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| July 2006 »
Los Arrayanes
Diego, Sebastian, Colo and I head out to hike the length of the peninsula on which the grove of myrtle trees stands at the far end. It’s a 12.5 km hike to the tip of the peninsula, so we leave enough time for a 5-hour round trip.
The path leads through mainly virgin forest and it is well marked. The forest is occasionally striking in that way that chaotic virgin forests can be — weirdly shaped trees, massive fallen trunks, huge ancient grandfather trees with scars and wounds from the local llau llao fungus and lightening. The full panoramic vision of chaotic creation and death. At one point one of the guys makes a comment that the tangle of angles and curves and shapes seems architectural — “gothico, art deco, neo-classico”.
Finally, 3 hours later, we reach the little grove of myrtle trees. Not so architectural.
They’re nice, but a little underwhelming. Rumored to be the visual inspiration for the forest in “Bambi” — in truth they were not.
There’s a dock nearby and a little launch pulls in filled with tourists. We hitch a ride back to the car park, which saves us what would be a boring return hike — no one is complaining. One of the launch pilots tells us that he flew to Buenos Aires when I first played here — 1992 (maybe?) — it was the Rei Momo tour with the large Latin band. The sonar on the boat displays the surprising depth of the lake. About 50 yards from shore the water is already 200 meters deep. No one has measured the depth at the deepest points.
Dog Eat Dog
Early morning by the cabin we watch a group of maybe 6 dogs that have gathered by the lakeside. A black doggie, an outsider possibly attempting to join the group or wanting to be taken seriously, barks at all the others, fairly aggressively, while a large Labrador repeatedly mounts a sad looking female with a hound-like face, eventually succeeding in the task, after which the two are locked together for a few minutes. Ouch. None of the others seem to pay much attention to this. Barking blackie is shooed off by the others repeatedly, returning again and again. A twin of the Lab fucker barks, demanding to chase sticks thrown in the water, ignoring all the fucking and barking and growling around him. The lovers have unlocked and the others pass by and smell the sad gal’s pussy, but make no attempt to mount her. The lovers lick their privates…possibly to ease the pain of being stuck together.
Finally fed up with the outsiders’ aggressive non-stop growling and barking, a muscular member of the group takes the case in hand, and, grabbing the outsider by the red collar while they are both knee-deep in the water, he attempts to semi-drown obnoxious blackie. Or at least that’s what it looks like he’s trying to do. Others join in — one chomping down on the poor dog’s leg. A violent scrum — the outsider could be drowned as the others thrash about and hold him down — but no — after a minute or two of violence they all let go of him and there is no blood despite all the showing of teeth and even biting. They seem satisfied that he should now know his place. It seems they intentionally didn’t hurt him. It was all for show, to show him they weren’t going to put up with his aggressiveness and threats. Outsider stands up, still knee-deep in water, dripping, slightly stunned, not moving. He doesn’t run away. He slowly saunters up the bank to the protection of some bushes. A minute or so later here he comes again for more; the never-ending challenge.
One dog pisses on another’s face. No reaction. The hierarchies here must be well worked out.
On my way to work I sometimes pass by a little dog park at 23rd St. and 11th Ave. It’s a triangle of man-made hillocks and humps. The dogs brought there by their owners usually pick a hump to occupy and there they are — one dog on top of each mound, kings of their own hills. Everybody’s happy. Everyone’s a king.
I imagine if there were only one mound there would be fights — a constant and nasty struggle to see who would be top dog — but as there are quite a few options available here every dog can be king, at least for a little while.
Watching the dogs it sure seems we haven’t “advanced” much from the territorial and hierarchical struggles that those dogs so obviously act out. The smart thing about dogs is that their posturing is often just that — blackie wasn’t really hurt, no blood was shed. Actual violence is a real last resort. We push to see where the boundaries lie as well, but sometimes when acted out on a national or global scale, with tanks and explosives, it’s a little too easy to fire off a few rounds or zap the target knowing there will probably be no (immediate) repercussions.
Paraguay
Diego informs me of the band’s recent gig in Paraguay. He says it appears to be — at least in Asuncion and Ciudad del Este — a whole state based on contraband — the CD stores are fully stocked with pirate versions. 95% of the CDs are bootleg.
