Loose Ends a Ethnomusikology

Under konsideration: “Midnight at the Barrelhouse: Why Ethnomusicology Matters Now,” a lecture delivered by George Lipsitz at the Society for Ethnomusicology in Los Angeles, 2010

Early on in his talk, Lipsitz sums up why ethnomusicology matters today: “At its best, ethnomusicology teaches us about the dynamics of difference, about the generative results that follow from recognizing that cultures are not the same even though we all share a common humanity. In the face of scholarly and civic traditions that find difference so vexing that they frequently can only offer us an unsatisfactory choice between disembodied universalism on the one hand and parochial particularism on the other, ethnomusicology enables us to imagine a third option: a universalism rich with particulars grounded in the dialogue of all, the dignity of each, and the supremacy of none. In short, ethnomusicology can help us see which differences make a difference.”

I love that explanation, because the thing I adore most about music is how it's a universalism rich with particulars -- it's something we all understand and are part of, even if we treasure or create or obsess about or are possessed by vastly different aspects of it.  And one thing that draws me to the study of music & musical communities is how, the more time you spend steeped in sound (and steepin' in it with other people), the more clearly and undeniably you understand and love those two truths about music: its utter democracy on the one hand, and on the other, its strange and ceaseless particularities, the sounded form of 7 billion human hearts.

Lipsitz focuses on the lives of two American musico-political revolutionaries, Johnny Otis and Americo Paredes; both were genius-musicians and charismatic inciters of public action in the 1930s, who represented the submerged ethnic bodies of black Americans and Latin American immigrants, respectively. Their music (along with the music of many other musicians who boasted more than one cultural loyalty), helped to transform "immigrants from unwanted aliens into redemptive insiders by celebrating ethnicity and immigration as the quintessential American experiences [...] Like many in their generational cohort, Paredes and Otis found their country’s culture more democratic than its politics.”  In my limited life experience, I've always found music to be a natural leveler, a meeting ground, an eraser of hierarchies.  Not to say it's a place where people agree or like the exact same thing or feel the same beat -- but somehow, subjectivity itself is validated; in music, we're all creating or being created by sound.

At one point, Lipsitz suggests that "good research about cultural life inevitably has to address the political dimensions of that life... Our work becomes weaker rather than stronger if we evade the power dynamics that pervade the production of culture and scholarship about it. As Toni Morrison says, ‘Excising the political from the life of the mind is a sacrifice that has proven costly. I think of this erasure as a kind of trembling hypochondria always curing itself with unnecessary surgery’.”  Those sentences sting like salt in new wounds, because for so long I was allergic to politics, especially in the realm of "culture"...so reluctant to understand music with any political context or cerebrality.  Music just seemed too beautiful and divine to mar with politics, and while I wouldn't have said this out loud, thinking about music seemed like an impossibility, an oxymoronic sin, a way of neutralizing the immediacy and visceral-ness of pure sound.  Music was something almost holy to me, too sacred to intellectualize if I didn't have to.  

Then a little over a year ago, I met this guy who understood music in its totality, and was consumed by it, somebody whose whole self was music: the way his body moved was music, and he talked in deep rhythms, and the way he thought about societies and individuals was in terms of sound and composition.  He was all music, and no one could say he didn't love it.  But he was also one of the most intensely political people I'd ever met, and instead of seeing a conflict between politics and music, he saw a necessary symbiosis: an inseparability.  He showed me how music became certainly less holy when you paid attention to its manifestations and eruptions in our unequal societies, when you considered its makers and audiences and censors and critics, but that that's where music gained flesh and blood and a beating heart -- that's where it became real, incarnate.  For so long, I'd seen music as an internality, a phenomenon of the spirit, when in truth, music is so beautiful and potentially revolutionary because it externalizes -- because it makes once-silenced spirits recognizable to others, because through music we acknowledge each other as being cut from the same basic cloth, because it gives anyone who was once-unvoiced and still-unheard some kind of traction in our clamorous world.

Feelin Dat

Songs always seem to me material in some way, with distinct shapes, densities, sizes -- and they come at me with the physical fullness of objects, grooved or grainy or melting slowly like ice in my throat and spreading into my arteries; they possess me.  Maybe then it sounds like I’m talking about music as a spiritual thing, something that “fills my soul,” but I mean more than that.  I mean it fills my physical body.  If it’s good music, I'm completely replaced by it: its backbeats replace my heartbeat, its harmonic flows replace my blood flow, my respiratory system is coordinated or disjunct to the exact degree the music is (un) measured.

I guess, if we're being really technical, music does have a sonar shape, actual vibrations that affect and are affected by objects -- thus qualifying music as a real part of the material realm.  But I think we tend to vastly underestimate music’s physical affectivities.  Like, most of the songs on Radiohead’s King of Limbs album can (without the aid of any drugs) exactly reproduce in you the experience of being high – that strange lightness of limbs, exhaustion in your diaphragm, red coals in your groin, that spiraling mind, fluidity of thought, the sense that you are a body both teeming and emptied, an easy jaw and cumbersome lips, loose and roving shoulders that you know belong somewhere.

Ongea Nami, Tuko Free

So far, Dar es Salaam has been an absurd linguistic acid-trip.

Got dat Kiswahili on fast recall when I'm using it in simple contexts like bargaining, or asking directions, or swapping niceties with friends.  I wouldn't say those conversations are superficial, but they're essentially scripted.  If you're not trying to articulate new thoughts, it's easy to sound fluent.

