the way the song begins – a church organ, playing on a scratchy old record, a childhood memory of a sound, for the briefest moment, then come her first few words, slurred like she is drunk and far away, lost inside an old shortwave radio." At other moments, his language is a careful stream of consciousness, where what the narrator omits matters as much as the words on the page, "Mum's home in Uganda is near the border with Rwanda, near Congo. She can't go to visit; the border is closed."

Wainaina's path to becoming a writer is wrapped up in his quest to realize his identity, to belong to his family yet create a life uniquely his own. I'm not going to tell you Wainaina writes to survive. But I will say that One Day I Will Write About This Place is a hilarious, intelligent, and nuanced portrayal of what it means to be A Kenyan-Ugandan-Gikuyu-Mufumbira-son-brother-foreigner-citizen-artist in our world today. Let's hope I haven't typecast him.

Music Break / Lexxus

New video for the Congolese AIAC favorite Lexxus, recorded in Kinshasa, featuring the Kinois rapper LeslyMan.

The Real Maids of Beirut

By Dan Moshenberg

If you've followed the news from the Lebanon over the last few years, you've read quite a bit about the difficult to desperate situation of domestic workers. Maids, child care providers, housekeepers face unrelenting abuse. They are assaulted, cheated out of their pay, imprisoned by their employers and trapped by visa conditionalities.

Trapped by visa conditionalities means that the vast majority of domestic workers in the Middle East are transnational or migrant workers. Not immigrant, because they are not allowed to stay, not allowed to become actual residents. Not quite like one of the family, domestic workers are more like part of the scenery. Think of them as furniture, without, of course, the occasionally high price tag or admired design feature.

For years, the vast majority of these workers came from South East and South Asia, especially the Philippines, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. But recently, Africa has provided much of this commerce in women's bodies, in particular Kenya and Ethiopia.

Western media and human rights advocates, as well as many from South East and South Asia and from the involved African countries, have told the story of the violence and super-exploitation of these workers. In the past year, for example, the press in the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Kenya have described the plight of imprisoned and abused domestic workers as attacks on their respective national integrity. And to a large extent they are.

When it comes to domestic workers, the advocacy story always relies on pathos. Those poor women. Those pathetic, hopeless, desperate women. They are the "new slaves" whose tragic and frantic screams pierce the early morning skies. They are women without protection, and so best described by morbidity and mortality rates: every week they die, often at their own hands. Even when the domestic workers are described as "starting to fight back", the framework of their struggle is that they are "abused, humiliated and deprived of the most basic rights."

Except that's not the story the women tell.

Rahel Zageye is an Ethiopian woman working as a domestic worker in Lebanon. She has been there for a while. And she has made a film, entitled Beirut. Zageye acknowledges that the treatment of "Ethiopian girls … working as housemaids" in Lebanon is dreadful, and must be exposed as such.

But, Zageye also insists, that's not the whole story. Those women are not defined by abuse and exploitation alone. Rahel Zageye is not defined by abuse and exploitation alone. Nor is her sister Hiwot, who has also worked as a domestic worker in Lebanon. In fact, no one's story is simple: "My main aim with the film was to show a different perspective on the lives of Ethiopian workers in Lebanon. We often hear stories of abuse and bad treatment of Lebanese employers towards their foreign domestic workers (maids). Most media and organizations working to help migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Lebanon portray the worker as a helpless victim, her fate ruled by evil agencies and bad madams. Although this often does happen and is definitely an issue that needs attention, reality is much more complicated."

Reality is indeed much more complicated. Reducing people's lives to a single story line turns them into pieces of furniture. Without, of course, the occasionally high price tag or admired design feature. "Even" Ethiopian women domestic workers in Lebanon lead their own complex lives. Who knew?

50 Cent Wants to Help Africa

Remember when rapper 50 Cent announced that he would try to provide 1 billion meals over the next five years to poor Africans? He has the solution: boldfaced capitalism. Now you can help him: by buying his new energy drink, "Street King." Yes, "… with every shot purchased, a meal is provided for a child in need."

