‘Our Kenyan brother, you know Menelik?’ the old man followed up.
Suddenly the whole table — all men — was throwing questions, comments and quips at me.
‘A great man — a great warrior,’ I shouted above them, having no idea. But it worked. And everyone at the table started speaking at once, all asking Mr. Selassie to allow me to write the story.
He stood up and shook my hand, then gave me a bear hug, lifting me off my feet so that I almost lost balance. He made a call to each of the musicians — I was to meet them one by one in their dressing rooms. And if they agreed, then I could have my story.
‘Anything else, Doc?’ he asked as I stood up to leave.
‘Of course, there is always one last question,’ I said, adopting the air of a private eye. ‘How did you decide these were the top four Tizita musicians?’
I will spare you the doctor-this-and-that jokes and report to you how he explained it. He had listened to the Tizita all his life. But for this competition, he had gone to his friends, relatives, former teachers, family, artist-type contacts he had made along the way. He did as much sampling as he could — he surprised me by taking out his mobile phone, opening up an app and proudly showing me and his entourage a series of graphs and Power Point-looking statistics.
‘I came up with 50, then I asked five of the people I had questioned about the Tizita to cut it down to three. They had decided on the four. I wanted three, but they gave me four. They just couldn’t get it down to three. It was that simple, really,’ he explained.
‘Miriam?’ I asked him.
‘You are the doctor; see her, but be careful; she is one of the best,’ he answered. I knew what he meant — I was to take her as seriously as the others; I was to be serious.
‘Was it democratic? Maybe some people are better suited for judging different genres, like different weights in boxing,’ I went on.
‘A boxing judge can judge any weight. But let me ask you, how do you pick a judge in anything?’ he asked me.
‘Experts, of course. You find the experts,’ I answered.
‘And your so-called experts, how do you pick them?’ he followed up.
‘People respected in the industry….’ But even as I started to explain, I could see where this was going — the judges and those who pick them, they are people who, for one reason or another, know each other. His process was just more open about it, but in the end, it really was no more or less professional than the Caine Prize or the Pulitzer — it was just as rigged or not as rigged as any of them. I thanked him and pushed the second Red Stripe towards him, like it was a treat. His entourage laughed alongside him.
There was going to be no objectivity on my part; I loved it too much here.
7
‘Have you ever had to kill love?’
I started with The Diva. She was sitting on a bench in the dressing room, among the leftover boxing gear. Her perfume wafting in the room felt alien layered over the enduring smell of men and sweat. She had changed into blue jeans, a white T-shirt and dirty brown sneakers. All around her were shiny plastic bags full of clothes and other things she had bought in Nakumatt and Westgate Malls to take back to Ethiopia. She looked taller than she had on stage.
‘I guess this is not exactly Broadway. Have you ever been?’ I asked, half apologising for the ABC and half to talk over the awkwardness I was feeling.
‘Why would I have been to Broadway?’
Her voice outside the microphone and the singing was deep, with a thin rasp at its edges; not the deepness of a woman like Big Mama Thornton, but a masculine-feminine voice — like a man and woman reading a poem together. It just sounded right coming from her. Her voice was hers.
She was not being contentious; she was genuinely perplexed. She had her own universe, after all, as I was soon to learn. So I introduced myself and explained that I wanted to do a story on her for The National Inquisitor.
She stood up and reached into a carefully packed travel suitcase and pulled out a bottle of red wine, Goats Di Roam. ‘South African — you Kenyans and your Tuskers,’ she said with a laugh.
‘We do have Kenyan wine,’ I said lightly.
‘Yes, just like we have Ethiopian winter-ski Olympians and the Jamaicans…. Can you just get me a wineglass?’
I hesitated.
‘Okay, two!’ She made a peace sign. ‘And a wine bottle opener,’ she added.
At the bar, Miriam seemed preoccupied, like she was still lost in her music as she went about cleaning the counter.
I held her hand to get her attention.
