Of course being a “World Music” rock star doesn’t inherently guarantee that he wouldn’t be capable of racial or ethnic exoticization, just as Tzipi’s being a woman doesn’t inoculate her from sexism. Lest you think Santutxo’s a saint, think again. Or more nearly: it’s precisely because he kind of is a saint that he feels compelled on occasion to be this crass and selfish. What can you say about a babe-in-arms like Binh? He doesn’t even realize what he’s doing yet.
“And what about you?” you may be thinking. “What makes you think a Midwestern white woman jetting off to Bamako is immune to any of this either?” Don’t think I haven’t thought about this myself.
Rolling Stone magazine sent me to do a story on Djeli’s homecoming in March of 2005. Actually, he’d requested me. As you know, he’d written me a few months before to thank me for that profile in The New Yorker. I’d never met him, but I’d been following his career for some time. His 2004 release, À Tierno Bokar, was one of the most politically trenchant and yet poetically sophisticated albums of recent memory. I don’t mean just among “World” artists. You can see I keep putting scare quotes around the term, and I hope you’ll understand that it has to do with the absurdity of the commercial bracketing of somebody as profoundly cosmopolitan as Djeli under a term which, despite its cosmic proportions, reads to the consumer as narrowly exotic. At this point, Djeli himself has had the conversation so many times he’s bored with it. Anyway, the brilliance of À Tierno Bokar, both lyrically and musically, was so self-evident, a lot of music journalists who usually covered other genres picked up on it – rock, jazz, classical. We were all talking about it.
I tend to write about jazz, but because my background’s in literature, when I do deal with vocal music and original lyrics I pay a lot of attention. His earlier albums were also layered and complex, but I couldn’t think of another disc that had such a novelistic intricacy. I did a very detailed reading. He’d helpfully included his own cross-translations between Bambara, French, and English in the liner notes. Even these translations were tricky, attentive to his own assonance, punning, and percussive metrics. There was a little citation from Amadou Hampté Bâ about orature, and how “les hommes de l’oralité ” were “passionnément épris de beau langage et presque tous poètes.” One may have one’s doubts about all oral cultures being this rich, but Djeli, without question, is passionately in love with language. He’s definitely a poet.
He said mine was the only critique he’d read that actually seemed to understand the full complexity of what he was trying to do. In fact, he said he wasn’t sure he’d understood it himself until he read my piece. He can be kind of self-effacing like that sometimes.
Djeli comes from a family of griots, but he went to boarding school in France and then studied philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. The one in Paris, not the one in Bamako. He plays kora and electric guitar with equal virtuosity, and he’s extended the technique of both instruments correspondingly. He was twenty years old and living in Paris when the coup took place, twenty-one when the democratic constitution went into effect. There were some hopes for him to return to Mali and become active in politics. It was clear that he was to be one of the leading intellectuals of his generation. Ousmane Sembène, the Senegalese filmmaker and writer, took a special interest in him, but encouraged him to follow his artistic impulses. Musically, these ran the gamut from Touré to Satie to Hendrix. Poetically, from the Epic of Sundiata to Verlaine to Dylan.
À Tierno Bokar was a complicated project for him to take on. He’d long ago openly stated his resistance to all organized religion and his specific concerns regarding Islam – not just fundamentalism, but even some moderate forms. He most frequently voiced his concerns in relation to gender politics and homophobia. But obviously, it was also important to acknowledge a figure of tolerance such as Bokar. His sister, Kadidia, was deeply involved in Sufism, and this surely had an influence on the project. So much has been said about that album. It won the Grammy, of course, and the international sales defied all expectations. It was probably the very last moment you could make money like that off a recording – just at the instant the recorded music market was going down the tubes. Even Djeli’s had to reconceptualize the business end of things since then. Who would have thought he’d be talking with Sony about ringtones?
But he doesn’t like to get lost in that kind of thing. The real reconceptualization after À Tierno Bokar was musical. Not that Djeli was dissatisfied, but his curiosity is insatiable. He’s constantly researching, incorporating change. He doesn’t tell me a lot about how his new songs are developing. But I get little hints from our correspondence about some of the things that might turn up in his lyrics. Since we communicate about so much – the books we’re reading, the films we’ve seen, little anecdotes from our daily lives – I naturally wonder sometimes if some of this will be reflected in the songs he’s writing. He let me listen to the master of Peau a few weeks before it was released late last year. It was on his laptop, and I had to hear it on headphones. We’d just had sex. As I told you, when we see each other we generally need to get that out of our systems before we can talk about anything else. So the circumstances were not ideal. He was lying back on the pillows looking very calm, watching me hearing this for the first time.
