Unbury Our Dead with Song

by Mukoma Wa Ngugi

  And that was when I heard it, his singing at the end of what he knew, his singing so that he would not get overwhelmed by the knowledge of what he did not know. It was, in its own way, a vulnerability that had taken control. Was he questioning, reaching out to God or to love or to death? If you could sing from the point where you could see something, something so real you know is there and yet unknowable, would you not sound like The Taliban Man? And if you could sustain that over a whole song, would that be a mastery of how to speak about that which you cannot really know? Listening to The Taliban Man, I sensed death, and I sensed life, and I was okay with either. I thought The Taliban Man would win — his Tizita was life and the fear and the love of what would come next. A young man singing into a future that he and all of us could only touch with our fingertips, constantly moving forward, out of reach. He was singing the vague awareness of transition.

  Then he jumped into that transition to make sense of it for us. And his sound — he had found it — I had to tease it out, and perhaps it was lost on the crowd, but it was there, and it was getting bolder and bolder — and it was mine to hear. He was thumbing the bass string so that it suggested the familiar Tizita bass as he was picking the strings; his left was picking them too, hammering down on them and picking them, his right hand picking, his left hammering and bending. It was as if he was playing the krar, only the guitar rounded off the notes in a way the krar could not. The sound that came out was somewhere between Malian blues and Lingala, and yet it was Ethiopian. He had found the boldness of hip-hop and the vulnerability of the blues. There was no mimicry — he tapped into the river of all sound; and all sound, like all languages, speak in notes and meter. These were his languages. He had found his sound — Ethiopia, Africa and the world would be hearing of him soon, I thought.

  As he was walking off the stage, I suddenly glimpsed an old man, guitar slung over his shoulder like it was a shovel — like he had quickly shape-shifted before reverting back to The Taliban Man. Is this what The Diva had seen and heard in him?

  I texted Maaza, I think your brother has found it. He will take it home tonight.

  She texted right back, Patience, young grasshopper!

  I was sure of one thing, I would regret the rest of my life because I would never see the kind of beauty this night was promising. No one can be that lucky.

  Miriam

  Miriam playing the sax? Impossible! And yet…I was sitting close enough to hear the metallic tapping of the keys and an intensely painful staccato of wails — high and then so low that I could hear her reaching deep down enough to hold the devil’s hand. Who was she missing? Her sister or the corporals? Her aunt?

  Miriam on the saxophone, her bony chest in a red silk slip heaving rapidly — I was afraid she was going to die on stage. Exhausted, she put the sax down and laughed into the mic as if to say, See what I could do in my younger days? As beautiful as it was, I was relieved when she picked up the krar as we cheered her on.

  Listening to her and the krar, it struck me — what if all along I had it wrong? What if the singer was not trying to outshine the guitar, the piano, the strings or the krar? That it was in fact the other way around, and it was the instrument in competition with the human voice? It was the instruments trying to match the human voice, and that bravado we hear in solos was their attempt at taking centre stage? Miriam’s voice was showing the krar its limitations, and rather than out-sing it, she was finding harmony with it, and then leading it along.

  Why did we create the guitar, the masenko, the saxophone and the krar? To take meaning, words out of sound, I thought. The human voice matters to us only to the extent it says or sings words. And even when we cannot hear or understand the words, we still find comfort in that in there is some decipherable meaning, if only we spoke the language. We wanted the human voice to do the work of meaning, so we invented the musical instruments to take the place of the human voice as a musical instrument — to be sound. And all along we have been trying to answer the question, what is sound? The instruments can create sound, but they cannot tell us what it is.

