Relaxin' in Mamallapuram

I’m writing this sitting on the front porch of our hotel villa at the Hotel Sea Breeze. In front of me is a field, dotted with palms and fern trees. Beyond that, barely visible, is a beach sloping down to the Bay of Bengal. Local fishermen use the beach, their boats lining the shore and nets piled on the sand, ready for straightening and mending. The sea is blue and slightly agitated, with flecks of white out to the horizon. A waiter just came up and served me a pot of masala tea. The weather is hot but very breezy, and pleasant in the shade. It’s a lovely afternoon in Mamallapuram.

We got here the day before yesterday after our ship docked in Chennai. Our first location was the Ideal Beach Resort, a fine and expensive place about three kilometers up the road. Initially, I thought it was…ideal. The pool was lovely, and included a little kids’ portion with water descending from three cartoon faces, their pupils widened so that they looked like Indian monsters. There were hammocks spread from palm trees. Our beach was private, guarded from the locals. The bathroom was full of gadgets, from a bidet to a Jacuzzi with rapidly changing lights. But it didn’t take long for us to feel isolated.

We took a taxi into town. I immediately fell in love with Mamallapuram. Its unpaved, dusty streets and rows of little shops with hand-painted signs reminded me very much of West Africa. And when I thought about it, I remembered that the initial merchants in many parts of urban West Africa were…Indians, specifically South Indians. The town was ramshackle and chaotic, with motorcycles beeping and pedestrians dodging, and cows wandering the streets with decorated horns, eating people’s garbage. So we bid the Ideal Beach Resort farewell (prompting endless questions and pleas—we were going to stay for four nights) and found this room at the Sea Breeze. It’s still pretty upscale, considerably more than the Green Woods Resort up the street (where we could have found a room for about 1300 rupees, or about $28 a night), but undeniably cheaper than the Ideal. They served us breakfast—hard-boiled eggs, Indian pancakes and donuts, sambor (I still don’t know what’s in it…), and hot tea. Having tea here is a very pleasant shift from most of the rest of the world, and a full potful every few hours seems remarkably pleasant.

Shopping has also been a treat, if only because of the exchange rate (46 rupees to the dollar). The U.S. dollar may not be doing well against the Euro and the pound, but it is still mighty here. For example, I’m wearing a beautiful green cotton shirt I bought at a cultural center (Dakshina Chitra) on the way into town that cost about $6. Lunch for four people (tuna masala sandwiches, a plate of chicken for the little ones, pineapple slices, hot tea, 2 glasses of milk) went for under $9. Merchandisers are aggressive—especially the little girls who haunt the street selling necklaces for a dollar and hang by your elbow long after you’ve told them you’re not interested. We met a young fellow yesterday as we approached a park that held a number of the local temples (the big tourist attraction in Mamallapuram). He spoke English fluently and introduced himself as a student at a nearby college, where he studied sculpture. He followed us around and explained the nuances of all the sights—the peculiar history of the place (an ancient Hindu kingdom in the 7th century, defeated suddenly in the 9th, leaving a few places conspicuously unfinished), the names of the various deities (Vishnu, Krishna, Ganesha, Siva) and their notable characteristics (e.g., one spot showed the ten different incarnations of Vishnu—including the last one, which has yet to happen; when it does, “the world is finished”). As we were walking, we were shadowed at every step by two gentlemen with merchandise. One fellow had a granite ball, covered with deities and elephants, to be held in the hand to ease tension. (It also looks like a paperweight.) He offered it to me for 1200 rupees. I made a counter offer of 300 rupees. By the end of our walk, when he seemed fairly desperate, I bought it for 400 rupees—and assumed that he still got a decent profit. We then went to our friend’s studio, where he pressed us to buy a few items. The place, he said, was a studio for fifteen art students, normally closed to the public, with profits shared equally. He began pressuring me intensely. No, he wouldn’t be here tomorrow, because Sunday was when the students went eight kilometers away to pick up their stone. We asked for his phone number, but no, we couldn’t contact him; if I didn’t have enough money, we needed to go to the ATM now—he’d take us there. Nancy began to feel that the story was probably fiction—too much salesman, not enough artist. (She also didn’t like the Krishna statue I was interested in, and I trust her taste.) The more I tried to disengage, the more intent he became. We finally had to run, literally, away from him—which was too bad, because I would have liked to have given him a few hundred rupees for our unexpected guided tour.

Other places have been more pleasant, though. The cultural center, as I indicated, was one such place: we bought fabric, clothes, and wonderful kids’ toys for a few dollars. Last night, after I had had two Kingfisher beers (each 650 ml, or the equivalent of two beers each), we bought some T-shirts, figurines, and handbags. We’re not hard bargainers, at least not in this economic climate: $5 for a t-shirt sounds good to us. So after looking hard and finding nothing worthwhile (or affordable) in South Africa and Mauritius, we’re finally getting some serious shopping done. The food is good. No particular place stands out, but it’s generally well-spiced and plentiful.


Reflecting back on India: I now wonder why I had such trepidations coming in. I had expected it to be a nightmare—the kind of place that would be so congested and crowded that I would lose my twins in the mass. That’s partly why we immediately retreated to Mamallapuram; and to some extent, we’ve since heard from people who saw the Ganges, or the Taj Mahal, and feel that we’ve missed the opportunity for some real adventure. But it was a sensible place to stay, and there’s something to be said about getting to know one place well before moving on.

The obvious reason why I enjoyed India: I’ve been devoted to certain aspects of Indian culture for many years. I mean yoga, which I’ve been practicing daily (at least in theory) since my college years. It’s not the physical aspects of yoga, but its spiritual aspects, that count. I was dealing with a nation inured to its poverty, but inclined to view their world as something that can be overcome with spiritual discipline. “Simple life and high thoughts,” said a yoga export in a pre-port presentation on the ship. “Not high life and simple thoughts. That way lies too many problems.” True dat.