No comment.

Funky Liberia

 

Italy based, UK Funky influenced, electronic music purveyors Pepe Soup recently released the above song and video, a proud recollection of Liberian childhood punishment survival.

The Italian-Liberian duo have been busy this year, releasing a string of EPs on their own label, and contributing to the soundtrack for Al Jazeera and Dutch Public Television's series on African migration, Surprising Europe.

It's nice to see such a strong entry coming in from the Liberian diaspora. Since Doneao's "Party Hard" was on repeat in Monrovia this summer, maybe by this time next year Funky Liberia a la Pepe Soup will be a staple at the city's clubs.

H/T: TIA

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This is to let you know that we'll be taking a break from blogging to catch up with our regular lives from August 13 till September 5–that, we'll be back the day after Labor Day.

This is a good time to read through our archive (just read backwards), and, more importantly, like our Facebook Page, and follow our various Twitter accounts: Sean, Sophia, Neelika, Brett, Tom, Boima, Loren, Dan, Dylan, Sonja (we're  hoping she'll come back someday and blog again) and Herman (who should blog more).

Weekend Special, August 12

Liberian Hipco music culture–"Liberia's version of hip-hop, the 'co' is short for colloquial or Liberian English"–in pictures. The full set via Al Jazeera English). (Separately we've blogged about Hipco here.)

* Meanwhile, in Senegal: Life President Abdoulaye Wade must wish rap never made it to Senegal. From the BBC here and here.

* Talking of protests, Britain's been on fire this last week. Here follows, courtesy of my man Peter Dwyer (his Facebook feed was gold this week), some snapshots from the violence and its meaning (the short of it: it is not "a riot" nor entirely an insurrection): Jacobin on looting; Gabriel Gbadamosi, in Granta; Seamus Milne, young people 3 weeks ago after 13 London youth clubs were close predicting "There'll be riots"; even Nick Clegg (serious) predicted it last year; "a very decent analysis" from Australia; a man on the street and from Russia Today; ; Mark Steel; Tariq Ali; Nina Power; London's Mayor Boris Johnson gets put on blast; and of course, finally, that viral BBC "interview" with the "old West Indian Negro."

* I would also recommend going back and looking at Liz Johnson-Artur's photo archive of black Londoners.

* The latest issue of Middle Eastern hipster art magazine, Bidoun, is out and the focus is the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Some of the articles are online.

 * Now for other news: Late last month the South African soprano Pretty Yende was one of two winners in the annual  Operalia competition held in Moscow. The competition was "founded in 1993 [by  Plácido Domingo] to give young, early-career [opera] singers exposure on an international scale." (Yende is scheduled to appear at La Scala in Milan next season in productions of "Aida" and "The Marriage of Figaro.") My New School colleague, Nina L. Khrushcheva, who attended the performance, sent me this message: "… Congrats to your compatriot, she was amazing …  She was absolutely divine. and then when she got first prize she cried on stage all throughout. And not in that calculated manner people sometimes do to show emotions (Halle Berry's oscar performance comes to mind) but in the most genuine way–she was so honored to be the best. I cried myself, and you know i am not an emotional sort."  The video of her  final performance has been scrubbed from Youtube, so we have to do with an earlier sample from nine months ago:

* Our Brett Davidson asked how this video, below, promotes a regional TV channel–that for the South African capital?

The ad company and the filmmakers must have decided they could not offend anyone. What we get are mostly images of young, black, hip, people and then the voice over by old white male. The result: a schizophrenic piece of work.

* After 5 years as Africa correspondent (I know, try covering 54 countries), Scott Baldouf of The Christian Science Monitor , is returning to the US. Here's his departing column on "five myths about Africa."

* In Harlem, Senegalese immigrants celebrate the legacy of spiritual leader Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba Mbacke.

