Fate’s a bitch ain’t it? I mean here we are. Celebrating what the magic realist, essayist, poet – and literary seer of sorts – Ben Okri regards as “probably the first great historic moment with a positive charge in the 21st Century.”
The man you are bound to hear about and from, possibly for the next coming hundred years, eight of which, straight from Capitol Hill, or somewhere about.
And then what happens? That beautiful healer, diva, sizzler Miriam goes and dies on us.
I’m like, what, Mama? Why did they ask you to perform in an anti-Mafia concert in the first place when the Mafia had issued death threats to all performers and attending audience in the South of Italy? Doesn’t matter now.
A person of resolve and artist of extraordinary conviction and passion, you went to Italy, even when you were supposed to have retired by now, and performed to your heart’s – and the audience’s – content even when your life was in danger, Mama.
Look, Mama; you are gone but you are still with us and I know I’m speaking for many when I say, you will still be with us for generations to come.
Yours was a sound straight from humanity, religion and the healers’ hearts.
Yours was a voice somehow trapped between that of a pure, sinless child and a wise, old and experienced soul to whom mere age was just a number. You could have been 5OO years old and living in the mountains, for all I care. And I do.
Your voice conveyed the spirit and message from the world beyond. The world that came before us and which awaits us in the beyond. But also, yours was a voice of those not quite born.
I am not one of those fakes – afraid of telling it up straight when you were able to respond for yourself – who’ll just heap praises now you are no longer here. I cannot lie, claiming that you were my all time favorite, or your entire body of work got my heart pumping, cause it didn’t.
Not all of it, at least. And that’s ok. Show me any artist who can fulfill all of their fans’ and critics’ yearnings.
Sometimes we fans and critics expect too much from artists. Sometimes the impossible.
I know that’s childish. Churlish, even. Too “bad”- as in too beautiful: that’s the emotional pact the artist signs with us, the minute they walk on stage or slam their vocals down in the studio. Too bad. Too unfortunate. This love we extract from you. But you applied for the job, we didn’t.
Same applies to you. I loved you smacks and was even more critical of you. On all those moments of despair and neediness on my part, you fulfilled me to my wildest un-expectations. Like a lot of young black South Africans, I saw you, Hughie, Katse Semenya, Jonas Gwangwa and Letta Mbuli among others, as our true liberators when our leaders were in jail. They tried to silence your voice, but we smuggled and exchanged your cassettes and LPs on the underground in the townships.
Even as I write this, I can hear your teary voice on LPs such as Evening With Harry Belafonte, your live performance at Au Theatres Des Champs Elysees in Paris – which in my head matches Mack The Knife: Ella in Berlin, or better still, Ella Fitzgerald Sings The Cole Porter Songbook!
I can go on and on. Talk about (for me) possibly your most haunted and emotion-demanding pieces, way beyond the level of classics, particularly the Katse Semenya produced album, A Promise.
Often, I would like to fancy myself a blues connoisseur…you understand the topography: Mississipi to Timbuctou. Blind Willie Dixon, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell, Howling Wolf, Bessie Smith, up to Nina Simone, Johnny Cash, Ali Farka Toure, Lobi Traore, night crawlers who could elicit the painful scream of a slide guitar, mimic a lover’s moan, replicate the sounds of blackness that refuses to be defined only by slavery and n’er-do-good hipsters.
And yet, I’d never ever imagined you as a blues torch singer, until that day after my own momma Nomvula got wheeled six feet under, that rainy February day 1991. Too numb to cry, I rushed to a friend’s backyard shack in the village, and buried myself in your songs back to back. The symphonic strains of your wails!
Did I say you weren’t my favourite voice? “Compared To What?” Brothers Les McCain and Eddie Harris would have asked. Better still, “So What?”
There’s A Promise, you comforted me. There’s a city, Gauteng, known for swallowing men and children, never to come back, you told me. But also you cautioned me to Quit It Now. And when the tears rolled down my cheeks, you winked at me: Show Me The Way, My Brother.
But then I had to myself the way first.
The way. . .
Ayi Kwei, Armah where you at…serene Senegal’s seaside?
Oh, you sage you.
The way…Our way.
Many moons later we met. You cooked for me. Told me some of the receipes and crops you threw in your kitchen remix are Congo Kinshasa delicasies, herbs from Kampala and what not…oh, and you said the dish you were concoting for me was your on-and-off friend Nina’s favourite.
Especially those times when she escaped the suffocating beauty of Southern France for the deranged, throbbing blues of Johannesburg, and your company and Mandela, whatever she or you had for him, you just dismissed with a naught eye wink. And I got it Mama. I did.
You motherhenned me, reprimanded me of some misdeed or the other, and of course regaled me with a torrent of intimate tales about a cast of other tortured beauties: Nina, Nakassa, Hughie, Stokely, Coltrane, Aretha, Dolly, about Tsietsi, about your late and only daughter, Bongi.
And then you wept. Gave me a hug. And dished for me.
“Food’s ready boy… come look how thin you are.”
I left dizzier with love. Giddier with the sound of music in my head: Mas Que Nada, I remember. And I felt calmer. Slightly. I wrote the story. You became both upset and ecstatic.
Oh, I remember why:
I’d broken the unwritten African code of respect to adults, especially icons: I’d mentioned that like Billie once or several times tipsied down and splashed face down on stages, the result of hooch and substance abuse, you also had your embarrassing episodes back in the day performing somewhere in West Africa…Dakar, possibly, on the bill marked to celebrate South Africa’s Tenth Anniv of “Democrazy.” [with all nods to Fela]
That made you mad…madder still was that i dared to pose uneasy- best-left-to-wither questions about your intense love and scold relationship with Hughie…the boy you took “Grazin'” to New York way before he could spell the “Jerry Roll Morton” or tell difference of tempo between N’Awlinz and goddamn Gotham.
Back in South Africa half a century later those questions, my probing, really caught you offguard but you were too much of a “Lady” to let it slip…
I would then meet you in Lagos, coupla years after our encounter in your kitchen.
Lay-bloody-gos! Ah, a city on perpetual boil.
You called me around, whiling away time at the airport. Ordered me on your lap.
“Sit!” you mock commanded.
“Tell me, what’s new, what are the young artists doing these days. What sort of music are they creating…you should be the ear…?”
To that I mumbled something. Bit my lip. What exactly is it that I could have told you other than, I love you, Mama?
End.