Lost in South Africa

South Africa is a confusing, bewildering place. After spending nearly a week there, I hardly know what to think of it.
After the country’s recent history, it’s hard not to get caught up in the rhetoric of revival. I had my Global Music class watch some of Paul Simon’s Graceland concert, held in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1987—because, of course, it could not have been held in South Africa, the evil apartheid regime. Watching that video, it seems impossible that political freedom could ever come for millions of black people—certainly not without the tumultuous violence of revolution. Yet we know what happened. Three years later, in 1990, Nelson Mandela was freed. In 1994, he was elected president. Now his face is everywhere as the elder statesman of South Africa, and his name graces stately pavilions.
Yet, at the same time, little has changed. As a few locals confirmed, apartheid has been abolished, and black people can go anywhere—anywhere, that is, that they can afford. Which is to say that the townships still exist. Nancy visited one on her Operation Hunger trip, and saw worse urban poverty than she had ever seen before. It was so sad, she said, that it was embarrassing to take photographs of the decayed housing and the permanently starved children. Meanwhile, white privilege also exists. We spent one afternoon at Kirstenbosch Gardens, located just on the other side of Table Mountain. It’s a beautiful botanical preserve, built out of the landholdings of Cecil Rhodes (one of the paths was the ride to his house). Black people can go, but few do. It was one of the loveliest spots I’ve ever seen—breathtaking vistas, open fields backed by jutting mountains. The meal we had the restaurant there was wonderful, and fairly cheap. We had to wonder: just what allowed this kind of beauty to exist here? Was it gold, or diamonds? Was it European “genius”? How to compare this Eden with the dystopic reality of the Cape Town townships, one of which (Mannenberg) was not much more than about five miles away?
I don’t know what to make of it. The music scene is fascinating, especially the intersection of African music with jazz. Before coming here, I basically knew Abdullah Ibrahim (or Dollar Brand), the pianist/composer who was lifted from obscurity by Duke Ellington in the 1960s. On the way here, I found out more about the jazz scene—how it developed and flourished in the 1950s, only to be dismantled once the new apartheid government saw the dangers of cultural overlap and ordered Sophiatown, the mixed-race city near Johannesburg, demolished. Soweto was built on its ruins.
For SAS, I was the trip leader for the “jazz safari,” run by Coffee Beans, a local tour group. Our guide, Jacques Jacobsz, took us to the house of one of the elder figures on the scene, saxophonist Robbie Jansen. It wasn’t easy to find: s it turned out, Jansen had moved into a new house only last week. We actually ran into Jansen himself, who was returning from a gig and pointed us down the street. Jansen is about 70+ years old, and suffered a serious stroke about four years ago—so serious that he was at one point left for dead. He now carries with him a portable respirator, which gives him enough air to speak and breath—and still play alto saxophone with as much passion and intensity as one could desire. We gathered in his living room, drank his beer and ate his snacks (cheese, chips, broccoli), and listened to him play duets with a shy-looking fellow on keyboard. At some point the conversation moved to Abdullah Ibrahim. Jansen has played with him (he appears on the famous Mannenberg album), and after Nancy and I told him that we had married to Ibrahim’s music, he played “The Wedding” for us. We held hands until it was finished. A sweet, private moment.
We then went to the house of a younger musician. Hilton Schilder comes from a rich family of musicians: his family history includes Dutch gypsies as well as Khosas. He’s the kind of gifted person who can elicit sound from virtually any sound source available. Most of the time he’s a pianist. Yet he greeted us with the sound of a musical bow. You couldn’t expect to hear such delicate sounds on a recording, but it enchanted the small group of people gathered in his home. He also played guitar, including a virtuoso display of “tapping” of a kind I’d never seen before. Students of mine who heard him the next day said he also played violin. From what I’ve heard on recordings, his musical language fits easily into post-bop playing, but his curiosity pulls him into things like the musical bow that are unusual and clearly African.
Cape Town is, in fact, an area populated primarily by “coloured” people—people of mixed ancestry, including Indian and Asian. Their music draws on an indigenous repertory dating back to the 1700s of Cape Town songs, or “ghomme music” (named after the drum that always accompanied the music). It relies on a simple harmonic repertory that remains at the heart of Cape Town jazz, to say nothing of other kinds of South African pop music. I’m still trying to understand it: it clearly indulges in European cadences (the I6/4-V-I progression), but is used in an African context as a kind of time-line pattern. The big accent comes on I6/4—a strong tonic chord, in a fat voicing (with the fourth on the bottom). But it is also a chord that is forced in movement—a dissonance that must resolve to V (and then to I). To use this progression intelligently requires balancing out these forces
Cape Town is a strong jazz city. The local club at the V&A Waterfront (Victoria and Alfred), the Green Dolphin, offers jazz every night (or “eight nights a week,” as a sign proclaims). Jazz at the Dolphin is American-style; but elsewhere, it blends into what Jansen called “folk music.” It is South African music with a jazz flavoring, with the saxophone the prominent instrument.
Our last day in South Africa involved a tour that forced us to look at apartheid. We were supposed to go to Robben Island, where Mandela and other ANC men were held for decades; but unfortunately, the ocean was too rough for the barge to travel out into the bay. But we did travel to District Six. This was a neighborhood, not too far from the center of the city, inhabited by Muslim and other Coloured people in a chaotic but lively pattern of settlement. In the 1960s, it was designated as a “white” area. People were told to leave. Some did. Others refused. The latter watched bulldozers destroy their homes, furnishings and all. All but a few landmarks (mostly churches) were cleared.
We had driven in this area the other night, coming back from a jazz benefit at Swingers, held to defray the medical expenses of saxophonist Winston Mankunku. The cab driver was the friend of a waitress at Swingers. To our surprise, it turned out that his father and Abdullah Ibrahim were close childhood friends—in fact, according to him, Abdullah was in town for a few days to provide acupuncture for his father. He drove us into District Six, stopping at a Moravian church that now sits by itself in the midst of empty fields. The only new thing that has been built in District Six is a college, originally intended for white students of engineering. The rest was blocked by court battles; and even after apartheid was dismantled, there are still legal issues about who the land actually belongs to.
Our tour stopped at the District Six museum. Clearly, this is an issue that cuts deep into the hearts of many people in Cape Town. Families that had lived there for decades, even centuries, were dislocated into townships on the other side of Table Mountain. The empty fields—gashes on the city’s landscape—are testimony to the ravages wreaked on South Africa as a whole. Nor has the post-apartheid era solved these problems. Our host, a light-colored woman, said that she and others like her had the right now to settle anywhere—anywhere, that is, that they can afford. And of course, few can now leave their township houses. So the city remains frozen where it is.
South Africa still has this flavor. One night, Nancy and I went out to a restaurant that offered a sampling of African cuisines. Nobody orders anything: instead, they bring by a continuous array of dishes from across the continent. It was entertaining, although offering less than promised. (We were told that we could eat as much as we wanted; but if you told them you liked one particular dish and wanted more, they looked at you as if you were a huge nuisance. Once they passed through their medley of dishes, that was it.) Everyone in the restaurant was European. All the staff was African. At one point, the waitresses and cooks came out and started singing, accompanied by a drum. It was pleasant, but it reeked of the old South Africa—our “happy natives,” and all that. And nothing contradicts it now: who, among the black South Africans, can afford to spend $20-25 a head on a meal like this? There are still stores on Long Street that offer beautiful African artifacts at exceptionally high prices. Again, the only people visiting them are Europeans.
And yet, and yet: it is a beautiful place. The view from the top of Table Mountain (we took the funicular) was spectacular. The Mediterranean climate is outstanding. Somehow, it is a land blessed by God. All the more tragic, then, that it must live with the ghosts of hundreds of years of oppression.

