What Spirits Settled In?

Ryszard Kapuscinski, in his autobiography about his early days of journalistic traveling and trepidation (Travels with Herodotus) muses about the Greek historian Herodotus, whose Histories accompanied R.K. during many of his travels.  Very little is actually known about Herodotus, beyond the fact that he was born and raised in Halicarnassus – and this information-deficit bothered R.K. constantly.  He writes: 

“The parents of Herodotus? His siblings? His house? All of this is in deep shadowland uncertainty.  Halicarnassus was a Greek colony on land subject to the Persians, with a non-Greek native population – the Carians.  His father was called Lyxes, which is not a Greek name, so perhaps he was a Carian.  It was his mother who most probably was Greek.  Herodotus was therefore a Greek Carian, an ethnic half-breed.  Such people who grow up amid different cultures, as a blend of different bloodlines, have their worldview determined by such concepts as border, distance, difference, diversity.  We encounter the widest array of human types among them, from fanatical, fierce sectarians, to passive, apathetic provincials, to open, receptive wanderers – citizens of the world.  It depends on how their blood got mixed, what spirits settled in.” 

I love that paragraph for a million reasons, beyond its obvious beauty and precision.  I like its insistent curiosity, the way he asks questions with no answers (either current or future).  And I was especially interested in his description of the Carians occupying a Greek colony on Persian land – how the identities of the residents of Halicarnassus must have been layered and conflicted and chafed and blurred in a thousand different ways.  It reminded me actually, a lot of Zanzibar – an essentially Arab/Muslim colony on land subject to mainland Tanzania, but populated by such a wild spectrum of cultural descendants: Indians, Bantus, people who crossed over from Oman or Saudi Arabia or Yemen, or migrated along dhow channels from Somalia or Madagascar or Kenya, and how their title now is essentially “Tanzanians” (or, “Persians” in the Herodotus parallel), but how maybe they should just be known as “Zanzibaris,” their own self-defined, self-inscribed culture.

And finally, I loved that paragraph because Kapuscinski seems to know intimately the character-alchemy of cultural or ethnic half-breeds – he must be one himself – if he is able to write how “their worldview [is] determined by such concepts as border, distance, difference, diversity…. it depends on how their blood got mixed, what spirits settled in.”  Since I’m a Third Culture Kid (what a tired and overwrought term!), and since all of my closest friends are in some way straddling or reconciling or splitting themselves between multiple cultures that they love or loathe but are nevertheless tied to – I can verify that our entire life-paradigms are consumed with questions of border, distance, difference.  These are the things we dream about, the knots our subconscious will never stop picking at, the themes that recur again and again in our art, even when we try valiantly to focus on other [bigger?] things. We will probably spend the rest of our lives working out the implications of those questions – becoming wider and more open as we grow comfortable with the vagueness & variety of answers, or becoming ever more dogmatic as we cling to some kind of stasis, anything fixed or static that we can assign to ourselves.  Or assign ourselves to.

And I've met all three distinct types of half-breeds that Kapuscinski mentions (in fact, most are well-represented on Zanzibar island alone): (1) the fanatical, fierce sectarians (2) the passive, apathetic provincials, and (3) the open, receptive wanderers.  The first kind might never be comfortable with themselves; the second kind have limited their field of vision in an effort to render the world more understandable.  But there’s hope for the third kind, if they keep their eyes turned insistently outwards and off themselves.  I think that understanding yourself (even partially) is almost always a kind of extra reward or afterthought – an unintended consequence of trying long and hard to understand someone else.

I Am the Son of Lightning, You Can Not Move I at All*

Because of all the political unrest on Zanzibar this past week, I think I’ve been feeling a kind of unrest within me too.  I’m not immune to the tenor of the times, to the voices mumbling and grumbling lowly as pass through the city’s alleys.  The source of most of this discontent is Zanzibar’s official unity with mainland Tanzania, a unity established in 1964 – most locals think Zanzibar should be an autonomous island nation in charge of its own legislation, policies and taxation.  In recent months, this secessionist crusade has been framed as an essentially Muslim initiative, and I think appropriately so.  Because, at its root, the push for legal/national independence is an assertion of identity – or of difference in identity. 

