photo by Alex Lear
HEAVEN?
When we got to heaven, we were surprised. God was slouched off to the side, unconcerned by the chaos swirling around him. Bored even. Would have been absent mindedly looking out of a window, but there was no window, only a horizonless expanse of conflict raging back and forth. We checked our cosmic map and guidebook: that was god, this was heaven.
The distant noise of battle: grunting, groans, screams, moans, drifted toward where we stood shocked with our mouths hanging open. Suddenly Jesus appears.
"Reinforcements. And not a moment too soon," he says, rushing up to us. "Come ye to the mountaintop and let us smite down Satan."
God groaned, "Ha. This madness will be going on for eternity. But he..." (pointing to Jesus) "...never listens. What makes him think he can control Satan. I created the little monster and even I can't do anything with him."
You looked at me out of the corner of your eye. I caught your vibe. Yes, it was just like kids on earth. Some yearning to burn, some yearning to save.
"Let's bounce," I said under my breath out of the side of my mouth without moving my lips much and not loud enough for Jesus to hear.
"I'm good to go," you replied in a whisper.
Jesus raised his hand to signal to us the direction to where the quartermaster was issuing heavenly bodies, angel wings and battle rations. But we were already backpedaling like MJ doing the moonwalk.
Although we didn't have our earthly bodies, we still had the common sense our mamas birthed us. I let the unneeded orientation guidelines slip out of my consciousness as we headed back through the pearly gates.
—kalamu ya salaam
3 Dope Songs from KRS-One
that You Should Find Useful
and Inspiring
KRS-One photo by B-Fresh
One thing we should do in this coming year is shed the industry frame-work that has been attached to our music. By that I mean we need to see Hip Hop offerings as timeless and something to be embraced when our spirits move us and not something that needs to be consumed to further a record label’s bottom line.. Far too many of us have been caught up in measuring the success of an artists or the importance of a particular song by artificial criteria like first week’s album sales or heavy rotation on the radio station claiming to be home to Hip Hop and R&B..
Even amongst folks who say they shun commercialism there is still a short-sighted criteria where the name of the game seems to be who got an album first or who got an exclusive..It’s a self-serving criteria that allows one to appear ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ but unfortunately what gets lost is the important messages and concepts put forth by an artist who finds him or herself quickly discarded and deemed irrelevant by the hipster type with the same reckless abandon as their commercial counterpart.
Music at its best is communal..It’s to be shared and upheld. It’s a sound track to our lives. Its healing to our wounded souls. It’s inspiring, in a world that seems hell-bent on keeping us down..Hopefully artists don’t get discouraged and start changing up their process by abandoning expressions that reflects what’s on their hearts to create throwaway product that fulfils the needs of fast food consumers and not those who need true mental and audio nourishment.
So for folks who are tired of the same ole same ole, please keep in mind there’s a treasure chest of good solid music waiting to be discovered.. Lets go back to browsing and digging for music that moves us vs waiting for it to be served by the tentacles of an industry that doesn’t have our well-being in mind..
Today we wanna celebrate a tireless champion and prolific artist.. Blastmasta KRS-One tha Teacha ... Here’s 3 songs you should take in..The lyrics and video are on point, uplifting and stand the test of time.. Shout out to his producer who is also a dope artists Mad-Lion.
The first song is Aztechnical.. It came out late last year and addresses the issue of the Mayan calendar and prophecy and the Earth supposedly ending. Well as you know that day Dec 21 2012 has come and gone.. But as KRS explains, what was supposed to take place was us reaching a higher consciousness in our thinking.. He takes you there in this song..