Help me, help me.....

It’s been a long week at sea.
We began with the Neptune Ceremony—a bit of silliness only loosely associated with our crossing the equator. The ceremony began on our first day at sea after Ghana, at 9 a.m. (more than fourteen hours before we actually entered the Southern Hemisphere). King Neptune, it was alleged, was furious that so many of us were still “polliwogs”—naïfs who had never been across the equator by sea and who had failed to pay tribute to his majesty. Neptune, of course, was Captain Jeremy Kingston, naked to the waist and ridiculously slathered in green. (I passed him in his resplendent semi-nakedness in the hall outside my room, where he looked suitably grim. I assume playing this role was part of his contract, an unfortunate consequence of his duties.) The ceremony itself was fairly simple, although time-consuming. Those who were to become “shellbacks” had to have a luminescent goo (green or shocking pink) poured over their heads, dunk themselves in the swimming pool, and then stand dripping in line to kiss a fish, held out by one of several “goddesses.” (Mine was held by anthropology professor Wenda Trevathan.) After this, you were knighted by “Dean Bob” (Chapel), whose role as royal chamberlain was marked by a silly straw hat. I put it off for a while—many of the faculty, clearly not playing the game, were standing to the side—but finally decided I’d better get it over with. The pool water by this time was a murky pastel sludge. I didn’t go on with the final phase: the seriously hardcore had their heads shaved. By my age, I reasoned, simply having hair was something not to be messed with. A small percentage of students (and a few adults—including one of the elderly Lifelong Learner women) went through with it, making certain portions of the lunchroom at times look like the Cancer Ward.

A few days later, the water turned wild. We had enjoyed remarkably calm weather up to this point, all across the Atlantic and around the bulge of West Africa; but somewhere south of the Congo our usual side-to-side rocking was irregularly joined with deep, unpredictable bulges. One day at lunch I was on the floor, talking to Celia, who was inconveniently telling me she needed her diaper changed. I looked up and saw my plate slide to the end of the table. It fell off, splattering my dessert and glass of iced tea. Gasps from nearby diners. As I got up to deal with the mess, a countering wave made my wife’s plate slide off the other side. It wasn’t always that bad, but it often was, and you never knew when it was coming. You could see the waves on the deck, but few people were out there—the weather had turned grey and windy. Inside, it was random and disorienting. And it stayed that way for several days.

I was impervious to all this. I had grown accustomed to the side-to-side rocking after the first day at sea, and took even this unpredictable movement in stride. That is, until Wednesday morning. The night before, we had been invited to “dinner with the captain.” About two dozen of us were dressed to the nines, drinking wine in the staffulty lounge before retiring to the Deck Five dining hall for our sumptuous meal. The food was good, and the wine kept coming. I joked with our Staff Captain, Mats Nelson, about his homeland (southern Sweden, which as we both knew was originally Denmark) and felt pretty pleasant staggering across the ship to my room, knowing that with the unstable ship, no one could identify me as drunk from my movements. But the next morning I became sick. I thought it was an aftermath of my inebriation. But in fact, I was sober then. I managed to empty my stomach (pretty thoroughly) over the morning and taught class at noon, much against my will. Perhaps that’s it, I thought. I made myself eat some toast and soup for supper and went to bed.

Over the next day I felt myself recovering, gradually increasing my appetite. But on Friday, I simply didn’t feel like eating. I wasn’t throwing up any more, but everything disgusted me. Once again I taught my Global Music class (this time, forcing myself into a decent presentation of the politics of South African music, relying on Paul Simon’s videotaped 1987 concert). I tried to eat lunch, but found that eating toast and soup just worsened my distaste. It was not just appetite: the whole ship turned foul before my eyes. I spent the afternoon watching “A Dry, White Season,” a well-acted but predictable melodrama about apartheid in South Africa, and by the time I was finished, I was looking at everybody as if they were villains in a drama. The ship’s clinic was closed all day: I had to wait until 4:30 to finally see a doctor. Her diagnosis was disappointing mild: yes, I’d had a virus, but I probably still felt lousy because my electrolytes were down. She prescribed some electrolyte pills ($1 each) and suggested I drink Gatorade. Damn. I thought I had something particularly vile. So I gradually resuscitated myself and felt my stomach slide into place.

Still, my mood has been foul. Part of it is my sentence of “dock time,” which I’m still serving in Cape Town. The weather is sunny and warm, the view of Table Mountain outside the ship is glorious—a huge, greenish monster off the port side—but I still have my three hours to serve. I know I’ll feel better once I get off the boat (when I’m finally in a place where I can call the M.V. Explorer a “boat” if I like), but until then, I’m stuck. I can hardly wait to get into South Africa to find out what it’s like to be on land south of the equator. I’ll report back as soon as I can.