  Listening to the Tizita in a language I did not speak or understand, I could hear Miriam’s voice as an instrument doing the beautiful work of voice and instrument. I could hear the human voice as an instrument in concert with other instruments, in love and at war, all at the same time. This tension was what broke Miriam’s voice into several sounds, guttural and refined, coarse, rough, unsure, human and disembodied, vulnerable to imperfection and yet able to soar like the saxophone she had been playing. To hear Miriam’s voice as sound and instrument was to hear the human voice as God intended it — something to always remind us that we are human beings to each other; our voices were not meant to order executions and bombings, wars and genocides. The original sound, the sound of a human voice, is a reminder of the love that binds us, as death awaits us all in the end anyway. Language as sound is the inheritance each generation passes on to the next, from Miriam to The Diva to The Taliban Man.

  Every now and then Miriam would challenge the krar, and they would both climb up a mountain, and when the krar tiredly started lagging behind, she would wait, impatiently — a sweet, deep anticipation that became tension would fill the room. That tension, that is the krar’s gift to the singer who does not try to out-sing it; the krar trains the singer to find and create tension. If the krar’s sound was a straight line, train tracks with missing rails every few meters, Miriam’s voice was making a million tiny waves along, underneath and above them.

  What Miriam was telling us, like James Baldwin had, was that we live in our times; we cannot live outside of them, but she was adding that we can dance just ever so slightly above this finite rhythm that is our lives. That tension — it was like peering into the inside of a grenade.

  Looking at Miriam, I wondered how she could get by on stage with so little movement, subtle movements that seemed to magnify her voice, make her frail body seem stronger, subtle little movements that seemed to send a wave, another wave and another one, each amplifying the music separating each instrument from the other, and her voice somewhere — her body, like the body of a guitar, part of an instrument. Everything about her, literally everything about her while she was on stage, was about sound and music.

  And she was singing using a language, with words — but each word was a burst of wind, riding on the repetitiveness of the krar, sometimes wrapping itself around the bass string, sometimes tapping alongside the beat — and then just like that, she was gone. And I followed the krar into her world. There, I too was just sound, awkwardly tall and wordy in speech, I was sound that could not wrap around the beats and her voice. I jumped in and let myself fall, no safety net, nothing — and she caught me. I was falling, and I held on to her voice. I heard her teaching me how to listen, not just listening to learn, but to be one with other people — and the whole ABC vibrated along, our hands held together by the Tizita, our feet dipped in a common pool of tears, our happiness all around us.

  She was done. She was met with a stunned silence, but when it broke into applause, it threatened to tear down the ABC. I went to the stage to help her down.

  ‘You did bring them back,’ I said to her, remembering what she had told me at the wedding.

  ‘Thanks, babe,’ was all she said in reply.

  The Corporal

  On stage, The Corporal was sitting on a three-legged stool, wearing a striped black jacket on top of a dirty brownish shirt that was once white, a cheap red tie, the legs of his blue pants pulled up to his ankles to reveal blue striped socks; his chin lay on hands resting on the masenko, a tired but calm face, almost hidden by a feathered fedora. If it were not for the way he was dressed, he would have looked like any worker on a farm, leaning tiredly on a hoe to rest, or a soldier resting his arm on the barrel of an AK-47. There was something about the way he sat there that told me music was a necessary chore for him, work he did in spite of himself.

  I rushed over to Mr. Selassie and blurted, ‘You have t
o tell me….’

  ‘Tell me?’ he asked.

  ‘I mean, translate — words,’ I corrected myself.

  He thought for a moment. ‘Only for you, Doc. You have earned it,’ he said with his laugh. He might have meant that my earlier doctored piece had brought in a larger crowd, or I had been working hard on the Tizita. Either way, I did not care. What I cared about was whether he would dare do a simultaneous translation. My plan was to get the raw stuff from him and work on it later.

  ‘He says he is going to sing a new Tizita; in English, it means, life in a life.’ And so, The Corporal went to work, with Mr. Selassie translating as I took notes and recorded. For the title, I wrote down “Life within a Life”; later, it would become “Two Lives in One.” But Mr. Selassie’s spontaneous translation and the spirit of the night would be the keys that mattered.