‘We really need to talk,’ I said to her. ‘We just need to talk.’
‘But not now…. Let me guess, wine glasses?’ she asked.
‘Yes, two, and a corkscrew — how did you know?’ I answered, puzzled.
She started laughing and gave me two beer mugs. Why would the ABC have wine glasses or corkscrews if it was a place for the slummers?
‘How did I know? What do you think?’ she asked.
I understood. She was the one who made the interviews possible. The why I knew or could guess; the how I would ask later.
I went back to The Diva and gave her the bad news. She found a pen and expertly pushed the cork into the bottle. She took the two beer mugs from me and filled them to the brim.
‘Music makes me very thirsty,’ she said, as she carefully lifted the overflowing mug to her mouth.
She had a slight tremor from the adrenaline of performance — I had seen it with some boxers — and a little of the red wine spilled onto the wooden floor.
‘And exhausted,’ she explained it away when she saw me looking at her hands.
She beckoned me to my mug, but it was so full that I first had to bend down and drink from it as if it were a trough. That made her laugh.
‘Why, really why, would I agree for an interview with The National Inquisitor? I know the tabloid,’ she said.
‘I have to, I simply have to — I am in love and don’t know why yet…. I just feel I have to. I feel compelled,’ I said, laughing self-consciously.
‘The Tizita is not a woman, or man for that matter, that you can possess—’
‘I don’t mean love, love,’ I cut in. ‘In Boston, when I heard my Tizita, I mean, I fell in love, like a haunting of something — I just want to understand…. I want to feel it.’
‘You speak like a hungry artist…. I like that. I agree, on one condition: you have to come to Ethiopia. You cannot know a river by drinking its water from a glass.’ She pointed to our two mugs of wine.
‘Is that your own proverb?’ I asked her.
‘What does it matter? Do you understand why?’
‘Yes, I will come to Ethiopia,’ I answered. ‘Before Ethiopia, one question — why did you help Miriam out? It was a competition—’
‘I was not helping her. I saw a beautiful Tizita — but save all that for later. You need to see more first,’ she answered.
‘Have you ever had to kill love?’ she asked me, seemingly as an afterthought.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It could be any number of reasons; the person doesn’t love you back, the love is impossible — distance, or abusive. For any reason.’
‘No — but I have had my heart broken,’ I answered.
‘It’s not the same. If it’s broken, it’s healing. I am talking trying to kill something in you that you know is good, and as you do, you realise you have to kill something in you that you want to keep so badly. People commit suicide trying to kill that love in them. The Tizita is balm; every time you excavate, try to dig out that thing, you rub it on,’ she tried to explain.
‘I don’t quite get it….’
‘Live some more first,’ she said as she stood up.
I gulped down my wine. As I left, I almost ran into a man who was walking into her dressing room hurriedly. I looked back at The Diva to see if she was okay. She laughed, either at him or me, and beckoned him in.
***
Armed with The Diva’s consent, I made my way to The Taliban Man’s dressing room. It was strewn with clothes, shoes and empty beer bottles and reeked of weed. There was a softness to him in spite of his blackened teeth and his rough exterior that I could not place. Perhaps it was a look in his eyes, or his long fingers, which on the guitar’s neck were more like a spider’s eight legs?
‘Hey man, make it quick — I got some business to take care of,’ he said, nodding at a joint in hand.
‘Your stage name, The Taliban Man, what about it?’ I asked him. He did not answer but gestured to his joint like he was saying, Get on with the question. He started to say something, but I could not make out the words until I realised he was rapping, tapping the back of the guitar to keep the beat:
I am The Taliban Man,
The Rock Man, The Caliban Man against
Which all breaks like an IED against the people,
The drone missile droning on until it hits me and
Ricochets a million miles away from home
I am The Caliban Man, bullets turn into water
Once they hit me. The missile hit the ground
Trying to drill oil but the only drilling done
Be of the people’s pain and more pain,
They will drone us to death these Obamas
I am The Caliban Man and my name is your
Bane!
