Jeliya at the Crossroads: Learning African Wisdom through an Embodied Practice (Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology) 3030830586, 9783030830588

Table of contents :
Prologue
Jobokunda
Acknowledgments
Praise for Jeliya at the Crossroads
Contents
List of Photos
Orthography
Chapter 1: Introduction
The Jelis, a Scholarly Perspective
Myself, as Anthropologist
Embodying a “Characteristic Species of Grace”
Jeliya at the Crossroads: A New Approach
Storytelling as Ethnography
Themes in This Book
The Flow of the Book
The Characters
A Reflexive Glance
Positions of Power
References
Chapter 2: Sweetness in the Gambia
Welcome to the Gambia
Kanyi Kunda
Disoriented
Greetings
Na Kontong!
Music Lessons
The Balafon
The Bo’ngo
Money and Status
Sweetness in Borabá
References
Chapter 3: Moving with Gambians
Romancing the Field
Embodied Methods
Moving with Lasiné
Cooking with Awa
The Market with Lasiné
Bala Time
The Market with Awa
Women’s Talk
Faith
Connections
Bala Changes
Husband and Wife
Boys Talk
The Marabout
Things Got Weird
References
Chapter 4: Doing Time: The Balafon Workshops, United States
The First Workshop
The Second Workshop: Learning the Time—12/8 Rhythms
The Jigsaw Puzzle
Relating the Patterns
Reflections on Embodied Learning
Aesthetic as Cross-Cultural Tool
Reflections Applied to the Gambia
Taken for a Ride?
References
Chapter 5: Direct Transmissions: Going with the Flow
The Flow in Guinea
Guinea: Conakry
The Daily Life
Safeguarding Culture
In the Compound
Lunchtime Tensions
Community Tensions
Tension in My Body
Jeli Money Tensions
Souraka’s Transmissions
Making Balafons
Mory the Apprentice
Multicultural Transmissions
When Children Learn
Reflections on Direct Transmission
Reflections on Money Matters
Tensions Resolving
Farewell Party
References
Chapter 6: At Home: Lessons in Respecting Time
Explaining Nyama
First Lesson: Djekoria Mory Kanté and Famoro Dioubaté
A Reflective Practice
A Sort of Apprenticeship
Taking Time
Jelis as Tricksters
Respect the Time
The Swing as Trickster
Time to Ask Questions
Time as Moral Imperative
Agility in Mind and Body
A Hard Time, 2014
Tying Up Time
References
Chapter 7: Enchanting Cosmopolitan New York
Manding Groove Bands
Culture and Music with Kakande
Cultural Sensibilities in Music
An Inkling of Jeliya
The Politics of Representation
The Technology of Enchantment
Jelying an Audience
Confirmation
References
Discography
Chapter 8: Manding New York: Jeliya Bara Bang
Methodology
Levels of Access
Manding Jeli Concerts
Oumou Versus Missia
Reflection on My Shock
Tracing Jeliya
Parallels Between Singing and Instrumental Jeliya
Moussa Recounts Historical Jeliya
The Modern-Day Jeli Event as Musicking Ritual
The Flame in Jeliya
When the Flame Starts to Flicker
Singing Versus Instrumentation
Debunking the Hɔrɔn
Mamaya, a Sign?
If the Flame Goes Out?
References
Chapter 9: Patronage: Becoming a Jatigi
In Defense of Jelis
Bicultural Perceptions of Money
Defining the Patron
Jeli–Patron Relationships Crossing Cultures
Saikou Jobarteh
My Jeli Teachers in New York 2005–2007
At War
Lessons in Generosity
Making the Idea Seem Like It Was Mine
A Different Perspective
Jelis Learn Too
The Turning Point
Fresh Perspectives
Saboule Moyala
References
Discography
Chapter 10: Living “in between” Cultures
Bringing the Parisian-Based Artist to New York
Planning Prior to New York
Planning in New York
Learning to Be a Productrice
The Negotiating Sensibility
Reflections
References
Discography
Chapter 11: Paris 2015–2021
Moussa Samba Kouyaté
Moving to Paris
Translocal Jelis
My Access and Methodology
Chez Gbessa Sékou
Postcolonial Development
Direct Oral Transmission, a Trajectory
Transitioning from Africa to Europe with Kanazoé Diabaté
Changing Jeli Music for a European Audience
Creating Music Schools
Moussa Samba
Global Jelis
References
Discography
Chapter 12: Duniya: Weaving Pasts and Futures
Representing Duniya “the Pattern Which Connects”
Jeliya as an Indigenous Educational System
Pressures of the “Global Hierarchy of Value”
Sitting at the Crossroads
The Embodied, Reflective, Transformative Practice
Misperceptions: Giving, Patronage, and the Trickster
A Note on Representation
Afterword
Famoro Dioubaté
References
Discography
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERARY ANTHROPOLOGY

Jeliya at the Crossroads

Learning African Wisdom through an Embodied Practice Lisa Feder

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology Series Editors Deborah Reed-Danahay Department of Anthropology The State University of New York at Buffalo Buffalo, NY, USA Helena Wulff Department of Social Anthropology Stockholm University Stockholm, Sweden

This series explores new ethnographic objects and emerging genres of writing at the intersection of literary and anthropological studies. Books in this series are grounded in ethnographic perspectives and the broader cross-cultural lens that anthropology brings to the study of reading and writing. The series explores the ethnography of fiction, ethnographic fiction, narrative ethnography, creative nonfiction, memoir, autoethnography, and the connections between travel literature and ethnographic writing.​ More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15120

Lisa Feder

Jeliya at the Crossroads Learning African Wisdom through an Embodied Practice

Lisa Feder Founder, Manding Grooves Paris, France

Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology ISBN 978-3-030-83058-8    ISBN 978-3-030-83059-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83059-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover photograph “Going Home” by Peter Bogardus, taken with Lisa Feder during the May 2018 Recording Sessions Photo depicts Famoro Dioubaté outside of his home in Harlem, New York. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my Dad

Prologue

This instrument you call the kora, it is Koriŋ Bato, a God, when you open it. (Jeli Saikou Jobarteh, 1995)

Jobokunda My journey into the Manding West African culture began in coastal Maine, of all places, in the home of Gray Parrot, an American kora player. At the border of his property, there is a sign made of a local tree with calligraphy lettering, in blue paint: Jobokunda. It means “parrot’s home” in Mandingo, the language of the Gambia. Far-Eye, Gray Parrot’s African Gray parrot, whistles and sings when Gray brings out his kora, the large calabash lute-like harp native to the Gambia. The instrument is played uniquely by the griots, or jelis, the oral historians and bards of the Manding society (also called Mande or Manden), West Africa. The jeli profession began in a place that lies between present-day Mali and Guinea, expanded through the Malian Empire, established by legendary leader Soundiata Keita in the thirteenth century, and today has reached the far corners of the earth, including Maine. There are at least four koras in Gray’s house. He also has several balafons, or African wooden xylophones, which are also a jeli instrument. His experience with Gambian jelis has earned him the African name Ousman Jobarteh, which is his handle on WERU community radio when hosting his show “Mostly Manding.” While Gray and his wife, Chrisse, or Istaou, are both New Englanders, they have deep connections to the African

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continent: the couple has also been adopted into the Jobarteh family of griots from Farafenni, the Gambia. Chrisse is snuggled up with a book on an old, green-covered chaise as fire crackles inside a small wood-burning stove. A desk lamp here and a standing lamp there give the room a soft, yellow glow. Pre-Columbian art adorns the bookshelves, along with books that speak of foreign cultures, a formidable reggae album collection, and African CDs and cassettes. Chrisse has arranged bogolon mudcloth fabrics over the backs of the couches and chairs, which were collected during many trips to West Africa. Gray is a hand bookbinder. Chrisse is a potter and an artist. In Manding culture, they would be considered of the caste nyamakala—a profession of skilled artisans who work with spiritual energy called nyama. Jelis belong to this caste. By family heritage, however, they would be considered of the horonya caste, the nobles, the royalty, the elite. I lived in Maine in my twenties to be closer to nature, on the outskirts of society. In my spare time, I started learning Guinean drumming from a group of intellectual, middle-aged white Americans who learned with Guinean teachers. The hosts of our drumming group built their large wooden home, as well as some of the djembes, or hourglass African hand drums. Gray was in that group. We played Guinean rhythms on dunduns (large barrel bass drums) and djembes for several hours every Tuesday night for years. These drums come from the same culture as the jeli instruments, but the roles that jeli music versus djembe music play in the society are distinct. During drum breaks, Gray took out his kora and played. He plucked the strings in cyclical, cross-melodic patterns and told me of the history of jeliya while he played. The kora sounded angelic, and I was instantly hooked. I began spending Thursday evenings at Jobokunda, learning kora with Gray and listening to his albums and field recordings. Sometimes we played balafon too (see Photo 1). Gray played me “At Home: Saikou Jobarteh,” the first recording he made of his kora teacher, Saikou’s home, in New Jeshwang, the Gambia, in 1995. On that recording, Saikou told the story of origin of the kora in Mandingo. He told that the first song ever played on the kora said “everything that you ever see in this world, it is going to finish, because it is nature’s job, that creates it that way. Nothing will be here forever.” Anywhere they play it, the Kings, queens, and holy people sat down to listen. “Up until today in Africa, there are some old people, they don’t call it kora, they call it Koriŋ Bato. That area where they sit down, it is

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Photo 1  Lisa Feder and Gray Parrot practicing balafon in Maine

called Koriŋ Bato.”1 He told us that all of society is in the kora. “It is God who creates everything. But what we meet in our people, our parents, [the kora] is like them; they talk a lot. The instrument preaches to people, about God and prophets and things good for the future, humanity, and the environment, togetherness. The way they play it, each song means something” (Jobarteh 1995). I did not comprehend the deep meaning of Saikou’s words at the time, nor how they related to Manding culture, to say the least of my own, but

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something in them rang true to me. Both the description he gave, and the kora music, made me want to sit and listen as well. At the time I was a budding cultural anthropologist, doing fieldwork with the Kayapo, a tribe in the Amazon and Brazilian savannah. Chrisse and Gray travelled to the Gambia every winter, where Gray studied kora with the Jobarteh family and Chrisse painted. I joined them in 2000–2001 for my first trip to Africa, between fieldtrips to Brazil. A few years later I shifted my personal and academic focus to studying jeli music, mostly in my home, in New York City. Twenty years later, I live in France and I am connected with the global network of jelis. For ongoing media on jeli culture, see Lisa Feder’s webpages www.lisafeder.com and www.mandinggrooves.com

Note 1. Koriŋ Bato may be understood as “the instrument which gathers people together.” Ka Koriŋ can meet to gather people together (in a circle). Bato is a kind of container. (Thanks to Mady Kamara for his assistance in translating this term on the An Ka Taa forum).

Reference Jobarteh, S. (1995). At Home [Recorded by Gray Parrot]. Fareye Sounds.

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I am grateful for my mother, JoAnn, and my father, Bob, who have given me their undying support through all of the intrepid adventures I have taken—often alone—to faraway places. They are the wind beneath my wings. My mother read early versions of the manuscript and provided invaluable feedback. This book is Famoro Dioubaté and Lisa Feder, combined. Somehow, we have found ourselves to be kindred spirits across just about every social boundary that has been created by humankind. “We are together” (wontanara) gives me endless hope for humanity and the planet. There are no words to describe my gratitude and acknowledgment to Famoro. He has shown me what jeliya is. Gray Parrot and Christine Covert lured me into the world of jeliya. They are more than friends; they are my mentors and adopted family. Gray sculpted me into a scholar of jeli music and Manding culture, and he and Christine encouraged me, and waited patiently, for 20 years for me to write this book. Gray painstakingly poured over every word in my PhD dissertation from 2006 to 2007, contributing his heart, thoughts, and words. Also in that adopted family is my brother, New York–based hand book maker Peter Bogardus, “Abdoulahad” whose photograph is the cover of this book. Peter is my comic relief, and trusted companion to all things African in New York. The tree that is jeliya has many branches and roots. Mamady “Djeliké” Kouyate has been a trusted friend whose wisdom in West African history is so vast that I could not do it justice. We have more work to do, together. xi

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My first Sosso Bala teacher (Bacar) gave me a most formidable training in balafon music. He was my best technical teacher, by far. Many other jelis have contributed to my understanding of jeliya: Missia Saran Dioubaté and her sister, Oumou Dioubaté, as well as their little brothers, Gbessa Sékou Dioubaté, Djekoria Mory Kanté, and Mohamed “Champion” Kouyaté. The late, great, Mory Kanté with whom I spent memorable moments in the final years of his life, and, my root jeli, Saikou Jobarteh—my encounter with both of these jelis was so brief, but the sweetness will last my lifetime and our memories will never be forgotten. Prior to publication, anthropologist Barbara Hoffman proofread the manuscript, generously offering her expertise on all things Manding. I am grateful for Amy Benson Brown, my book coach for several years—I could not have fathomed writing this book without her insightful, kind critiques and suggestions. Many times I did not think I would see the end, but she got me there. From my years at Cornell University, I am still indebted to Professor Steve Pond, my mentor and fellow samba percussionist. He guided me through the difficult dissertation process and helped me keep it real in the Ivory Tower. Steve Callahan (author of Adrift) and Kathy Massimini were my first editors and they have provided endless love and support from my dissertation years until today. Subsequently, Malaika Adero read a previous iteration of my manuscript and provided wise counsel particularly by awakening me to my blind perceptions and urging me to consider a wider point of view. Brendan Dabkowski gave me thoughtful, line-by-line editing right up to the end. Nick Hansen and Zoe Adlersberg, my lifelong friends, have encouraged and supported me to write this book. Nick could sum up in one eloquent sentence what I would belabor for hours. Zoe was my iron rod through all the emotions that come with writing a book. Lastly, to Doug Duncan and Catherine Pawasarat of Clear Sky Meditation Center, BC, Canada, for setting the bar high, and urging me to find my life vision.

Praise for Jeliya at the Crossroads “In a stunning achievement of literary ethnography, Lisa Feder guides us into world of music the sonorities of which reveal the cultural centrality of music in ever-changing West African social life. Jeliya at the Crossroads is a book with soul that will be read and debated for many years to come.” —Paul Stoller, author of Yaya’s Story: The Quest for Well-Being in the World “In this absorbing, readable ethnography/memoir spanning the Gambia, Guinea, Paris and New York City and beyond, Feder gives us a 21st century perspective on an alluring subject: West African Mande music culture. Candidly exploring issues of diaspora, gender, apprenticeship and patronage, morality and character, privilege and status, Feder enhances the literature of West African music. Required reading for anyone wishing to learn Mande griot (jeli) music.” —Banning Eyre, Senior Producer for Afropop Worldwide “Ethnographic accounts of first contact and subsequent participant-­observation typically focus on cultural institutions such as language, marriage, and kinship of the Other; Lisa Feder offers a refreshing auto-ethnography of her lengthy experiential learning about Mande people and culture through their music in Guinea, The Gambia, New York City, and Paris.” —Barbara Hoffman, Professor and Director of Anthropology, Cleveland State University, USA “Lisa Feder’s decades-long study of Manding  jelis  plying their musical art and wisdom traces their struggle to navigate between cultures. This is an example of how ethnography ought to be—a  narrative of how becoming deeply entwined changes everyone involved.  Feder  fearlessly  examines her own in-betweenness, grappling with vestigial traces of anthropology’s unwitting colonialist past. This engagingly written book overflows with mutual love and respect. A potent read.” —Steven F. Pond, author of Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz’s First Platinum Album

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Sweetness in the Gambia 21 3 Moving with Gambians 41 4 Doing Time: The Balafon Workshops, United States 61 5 Direct Transmissions: Going with the Flow 81 6 At Home: Lessons in Respecting Time101 7 Enchanting Cosmopolitan New York121 8 Manding New York: Jeliya Bara Bang143 9 Patronage: Becoming a Jatigi167 10 Living “in between” Cultures189

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11 Paris 2015–2021209 12 Duniya: Weaving Pasts and Futures231 Index247

List of Photos

Photo 1 Photo 7.1 Photo 7.2 Photo 7.3 Photo 8.1 Photo 9.1 Photo 10.1 Photo 10.2 Photo 10.3 Photo 11.10 Photo 11.11 Photo 11.12

Lisa Feder and Gray Parrot practicing balafon in Maine ix Famoro Dioubate singing at Shrine World Music Venue, New York City 2013. (Courtesy of Raul Rothblatt) 123 Mamady “Djeliké” Kouyaté playing with his band, Mandingo Ambassadors at Café Barbès, Brooklyn, New York in 2013. (Photo by author) 124 Kakande band with Famoro Dioubaté at Shrine World Music Venue, New York City 2013. (Courtesy of Raul Rothblatt) 125 A Mamaya jeli party in Paris, France 2018. (Photo by author)161 Gray Parrot and his teacher Saikou Jobarteh in Casamance, Senegal 2006. (Photo by author) 174 Fatmata (Hadja) Naby and Sékou Dioubaté arrive in Kennedy airport, New York, 2018. (Photo by author) 195 Sékou Dioubaté at Famoro Dioubaté’s home in Harlem, New York. (Photo by author) 198 Famoro and Sekou Dioubaté playing back their recordings for me at home in Harlem, New York, 2018. (Photo by author)202 Djekoria Mory Kanté recording at Sekou Dioubaté’s home studio, 2018. (Photo by author) 216 Seydou “Kanazoé” Diabaté playing with the Kanazoe Orkestra at 360 Paris Music Factory, February 2020. (Photo by author) 224 Mamady “Djeliké” Kouyaté in an interview at Café Barbès, Brooklyn, New York. (Photo by author) 227 xvii

