The crowd of drunks, gamblers, slummers and swingers — we his degenerate audience — we punished him with tepid applause for denying us escape. He knew what he had done to us, because he shook his head and laughed as if to say, That was only the first round.
It was only when he stood up and started walking to his seat by the ring that I noticed he had a limp.
***
‘And now, ladies and gentlemen…The Diva!’ Mr. Selassie screamed into the microphone.
The Diva walked in, the glow of sparkling whiteness from her diamond studded dress almost blinding, high heels tapping a confident, unhurried rhythm on the concrete floor. And all that to set the stage, it seemed, for her beauty, exaggerated by her being tall, a beauty amplified by her bright-coloured doll-like makeup. She was somewhere between caricature and performer. She climbed onto the stage and slowly wrapped long, silver metallic nails around the microphone next to the piano and adjusted it. She pulled the gold sheet off the piano, sat down and smiled as she looked at the keys. And we waited and waited, waited for a voice, for sound, that first sound, but she kept looking and shaking her head from side to side, as if the thought of playing was dragging her along against her will. She kept leaning into the microphone as if about to start singing before being pulled away by the piano.
In the audience, we started sending each other glances that betrayed our growing doubt and desperation to hear her voice, at least once — to know what she sounded like. But I was tipsy enough to let myself take in what she was offering instead of longing for what I wanted to hear. And then she fell on the piano keys, light as feathers, so that every time she hit a key my body fluttered with her every exertion. Her breath escaping her mouth in small bursts hit the microphone.
I followed The Corporal’s old eagle along the tumultuous swollen river, dipping in and out of the water with her slow trance-inducing touch of the piano keys. But it felt like there was something wrong — her or me, her or the audience, one or the other was in the wrong place — and I pulled out of her world, which was really The Corporal’s, and back into the ABC. I suspected this was The Corporal’s doing; he had set the stage with his Tizita in a way that spoke to the musicians in a language that had gone over our heads.
She seemed to think for a minute.
‘Did you know that there is no sound in heaven and space? Or words? What would music sound like without sound?’ she whispered into the mic, a bit drugged, it seemed. ‘And how would you really sing your Tizita? Or listen to it?’
It felt like the stage could barely contain her, and the pain or anguish of being confined seemed to rise out of her in the low cry she let out to finally start her Tizita. Yes, reading this now, you will think I am being melodramatic, but hearing that cry that started at a high note, then made lightning zigzags, tapping something here and there until she hit the earth with a bass lower than a man’s — to hear that, to feel its vibrations, was to realise what not a just-failed song sounded like. It was to realise there was a lot more to her than what this stage, this night and this competition were allowing, what we were allowing. It was beautiful, this protest that hurt.
She stopped playing the piano altogether and started to sing, and even though she had stopped playing it, I could still hear it. She had suggested the piano and then let us do the rest of the work while she took us through the Tizita, filling in piano keys running fast downhill when her voice soared and letting the keys climb up a steep hill while her voice dug deep into an abyss and dragged us along and beat our bodies against its jagged edges — her glamorous look and her mournful Tizita at odds. And there I felt the tremors of extreme happiness. Then a singular force of all my tragedies — the night when my grandmother died in her sleep after a simple goodnight, my two grandfathers who died before I was born — hit me. My own weight collapsing in on me with the force of a black hole was unbearable. And then she was done.
And whatever that was, it was gone, and bewildered relief set in for all of us.
***
‘The Taliban Man!’ Mr. Selassie announced, even before The Diva left the stage. We went wild. We wanted something to wash our blood off the ring. We were not ready to go where The Diva was taking us. We yelled, clapped and patted each other, bought each other beer, lit cigarettes and nodded at each other vigorously.
The Taliban Man — I was going to ask him what his name meant to him and his fans. A name of defiance, I guessed — for an artist, it made sense — to take on that name meant to subvert its uses, whether it was the actual Taliban or the United States and its war that had now found itself in Somalia and, by extension, Ethiopia. It was the kind of name that, once you heard it, remained seared in your brain and, in time, in the recesses of your subconscious. There were the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan shooting school kids in the head; there were the Americans dropping drone bombs on school kids and weddings in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and then there was The Taliban Man, the rapper musician from Ethiopia. In the ABC, it made its own peculiar sense.
Mr. Selassie laughed into the mic. ‘The Taliban Man!’ he yelled again.
The Taliban Man ran into the ring dressed in a black suit, a black bow tie and military boots into which his black dress pants were tucked. He did a somersault, his tall frame making it look like it was in slow motion. He walked to the piano. He hammered a few keys with youthful energy, and from the chaos, order started to emerge. Ragtime. The little I knew told me that ragtime is classical music played over itself many times at the same time — where each fucking voice has something to sing along to or eventually say. Schizophrenic classical music, but the musician has to give it form, madness contained. The Taliban Man was all of them, and I was sure he would take the cup home. He was asking us, If you were many people with different rhythms, voices, how would you hear yourself? As one? As many? He was playing that many songs at the same time. He hit a few more bars, leaned back and laughed into the microphone as if to say, Just joking.