In sharp relief, I have one friend here who I sensed was a kindred spirit the moment we met.  In our first ten minutes of conversation, we hit these daunting language barriers because of the complexity of the things we wanted to talk about.  I was suddenly speaking Kiswahili like a three-year-old -- the only words I seemed to know were dry, simple, unspecific.  Those higher-order relationships are the best and most tiring ones, because you're constantly straining toward a point of understanding: reading extralingual clues, and trying out new words all the time to maintain some thread of connection.   It takes more than two engaged minds to reach understanding; you need two effortful spirits to fill in the gaps between insufficient words, to intuit attempted meanings. Yesterday I learned some new words like tai-samaki is fish-eagle and mikoko are mangrove trees and mapinduzi are revolutionaries, and to describe a coup you say haki haitapatikani ila ncha ya upanga (or something, sijui), and I learned the words for hypocrite (mnafiki) and principled (kanuni), and we made up a new Kiswahili word for the sand-dollars we found on the ground: dola wa mchanga.

But for every moment of surprising clarity, we met with an aching lack of language.

The couple I rent from are Zimbabwean and Irish.  There are also two Malawian women who work on the compound, and both are pretty fluent in Kiswahili as a second language, and we all communicate in this weird amalgam of Kiswahili and English.  The other renters are a Hungarian family who don't really know either language.  They move around the house, strange and silent.  The wife smiles and points at things and tries to communicate; the husband keeps his eyes on the ground, pretending there are no other humans around. He doesn't know any English or Kiswahili -- not a word.  Every time I look at him, he seems utterly trapped inside his own body, horribly mute.

The other night, I went to a music event that was well-frequented by expats from all over Europe.  Everyone was mingling between songs, and I found that with most of them, regardless of where they came from (Spain, France, Sweden), Kiswahili was our natural linguistic meeting-point.  I finally understand, experientially, why Kiswahili is such an effective trade language: it's an ideal common ground, an easily-acquired, politically-neutral tongue.

Another guy I met this week (at the music event) was the exact counterpoint to the mute -- he was fluid and alight and played easily with three languages, making jokes in Kiswahili, Spanish and English, feeling the pulse of each individual tongue as he spoke it.  He was such a free being, so easily expressed.  Later on, I found out he knew another language: he played the guitar with his eyes closed, Marley and Los Lobos, strumming and humming on a wooden tabletop, slipping into his fourth and most divine tongue.  I know there are other reasons those two men are the way they are, but the Hungarian's silence and the other's absolute liberty confirm what I've always thought:  that language sets you free.

I had a creative writing professor in college who told me I should read Ryzard Kapuscinski's translated works, that I could learn a lot from him.  He said that my prose had similar characteristics, sounding as if it had been translated from another language, containing foreign cadences, and word choices that were just wrong enough to sound like poetry.  I remember feeling so happy that he heard another world thrumming beneath my writing, one far away from Harvard.  Whenever I write, I hope to tap into the old-forgotten, once-learned rhythms of the land I love madly, and am afraid, always, of being shut out of those rhythms permanently, of losing my memory of them, my access to them.  

I'm finally reading Kapuscinski this week, his travelogue Travels with Herodotus, and he has a paragraph on language that astounds me.  In the book, he has just arrived in India, and cannot speak the local language.  He writes: "I understood that every distinct geographical universe had its own mystery and that one can decipher it only by learning the local language. Without it, the universe will remain impenetrable and unknowable, even if one were to spend entire years in it.  I noticed, too, the relationship between naming and being, because I realized upon my return to the hotel that in town I had seen only that which I had been able to name: For example, I remembered the acacia tree, but not the tree standing next to it, whose name I did not know.  I understood, in short, that the more words I knew, the richer, fuller, and more variegated would be the world that opened before me, and which I could capture."

In Which Shani Unpacks her Apolitical Impulse

To me, the saddest truths about the world are sometimes too unbearable to think about -- I don't want to acknowledge everyone who is oppressed, silenced, terrorized or dominated because it feels like too much to carry (even the knowledge of it is too much to carry), and I'd rather not.  Sometimes I think I cannot.  So I close myself to portals-of-pain and try not to understand other subjectivities or other states of being.  And lately I've begun to see that I need friends, peers, coworkers and confidantes who will force me to look at, acknowledge and consider the hardest truths, and hopefully, against all of my inertia, act.  My natural inclination has always been toward apoliticism, but I don't want to be apolitical -- it's just a defense mechanism that I developed starting from my earliest encounters with oppression.

Here's a fact: partly cuz of my personality (I'm crazy about that categorizin' shit!) and partly cuz of how I grew up across continents, I have high capacity for empathy.  I don't mean I'm kind or empathetic (the opposite, usually), but if I choose to empathize, or if I begin empathizing against my will, I become completely replaced by the other person's subjectivity.  I almost totally lose my own feelings, thoughts and mental frameworks in the process of seeing through someone else's eyes.  I'm not exaggerating; it's true that sometimes I empathize with the wrong people, with the vapid or the vain or the the vicious people.  I can empathize with anyone who fascinates me enough that I adopt their stances and status and mental states.  Sometimes it happens in weird places -- at a bar, at a table playing cards, at dinner.  I will feel the walls of myself melting away, feel myself morphing into the mold of the other person; I begin interpreting the room, the gathering, the entire world as I think they would.  It can temporarily make me a stranger to myself.  It always happens when I fall in love, collapsing into the other person somehow.

Maybe then that explains why I shield myself, when I can, from the people in the greatest pain -- shield myself from their stories, their realities, their voices, for fear that I'll begin to identify with their aching hearts and bodies in the only involuntarily totalizing way I know how.  I'm so afraid that I'm becoming callous, that I've already become callous, in these efforts at emotional self-preservation.