Via the fabulous Ghetto Radio blog I found this video about Mamadou Tall Diedhiou, Senegal's most renowned "trash" artist. He started out as a poet in his village on the Southern coast, and has now become one of the most original sculptors in his country.
It seems that after writing his first poem, Mamadou wanted a painting of the girl that he sang about in it. Then he went to see an artist and asked him to paint the girl for him but the artist charged too much. Since he could not find the money, he decided to do it himself. A Ghanian named Eric who had his workshop next to that of Diedhiou helped him with his painting, giving tips as to how to use color and light or shapes in an optimal way. Little by little, he improved his painting, combining it with the intelligent use of old objects like tins or cans that he picked up from the streets. This was totally new in the Senegalese artistic environment.
Nowadays, he makes birds out of recycled materials - including the most unexpected ones. Watch the whole process in the video below:
Stumbling upon some blogs, I found a very interesting excerpt from Barack Obama's memoir Dreams of my father which I think is worth sharing. I haven't read the book, which was written almost 15 years ago, but according to the back cover description it's about Obama's emotional journey after his father dies in a car accident. That takes him from Kansas and Hawaii to Kenya trying to retrace his African side by finding out more about his father, and his life away from him that he never knew.
This excerpt is a reflection about his passage through Europe on his way to Kenya, during which he remembers a Senegalese man he crossed paths with in Spain:
By the end of the first week or so, I realized that I'd made a mistake. It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful; everything was just as I'd imagined it. It just wan't mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else's romance; the incompleteness of my own history stood between me and the sites I saw like a hard pane of glass. I began to suspect that my European stop was just one more means of delay, one more attempt to coming to terms with the Old Man. Stripped of language, stripped of work and routine - stripped even of the racial obsessions to which I'd become so accustomed and which I had taken (perversely) as a sign of my own maturation -I had been forced to look inside myself and had found only great emptiness there.Would this trip to Kenya finally fill that emptiness? The folks back in Chicago thought so. It'll be just like Roots, Will said at my going-away party. A pilgrimage, Asante had called it. For them, as for me, Africa had become an idea more than an actual place, a new promised land full of ancient traditions and sweeping vistas, noble struggles and talking drums. With the benefit of distance, we engaged Africa in a selective embrace - the same sort of embrace I'd once offered the Old Man. What would happen once I relinquished that distance? It was nice to believe that the truth would somehow set me free. But what if that was wrong? What if the truth only disappointed, and my father's death meant nothing, and his leaving me behind meant nothing, and the only tie that bound me to him, or to Africa, was a name, a blood type, or white people's scorn?
I switched off the overhead light and closed my eyes, letting my man drift back to an Afrian I'd met while traveling through Spain, another man no the run. I had been waiting for a night bus in a roadside tavern about halfway between Madrid and Barcelona. A few old men sat at tables and drank wine from short, cloudy glasses. There was a pool table off to one side, and for some reason I had racked up the balls and started to play [...]
As I was finishing up the table, a man in a thin wool sweater had appeared out of nowhere and asked if he could buy me some coffee. He spoke no English, and his Spanish wasn't much bettr than mine, but he had the winning smile and the urgency of someone in need of company. Standing at the bar, he told me he was from Senegal, and was crisscrossing Spain for seasonal work. He showed me a battered photograph he kep in his wallet of a young girl with round, smooth cheeks. His wife, he said; he had to leave her behind. They would be reunited as soon as he saved the money. He would write and send for her.
We ended up riding to Barcelona together, neither of us talking much, him turning to me every so often to try to explain the jokes on the Spanish program being shown on a TV-video contraption hooked up above the driver's seat. Shortly before dawn, we were deposited in front of an old bus depont, and my friend gestured me over to a short, thick palm that grew beside the road. From his knap-sack he pulled out a toothbrush, a comb, and a bottle of water that he handed to me with great ceremony. And together we washed ourselves under the morning mist, before hoisting our bags over our shoulders and heading toward town.
What was his name? I couldn't remember now; just another hungry man far away from home, one of the many children of former colonies - Algerians, West Indians, Pakistanis - now breaching the barricades of their former masters, mounting their own ragged, haphazard invasion. And yet, as we walked toward the Ramblas, I had felt as if I knew him as well as any man; that, coming from opposite ends of the earth, we were somehow making the same journey. When we finally parted company, I had remained in the street for a long, long time, watching his slender, bandy-legged image shrink into the distance, one part of me wishing then that I could go with him into a life of open roads and blue mornings; another part realizing that such a wish was also a romance, an idea, as partial as my image of the Old Man or my image of Africa.