The second song ‘Just Like That‘ deals with a topic that KRS has addressed on at least 3 or 4 different occasions.. His upbringing. For those of us who know KRS, we might be tempted to say ‘I heard this story’ before.. But for folks who are just getting acquainted to KRS, its inspiring as and gives us insight on how we might overcome rough times.. In short the message is timeless
The third song was released a few days after Hurricane Sandy… It’s probably his most important song and shows KRS at his best.. Here he gives sound advice as to what we should be doing in preparation for a natural disaster..The song is called ‘Disaster Kit‘
KRS-One Aztechnical
KRS-One Disaster Kit
TCHEKA
<p>Tcheka | FNAC Chiado 29.10.2011 from culturafnac.pt on Vimeo.</p>
TCHEKA - Biography
Tcheka was born Manuel Lopes Andrade in 1973 in Ribeira da Barca, a small rural town on the northeastern coast of Santiago whose modest economy is based on farming and fishing. He was the second-to-last child in a large musical family – music being the family’s principal source of income for many years. His father, Nhô Raul Andrade, was a renowned violinist in the area who taught music to his sons and eventually created a small family band that played at local weddings, funerals and baptism festivities. Tcheka says he learned to play the acoustic guitar under duress at age 8, and by age 9, he was playing in the family band under the stern direction of his father. Like so many young Cape Verdeans, Tcheka’s secondary education had to be cut short because his family could not afford the expense, so his teenage years were spent fishing, diving and exploring the coast around his hometown. It was during this period that he also began composing songs. Surrounded by the jagged, ominous shapes of the Serra Malagueta Mountains and the dark, billowy sea, Ribeira da Barca proved the ideal landscape in which the artist could construct his unique vision. Tcheka’s first stint in a non-musical profession became, arguably, the thing most responsible for widening the scope of his musical artistry. In 1991, at the age of 18, he landed a job as a camera assistant at the national television station (then TNCV) in Cape Verde’s capital city, Praia (also located in Santiago). From 1991 to 2000, Tcheka worked as a cameraman while playing nightly gigs with friends in small bars, hotels and restaurants around the capital. His first recording Ma’n ba des des kumida da? [Will there be a harvest this time?] appeared on the benefit compilation CD Cap Vert Les Enfants (1999) while he was still operating camera for TNCV, but he remained in relative obscurity, still committed to his full time job.
A major turning point in his career came with the 2000 release of another compilation CD Ayan: New Music from Cape Verde. Among Tcheka’s three contributions to this groundbreaking project was the original version of Primeru bes kin ba Cinema [The first time I went to the Cinema] in which he recounts, with levity and great detail, the moment he first saw motion picture. The song not only re-imagines that moment as a sudden, frightening and irrevocable loss of innocence to the seductive illusions of the screen, a decidedly formative moment for Tcheka, but it also establishes the visual as the predominant theme and narrative methodology of his compositions. Tcheka describes his creative process thus: “When I create a song, it is like a sequence of images, like the frames of a film, before my eyes – the melody is itself a story I actually see in my head, and then I write the lyrics according to that vision.” Indeed, what immediately distinguishes Tcheka from all other Cape Verdean composers is the idiosyncratic and non-linear approach he takes in structuring his songs – often with very abrupt shifts in tempo, melody, lyrical subject and mood, very suggestive of the quick cuts and scene transitions of a film.
The release of Argui [Get up] (2002), his first solo album, solidified his reputation in Cape Verde as a guitar virtuoso and an original, soulful songwriter, and its success forced Tcheka into music full time. In 2005 he entered the prestigious Radio France International “Découverte Musiques du Monde” Competition held in Dakar, Senegal, and competed against some of the leading artists in contemporary African music. Needless to say, he returned home to Cape Verde with first prize and, finally, national and regional stardom. It was, however, the critically acclaimed Nu Monda [Let’s weed] (2005) that shot him into the stratosphere of world music, and started tongues wagging at home and abroad about him being the true “vanguard” of Cape Verdean music.
With this latest album, Lonji [Far away], Tcheka journeys even deeper into experimental territory. With Brazilian acoustic rock superstar Lenine as producer, he stays true to his richly textured acoustic chords and Afro-creole rhythms, while incorporating more electronic elements and ambient sounds that lend the tracks a fresh, futuristic sensibility. Some of the familiar sensations explored on previous recordings are also further enhanced here: there is the cool, aquatic feel of the new version of Primeru bes kin ba Cinema; the heat, tension and suspense of Lingua Pretu [Black Tongue] and Ana Maria; and the surreal and atmospheric Lonji. There is also a greater percussive insistency on this record – an unusual collision of Cape Verdean, West African and Afro-Brazilian percussion – that is, at times, soft, tinkling and playful, and at other times, brash and thunderous. What is carefully preserved, though, is the vivid lyricism conveyed by Tcheka’s vocals that still ring with tenderness and vulnerability.