Ghana Time

We’re just about to leave. I’ve just accrued “dock time”—the detention given to anyone who misses the official “on ship” time by more than a second. I was late about five minutes, which earns me three hours I have to stay on board in the next port. But I feel I have the ideal excuse: I was on Ghana Time.
Which means that I was inhabiting Kudzo Dunyo’s world. Kudzo is constantly in motion. His car has 260,000 kilometers on it—some of it from making the trip between Tema and his home village, Dagbamete, but most of it simply spent cruising the streets of Tema. Kudzo’s work involves electrical generators: he supplies and maintains them for numerous businesses. But he is also involved in a garage in town, and does many other things as well. Every time I meet with him, we take off for another endless round of errands.
Take Wednesday, for example. I had thought we were going to spend the day trying to deal with the crisis of dressmaking (too many girls buying fabric and none of them having time to meet with the dressmaker). But we ended up at the garage instead. He said, suddenly, that Kwasi’s “senior brother,” Hunua, was there: he knew because he saw his car. He took me into a side room, where an elderly man sat, clothed in traditional African finery: cloth, cap, and fancy sandals. He looked lost and vaguely bewildered. Kudzo talked to him in Ewe, and finally introduced me. Hunua’s stony face broke into a smile, as he announced that it was his pleasure to meet me. According to Kudzo, Hunua was not only an important elder, but also a national figure: the president of the Ghana association of traditional healers. We talked for a short time before going outside. It was only then that Kudzo explained why Hunua was there: his car (a fancy van parked outside) had failed because of a faulty fuel pump. In short, this small room was a kind of temporary waiting room for his distinguished visitor. Having diagnosed the problem, Kudzo sent someone into town to fetch a replacement. An hour later, the pump arrived and numerous mechanics stood over the engine (in the floor of the cab) until it was installed. All this took precedence over anything else Kudzo may have planned.
We then had to wrestle with Ghanaian bureaucracy. Kudzo is buying an apartment. He’s been living there for several months—long enough to convert one room into an elegant office with a computer. He was near the end of the process by which this sale could be made official. We picked up a small photo: it was the man selling the apartment. Apparently, these photographs were necessary to set up a meeting between the two people (seller and buyer), who would then be interviewed before the sale would be approved. The old man was sick, though; Kudzo went to pick up his wife, but she didn’t want to come today. Kudzo agreed to the next morning—until I reminded him that we had our FDP (Faculty Directed Practice—our ship-approved field trip) that day. So we went to the Tema Development Board, where Kudzo explained his situation to several people. Having the woman come wouldn’t have done any good, as it turned out: she was not the official owner, but simply his wife. To make things work, he would have to give her Power of Attorney. Fine. We had that point settled. But our time was not yet complete. Kudzo has been in Tema all his life, and knows people everywhere. We went around the building saying hello to several of them. One was a senior official on the top floor, in a fancy office (two windows! A refrigerator!). Everywhere we went, I was introduced as a “professor” of music from the University of Virginia, traveling by cruise ship. They nodded their heads, grinned widely, and bid me welcome, asking me again and again how I liked Ghana. All very pleasant, if time-consuming; but this kind of culture requires a great deal of time.

Today we had yet more errands to run—except that I didn’t go out until 4:30, just an hour and a half before on-ship time. I didn’t expect to leave the port gate. I had dropped off fabric with Kudzo that morning and planned only to pick up the shirts and pay the tailor. But back into the car we went. There were more errands: a second-hand refrigerator that Kudzo had to inspect, a shop (the one where we met Hunua) to be closed. I grew nervous. We finally made our way back to Sakura’s shop, where a woman was still working on one of Nancy’s shirts. It took time before I paid him for his work (5 shirts—2 for me, 3 for Nancy), and it took even longer before we had gathered the shirts into a plastic bag. We sped mightily to the gate. No shuttle: so Kudzo found a man driving a car with the proper port permit. This man was wearing a Jerome Bettis jersey—the second bit of Steelers gear I had seen in the past hour, which I took as a good omen. I got to the ship—but five minutes late.

The piece de resistance of Ghana was Thursday, when we took our busload of students out to Dagbamete. The trip didn’t start out smoothly: we were supposed to start at eight, but getting Nancy and the girls in the bus held us up twenty minutes (nothing like the bus leader screwing things up!). Then we had to find Kudzo, who was going to lead the bus there. He wasn’t at the port gate, but was stuck in traffic (probably taking care of a few errands before leaving town). We didn’t really get going until forty-five minutes had passed. The bus went slowly. It was an aging industrial hulk with big noisy gears, drowning out the inadequate, intermittent sound system the tour guide was trying to use. The road was a motorway—a pleasant change from the usual pothole scarred streets of Tema and Accra—but every town we went through had large speed bumps, which had to be spotted and carefully negotiated. As we neared our destination, the roads deteriorated further, to graded unpaved roads to bumpy trails to tiny village streets, barely wide enough for the bus.
By the time we finally pulled into Dagbamete, I was not in a good mood.
But nothing like being in a real village to put a smile on your face. I had been told we would be greeted by a procession—slow Atsiagbekor (the Ewe war dance) to the dance place. And by God, there they were, dressed in purple finery, carrying drums on their heads. Because we had arrived late, the village people decided we would eat first. Our lunch was held in the Kathy Armstrong Lodge—a sizeable building (built by Kwasi and dedicated to his favorite Canadian drummer) that dominated the town square. Inside were pictures of Kwasi in African garb. Seeing his gold-flecked fabric and elaborate caps, my students had assumed he was a prince—not a former food processing factory employee! They enjoyed their lunch, but turned up their noses at my additional course of akple and palm-oil sauce (“too fishy,” said one woman).
The performance was excellent—a young and energetic troupe of drummers and dancers from a nearby village (four miles away, they told me). They performed Adzogbo, a time-honored traditional piece I remembered from my Berkeley years; and Fume-fume, a hand-drum-based piece apparently aimed more at youthful entertainment. Because of my relatively high status, I was pulled away at different times. Kwasi’s wife wanted to show me “my room” (where Nancy and I would stay if we spent the night—obviously, our scheduled departure in the late afternoon did not sit well with many). Later I was told that the elders wanted to “have a word” with me. I didn’t know what they were after, but found out, after some nudging and coughing, that these men were the elected officials of the small district Dagbamete was in, and that they were making a pitch for economic development. I sat while they touted their excellent clay deposits, the superiority of their pineapples and mangoes, and their central location. I finally earned my escape when I noted that I was, alas, not a businessman, but a professor of music who doesn’t know bleep about how to ship mangoes, but that I’d do what I can.
We closed with a drumming and dancing workshop. At my request, they taught my students the basics of Gahu, beginning with the drum parts (twenty students in a circle, each with their own drum. Not much you can do in half an hour, to tell the truth. Those who got the rhythm still struggled over stick technique. The dancing was more successful. They learned how to match certain steps with drum patterns, and began to distinguish the signal from the bewildering variety of sounds the lead drum can make. But after just a few minutes, I had to call a halt. We were already late, and we still had two-and-a-half hours of driving ahead of us. (We didn’t in fact get back for dinner until 8:30.) Next time, we need to spend the night. This group was ready.