I think one of the most basic human impulses is to resist absorption into a larger entity or organization whose identity is at odds with your own.  I remember when I first started school at Harvard, I felt completely paranoid about how antithetical the typical (or at least assumed) “Harvard persona” was to my own – I felt a huge and enduring anxiety about how to reconcile the two realities (the fact that A. I was technically a Harvard student, while B. I didn’t feel I displayed [or at least, I didn’t want to display] many of the personality qualities ascribed to the average Harvard kid: ambitious, competitive, self-absorbed, elitist, anxious, over-achieving, condescending, perfectionist, rich, money-oriented, and the list goes on).  It was an anxiety, or a kind of chronic identity dissonance, that stayed with me until graduation day and beyond, and is only subsiding now that my status as “a Harvard kid” is a past, not a present, reality, and thus doesn’t constantly demand to be reconciled with “who I am now.”

Anyway, to get back to Zanzibar, one important fact to know is that the island’s population is 99% Muslim.  While Dar es Salaam’s population is pretty Muslim too (I’m guessing around three-quarters), the bulk of mainland Tanzania is a patchwork quilt of religion, and if you made a pie-graph of all the religions represented, Pentecostal Christianity would probably get the biggest slice.  In the most rural parts of the country, animism or spirit-worship might still hold sway, but a huge chunk of inland Tanzanian life is intensely Christianized, with whole communities revolving around choir competitions, baptisms, and month-long Christmas festivities at church.  Basically, what this boils down to is a Zanzibari population that doesn’t feel an especial affinity to the mainland, though they share the same laws, privileges, and – perhaps most provokingly? – the same identity on the world stage (the United Republic of Tanzania). 

I guess, for anyone who's never been to Zanzibar, this "issue" of identity-dissonance might seem a little abstract or over-thought… a product of Shani’s imagination & too many anthropology classes.  That would be a false conclusion.  If you’ve been to Zanzibar, it’s clear within minutes of arrival how thoroughly Islam has saturated and determined the island’s culture – aesthetically, relationally, practically – down to the tiniest details of daily life.  I’ll save longer descriptions for another post, but there are very few elements of life that go untouched by religion in Zanzibar.  

If you're a man, you probably won’t see a woman’s face during your time on the island (much less her shoulder, ankle, etc) unless she’s a visitor, a prostitute, or if you happen to catch her unprepared to meet you, i.e. eating dinner with her veil partially off.  You'll see men enjoying public spaces -- sprawling, chatting, fully-dressed or not, and otherwise enjoying normal freedoms.  You'll see women scurrying from doorway to doorway -- or more accurately, you won’t really see them at all, since they tend to stay indoors and out of sight.  You will not find the tiniest smidgen of pork (or ham, bacon, sausage etc) on the island (I actually have not been on the lookout for pork, due to my recent but thorough conversion to vegetarianism, but my European-friends-cum-Zanzibar-residents often moan in longing as they discuss the fortunes they would trade for a single slice of bacon).  You will hear the call to prayer five times a day, and if, like me, you live next-door to one of the island’s scores of mosques, you will wake up at 5:00 every morning to the wails and warbles of the first call, and amiably yawn in the still-dark to salats you cannot understand – sounds of a culture still outside you or beyond you, but insistently touching you on all sides, hemming you in.

Basically, for a city that's so patently and intensely Muslim, being labeled by the world community as a mere add-on to fairly-Christian mainland Tanzania probably feels insulting, a de-legitimization of identity.  I think the issue must be worsened by Zanzibar’s island-status – to be bordered on all sides by ocean, and yet to be beholden to a land you cannot even see, are in no way physically connected-to.  And a land (I’m sorry to say) that is siphoning off a lot of Zanzibar’s tourism revenue through an unfair redistribution scheme designed to benefit the less fortunate swathes of Tanzania that don’t attract extravagant wazungu.  There are many reasons why Zanzibar wants to be (and maybe should be) separate from Tanzania, but I don’t think it’s an error to consider the movement a primarily religious one.  Because religious identity in Zanzibar is encased within geo-national identity like the thin and barely-separable layers of a jawbreaker, bleeding into each other, showing through in the thinnest and most transparent parts.  And if there’s anything that will provoke people into violent insurrection, it’s an identity war.

*title borrowed from one of my favorite-eva Pete Tosh tunez!