There are streets of huge mansions and surprising luxury cars. You’d think the contraband industry would somehow be incompatible with traditional music, but he says there is quite a lot there. Well, maybe compared to Argentina.
…
In the morning I bike out to Tierra Santa (Holy Land) in hopes of some photo opportunities. It’s a theme park out past the BA domestic airport that advertises “a day in Jerusalem in Buenos Aires”. It’s closed, but I can see “Calvary” and the three crosses from the outside:
To reach “Jerusalem” I ride along the promenade that borders the riverbank. The river is so wide one can’t see the opposite shore. Fishermen lean on the railing. Along here (and also along the border of the Parque Ecologico) are kiosks that grill meats for truck drivers and others who want a quick lunch. 
Bags of charcoal supply the heat to grill blood sausages, steaks, hamburgers and various other cuts that sizzle during the early afternoons. The word Choripan is a conjunction of chorizo (a cut of beef) and pan (bread)…there’s another offering called Vaciopan, which literally means empty sandwich — but it also is a cut off the cow.
The slang here is many-layered and inventive. There’s even a genre of slang created by pronouncing words backwards. Sometimes this is compounded and complicated even further when a euphemism for something — a word for marijuana or one’s wife, for example — is pronounced backwards, adding yet another layer of obscurity to the in-crowd language.
I stop at MALBA, the modern art museum, to have lunch with Amelia and her daughter. There’s a Roy Lichtenstein show at the moment, which hardly seems fitting for a museum of arte Latino Americano.
Heavy traffic to the airport. United Airlines bumps me from the flight for being 5 mins late. We buy a ticket on American. They lose my bike, but promise there is another flight arriving soon (the bike arrives at my place later — whew.)
Rules of Empire
• Empires love classification
• “Ancient Hatreds” often turn out to be byproducts of colonial structures
• Maintaining an Empire is a huge financial drain on that empire
• Globalization spreads imperial employment practices and patterns
• Empires promise peace but beget war
• Imperial borders are inherently unstable, as they do not exist by consent.
We’re all exhausted — the band more than I, as they stayed on at the club last night to greet friends and well-wishers. Bariloche is a 2 hour flight south — it is a ski town so the shops are all filled with ski outfits, souvenirs and chocolates (German/Swiss influence up here…one of the famous Nazis was hiding out in this region…as were Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid and their molls.)
It’s drizzling; we grab a bite to eat as the next world cup game plays on a massive TV. I get ½ hour sleep before the band begins a short one-hour set (8PM — early this time) …me joining at the end, as before. We suspect the crowd here will be less familiar with all of our stuff, both theirs and mine, which is true — they are mostly locals — but the reaction is good. A few mention that they never expected to see me live in their lifetime, so they are fairly thrilled.
I remember all the words this time.
Immediately after we finish a fireworks display commences — to celebrate the end of the snow festival. The PA pumps out music that someone has attempted to synch with the fireworks. Pink Floyd, Björk, some very grand Beethoven-type classical music. It sort of works — kind of like the dancing waters in Las Vegas but with fireworks.
We walk to a local club to get some dinner and maybe catch a BA singer who will be doing a show later (her show starts at 1 it seems, so we pass on staying for it.) 2 giant video screens play live concert videos of U.S. and UK acts over and over. The Eagles, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, Sting, Phil Collins. Not a single Spanish language act. Diego comments that this music is sort of folkloric…global folkloric? Hearing these tunes here — songs I would never listen to at home — I reluctantly realize that some of the songs are powerfully catchy — or just plain bombastic in some cases. I do feel sort of bad witnessing what I thought was a thing of the past. The steamrollering of local music by international acts. (I know, I am one.) Argentina was one of the first Latin countries to have a wave of Rock Nacional — homegrown rock acts that sometimes, O.K., imitated Northern models, but just as often they added local elements that proposed that the local audience might not merely be satisfied being consumers of Northern corporate rock. The hegemony of international corporate acts was being countered.
Another generation of bands and artists followed the originals; these new ones were often (though not always) even more independent-minded, culturally localized and original (in my opinion). La Portuaria might be considered a member of this second wave. I felt that where once I would enter a club in Rio and never hear a samba or in Bogotá and never hear cumbia or vallantao, well I thought those days were over. They’re not over up here in ski country. Maybe ski village soundtrack music is the same everywhere.