Ghana was exhausting, but splendid. All my students—indeed, just about anyone I’ve met—loved the place and want to come back. I do, too.

first day in Ghana

I can’t get out of my mind the images of my trip back from Accra. Frustrated with traffic on the Beach Road, the taxi driver spun onto a more local road, pulling us through an endless string of small neighborhoods, each one celebrating its Tuesday night. As the taxi wove its way past the foot traffic, honking its horn and slowing down for speed bumps, we passed hundreds of tiny establishments (my favorite: “Observers are Worried Business Centre”). Somehow, every pedestrian got out of the way just in time (although one bicycle came close…) It was hard to see what people were doing: were they crossing the road to get to (or get back from) their local beer joint? Were they hungry, or starved for entertainment? What was going on in that table where a sullen-faced woman sat with her head surrounded by candles? All I knew was that it never seemed to end. At one point—when I thought, by now this surely must be Tema—I saw the new Kofi Annan Center for Peacekeeping, which had been previously pointed out to us at Preport as only halfway between the two cities. Meanwhile, Accra just kept on going on.

Ghana was a place I was eager to see again. Indeed, apart from a few interport travelers (including Prof. Kwadwo Appiagyei-Atua from Legon), I was virtually the only person on the ship who had ever been there. In effect, this was my fifteen minutes of fame. Long ago, I had volunteered to do something on music in Ghana. But I was still unprepared when, on Monday, I got word that I was expected to present a lecture on Ghana’s culture—without music. Man, it had been twenty-two years since I was last there! I spent that morning culling my memory, trying to pull anecdotes from my two previous trips. Inevitably, it became an exercise in retelling the “bad” days of Ghana in the early 1980s, the depths of the early Rawlings regime, when Ghana had aligned itself with Khaddafi’s pan-African rhetoric and incurred the wrath of the Reagan administration. Even four years later, although it was markedly improved from the curfews and empty store shelves, it was still primitive in comparison with today. I pulled together my notes, and by about noon decided I had enough stuff. I could b.s. my way through what I had.

My talk drew a large enough audience that it was shifted from Classroom 8 (which seats about thirty) to The Union, giving me ample space. Admittedly, I did overemphasize the negative—my misfortunes back in the old days—but I still love the country and hoped that I gave some of that impression to my shipmates. Two nights later, I gave my “music in Ghana” talk to a much smaller crowd, and did it again the next night for the Lifelong Learners. Finally, at the Cultural Preport, I had about fifteen minutes to boil down my music talk. I concentrated on Gahu, something that had worked earlier. Using Fred Dunyo’s recordings, I played layer after layer, piling them on, and then gave them some idea of how the dance movement fit in. The Preport crowd, of course, included all the students on the ship, and they roared with approval—especially when Kwadwo jumped in behind me, expertly mimicking my movements. After introducing Gahu at an artificially slow speed, I finally brought it back up to the “traditional” fast tempo. This inspired one of the little Wagner kids to jump in, to tumultuous cheers; within a few moments, students had filled in the circle. Some were excellent dancers—indeed, they made Gahu shine. It was a splendid introduction to the music and the dance.

We docked this morning at 9:00: an overcast, humid day, not terribly hot. The day before, I had offered to my students in Global Music the chance to have their clothes made by local seamstresses. We met in Classroom 9 (near the Deck 5 dining room) and eventually made our way off the ship. Kudzo Dunyo was there to meet us. I had seen him from the ship; indeed, I had kept calling him, hoping to figure out which one he was. He said he was wearing a yellow top, but the only guy I saw like that was standing with a port official and didn’t pick up his phone when I called. But it was Kudzo—wearing a Bluetooth set, having made his way to portside thanks to one of his uncles, who was director of security for the port! Kudzo is stockier than his uncle Kwasi, but has much of his verbal mannerisms. We had about seventeen students (all girls, except for one smiling guy) to take care of, so we sent them via shuttle to the port gate, and then distributed them in taxis to the Tema market, where they were supposed to choose their fabric. It took some time to reassemble them at the first stop: Barclay’s Bank, where we changed money. I had thought we would then walk to find fabric at the market, but Kudzo insisted it was too far. He also disliked the disruption of paying the various taxi drivers (as well as the irritation of having to find out where they dropped the students off), so he called for a tro-tro (i.e., a van) big enough to carry most of them. This took a long time; indeed, it was well past noon when we finally got loaded into our (now) two vehicles.
The rest of the afternoon continued in this desultory, disorganized fashion. We drove for miles and miles, finally arriving at what seemed to be yet another small marketplace. Kudzo had apparently hoped his sister (one of the seamstresses) would be able to join us, but instead we wandered around vaguely, looking at various small shops that had a few yards of a few patterns for sale. Nancy took me aside at one point: she was beginning to feel at home in this environment—it reminded her of Kenya—and she had noticed a store at the fringes of this marketplace that had a much bigger selection. We bought a good twelve yards of fabric; and after paying for it, we expected to bring our student population to our store. But we needed to wrap things up: Nancy had arranged for Jane to bring the girls to Accra to meet us, and the time of that meeting (2:30) was all but on us. So we hastily agreed to have the seamstresses meet the students at the boat while Kudzo hurtled us toward town.
As it turned out, the students have yet to have their measurements taken; apparently, our cell phones work intermittently in this environment, and no one was able to rouse the faculty leader (Allie Hinkle, our AV director) to contact the rest of the students. So one of our first tasks for tomorrow morning is to see how many of them we can put together with their tailors.