Orthography

The orthography I use throughout the book is English when speaking about people in the Gambia and French when speaking about francophone Mali or Guinea. “Jeli” is a Mandingo term equivalent to the alternative spellings, djeli and jali. The plural of “jeli” in Mandingo is “jelilu,” or “jeliw” but it is common for jelis to use the English “jelis” when speaking English, as I do in this book. I use the Francophone spelling of djembe because the instrument originates in Francophone Guinea and I first learned to spell it this way. It is the equivalent to the English orthography jembe. Many of the names of family lineages have alternative spellings, such as Kouyaté/Kuyaté, or Jobarteh/ Diabaté/Dioubaté. I use the spelling that the individual uses for him or herself. There are historical figures whose names are spelled a variety of ways in literature. The two most prominent historical figures are Soundiata Keita and Soumanoro Kanté, rivals and rulers of the Mande people at the formation of their great empire in the thirteenth century. These names are spelled elsewhere as Sunjata, Sundiata, Soundjata and Sumanguru, Soumaoro and otherwise.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This is a story of breaking through cultural barriers, of learning to see and be in the world through a foreign cultural perspective, one that is ostensibly, vastly different from one’s own. It is a testimony of how I did this by using a musical practice as the methodological framework for cross-­cultural learning. For the past 20 years I studied with jelis of the Manding people in West Africa. Jelis, more commonly known as griots (gree-oh), are more than musicians, they are part of an 800-year-old profession that keeps and recites the oral history of the people through music and verse. Contained within the musical practice is an indigenous education system that, I discovered, works with students like me, an American, across cultural boundaries. I focused on the instrumental music of this culture in the Gambia, Guinea, New York, and now in Paris, where many of us make our home. I began traveling to West Africa in 2000 to learn djembe, kora, and balafon. I returned in 2001, 2004, and 2006, living with local families each time for a two-month stint. Aside from that, I studied balafon in the United States and France over the course of 15 years from 2004 to the present, 2021. I let my lessons and my musical practice drift in and out of my life until jeli music, and my relationships with my teachers naturally took on greater importance to me. Jeliya is the Manding name of this profession, and it is practiced exclusively by griots, or jelis, who guard it through family lineages. By learning the music, I found that jeliya grew into a philosophy of life—a different © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Feder, Jeliya at the Crossroads, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83059-5_1

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kind of morality that resonated with but was different from what I learned in my own culture in the United States. Having been transformed, and still transforming through my experiences with West African culture, there was a wisdom in their humanity that is upheld, reinforced, even taught through jeliya. Once fully mastered, jeliya becomes a habit that can be performed without much thought about its deeper meaning—much like when I recite a Hannukah blessing over the candles; I do it because my ancestors did it, but I am not emotionally attached or grateful for what took place 2000 years ago. Furthermore, like all cultures born in local communities, that of jeliya is constantly changing due to internal and external influences and the need to make a cash-based living. Nevertheless, there remains an ideal, perhaps romantic, but nevertheless true vision of jeliya held in the hearts of the jelis that practice it that they have not forgotten. I argue that the idea vision is still useful and relevant in today’s world. I see jeliya, as my jeli interlocuters do,1 as what I call, a “practice of wisdom,” a set of behaviors that can resolve the tensions and difficulties in life, and see a bigger picture that reorients society toward the greater good.

The Jelis, a Scholarly Perspective In Western scholarly literature, jelis are described as musicians, singers, oral-historians, advisers, diplomats, mediators, ceremony participants, teachers, bards, and more (Bird, 1970; Charry, 2000; Hale, 1998; Hoffman, 2000). A jeli refers to a person born into a particular caste and specific family lineage in the Manding region of West Africa, particularly Mali, Guinea, the Gambia, Burkina Faso, and neighboring countries. The profession and practice called jeliya is reserved for those who belong to one of a small handful of family lineages guarded by endogamy, particularly Kouyaté/Kuyaté, Diabaté/Dioubaté/Jobarteh, Sissoko/Cissé, and Kanté/Konté. Jelis are musical artists who sculpt sound with their song, speech, and music to create an intended feeling. They are members of the nyamakala caste of smiths, metal, wood, leather workers who shape, sculpt, and imbue inanimate objects with spirit (Charry, 2000: 49) and in contrast to the hɔrɔn caste of nobles (Camara: 70). They may play one of several instruments, the most common of which are the balafon, (more than 800 years old), the kora (more than 200 years old), the ngoni (about 700 years old), and the guitar, adapted from Europe and played in a particular jeli style. They also use their voices with stylized speech and in

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song. The balafon, or balanyi in Manding languages, is a xylophone of 23 wooden keys with 23 corresponding gourds or calabash, each hanging below a key that reverberates and amplifies the sound. The instrument is played with a wooden mallet with a rubber ball at the end in each hand. Many scholars have noted that jelis specialize in one or two of three skills— speech kuma, singing called donkili, or instrument-playing called foli/kosiri. Jelis function historically to influence their society, to sing people’s histories to them, to weave a web between the ancestors of the past and the present. They preside over family and social events such as weddings, baptisms, funerals, and other rites of passage. They can resolve conflicts, matchmake, and advise political leaders. Their music and words serve to raise tensions where people have become too lax, and to resolve tensions when relations become too heated. The words and instrumentation work separately and together, to serve the same function. Without knowing Malinké, Bambara, or other jeli languages, I have concentrated on how jeliya is applicable to some degree, cross-culturally, through music. In participating in this music, either as a student or deep listener, the non-­ Manding person can also feel the balancing effects of jeliya.

Myself, as Anthropologist My motivation to study anthropology was to learn practices of wisdom— rituals, arts, storytelling—that hold and reinforce values in society. In graduate school, I sought wisdom in tribal societies from the forest and became enthralled with anthropologist Terry Turner’s class on the Kayapo people at the University of Chicago. I continued to work with the Kayapo intermittently from 2000 to 2008, researching the competing versions of “environmentalism.” But my interests included more than environmental preservation. My colleague, Marko Zivkovic, helped me define my interest as “practices of wisdom” a few years later. In 2004, at Cornell University, I shifted my doctoral focus to the balafon music of the jelis. During graduate school I also began an intensive yoga and meditation practice for my own well-being. My contemplative practice, now 20 years strong, grew in parallel with my explorations in Brazil and Africa and it influences the way I practice anthropology. In the course of completing a PhD in cultural anthropology, the researcher does one or 2 years of intensive “fieldwork” study in a host culture before writing a dissertation. My official fieldwork took place in

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New  York and culminated in a dissertation entitled “Learning Culture through a Musical Practice with Manding Jelis in New  York” (Feder, 2007). My graduate work was just a beginning; studying and working with jelis became part of my lifestyle. My fieldwork became multi-sited. I traveled to the Gambia and Guinea four times during the years of 2000–2006, and I studied balafon in New York City and the northeastern part of the United States. Since 2015, my fieldwork on jeliya is centered in France, particularly the Métropole du Grand Paris. In my research, learning took place in an already well-engrained system of direct oral transmission that had been passed from generation to generation for about 800 years. The ineffable spirit of the past 800 years still exists, in New York, in Paris, and in the villages of Guinea and the Gambia, through that direct transmission to Africans, and to me and many others like me. But jeliya is also very much global, cosmopolitan, business-savvy, Western. As we move into one another’s worlds, in some ways I become more “local” clinging to the old values of Manding society, while many of my interlocuters are transforming their ancestors’ ways into the global system of values.

Embodying a “Characteristic Species of Grace” In West Africa, as everywhere, learning happens largely through the body.2 In my methodology or techniques for learning a foreign culture in the field, I started from syncing up and tuning in to the rhythms of movement and speech in the everyday routines as discussed in Chaps. 2 and 3, and then in music, in Chaps. 4, 5, and 6. Blending in, corporeally, we gradually become aware of the priorities and habitual ways of using our senses in the world as we conflict with other modalities (Lee & Ingold, 2006; Howes, 2003; Grasseni, 2004; Stoller, 1989, 1997). By reflecting on our inculcated habitus (Bourdieu, 1990; Mauss, 1979) we may have a prise de conscience (Hanks, 1996) when we are out of sync with the host culture, causing either pleasure at the novelty of the experience, or anxiety at not fitting in. This is a phenomenological place from which the researcher can ask deeper questions about the driving forces, sometimes called the moral imperative, or guiding force that directs and influences action and thinking in a culture (Benedict, 1935). Said similarly, Gregory Bateson described it as the “ethos” (or eidos) of that culture—the zeitgeist, or spirit—at that moment in its history (Bateson, 1965: 112). This book is my testimony

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that learning to embody Bateson’s “characteristic species of grace” (Bateson 1972). I came to understand the ineffable spirit of jeliya as it is imagined by many of its practitioners, and how it is currently manifesting in a state of transition, as jeliya moves further into the global economy. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson explains  in his article on grace and primitive art (1972) that art is humanity’s attempt to combine our rational, thinking minds with our intuitive minds, or as he says, “matters of the heart with matters of reason.” Graceful movement manifests through arts, crafts, and sports, when the practitioner can effectively integrate skills and effortlessly practice them with ease and inspiration. Each culture’s art has its own “characteristic species of grace,” or, the successful integration of heart and mind, and such human grace is recognizable across cultures. I suggest that learning to embody the “characteristic species of grace” of another culture, we assume postures, gestures, phrases, ways of learning, ways of approaching life that contain the values of that culture. Understanding comes nonverbally, tacitly, through the practice and the style of teachings. This method belongs with the field of anthropologists who believe in using the body as a tool to resonate with their interlocuters until the action becomes less conscious, more habitual. It involves the tacit, nonverbal, emotional, intuitive kind of learning (see Csordas, 1990; Lee & Ingold, 2006; Pink, 2015), learning in context, or “situated learning” (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Donald Schön explained that “knowing is in the action” in which “tacit knowledge” acquired through experience comes out in the doing before one can even speak about it, if at all. The learning requires a “reflective practice” in which the learner is continually reflecting on her success or failure in fitting in and adjusting accordingly (1983). As the novice seeks to imitate new styles of moving, such as capoeira (Downey, 2005) or Japanese dance (Hahn, 2007), one of the central obstacles he or she must confront is unconscious patterning, or cultural conditioning, that is only apparent when challenged by new kinesthetics (Downey, 2010: 27). While this process may enlighten the researcher to the host culture’s epistemologies, it may also be transformative to the researcher as she embodies this new way of being. Making the researcher’s transformation the focus of the ethnographic writing is a technique and a style which I refer to as “transformative ethnography.” The intention is that the reader, perhaps associated to the researcher by overlapping cultures, can learn along with the researcher as she reveals her experiences in the text.

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Jeliya at the Crossroads: A New Approach None of the scholars—in my own research, at least—who write about the words, songs, and instrumental music of the jelis explain it from the angles I have here. Ironically, for the most part this book is not about jeliya. It is about my own process of transformation—which is why I call this transformative ethnography. I am learning, during the course of these 15 years, about the difficulties, prejudices, and misunderstandings so much a part of the divide across the largest economic and power discrepancy that exists on the planet: Africa and the West. There is such a big knot to untangle in that broken relationship, it is daunting and scary and I hope that I have faced it head on in this book. My intention is to show how we can unwittingly believe that our point of view is correct when it may be unintentionally or naively disrespectful. I am exposing myself and my interlocuters, using myself as a representative of the Western culture, showing the assumptions and misunderstandings I have made, as Westerners often do, in judging and misperceiving the “African musician.” There are many times in my stories that I may seem to paint an unfavorable picture of a musician. In fact, they are equally painting unfavorable pictures of me, and rightly so. Talking openly through hurt feelings and suspicions while maintaining good faith, we are often able to untangle the knots of centuries of cultural conditioning. There are some occasions in which I was, unfortunately, not successful, and some very respectable jelis and I have parted ways. This deeply saddens me. But more so than not, I have been able to navigate these sticky roads, much to the benefit of both sides, and our relationships and mutual respect solidifies. This book is about jeliya, however, in a different way than other scholarly works. I describe jeliya through the first-person perspective, through my experience of it as it is relevant and useful for someone not of Manding culture. How jeli music feels in my body and how it affects my mind gives me insights into why it is important in Manding culture, but also potentially to any human being. In this sense I attempt to valorize jeliya far beyond its particular use in Manding culture. On the other hand I most certainly ignore some of the tenets of jeliya that anthropologists like Eric Charry, who honors the musical aspects of jeliya, and Barbara Hoffman, who respects the verbal and mediation aspects of jeliya, explain. I hope that my mistakes and revelations can help European and American scholars, musicians, students, producers, and others with whom jelis do

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business to understand better about where they are coming from and how we may give them the due respect they deserve. Most of my research explores jeliya as it exists in the United States and France as it transitions into the global economy, as many other local cultural practices are doing. The encounter of jeli and Western culture intersects with Arjun Appadurai’s ideas about globalism (1996), particularly addressing post-colonial power and dominance as the local and the global merge into one another. Specifically, my research addresses the “global hierarchy of value” and subsequent marginalization of the local artisan (Herzfeld, 2004:4). At times my research explores how I, representing the European/North American culture of the “global elite,” may unwittingly reproduce marginalizing ideas on those represented by my jelis teachers, who often prove to be more adept at creatively navigating between the global and local modalities, such as in Chap. 10. I was hardly aware that my inculcated values relating to time and money were marginalizing until I tried to see the world from another perspective. The existing scholarship on jeliya comes from anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and sociologists of American, European, and African origin. The Francophone African scholarship excels in explaining the social role and power that jelis have in society. Sory Camara (2017) and Drame and Senn-Borloz (1992) give details about the place and role of griots in society. Cissé and Kamissoko (2009) explain the origins of jeliya, dating to the Malian Emperor in Soundjata: la gloire du Mali (2009). Sociologist Mamadou Diawara discusses the effects of globalization on gender roles in jeliya (1996). In English scholarship, Eric Charry’s Manding Music (2000), and Thomas Hale’s Griots and Griottes (1998) both serve as encyclopedic-like scholarly explanations of griot and other West African music. They explain instruments, stories of origin, purposes of social roles, and kinship relations that are essential to understanding how jeliya functions in Manding society. Barbara Hoffman’s Griots at War (2000) offers a deep linguistic interpretation and analysis—like that of her mentor, Charles Bird (1975)— of jeli speech, in which she transcribed, translated, and explained a four-­ day jeli meeting in Kita, Mali, in 1985 meant to restore harmony between competitive griot factions. Paulla Ebron addresses the image that has become exoticized as “Africa” in her book Performing Africa (2002). Her fieldwork among Gambian jelis details “personalistic economy,” the power dynamics of the patron–client relationship between jelis and their patrons both within Manding culture as well as between Manding and European

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and North American relations. The cross-cultural patron–client relationship is a theme I develop here as well. Dutch anthropologist Jan Jansen’s (2000) intensive fieldwork living with griots in Kita culminating in The Griot’s Craft is poignant. He describes how jelis can make latent tensions “heat up” in society, and they can also “cool down” heated situations, moving society toward harmony/resolution. Nonscholarly storytelling about jeliya paints a vivid picture of reality that for me can be more informative than academic work. Banning Eyre’s In Griot Time (2000), for example, provides an anecdotal view of the life of Djelimadi Tounkara, the famous Malian guitar virtuoso. Taking part in rehearsals and performances of the Rail Band, Eyre depicts jeliya in Bamako in Mali in the 1990s. Fictional works based on truth such as Dani Kouyate’s film “Keita! L’Héritage du Griot” (1996) and Camara Laye’s “L’Enfant Noir” (1954) and “Le maître de la parole” (1978) bring heartfelt insight into this musical world that most academic-style books tend to flatten. Similarly, I hope that my narrative, which may be closer to a memoir than a scholarly study—serves as a complement to the more formal texts. The intention is that, at times, you will feel jeliya yourself as you read this.

Storytelling as Ethnography Storytelling, whether fiction based on truth or as a memoir, is my favorite kind of anthropological reading. Paul Stoller, a mentor to me, validated memoir and narrative storytelling as a valid form of ethnography. He grappled with how to write his first book about his apprenticeship to Adamu Jenitingo in Niger. In Sorcery’s Shadow, written with Cheryl Olkes (1987), came out as a narrative memoir, his antidote to prosaic ethnographic scholarly writing that is often devoid of emotion and sensual description. Subsequent books by Stoller included his sensorial experiences in the field through narrative nonfiction (1989, et al.) and fiction (2016). Storytelling, Stoller contends, privileges human connection, as opposed to more formal academic writing, which tends toward exclusivity through academic jargon and complex theories and analysis (personal communication November 2017). The first quintessential book for me was African Music and African Sensibility, penned by John Miller Chernoff (1979), who explains

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Ghanaian values through his musical practice. I relate to his approach to the field and to his writing. He says: I was interested in finding a place in the musical context rather than finding a place for my involvement with music in a scholarly context. Just a few weeks after I had arrived in Ghana, I was dimly aware that in the cult I was accepting other standards of judgement, that African values would define the meaning of my actions. I was deferential and self-conscious because I assumed that I did not know what to do in most situations. I accepted what people told me about myself and what I should be doing. (Chernoff, 1979, 170)

Alan Merriam critiques Chernoff (1980) for his personal and humanistic approach to ethnography, raising important points to address with regard to my work. Merriam believed that using one’s emotional and psychological responses in participant observation did not produce valid data in social science and questioned Chernoff’s belief that practicing this music was in part a spiritual quest. First, I will argue that West African music, and certainly jeli music, is designed to be a spiritual quest in Manding culture but not everyone will choose to use it that way. Thus, I agree with Chernoff that musical excellence is determined by ethics as well as aesthetics. Chernoff’s realization of such could not have been understood had it not been for his committed, emotional, humanistic, and embodied research of Ghanaian drumming. But the validity of using subjective, emotional methods in anthropology (Behar, 1997) and narrative (Rosaldo, 1993) and storytelling as valid representation (Stoller, 1989) has since been proved to be an effective and maybe a less harmful (Haraway, 1988) and more honest account of a foreign culture (see Abu-Lughod, 2000). Lila Abu-Lughod expresses it as engaged anthropology, a critique “questioning the ‘common sense’ and an ethical concern about the violences of power” (Abu-Lughod, 2019). I consider my work as part of an “engaged anthropology.” I am part of the lives of several cosmopolitan jelis as their 800-year-old practice survives and adapts to the global power based on business. I believe I have a role to play in creating more space and broader opportunities for jelis as they continue to carve out their role in the world.

