Unbury Our Dead with Song

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  20

  ‘It freed my talent and me — I refuse the pressure of making history.’

  It is close to midnight when The Taliban Man goes to the mic and without any introduction launches into a beautiful, intensely personal poem. The poem on this night comes from a place of pain, of abuse and cold love, yet the child has grown up, gone through the pain and is now ready to embrace and be embraced. I will look it up later — it’s called “Poem at Thirty” by Sonia Sanchez. He repeats the first line: ‘It is midnight, no magical bewitching hour for me’ and picks up his guitar. He starts rapping to heavy rock-and-roll chords. He says he has been trying to have more fun with his music and gets to it.

  I am The Taliban Man!

  I am the Caliban Man, against which all breaks

  Them drone missiles drill our oil and blood

  And them over there mining our pain for their gain

  And we mine and mime back saying, give us this day

  Our daily bullets, we have a brother to kill we have a sister to kill

  The Caliban Man will IED you every time you ask him for his ID

  My DNA is not for sale to the highest bidder. Your drones want to send

  Me to heaven in pieces, but my IED says I will send you to hell in two pieces. Do

  Not sell me your dirty bullets telling me I have a sister to kill,

  I will not do your bidding, I will not be sold to the highest bidder!

  The Taliban Man is here to stay

  Here to say, I am the rock-man

  Against which all breaks,

  Strike a child, you strike the Caliban Man

  Strike my bitch and you have struck the rock-man

  Give me your George Bush, so I can scatter, scatter him

  In the bushes, I will return your emperor and your dictator

  Give us back our Obama and we will teach him the African

  Way of peace, but if you don’t, The Taliban Man

  Will IED him back to Kenya-land!

  Why don’t you man up and give me your hungry for justice,

  Live up to your bible and give me your hungry for bread,

  Yes, the Caliban Man knows of your long welfare lines

  I will tell you what - I am The Taliban Man and my name is your

  Bane!

  The Taliban Man is here to stay

  Caliban Man here to say, I am the rock-man

  Against which all breaks,

  Strike a child, you strike The Taliban Man

  Strike my bitch and you have struck the Caliban Man.

  He is having fun, and his laughter is joined by that of his friends as the house band joins him back on stage, and they keep playing as other guests come on stage and pick up an instrument or sing.

  What follows I can only describe as hours of an orgy of creativity — dirty, raw, personal, intense — an orgy that creates as much hunger as it satisfies, as musician after musician takes the stage. The set-up is like that of an open mic, but not exactly. There is no order, no one looking at the watch. Whoever is on stage plays or sings until they are done, and then just as gracefully (or as drunkenly and as ungracefully) as they had entered the stage, they exit to applause. The Taliban Man’s stage is a place where the music is as true as speech, as true as a conversation with all its starts and hiccups and silences as one searches for meaning, or the right words.

  Well, some of it is bad and ‘jars my drink lobes,’ as one of Soyinka’s characters famously quipped — or, to put it in more contemporary terms, seriously fucks up my high. The krar, played by one of The Taliban Man’s friends, ends up sounding too busy when it goes up against the hired house band — like the showmanship of an amateur boxer in the ring with a Mayweather in an exhibition match. Others shut down the band and do karaoke with their iPhones and iPods held against one of the mics, their voices out of key, screaming out the song they are streaming.

  But out of this stream of partier-performers, Maaza stands out. It is the house musicians and The Taliban Man who call her to the stage. Underneath the yells of encouragement, I can feel everyone is taking her just a little bit more seriously. She gets on stage and playfully shoos the piano man away. The drummer does a solo and then the familiar rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat before coming back down to the slow beat of the Tizita. The rest of the musicians join in with what they know, each wanting to leave their own mark on this Tizita. So we end up with a bit of jazz, classical music and Lingala, all on the rail tracks of the Tizita. It does not work. Classical guitar — fleeting and heavy, intricate and yet violent — its schizophrenia cannot be contained within the form of the Tizita. The jazz is also fighting the form imposed by the Tizita. The jazz is getting lost inside the Tizita — and at other times, it makes the Tizita formless, like when The Taliban Man’s jazz guitar, with its in-between clean chords, announces itself and makes a break, only for it to be put in check by Maaza’s piano. The more they struggle, the more the Tizita pulls them back, and the more they sound discordant. They come to a stop in a jumbled heap. Silence follows.