The following morning we drive to La Angostura, a small town in a huge national park — the 2nd one created in the New World after Yellowstone. Eventually the sun came out. Here is a view from our cabin where we all stayed.
Looks like a postcard. The green low area on the opposite shore is a smaller park within the park. Los Arrayanes — a peninsula that is home to a grove of peculiar trees — this is where we will go hiking tomorrow. They are a species of myrtle and this is the largest stand in the world.
Early afternoon. Rehearsal with La Portuaria at the Trastiendo club in the San Telmo district. They are well prepared. As well as a couple of their own songs we practice a couple of Talking Heads songs and, at the end of the rehearsal, there arrives a small (6 person) choir to sing the choir parts of "Road To Nowhere". It sounds incredible — I usually cut that part of the song if I perform it, as it is impossible to do without a bunch of singers — so this is a treat.
We finish rehearsal just as the Mexican and Argentine players enter the field for the World Cup match that will decide which of them continues to the final rounds. The entire city has stopped for the game. All the club and band technicians gather round the TV. The national hymns are sung and the players take the field. Diego drives me to my hotel — he’s not a big football fanatic — the streets are almost deserted. All shops and restaurants are closed except a few where televisions can be seen with clumps of people huddled in front. All worshipping at The Church of Football.
We stop at a sandwich shop for a late lunch. It is manned entirely by women, which might explain why it remains open — though there is a tiny TV sitting on the bar, which competes with the techno music. Diego mentions that he was in high school during the dictatorship. The world cup was here then — in ‘78 — and he says that some claim it was used as a screen for many to go missing and become disappeared. The government supported the event massively and used it as a clever way to disappear people when few were paying attention.
Most people were then, and even now remain, in partial denial, many claiming they saw or knew nothing — although many sensed that this was happening. As a high school student Diego went to visit some friends one day and no one answered the door. The house was vacant and remained so — later his father said maybe they were taken. There was a general feeling of paranoia — and for a high school kid the fear manifested in stuff that a typical school kid of that time might worry about — that if your hair was too long or if you got caught with a joint you might be picked up. Only the repercussions of being picked up were ominous. Everyone was careful, political talk was hushed. Gunshots could be heard on the streets at night — the military or police (often the same thing) doing business.
I myself remember paranoia in elementary school. It was the Cuban missile crisis and the level of fear must have been intense. I remember walking home from school in suburban Baltimore (I would have been in 5th grade maybe — 10 years old?) It might have been about a mile to my home through mostly old suburban neighborhoods of lawns and trees. I remember I could imagine the dark winged bombers coming overheard (Cuban bombers? Russians?) …and as I walked I planned my route to shelter, block by block. On this block I could make it to Dean’s house — it was just over there — then, a little further, my friend Ricky’s house would be a better bet. The way home had to be calculated, planned, measured.
Changing neighborhoods
Palermo, where we are having a sandwich now, used to be a quiet neighborhood with lots of pocket parks — which are still here. It got gentrified in the last few years and now it’s filled with clothing boutiques, chic eateries and bars. Diego recently moved out of his apartment across the plaza from this sandwich shop. The house is for sale. He asks what changes NY is going through — commenting that it now seems so clean. Same process — the artists and new arrivals seek apartments further out as the rising rents drive them out, away from the center. I comment that the resulting lack of concentration and mixing of people is ultimately detrimental to creation. Creation of all kinds. With young creative types now spread out over NJ, Bronx, Williamsburg, Red Hook and elsewhere it’s harder for a scene to gain traction…the city will end up like Hong Kong or Singapore — a vast gleaming business and shopping center.
We walk to my hotel — a few blocks. The streets are empty (football is still going on.) The rain has stopped. Diego asks about hip-hop. I reply that the beats and music are often incredibly innovative and sophisticated, but for the most part the lyrics are gangster crowing and put-downs of bitches. He brings up Baile Funk — the fairly recent Brazilian evolution of 808 beats, techno, hip-hop, and funk (though it’s more like being pummeled in a violently disorienting fairground ride than getting funky, in my opinion) — we agree it’s incredibly innovative and ridiculously extreme. Diego says the lyrics in the Brazilian case are violent and rough, but unlike hip-hop the words are usually from a victim’s POV.
Argentina just scored a goal — it's 2-1 Argentina — shouts go up from the hotel bar.