He finished, did a solo lead that followed echoes of his guitar rhythm before turning his back on me to re-light his joint. I knew it then, even though it was just a fleeting thought — what I had was not envy; it was jealousy. I was a journalist who wanted to be his source, to have his light and heavy coolness.
‘What do you think?’ he asked.
‘I like The Caliban Man bit, but it sounds like it needs a little more work.’ I spoke bluntly, thanks no doubt to The Diva’s wine.
He turned around so that he was facing me.
‘Yeah, I like you — just playing around with it. Now tell The Taliban Man what you want and get the fuck out of here!’ he said.
I explained; he agreed.
‘Hey man, you wanna get high?’ he asked as I turned to leave.
‘No, man, I am okay — the wine, Tuskers and vodka…. But can I ask you a question? Why did you help Miriam?’
‘That was not help. Help is when you offer someone something. You dig? You sure about getting high, though? It will be fun: me, you, music, ideas flowing like shit, a few girls… Kenyan?’ He was now pouring a mountain of cocaine on the back of his guitar.
‘Have to head back home,’ I said, making my way out of the dressing room.
‘Well, I am gonna get high then and do my thing,’ he said with a laugh.
He had, or at least his façade had, an easiness that I liked. What a guy! I mean, how cool can one human being get?
***
The Corporal was dressed in military fatigues, as if the man on stage had been the performer and this was who he was. Despite the small size of the room, he had a small portable charcoal stove burning some strong incense. He asked me to sit down. I gave him my business card and explained, and when I was done, he looked at me, sizing me up. He had a bottle of Jameson whisky, thanks to the house, and he poured me a glassful into a paper cup that felt flimsy in my hands.
I did my spiel, easier this time around because I had two of them in the bag.
‘I have one question for you — just for you, my friend. How are you going to write about something you don’t understand?’ he asked in a tone that was neither aggressive nor dismissive, as though he genuinely wanted to know.
‘You mean Amharic?’ I asked him.
‘I mean, eh….’ Unable to find the words he wanted, he simply tapped his chest.
‘The heart of the Tizita?’ I suggested, and he nodded in agreement.
‘If you fall in love, you fall in love — everything else happens later, good or bad.’ I pressed on.
He thought for a minute. He picked up the masenko and handed it to me. I felt like my hands were made out of stone.
‘What can you do? Can you play your lover?’ he asked.
I handed it back to him. He nodded in the direction of a guitar. ‘That lover — you play?’
‘I cannot play. I write,’ I said. ‘It’s what I do.’ I handed him my pen and notebook — it seemed like the right thing to do.
‘You, what can you do with this?’ I asked him.
‘Not same.’ I could tell he wanted to burst out laughing, but he held it in for an amused look.
‘I mean, write me a story I want to read,’ I explained.
‘For a rubbish paper? Anyone can do that,’ he said dismissively.
‘You are wrong — to tell a good, solid lie is not easy,’ I said to him.
The Diva intrigued me, and I wanted to get to know her story; The Taliban Man I wanted to hang out with. With The Corporal, I wanted to listen — it was something else, like getting fucked up with my grandfather that I never knew.
‘No lies for me — I want the truth,’ he said.
I flopped more deeply into my stool and raised my glass.
‘A good story, like a good song, is always true — your daily newspaper contains more lies than The National Inquisitor. My story will have your truth, that I can promise you, and that truth will be read by over a million people,’ I pleaded my case.
‘I am sorry if this sounds like a…job interview — but why you? I mean you….’ He looked at my business card again and jabbed a finger in my direction. ‘John Thandi Manfredi?’
‘Well, I have an MA in journalism from Boston University….’
‘Yes, but you…why?’ he prodded.
This was dangerous ground. I remembered once reading how Muhammad Ali would turn the tables and the journalist would end up revealing more about themselves than Ali. I sighed, feeling very tired and drunk.