  Maaza tears into Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with such ferocity that I can feel the casual party fun draining away. We crowd around the stage. The band members leave their instruments and stand around her. Only The Taliban Man remains, with his hands on the guitar strings to mute it, eyes closed, facing her direction, as if to receive the violence on his naked face. She hammers the pompousness out of us — and then again. One more time, she rips the skins right off our bodies. She cheekily runs tender tendrils along our raw skins and prances away, skipping, thrilled — and now needing her, we trail after her.

  Again, she thunders, but this time The Taliban Man joins her, and he picks at the Fifth Symphony alongside her, as if competing to see who can express the widest range of emotions, complete on their own, but tenuously held together by a fragile thread. They throw tantrums; they take leisurely walks; vicious past fights and tensions are brought up, long forgotten familial wars. And being the exhibitionists that they are, they stray from the song and their conversation to tell us of past loves, and they giggle in embarrassment and laugh, all in the piano and guitar. And then their individual stories run their course, and they tell us about war and peace and the in-between tensions of war without cause and peace without meaning — then they start playing together in such harmony that the violence in their playing becomes peaceful and soothing.

  By the time they are done, the realisation that the party has lost its lustre, that it cannot compete with the intensity that they have just displayed, hits us all. It is an excellent performance, too good for the kind of party where it is release we seek. And it feels like there is nowhere else to go but back home and, in my case, back to the hotel.

  Not so fast, though. The Taliban Man says something in Amharic, laughter ensues, and as Maaza leaves the stage to applause, two groups of roughly ten people each get on stage, the men on one side, the women on the other. The band starts playing what I recognise as an Ethiopian traditional song. The men sing one verse and the women reply, but there is so much laughter, some people close to tears, others rolling on the wet marble by the pool, that I seek out Maaza, congratulate her and ask her what is going on. It turns out the revellers have taken a revered traditional song and turned it into a dirty song. The call and response — men bragging about how they were going to fuck the women with dicks that were so long that they had to be tethered to their ankles, and the women replying and saying that what the men really wanted was for the women to fuck them in the ass with their clits and strap-ons. The song goes on like that —machismo and hyper-masculine metaphors of cannons and fucking, and the women cutting the men back to smaller sizes.

  This is, of course, not peculiar to this group of young men and women. We do the same thing in Kenya, where we take a popular song and subvert it. For example, “Malaika,” the love song, becomes one of longing to fuck but the result is blue balls. Kenny Rogers’ “Coward of the County” late at night becomes “Booty of the County.” There is the all-time Kik
uyu late-night favourite, a love song where the man is leaving late at night to go to work, or to war or someplace, and he is telling his girlfriend to close the door, but not to bolt it, as he will be back soon. The latenight drunken choir would turn it into a plea that she put her underwear back on, but not all the way; morning will not come before he gets another hard on. The sexualised mock performance ends, and the party, reenergised, resumes with new purpose.

  ***

  ‘So, your brother, what do you think?’ I asked Maaza. I did not let on that I wanted to find out from her why she never pursued something which, to us sitting on the outside, was a visceral talent.

  ‘His music, what do you think?’ I rephrased.

  ‘I will give you two answers, one for you and the other for your paper — deal?’ she answered, and I nodded in agreement.

  ‘He has not found his way yet, but when he does, the world better watch out — that is for you. And this is what I want him to read in your paper, your tabloid, I mean. Quote me as saying he needs to be himself, to find the music he was meant to play. He needs to be himself. Quote me directly here — he does not need to wear his pants low.’