Now Argentina plays control-the-ball, beautifully, I hear.
15 minutes later — Argentina has won — the crowds in the club tonight are sure to be in good spirits.
They are. It’s a typically late show in Buenos Aires (12:30 start…maybe later.) I joined the band at the end of the set and the crowd was caught unawares. I flubbed some lyrics in the excitement, but the vibe was good. Got back to my hotel around 3AM and fell out, as we fly to Bariloche in the lake district of Patagonia tomorrow for the closing show of the festival de nieve.
I’ve been reading an Argentine guidebook alternating with Lolita. Nabakov’s hilarious descriptions of his darling Dolores Haze (what a perfect name), her mother and anyone who enters his view are perfect. The way he catches how one obsessed fixates on skin, the back of a neck, a goofy posture — “polyp-like lips” was part of a description of a neighbor of “Big Haze and Little Haze”.
Even his descriptions of the object of his obsession and desire are less than flattering — gum chewing, silly, and slightly awkward — but they still convey the perverse rose-colored view of one in love — love of a very special sort.
One of the funniest books I’ve ever read.
Joined the video shoot with La Portuaria all day yesterday at a bar called Rodney across from the massive Chacarita cemetery. I played a bartender/owner in a strange sparkly vest. A man named Dani directed — very focused, and he kept everything more or less on schedule.
The band is easy and relaxed and when we “sang” some choruses together in synch with the playback it all felt very natural.
Adi Azicri: guitarra y coros
Colo Belmonte: batería
Diego Frenkel: guitarra y voz
Pablo Giménez: bajo
Sebastián Schachtel: teclados
Diego’s wife appeared in the afternoon with their new baby. She was in the original company of De La Guarda when that group came to NYC, which was why when I saw their show there I was targeted to be lifted up — by “the hairy butt man”, as Malu described him. She was terrified that a half-naked flying stranger would abduct her papa (she was young at the time.)
Funny, I always saw that show — Villa Villa — as a political allegory. A celebration of release, freedom, anarchy after years of dictatorship — a roar of freedom, yet still acknowledging the painful and creepy past. I might have been imagining all that, projecting my own ideas about Argentine culture and memory onto a freewheeling piece of physical theater — but maybe?
This reminds me of the human chain that brings me here. Bernardo Palumbo, an Argentine folksinger, was teaching me Spanish in the early 90s. He introduced me to the music of Susana Baca, Silvio Rodriguez and others. Amelia Lafferriere, a friend of his here in BA, had worked with Silvio, as well as with Leon Gieco, a folk rock singer here — who was also friends with Mercedes Sosa. I did one of his songs on my first tour here (and one of hers too I think) and later in NY he invited me to join him on a concert he did with Pete Seeger. (The connections are mind-boggling.)
Years ago a La Portuaria song, amongst many others, was slated to be on a Luaka Bop Latin Rock compilation that never happened, mainly for legal clearance reasons — but news of it got around, which served as another introduction. Juana Molina, who opened for me on many dates of my last U.S. tour, is friendly with many of these same people. The tango group El Arranque was introduced to me on my last our here — mainly through Glover Gil, the Austin leader of the Tosca group that my strings belong to. The chain just goes on and on. One often wonders how what seems like fate or pre-determined meetings or collaborations happen — how does one end up in Patagonia with an Argentine band? This is how it happens — a human chain.
The interviews we did between set-ups all remarked on the time years ago when Diego was visiting NY and he stopped by Luaka Bop and I suggested we catch Los Autenticos Decedantes, an Argentine band, later that night. I was going to lend them an accordion, so I was going anyway. They were playing at a Latin ballroom, so their gig didn’t show up on the usual NY rock listings.
Los Autenticos Decedantes were viewed by locals here as a kind of theatrical comedy band — which they were at the beginning. Musically, they weren’t taken seriously, though soon enough they learned to play, stay in tune and write amazingly catchy tunes in a variety of rootsy and popular genres — if you include disco anthems as roots music — and I do, since disco pop is heard in bars alongside rancheras and cumbias everywhere. The media here thought it was poignant that I would be inviting Diego to see an Argentine band that he wasn’t aware was in town. Diego admitted that seeing them outside of Argentina was like seeing them for the first time.
