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.

Dar Street-Economiks, The Wild Web, & the Currency of Trust

One of the things that annoys and delights me the most about Dar es Salaam is how everything can be twisted into a business venture, into an opportunity for profit or pleasure.  Everyone is an entrepreneur, and everyone (in every context) is a potential consumer.  

Entrepreneurship in TZ can look whimsical: there's a guy near the ferry who put a scale out on the sidewalk, along with the sign, "Upime Mzito, 100/-."   Learn your weight for a mere six cents!

Or it's kitschy: in Zanzibar's eastern beaches, there are some Masai guys who dress in full warrior attire and walk up and down the hot sand, faking nonchalance, totin' spears and smeared in paint, hoping that a tourist will be like "omg look at those warriors on the beach we're so lucky can u believe this crazy photo op???" 

Or it's extraneous: If you've ever tried to park a car in Dar, you've had like 3 guys magically materialize from the bushes to "help" you park by waving furiously for you to reverse, then screaming "Stop! Stoooop!"  And in their magnanimity, they only expect a minor return for their efforts.

Or it's actually helpful: In Kariakoo, the major fruit/veg market in Dar, kids will wait until some poor lady is juggling all the food she just bought, and come running up to sell her a convenient plastic bag.  

I recently watched a TED talk by Rachel Botsman called "The currency of the new economy is trust."  Her focus was online economies, and she talked about the "third wave" of human trust in the internet: First we shared our personal info online, followed by our financial info, and today, we trust the internet to connect us with real-life strangers. We rent rooms and cars from each other, buy books and appliances from each other, and even run errands and pet-sit for each other -- all through connections formed on the web.

She talks specifically about an economic value shift taking place, in which human connection and trust can translate into quantifiable benefits:"At its core, [collaborative consumption] is about empowerment.  It's about empowering people to make meaningful connections, connections that enable us to rediscover a humanness that we've lost somewhere along the way, by engaging in marketplaces (like Airbnb, Kickstarter and Etsy) that are built on personal relationships versus empty transactions.  The irony is that these ideas are actually taking us back to old market principles and collaborative behaviors that are hard-wired in all of us.  They're just being reinvented in ways that are relevant for the Facebook age.  We're beginning to realize that we have wired our world to share, swap, rent, barter or trade just about anything."

In Tanzania, more than anywhere else on earth, people believe you can "share, swap, rent, barter or trade just about anything."  Whatever tiny resources people have at their disposal can be flipped into business-schemes, resulting in the daily emergence of thousands of impromptu translators, mechanics, chefs, valets, fundis, guides, bodyguards, etc.  And what Botsman calls a new shift toward trust & human connection, and a "return to old market principles" is already operative and flourishing in Dar es Salaam -- here, business has never been divorced from the actual human beings who are profiting and paying.

One thing that sometimes annoys me about Tanzania's economies (both formal and in-) is the absolute imperative to barter, for everything from peanuts to hotel rates. Bargaining and heckling is not optional -- it's totally necessary in nearly every context where money is involved.  Like, when I'm trying to get a ride back from town, the conversation sounds like this:

-Itakuwa bei ngapi kufika ubalozi wa ufaransa?

-Ehhh... shingi elfu tano tu rafiki

-Ah ndugu, nimekuja kwa elfu mbili.. nadthani hii ni bei ya kawaida

-Eh dada, lakini bei ya gesi inapanda siku hizi. Elfu mbili haifai

-Sawa bana, hamna shida, ntachukua basi ya Mwenge.  Asante

-Eh sawa, fanya kwa elfu tatu dada

-Tafadhali fanya kwa elfu mbili.. ubalozi sio mbali

-Eh, sio mbali

-Kweli siwezi kulipa zaidi

-Ahhh unanishtuka dada

-Ni kweli tu, siwezi kutupa hela zaidi.. unakubali kwa elfmbili?

-Hiya, let's go

So during an average conversation about the price of the ride (which always ends up being the exact same, though it takes 3-5 minutes to settle on it), we talk about the price of gas, the economy, the distance to the Embassy, the city traffic, our respective financial situations, and we've probably referred to each other as "brother" and "sister," all before I hop onto the motorcycle.  We have a relationship, however provisional.

Botsman says that through collaborative consumption, a shift is taking place in which "instead of consuming to keep up with the Joneses, people are consuming to get to know the Joneses."  Well, Tanzania beat everyone to the punch in that respect.  A major facet of any business transaction here has always been the relationship between buyer & seller, the rapport between provider & consumer.  Throughout TZ's history, the "humanness" of business never once fell by the wayside.  So is Tanzania ahead of the game economically?  Hardly. But we do have something worth hanging onto.  As Tanzania becomes more digitized/ technified in the coming years, our goal should be to move toward web-aided "collaborative consumption" without passing through that impersonal, sterile middle-phase of "empty transactions" that dominated Western business for decades.

Tanzanians usually place a high priority on people & relationships, and I love that -- I think its rare and beautiful.  We can fault TZ's economy for a ton of things, but not for its inhuman-ness!

Myth & Meritokracy: Fight Like a Woman

Also published on Vijana.FM.