After trying in vain to Skype with Amelia and Flora at an Internet café, we took a cab ride to visit Aku’s family—her aunt, Constance, and her grandmother Grace. It was a lovely occasion. We love Aku and now feel the same about her family. Her aunt greeted us at the door with a grin that was as wide and welcoming as possible. The kids had the run of the place, at times rolling on their backs on a dusty, outside porch that darkened their clothes. We met young Felix, a boy about fourteen who is thinking of becoming an architect. I kept my eye on the Ghanaian TV blaring in the background—local news and an English-dubbed telenovella from Latin America. The girls wheedled toys out of Grace, whose wheelchair was parked next to a cabinet full of mementos.
Then came the two-hour taxi ride home. Ghana is now relatively prosperous, but alas, it needs roads to match the cars that jam the streets of Accra. More later.

Ramadan in Morocco

Casablanca seems like a lovely location—the ideal port of entry for Morocco. As it turns out, it’s a dull, dreary industrial city with little to offer except for a huge mosque and miles of beach. So we got out of town fairly quickly after docking to head for Essaouira.
The trip out wasn’t easy. We took a train to Marrakesh—second-class, as that was all that was available. The second I took a step off the train I felt a lash of cold rain. It quickly gathered into a solid downpour. We hurried across the track to huddle under a shelter (looking, ironically, like palm fronds), waiting for the rain to stop. It didn’t. We had a bus to catch, but no way of knowing when or where to catch it. I finally decided to trudge all the way to the main terminal to find out. None of the people I asked knew when the bus left, but they knew it left from the bus station—back the direction I came. I trudged back again, looking for a way to cut across the tracks to the street. Finally I found a way. In fact, it was the bus station. In fact, the bus was leaving now. “Vite, vite, vite!” they told me. I thus ran back, dragged my family through the downpour, and got them on the bus with just seconds to spare. My sneakers didn’t dry out for two days.
But Essaouira was fine: a small city defined by its medina, set off from the modern development by a thick, crenellated wall. Our riad was square in its center, off a side street from the main drag. The next morning I awoke early and walked through the town. My first impression was that it was dirty and depressed: only a few shops open, few people. But it was Ramadan. People had arisen early, before dawn, and eaten their morning food before 5 a.m., when sunrise was announced by the call for prayer, and returned to bed. Muslims take Ramadan very seriously—indeed, as we were reminded, it’s one of the Five Pillars of Islam. We foreigners were allowed to eat, but I never felt terribly hungry when the entire population was fasting. By noon, people had woken up. Vast crowds mobbed the narrow streets, with occasional bicycles, motor scooters, or handcarts working their way through the mass of people with surprising grace.
Our riad (the Riad Sidi Magdoul) featured music in the evenings. The first night it was nothing special: a small group of kids playing Moroccan pop of their own creation to solid but repetitive hand-drumming. But the next night featured a small troupe of young Gnawaian musicians, including one of the most inventive and virtuosic hand-drummers I’ve ever seen. I was entranced, and at the night’s end got up the nerve to talk to them, mentally practicing sentences in French to say to them. But they spoke English! Indeed, it was the best English I ever heard in the country. I made friends with Omar Afif, a young man in his thirties with dreadlocks and a thin beard who played the gimbre, a box-shaped lute with three strings that produces the bass-line riffs for the music. I met Omar the next day, bringing the girls (who can be heard clearly on the tape I made: “what’s dat?”). The Gnawas are descendents of sub-Saharan African slaves, brought to Morocco centuries ago. Their music is riff-based—repetitive, hard-driving, yet beautifully and subtly improvised. Each song is a hymn to the saints, or sidis, and the specific combination of songs (specified to me by Omar) is enough to put adherents into a trance. It’s still not clear to me whether Omar himself is Gnawan. His face suggests a Sub-Saharan African ancestry, but at one point, he made it clear to me that he is “100% Berber,” citing the different Berber tribes that contribute to his heritage. But he and the other young musicians have been studying with older masters and are dedicated to the Gnawian religious beliefs, which are peaceful, mystic, and ecstatic (as with the Sufis).
Gnawian music has never had a high social status, but thanks to the enthusiasm of a handful of rock luminaries, it has become chic. There are now posters for Gnawian festivals. Omar appeared at one recently; as with his appearance at the Riad Sidi Magdoul, he was paid next to nothing. He doesn’t seem interested in his commercial success. For several years, he earned his living building boats in the Essaouira harbor. His apartment, located in a small alleyway within the medina, was small but comfortable, with a few modern touches (like the shower curtain covered with colorful fish that entranced Celia: “what’s dat?”). If nothing else, I’m interested in coming back here to see how Omar is doing—and to learn more about the music to which he dedicates his life.
Morocco was a pleasant place. One couldn’t help but be impressed by the unquestioning firmness with which people lived their religious lives—everybody was fasting, everybody went to the mosque, even the doctor (specializing in reproductive issues) with whom we spent an evening in Casablanca (as part of “dinner with a Moroccan family”). No alcohol: the Riad Sidi Magdoul was probably the only late-night music venue I’ve been in that served me only water for my beverage. Yet the Moroccans were also predatory, even in their politeness. Nancy got a taste of this after being drawn (reluctantly) into bickering with a stall holder about some wooden curios we were determined to buy. The man quickly insisted that we were good friends; that his stall was different because he makes the material himself; that he would charge double in Marrakesh; that the items were of exceptional quality; that the price fluctuated depending on the customer—wealthy people didn’t care, poor people couldn’t afford it. And tourists have their own price, we thought. Nothing we can do about it. Did this man actually think he was making friends? How could he? It was a business transaction, carried out very elegantly (if time-consuming), and it ended with a sale. He was apparently right about Marrakesh, too; we didn’t go into town, but our students who did saw the whole deal—a huge square packed with people, donkeys, snake charmers, and hustlers of all variety, doing anything they could to make a sale. One student got the trifecta: all at once, she had monkeys and a large snake put on her, all while a henna artist started coloring her arm. Yes, Marrakesh is a famous place, on the border between civilized Morocco and the nomadic inner world of the Sahara. But the same barriers still existed throughout the country. Onward to Ghana.....