While they were shooting their bits of the video or setting up takes I took walks in the cemetery across the street to memorize their song lyrics. Here is the grave of Gardel, the famous tango artist who died in a plane crash. The tomb is covered in plaques commemorating his influential work and inspiring (for some) example.
This, even more than Recoleta cemetery (where Evita is buried) is a city of the dead — long avenues of “buidings” in varied architectural styles — art deco, classic Greco Roman, gothic, modern — block after block, an entire metropolis for the dead, built on a slightly reduced scale from the real city outside the high walls that surround the cemetery. A few men sweep and clean dead flowers, a few people wander aimlessly and a few bring flowers.
The citizens of the city are upstanding
Tired of living
and some will be devoured by buzzards.
I’m down here at the invitation of the band La Portuaria. We did a song together some months ago and I guess it was well received (they won the Argentine equivalent of a Grammy) so they invited me to hang out for a week, be in their video and join them on stage at their show this week. I like the band and this town and I was free, so it was an irresistible invitation. Today I went for a bike ride to the Parque Ecological, quite a ways from the hotel, which is here in the Palermo district. I rode there to shake off the jet lag and as an attempt to say hello to the band as they were beginning their video shoot. Cell phone problems — we didn’t meet — but I had a nice long ride through the park, which has paths through wetlands that border one side of the city. It seems the park is also a place for secluded meetings, as there signs advising that the park is not a place for “encuentros” …meaning sex, I guess.
The hotel in Palermo is named after the book Bobos In Paradise, a humorous view of the gentrification of bohemian culture, which is confusing as this area and the hotel are prime examples of that kind of gentrification. As if the Tribeca Grand poked fun at the fact that it’s located in a formerly arty neighborhood. This hotel is located on Guatemala, between Jorge Luis Borges and Thames — the names alone say a lot about the cultural makeup of this town. A mixture of Latin America and Europe — a mixture that produced a writer and culture that are completely unique.
…
[October 2004 Buenos Aires tour posts: 10.12.04, 10.13.04, 10.15.04, 10.21.04]
Denote refers to the literal thing. If one screams “fuck” when one makes a mistake is one denoting rough sexual intercourse? Not likely. To connote is to refer to qualities implied or suggested by that thing, but not the thing itself. In trying to apply the above example I am therefore lost — obviously we often use the F word solely for emphasis…as far as I know when one says, “that’s a big fucking tree” one does not imagine the tree engaged in sexual intercourse. So how did “qualities implied or suggested” by sexual intercourse become an intensifier, how did a word for sex become a word for adding emphasis?
Parallels
Here are some frames from Blind Spot — Hitler’s Secretary, that is pretty much one long contemporary interview with that woman. It is a wonderful example of how we humans can deceive ourselves, delude ourselves and blinker ourselves.
Now, of course, she realizes what she had willed herself not to see or admit, just as now many people (many less than previously) refuse to admit what the Bush admin is doing because the politicians and others push their buttons with words or national security, terrorists, democracy, small government…
Our ability to live in denial and hide from facts in front of our faces is obvious. I am thinking that it must have evolved out of a survival mechanism — some mental ability that helps one focus on the hunt, on courtship, on our children and on other ancient behaviors that are essential and absolutely necessary…necessary at the time that they are needed.
The fact that demagogues, advertisers, marketing experts and religious leaders have learned to tap into these powerful instincts is unfortunate, but maybe inevitable. In fact, since it is natural that we have these abilities, maybe it is also natural that they will be exploited and that some will become skilled at this exploitation.
However, as powerful and irresistible as these buzzwords are, it is possible to resist them and be aware when they are being employed — employed for better or worse. And then to make a decision whether one wants to be manipulated or self-deluded, or not. There are times when a certain amount of self delusion is “good”, when it allows us to accomplish a necessary task, create something unlikely or new, or even speak out — and in those cases it might be deemed worthy.
E.B. White, Death and Hope
Read E.B. White’s skinny little book This Is New York. It was written in 1948 as an assignment for Holiday magazine — I’m not sure travel and leisure mags would accept a piece like this these days — it concludes with some very prescient meditations on death and war.
When he wrote this piece, a few years after WWII, the UN building was either just completed or was being built. He points out that after that war all cities, New York being a prime example, were opportunities for massive carnage and destruction on a scale not hitherto imagined:
"A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal passages, cremate the millions."