* Yes this is a trailer for a new British film:

* Sacha Frere-Jones on Amy Winehouse and race in The New Yorker:

[Winehouse's] style provides a way of singing derivations of black music without resembling modern R. & B. In fact, avoiding the sound of current R. & B. may be its guiding principle. White singers generally seem to use it more than black singers, though it is open to anyone who wants to use its limited vocabulary. "Back to Black" also sounds nothing like current R. & B., but chooses rich, older source material; Winehouse's collaboration with Ronson catalyzed her songwriting, and a radical change in her vocals pushes the album. Her tone is darker, the control is infinitely stronger, and her range sounds as if it had gained an entire lower octave. And then there's the accent, which isn't simply the Southgate speaking voice that makes "cool" sound like "coal." Winehouse's singing sounds, even to a nonpolitical ear, like some sort of blackface. She slurs words and drops consonants; you hear "dat" and "dis" in place of "that" and "this" several times. Is "Back to Black" meant to be literal?

And this essay from 2008 by academic Daphne A Brookes in The Nation:

Black women are everywhere and nowhere in Winehouse's work. Their extraordinary craft as virtuosic vocalists is the pulse of Back to Black, an album on which Winehouse mixes and matches the vocalizing of 1940s jazz divas and 1990s neo-soul queens in equal measure. Piling on a motley array of personas, she summons the elegance of Etta "At Last" James alongside roughneck, round-the-way allusions to pub crawls and Brixton nightlife, as well as standard pop women's melancholic confessionals about the evils of "stupid men." What holds it all together is her slinky contralto and shrewd ability to cut and mix '60s R&B and Ronnie Spector Wall of Sound "blues pop" vocals with the ghostly remnants of hip-hop neo-soul's last great hope, Lauryn Hill. Who needs black female singers in the flesh when Winehouse can crank out their sound at the drop of a hat?

Anyway RIP Amy Winehouse. Tribute by the Dutch DJ Kypksi:

*  Dylan Valley sent me this this video by South African singer, Jamali (who won Coca Cola Popstars a couple years ago). It is a really bad pop song, but the video may get some attention, "kind of a faux Lady Gaga video with really weird and problematic imagery of slavery. Basically the three members of Jamali are being auctioned off in the video as 'exotic beauties'."

* I've posted before about the strange relationship between American (including African-American) comedians and Africa and whether they're laughing with or at us. I have found some new sources. I found this video, below, from a recent set by Aries Spears (remember him from MAD TV and his imitations of rap artists)' doing his "Africa" bit:

Not that funny. Instead, I find this recent stand-up by fellow comedian Godfrey (son of Nigerian immigrants) hilarious:

* South African parody rappers, Die Antwoord, is playing a gallery opening in New York City in October. Anton Kannemeyer will exhibit his work at Jack Shainman Gallery.

* If you're around in Amsterdam on August 19, go watch the South African trio Bittereinder at Paradiso.

* Also in Amsterdam on August 28: Made in Africa Weekend: Doin' it in the Park. Guests performing are Baloji, Secousse, D.j. Threesixty and others.

* Finally, later this month it will be the 6th anniversary of late August 2005′s  Hurricane Katrina. We'll sign off with Ohio rapper Stalley's 2010 song and video which release coincided with the 5th anniversary of Katrina. Nothing to celebrate today 6 years later:

Independence August

Since we'll be on break for a minute (details tomorrow) when the following central African countries celebrate their independence days, let's do a quick roundup for Central African Republic, Congo Brazzaville, and Gabon.

August 13, The Central African Republic is the home of Deep House DJ Boddhi Satva, who we talked about here before.

August 15, Today, Congo Brazzaville artists like Bisso Na Bisso and Freddy Massamba carry the flag of Brazzaville pride in the diaspora. While Freddy Massamba impresses me with his range of styles collaborating with the likes of Boddhi Satva, and a host of African superstars through his group Fresk, Abd al Malik, who we have covered before here, surprised me pleasantly.

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August 17, Gabon is probably best known for African Zouk, and the classic pan-African hits of Oliver N'goma. But today (along with most countries), it's a Rap nation. Teenage rapper Jojo made a Pop-Rap hit that made enough noise to get an MTV Africa nomination:

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Happy independence days to C.A.R., Congo, and Gabao!