"The Awakening"/ But Dey Still Sleeping

Paradise Lost (or, Is It Just Sheikh Farid Ahmed?)

Here's the scene at Darajani (Stone Town's main marketplace/ bus-stop) on 2:00 Wednesday afternoon:  Piles of burning rubber in the streets and the ground littered with rubble and rocks and broken ceramics and coconuts. Eerily empty dala-dala lots and fruit stalls. The butchering hall -- normally full of cow gristle and fish-tails, and ringing with the sound of metal on flesh on wood-block -- was completely silent, with just a lot of rancid blood stains all over the concrete and some abandoned chopping blocks.   The billboards on the main street were ripped up, the canvas curling off of the metal frames dejectedly.  Most of the men wore bandannas around their faces to help with breathing and anonymity; everyone held sticks or rocks or pangas, just in case the time for fighting arose.  Some guys threw pots and plates into the air, or smashed them directly onto the tarmac, just to contribute to the chaos.  This is a not-so-dramatic picture of the main street, taken when we first arrived on the scene... we stopped snapping pics as the drama escalated.

Kwa Nini? You Might Ask

First, some minimal political context: The United Republic of Tanzania was born about fifty years ago, when the island of Zanzibar officially joined with mainland Tanzania.  Ever since then, Zanzibaris have murmured and shouted and grumbled about seceding from the rest of the country.  Their cultural identity is pretty distinct from that of mainlanders, the island largely legislates itself already (i.e. education & healthcare) -- and, maybe most relevantly, the islanders vastly over-pay in taxes.  The local government subtly encourages the grumbling, happy to deflect everyone's grievances toward the mainland.

Some Zanzibaris are really serious about seceding, though, and they've coalesced under a movement called Uamsho (aka "The Awakening").  Uamsho is an Islamist secessionist party that bills itself as basically a Muslim NGO concerned only with social development and "awareness issues."  They claim to be apolitical, but in reality they're intensely active in the political sphere and have been associated with several bombings, burnings and assorted acts of violence in the past year alone.  If you care to drop by Uamsho's central offices in Stone Town (which look pleasant and welcoming, just like an NGO's), you'll see every newspaper article that has ever implicated Uamsho in a crime or act of violence -- taped up proudly on their walls.  Yes, I also found that creepy.

The rioting and fires in the streets around Darajani were a sad interruption in Zanzibar's normally peaceful and idyllic sea-sphere.  On Wednesday morning, Uamsho's leader (sheikh) mysteriously disappeared, and Uamsho followers instantly assumed he had been arrested, despite the Head of Police's claims to the contrary.  When protestors began gathering and lighting tires on fire, the police responded by firing their guns into the air and releasing tear-gas bombs onto the rioters.  The tear-gassing continued for two full days, sometimes multiple times a minute.  Here's a picture of the guy whose "disappearance" instigated the whole ordeal, Sheikh Farid Hadi Ahmed -- he magically reappeared on Friday evening!

Maybe-Mapinduzi

When the violence started, I was watching it unfold with my friend Kate, huddled under a jacaranda tree with some other non-fighters.  One guy couldn't drop his tourist-speak, even in the middle of a rebellion.  As bombs and fires peppered the marketplace around us, he looked at our mzungu skin and told us, "Welcome to Zanzibar, hakuna matata!"  Just then, a tear-gas bomb exploded about twenty meters away, and a sudden flood of humans stampeded past us to take cover in the labyrinthine alleys of Stone Town.  We joined them reactively, and I whispered under my breath as I ran, hakuna matata, welcome to Zanzibar... hakuna matata!

Some people actually seemed to love the chaos, even if they weren't part of the Uamsho party.  A lot of the guys hanging around the scene on Wednesday had lit-up eyes, like it was the best thing they'd seen in years. One swaggering scruffy teen walked by me with his hands flung wide, and said gleefully, "S'like Iraq, man! It's just Iraq here!"  I was like, "Um, not exactly..." but he was too caught up in the moment to argue the point. There seems to be this widespread desire for the uprisings to be bigger than they are -- for it to be epic, historical, a "real" revolution.