Cities once were secure refuges for people — whether walled like the Medieval ones or not — they were places where people met, haggled and were to a degree protected. Now, with the atomic bomb especially, the protection part has been turned upside down.
But he notes that just as this shadow begins to loom over great mixtures of humanity like New York, an institution, the UN, rises to attempt to put an end to this threat. Death and hope, simultaneously, as always.
That the U.S. has clearly and brazenly taken an anti-UN stance in recent years — failed to pay their bills and has acted in defiance of UN resolutions and principles is a bad sign. The U.S. are not the only ones to have done so, but being the biggest kid on the block, it’s the most obvious, visible and ominous. It sends a sign to all the other kids that this kind of behavior is OK. A sign that death is sometimes more powerful than hope, temporarily. The UN is far from perfect — self interested parties and nations skew its abilities to perform its mission, its members are human — but the fact that that a little ray of hope still exists and it is unavailable to corporate lobbyists, religious demagogues and crooked election rigging is something.
Saw the Chan Marshall/Cat Power show at Town Hall last night. It was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. Well, it helps that she’s both gorgeous and eccentric…and talented. A huge band — brass section, stings, 2 backing singers on a platform, guitar bass drums filled the stage and allowed no total detours from the road map. Her eccentric and often incomplete live shows are legendary — I bought tix for a February show but that whole tour was cancelled. I said hi before the show to Teeny Hodges and others from the Al Green Hi records band — co writers of "Take Me To The River" and other songs. We chatted afterwards downtown — they were as surprised and thrilled as anyone that this combo worked.
Anyway, she kept it together, though her solo portion came really close to the rumored disintegration. Her phrasing is so personal and emotional, and unlike anyone else’s. This combination of Memphis rhythm section and her hesitant yet fully aware and evidently worked out phrasing was unlikely — even Teeny said he’d never heard of her beforehand and the match seemed like a very strange idea — the result is somewhere in the middle of two worlds. Some new thing came into being that had elements of both worlds but that was neither.
She was obviously overjoyed to be holding it all together, sounding good, fit and toned, pulling it off yet still keeping it fragile. It was show business at the service of personal truth, which is amazing when it happens. The audience, for the most part, were fans — they willed her to hold it together, cheered her on and empathized with her tenuous and at the same time very assured and confident take on her new songs…and the cover songs…
Her little solo set was mostly covers — which were almost unrecognizable at first. She plays her own chord progressions under others’ songs ("Wild Is The Wind", "Who Knows Where The Time Goes", etc.) and sings mostly the original words — but she changes the melodies almost totally (there were a few recognizable melodic patches) to fit her own style of melodic phrasing and melodic leaps. Somehow this deconstruction of standards added new meaning to these old songs — they became intensely personal and real, new, as if she had written them all herself — which I guess she was in fact doing. What this means in terms of copyright I can only guess, but creatively it was wonderful.
Camille at Joe’s Pub
I wondered how she would perform the songs from her last CD — the music is mostly vocal sounds, body slaps and tics. Between herself and two guys they did it…occasionally there was some piano or a kick drum, but mostly they created live loops and then supplemented that with live sound making. Musically it doesn’t fit any genre — though there a bit of Björk, Zap Mama and even a little Chanson in there. The show was pretty elaborately staged...she even brought her own lighting person who obviously knew who was going to do what and when, so there was a danger of it all being a little theatrically over-planned and stagy...but she's an amazing performer who maybe does a teeny bit more stage business than Americans are used to, but it never falls into cabaret, as the Brits call it. And she is a great stage presence — a very worked out show but with a slightly anarchic edge. There’s a (studied?) carelessness and chaos that gives an edge, but never falls over it. And the music is extraordinarily good.
Heard Chinua Achebe, the African author of Things Fall Apart, speak with Uche Okeke, the African modernist artist, at Newark Museum. Here’s a drawing by Okeke. 
Pretty contemporary looking, eh? It was done in the late 50s or early 60s. Okeke collaborated with Achebe on an illustrated edition of the famous book — and there is a small show of his work at the museum.
The photographer Phyllis Galembo told me about this talk — it became an excuse to read Things Fall Apart, which had been on my bookshelf for decades. I’m glad I finally read it. “The Empire Writes Back” is a Salman Rushdie quote, referring to the wave of writers in former colonial countries that are now part of the literary global mix. Achebe’s book was a prescient antecedent to all of those.