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Themes in This Book Tension-and-resolution is the underlying theme throughout this book. The stories in this book can be tension-provoking or very pleasing, much like the music. Tensions and resolutions exist in the cross-rhythmic melodies of the music, and metaphorically represent the tensions and resolutions in human relationships and other trials and tribulations in life. In this story, the tension rises at times between myself and my jeli teachers. It rises between jelis and French and American musicians in general. And it is also present between jelis themselves, as well as jelis and their patrons of the noble class as their culture undergoes changes. I highlight two sub-themes in which tensions arise between two worldviews: the use of Money and Time. The mitigating factor—or resolution—of tensions comes through a Manding trait called Sweetness. Sweetness refers to a feeling of human warmth prevalent in jeli music and West African human relations. At the roots of their music, jelis cultivate sweetness. The sweetness is palpable in Manding social relations and is also used as a tool to move things in one’s favor. Something that is “sweet” entails care, love, patience, and time. Sweetness is cultivated when jelis play music for others. The high priority that Manding people put on cultivating and appreciating sweetness was alluring to me. Sweetness is an obvious point of harmony, but it also intersects with time and money to create tensions. To cultivate sweetness in human relations takes time, and once it is there, it comes with responsibilities that take time to fulfill. For myself, an American New Yorker who is forever trying to be time-efficient, slowing down and taking the time for myself as well as my jeli teachers did not come easily to me. It proved a lack of respect on my side. People, both African and not, who relate to jelis may be drawn in by their sweetness and attention only to be expected to pay, or asked directly for, money. This can cause great friction cross-culturally due to different approaches and judgments about giving, as well as ways of earning a living. Sometimes these tensions break friendships, each side withdrawing into the comfort of their own habitual patterns, ready to blame the other for manipulative or controlling behavior. In doing so, they often unwittingly reify their respective ethnocentric views that our way is better, safer, more just, more moral, than yours. I show, through trials and tribulations, both myself and my jeli collaborators navigate and learn to play by both West African and Western views. The more profound skill of learning

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when and how to use which modality of being is something my collaborators and I face every day, and I, certainly, have yet to master it. Most of my jeli collaborators fare better than I do.

The Flow of the Book The book is organized into 12 chapters. In Chaps. 2, 3, and 5, I immerse myself in West African music and culture. My homestays in the Gambia test my capacity to tune in and sync up with the local culture, providing me with an intensive field experience on which to base my future studies of jeliya in the northern countries. In Chap. 5, I return to Guinea and experience the power of direct transmission as jeliya is passed from generation to generation. Chapters 4 and 6 focus on my embodied practice learning balafon music in the United States. In Chaps. 7, 8, 9, and 10, I deepen my experience with jelis in New York. I contrast how jeli music functions in, first, a cosmopolitan, multicultural audience (Chap. 7) and then for a strictly Manding audience (Chap. 8). In both cases, jelis explain to me how their practice is transforming as it moves out of Africa and into the world. Chapters 9 and 10 expose the more difficult underlying tensions that exist between myself, as a person from the dominant, oppressive, postcolonial power, and the jelis, as a people and a culture undergoing the pressures of assimilating into that dominant culture with its unfair advantage. In Chap. 9, I explain the transformations that both Famoro Dioubaté and I underwent to understand, respect, and trust one another when dealing with gross cultural and economic differences. Chapter 10 is a detailed case study of my experience in trying to produce an album in New York with jelis. Both me and my interlocuters are living between two worlds, two sensibilities. Having to navigate between them can be both anxiety-inducing and inspiring. In Chap. 11, we enter the world of jelis living in Paris, France, from 2015 to 2021, including the Covid pandemic. My Paris-based interlocuters speak to me about the state of jeliya during this time, explain what it was in the past, and share their diverse techniques for helping it to survive and thrive outside of Africa. The conclusion revisits the developments through the story line and considers what the future of jeliya may be and how anthropologists may have a role to play.

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The Characters In the following essays we will meet many jelis, but of particular influence in my life are the late Gambian kora player Saikou Jobarteh, and  New York–based Guinean jelis,  Famoro Dioubaté, Mamady “Djeliké” Kouyaté. I met Saikou Jobarteh in the Gambia through Gray Parrot only for a short stint in 2006, but we were inextricably woven into one another’s lives through verse and in heart since my first encounter with the kora in 1999. I met Famoro Dioubaté in New York in 2005, and our paths in life have been inextricably linked ever since. We depend on one another for validation of the meaning of life in which we share the same vision. I have been his apprentice, patron, manager, producer, and now, soul sister. Famoro is a jeli leader in the ex-patriot Manding community in New York, and the band leader of Kakandé, a Manding music band. There are others in New  York, particularly Missia Saran Dioubaté and her famous sister Oumou Dioubaté, both formidable jelimusolu (female jeli singers). New  York–based elder guitarist Mamady “Djeliké” Kouyaté informed my knowledge of jeliya, first as Kakandé’s guitar player later as the leader of Mandingo Ambassadors, a Manding African Jazz band. Since I moved to Paris in 2015, I have grown close to guitarist Djekoria Mory Kanté; singer, bassist, and guitarist, Gbessa Sékou Dioubaté; the young guitarist Mohamed “Champion” Yonne; Burkinabè balafonist Seydou “Kanazoé” Diabaté; and the late Mory Kanté. My conversations with all of them have deepened my understanding of how jeliya works in the European-based global market.

A Reflexive Glance This is a reflexive, subjective ethnography. To be reflexive, to consider how my own background influences my fieldwork, is not as simple as the social labels that one can place on us. These lines blur depending on the context and the intimacy and say very little about our possible shared values. And yet, understanding where we come from vis-à-vis our interlocuters is essential to correct global inequalities. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) era exposed the gross divisions and misunderstandings in the American people, and

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similarly across the globe, sparking a desire for many to understand how we can do better. In the book, How to be an Anti-Racist (Kendi, 2019), the author challenges us as he challenges himself, to unearth our own inculcated assumptions that may be unwittingly, marginalizing, or prejudiced, or discriminatory to other valid ways of being in the world. My fieldwork in an African culture, and the subsequent discussions I had with reviewers of my writing, revealed my own pernicious beliefs that reinforced the dominant power hierarchy and marginalized my interlocuters. I hope that I have been able to shed new light through revealing my own misperceptions around these issues. That said, in Kofi Agawu’s critique, “the ethics of self-reflexivity” he questions whether in Michelle Kisliuk’s ethnography (1998) among the BaAka people in Africa, she did more to reproduce the dominant racist ideology even when intending to elucidate our common humanity (Agawu, 2003). I hope that is not the case here, but if it is, it only shows that I am in an ongoing learning process. I ask for forgiveness ahead of time for my shortcomings. I am a white American from a middle- to upper-middle-class family. I was born in Manhattan, New  York, and raised in Bergen County, New Jersey. My father’s parents were born in Eastern Europe with Jewish origins. My mother’s ancestry comes from England and Italy. Both my parents came from modest backgrounds, and made successful professional careers, my father as a lawyer and my mother as a hair salon owner and colorist. In Africa, my experience is that the color of skin matters less than the character of the person. From my perspective, my African friends have a strong sense of security, pride, and confidence that, when they come to the United States, cannot be discouraged by American racism in the same way it might for African Americans. In West Africa, there is such a large mix of subcultures and language groups that assessing whether people are trustworthy is a skill they value. It starts from a position of mutual respect and common belief that most people have good character, unless they prove otherwise. This is a valuable lesson for us to learn for Whites entering into Black or other minority spaces. Coming into the field with comparatively large access to financial resources at my disposal was and continues to be my largest power differential compared with my interlocuters. I could, and often chose to, live on a shoestring budget when in Africa, mostly because I did not have an income as a graduate student. However, when things got tough

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and I needed a way out, which happened once, Mom charged a plane ticket home in the blink of an eye. My African friends do not have charge cards. When they want to travel home from New York or Paris, they call all of their friends and family members and start to collect donations. They piecemeal it together, if they are even so lucky. It may take months, or years, if ever. Furthermore, money in the United States is personal. It is accumulated by the individual or nuclear family and is not easily shared. Where I have lived in West Africa, accumulation of money is minimal because accessing large amounts is rare. When a person receives a sum of money, it may be splurged quickly on material items like nice shoes or clothes,3 or a TV or new phone, and it may be shared quickly with family members and friends who are near. Access and usage of money may be one of the largest differences between myself and my jeli teachers, and issues around exchanging it continually surface in our relationship as a spot of contention and a tremendous source of learning. Religion warrants mention, particularly because Manding people are 90% Muslim. They practice a moderate, tolerant branch of Islam, mixed with indigenous African beliefs. Most of my Manding friends do not drink, do observe Ramadan, do pray—sometimes five times daily—and sometimes attend mosque on Fridays. The women may or may not cover their heads, may or may not wear long skirts. The children are taught to pray. But never has anyone tried to convert me or make me feel less moral for not being Muslim, and my relationships with men and women equally have been based on mutually defined ethics with occasional differences in opinion (they judge me on my actions, not my religion). Oddly, my secular upbringing, which left me little desire to understand any idea of God or higher spirit, began to change when I saw how Islam manifested in West Africa. People uphold a moral code that privileges a calm and level-­ headed demeanor. They take time out of their day to sit quietly and contemplate a higher spirit, to invoke Allah to hope that things go well (inshallah), and to thank Allah when they do (alhumdililah). They appreciate. I also learned to appreciate and believe in these incantations and expressions of gratitude. I’ve adopted these terms as a regular course of my speech and I believe it to be important, even though I am not Muslim. I also respect the local norms of modesty in dress and mild-mannered behavior. However, I am also aware that because of my birthplace I do transcend some of the norms.

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Women do not enjoy the same level of freedoms and equality that men do in Manding culture, whether in West Africa or in New York and Paris, although I suspect their freedom is greater in New York and Paris. Some African women will tend to defer to their husbands to do the speaking first, when in public, and men may make rules in the household, although it does depend on each family. It is acceptable for the man to have more than one wife, but it is not acceptable for the woman to have more than one husband. With regard to my gender, that of woman, becoming involved in a man’s world in Africa was relatively easy.4 No one questioned me when I wanted to learn the kora or the balafon. My jeli teachers were happy to teach me and encouraged me to practice so that I could play in village ceremonies in Guinea. For one, some jeli women are starting to play the instruments beyond the karanyi (the female jeli bell-like instrument).5 But the jeli girls and women I know are free to practice balafon. The system of direct transmission, however, caters to girls learning from their mothers and boys learning from their fathers as ethnomusicologist Lucy Durán captures in her documentaries Growing into Music (2012a, b), as most things are gender divided in Manding culture. I suspect a second reason for my acceptance as a woman balafon player is that I did not promise to excel to any great heights musically. Therefore, I am no threat; rather, I am a novelty, a source of pride to my jeli friends who can show off my limited balafon skills in their culture. They see that I respect and love jeliya, as they do, so it revalorizes their culture. In general, for men, I was more powerful than local women and I had more freedom to shift between gender roles. However, I am still a woman, and clear boundaries with regard to sexual and marital relations were important to delineate in no uncertain terms. I had to reformulate from my own cultural norm where the appropriate boundaries were in terms of affection and attention I shared with men, as well as my dress code, which is a place-specific and delicate matter. My access to higher education, while a definite advantage in the global scheme of things, does not always serve as a source of power in my daily interactions with my field hosts. In fact, relying too heavily on erudite education can be an obstacle. Showing off knowledge, standing behind notebooks, and relying on interviews, out of context, does not bode well in West Africa, as Paul Stoller affirms (1997). Barbara Hoffman similarly affirms that she did not conduct interviews until she lived in Mali for two years (personal communication 2021). Select scholars have discussed the

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importance of developing an “ethnographic sensibility” to the host culture (see Henderson, 2016; Pacheco-Vega, 2016). Asking questions as relevant to the present circumstances, sensitivity to your surroundings, and reading people’s moods is essential to progress in learning West Africa, and my experience there has helped me to develop my ethnographic sensibility in any foreign culture. We should discuss the notion of an ethnographic sensibility in our graduate classes. Seen from a different perspective, my education level vis-à-vis my jeli teachers is an added advantage when they want to spread their wisdom, talents, and culture in the United States and France. Because my field site was in part on my home turf, my expertise in American culture became a great advantage to my fieldwork friends whose English was broken, whose knowledge of the legal system was spotty, whose social capital—people they knew—was limited to musical circles, and whose levels of literacy (particularly on the Internet) were minimal. I became an asset to them, as they became to me, as we both strived to penetrate one another’s cultures. Mamady “Djeliké” Kouyaté, perhaps due to his advanced degree in agroeconomy, understood the value of my PhD, often introduced me in his concerts as “Docteur de la Musique Manding.” He calls upon me to help him in several capacities. I have sought out gigs for his Afro-Jazz band, the Mandingo Ambassadors in colleges, I have read many legal papers, helped him navigate the naturalization process in America, and helped with other legal matters. Rather than money, which most jelis request, Mamady taps me for my contacts, skill sets, and education. I, in turn, tap him for his extensive knowledge of Manding history and jeliya. When Mamady calls me on the phone, he says, “Bonjour, La Reine!” (the queen), and this is a term of endearment and respect. I call him by his nickname in the Manding world, Djeliké (pronounced between a hard and soft G, Gely-K). Here, I may refer to my Manding relations as teacher, host, adviser, interlocuters, friend, or another title that I feel describes our relationship in that moment, but most often, I use the name by which I call them.

Positions of Power In short, Africa has taught and continues to teach me many things, and one of the most important is how to recognize your position of power and use it wisely for the benefit of yourself and those in your community. Perhaps it is because of poor role models, or a history plagued with colonialism and imperialism, that in American society we tend to either fear and refuse power or to grasp dearly for it risking our dignity and respect

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for others. Jeliya is meant to smooth these imbalances and teach proper skills. Through my encounters with jeliya and my experience in Manding cultures both in Africa and abroad, I have learned to assume and to wield my power more smartly, as I learn how they wield theirs. People have a different relationship with power in the Manding region of West Africa. First of all, the imposition of a French or British government and economic system dependent on the globalized economy destroyed Africa’s economy and social system. Although corruption is common in West African government, the same actions that we, the Westerners, might consider to be corrupt are often commonly acceptable practices in West Africa (see Blundo & Sardan, 2001). In West Africa, there is still an indigenous hierarchy of power that is part of every institution from the family to the village, to a musical band, to the government, and this power structure has an ethical system of balance. Generally, the elders, those with the most experience, have power and earn respect of those with less age, experience, and wisdom. Money, food, and shelter are stretched much further in West Africa than in my homes in the urban United States and France. West Africa thrives on human relations, generally within a lack of material resources. There are too many people and not enough financial opportunities, yet they still joke, tell stories, and enjoy life together. Poverty results in two complementary and opposing forces: gross competition and surprising generosity. Generosity, one of the five pillars of Islam, and central to indigenous African cultures as well as Christianity, is palpable in West Africa and perhaps in the diaspora. Generosity and community run hand in hand. My African family who may struggle to feed 10 will set aside an extra bowl of rice and sauce for charity. A good-hearted and hungry guest who shows up unannounced will be fed. Before a trip, donations to the local mosque may be offered, such as white fabrics. Kola nuts may be given to a stranger in the street. Charity is a way to nudge the flow of events to unfold in your favor. A successful outcome is never a sure thing. For that reason, all uncertain wishes are accompanied by “inshallah,” or “God willing,” and all successes are acknowledged in gratitude, “alhumdililah,” or “thanks to God.” Somehow, in my American cultural perspective, we have the impression that we can control all things. An appreciation for the workings of chance, fate, or favorable conditions beyond our control is generally not a part of our secular reality. Jeliya changed that for me.

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Notes 1. “Interlocuter” is the most recent term that anthropologists use to label the people they learn from “in the field” or the host culture. We also use collaborator and informant. I sometimes use the terms, my teacher, my jeli, my friend, my relations, depending on the circumstance and the relationship I have with the person. I use interlocuter as a default term to indicate the jelis with whom I talk. 2. Paul Stoller critiqued Eurocentric predispositions toward intellectual learning in Sensuous Scholarship (1997) through his work with Songhay bards. In my work among the jelis, also West African bards, I also found it impossible to do fieldwork in any other way but embodied practice. 3. See the documentary on YouTube about the “Sapeurs of Papa Wemba.” https://youtu.be/Xw-­guQBCy8M 4. Barbara Hoffman commented similarly that she felt women “get a free pass as honorary males.” She explained it in part, due to economic differentials, as well as “not meeting all the criteria for being fully women in those cultures” (personal communication 2021). 5. See the British-Gambian Sona Jobarteh, prominent on YouTube who plays the kora worldwide.