The Citizen recently published an article on the deficit of female artists in the music industry, entitled “Divas: What’s Wrong With the Conveyor Belt?”  While it suggested, controversially, that many Tanzanian women had an unfocused or “half hearted approach” to making music, the article placed most of the blame on systemic problems in the industry – problems that make it “practically impossible for young girls to break through.”  At first I was appalled at the “conveyor belt” metaphor – it seemed supremely disempowering syntactically, as if female artists gained success through some kind of machinated, factory-like process beyond their control, rather than through their own effort, talent and willpower.

But on second thought, I think the title was reaching toward something true: I think it’s right to turn a scrutinizing eye onto the system, onto the endemic and often hidden workings of the music industry.  What factors, beyond a supposed lethargy among women, could account for such lopsided gender representation in the TZ music scene?  Here is where meritocracy loses its credibility; no one can tell me that Tanzania’s guys are simply 200% more talented than its girls.

The article, though brief, touched on some of the most daunting roadblocks for Tanzanian women who are trying to become recording artists.  Dar’s music world (like most others) has limited equipment, low airspace, and profiteers at every juncture; so, competition for radio-play, stages and promotion is fierce, and it’s not so much a matter of talent as it is a complicated game of politics and profit.  Who you know and how much you can pay will determine your time in the studio, on the radio, and what concert slots you get.

Women, unsurprisingly, are pressured into paying through “alternative means,” fostering what the Citizen calls an economy of “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.”  If women balk at swapping special “favors” for studio-time, their careers will likely come screeching to a halt.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of talking with Yvonne Mwale before one of her shows.  Yvonne is gorgeous, gypsy-spirited reggae singer from Zambia, now based out of Dar es Salaam.  She has a newly-released album Kalamatila, and recently collaborated with hip-hop artist Fid Q on the song “Sihitaji Marafiki.” During our interview, she talked candidly about her harrowing career path, which involved rape, abuse and displays of blatant sexism from industry curators.  Her journey began at age twelve, when her parents passed away suddenly.  Yvonne spent the next several years doing piecework to get by – laundry, cleaning, anything that she could find.  She sang in tiny venues when she got the chance, but people seemed to take advantage of her at every turn.

She recalled her earliest days as a musician, when she couldn’t find a single Zambian studio that would record with her.  At studios, she begged to be allowed to record just one track, but was “treated like scum” by every producer she met.  The few producers who didn’t turn her away told her to stand in the front lounge, where she waited until 11:00 pm or later — unacknowledged until all the other (male) artists had been attended to.

In the midst of her story, Yvonne recalled one group of artists who treated her with respect and kindness.  Several years ago, a Zambian band led by the legendary guitarist Jones Kabanga held auditions for a female vocalist.  When Yvonne showed up, she looked unimpressive – “useless, a dirty orphan,” she says.  But they handed her the mic to see what she could do, and her freestyle vocals worked well with their music.  She didn’t get a job offer immediately, but the band took a liking to her and began to help her with voice training.  Yvonne talks fondly about “Uncle Jones Kabanga,” who became her musical mentor and a father-figure in her life. When she was young, she’d always tried to sing like Mariah Carey, twisting and straining her voice to match the diva’s.  But Uncle Jones advised Yvonne to sing more naturally and just “use the voice that you have.”  She says, “I realized then that you don’t have to imitate anybody – if you have the feel and the passion for music, you can do whatever you want.”  As she started making her own musical and aesthetic decisions, she opted for her traditional home sounds, and usually sang in Nsenge, her home language.

Later that year, Yvonne entered Zambia’s major Music Crossroads Competition, where she won first place.  First prize included a sponsored 8-country tour of Europe, after which she had less trouble finding studios who would work with her.  But her early experiences of intense prejudice left deep marks on her mind and her music; the gentle woman I met in a Dar es Salaam dusk also writes indignant, ignited songs like “Fight Like a Soldier.”

I watched a TED talk recently by Alain de Botton, in which he probes the pros and cons of a meritocratic society — or of a perceived meritocracy, since he concludes that no such thing exists.  He says: “What is a meritocratic society? A meritocratic society is one in which, if you’ve got talent and energy and skill, you will get to the top.  Nothing should hold you back.  It’s a beautiful idea.  The problem is, if you really believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the top, get to the top, you’ll also, by implication and in a far more nasty way, believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there.  In other words, your position in life comes to seem not accidental, but merited and deserved.  And that makes failure seem much more crushing.”

De Button essentially believes that an ideal meritocracy is a myth.  He says, “Meritocracy, this idea that everybody deserves to get where they get to, I think it’s a crazy idea… it’s an impossible dream.  The idea that we will make a society where literally everyone is graded, with the good at the top and the bad at the bottom, done exactly as it should be, is impossible. There are simply too many random factors: accidents, accidents of birth, accidents of things dropping on people’s heads, illnesses, etc.  We will never get to grade them, get to grade people as they should be.”

I agree that we’ll never get to evaluate others “as they should be,” but where de Button suggests that “random factors” dilute meritocracy, I think it makes more sense (at least in Tanzania) to look at systemic factors that chronically preclude any kind of real meritocracy.  Let’s recognize those factors and biases working against East African women who dare to venture out of their domestic spheres, and into male-ruled domains like muzik and entertainment.  Maybe someday it will just be accidents preventing a meritocratic society, but for now, success-distribution is anything but random.