Now I can tell you, I think Peau is in many ways superior even to À Tierno Bokar. Texturally, it’s exquisitely pared-down. The lyrics are extremely spare. There’s very little Bambara, and my French is pretty good, so I was able to follow almost everything. But, I hate to admit, I had a hard time listening to it with any objective distance that first time. I couldn’t help straining to hear a trace of myself in the lyrics. This little hunt-and-search operation made it hard to hear the deceptively simple elegance of the music. I was distracted by the multiple references to sex, which sounded discouragingly like reminiscences of other bodies than my own. That “beautiful, dumb Thai girl” made a pretty obvious appearance (not, of course, in these words), as did a few other probably both real and imagined breasts, loins, fingers, and necks, none of which evoked my own person. Except for one thing: I’m not sure, but I suspect the brief, tender, clever, and suspended image of the “paupière de chagrin” might have been a reference to my lazy right eyelid which had seemed to fascinate him so that time in bed.
Friday, May 27, 2005, 0:37 a.m.
Subject: Je mets ma main sur ton genou.
I loved Pierrot le fou completely. How funny I hadn’t seen it before. It had everything to do with everything. Of course I always loved À bout de souffle because who wouldn’t, and Le Mépris affected me profoundly. And I watched Masculin féminin with Sandro, who loves Jean-Pierre Léaud and wanted to see everything with him after he saw Les 400 coups. And we saw Weekend, which is also great. But Pierrot le fou I loved in many ways. I loved her singing, and the slapstick, and the discontinuous music and the paintings and comic strips.
And do you remember – there’s Coca-Cola and violence! The dwarf is drinking a bottle of it just before she nails him in the back of the neck with the scissors.
I watched it alone. Sandro went camping with his class from school. I’ll watch it again with him when he gets back. I know he’ll love it.
I wrote an article about Charlie Parker and photography. I think it might interest you.
Florence is also traveling. She went on a cruise to Alaska with her parents and her brother. She sends me funny descriptions of the weirdos she meets on the boat, and in the bars in the ports of Alaska.
When you read this I guess you’ll be back in Paris. I hope you’re well. I’m a little lonely without Sandro but sometimes it’s good to be alone.
After I’d sent the sestina, Djeli asked why I’d placed the hotel in the neighborhood of Neve Tzedek (he didn’t know where that was) instead of the Quartier du Fleuve, which he thought, rightly, was a beautiful name. I thought it was funny that he didn’t understand why I might want to protect his privacy. And protect myself from Mariam. He liked the fact that
I’d described the scene as “cinematic.” In the exchanges that followed, we began discussing film, and as you can see, he recommended Pierrot le fou. We agree about a lot of films, but we disagree about a few. I like Wang Kar-Wai. He doesn’t, particularly, although he conceded to being moved by Happy Together when he first saw it. He said he couldn’t remember a lot of details, but that it had struck him as having “a thin membrane. Bruised.”
You see what I mean about his delicate sensibility.
Sembène had even pushed him to think about filmmaking himself, but I think he knows his real gifts are elsewhere. That is, he toyed with the idea, but when Sembène passed away last year I think that dream also died. It’s not as though he doesn’t already have enough on his plate. In the last couple of months, for example, he had a benefit concert for Cité Soleil with his best friend, Wyclef Jean. He also did a benefit performance at the New Orleans Jazz Festival. He was briefly back in Bamako for a private strategy meeting with Amadou Toumani Touré, the president. He spoke at the third World Congress Against the Death Penalty at the Cité universitaire internationale de Paris. He attended, though didn’t speak at, the Conference on Moral Particularism at Paris I. There’s a documentary filmmaker who’s been following him around with a small crew. That’s been going on since last September. Djeli goes back and forth between finding him entertaining and a pain in the ass. And of course, there’s the regular media attention. This seems to flair up when he indulges himself in dinner dates with supermodels. When the pictures turn up in the tabloids, Mariam freaks out and everybody’s rattled for a couple of weeks. When I raise an eyebrow about this kind of thing, he looks at me like a naughty kid and says, “It’s not my fault, they keep calling me!” The supermodels, he means.
So what is it, you’re thinking, that a man like Djeli sees in me? I’m ten years older, I don’t inhabit that world of glamour, I don’t even have much patience for it. But I satisfy Djeli’s other desires – intellectual, and poetic. Even though the only recorded trace I’ve found of myself in his artistic output was that paper-thin eyelid of regret, I really do think our correspondence feeds his process. In fact, he just wrote me to say that he might use that image of a castrato “jouant au mini golf ” in a song inspired by Cage. He’d never be so base as to steal one of my own good turns of phrase, but I think my general linguistic sensibility in English has had an effect on his. Once, when we hadn’t seen each other for a while, and I was also feeling kind of overwhelmed by my love for Sandro, I wrote him, “Sometimes the heart is hungry like a stomach and you’re not sure exactly what you want. That’s a good line, isn’t it?” He wrote back that yes, it was a good line.
As a form of research for writing this book, I’ve been reading a few things – as I mentioned in that e-mail to the paramour the other day – travel books, the collected writings of El Sup (he also co-authored a mystery novel! I’m halfway through it), and The Mandarins. Then, as luck would have it, I found a remainder of A Transatlantic Love Affair in Mercer Street Books. This is Simone de Beauvoir’s side of her correspondence with Algren. Her adopted daughter published these letters after Simone’s death, and her introduction suggests that she was fulfilling Simone’s wish, although she said she’d have liked the chance to clean up her own errors. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir left the errors in, not (if you take her at her word) out of spite, but because she wanted to show how the correspondence affected Simone’s written English over time. She starts out making some kind of silly errors, but her prose gets increasingly sophisticated.