  My voice, my tongue, my memory, my whole being

  I find myself dropping like a stone weighed by the moss

  It has gathered, collected as I rolled through life faster

  Than a bullet, Tizita, Tizita, Tizita, Tizita, Tizita

  Tizita, how will I caress my lover with these hands

  That killed her brother, or sister or father

  Or mother, Tizita, Tizita, Tizita,

  His was an interesting style of singing the Tizita, ending each line with such a smooth finality that it sounded like an experienced hand with a machete cutting through sugar cane. And yet, the words of his Tizita were asking questions of his life and our lives.

  Oh, Tizita — I should know, because I once went to war

  To find myself, but what I found I cannot reconcile

  With what I wanted to remember, a time when

  We were one, wading deep in rivers of love,

  In the war I waded deep in another kind

  Of love with a name I cannot say

  He bowed the masenko long and hard; I could feel the weight of whatever it was he could not say. As he pulled back the bow, there was a collective gasp of awe at this sound that was both devil and god, that threatened to swallow them both into this lone human’s masenko, who out of sound wanted to create light.

  I invoke you, Tizita, I beg/plead/kneel down

  To take my memories so I can wake up tomorrow/day after

  Back/in past of/ in time in a future where we have not learnt

  The beautiful art of war, Tizita, oh, Tizita, Tizita

  Tizita, how will I caress my lover with these hands

  That killed her brother, or sister or father

  Or mother, Tizita, Tizita, Tizita,

  The masenko emphasised. At this point, especially with Mr. Selassie’s voice breaking as he translated as if he could not do it fast enough, I was worried about what would follow next.

  I do not want this love you have found for me

  I do not want this love I have found in me,

  Tizita, Tizita, oh, Tizita

  Let me go back and die in that battlefield

  A thousand times

  Let me sink like a stone weighed down by the moss

  It has gathered, deep down into the Nile

  He was no longer singing, and his masenko had gone quiet. He spoke the words, as if a poem that still wanted to be sung.

  Oh, Tizita — will I find warmth in the cold waters of the Nile?

  Oh, Tizita, will I find light in the dark cold waters of my sins?

  Tizita, Tizita, do not come with, here, even though we cannot

  Must we just part ways, we have….

  He stopped, ended his performance abruptly, his head bowed down. ‘I am very sorry. The Tizita is not to be so raw — so fresh, not at all…,’ he said.

  He was done. I had heard of the Tizita described as being like the wind — you can tame it, use it to run your windmills or to set sail, but you could never truly own it.

  To others, the Tizita was like a river, the same but never the same, constantly moving, new and old at the same time — a cliché that was new each time. And you ran the risk of someday being swallowed by something that was constantly in motion. To The Corporal, the Tizita was where he emptied his life, and this time it was heavy, just too fucking heavy.

  Broken, he stopped playing and left the stage. We were not sure what to do, and we looked at each other for signs — is it okay to cry, or laugh? We settled on he tried. Only a man can try that hard; sometimes to try is to win and so on, we said to each other with our eyes.

  Mr. Selassie rushed to the stage and announced The Diva.

  The Diva/Kidane

  What was The Diva going to do? Would she just glide along her glittery image before going back home, a lesser musician perhaps, but one who had not failed, at the very least? Or would she perform as Kidane? Would it matter if the truth of the Tizita was told by either? I did not have long to wait.

  It was Kidane walking towards the stage, her hair cropped short; no long, looping ivory earrings; no long dress studded with diamonds (fake or real) drooping over her shoulders — just her in simple white Bata sneakers, wrapped in a shuka, the single sheet of sunflower-patterned wrap with an embroidered Kiswahili proverb: ‘Akili ni nywele, kila mtu ana zake.’ I was not sure what to make of the proverb — that a brain is like hair, every human being has theirs — in this setting, but I imagined if she could have walked on stage naked, she would have. Her understated look had the men and women in the ABC talking in animated buzzing sounds.