Flamenco night(s)

I’m in Morocco now, but haven’t finished writing up my experiences in Spain! So let me describe one of my days—the first, when I discovered flamenco.

When we arrived, I still felt…at sea. I had grown accustomed to my regular schedule during the ocean voyage, teaching class every day and eating three times a day in the 5th deck dining area. A reasonably demanding workload, but still pleasant. Suddenly, it became clear that to my students (and to many of my colleagues), the ocean routine was prologue to the main event. Everyone wanted to get the hell off the boat and on to Spain. This was disconcerting. What the hell would I do there?

Cadiz is an old-fashioned city connected to Spain only through a narrow isthmus. It had its more modern parts, which I only passed through on my way to the mainland. We spent all our time in the old city, a narrow, slightly confused passagework of alleys and lanes. On our first visit, we took the girls, which wasn’t easy: steering the weighty double stroller over narrow, bumpy sidewalks was exhausting. Often the narrowness of the sidewalk forced us onto the cobblestone streets, which was in some ways an improvement, but exposed us to the occasional motorbike or car roaring through the crowded streets.
We followed directions to a playground, all the way across town in a seaside park. We were apparently dressed appropriately: numerous signs read “No Talon,” illustrated by a high-heeled shoe with a slash through it. After letting the girls play on the jungle gym and swings, we pushed our way back to the main square for a generic lunch of pizza at the touristic time of 1:00. We left the girls on the ship, and found things much easier. (No wonder our shipboard colleagues looked so ecstatic when we had passed them earlier!) We made our way to a restaurant Nancy had looked up in a guidebook, Le Faro, and managed to talk our way to a table for two at 3:30—ordinary lunch time in Spain. It was a fabulous meal. In Cadiz, they have an excellent variety of fresh fish, as well as time-honored ways of preparing them. It was the kind of meal where a bite of black pasta—not the fish, but its accompaniment—was enough to cause me to stop, stunned, overwhelmed by the taste, unwilling to go on without absorbing every nuance in my memory.

That evening, I took my leave from the family to go off on my flamenco adventure. This was an “FDP” (Faculty Directed Practica) offered by the ship. We took of on a bus for Chiclana, a town that bordered Cadiz on the mainland. I had expected this to be a public event at the bullring, but found us heading into the countryside. Only on disembarking did I realize this event was a private function for SAS. Quaintly dressed waitresses greeted our arrival outside a tiny bullring with small glasses of Spanish sherry (or Coke). For the first course of our entertainment, we were herded inside a tiny bullring, about thirty feet across, barely large enough to hold our two busloads of students and faculty.
The first phase wasn’t promising. Two flamenco ballerinas emerged, to dance in synchronous precision to pre-recorded flamenco soundtracks. They often danced with—or at—a horse, with gestures that combined seduction (bestiality? Really?) with a stern flamenco air of control. An imperious young man dressed comically in traditional Andalusian horse wear kept the horse painfully in check. It wasn’t easy to watch. Bits of foam flying from the beast’s mouth made it clear that these “amusing” movements came from mistreatment. (I could imagine the horse thinking, “What the hell do I have to do to get a lump of sugar?”) The horseman came out by himself on a new steed, forcing it sideways across the ring and contorting it into new dance steps. It was cruel entertainment. It reminded me of a familiar critique of Spanish entertainment—the disdain toward animals, culminating in the ritual slaughter of the bull in the bullring.
In the “cow entertainment” that followed, a young boy came out dressed as a junior matador, facing an undersized two-year-old bull. Highly amusing for the crowd, who saw a harmless reduction of the real thing—especially when the bull, who looked as if he would rather be anywhere else, searched frantically for the exit. Yet it was also serious. The matador carefully worked for his points, trying to get the bull to charge his red cape, sometimes chasing him around the ring. But the bull had his moments as well, roughing up the young boy on several occasions—more with his head than his horns, to be sure, but it looked as though he would go home with large bruises on his thighs. One of my Spanish-speaking colleagues, Dan Duran, found out that that he was fourteen and that he’d been working his way toward matador-hood since he was nine. We were told to acclaim him as “toreador” at the end (just as we were instructed to yell “Ole!”) I felt like saying to the boy, “Yes, you are a man!” It was a crude jolt of testosterone excitement. But I wished him a better life than this.

We were then shepherded across an empty field—and past a water slide!—toward a restaurant, where what was promised as the “real” flamenco would be held. By this time I was confused. I had told my friend, Juan Zaglaz, that he could pick me up from the bullring at Chiclana—not from this out-of-the-way entertainment center, where it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to find me. I’d been in touch with him by e-mail, but had made contact by phone just a few minutes before I left on the bus (because I’d forgotten to shift my cell phone from normal to “global”). By this time (c. 9:00,) I felt a painful need to see something different. Fortunately, in the restaurant, I saw the familiar stage set: chairs in a semi-circle—two in the rear (for the musicians), four on the side (for the dancers). Ah, traditional flamenco, I said. But they kept with their touristic entertainment. Again, the dancers (now three) were performing set pieces, matching recorded soundtracks with well-rehearsed movements. The dancing was fully competent, but I was growing angry at the absence of improvisation, wolfing down pieces of tapas (ham, quiche, crackers) in frustration. Finally the musicians arrived: the (male) guitarist and (female) singer, dressed in the casual black attire that seems like a cross between classical dress and Johnny Cash attitude. The pieces were still aimed toward a pop audience—all in 2/4, all featuring well-rehearsed movements, featuring backbeats that struck me as closer to MTV than flamenco. Who wants to see this kind of fake ballet, I thought? Unfortunately, everyone else in the audience. They had the flamenco “look” down pat (that fearsome glare) and were raising a sweat, but toward what end? A male dancer—elegantly tell, shockingly thin—joined the troupe. His dancing had a professional flair, but he seemed to be there as a contrast to the female dancers, dancing with them one on one.