Sylvie couldn’t include Algren’s side of the correspondence, even though she had physical possession of his letters, which her mother had saved. Apparently there was some conflict with his estate about copyright. She paraphrases a few things he wrote in editorial notes, just so Simone’s references will make sense.
Well, never mind my comparison of our correspondence to that of Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren. Simone was incredibly demonstrative! Within days of meeting Algren, she was gushing about her undying love. So much for saying “I love you” being a peculiarly “American” trait. Or maybe she was trying to find an “American” writing voice and she thought this was it. Sylvie really hammers home how foreign they were to one another. She says it was like they were from different planets. She refers to the liberating effects of the “unanticipated arrival of this boor, this alien being” into Simone’s world. Actually, it was Simone who landed first in his world, but never mind. I like thinking of myself as a “boor.” In that respect, anyway, the parallel may hold.
We were eating kedjenou, stewed chicken with peppers, at the African Grill in Bamako when Mariam appeared, tall and luminous in a pale blue boubou. Her head-tie had come off and her hair was mussed. I thought her shining black eyes would burn holes in me. I’d never seen somebody in that much pain. That’s when she dumped the Coke on my head.
Djeli met Mariam when he was still a student. It was actually she who had the ambition to make it as a singer in Paris. She encouraged Djeli to perform, and when he started to get a following, she was his back-up singer. She performed with him through her pregnancy with Issa in 1996, but after he was born she decided to shift her energies to the business side of things. Four years later they had Farka. The kids were 8 and 4 when things fell apart. At first, she took the boys to Bamako, which was hard for them. Djeli and Mariam had bought some property there, but they rarely went back. But Mariam felt isolated now in Paris and wanted to be near her family. Djeli told me later how much he suffered during that period, missing his kids. He’s an extremely dedicated father. Now, depending on Mariam’s moods, they sometimes come to stay with him in Paris. When they come, their nurse comes with them. The kids are beautiful. When I visit and they’re there, I feel a little shy around them. Djeli tries to get them to speak English with me, but Issa calls it “cette langue affreuse.” I don’t take this personally. I try to make do with my fumbling French. They seem neutral. I can’t blame them.
Monday, December 5, 2005, 1:23 a.m.
Subject: It took me a couple of days to recover but now I’m okay
You have that beautiful expression in French – “l’amitié amoureuse”. I think that’s what we have – at least it’s what I feel for you. In the middle of your kind of confused speech about the “fragmentation of your affective life,” I wasn’t sure if you still thought it would be possible to maintain this friendship. Which has been very precious to me. I thought, “Who else is going to describe a film to me as having ‘a thin membrane, bruised’?”
I think you’re one of the great poets of our time. One of the five most intelligent men I’ve ever met in my life. I think that sometimes you say idiotic things. I think you need to learn to let the other person lead in bed. I have a lot of affection for you.
It’s funny, although he’s very graceful, any time Djeli and I have attempted couples dancing he’s had a profound disinclination to lead, but in sex he tends to take a very traditional masculine role. He’s surprisingly uncomfortable letting someone else take over. He doesn’t really like fellatio. He even stooped to invoke national stereotypes in regard to his distaste for the blow-job. “Bon,” he said, “tu es américaine…” as though that explained anything. When I said I thought that had little to do with this, he relented. This message about “l’amitié amoureuse,” of course, followed one of our early visits. He’d been very warm, almost effusive in his affections. We stayed up late after sex talking about film, politics, music, and books. One night we were lying in bed together. There was a pause in the conversation. I kissed his shoulder. Djeli smelled faintly of coconut oil. He drew my head upward, brushed the hair from my eyes and said, “I want to play something for you.” We were both naked. He got his kora from the corner and propped himself up at the head of the bed and began to play.
Imagine being the unique and privileged listener to the most beautiful music in the world. He began to sing, softly, in that haunting falsetto of his. It was an old song, traditional, one of the fi
rst his father had taught him. A tear rolled down his cheek as he sang. Afterwards, he wiped away the tear and said that sometimes he cried like this when he played for his sons. He said he was moved because he knew I was hearing this beautiful song for the first time.
But just at the end of my stay in Paris, he seemed to pull back. There was that awkward conversation about “fragmentation.” Things were complicated with Mariam. There were obviously some other women he’d seen. That didn’t worry me particularly. I was just afraid of losing the correspondence. I would be very sad to lose the correspondence.
But pretty quickly he warmed up again. One day he wrote to say that he missed me and he wanted to see me in New York. He said he thought we needed to “talk.” Then I felt safe enough to be honest about my feelings, without actually using the word “love.”
The Correspondence Artist Page 5