I just heard about a documentary about Senegalese musician Yossou N'Dour titled I bring what I love. According to the website, the film "takes you behind the scenes and into the world of Africa’s most famous musician". Although I'm not sure if other famous African musicians would agree with that title, Youssou N’Dour surely is a fascinating artist and I'll definitely try to watch the film.
Apparently the film focuses on the controversial release of his album Egypt in 2004, which was named Sant Allah (Thanks to Allah) in the original Senegalese release. With it he was hoping to promote a more tolerant face of Islam, with most of the tracks (which are sung in Wolof and Arabic) dedicated to great marabouts of the Muslim brotherhoods of Senegal. 'Egypt' is dramatically different from the sexy, rhythmic mbalax sound that made Youssou famous. So his fellow Senegalese rejected the album almost instantly and denounced it as blasphemous. Merchants quickly returned their copies and N'dour was made the center of controversy. The ‘Egypt’ album moved me the first time I listened to it.
The film was shot during the course of three years across several countries by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, a young filmmaker from New York who had won critical acclaim with his debut documentary A Normal Life in 2003, about young Kosovar Albanians who came of age during the recent war. This is how she describes I bring what I love:
Besides just introducing them to my friend Youssou N’dour, I hope people discover someone new, come away with a stronger appreciation of Islam and the role that music plays in the West African culture. At the same time I would just like an audience to sit back and enjoy what I would consider a contemporary African musical.This is a film about conscience, faith, and simply doing the right thing. Regardless of your religious upbringing or musical tastes, here is an artist who had to make a decision, face the consequences and affect change. In the process, he is finally rewarded on the world stage. I hope that a young woman in the states will relate to this just as intensely as a religious student in Egypt would.
Watch the trailer below:
The film opened in Holland in January and will continue to open throughout Europe this summer. In the US it opened last month, and I received word that it will come out on July 31st in San Francisco and Berkeley. And in case you're still undecided about going to see it, here's what the film press release says:
Enjoy the tantalizing beats, be inspired by Youssou's compelling story, but also go see the film because there is more at stake. It’s all too rare that an African or Muslim subject gets this kind of filmmaking and this kind of attention. Amid the images in the U.S. media of African AIDS, war and poverty, this film is a chance for Americans to see a positive, realistic representation of contemporary Africa. In addition, it is all too rare that stories go below the surface and give nuanced views of a more tolerant Islam. Every film is judged by its box office receipts, so please do your part to make this film a success - to show theaters and the media that we want to see films that reveal an entirely new Africa.
Africa, the forgotten continent. I mean, we think about zebras and about cooperation projects, about trips and travelers. It's a bit harder to realize that in Africa people make movies, people write, people make music, people live. Living the African way, and so cinema is made the African way, music is made the African way and literature is made the African way. Although Kapuscinski, who knew Africa much better than I'll ever know it, warned that Africa doesn't exist.
This Spanish friend asked if we had cars in Senegal. Jokingly, I said: " but of course!! The diference is that, since we are so poor and have no shoes, the engine is made out of wood, and in steep slopes we push the car ourselves. She answered: "wow, that's so sustainable!!" I couldn't believe my ears, she thought I was serious!! And really, that's our biggest problem: that in Africa we think that money grows from the trees in Europe, and in Europe you think that all Africans wear a loincloth and live in the jungle. We won't be able to solve any problems until we sit down and learn about each other.
I never imagined that in Africa they also celebrate Carnival. The images and the news that we receive from the media about that continent usually speak of disasters, famines, armed conflicts, killings and epidemics... But the truth is that living in a country like Senegal gives you the opportunity to discover another face of this territory, that is unknown to most people.
First of all, in Europe the weather is too cold for us, and also the way of living here has nothing to do with how we Africans live. When we are in Africa we think that everything is wonderful and perfect in Europe, but that's far from the truth. In Europe it's harder to get anything than in Africa, where not much is needed to live happily and where life is simpler. Here we end up in an endless spiral of looking for money for everything, and if you don't succeed it's easy to fall into tragic situations that make you prey to mafias or even to go to jail. For us Africans, the only reason worth coming to Europe is acquiring knowledge and then going back to our countries to make good use of it.