References Abu-Lughod, L. (2000). Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. University of California Press. Abu-Lughod, L. (2019). The Courage of Truth: Making Anthropology Matter. Working Papers in Anthropology. 7 September 2019, Leuven: KU Leuven. Agawu, K. (2003). Representing African Music. Routledge. Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large. University of Minnesota Press. Bateson, G. (1965). [First published 1936]. Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of view. Stanford University Press. Bateson, G. (1972). Style, Grace and Information in Primitive Art. In Steps to an Ecology of the Mind. Random House. Behar, R. (1997). The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Beacon Press. Benedict, R. (1935). Patterns of culture. Routledge. Bird, Charles S. (1970). “The development of Mandenkan (Manding): A study of the role of extra-linguistic factors in linguistic change.” In Language and History in Africa, ed. David Dalby. London: Frank Cass, 146–159. Blundo, G., & Sardan, J.  P. (2001). La corruption quotidienne en Afrique de l’Ouest. Politique Africaine, (83), 8–37.

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Bourdieu, P. (1990). The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press. Camara, S. (2017). Gens de la parole. Karthala. Charry, E. (2000). Manding Music. University of Chicago Press. Chernoff, J.  M. (1979). African Rhythm and African Sensibility. University of Chicago Press. Cissé, Y., & Kamissoko, W. (2009). Soundjata la gloire du Mali. Karthala-Arsan. Csordas, T. (1990). Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology. Ethos, 18, 5–47. Diawara, M. (1996). Le griot à l’heure de la globalization. Cahiers d’études africaines, (144), 591–612. Downey, G. (2005). Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-­ Brazilian Art. Oxford University Press. Downey, G. (2010). Practice Without Theory: A Neuroanthropolgical Perspective on Embodied Learning. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16(1), 22–40. Drame, A., & Senn-Borloz, A. (1992). Jeliya: Être griot et musicien aujourd’hui. L’Harmattan. Durán, L. (Director and Producer). (2012a). Da Kali: Pledge to the Art of the Griot. Growing into Music Series. [Motion Picture] SOAS. http://www. growingintomusic.co.uk/mali-­a nd-­g uinea-­m usic-­o f/films-­o f-­g rowing-­ into-­music.html Durán, L. (Director and Producer). (2012b). Dò farala a kan: Something Has Been Added. Growing into Music Series. [Motion Picture] SOAS. http:// www.growingintomusic.co.uk/mali-­and-­guinea-­music-­of/films-­of-­growing-­ into-­music.html Ebron, P. (2002). Performing Africa. Princeton University Press. Eyre, B. (2000). In Griot Time. Temple University Press. Feder, L. (2007). Learning Culture Through a Musical Practice with Manding jelis in New  York. Cornell University 3260855. https://search-­proquest-­com. proxy.library.cornell.edu/dissertations-­t heses/learning-­c ulture-­t hrough-­ musical-­practice-­with/docview/304866110/se-­2?accountid=10267 Grasseni, C. (2004). Skilled Visions: An Apprenticeship in Breeding Aesthetics. Social Anthropology, 12(1), 41–55. Hahn, T. (2007). Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture Through Japanese Dance. Wesleyan University Press. Hale, T. (1998). Griots and Griottes. Indiana University Press. Hanks, W. (1996). Language and Communicative Practices. Avalon. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated Knowledges. Feminist Studies., 14(3), 575–599. Henderson, H. (2016). Toward an Ethnographic Sensibility in Urban Research. Australian Planner, 53(1) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/ 07293682.2015.1135817 Herzfeld, M. (2004). The Body Impolitic. University of Chicago Press.

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Hoffman, B. (2000). Griots at War: Conflict, Conciliation, and Caste in Mande. Indiana University Press. Howes, D. (2003). Sensing Culture: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. University of Michigan Press. Jansen, J. (2000). The Griot’s Craft: An Essay on Oral Tradition and Diplomacy. Lit. Kendi, I. (2019). How to be an Anti-Racist. Penguin-Random House. Kisliuk, M. (1998). Seize the Dance. Oxford University Press. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press. Laye, C. (1954). The Dark Child: The Autobiography of an African Boy. Noonday Press. Laye, C. (1978). Le maître de la parole. Plon. Lee, J., & Ingold, T. (2006). Fieldwork on Foot: Perceiving, Routing, Socializing. In S. Colman & C. Collins (Eds.), Locating the Field: Space, Place and Context in Anthropology (pp. 67–86). Berg. Mauss, M. (1979). Techniques of the Body. In Sociology and Psychology Essays (B. Brewster, Trans.). Routledge/Kegan Paul. (Original Work Published 1950). Merriam, A. (1980). Review of the book African Rhythms and African Sensibilities: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms by J.M.  Chernoff. Ethnomusicology, 24(3), 559–561. Pacheco-Vega, R. (2016). On Having Ethnographic Sensibility. http://www.raulpacheco.org/2016/09/on-­having-­ethnographic-­sensibility/ Pink, S. (2015). Doing Sensory Ethnography (2nd ed.). Sage. Rosaldo, R. (1993). Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Penguin Random House. Schön, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Routledge. Stoller, P. (1989). The Taste of Ethnographic Things. University of Pennsylvania Press. Stoller, P. (1997). Sensuous Scholarship. University of Pennsylvania Press. Stoller, P. (2016). The Sorcerer’s Burden. Palgrave Macmillan. Stoller, P., & Olkes, C. (1987). In Sorcery’s Shadow. University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 2

Sweetness in the Gambia

When I first went to the Gambia, I was already doing anthropological fieldwork in a remote indigenous village called A’Ukre, in Pará, Brazil, with the Kayapo tribe. In two consecutive years I went to both the Amazon and the Gambia. Gray Parrot, my kora-player friend from Maine, had warned me that Africa gets its hooks into you and it is hard to pry them out. After my first trip there, I could not, did not want to pry them out. Gambian culture had something that I desperately wanted, something that I in fact craved that I didn’t get in an efficient manner elsewhere. The people challenged me in ways that no other people had. There was a palpable power to the richness in culture, and an equally grand kindness. Their culture forced me to expand my mind; I was inspired to strive to understand their world in a new way and to practice embodying it. I felt that Gambia also quickly exposed my character weaknesses, forcing me to grow and transform. During my second year at Cornell, my adviser asked me if I wanted to change my fieldwork focus to West Africa. I declined and continued preparing my A exams—a test of historical and theoretical knowledge of relevant literature—on Brazil even while aboard a flight from New York to the Gambia. It was an exhilarating time in my life.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Feder, Jeliya at the Crossroads, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83059-5_2

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Welcome to the Gambia The capital of the Gambia, Banjul, rests at the very tip of the country, hanging off the peninsula between the sea and the watershed of the Gambia River. There are governmental buildings in in this small city, but the streets are paved. We land in Banjul but almost never have a reason to visit again. The main urban and residential area is Serekunda. The dirt and sand streets are organized into blocks that connect its neighborhoods. Compounds, family units made of cement, line the blocks in Serekunda, and every so often you see a corner store that sells things like canned sardines, tomato paste, oil, sometimes small loaves of bread, lightbulbs, batteries, condoms, candles, candies, and perhaps cold sodas. The British occupied the banks of the Gambia River beginning in the late 1700s, making it an official colony in the late 1800s until it gained independence in 1965. People in the urban areas speak English. They learn it in school and generally speak the language quite well, with a British-Gambian accent, by the time they reach their teenage years. They use unlikely expressions to an American ear such as “loitering,” meaning, hanging around. In the urban areas most people speak Mandingo and Wolof as their native tongues. The Gambia is surrounded by Senegal, where Wolof is the primary language and French is the colonizing language. Elements of French creep into Gambian vocabulary as well. Intrepid Europeans travel to the Gambia for vacation from the winter months. They stay in the fine hotels that cater to Europeans on the beaches of the Gambia. Other Europeans and Americans travel to West Africa with their Toubabadou1-based African drum and dance teachers. At the time of my first Gambia trip in 2001, nearly 20 years ago, the niche was not as carved as it is today in 2018, and the Gambia has never been as popular a destination as Senegal, where drum and dance has gained more popularity abroad. The Gambia is known for being small, quaint, and more conservative in values and customs than the major cities in Senegal, Guinea, and Mali. Drum and dance schools in West Africa are usually hosted by a teacher who lives abroad. Classes may take place in his or her outside space in the family compound, a space that has perhaps been enlarged with the bounty of the teacher’s income abroad, or elsewhere in other rented community/ public spaces. These schools may cater to a greater or lesser degree to foreigners. One American friend of mine who has been studying for many years with Youssuf Koumbassa, Guinean dance teacher based in the United

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States, tells me that as of 2018, Youssuf’s compound in Guinea-Conakry offers visitors from abroad three, square meals a day, with vegetarian and gluten-free options. On the other end of the spectrum, you have small-sized and rather informal homestays that offer nearly full integration into the local family lifestyle—which was my experience. On my first trip to the Gambia, I went with Gray Parrot and his partner, Chrisse, and three other toubabs, the local name for Europeans and Americans.2 We traveled with Mike Bennett, a professional drummer seeking to learn West African xylophone and two other musicians in their twenties, all from Maine. We were to stay with Bakary Kanyi’s family and take music lessons with various young Gambian music teachers in the compound, daily. Our experience with Bakary Kanyi’s family was relatively homespun in that there was no separation between Bakary’s family life and our own. We ate whatever the family ate, we shared the same accommodations, took part in the daily routines, and the Kanyi lifestyle carried on, almost as usual. At first, I found myself overwhelmed with myriad people who came to greet us on a nearly constant basis. Taking care of my daily needs was a tremendous effort. I was not better than a two-year-old, until slowly, after about a week, I started to catch on to some of the repeating patterns of behavior. The morning greeting. The lunchtime meal. Music lessons. These provided a framework for the day and gave me an expected way to relate to my hosts. I started to form new habitual patterns of behavior according to Gambian norms, which is an essential part of fitting in when you are a foreigner in a new culture.

Kanyi Kunda Kunda means the house. Kanyi is the last name of our host, Bakary Kanyi. Bakary’s house was in the New Jeshwang area of Serekunda. It was a 10-minute walk through sandy streets to get to the main crossroads called “the Junction.” One road takes you to Fajara Beach, a nice resort area where Europeans go for vacation, where we would go to shop and eat a European-style meal every so often. The other paved main road, called the Serekunda-Banjul highway, takes drivers to Banjul in one direction, and upriver to the country in the other. At the junction, there were the vano stop and the taxi stand. Vanos are white minivans that function as public transportation. Assistants stood outside each vano and coaxed people in. When the vano was full, people squeezed against each other on long

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wooden benches backed against three walls of the van, and the boys hopped in and closed the sliding door. One would stick a hand out and tap the top of the roof twice, to signal to the driver, “let’s go!” and they would speed off down the dusty road. The short-distance vanos shuttled people around “Kombo,” the area which may be appropriately named for the combined urban areas. The long-range vanos took people to upriver, where countryside villages and small towns lined either side of the Gambia River, leading inland, to the center of the vast sub-Saharan continent. We, the toubabs, came as music students and, for 3 hours a day at least, what we did is practice music. I came with high expectations. I intended to undertake hardcore musical training so that I could build a repertoire that I could play back in the United States. But once I was in the thick of things, whatever preconceived notions of what would happen when I got to the Gambia evaporated into thin air, like drops of water thrown onto a hot stove. Poof. All that remained was a cloud of steam that quickly dissipated into the Harmattan winds. Africa took over.

Disoriented When Bakary opened the large metal gates to the outside world each morning, the sun was still a great orange ball hanging just over the horizon. It was early January, the dry season in West African when the Harmattan winds toss up the Sahel desert dust, casting a veil over the bright sun rays. When people came into the compound they made the rounds, greeting everyone. Some were friends of the family, some were family, and some were musicians and music teachers. I didn’t remember them from one day to the next. The greeting was awkward for me. One young man who greeted me sat on the edge of the cement wall of my balcony, politely, hands folded on his upper leg dangling over the edge. He repeated “How is the day?” and “How are you?” and “How is the family?” several times. Why does he keep asking, I wondered. But he was calm, just lingering, hanging out. I was not sure what to do, so I smiled a lot. After a while he said, “Okay, Lisa! Fine, fine. See you later.” And off he went. Just about every cultural pattern I grew up with was somehow reconfigured in the Gambian reality, and I was not confident that any of my interactions with people were mutually understood. “You’re welcome” was no longer the appropriate response to “thank you,” but instead often came as a precursor. In the Gambia, “you’re welcome” was more

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frequently used as an invitation to come in and make yourself at home. If I used it at the wrong time, I had unexpectedly allowed someone to enter my space or, worse, if in my confusion I followed their “you’re welcome” with “thank you” I unknowingly agreed that I would enter their private space. Another cultural concept I had to reimagine was that of being able to carve out “private time,” which was a rarity. Chrisse explained to me that in this culture, “alone time” is not a value, like in my culture. Family and community mean everything, so a person who sits alone is a sad person. Chrisse understood many things about Gambian culture in only five or six previous visits. She associated with the women when she could, and she wore African dresses with headwraps frequently. The Africans called her “Fulah” because she had similar features to the Fulah, an ethnic group who were traders in the past. When I arrived at Bakary’s, I did not know how to shower, how to use the “toilet,” which cup to use for water for brushing my teeth, which cup to use for washing the body, or other basic rituals that we normally need not think twice about since about the age of four. There was one spigot in the compound center, outside, the water was potable, and people used it throughout the day to fill various containers. The required focused attention I needed to keep proper hygiene was challenging for me and dependent on my level of heat, fatigue, and sense of being overwhelmed. To live abroad, whether in France, Brazil, or West Africa, to me was an exercise in deepening one’s awareness of self in relation to other. It wakes up the traveler from their humdrum of habitual patterns of thinking and action. But to really penetrate beyond the surface of a culture requires repeated dives, prolonged stays, a do-or-die mentality to commit to a sense of place and the people that inhabit it. There are risks. There are all kinds of contradictory feelings that emerge from your gut and warn you to stop. Sometimes they should be heeded, and sometimes they must be dismissed. There is always discomfort, fear, and excitement in the unfamiliar. Learning local rituals and patterns of behavior in the host culture are indispensable to establishing one’s grounding. For me, those initial rituals3 and repeating patterns were found in the greetings, in lunchtime routines, and in my music lessons. Greetings in West Africa are essential before people can get on with other matters. The ritual greeting may last several minutes in which each side repeats phrases asking about the family members, are they in good health, is there peace. In the countryside, the greetings are even more

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extended than in the city. I noticed the rhythm of the greetings long before I understood what they were saying. Back in Maine, Gray Parrot’s weekly music show “Mostly Manding” started with a recording of the Manding ritual greeting. It had a certain cadence to it. The time had come for me to practice it, and eventually I learned that it was a form of establishing respect between people before the conversation turned to other things.

Greetings I was sitting on a mat, with Bakary, lounging in the coolness of the evening. He said each word and had me repeat it. Sumolɛ.4“Sumolɛ,” I repeated. Ibebejɛ. “Ibebejɛ.” Then he taught me to respond to his questions. Ko tana tɛ. Tanan tɛ. Kaira bɛ? Kaira doron. He ends it with a deep, Yo!, which I come to recognize as a sign of approval. The greeting translates as, “Where are your people? They are there [at home, in the compound]. Any problems? No problems. Is there peace there? Peace only. Okay!” We went over this several times. At first, I was sloppy and stuttered, but eventually I ironed it out, made it smooth, and caught the rhythm of the call and response. The family members, hearing that I was learning the greeting, each came to practice with me. “Yeah, Lisa, That’s good!” After a while, when people came into the compound each day to greet me, or when I was out and about, I was prepared. People were always pleased to see that I had made efforts to learn their language, and it gave us a grounding on which to form a relationship, or at least engage in a little conversation. Because most people in the urban areas speak the colonizer’s language, it is not taken for granted that a foreigner like myself will take the time to learn, and I believed that they saw it as a sign of respect. From that point on, personalities and faces start coming into focus for me. Weeks later, I learned a less formal greeting that the younger generation used. It was their hip greeting, like an American might say, “Yo, what’s up?” It goes, “A beh nya di?” (how are things?) to which the response is, “A beh jang” (they are fine or, literally, they are there). I

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rationalize that if things are present (there) they are relatively okay. Then the kids taught us the really hip answer, “A beh li jering!” which translates as things are sweet as honey water! “Sweet” becomes a recurring theme in West Africa. It is a description for materials, events, and circumstances that are pleasant, tasty, gentle, soothing, good-mood-producing. It is not far from a certain subculture in the United States that says, sweeeeeeet! to indicate that something is good, welcomed, making us happy. But sweet in Manding culture is also commonly used to describe a warm, familial feeling with other people. Linguists say that language creates reality. West Africans habitually create this warm, familial feeling of joy in their interpersonal relationships and it is very alluring to us, toubabs, who might not realize the deficit of such sweetness in our own culture until it surrounds us in Africa.