  Mustafa was behind her, but if you did not know him, you could not tell he was there to protect her. He was dressed down, like any overly branded 40-year-old American still hanging on to his youth: a 49ers football jersey, jeans, white Jordan Nikes and a Red Sox cap put on backwards.

  Kidane walked over to the keyboard piano, bowed ever so lightly, waved to us, then sat down. She made some adjustments, took a deep breath, lifted her hands up and plunged in. Only it was not a plunge, it was like a long plaintive wail. She had set the keyboard to a church organ sound, and the wail, which was getting higher and higher, was being pulled back by the trembling black keys that gave a cascading bass line until she found a place for them to be in contentious harmony. And the way she found it was by throwing her voice at the overpowering church organ. And then she guided her voice in and out until she found a safe flight path through the turbulence of a church organ at war with itself.

  She started humming along. She had so much control of her voice that it sounded like it was gushing out of a water faucet, from torrent to a steady pour to trickles to droplets, sometimes a mixture of torrent and droplet, or trickle and torrent. Then it hit me, her voice was like the sound pushed out of an accordion — pulled and squeezed, sweetness and bitterness, longing and hope, hope and hopelessness, longing and death, longing and life, longing and then the echoes of a stopped heartbeat.

  Her voice always filling space like the church organ — a sound bigger than itself. To put it another way, imagine the sound of the proverbial bird that flies with the waves of a turbulent ocean — and the sand bed and the full moon that gives it its ebb and flow — imagine that bird singing inside, within and above the roaring ocean. That was what Kidane was able to do, her Tizita the bird working steadily, sometimes faltering, sometimes daring, through the storm created by the organ.

  ‘By the way, this is a brand new Tizita,’ she whispered into the microphone. We dug deeper into a silence that was the loudest applause I had ever heard. Kidane continued fanning the organ into sound.

  She looked over at where The Taliban Man was sitting, drink in hand, looking cool as fuck. Their eyes locked; he dropped his drink on the table and half ran to the stage. Once settled in, he started something slow and intricate on the krar. She smiled at him but shook her head no. He tried something else — a classical Tizita on a clean, muted guitar — she shook her head no again. He started another tune, plucking at the bass and picking the higher strings, like the sound of different clocks striking midday at the same time, different yet the same. She threw her head back and laughed.
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  They had something. Was this how she was going to bring him in from the cold?

  The Taliban Man jammed solo over her organ for a while before beckoning the broken Corporal, and he rushed to the stage armed with his masenko. He did not waste any time — he kept a steady, urgent beat, so that it sounded like the devil was chanting behind Kidane’s organ. God and the devil duelling through sound as he chanted a devil’s prayer, and Kidane stretched the sound of the organ.

  The piano’s many voices are within the multiple keys, within the instrument itself. The krar or the masenko — the instrument knows its weakness, understands it and does not try to mask it. It thrives to the extent it makes the listener do its work — emotion has an infinite number of notes and strings, and a krar or masenko musician is as good as they can hit the notes within the listener; that is the genius of simplicity. Classical music, if you listen hard enough, works with that core, which it then masks with the orchestra; the krar and the masenko have no masks, save for the one the listeners, to their loss, might choose to wear.

  Imagine jazz without improvisation, and yet it was demanded of it that it convey the same sense of adventure, the same intensity, like crying without tears, laughing without sound; what if it was demanded that the most intense of feelings be contained within a single phrase that never rose to the skies, that a whole poem be expressed in a syllable, one sound — what would that do to your voice and your instinct to celebrate by excess? If all you would do within this form was to contain your voice, and your voice was rebelling against the constraint because all you wanted was to break out, it would be like driving a sports car using the first gear, the engine pushing for speed and yet held back by something that was part of it. It would destroy it. Unless the Tizita musician learns how to contain that tension of a form that holds back flight…implosion, the grenade turned on itself — I now knew that was what had happened with The Corporal’s failed new Tizita.