Whenever I hear a song with a guy laying down a deep and rough bass rhyme while girls sing a liltingly melodic background, I remember the hits of Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens (some of the best music ever made, IMHO). The similarities are very striking. Thus, I was not surprised to read that Zola’s success is bringing some to realize that “American” forms of music are rarely an invention at all, but rather an evolutionary step:
“Maybe hip hop does not come from the States,� Zola proposes. “Rhyming over a beat? Zulus and Xhosas have been doing that for a long, long time.� If that is indeed the case, then kwaito has thrown hip hop just about the most raucous homecoming bash imaginable.
And this translation shows a bit of humor in the darkness of poverty and violence, if I’m reading it correctly:
You need to be fluent in tsotsitaal, the street slang of South Africa, to understand so much as a bar, but you quickly get the gist. Like the cratered streets he grew up on, Zola’s music is littered with the scree, broken glass, spent bullet casings and other detritus of recent township wars. The music is a collection of sonic snapshots taken under fire. Umdlwembe sets the tone:
Always looking for more booze
When we leave the only people left standing will be widows
Real men die and left will be the gangsters
The gangsters will die and leave the beers
Many, many years ago when I was twenty-three,
I got married to a widow who was pretty as could be.
This widow had a grownup daughter
Who had hair of red.
My father fell in love with her,
And soon the two were wed.
This made my dad my son-in-law
And changed my very life.
My daughter was my mother,
For she was my father’s wife.
To complicate the matters worse,
Although it brought me joy,
I soon became the father
Of a bouncing baby boy.
My little baby then became
A brother-in-law to dad.
And so became my uncle,
Though it made me very sad.
For if he was my uncle,
Then that also made him brother
To the widow’s grownup daughter
Who, of course, was my stepmother.
Father’s wife then had a son,
Who kept them on the run.
And he became my grandson,
For he was my daughter’s son.
My wife is now my mother’s mother
And it makes me blue.
Because, although she is my wife,
She’s my grandmother, too.
If my wife is my grandmother,
Then I am her grandchild.
And every time I think of it,
It simply drives me wild.
For now I have become
The strangest case you ever saw.
As the husband of my grandmother,
I am my own grandpa!
According to an interview with poet Michael Longley, “writing poetry gives him a better buzz than sex or booze”:
If you have nothing to say don’t force it. The trouble is, you do acquire a lot of skills over the years. It is possible without knowing it to produce forgeries. It is important not to do that. It is better to remain silent rather than fool yourself and others for a while by producing forgeries.
One of the problems is repeating yourself. That doesn’t necessarily mean with regards to subject matter. It is more doing the same trick, as it were, producing the same performance.
Is he talking about poetry or sex? Can’t tell. It seems he prefers the cerebral rush to the carnal, although he does admit to finding shortcuts, thanks to technology that allows him to repeat someone else’s performance:
I get as much pleasure out of music as poetry but I can’t do anything musical except put in the CD!
A portrait of the extraordinary (and ordinary) lives of a whole cross-section of Iraqi women: a sexy painter, a radical Communist, doctors, exiles, wives and lovers. This work delves into the many conflicting aspects of what it means to be a woman in the age-old war zone that is Iraq. An unusually timely meditation on the ancient, the modern and the feminine in a country overshadowed by war.
I noted that the star of the show is, in fact, of Iraqi-American decent:
Originally from Michigan, Heather divides her time between New York and Los Angeles. Her father is from Iraq and her mother is American.
The reviews all seem to be favorable, like this one:
The birth of this play almost reads like poetry: In 1993, against the backdrop of gargantuan portraits of Saddam Hussein’s oppressive face, Raffo discovered in an art museum a painting of a nude woman against a barren tree. Her research revealed that the free-spirited and notorious artist Layla Attar had recently been killed in a bombing raid. Thus began a journey that brought her further into her homeland, back into the arms of her relatives and ultimately into the lives of the numerous Iraqi woman who form the backbone of the show. Some plays seem to slip out of a playwright; others clunk. The rare, exceptional ones seem to burst out as an intense gut reaction – Raffo’s Nine Parts of Desire is such a play.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995