He left the piano and picked up a guitar — he played an instrumental Tizita, the guitar clean and efficient, walking steadily underneath his voice. Then he broke into it and ran the Tizita faster and slower until he fell onto a lean, steel guitar jazz tune. It was not quite working — it was like the two were clashing, jazz refusing to be contained, but the Tizita beat insisting steadily on being heard. They both overwhelmed each other, and I for one was getting disjointed. He laughed again and lifted up his hands as if in defeat.
He paused and started a slow, major chord-driven Tizita that he drove with a hip-hop beat before breaking into rap. He rapped a few stanzas before asking us in English to clap along and repeat after him:
Life’s a bitch and then you die,
You never know when you are going to go
That’s why we get high on — he taught us how to pause here, letting it hang on before dropping — love.
We rapped along like that for a while, laughing childishly at being able to say the word ‘bitch’ to each other, inflected by our various accents — mbitch, birrtch, biaaatch, bisch and so on. Eventually, The Taliban Man stood up and led us through a roof-raising ‘life is a bitch and then you die.’
He thanked Nas and, buoyed by the applause, hopped off the stage.
4
‘Tizita, What I fear the most is that I will forget this pain that carries my love.’
We were still hungry. We were, in fact, getting hungrier. It was like they were feeding us appetizers and not the whole honey-roasted goat. We wanted more.
‘And now, our very own Miriam,’ Mr. Selassie yelled.
That was a surprise. Nobody, least of all me, knew she could sing, let alone compete with the best of Tizita singers. But it soon started making sense, without any logic behind it. It just seemed right that she too would be on that boxing ring-cum-music stage.
She started looking around, one hand over her eyes, until she spotted me. She beckoned and I walked over and helped her onto the stage — she felt light and frail. After she sat down, sh
e blew me a kiss, looked up at the microphone hanging down and pulled it further down so that it was within her range. She took a deep breath, almost a sigh, into the silence that had followed her every move. At that point we, her crowd of loyal customers, came to life and started cheering her on. She raised her left eyebrow and put her right arm out, and we quieted, recognising her usual signal for when one was in danger of being cut off at the bar.
She started singing her Tizita acapella, like it was something she did every day — in the shower, humming it as she served drinks, singing it as she went about the business of living. For The Diva, The Corporal and The Taliban Man, their voices in their own unique way contained an explosive power that had to be held within the vulnerable Tizita — and their Tizita seemed to work to the extent they were able to contain their powerful range within the melody of the song, a melody that did not require one to hit impossibly high notes. They were working with more than they needed, the danger there being showing off. Miriam’s voice was old, and when I listened more closely, for a moment I thought I had walked into my grandmother’s house, which always smelt of wood burning, but underneath that, a warm, sweet, musky smell, like someone had eaten sweet plums and thrown the seeds and the skin on the floor in a room that rarely saw the sun. Her voice, old and hoarse from age, smoking, drinking and yelling at customers all night at the bar, sounded like the Tizita she was singing — vulnerable — and when it started cracking, I knew her voice would not carry her and us through the song.
The Taliban Man walked onto the stage so unobtrusively that it was only when he picked up the guitar that we noticed him. He gestured to Miriam to pick up the krar. She did not hesitate; they whispered something to each other, and he sat down on the stool as she went back to the microphone. The Taliban Man started tapping his hands on his thighs, tapping his boots on the wooden floor, and then he began to play.
Miriam looked at him, her smile now like that of a smitten lover. She leaned back and closed her eyes and started playing the krar, with its high and low muted strings sounding like light rain, increasing in tempo until she was playing somewhere inside The Taliban Man’s guitar. The krar, in terms of range, could not compete with the steel guitar, but it could improvise, take some of the energy from the guitar, or give it largesse by letting it finish what it could not with its metallic trilling sound. The Taliban Man followed her lead and started bending his notes, but just to show us he knew what Miriam was doing, he would every now and then snap his strings so that they created a buzzing sound, like a razor bent back and let loose.
The Diva joined them on stage and started humming, a low, constant hum that rose and fell with Miriam’s krar, so that they both were working inside The Taliban Man’s guitar. The Corporal walked in with his masenko — the sound he lent them was no longer the anguished journeyman between God and the devil, but rather of an older, raspy and surefooted man.
I looked over at The Diva. I was expecting to see competition, or even the look that says ‘I am better than them.’ Instead, her look reminded me of being in primary school and that occasional class when my English language teacher, Mr. Mbugua, would say something so profound that we would look at each other in awe and appreciation. Like this one time, when Mr. Mbugua asked the most philosophical question: what if we are actually awake and living when we slept and dreaming when we thought we were awake? For months afterwards, that is all we spoke about. She had the look that said, I am learning something, and I appreciate how it’s being taught.
Onstage, the musicians were enjoying themselves too much, and they left us behind. And by the time we caught up, it was to find Miriam playing the accordion, looking so slight and bent forward that I worried about her. But she was at it, pulling, ebbing and letting out a gentle, church organ-sounding song, the accordion lungs expanding and contracting gently, breathing in and out layered prayers. She was swaying side to side, dipping in and out, lifting one foot in and out, wading out of the river of this Tizita that as yet had no words.