Uamsho, Ni Saa ya Kuamka

By the second day, sadly, the rebellion took on a sinister dimension.  On Thursday around midnight, a bunch of young guys assaulted a police officer as he drove home on his motorbike.  They cut off his hands with a machete and hurt him in other places, and he died soon afterwards from loss of blood.  It's the first (and hopefully only) casualty of the riots, but it's disturbing and inhuman and the kind of behavior that completely undermines Uamsho's efforts to become a legitimate civil entity.

The Sea, and Other Loves

I have been in love at least once, maybe another time or two (who can ever say), but no love has been as long and as steady as my love for the ocean.  I've been in love with the ocean for as long as I can remember.  Maybe it seems indecent to talk about humans and natural forces as commanding the same type of love from me (intense, physical, addictive, somehow destructive and obliterating) – but the men I’ve loved most have had a lot in common with the sea.

When I was really young, we used to drive to Walvis Bay, an ocean on the southwestern coast of Africa.  Namibia was all desert, and the desert ran right up to the edge of the sea.  But where most of the country was scorched land, dusty and deadened, near the sea it became a cold desert – almost blue – and the sky at Walvis Bay was steely and metallic, the sea always high and cold.  I can hardly remember it except as an atmosphere – a kind of comprehensive, agitated coldness that eclipsed the heated desert as soon as they met.

In America, I loved the Gulf of Mexico – a warm, humid sea, sometimes transitioning into the land through soupy stretches of swampland.  Florida is often plagued by hurricane weather in the very deepest parts of summer – the sky grows black and wet and hot in the middle of the day, the warm and normally placid sea starts to grow white and frothy with motion, and lifeguards shove red flags into the sand as a warning to surfers.  That’s when I always went swimming – I would leave my clothes in a pile on the sand and go running into that storming expanse of water like it would cleanse me, resurrect me.

At some point, I fell in love with the hard, blue Pacific – the most alive ocean I’ve ever seen – a terrible, mighty thing, beating itself again and again on the black Western rocks, thrashing like a wild animal that finds itself stupidly caught in a trap too small to hold its strength for long.  In central California, where the sea is high and the sand is dark and everyone swims with lonely shoulders, I stopped thinking and just smelled things: the faintly dank and mossy sand, the sharp salt air.  

The last man I loved drew out the same physicality in me -- when I was with him, his beauty seemed straightforward, something to be learned with the senses, un-abstract; beauty to be absorbed with my own body, not contemplated or considered.  I loved his shoulders, I loved the long lines of them, that swift downsweep from just below the ear with knobs like smooth pebbles underneath the skin, and the sleek skeleton of his back’s two mirrored wings, full and broad like two taut sails of a skipper.  

In Kenya, my brothers and I became adopted children of the Indian Ocean, sea-dwellers.  In Mombasa, we hardly left the water for days, our skin growing grooved and coarse and swollen from the salt-water.  The sea at the African equator is so clear and full of light and colored creatures -- living breathing things -- and the water close to shore is strewn with dhows and ropes.  Afterwards on the sand, the sunlight came down on us like a storm, like white fire falling on our faces.

But it’s not so much the coasts that interest me.  When I swim in the ocean, it’s always with my eyes toward the horizon, always with a longing to be farther out, to be taken and never returned by the wild sea-forces – consumed, drowned, I don’t care – anything to have the sea in me and me in the sea.  I have no words for the extent of my desire.  

I used to imagine what life under the sea would be like – it had none of the cartoonish-ness of The Little Mermaid – I imagined a wild dark infinite blueness, a heavy humming quiet, a constant sense of bodily semi-suspension; and the light, when it came, would always be filtered, refracted, diffuse, everywhere and everywhere and yet nowhere fully.  I remember listening to Radiohead’s In Rainbows in my room in the Meru jungle in 2008, and how the sounds of “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” were the first to aurally capture the strange desire I had for permanent submersion, to be sunk in the darkest seas/ human longings –

In the deepest ocean, the bottom of the sea

Your eyes, they turn me

Why should I stay here? Why should I stay?

I'd be crazy not to follow, follow where you lead

Your eyes, they turn me

Turn me to a phantom

I follow to the edge, of the earth

And fall off

Yeah, everybody leaves if they get the chance

And this is my chance

I get eaten by the worms and weird fishes

Picked over by the worms, and weird fishes

Yeah, I’ll hit the bottom

Hit the bottom and escape

Escape

Hip-Hope na Maneno Mbeleni

Also published on TZHipHop.