I took off for the hallway, trying once again to get to Juan. He was driving around—getting closer, his friend Teresa said, but still not sure where I was. The restaurant was huge—taking a wrong turn, I found myself I the middle of a Spanish wedding reception. When I returned to the hall, things had suddenly changed. The music shifted to 6/8; the dancers were clapping accompaniment. The male dancer had taken charge. His improvisation—unexpected bursts of sixteenth notes, abrupt movements—had taken things to the next level. Having satisfied the crowd (and thus met the requirements of the gig), the troupe had shifted to the music they liked best. Everyone was listening and reacting and improvising: the guitarist played more experimentally and the singer, previously confined to a stool, now stood up aggressively. It was a splendid twenty-minute set.
Watching the beginning, I feared having to tell my students on the ship something like, “You didn’t see the real flamenco.” Now I saw that they had seen flamenco: they simply saw it from the conventional middle-class position. Flamenco musicians had been doing this kind of gig since the mid nineteenth century—selling it to bourgeois audiences, who loved hearing it in bizarre mixtures like the cafes concertes and opera flamenco. Nothing wrong with that—especially if such gigs helped flamenco musicians survive. This group was certainly doing well. At the end, the singer surprised us all by joining the dancers with superb, expert movements—after all, guitarists are often singers, singers are often dancers, dancers are certainly musicians. Thorough professionals.

As the SAS students moved on to dancing to a kind of flamenco disco, I looked for Juan. I first walked out to the bullring, the place we had initially entered. It was deserted, but under the full moon, the path was mot difficult to find. But the gate was locked. Only on walking back did I discover that the real entrance was in front of the restaurant. By the time I got out on the parking lot, Juan pulled in, and I ducked into his black Citroen. Juan is a young man I’d “met” through the Internet. He’s a graduate student, and guitarist, working on a dissertation dealing (among other things) with “Body and Soul” in the years 1935-1945. He’d interviewed me by e-mail (and I wrote my response carefully, hoping he’d return the favor). He knows my book and seemed tremendously dedicated. He was thrilled to devote his evening to me, taking me wherever I wanted to go. Merely getting to this spot was no easy business: after finding the bullring in Chiclana (and figuring out that nothing was happening), he worked his way to “El Postino” (the name I’d given him) and finally found people at a gas station willing to scrawl a map on the back of a napkin. He took us to Jerez de la Frontera—the birthplace of flamenco, as well as the headquarters of Harvey’s Bristol Cream. He wanted me to meet a friend of his, Salva, a guitarist with deeper connections to flamenco (Juan’s interest is more in fusion). We drove aimlessly around Jerez for a while (Juan had no map) and eventually worked our way downtown, where we had tapas (including Andalusian fried fish—the Brits, I was told, had stolen the idea for “fish and chips” from them). By midnight Salva joined us—a burly, friendly fellow with a thick beard and T-shirt. The conversation was interesting. Salva spoke no English, I no Spanish; both Juan and Teresa were in the middle, occasionally speaking in one or the other language. But we got along famously, absorbing information through body gestures and some inner knowledge of music.

By 1:00, we made our way to the bullring, home to a large flamenco festival—the 42nd Festival de la Bulieras. The sound was excellent: you could hear it from a half mile away. The door to the ring was open, so we could see the music distantly on stage; but hired security people kept us from entering (we hadn’t paid the 15 or so Euros to get in). Hoping for better treatment later, we went to a neighboring peña—empty, of course (everyone was in the bullring). It looked like a former warehouse, with twenty-foot ceilings. We had more Spanish sherry and heard excellent recorded flamenco, punctuated occasionally by expert handclapping by the waiter passing by. Everyone here seemed to know this music.

By 2:00, we went out again. The music was still going on—indeed, this festival, which had started around 10, was packed. People felt free to go back home for refreshments, passing by us to rejoin the entertainment. Teresa (a slender friend of Juan’s from childhood) finally convinced one of the security guards to let us in. It was a huge band—a panoply of flamenco virtuoso all-stars, all apparently from Jerez. From left to right: about three handclappers and a singer, a flutist and violinist, a percussionist playing a flamenco drum set (hand drums, cymbal), two to three guitarists, a bass guitarist. In front (and moving around the stage) was a spectacular male dancer. If the people at Il Postino were thorough professionals, these people were magicians. Everything blended together beautifully. The singer’s voice was always in place, penetrating the texture with his poetic song. The dancer reacted to everything with subtle yet abrupt movements that always climbed to a climax and ended with a spectacularly timed downbeat. The guitarist (and bassist) worked with the drummers to set up an effortless groove. It was effortlessly improvised, yet spiced with bits of complex composed riffs that sounded a good deal like Chick Corea (after all, he had just done a tour with flamenco artists last year!)
The thing that amazed me was how wide the web was that contained this improvisation, and how well all these bits fit together. It attracted a much wider web than jazz. There were many more women there than anyone would have found at any jazz festival, many with their babies, still awake and wide-eyed in their strollers! For those unmoved by the “jazzier” virtuoso playing of the instrumentalists, there was still a lot of singing, the poetry, and dancing. To my ear, it was intensely complicated, some of the deepest musical interaction I’ve seen on stage. Yet its appeal lay far beyond the nerdy musician crowd. Perhaps this large, Andalusian populace heard in it an expression of cultural identity. I can’t say I have the answers. At quarter to three, after hearing a solid set, I had to call it quits. Juan got me back on the ship around four, leaving me just a few hours sleep before the next day’s FDP (a bus tour of the “white towns” to the north). But my mind felt blown open. Somehow, in some way, I had to get back in touch with this music. Thank you, Juan (and Salve and Teresa)!