She stomped her feet, ran her right hand against her left on the accordion to create confused, upside-down rainbows of sound, and then a caesura. The silence transfixed the drunkards, gamblers, slummers and the believers in place. The silence moved from being expectant to bordering on being painful. At the end of that silence where the pain was turning into relief, The Corporal with the masenko came in and bowed a long, devilish, trembling bass, low and threatening. But The Taliban Man was not going to have us threatened, and his guitar with its clean, thin sound, note for note, came in.
Miriam stomped her feet again, and silence reigned once again, and from that silence, she started singing, low, long moans gliding above and underneath the lazy accordion. The Taliban Man’s guitar was getting more urgent while The Diva on the piano was furious and The Corporal on his devilish masenko held everything together.
Then The Corporal left his post and came in with the low buzzing sound of the masenko, mourning that was amplified by the slow wail of the accordion as Miriam pulled it apart. Her voice, with a contained rasp, came in once again.
The Taliban Man did a violent lead solo. The Diva’s piano jumped into the fray, playing peaceful but sharp short determined notes that threatened to undermine The Taliban Man’s work. They both went on for a while as we clapped and cheered and clapped the beat.
They played on, helping each other up when one of them faltered with the beat and timing. A few minutes into the jam, Miriam looked at The Taliban Man, and he slowed down his syncopated guitar playing and the others followed suit — silence, save for the low hum buzz of the masenko and the sound of the accordion slowly running out of air.
She winked at me. ‘This once,’ she said in English. And she bent her voice low and joined the masenko:
When I dream of happy days, oh Tizita,
Wake me, so I can find you once again
I fear so much that you too will leave me
And I will forget
This pain that carries my love.
And Tizita, if I forget those I loved,
How can I remember who I am?
One day, I will be dead and gone
My grave untended
Date of birth and death
On my gravestone from centuries past
And only my Tizita will remain,
Only you will remain.
Tizita, What I fear the most
Is that I will forget
This pain that carries my love
The musicians clapped for each other as we jostled and cheered for them. Some people were patting me on my back, thrusting beer in my hand, just for that little recognition from Miriam. But I was lost in one question — why had the musicians joined Miriam on stage? Had they decided not to compete? Recalling Miriam’s question — maybe they had not been competing all along. It felt that way. But they could not have planned it. They could not possibly have.
Yes, I could rationalise that, in the same way I had helped Miriam onto the stage, the musicians were helping her along as well. That they too were holding her by her ribs, as the Kikuyu said of solidarity. But I started thinking through the adrenaline that was still running through me. The musicians — this I had seen — they listened, heard each other; when one of them was on stage, the others leaned forward from their seats unconsciously, tapped their fingers or moved their heads to the beat before clapping politely.
Maybe it was the nature of the Tizita: how do you compete over who is the most honest? Over who conveys the very fragility of life? Was she also right about the ear being the most important musical instrument? For now, I resolved to leave everything at call and response, the most expedient answer for African art whenever it threw a curve ball at us.
Fuck! How do boxing-addicted, hardened gamblers listen to the Tizita without tearing into each other? No need to worry, for when Mr. Selassie said it was time to vote for a winner, we shifted listlessly, tepid applause, followed by eyes cast downwards, or lifting of bottles to lips, or people talking to each ot
her in hushed groups, or others pretending they had just got to the ABC a few minutes ago and had no idea what had been happening. I started to feel like there were people around me, all digging and singing and dancing in quicksand, sliding into a black hole. I had overestimated our hardness.
This is what it boiled down to — there was no clear winner. It had to do with the nature of gambling; in a winner takes all, you bet on your musician and against all the others. And so you cheered your bet but otherwise remained silent. The musicians had effectively sabotaged the competition by not competing and joining Miriam for her number. And so, bets notwithstanding, to have seen what we had seen and then cast a vote — it just did not feel right. It felt downright shameful, a ‘damn disgrace,’ as one blues singer in Boston used to say about her cheating lover. So the purse money was going to be divided amongst them; they had created the spirit that made it possible for rules, which at the ABC were never held onto steadfastly, to be broken.
We called out for an encore, one more chance to get it right, we said, without believing that is what we wanted. But the house, which is to say, Mr. Selassie, had other plans — let the musicians go home, let them go home and work on the Tizita; in a month, there would be another round. The gamblers groaned and cursed. But the truth was that no one wanted a winner — not the musicians, not us and not the house. We wanted more of everything, and that extra that we would recognise only when we finally came across it.
I rubbed the ear Miriam had pulled — there was still a dull pain. She was onto something.
5
‘A good story, like a good song, is always true.’
I knew enough about the Tizita to believe it — that the first time you heard a Tizita that was yours, you fell in love with it. You never forget your first love; you never forget your first Tizita. Where were you when J. M. Kariuki was killed? Or Ruth First, Lumumba, Kennedy or Malcolm X? Where were you when you first heard it?
Unbury Our Dead with Song Page 2