The book is incredible. It came out in 1958, and along with Amos Tutuola’s books (My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts was his second one) heralded the arrival of uniquely African literature. Tutuola’s books are fantastic and surreal, but Achebe went for something quite different. He saw Africans abandoning their own culture and he wanted to point out that there was something valuable there before it was all gone, before it was too late. The colonial powers had convinced most Africans that African culture was inferior, and that to engage the modern world one should adopt European models. Sounds like the era of globalization, no? Achebe describes this in beautiful language and through a story that is tragic but not didactic. The African characters often speak in proverbs — “proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten” — so there is a metaphorical and even musical tone to the whole story.
The story begins with a man in a traditional Ibo village (southern Nigeria), describes a few years in his life, and that of the villagers, before the arrival of whites. Then, in what would be considered the 3rd act of the book, missionaries begin to arrive, in ones and twos, seemingly harmlessly. They challenge the local beliefs and customs, not through aggressive force or conquest, but slowly, subtly, overturning “superstitions” and even showing a kind of tolerance. (Of course it is a kind of passive aggressive tolerance — a kind of psychological warfare that gives no ground — tolerance as a destructive force). Eventually, they gain some converts and increase in numbers — numbers who are backed by the law of the distant white government — the district commissioners. From these sometimes innocuous and often well-intentioned interventions things do indeed fall apart.
At the Newark Museum the Africans, 2 men and 3 women, sat on the stage, a white woman moderated. The Africans all wore traditional robes and head wraps or coverings, which made a colorful and regal impression. Their body language was slightly reserved, dignified, calm and relaxed. When the men spoke they spoke slowly, deliberately, as if they were talking to people they knew.
Achebe at his teaching post at Bard.
In Africa and elsewhere, anthropology, and archeology especially, are European ways of separating a people’s history and culture from those who are still living. Sometimes science destroys the thing it seeks to examine and understand. Like young boys, we will understand our toys when they lie scattered in bits around us. For Africans though, archeology IS their history. In Achebe’s words, the establishing of museums in Nigeria that began to display the works of the great African civilizations “confirmed what we already knew — that we were human”.
Implicit in his statement is that colonialism had dehumanized the cultures that it had touched.
He made a statement near the end of the evening that had relevance for me. He said the “emperor” prefers that artists and writers and musicians relegate themselves to making beautiful things. The “emperor” says that the arts and politics should not mix, that political decisions should be left to the politicians. But Achebe implies that all art is political — even if, like the emperor approved work, it denies being anything but beautiful. That too is a political statement and a decision. To not act, not to not include part of life in one’s work is to leave it to the politicians.
That, to me, does not mean that I should write a bunch of rabble-rousing songs — though I might if I thought I could — but rather that every creation implies a worldview, a social context and resonates meanings beyond what it objectively is. I think we feel and sense all this, all these layers of meaning, without consciously bearing this moral and social weight. A song can be light but deep — that’s part of why we like them. As animals that is what we have evolved to be — beings that can sense the subtle meanings and repercussions of things. We have evolved to read intention, deceit, love and tenderness in faces, but we also see, read and hear music and everything else with the same mental and emotional acuity. But I’m getting off the track.
“Until the lions produce their own historian, the story of the hunt will glorify only the hunter”. Achebe was instrumental in beginning to redress the balance of stories. Interesting that the Rushdie quote puns on both Star Wars and the postal service. Achebe says in his book Home and Exile that the British established the Royal Mail as an early and integral part of their colonial enterprise. The British were proud of its reach and organization, and Achebe remembers as a child the rumbling Royal Mail truck that would visit every little African village — the symbol of a far reaching global network and distant power. An Internet of paper. The British must have sensed that communication, in this case the Royal Mail, facilitated control – though they probably believed they were nobly bringing enlightenment to the “savages”. But like much else, communication is 2-way. What might have been established as a means of facilitating a European order in far-flung lands also became a way for the inhabitants of those lands to talk back. When I connect to you, you become connected to me. The writing back may have taken decades and not taken off until after independence, but the floodgates were opened.
The Internet, our modern parallel, is mainly managed and controlled by America and American companies. Yes, the communication is not one way, but structurally and philosophically it emanates from North America. I suspect that, like these writers, once the lion has a chance to tell his story many things will change.
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