Na Kontong! Lunchtime had a definitive structure in the Gambia. It was not a grab-a-­ sandwich-and-go type of context. We followed the same routine almost exactly, day after day. Bakary’s wife Nyima started cooking at probably around 10:30 in the morning over a wood-burning fire. She used large metal pots and pounded things in a mortar. The girls helped her, and their activity became a backdrop to the morning as the rest of us went about our business—which for me was music lessons. At about 1:45 pm, one of the girls would signal that lunch was nearly ready. That was the sign for us to prepare. I would go inside our front door and grab the rolled-up orange and yellow baso mat from our room. These mats made of recycled plastic are ubiquitous. Some have a mosque pattern. I would unfurl it on the porch floor outside of our room on the terrace. We would wash our hands well with soap, give them a shake, and then take our seats on the mat. Then one of the girls would come, carrying a very large enamel metal bowl painted white with floral designs, covered by another bowl on top. She would place the bowl in the center of the baso mat and take the top off, revealing a large heap of white rice with a steamy, orangey sauce in the middle. Bakary and an older child would often eat with Chrisse, Gray, the other toubabs, and me. Nyima ate with the girls and smaller children from a separate bowl on another terrace. We used our right hands to scoop out mouthfuls of rice from the portion directly in front of us. To mark our places, we would hold the edge of the bowl with the left thumb on top. The orangey red palm oil would

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form red rings around our lips. Sometimes we ate a thick peanut sauce with onion and garlic and hot pepper. That sauce held heat, and someone would have to fan it before we put our hands in it. Sometimes we would eat a green, leafy sauce. Sometimes there were chunks of salted dried fish, sometimes hunks of meat, sometimes fresh white fish. Bakary would handle the meat in the center, breaking up the larger chunks with his fingers and dropping small pieces in front of each eater’s place at the bowl. He controlled how much we received. Adults got larger servings than children, and men got larger servings than women if such rationing were necessary. In my section of bowl, I pushed a small chunk of fish that was portioned out to me into the loose rice closest to me. I scooped up the pile and squeezed it, letting the oil drip through my fingers, turning it 90 degrees each time until it formed into a ball. Then I shook off the pieces of rice hanging on the outside of my hand and popped the ball into my mouth. This is how I learned to do it after observing family members. I would peek around at the others, although watching others eat is considered rude in this culture. When sitting around the bowl, people keep their eyes on their portion of food. I would notice fish bones hanging from men’s lips, which they eventually spit out or let fall onto the baso along with grains of rice. I watched children lick the oil dripping down their hands. Anyone walking in the vicinity who was not eating with us would be called out to join the meal. Na kontong! Come eat! That person could choose to join, but they would usually decline by replying bon appétit. A person in front of the bowl is expected to eat heartily, and if she pauses, she is instructed, A domo! Eat! If the person has had his or her fill, she might respond with Kono infata tep, my belly is full. There is no pausing, conversing, or going back for more. You are either eating or you are done. Eating is serious business and it is done rather quickly. If you are finished before the food is gone, you are expected to get up and move away from the bowl. After the bowl had been cleaned of the last grains of rice and sauce, one of the girls would take it and sweep up the fallen rice and fish bones with a handle-less broom made of a long bundle of hay. She would bend over at the waist, pushing particles into a small pile that she collected with her hand. I noticed that cooking, serving, and cleaning up after mealtime were women’s business. Meanwhile, the rest of us would drink a little water and wash our hands clean with soap, scrubbing lightly to remove the oil before collapsing into our beds for a few hours during the intense midday heat.

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Music Lessons When Souleyman arrived at the compound on a scooter, he had three newly made koras slung around his body. He was wearing a long, white damask tunic over loose-fitting pants of the same material, grayed with the Gambian dust. His shoes were long, pointy slippers. He brought my kora, made small, to suit a small woman’s hands. I paid him $100 for this beautifully hand-crafted instrument made of cowhide, calabash, wood, and synthetic fishing line, a prearranged price by Gray. I was excited to try out the five songs I learned from Kora Nights back in Maine. Each morning at around 10 am, young musician teachers came to give us lessons which lasted until lunchtime. All of the musicians played for local baby-naming ceremonies, weddings, and other local celebrations. They played at tourist hotels and bars and venues where, if they were lucky, they would cover their cost of travel to and from the venue, amounting to less than a dollar.5 They could choose to offer their talents to a commercial record label or group, but that, as Lasiné Camara complained, often compromised their style and creativity. Instead, they chose to wait for a European or American to become enchanted enough with their music to sponsor them. Many believed that the best way to make a good living in the Gambia was to channel money from Toubabadou (Europe, America, and any strong economy). Bakary Kanyi has done this well with our two-month visit. There was some jealousy about this. During our two-month visit, we paid our teachers a set price of 75 dalasy, or about $6 for a 2-hour class, prearranged by Chrisse and Gray to facilitate things for the toubabs. The fixed price allows the toubabs to feel secure in knowing that their teachers are compensated appropriately, and that anything more is a gift that we can give from the heart. Assuming we took five classes a week, they would receive $35 dollars, not a bad salary for them, and an outstandingly low price for us. But we were only staying for 2 short months, and I came to see that these young men were struggling and hopeful to forge side deals with us. Each one attempted at some point or another to propose a plan to me that would generate a long-term source of income from toubabadou.6 Chrisse and Gray warned me not to fall in love with a music teacher; their great wish is to be taken to toubabadou to launch a successful musical career, and falling in love is a sure way to do this. Mustapha Jobarteh, my kora teacher, was gentle. We sat side by side, and he showed me a cyclical repeating pattern on his kora. I repeated the

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notes on my kora, building slowly, phrase by phrase, until I could fumble through the pattern, not unlike the greetings I learned from Bakary. We played together, going round and round. When I smoothed out the pattern, Mustapha started to improvise, playing little runs and countermelodies. Sometimes he would show me a few notes to add in. With Mustapha, I worked on the standard tracks that Gray had taught me in Maine. The first track that many students learn on kora is “Kelefaba,” honoring the warrior Kelefa who lived in the mid-nineteenth century. I learned to sing the chorus. We worked on “Mali sadio,” an ancient song about a hippopotamus from Bafolabe. The hippopotamus befriended a young woman from the village who came to fetch her water every day from the hippo’s river. I learned other standard jeli songs like “Bamba Bojan,” “Mansana Cisse,” “Kuran Bisan,” “Allah l’a ke” (or Lamban), and the ubiquitous “Jarabi,” meaning sweetheart, the only love song, as most of these songs are praise songs for brave souls. I would hear many of these songs, years later in a club in New York with backing drum set, guitar, jembe, featuring the balafon. We played music on the front porch outside of my room while the women took care of household chores. Maddy, a young cousin from the country who had come to live with the family and help with chores, fetched cooking tools for her aunt Nyima. She had a strong body, a bright smile, and beautiful long, thin braids pulled into a low ponytail. Kadi, her “sister” but really a first cousin, took care of her baby twin brothers, who rolled around on a baso while she cleaned leaves for lunch. She wore a fano, a wrap skirt with red and yellow patterns. Both girls were strong and hard-working, soft in personality, and sometimes shy. Nyima, Bakary’s wife, sat on a very short wooden stool next to the fire, preparing lunch for 15 with absolute grace. She wore a green head wrap, mostly to keep hair out of the way, and an old T-shirt. Her house fano was tucked well around her legs to keep modesty while she cooked. Sometimes, she used a piece of it as a potholder. I was wearing a fano now as well, learning how to dress appropriately for my gender and age. It took an adjustment before my intrigue with the family, my new clothes, my confusions could recede into the background so that I could focus on the music. When I managed to concentrate, the cyclical cross-­ rhythms absorbed me, and my fingers somehow produced them by rote. The music is meditative, to say the least, soothing my scattered mind, calming my body. Mustapha and I played on and on, serenading the family with our music while they went about their day.

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At this time, Mustapha rented a room in Bacau within the greater surrounding area of the capital. He had very few possessions: a kora, some clothes, a small microwave, and a mattress and frame. He invited me over to see his small collection of batik-dyed fabrics. He had noted that I loved the hand-dyed batik fabrics I saw on people and in the markets. He had invested in a handful of them. He wanted me to buy a crate of the nicest ones to take back to the United States and sell them at African dance classes and to friends. At first I said yes, because I wanted to help. His request awoke in me a realization that I possess financial means that could be useful, and which are not easily accessible in the Gambia. But then I decided the responsibility of bringing home the box of fabrics and selling them was a responsibility I was not ready to take. Compassion and guilt arose in my heart. Our music teachers, who also served as guides, fielded strangers who were interested to meet us, carefully. In most cases, people were gracious, curious, and most hospitable hosts, a lovely characteristic of Gambian culture. However, according to Lamin, our djembe teacher, some people took this encounter as an opportunity to see if they could form a connection to Toubabadou, which inevitably could create a flow of income. West Africans, I found, were quite entrepreneurial in that regard. They seek opportunities where they can be found. Lamin, for example, saw that I knew the French culture and language, and suggested that we start a drum and dance school in Paris. I began to grow a consciousness of my marked identity as a white person in Africa and what that might symbolize in this culture.

The Balafon Kebba Manneh is a blind musician who speaks French but not English. He lost his sight at a young age after being bitten by a black fly. He plays the 23-keyed wooden balafon. His people, the Balanta, are a small, ethno-­ linguistic group who live between Casmance in southern Senegal—a mere 2-hour car-ride away—and Guinea Bissau. I had come to learn kora but the balafon intrigues me. I like that I could see the patterns that developed on the keyboard. I started taking balafon lessons with Kebba. Kebba’s style of balafon is hardly known by toubabs in the United States, and even few West Africans know of this style or ethnic group. I have never encountered another Balanta balafonist other than Kebba, and the musical style is unlike any other I have ever heard.

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Kebba sat on his baso mat in front of me in his well-worn, pastel-striped damask tunic and pants, and big sunglasses, one leg extended, one leg folded. His style of playing was lulling and soft, considering its highly polyrhythmic percussive quality. The gourds undergirding each wooden key progressed from grapefruit sized to unwieldy, almost watermelon sized, and the frame that held the keys and gourds seemed to be tailor-­ made to accommodate the gourds; it sloped upward near the base notes, the largest keys, and gourds. Sometimes Kebba and his wife, Fatu, would sing over the balafon, and sometimes Kebba would play the guitar. His voice was soothing, steady. Fatu’s voice was lilting, bouncy, and nasal. They blended in what seems to me a mismatched harmony that I found intriguing and appealing. The base notes of the balafon hold a steady pulse, while the high notes create a sprightly and syncopated riff.

The Bo’ngo Finally, I met Lasiné and his Bo’ngo. Lasiné, the tall, thin rastaman, has equally thin long dreadlocks and incredible rhythm in his body. He has played all percussion, including the bugaraboo, conga-like drums, but his most interesting and accessible instrument to me was the bo’ngo. The bo’ngo in the Gambia is not the same as the small Cuban drums we think of in the Occident. The bo’ngo in its first iteration was made from a large, half-calabash. In its modern variation, it may be a wooden box of about 60 cm by 40 cm, with a hole carved out, like a guitar, but rectangular. Over the hole are several long, thin metal saw blades bolted down on one end. The sawblades are plucked with one hand, while the box is tapped with the other hand. Lasiné painted his wooden box bo’ngo bright red and he added extra sawblades so he could have more notes. Most bo’ngo have four or five notes; his had six, and he played it way faster than how others generally played it. He sang with the raspy voice of a smoker, which he was. And a drinker. He was racy compared with the other more pious Muslim music teachers I had. I signed up for lessons, twice a week. Clearly, with kora, balafon, bo’ngo, and djembe, I was overextending myself. Lasiné taught me a song with each rhythm, and my favorite went like this: Ah, ee ah ohhh, ahhh ehhh, eee ah ohh ohh yeee. Dowda sané kulo buté. Kulo buté nté bendona. Ninki nanka bino bala, bade bina bala te muso lillah yé

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The words mean “Dawda Sané (a man), beat the skin/Beat the skin, I’m going to dance/Ninki Nanka (a huge serpent) has horns/His has horns, but they won’t stab anyone.”7 It is a song about the boys’ circumcision across the Senegambia region, when the Kankouran mythical figure can be seen roaming the streets, protecting the newly circumcised boys after their rite of passage. It has become a popular folk song over the past 50 years and has been remade many times, including by Touré Kunda. Sometimes “the boys,” the music teachers and their friends, came to play with us in the evenings. Mustapha’s brothers Famara and Ba Ansu were common musical guests. We sometimes had three koras, two djembes, a bongo, a balafon, and often a guitar. Sometimes we played songs from American bands on the guitar like Phish and Blondie, to which the Africans provided accompaniment. It was telling to see how they developed the rhythms, which were often quite different from where an American would feel it.8

Money and Status Money, and how it related to human relationships, had a different flavor in the Gambia than what I was used to in my culture. Chrisse, Gray’s wife, seemed to embrace a mentality of a “patron” that to me was foreign. When she agreed to let young men carry her bags at the airport—for which she paid them a few cents—I was shocked. “I’ll carry my own bag, thank you very much!” I took the exchange as condescending, but in fact, she explained later, she was helping the local economy, and her act could be construed as a form of generosity. I did not see it that way at the time. One day, Chrisse called a fabric merchant who sold his goods in the market to come to Bakary’s compound with his finest fabrics to give her a private showing. She wanted to avoid the commotion of the market and, surely sighting a potentially good customer, the fabric merchant happily obliged. I sat next to her on the compound floor on a baso, while a finely dressed man wearing a boubou and cap unfolded and displayed fine pieces of mudcloth. She made the trip worth his while, buying several choice pieces. But I felt uncomfortable with the privilege of calling the merchant to the compound, which I equated to a privileged status as a white American. It seemed to drip of postcolonial power imbalances. This was my view at the time that changed significantly over the next 15 years.

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My discomfort around money was nothing I could escape. One day, Kadi and Maddy invited me to attend a baby-naming party with them. I was excited to have an outing with the girls as the only toubab on the adventure. It took two vano trips to get to the party. On the way, Kadi had a yelling fight with the vano money collector. She won. I assumed he wanted to charge us more money because I was with them, but I could not decipher the Mandingo. When we got to the party, everyone looked at me. The white woman. The toubab. The children positively stared. As soon as I opened my mouth to greet them, they became lovely human beings again. After having tasted several attayah (tea) drinks and chatting with a few people, Kadi asked me to give her money to give to the family. I was confused and found the request a bit off-putting. How much was I supposed to give them? Kadi explained that it is a gift and I could give whatever I wanted. After some deliberation, I decided on 100 dalasy, about $5. She took the money and gave it to the bride. I was offered one of the nice, cushiony chairs. I was offered Fanta soda to drink and I was offered plates of food before other people. It made me feel conspicuous. I thought it was because I was the white woman, the rich woman, and that feeling of separation and privilege made me uncomfortable again. Then I noticed a few other Gambians, who were also sitting in big cushiony chairs. Some men wore business suits. They gave money to children to run to the store and buy more sodas and things. They were also given plates of food before others. Sometimes Kadi and Maddy joked that I was the Mansamuso, literally, the King-woman. But I felt like the Ding-ding-o, the child. I wanted to be the child. I thought that I could ignore the fact that I had a certain power by virtue of having access to money for all of life’s necessities and even luxuries. Such an economic disparity did not confront me head on in Costa Rica nor in Brazil, although I lived with families who had much less means than me. No one ever asked me for special favors or gifts in Latin America, and I did not spend money to make my life more comfortable. I rode the bus like everyone else. I have had American friends who, living in Latin America, would splurge every now and then on a few nights in a nice hotel with cable TV and air conditioning. I never felt the need to do it, and I thought myself somehow more noble for this. I thought my financial advantage divided me from the people with whom I wanted to blend in. I used my money the same way that they used theirs, bought the same things they did. But Africa was different from Latin America in this way.

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In Africa, I observed that people assumed their positions of power and authority, whether that power came from their particular knowledge, their age status, their class, or their financial means. If they had power, they used it, unabashedly. They treated themselves with respect. Part of that power was to give to others, whether in the form of gifts—which could be direct money—or in sponsorship for a project or business. Those with less means asked for gifts and sponsorship rather directly, and to me, unabashedly. Coming from my culture, asking for money could be construed as reproachable, if not shameful, for the asker. In my culture, people are expected to make their own living beyond a certain age. When I was automatically put into this position of power, I felt awkward and had no idea how to deal with it gracefully. I was getting my first lesson in the nature of the patron–client relationship in West Africa.9 In West Africa, the roles of patron and client are well-engrained and come with a slew of responsibilities on both sides that, when practiced well, reinforce a system of mutual benefit and respect. This structured relationship of patron to client exists formally and traditionally in Manding society between the noble, elite, ruling caste, or hɔrɔn in Mandingo, and the nyamakala caste of which jelis, artisans, spiritual workers, and smiths are a part. Cultural theorist Kwame Anthony Appiah explains about his birth country, Ghana, that “success in life depends on being enmeshed in a web of relationships. To get things done…you need to be someone or know someone with the social standing to work your will. Since most people don’t have that status, they need to find someone—a patron—who does. In a society like this, to ask someone for something is to invite him to become your patron. It’s a sign that you think he has the status to get things done. And so it’s a way of indicating respect” (Appiah, 2006: 92). Embodying the role of the patron took me years to learn, and may take a lifetime to fully digest. I saw two other small examples during this trip of how different cultural views about money and power could be problematic. Mike the balafonist had made a compilation CD of the Gambian musicians including all the aforementioned ones. He paid them money upfront, and if he were to have made any money selling the CDs in the United States, he might have paid them more. One of the musicians believed that Mike had used their music and pocketed the profits for himself. I had a hard time convincing this musician that I knew, for a fact, that the cost of production was far greater than the profits Mike had made. I, myself, had a box of these unsold CDs in my house. Mike was able to sell them, occasionally, at local

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gigs in Maine, but we had no way to market them on a large scale, and even if we did, they are not guaranteed to make any money. In another incident, the same musician asked an American student for help, financially. I watched this student take out a pad of paper and illustrate for his teacher how much money he makes each month and how much money he has to pay in bills. He did not have extra money to give. These moments were unsettling, but I admired the American student’s patience to explain his position.