  ‘You have a problem with hip-hop?’ I asked.

  ‘No, but it’s not what he is meant to play,’ she answered plainly.

  ‘What is he meant to play? Ethiopian music? Classical? Jazz?’ I asked.

  ‘Only he knows, and he does not know it yet. It’s like Fela Kuti — when he was in the United States playing jazz, no one could have predicted what he would play in a few years. Even he himself did not know, but he became himself, and all the parts fused in him, and he produced a sound like no other. That is Yosef’s future.’

  ‘I met with Mrs. Hughes today…,’ I said, to her sigh.

  ‘I am so tired of this bullshit! You know, you can be good at something, even excellent — hell, even talented — but it does not mean that is what you want to do. I did not want to be hauling ass and piano from concert to practice, playing to stiff audiences. I love people — I am doing what I love.’ Her voice was somewhere between anger, pain and irritation.

  Later, when I ask The Taliban Man about Maaza, he will tell me she should have been a musician — that was her calling, but she was the casualty of their parents wanting her to make something of herself. The same answer Mrs. Hughes had hinted at. But as it turns out, she knew, or might know, herself better, and she became a poor people’s lawyer, still servicing and freeing souls in the courtroom.

  ‘And how did you escape the same fate?’ I will ask The Taliban Man.

  ‘I am doing what I need to do. I fought back,’ he will say, but I cannot help but feel that Mrs. Hughes would have added that he fought back by going overboard.

  I could feel the loss that Mrs. Hughes must have felt knowing that, even as we spoke, Maaza could step into any concert hall and hold her own, and with practice, win a coveted spot in the world of music. I am the wrong person to judge, however, being sure my professors back at BU were probably saying the same thing about me — the African who could have broken into the ranks of New York Times, CNN and the likes. Certainly, that is the dream my parents had for me when I went the way of journalism. It could be said that tabloid journalism was my way of excessive fighting back. And the answer I would give would be very much like The Taliban Man’s — I am doing what I see I need to do.

  Maaza stood up to get a fresh drink, but I sensed she wanted to get away from me. I made my way to the hot tub, where a couple was having a heated conversation, so I listened in.

  ‘We imagine God as an absolute, but what if God, with all that power, absolute power all round, turned out to be as whiny as we are? For fucks sake, give God a six-string guitar that is out of tune — tell him, Hey, Mr. God, no using powers, just jam your butt off. Then put God next to Jimi; say to him, Jimi, show the good Lord what you can do. Who do you think would win?’ the young woman was asking her boyfriend.

  ‘Jimi would take it home,’ the man said, to their laughter.

  ‘Yeah, possible — but this is what I think — I think Jimi would want God to win. ‘Cos if you think you are better than an absolute something, what else is there?’ she countered. ‘Don’t you then take his place? And what is fun? To be all powerful is to be amorphous — no limits — you are just there, spilling out of bounds all the time.’

  ‘But here is the better question, would God allow Jimi to cheat in order to save face, or would he accept defeat? Would he say that the Jimi I created is a better guitarist than I, his creator?’ the man asked playfully.

  ‘Hell, no — they both need each other — that is the point I have been trying to make,’ she replied.

  Before they could continue, The Taliban Man joined us in the tub.

  ‘So, what do you think, eh? Not a bad party,’ he said as he slipped off his sandals and put his feet in. ‘Time to make some toe soup — motherfucking tasty, no?’ he added, to the laughter of the couple who jumped out of the tub in pretend disgust.

  ‘It’s certainly a great party — so much talent around you,’ I replied.

  ‘No, I am asking you what you really think,’ he said, shaking his head from side to side.

  ‘I like it here. Your parents, what do they think of your music?’ I asked.

  ‘Shit man, they don’t give a shit. If I am not all classical, I embarrass them. I have some success but nothing major. I need an album out there, something that will do well.’