Hip-hop, in its purest form, has always been a language of resistance. In the Bronx in the seventies, verbal battles served as a slick substitute for violence, and the quickest minds and mouths came out on top. Since then, emcees have been wielding that language to resist intolerance/injustice/inequalities. The first step to resisting wrongs is to name them, to bring them into public consciousness, to expose them for what they are. Words may have the power to obscure, shrouding skewed systems in rhetoric; but they also have the power to clarify, to reveal our realities.

More than that, words have the power to structure our futures.

Saul Williams (poet, emcee and hip-hophilosopher) writes that “Language use is a reflection of consciousness… as we become more aware of our existing reality, it becomes clear that we live with the power to dictate our given situations and thus the power to determine our future.”  He’s not saying that we’re totally in control of our life-situations — but through language, we define more of our reality than we realize. Rapping and writing about our potential futures is step-one to making them real.

In his self-titled track, Songa raps about how words can seem impractical, even useless: Baba ananiambia, maneno hayavunji kuti/ Sawa nachana, ila mbona flow zangu hazifumi suti? But he ends the same verse with some fighting lines, cause he knows about the real returns of words, the coming harvest: Hii mic ni shamba na mimi ndio mkulima/ Navuna ninachopanda na ulimi ndio unalima. Words are of infinite importance, cause they are the manifestation of our thinking patterns, and what we think defines what we do and who we are.

Guru of Gang Starr got it right when he told his audience to “Listen to the words I manifest” — he knew that lyrics don’t just stay on the radio.  Once spoken, they gain flesh and blood and a beating heart, they become our modes of thinking and living.

When Williams looks at hip-hop through the decades, he sees evolutions and revolutions of style and skill, and yet a consistency of lyrical content: “Vivid, descriptive narratives of ghetto life seem to have come at the cost of imaginative or psycho-spiritual exploration. In other words, niggas have come up with amazing ways to talk about the same ol’ shit. The problem is, when we recite the same ol’ shit into microphones which increase sound vibration, the same ol’ shit continues to manifest in our daily lives, and only gets more deeply embedded. But of course employing one’s imagination is problematic when the aim is to keep it real.”

When we rap only about what already is instead of what could be, when we describe our fetters instead of the freedom we want, we solidify our current situations (both mental and material). We (t)rap ourselves in dictation. We live out what we rap about, and we rap about how we’re living: recycled reality. We can’t ignore the wrongs of the present moment, since “the aim is to keep it real,” but we can do more than just describe those wrongs; we can envision a way out of them. Hip-hope.

The things we talk, write and rap about will become our future realities. Williams asks, “If Biggie’s album hadn’t been titled Ready to Die, would he still be alive today? Did his vocalized profession dictate his destination? The fact that we were so ready to hear about how he was ready to die increased the sound vibration of his recitation through playing it on a million radios and televisions, to the point where it affected our reality and his.” It’s unlikely that Biggie’s death was just a sound-translation, but some ideas do become manifest through mass audio-play. Women tolerate brutality from their men cause they’ve heard it sung a million times; kids are down with jail time, cause rappers come out proud to spit their cell stories. Maybe it’s time for some new words, and some new futures.

MC Bonta, in his song “Bwana Malaria,” describes the shidas of the TZ healthcare system and the trend of malaria over-diagnosing. But he also imagines an alternative, placing the responsibility on himself and his listeners: “Inaanzia kwako, inaanzia kwangu.”  We can use language to deny or to glorify our realities, but that gets us nowhere. Or we can use language to alter the here-and-now — to redeem it.  Our words define our thoughts, and our thoughts determine our realities, so our choice of words means everything.

One last WORD to all the rappers and poets:

With the command of beautiful language comes extraordinary influence. Emcees with flow and flexibility can rap about almost anything, and their words will be heard, (un)consciously internalized, and translated into thousands of real lives.  If an emcee’s work is marked by negativity, it’s like the message is Konyagi and the words are Tangawizi/ when the words are sweet enough, the poison go down easy.  Recognize that when your thoughts are packaged in rhythm and rhyme, they’ll spread further and last longer.  Rap responsibly.