‘I am looking for something. I do not know. Okay? I am looking for something — it’s somewhere in the Tizita. I am looking for love lost or found, or both…. My late grandfather and grandmother — I just do not know.’
‘This story about me, the others, Tizita — is you? About you, I mean?’ he asked, jabbing into my chest — he might as well have gone and pulled my ear as Miriam had done.
He started laughing, a deep, uninhibited laughter, which I was sure everyone at the ABC could hear. I put my paper cup, now half full of Jameson, on the ground and stood up to leave, feeling somewhere between humiliated and lost. I got to the door and turned around to angrily, or rather, sullenly, tell him to fuck off.
‘What first?’ he asked.
I was confused.
‘I mean, for your story, what first?’
I started laughing, feeling like I had behaved like a spoilt journalist, more like Miriam’s spoilt child, really.
‘We drink first,’ I said, finally finding my footing.
And so he and I sat in that makeshift dressing room, talking about the best way of telling the Tizita story. Inevitably, we came to The Diva’s request — I had to go to Ethiopia. The Diva and The Taliban Man could, for lack of a better word, philosophise in English, but for The Corporal, even though he laughed it off when I suggested it, to dig deep into the Tizita as he lived it, as I needed him to, I would probably need a translator.
‘Tizita — even God, every god — speak Tizita,’ he had said.
8
‘Love and God — they are the same thing, no?’
I returned from The Corporal to find Miriam still at the bar looking like she had never been up on that stage. And so I followed her lead and ordered my two beers, not sure how I would survive them, and stood by the counter and surveyed my fellow Tizita listeners all in different stages of extreme drunkenness.
‘Jesus, go ahead and ask, and I will say yes,’ Miriam finally said.
‘Babe, so you sing?’ I asked her, feeling my question was the understatement of the year.
‘Try again,’ she said.
‘I mean…I feel bad. I’ve
known you for a long time, but I did not know you could move…sing…the world,’ I said.
‘Much better,’ she said.
She looked in the direction of Mr. Selassie. He was still holding court, so she pulled a bottle of Black Label Scotch from the top shelf and poured both of us two shots.
‘Fuck. I will never get out of this club alive,’ I said, as I toasted to her.
‘As my people used to say, no one gets out of this world alive,’ she laughed.
Miriam, in some ways, always made me feel young. She somehow made me conscious of how little I knew and how little I had done with my life, like my older conscience. Like me a few or many years from now, talking to a younger me.
‘I know why I am here — in this place. But you, why are you here?’ Miriam my bartender liked to ask me late into a drinking night. Coming from the epicentre of Kenyan wealth and privilege, I must have appeared to her to be spoilt, a trust fund baby just whiling away time at a tabloid.
It was not just her; my family was connected enough to get me a job at one of the major newspapers owned by His Highness the Aga Khan and could never understand why I was throwing away my life working at The National Inquisitor. Especially my mother, a politician who, at some point in the ever-revolving doors of who was in and out with the dictatorship, had been the minister of information, then a minister of something more obscure, then less obscure. Each of her appointments found the whole family at the State House with a small sack of money (collected from the church and other functions in the spirit of harambee), which we would give over to the dictator. Without fail, he in turn would give us sweets, Big G’s, Tropical and Orbit and some cookies with orange juice before the doors were closed and the adults conversed.
My father was a retired criminal lawyer whose client list grew in tandem with my mother’s rise up the shaky political ladder. When democracy came calling in the early 2000s, they were out in the cold, but they had made enough money to ensure we could live comfortably for several generations. They were not the kind to brag about their wealth by living in a mansion manned by servants dressed in colonial era outfits, as I saw time after time in rich homes. They owned a four-bedroom ranch house in Nakuru, two cars, a Datsun Pickup and a Pajero, and a farm in which they grew flowers, mostly carnations, for export. Not opulent, considering what we could easily afford.
Unbury Our Dead with Song Page 4