Tcheka is undoubtedly a young master of an art that he has invented, and like any true master, his essence is impossible to grasp, let alone pin down. Contrary to journalistic opinion, he is neither modernist, nor traditionalist, and his music resists any easy categorization or comparison. While referencing multiple Cape Verdean genres (batuku, funaná, finason, tabanka, morna and coladera), Tcheka’s music is also a busy intersection of Caribbean, Brazilian and African pop and traditional forms, folk, jazz, blues, rock, literature, anthropology and film. It is never just Santiaguense, never just Cape Verdean, and never just music. Perhaps what Tcheka presents is an entirely new vision of what it means to be Creole in the age of globalisation: to be a hybrid product of the historical forces of slavery, colonialism and national independence, but at the same time, to be deeply affected by post-modern forces as well – by the growing inevitability of travel and trans-national encounters, by the emergence of new regimes of knowledge, art and capitalism and by the increasing inseparability of technology and the human imagination.
Discography
« Argui ! » CD Lusafrica 023132 (2002)
« Nu Monda » CD Lusafrica 023332 (2005)
« Lonji » CD Lusafrica 023932 (2007)
Artist's albums
www.myspace.com/tchekacaboverde
Booking MAD MINUTE : www.madminutemusic.com/artist.php
via lusafrica.com
Atlanta Review
International Poetry Competition
A prize of $1,000 and publication in Atlanta Review is given annually for a poem. In addition, twenty entrants will be published in Atlanta Review. Dan Veach will judge. Submit a poem of any length with a $5 entry fee ($3 for each additional poem) by mail or via the online submission system by March 1. Send an SASE or visit the website for complete guidelines.
Atlanta Review, International Poetry Competition, P.O. Box 8248, Atlanta, GA 31106. Dan Veach, Editor.
via pw.org
Lotus Press
Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award
A prize of $500 and publication by Lotus Press is given annually for a poetry collection by an African American poet. Submit two copies of a manuscript between 60 to 90 pages by March 1. There is no entry fee. Send an SASE, e-mail, or visit the website for complete guidelines.Lotus Press, Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, P.O. Box 21607, Detroit, MI 48221. (313) 861-1280. Constance Withers, Contact.
via pw.org
CFP: Postcolonial Text – Special Issue:
Situating Postcolonial Trauma Studies.
Saadi Nikro (Guest Editor)
Postcolonial Text is an open access, fully online journal, internationally peer-reviewed and accessible to a global audience. A quarterly journal, it is affiliated with the Open Humanities Press (OHP). The editors seek submissions for a special issue on postcolonial trauma studies.
Abstracts or else queries should be sent to Saadi Nikro: saado33@hotmail.com by March 15, 2013.
In recent years trauma studies have been taken up by critics engaging postcolonial cultural production, or else cultural production in postcolonial contexts. The very term postcolonial trauma studies has come to gain some consistency as either a specific field of research or a range of conceptual applications across fields of research.
In staking out the terrain of postcolonial trauma studies, there has been a tendency to produce a non-relational clash of civilizations scenario that pits a notion of the west against the rest, the former marked by an apparent concentration on the individual that is unsuitable to the equally apparent collective experience of trauma in non-western societies.
This logic is framed by and informs a compulsive, though debilitating binary opposition between the West and the Rest, symptomatically expressed by the negative valorization of the work of Cathy Caruth (Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 1995; Unclaimed Experience; Trauma, Narrative, and History, 1996) , often positioned as “the ur-texts” of contemporary trauma studies, or else an equally symptomatic neglect of the work of, for example, Kai Erikson (A New Species of Trouble, 1994).
The work of Franz Fanon has come to be positioned as providing a non-Western approach to trauma studies. And yet considering how Fanon’s work moves across and between Caribbean, European and North African contexts, to what extent does it make sense to maintain a unique sense of trauma studies as non-Western, which serves to assert a unique West? Towards questioning the methodological and ethical value of this dichotomy, we can note Ella Shohat’s “situational” or “relational” approach to Fanon, which in part she describes as posing “questions about Fanon’s choices of where, when, and in relation to what and whom he opens up or closes down his analogies and comparisons” (Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices. Duke University Press, 2006, 251). More directly situating trauma within a relational approach, Michael Rothberg has recently argued that as a category “trauma often functions as the object of a competitive struggle, a form of cultural capital that bestows moral privileges” (Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford University Press, 2009, 87).
We can also note how significant Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987) has been for the study of postcolonial trauma literature. The novel, produced in the very heart of “the West”, wonderfully corrupts any neat model of “individual” and “collective”, and can be read to question a decontextualised distinction between an event-based model of trauma and its belated reverberation or else circumstantial situation as a modality of social exchange. These three inter-related, though not equivalent registers or themes have been pointedly addressed, for example, in two recent publications on South Africa, both from the publisher Rodopi: Ewald Mengel, Michela Borzaga and Karin Orantes (eds) Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in South Africa: Interviews, 2010; and Ewald Mengel and Michela Borzaga (eds) Trauma, Memory, and Narrative in the Contemporary South African Novel, 2012.