Sweetness in Borabá After several days trying, Gray finally succeeded in contacting Jeli Basiro Jobarteh, a grand jeli and cousin to Gray’s teacher, Jeli Saikou Jobarteh, who was playing kora in Europe. Basiro spent his time between Switzerland and his country home in Borabá, Georgetown, in the Gambian countryside, and Gray was pleased to find that Basiro was currently at his countryside home and willing to welcome us for a visit. The next day, Chrisse, Gray, Mustapha, and I piled into Bakary’s minivan early in the morning, with several koras and a few small bags for a three-day trip. Many hours later, Bakary parked the minivan at the end of a dirt road and the five of us spilled out, stretching our limbs. The land was flat savannah, grassy, and more brown than green. It had not rained in a while. We gathered our small bags. To the right there was a windy, narrow dirt path that led into a small village of houses made of thatch and mud. Bakary led the way, followed by Gray, then Mustapha. Chrisse and I were straggling behind, arranging bags, admiring the country scene. This is different, I thought to myself, so different than New Jeshwang, in Serekunda. Rather than cement walls, each house was sectioned off with wood and thatch and barbed wire fences; they seemed to be there mostly to keep the goats in, I noticed as I walked by a few, rather than to keep the people out. A breeze picked up white kitchen smoke and carried it around the houses and off into the grassy hillside. Just up ahead on our path, Chrisse and I heard a beating rhythm. Bakary and the men had already disappeared down the path. Chrisse and I rounded the bend and saw a small crowd of women. The leader was holding a calabash and beating it with her hand. Another woman picked up a white plastic jerry can and beat it with a stick. They were dressed in old fano wrap skirts past the ankle, and T-shirts, their heads wrapped rather casually in old cotton scarves. All eyes were on us! They were

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waiting to welcome us in their village! Before I knew how to respond, Chrisse dropped her bags and ran in front of the women, who started beating the drums faster. Chrisse broke into a dance, flapping her arms and stomping the ground. The women clapped to the rhythm, encouraging her participation. A woman from the group joined her. I stood there, frozen, taking it all in. One woman started hooting and clapping at me, breaking me from my shock. I approached them a bit gingerly, dropped my bag, and tried to follow Chrisse’s moves. I felt a bit silly, but the women just cheered and clapped, full of good will, until the whole group fell into a semicircle surrounding us, laughing and patting us on the backs. Welcome to Borabá! One of the finer moments in my life, Africa luring me in. Jeli Basiro Jobarteh was a stately looking gentleman. Tall and thin, he wore a fine knee-length tunic over light blue pants, and a small Muslim kufi. He was an acclaimed master kora player in Europe where he performed with his kora on a stage with lighting and amplification and an international audience. In the Gambia, he and his family maintained a quiet country lifestyle and Basiro practiced a home-style, old-school jeliya here. His Swiss wife was in Switzerland. She spent time here in Borabá, as well, along with Basiro’s African wife number one and wife number two, and the family. After dinner, Basiro played kora for the family and us. Badé, Isatou, Awa, and other girls in the compound braided my hair into 20 cornrows after dinner, then we sat around a campfire and sang songs that I learned from Gray back in Maine, old Mande standards. They let me lead. Soon, Basiro came out carrying his kora and looked formal in a fresh-pressed royal blue grand boubou. He took his seat, cross-legged on the large cement block that retained the heat from the day’s hot sun. He arranged his clothing and the kora. His two wives, Cundo Kunyate and Sharta, came out and sat next to him, and they began to sing. Cundo clicked the side of the calabash, three knocks and a rest. Three knocks and a rest. The evening air was cool, and one of the young women in the compound brought out some blankets. I cuddled under one with little Isatou and her younger sister on the warm block. The music sounded angelic, and I imagined what it would be like to have grown up in this compound as one of Basiro’s children. We were enswathed in the music, the cool air, and the warmth of the family of which we had become temporarily a part. Heavenly. Happy. Basiro created an ambiance that comforted us like a blanket. This was old-style jeliya, the kind I imagined most do not experience anymore.

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Someone called out a diata ba ké! What is that, I asked. “It is really sweet,” one sister explained to me. “The music, it is sweet!” I agreed and committed this phrase to heart. A diata ba ké: A diata means it is sweet. Ba ké means big or really. Sometimes they used this phrase to describe a good meal or kind words spoken. But often it was used to compliment the jeli when the music enveloped us. I felt a oneness there under the stars. It was a similar sweetness I used to feel in Gray’s living room, playing kora next to the wood-burning stove. There in the Gambian countryside, I fell asleep with the twanging cyclical melodic loops swirling around in my ears. These sounds would fill everyone else’s dreams as well, on that night. When Basiro’s concert came to an end, the women began story time. Bakary came and sat down next to the girls and me. After listening awhile to Manding banter and laughter, I asked him what they were saying. “They are recalling how their grandmothers used to tell them stories. These stories are very old. They are instructions, education, as there was no school at that time. It also distracted the children from hunger when there was not enough food.” I contemplated this hardship, a hardship that is also mixed with the sweetness of love. Bakary continued. “The stories are dying now.” “Do you remember any of them?” I asked him. “There is one about a hyena,” he says. “Hyenas are greedy and always try to be first. But the cow washed himself, he did ablution, and he fasted by jumping into the river.” I did not understand, but the story cracked up Bakary. He was laughing and rolling. I think I have missed something. Bakary straightened himself out and added solemnly, “I don’t tell these stories to my children anymore.”10

Notes 1. Toubabadou refers to Europe and North America. 2. Toubabs refers to people of any race who reside in North America and Europe. 3. Note the difference between ritual and routine or habitual pattern. A ritual indicates there is a supernatural belief in the practice. Said differently, the ritual must be performed for things to turn out well. In this case, I am suggesting that the ritual greeting is important for the interaction or relationship between the people to go favorably. 4. The ɛ is pronounced as “eh” as in dress.

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5. For more on the diverse ways in which Gambian musicians make money with tourism, see Paulla Ebron (2002, 77). 6. Our home-grown pre-paid price negotiation with musicians can be contrasted with Paulla Ebron’s pre-paid fixed fees determined by the Gambian Government’s Oral Histories and Antiquity division. Her argument was that the high fixed price honored the jelis for their position as historians, and gave her greater access than other researchers who negotiated lower rates directly with their interviewees, but failed to access the same level of information (Ebron, 2002). 7. Some 20 years later I was on the metro in Paris with a Senegalese Rasta called Moussa “Lionman” Ly, a friend of friends. I somehow recalled this song and started to sing it to him. He simply stared at me in disbelief and joined in the chorus. We became instant friends—the power of music. I credit Lionman for the translation and explanation of this song (personal communication 2021). 8. Toure Kunda made one version of Ninki Nanka here: https://youtu.be/ wS7JuJ5f-­f0 Also, for an excellent example of an Africanization of a European song, Toure Kunda covered Phil Collins, “In the Air Tonight” in Wolof, sabar-­ style rhythm. http://youtu.be/8Rhro0xxkhs 9. Both Eric Charry (2000, Chapter 7) and Paulla Ebron (2002, Chapters 4 and 5) describe their own (uncomfortable?) experiences in becoming a patron in West African society, a role that does not have the same flavor in our own culture in the United States, and therefore requires some adjustment. 10. Chrisse and Gray intended to formalize our trip into an annual Gambia study abroad program and I offered to help them. I wrote a student handbook for life in the Gambia based on my professional experience working for CIEE. The program did not manifest, but the intention to create such a program in West Africa remained in my heart.

References Appiah, K.  A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. W.W. Norton and Co. Charry, E. (2000). Mande Music. University of Chicago Press. Ebron, P. (2002). Performing Africa. Princeton University Press.

CHAPTER 3

Moving with Gambians

It is necessary to adopt a methodological strategy of joining in without ulterior motive and literally putting oneself in the place of another person: inhabiting their world. (Michael Jackson, 1983, 340)

Romancing the Field While living at Bakary’s compound, Lasiné Camara,1 the bo’ngo teacher, and I grew closer and a romance ignited, much against the advice of Gray and Chrisse.2 They were sure that romances would be complicated because they would be, most likely, intertwined with the Gambian’s dreams to live in toubabadou and acquire the economic means to secure a musical career and/or find an easier lifestyle. This rationale did not really register. I noticed a few relationships that brewed between toubab men or women of a more mature age and economic means than their younger Gambian lovers.3 But this was not the case with us. We had our first emotional connection when Lasiné was telling me stories about the intense racism he experienced in Germany from a group of young neo-Nazi baldheads. His story moved us both, quite unexpectedly. We shared this moment of sadness that such blatant hatred could exist for another kind of human being. Just afterward, we spent a week traveling to a small fishing village in Casamance with Gray and Chrisse and other friends, and that is when the romance began. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Feder, Jeliya at the Crossroads, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83059-5_3

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Eighteen months later, Lasiné was admittedly surprised when I phoned him to ask if I could come and spend the summer in the Gambia with him and his sister’s family. It was the summer of 2002 when I traveled to the Gambia alone to spend 2 months living with Lasiné and his sister Awa Camara. No other toubabs would be around for me to seek refuge when cross-cultural fatigue set in. No other experienced people, like Gray and Chrisse, would be there to cushion the economic disparities by making prearranged deals with Bakary and the other musicians. I would be negotiating life on my own accord this time. Although I may have had only the faintest inkling when I boarded the plane, it is this trip that would begin to cut the path toward a deeper cross-cultural absorption and understanding. When he picked me up from Banjul International Airport, Lasiné just kept shaking his head in disbelief. He looked skinny, and I wondered if he was eating enough. We arrived at the little, two-room apartment he rented in Serekunda. His sister Awa’s compound was just around the corner. His room was bare, but for a mattress on the floor with a sheet and a small fan. “There is no mosquito net,” he pointed out, and suggested that buying one should be our first priority. There was a small table with a cassette/ CD player, and several albums including Bob Marley’s Song of Freedom four-CD box set, a cassette of the Ivoirian group Magic System with the hit song “Premier Gaou,” and Buju Banton’s album Inna Heights. This music became the soundtrack of my summer with Lasiné.

Embodied Methods At this time, I was not practicing official anthropological fieldwork in Africa. Fieldwork consists of living in the culture of study and practicing participant-observation, the general name for our method of research. Participant-observation may include participating in activities with the local community, interviewing, observing, and taking field notes. Generally, the anthropologist has an idea of what they want to “discover” or learn, such as gender roles or the meaning of ritual practices. In the Gambia, I was living my life not as a researcher but rather as Lasiné’s girlfriend, as a music student, and a guest and temporary member of the family. In retrospect, I failed to see how this was different than formal anthropological research. I naturally wanted to “move with Gambians,” meaning, sync up to whatever it was that my family was doing, and do the same. So, if my host sister was shopping in the market or cooking, I

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shopped and cooked with her. If my man was walking through the streets looking for work opportunities or social time with friends, I walked with him. “Moving with people,” just a natural attempt to get along, fit in, learn in this new culture, turned into my research method by default. It turned out that this kind of method was common among anthropologists and ethnomusicologists working in West Africa such as Michael Jackson, John Chernoff, and Paul Stoller.4 These same social scientists noted the benefits of doing fieldwork this way, as we see in the quote from Jackson in the epigraph. He continues, “While words and concepts distinguish and divide, bodiliness unites and forms the grounds of an empathic, even a universal, understanding.” Jackson explains that “it is, moreover, often the case that gestures and bodily habits belie what we put into words, and give away our unconscious dispositions, betraying character traits of which our verbal and conceptual habits keep us in ignorance” (Jackson, 1983, 340). Was it possible that by experiencing through the body first as a means of getting along in the world, rather than intellectual interests, could yield a particular kind of anthropological understanding that other, more formal methods lacked? I spent 2 months adapting my natural interests and proclivities to a Gambian lifestyle. It was after returning to the United States, and over years, that I was able to reflect on the experience and express what I learned, and to conceive of my lifestyle as a valid research method, one that I believed, as well as these other anthropologists, yielded something more empathetic, more human, less divisive, than maintaining an objective, analytical distance. This did not mean that I became Gambian; pronounced differences that I construed as tensions, or out-of-syncness, surfaced in some circumstances that in time had to be negotiated and resolved. Those differences could be broken down into three categories. My financial position vis-à-vis my hosts became more pronounced than my first trip to the Gambia, where Gray and Chrisse had pre-arranged the finances. I had the power to control if and how we traveled, what we bought at the market, and our general standard of living. I experienced the power, or lack thereof, in gender. At times I was beholden by the same social rules and norms as other Gambian women, and at times I was exempt from those rules. Lastly, I learned the humility that humans share with regards to the power of Allah, or said another way, how things might work out that are beyond our control. What I learned came through my physical experience of being in real-life situations.5

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Many times, I was enveloped by the warm humanity between people that included me. Other times I was wrought with anxiety about how the rhythms of life here did not coincide with my own inculcated rhythms of life in my culture. These moments of harmony and discord become part of my methodology. They allowed me to raise my awareness to my culture that constructed me and influenced my understanding of the new culture that was transforming me.

Moving with Lasiné The sun had just set, and the air was cooling. Lasiné cruised into the compound to get me and take me out. He was wearing Baye Fall colorful yellow and red baggy patchwork pants and a tee. I changed from my daily sarong wrap into the Baye Fall outfit we bought for me in the Senegambia market: baggy pants with shades of blue and white patchwork and a matching halter top.6 He took me by the hand. “Let’s move!” Moving is the Gambian term for walking or otherwise transporting oneself around town.7 We headed out the compound door and set a good pace. Lasiné walks through the sandy streets of Serekunda with a spring in his step, closer to New York strut than the African gentle sway that characterized my daytime trips to the market with the women. Moving with Lasiné gave me some freedom from the constraints of life in the family compound. At the heart of it, I am still a New Yorker, so I enjoyed the exciting pace and freedom that I felt when moving with Lasiné. In the city of Serekunda, there were lots of people interacting, wheeling, and dealing and hustling to make a living, and everything moved a little too fast to fully absorb what was happening. I tried to go with the flow, blend in, follow along. When out in the streets, I found that Lasiné knew many people. No sooner would we start moving toward our next destination than someone would call his name. “Heeeyyyy, Lasiné Camara!” People knew Lasiné as a musician in town. Sometimes we would be passing by their open compound door and they would call out to him and he would be obligated to stop in, shake hands, exchange greetings, and possibly enter the compound and greet other important elders. We would be offered something to drink. At first, it was fun. I got to be the American toubab who could practice her Gambian phrases and courtesies. But they turned into interruptions that broke our stride. After the third, fourth, fifth meeting in our

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walking trajectory, I grew impatient. “Come on, do we have to stop?” “Let me just greet this Daddy,” Lasiné would answer. He shook an older man’s hand who was sitting outside of the little pharmacy shop on a stool, chatting with passersby. Although Lasiné also wanted to continue to our destination, greeting people proved to be a stronger cultural imperative than our individual desires to keep moving. Herein lied an obvious discomfort or agitation that I felt in my bodily rhythm as compared with Lasiné’s, as well as an important lesson in my embodied methodology of syncing up with locals. Lasiné and I gravitated toward each other naturally; we were both fast-paced, social, and goal-­ oriented—whether that be the music program we planned for the evening, or a career goal. In New York, if I were off to make a destination, anyone I met along the way, I would likely greet them quickly as we would both have someplace to be. The greetings in the Gambian culture seemed to take precedence over any other plans; for me, they wrecked the rhythm we had going. I came to realize that these shifts in rhythm from walking quickly to greeting slowly was something he did instinctively with his parents since he had been a baby. My visceral anxiety perhaps indicating something deeper about the moral imperatives (Benedict, 1934) or ethos (Bateson, 1936) of our two cultures, marked a difference in what values we prioritize. In his book The Dance of Life, anthropologist Edward Hall makes a distinction between societies that function on polychronic versus monochronic time (Hall, 1983).8 It may be that I was experiencing the discomfort of switching between those two modalities, viscerally. Noting this reality in the Gambia was helpful in recognizing a deeper cultural lesson that was lurking beneath the surface. Few anthropologists discuss using the five senses in embodied research, in which the researcher, using her body as the tool, is sensorily reflexive (Bendix, 2000, 8 as quoted in Pink, 2015, 8). The researcher, in doing “emplaced” and “situated” research in the field, reflects on the ways that her informants use sensorial experience (Howes & Classen, 1991), which she may note, are different than hers.9 Transcribing this into written representation in our ethnographies may be challenging, but also may lend a more vivid and real description of the culture to the reader (Pink, 2015, 50). In my research, I am using syncing-up-in-rhythm, or pace of life, as a sensorial perception that is not described by these authors, but I feel is a relevant part of embodied, sensorial ethnography.