  ‘So who pays for all this?’ I asked him.

  ‘Who do you think?’

  ‘Yeah, when I spoke to them, they said they supported you….’

  ‘I am a cliché — rich parents throwing money at their kids instead of…. They wouldn’t even see you, and they live, like, a few houses from here.’

  ‘I thought they were out of…I thought they were busy.’ No need to add to their personal issues their lie that had no real consequence to my story.

  ‘Is that really what you want to know? Who pays for my shit? Like, you came all this way for that?’ he asked, genuinely disturbed at the thought — maybe even a little disappointed.

  ‘No, you are right. I came for more than that. I am searching for something I cannot name yet — something buried deep in the music,’ I answered.

  ‘No, brother, you are looking for something buried deep in you,’ he said and laughed.

  ‘Perhaps. It would be easier if we can all rip into our chests and peer in,’ I replied.

  ‘That is what music is for, to find your secret,’ he replied, aware of how wise he sounded.

  I took out my notebook and read to him what Maaza had said.

  ‘Hell, man, you’re cutting deep; that is my sister. Come with me. Let me show you something. You better bring something to drink — you will need it.’ He sounded resolute.

  I grabbed the nearest bottle of Chivas floating in the pool and followed him. We walked towards the fence, where there was a guard standing by a much smaller gate, which he opened with a smile. The Taliban Man reached into his wallet and gave him some money with a slight bow. It was something I had been seeing over and over again, so I asked him about it.

  ‘‘He is older than me. Unlike Kenyans, who throw money at waiters, here we are first and foremost all human beings,’’ he answered.

  ‘That is true, but you are still you, and he is a watchman,’ I pointed out.

  ‘That is true also, but why abuse someone’s dignity?’ he replied gently.

  We stepped onto a paved path lit with floor lamps. We walked for about ten minutes and then came to a forested area. He found a long stick and beat the bushes until they opened up to a path overgrown with grass, and we kept walking. A small hill and at the top looking down, there was a graveyard. It was still, save for the noise from the party, faint laughter and music in the background. I could see the shimmer of a stream that was somehow not running, dead leaves and small branches floating, doing a slow dance to nowhere. A small bridge, and we crossed into the graveyard and darkness.
>
  We took out our mobiles and used their flashlights to read the names on the headstones as he pointed them out. But it was not the names he wanted me to see — it was the dates on the headstones — and now that I was paying attention to them, they leapt out at me. The dates ranged from the 1700s to the 1920s. Save for some graves with plastic Ethiopian flags on them, I could tell no one brought flowers, and the grass was mowed only once in a while.

  ‘It makes me think the bond of killing together is stronger than the bond of life,’ he said, looking at the flags. He added that every now and then a veteran’s association paid someone to bring fresh flowers and flags to their long-ago dead.

  ‘Killing together or defending together?’ I asked him.

  ‘Is there a difference in the end? Those attacking will also end up in their own graveyards,’ he answered.

  ‘Okay. But why are we here?’ I asked, even though in the quietness surrounded by so much life, I could sense why.

  ‘This graveyard, we found it here abandoned. The people lying here beneath us, they could be my great-great-grandparents. It makes me think, in a hundred years from now, another you could be standing on mine,’ he answered thoughtfully.

  ‘So?’ I asked him.

  ‘I am trying to say something that will make sense of all this — that we are here and then we are gone. Knowing a hundred years from now, even my grave will not have anyone to tend to it, does it matter what my parents, Mrs. Hughes or Maaza say?’ he asked rhetorically.

  ‘Okay, go on, tell me,’ I encouraged him.

  ‘My point is, who remembers the long dead and why? What does it mean to be remembered? Who says that we must all be remembered by our names? If these people were good parents, we might not remember them by name, but they live on, right? Their spirit is still around. What I have learned standing here is that it’s okay not to make history. I do not live to be remembered by my name….’