Papers are invited to develop a more relational, comparative approach to postcolonial trauma studies, to better take account of physical and imaginary flows and movements across and between geographies, historiographies and related conceptual registers. Some of the following questions/themes can be addressed:
- What is the potential of trauma studies to further a more relational compass of postcolonial studies?
- To what extent can cultural production engaging experiences and articulations of trauma in both settler and postcolony geographies extend the scope of the postcolonial?
- How does and can postcolonial trauma studies adapt an ethical register for research on gendered, ethnicised and racialised relationships between personal and public trauma (rather than, or in tension to, individual and collective)?
- How can postcolonial trauma studies maintain a tension between an event-based model and a belated model towards situating testimony, witnessing and responsibility, as both discursive and social modalities of exchange.
- How does a circumstantial scope of trauma as ongoing, pressing situation foreground the temporalizing limits of event-based and belated models?
- To what extent can postcolonial trauma studies take into account more layered and inter-textual relationships between history and memory?
In focusing on one or more of these themes (as well as relevant others), papers may address literature, film, autobiography and memoir, theatre and performance, curatorial and exhibition practices, as well as other practices of cultural and media production emphasising a more documentary register.
Abstracts or else queries should be sent to Saadi Nikro: saado33@hotmail.com by March 15, 2013. Essays should be submitted to Postcolonial Text by August 30, 2013, by logging into http://postcolonial.org and following the prompts.
Dr.Norman Saadi Nikro
Research Fellow
Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin
Kenyan Doc 'Upendo Hero'
(Participatory Film About
Public Space Activism)
November 8, 2012
This is captivating - of course the content, but also the style in which it's made, and the approach the activist/filmmaker takes to tell his story, and shed light on the cause he's fighting - the lack of community/public spaces in largely poor urban areas, all over the world.
In his own words:
My Name is Upendo Hero and I am from Nairobi, Kenya. I am a public space superhero reclaiming our spaces with the most potent power; the power of love.
A selection of the Africa in Motion Film Festival 2012, and Film Africa, London 2012, watch the 20-minute short film below.
Upendo Hero - Battle for Public Space from Westerdals on Vimeo.
Professor Sun Ra
By Sir Andre Bemler
-->In the Spring of 1971 Herman “Sonny” Blount, aka Sun Ra, was artist-in-residence at the University of Califonia at Berkeley, where he offered a lecture course, variably described as African-American Studies 198, “The Black Man in the Universe”, or “The Black Man In the Cosmos,” or perhaps it was AAS 171. Apparently there was always some confusion regarding the course, and students had difficulty in picking up books from the required reading list, although one listing, The Source Book of Man’s Life and Death (i.e, The Bible, “King James”), whose author was listed as “God”, was available from “numerous” publishers.
Supposedly enrollment was sparse, but the classes filled up anyway as folks wandered in off the streets, and Berkeley back then (and perhaps now) didn’t mind civilian walk-ins. Ra would lecture for the first part of the class, then treat everybody to keyboard solos, or perhaps Arkestra performances for the second half.
Pencils sharpened? Here’s what’s believed to be the sole existing recording of one of those lectures:
African Diaspora in South Asia
for people who don’t want to acknowledge that black desis exist.
who’s surprised west indian blacks and biracial ppl look just like these people???
- white people
- south asian americans
- light skinned south asians
- non-west indian south asians in general
so unsurprised rn
seriously these could be.pictures of my family
RIGHT THO???
IT’S LIKE LOOKING AT FUCKING FAMILY???
SO MANY OF THEM LOOK LIKE SOME OF MY FAMILY MEMBERS
Wangechi Mutu - My Dirty Little Heaven
The Kenyan artist speaks at Michigan University’s school of art & design about her personal and artistic journeys, and the inspiration and influences she’s collected and interacted with during this time.
A definite must watch.
>via: http://dynamicafrica.tumblr.com/post/39552636812/wangechi-mutu-my-dirty-littl...
WANGECHI MUTU
(via nocturnalphantasmagoria)
Wangechi Mutu, “The Bride who married the Camel Head”, 2009