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Cooking with Awa At Awa’s house there were varnished wooden bedframes, bunk beds for the girls, double beds, thick mattresses, a sofa and soft chair in the living room, and a TV set on a table. The bathroom consisted of a toilet with no seat and a tiled, square shower with a pipe that came from the wall and no curtain. It worked well, and I showered there. Seeing the difference between Lasiné and Awa’s accommodations, it dawned on me that our level of comfort could be improved quite easily. We bought a new mattress and hired a local carpenter to make a small dresser for clothes. We also refilled a gazo, a small gas burner in which we could boil water for tea and coffee and make eggs and rice. Lasiné confessed that he had been living on bread and sardines lately. Awa and I became close during the mornings that I helped her prepare the lunchtime meal. Awa moves through the world slowly, but she has an edge. She usually wrapped her hair in a colorful scarf, but in the house, she wore the customary nondescript well-worn wrap skirt and tee. She knew how to command her household of mostly girls, and she talked forcefully when she did at all. Her tone startled me at first, but she would laugh and tell me they were just talking. We sat on low wooden stools behind the house next to the cement compound wall where she cooked over an open fire for several hours, like Nyima, Bakary’s wife. She instructed me to pound the onions, garlic, and hot pepper in the mortar. She taught me to not touch my eyes after I had touched the pepper or my eyes would burn. The fire was smoking too much, and she explained that the wood was wet. Our eyes streamed tears as we continued to pound and boil sauce. “There is nothing to do about the smoke,” she said, “but smoke cigarettes,” she continued with a laugh. So, she smoked. Each time before we would add ingredients to the pot, Awa taught me to say bisimillah, which is a prayer to Allah to bless the food. Awa did not always cook the lunchtime meal. Sometimes she designated her oldest daughter to do it. She would then watch TV instead. She learned to speak English and Hindi by watching Bollywood movies. I learned a lot from Awa. Her husband number three was living in Sweden. Awa was a singer, but her husband did not not permit her to go out in the evenings and sing or to attend shows while he was living in Europe. She obeyed. “Why?” I asked her. “People talk!” she responded.

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The Market with Lasiné We went to the open market frequently to buy any items we might need. Shampoo, a bucket, socks, a paring knife. Each time we went, Lasiné requested things. Jean shorts, new tennis shoes, a belt. He would suddenly stop at a stall, pick something up and inspect it, and say, “I need this.” I usually asked how much it was, thought about it, then gave him the money. But the requests became more frequent, and I realized that I had to pace our purchases. He needed many things, so which things did he need most? Would he rather buy a few small things here or wait and have something bigger that he really wanted later? This was how I thought about it. He did not. If it crossed our path and he could use it, the time was here and now. There was a disconnect between us, and I did not know how to communicate that there was a finite amount of money I could spend over a certain stretch of time. Sometimes, to drive the point home, I went through ridiculous measures. One late evening when we still had not eaten dinner, I told him the money was gone. We mustered up a few cents and bought a couple bags of peanuts and some chips. It wasn’t that my money was completely gone, but I did not know how to control the flow. I lied. It was that night that I asked him, “If we only had money to eat cans of tuna fish, would you still love me?” He simply did not, or pretended not, to understand the question. I could not gauge the sweetness and hospitality that they showed me with my responsibilities to be generous.10 In looking back, Lasiné was more than patient and understanding with me. The economic disparity between us, to say the least of our economic potential, could not have been greater. In retrospect, I’m embarrassed. This big lesson about worldwide economic disparity would inform my understanding in the decades that followed in my student–teacher relationships with jelis. Paulla Ebron recalls a moment in which one of her jeli informants Jali Suso enthusiastically brought her into his home and offered her the research answers she was seeking. She says, “in hindsight, I could see that his freely given services in the Gambia were an investment plan. We forged the sort of patron-client relationship that implicated our mutual obligation to one another” (Ebron, 2002, 127). This kind of power–money dynamic was an extenuating complication in my romance with Lasiné that I did not know how to handle.

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Bala Time Kebba was teaching me a new song, Jing Ab. When he played it, I was simply amazed. I thought I would never be able to do that. But he taught me, several notes at a time, left-right-right. I would repeat, left-right-right. Then he would gradually add on. I learned the dance-of-arm movements, much like I would learn the dance steps to a modern choreography. When we reached the full measure, I would repeat the pattern, round and round. Before I knew it, I was producing the accompaniment that I thought seemed so complicated. The polyrhythmic sound that my hands were producing now stupefied me. I could stupefy myself. I found I could watch my hands moving from my visual position above the keyboard, and I could listen to the sounds according to the relative parts. But I have little understanding of how it has come together. I learned by sheer imitation and rote. I had to work to control the pace and precision. If I cruise on automatic pilot, my hands can get out of control. Sometimes I have to get up and walk away and come back a few minutes later. By the end of the session, I could play the piece.

The Market with Awa When I accompanied Awa to the market, I would give her money ahead of time to buy food. If the vendors saw that I was the one paying, they might increase their prices. She used the money to buy food for the family. We wore full-length tie-dyed wrap skirts called fanos draped with long tunics and head wraps, all matching colors, all cut from the same fabric. The market stretched on and on, and a portion of the stalls were within cement building structures, but most stalls were merely blankets stretched over wooden tables or right on the ground of packed dirt with tarps stretched over poles to protect the vendors from the sun. Each vendor had a specialty: salted dried fish, barrels of spices, tomatoes stacked into pyramid shapes, piles of skinny peppers, piles of little round red spicy peppers, green tomatoes, squashes, green leaves, oranges, the list is standard for this region. We slowly stocked our wicker basket—fish on the bottom, leaves on the top—and made our way through the crowds back toward home.

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Women’s Talk When I cooked with Awa, we would tell each other about our lives. One day she told me about her multiple marriages. Awa was married off at age 15, which is when she had her first two daughters. The man was much older than her, and she had been promised to him when she was still a virgin. Eventually, she escaped by running away and heading back to her mother’s home. A few years later, she married husband number two. She had two more daughters, but the relationship became abusive and she left that man as well. When I met her, she was married to Modou, a man who worked a forklift in Sweden. With Modou she had just one daughter. Her oldest daughter, Fatu, gave birth while I was visiting. All of Awa’s children lived with her. Modou visited once a year and regularly sent her small amounts of money for living expenses. Since Modou had left for Sweden, Awa did not go out at night anymore. Awa likely would not be the type of woman to obey rules from a far-off husband, I thought, if she lived in the United States. She had strong character, talent, and smarts, and she seemed perfectly capable of being independent. In my cultural norm, it is not normal for men to have this kind of control over women. The society would encourage the woman to not stay with such a man and would probably deem such control to be over the top. A woman, especially a smart, strong, talented one like Awa, would not likely stay with such a man. She had left other men before. Why would she accept this from Modou? Was it worth her while to be supported by him, from abroad? Was his control acceptable on Gambian terms? I assume so. The Gambia did not live through the women’s rights movements, much less the “me too” movement as we did in the United States. Furthermore, they were influenced by Islam. It was quite a difference from accepted norms in the United States.

Faith Islam did not always work against my favor. In fact, much to the contrary. Here in the Gambia, I was learning to appreciate and believe in some of the norms that Islam and otherwise traditional Manding customs supported. Islam spread to West Africa starting in the seventh century through traders, merchants, and scholars, mostly peacefully. West African leaders adopted the religion, spreading it to the people. Sometimes Islam and Manding norms were in conflict, and sometimes they were synchronic. At

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the time, I often did not know which was which. However, generosity, or alms, or Zakat, was one of the five pillars of Islam, and the Gambians did that well. I knew that this type of Islam was of the much more tolerant kind than what I had heard about Islam in places like Saudi Arabia. Here, Sufi Islam was popular, of which the Baye Fall were one such group. Lasiné considered himself that kind of Muslim. He did not pray daily. He was a more secular kind of Muslim. It was August perhaps, about 5 weeks into my time living in the Camara compound, when Lasiné and I took a trip upriver to Farafenni. As we were leaving the house, Lasiné took a glass of water and poured it over the threshold of the compound door before we stepped over it. It was an offering to the spirits that our journey may go well. Then we stopped to buy three kola nuts from a local vendor. They were wrapped in a piece of white paper, and the next person we passed on the street, a holy woman with her head covered by a veil, was the recipient of our gift. Lasiné greeted her and then handed her the kola nuts, explaining to her that we are traveling today. This kind of offering was not uncustomary, and she readily accepted the gift and prayed for us. I followed Lasiné’s gesture in turning palms up toward the sky. I said amin, amin after each pause, as he did, fumbling my way along this ritual without really knowing what I was doing, but recognizing that it was the proper thing to do. I feel the parallel between these kinds of imitations in everyday life, and the imitations I do on the balafon as I follow Kebba. When the lady finished praying, she thanked us and Allah, saying abaraka, abaraka, abaraka, and continued on her way. A gift of kola nuts is a blessing. Usually, I saw the men nibbling on these bitter seeds, and they provided a small amount of stimulation to the chewer. Maybe she would give them to her husband. We felt blessed to receive her good wishes, as she surely felt blessed to be the recipient of the gift. Although I was not from this culture and had never participated in such an activity before, I saw the joy it brought to both sides and was warmed by it. In the Gambia, I was learning what faith meant, perhaps for the first time in my life. This exchange set a good tone for our trip to Farafenni. On our trip upriver we took various vanos—the white minibuses used for public transportation. There were police checkpoints, there were vano breakdowns, there were river crossings, all of which could delay our journey for hours. During midday stops, we would seek out the shade of a tree. Boys sold peanuts and oranges through the windows of the vano at

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each stop. There were times when we were uncertain that we would reach our final destination, and the water poured over the threshold and the offering of kola nuts somehow comforted me. They were small rituals that helped the believers, us, to ensure we started off on a good path, one characterized with clarity and compassion and faith that God would provide what we needed for a successful journey. We were not alone in the exchange of good will and blessings. In transit, people shared their food with crying children here. People offered the prime shady spot under the tree to the elder. People looked out for one another here. No one was a stranger. When people spoke of hopes of progressing on the journey, people responded with inshallah, if Allah wills it. When things were moving forward, people offered thanks, alhumdililah, Thank you God, and they meant it. I meant it too. Things were beyond my control here and survival felt somewhat precarious.

Connections Our vano stopped at a police checkpoint on the road home from Farafenni, and a guard tried to extort money from me. For the guard, spotting a toubab was lucky, an effective way of making some extra money that day. I had no recourse, and his demands were more or less extravagant. He could prevent me from traveling if I did not comply. Lasiné stepped out of the vano, and they walked around the back to discuss the terms of a money exchange. I watched from the window, miffed at being targeted when I was clearly with Lasiné and not a regular tourist. Lasiné was friendly, shook the guard’s hand, polite. Luckily, I was not with them to ruin the good rapport. He told the guard that he is a musician and that I am his student. He talked about people he knew in Kombo. They determined they had mutual friends. Lasiné spoke of recent developments in the life of their common friend, giving the guard some new information that brought him into the current loop. The guard started smiling now, shaking Lasiné’s hand and holding Lasiné’s shoulder with the other. With that, the exchange of money became a friendly gift rather than an extortion of the foreigner, the fee determined by Lasiné with my consent, and well less than what the guard might have demanded had I not had Lasiné to negotiate, the Gambian way. Later Lasiné told me, “you remember that daddy we greeted in front of the pharmacy shop? That guard was his nephew.” Connections.

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Bala Changes There are switches between patterns in a song, and they come at breaks in the rhythm, and I do not understand the timing of these switches, but I can imitate Kebba and eventually I come to know about where we will make that strange transition at each cycle. What is the logic, I wonder. But I am too overwhelmed to ask, so I just keep chugging along, fumbling my way through the transition. Kebba is encouraging. He says “c’est bon, ça va aller.” Metaphorically, my experiences fumbling with the flow of Gambian life match the way I fumble through balafon rhythms when I am playing. I somehow get it, but it is a little awkward, a little ungraceful. I learn both the musical and social flows through the act of tuning in and syncing up to what is happening around me, and imitation, in a sort of sink or swim attitude. I reflect on my actions, and my teachers, usually Lasiné, or Kebba, or Awa, encourage me.11 Lasiné takes more and more liberty to correct me when he thinks I am out of sync as well. It seems to be working, but I am functioning on faith that things will continue to work out. Perhaps that is what cross-cultural experiences are about. A leap of faith in humanity, or in God or the universe, that things will work out. Inshallah. I get it.

Husband and Wife Modou came back from Sweden during the time I was living with Awa’s family. When Modou came home, Awa was on her best behavior. She cooked every day. She did not smoke cigarettes. When they went out, she did not talk much. She stood back a little, and I was a bit surprised to realize her position vis-à-vis Modou. At the same time, I became more conscious of my custom to talk to whomever we met. Perhaps this was a toubab’s privilege. When Modou left, Awa did not get to go out again at night until his next trip to the Gambia. There were exceptions when there was a community event like a baby-naming ceremony, Awa attended with the girls who stuck together, ate together, and danced together. I started to realize my privileged position as an American woman, who was single and free. But then, was I so free? There were many times that Lasiné would tell me to “lower my speed” or to not argue with him in public. He wanted to present a smooth image to those around us. Other times he would

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“correct” my behavior or the way I wore my hair or dress, and I would rebel. He told me he had to “break” me, like a horse. He meant to break me in. He said that this was normal as we adapt to one another. So, I asked him if I also had to “break” him, as well. He was reluctant to agree.

Boys Talk While women took care of the house, men were out “hustling,” which means trying to find a way to earn a living in an economy in which very few people had expendable money. This also meant they were networking or apprenticing themselves to someone with skills. But hustling often amounted to “loitering” or hanging around, killing time. Lasiné referred to his friends as “the boys.” These talented musicians had little opportunity for earning money in a Gambian economy, which is why they wanted to find a ticket to toubabadou so badly. Many days, they pulled wooden benches into the shade of the compound walls to block the sunrays and hang out. They pulled out tape decks, put in reggae or local pop music, such as the latest coupé decalé from Côte d’Ivoire, or the latest hot rap group Black Mbolo from Senegal. They drank attayah, green tea with lots of sugar, rolled cigarettes of tobacco and marijuana, swapped stories, complained about the lack of opportunities, and gave each other encouragement for life. Sometimes they pulled out djembes and dunduns and we jammed, improvising lyrics. Guantanamera was a popular framework for our improvisations, as Buena Vista Social Club was filtering through the radios from Ry Cooder’s recently released soundtrack made in Cuba. Lasiné told us stories about his life, or life in general, while we sat with the boys. He was a bit older and more respected than most of them. He spoke for a long time without interruption. He would pause and think and continue and pause. The others would ask questions and make remarks only after he was finished. It was another bodily practice that I felt was quite different than the pace of conversation I might have with my friends in which we would constantly interrupt one another with comments and reactions. Like moving through the streets with Lasiné, the difference for me between my culture and his was in the rhythm, and I felt it viscerally, in my body. Lasiné told us about the hardships he faced in Germany, and how he struggled to send money back home. When he did return, his brother confessed to having spent all of his savings. Lasiné got over his

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disappointment and forgave him within a few weeks. To Lasiné, the financial struggles one had in the Gambia are strong and the temptation to spend the money that relatives send from abroad are everywhere. Long-­ term investment or accumulation of wealth does not necessarily take high priority, because there are more immediate needs and desires to make one’s lifestyle more comfortable. Furthermore, family pressure to share wealth is strong and expected. Money is limited; family goes on forever.

The Marabout Lasiné wanted to clean up his act, to start praying, and to stop drinking beer and smoking marijuana and cigarettes. He was turning over a new leaf, making a fresh start. Lasiné wanted to visit the family marabout for help. The marabout is a holy man, a religious leader and teacher who studies the Qur’an. People visited him for prayers and juju, or spiritual protection. In some places, they call it gris-gris. Lasiné sought spiritual help to quit his bad habits and asked me to sponsor his visit to the marabout. He enticed me by saying that I could receive a prayer too. I did not know what it was about, but I conceded. The marabout was sitting in his mud and thatch house when we arrived. He was tall and lanky, late middle-aged, and dressed in a robe and cap. He invited us to take a seat outside, and he asked us to tell him about our lives and our aspirations. Lasiné explained his problems and dreams to him in Mandingo. When it was my turn, I explained my graduate work in Brazil, and my new ties to the Gambia. I felt unsure that my complex ideas could translate well. Lasiné translated, but he also found my rationale a bit too complex. The marabout listened and nodded, nevertheless, and he told us to return after lunch, when the sun was low. When we returned in the afternoon, the marabout delivered the spiritual protection to both of us, one by one. I recalled seeing lots of babies with this kind of juju draped around their necks and wastes. He handed me a white cotton waistband with three little pouches that I was to wear around my waist. Then he gave me a brown leather pouch about twice the size of a standard envelope stamp. It was hand-sewn shut with thick black string, and its contents held handwritten prayers. The pouch fastened around my bicep with a black leather cord. I thought the leather pouch looked incredibly cool, and I was excited to wear it, an admittedly shallow motivation.

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The next day Lasiné visited the herbal medicine man for some detoxifying solutions. The medicine man moved slowly. He invited us into his sunlit examination room, containing only a desk and a stool. He listened to Lasiné and then inspected his body using a divining screen made of bamboo. The screen waved and swayed seemingly from magnetic force. After the reading, he gave Lasiné instructions to fill glass bottles with water and to put particular herbs inside. Shake them and take a swig twice a day, hold the water in your mouth, then spray it out of your of the mouth, the medicine man told him. He also gave Lasiné a strong potion to drink, in full. It was to purge his body of all bad chemical dependencies.

Things Got Weird My time in the Gambia was drawing to a close. I had been in the Gambia almost 2 months. I had almost forgotten that there was life beyond this small corner of the world. Cornell seemed like a distant memory. I recall John Chernoff’s words. “To arrive at the point where one sees the life of another culture as an alternative is to reach a fundamental notion of the humanistic perspective” (Chernoff, 1979, 9). I could almost conceive of living in the Gambia forever. Perhaps that was what prompted the wake­up call that I was about to receive. During my final week with him, Lasiné began his detox cure. He stopped smoking cigarettes and I thought he became quite testy and suspicious of everything. He was a bundle of nerves. If I was out of his sight, he assumed that I was with other men who might try to convince me to leave him and go with them. He would question me incessantly. I just kept trying to reassure him. On the day of my departure, we had an argument, and I arrived at the airport 1 hour, rather than the required 2 hours, before departure. They refused to let me board the plane. The next Ghana Airways plane would not leave until a week later. During that additional week, the wind blew over the little hand mirror that I left on the windowsill and it shattered. I left a candle burning and it caught the edge on my towel hanging over the door and Lasiné found it burning, just before it caught the door on fire. I carelessly kicked over the bottle of holy water and it spilled across the floor. Lasiné stood in front of me, glaring. “What is going on?” he asked. “I don’t know!” I answered. “Well, you had better check yourself!” I was not sure what that meant, but I felt he was blaming me for something

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important. With all of the spiritual remedies lurking about, I felt I was in over my head. The next day, Lasiné visited the cowrie shell reader. Lasiné told me that she said that one of my maternal ancestors was not happy with us. “What does she want?” I asked him, as if I knew how to talk to my deceased ancestor! I reasoned that Lasiné was paranoid because of his crash detox. Meanwhile, he was suspicious of me. We were in a draw. That evening, Lasiné told me to come inside from the porch several times, and when I didn’t, he came out and dragged me in by the arm, locking the bedroom door behind him. He crawled under the mosquito net with the key in hand and instructed me to get into bed. If things were already tense, I had certifiably entered a state of panic. Heat crawled up the core of my body, and my conscience was hovering over the physical me. Being grabbed and pulled by the arm was past my limit of acceptable. Having crossed the line, I was not sure what Lasiné was capable of doing. I was not able to be reflective about our differences in that moment, I was in fight or flight mode. Perhaps this is where the fruits of my experience in the Gambia were being put to the test. Did I really embody and digest what I was living there? As if being taken over by some supernatural force, myself, the right words came out of my mouth to lower the temperature of the situation. They were slow and measured. I told Lasiné that he was scaring me. Then I said, “Allah knows that this is not a good way to treat your woman. Allah sees that you have scared me, and that I am a guest in this country, and I don’t understand. In the name of Allah, please unlock the door and let me be.” I really believed it, and I knew he would too. Lasiné did not say anything. But slowly, he reached a hand out from under the mosquito net and placed the key on the little cabinet. I gently reached for the key and unlocked the door, leaving it a crack open. Then I put the key back on the table and crawled into bed. Having been wrapped in Gambian reality for 2 months, my sense of normalcy had been completely destabilized. I had been able to adjust my rhythms to the Gambian pace of life. This was my forte that lent itself well to being an anthropologist, and to me, it came naturally. I had the ability to adapt to just about any reality that was fairly wholesome. But here I had put myself to the test. I had met the edges of my tolerance. I realized that I was not the one in control, here. Without thinking about it, but from a tacit understanding, I had to be cool and move things in my direction without causing alarm. I was tested to act in a way that was far from my

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inculcated cultural habitus. In a sense, I was acting in between two cultural modalities for the first time. I was completely dependent on the good will of this one person for my well-being in the Gambia, and according to my cultural norm, he had just breached my trust. Nevertheless, there was a sense of humanity here, and I knew how to access it. In the Gambia, Allah was everything, and he was benevolent and good. Invoking Allah in a moment of real fear was the key to unlock the door of Lasiné’s conscience. When I bade the family farewell, again, they did not know anything was wrong between Lasiné and I. Lasiné groveled the whole trip to the airport, asking for forgiveness. I took the opportunity to express more calmly how I was scared by his physical force and how American women are not used to being treated like that. He apologized. I went on. The spiritual power was unknown to me, and I felt responsible for things out of my control. He understood. But I also knew in reflection that, in part, my fear of the unknown got the better of me, but I was still unable to process and respond to it in any other way than to flee. I was done having a relationship with Lasiné. This incident did not deter me from returning to Africa, but I never engaged in another romantic relationship. I decided to pay more attention to Chrisse and Gray’s advice. Years later, Lasiné eventually made it to Switzerland, where he lives now.

Notes 1. Lasiné is a fictitious name. 2. The inspiration to include this chapter came, in part, from reading Michelle Kisliuk’s ethnography called Seize the Dance! (1998) about the Baaka people of the Central African Republic. She was criticized by Kofi Agawu for a self-­reflexive, subjective ethnography and only mentioning at the end that she had coupled with Justin, her African research partner and guide. In considering that critique, I decided to include this informative time in the Gambia and my relationship with Lasiné into my story. While I do not recommend romance as a fieldwork method, it happens, and anthropologists should embrace that reality as an informative part of understanding across cultures, including the ethical issues that arise (Agawu, 2003, 389–390; Kisliuk, 1998). 3. In Chapter 6 of Performing Africa, Paulla Ebron elucidates the sex tourism common in the Gambia between foreign women and Gambian men (2002). I witnessed these kinds of relationships, generally between older, wealthy women and younger, poor men. They made me uncomfortable

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and ­self-­conscious about my relationship with Lasiné, another complicating factor in our romance. 4. There are other anthropologists not in West Africa who similarly promote engaged, embodied, fieldwork. Ruth Béhar’s The Vulnerable (1997) is one notable example. 5. Embodied, emplaced learning is a topic on which Sarah Pink elaborates in Doing Sensory Ethnography. In her outlined method, emplaced interviewing consisting of a natural conversation around a topic of mutual interest between the anthropologist and the informant. I did not do any kind of interviewing in the Gambia, per se, but the lines between interviewing and conversations of interest might blur here. 6. Baye Fall is a brotherhood of Mourides, a branch of Sufi, or Tariqa Islam (see Joseph Hill, 2018). 7. Walking as a sensorial fieldwork method has gained more popularity in recent years (see Ingold, 2010; Lund, 2005; Pink, 2015) as a way of sharing a sensorial experience with participants, among other everyday activities. 8. In Northern Europe and the United States, time is planned, organized, and efficient, and we privilege keeping to schedules. Time is thought of more linearly. We say that we “waste time,” “lose time,” “spend time,” and “save time.” Edward Hall explains that “time is so thoroughly interwoven into the fabric of existence that we are hardly aware of the degree to which it determines and coordinates everything we do, including the molding of relations with others in many subtle ways” (Hall, 1983: 48). In polychronic-type societies, which are perhaps more common in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures, good interhuman relations are how things get done. Appointments are not kept to fixed times. Information gets passed through by people staying in touch with one another. People know each other’s stories. “In polychromic countries, one has to be an insider or have a ‘friend’ to make things happen” (Hall, 1983: 50). Polychronic cultures are people-oriented and this influences their time. One will not cut off another’s story just to be “on time.” Polychronic time rules in the Gambia and adjusting to that reality opened my eyes to an entirely new way of perceiving the world. 9. It is important to note that Merleau-Ponty’s The phenomenology of perception (1945) is the root for sensorial, embodied research. 10. Louis Sarno, an ethnomusicologist, lived with the pygmies in the 1980s. One of his ongoing difficulties was striking a balance between the constant requests for material goods from his friends and family, and his generosity (1993). Michelle Kisliuk, an anthropologist who also lived with the pygmies, discusses the same conundrum (1998). Also see Appiah on the patron–client relationship (2006).

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11. See Donald Schön on the Reflective Practice technique in fieldwork. Reflection-in-action, the art of reflecting on your actions and adjusting them on the fly, and reflection-on-action, the art of reflecting on your experiences after they have occurred (1987). Similarly, there is an excerpt in Hans Joas, “Creativity in Action,” in which he discusses knowing comes in the act of expressing ourselves (Joas, 1996).

References Agawu, K. (2003). Representing African Music. Routledge. Appiah. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. W. W. Norton and Co. Bateson, G. (1936). Naven: A Survey of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn from Three Points of View. Stanford University Press. Behar, R. (1997). The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart. Beacon Press. Benedict, R. (1934). Patterns of Culture. Houghton Mifflin. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press. Chernoff, J. (1979). African Rhythm and African Sensibility. University of Chicago Press. Ebron, P. (2002). Performing Africa. Princeton University Press. Hall, E. (1983). The Dance of Life. Anchor Books. Hill, J. (2018). Wrapping Authority: Women IslAwac Leaders in a Sufi Movement in Dakar, Senegal. University of Toronto Press. Howes & Classen. (1991). Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society. Routledge. Ingold, T. (2010). Footprints Through the Weather World: Walking Breaking, Knowing. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 16, S121–S130. Jackson, M. (1983). Knowledge of the Body. Man, 18(2), 327–345. Joas, H. (1996). The Creativity of Action. University of Chicago Press. Kisliuk, M. (1998). Seize the Dance. Oxford University Press. Lund, K. (2005). Seeing in Motion and the Touching Eye: Walking Over Scotland’s Mountains. Ethnofoor, XVIII, 27–42. Pink, S. (2015). Doing Sensory Ethnography (2nd ed.). Sage. Sarno, L. (1993). Song from the Forest: My Life Among the Pygmies. Trinity University Press. Schön, D. (1987). Educating the Reflective Practitioner. Jossey-Bass.

CHAPTER 4

Doing Time: The Balafon Workshops, United States

Their adeptness at mimetic techniques made their teaching perhaps less ambiguous than it might have been had they used words. (John Chernoff, 1979, 21)

For the next 2 years I finished my graduate classes at Cornell and spent my leisure time playing percussion between the campus Brazilian Samba band “Solto Frango” and an Ithacan djembe troupe that played for African dance classes. I would not return to Africa until 2005, but the warmth of the people, the rhythm of life, the music, their values, were planted into my heart. And there was something else. Africa was working on me to confront, or to understand, myself as a white, American, Western-educated woman of a certain socioeconomic status. It gave me the insight to look at things from a different perspective, and it is one that would have been difficult to see had I not had an in-depth experience abroad. Removing myself from my native context and seeing myself reflected by others in a foreign society was a new kind of perception. Who was I in Africa? How did they see me? What kind of impression was I leaving behind? Who did I want to be in an African context? Living abroad, especially in cultures vastly different from one’s own, can also be overwhelming. Sometimes, we need the filters, the limitations, and the focus that allows us to integrate slowly, to digest things gradually, instead of throwing oneself in, whole hog, as I did in the Gambia. My © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Feder, Jeliya at the Crossroads, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83059-5_4

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learning experience with West Africa deepened in a new way when I took on the intensive study of the balafon in the United States. Firstly, my experience was contained and focused on learning balafon and the culture related to balafon. Secondly, I placed myself in the position of a student and was taught and evaluated according to the discretion of a Guinean teacher.1 I was developing my own methodology for anthropology: “Learning culture through a musical practice” (Feder, 2007). In 2004, I shifted my academic focus from Brazil to Africa. This shift was somewhat sudden for a doctoral student about to embark on fieldwork. Entering the field with almost no formal anthropological preparation in Africa, I had little knowledge of the related theoretical interests about learning culture through music, the arts, postcolonialism, or West African literature on jeliya, the profession of balafon musicians. It may have given me fresh eyes to approach a subject in a new way. Learning through a contained system, an art, challenged my mind like learning a foreign language, of which this music was a part. There was a logic to it, but it was not readily available to me. Through the music medium, I practiced musical phrases again and again to learn how they connected to one another. Because our communication was largely nonverbal, realizations about the culture came through bodily experience and styles of transmitting the knowledge. Learning intensively from a native teacher also put me in the rightful position of student who progressed according to the teacher’s discretion, in context, which also provided useful information about what they valued. It was a challenging prospect because I had to open myself to learning the Manding way, which required a level of trust in the teacher’s technique when his methods at first defied my reasoning. Doing so in a framework of music, to say the least in my own country, made it a non-threatening, and aesthetically pleasurable endeavor. The following scenarios are a conglomerate of balafon workshops that I have taken over the years in the United States and in France with various teachers. All of the teachers play the Sosso balafon, the Malian/Guinean instrument of the greater Manding people with origins dating to the Malian Empire, 785  years ago. The original balafon of the Sosso ruler Soumanoro Kanté is supposedly kept in Niagassola, Guinea, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Jelis sometimes travel there, and sometimes take their European and American students to visit it. Some teachers have also formed a dedicated following of Americans and Europeans who attend their balafon workshops whenever they give them. My teachers

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have mostly come from Guinea, sometimes Mali, and one, Kanazoé, is from Burkina Faso. They are all part of the greater Manding culture, although they also have sub-cultural groups. My jeli teachers were born and raised playing balafon and telling the stories of Soumanoro Kanté and Soundiata Keita, two rulers whose histories describe the foundation of the Malian Empire and the unification of the Manding peoples, including the Sousou and Malinké. Some of my teachers have also begun to study and include the history of Europe and the Americas in their oral repertoire, proving just how versatile jeliya can be. The United States–based teachers came as members of internationally touring groups such as Ballet Africain or Bembeya Jazz. When their tour finishes in New York City or other destinations abroad, many stay in search of better financial and musical opportunities than were possible in West Africa. There are many more France-based West African teachers than United States-based teachers, and in France, they come in a variety of ways. As West Africa and France are closer in distance and because independence from French colonization is relatively recent (late 1950s and 1960s), the two share greater cultural ties. It is commonly said that it is easier to obtain legal working papers in France than in the United States. Nevertheless, many of my American-based teachers have gained legal working status with the help of immigration lawyers, and thus could begin careers playing and teaching balafon in various capacities. Most leave families back in Guinea, sometimes with many children, as we saw in the previous chapter with Awa and Modou. But the reality in living in Europe and the United States is not as easy as it might seem to the family living back home. The cost of living is expensive, and landing a good-paying gig or class as a jeli musician in Europe and the United States is not as easy as people might think. Furthermore, there is simply not enough interest in instruments like the kora and balafon to make it profitable for jelis to make a living from teaching. From my experience taking balafon classes in France and in the United States, there are more balafon students and good teachers in France. In both countries, the Balafon Workshops often happen as either a weekend workshop or part of week-long drum and dance camps. I have taken part in these workshops over the past 15 years from the beginning to the intermediate levels. I have even organized a few of my own. Throughout the years, I learned songs such as “Solí,” “Kuku,” “Yankadee,” all songs I knew on djembe, and that I would learn on a C-tuned balafon. I also learned Keme Bourema, Mané, Lasidan, Lamban,

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and many more. Some of these songs originated in Mali, others in Guinea or the Gambia, but they were all part of the cultures united under the greater Manding Empire. When I signed up for my first balafon workshop in New England, I told the teacher that I wanted to play a traditionally tuned balafon, like the ones Kebba Manneh and I played in the Gambia, like the one I played in Maine with Gray. Kebba Manneh, however, was Balanta, and their songs were of a different group than the Manding jelis. Furthermore, I found out that a “traditionally tuned” balafon simply refers to a tuning that varies from region to region, village to village. The Manding and Balanta balafons are both heptatonic (seven-note scales), as opposed to other balafons in the region that are pentatonic (five-note scales), such as some of the balafons from Kanazoé Diabaté’s region of Burkina Faso. However, even among heptatonic balas, the distance between notes may vary from region to region, almost like dialects.2 Balafon musicians, whether in cities in West Africa or Europe, or in New York, often tune their balafons to a Western scale in order to play with Western-tuned instruments.3 Up until then, I had only encountered Kebba’s tuning and I never met a balafonist who played with other European instruments.

The First Workshop My first balafon workshops in the United States happened over weekends. We played on Saturday and Sunday, from 10 am to 1 pm and from 2 pm to 5  pm. The workshops would meet anywhere from once a month to once every 2 or 3 months. There were generally five to eight participants. At that time in 2004, participants paid only $65 for the weekend. This price was very low, in considering what we would be learning. It might as well have been $200 and it still would have been a proper amount. We would usually concentrate on two songs during the course of the weekend. The workshops were not dissimilar from the Suzuki Method, or any group classes where students of different levels of ability play together and teaching emphasizes oral rather than written transmission of knowledge. In balafon workshops, a teacher introduces a new song to students by playing the song himself so the students can hear it. This is true when teachers teach foreigners in France and the United States, based on my experience. In West Africa, balafon is not taught in a workshop format. A student, who is a young jeli, generally spends most of his time with a teacher. He learns by listening all the time, and by trying to imitate his

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teacher when he can, or so I am told. He also accompanies the mentor on his jeli duties, and is made to play the accompanying patterns while the master player plays more intricate technicalities. For many European and American students, the teacher’s demonstration of what we are to learn can be the first time they have heard the song. After playing it for a few minutes, the teacher will reduce it down to just one repeating pattern—perhaps the bassline, or the main melodic loop— so that the student can pick out and hear what she or he will learn to play out of this complex song of interweaving patterns. Learning one pattern (also called accompaniment) may at first be a challenge and require a great deal of concentration, but before long, the body learns to repeat the motions without using much mental effort at all. However, learning how the patterns link up to one another and to the tempo can be challenging. My first workshop took place on a Saturday morning with one of the best Guinean balafonists known in the United States who I call Bacar.4 Seven of us arranged ourselves in a circle with balafons splayed in front of us on stands or chairs. Bacar told us we would be learning “Solí.” “Solí” is a challenging song to learn because of its complicated 12/8 polyrhythmic melody, of which pattern one is composed of four variants on a theme that can be broken into 6 or 4 beats per measure. Bacar broke down pattern one into several bite-sized pieces until we had strung together Pattern One, a lengthy four measures long, with relative ease. After about an hour, I played the pattern fluidly. Shortly after becoming comfortable, I felt Bacar’s gaze on me. From the corner of my eye, I could see him approaching. His eyes were following my moves, making sure I played the pattern correctly. “Relax and concentrate,” I told myself. When he was standing over my balafon, opposite me, he started to hammer on my balafon with his mallets, playing my part while standing across from me. He added a new, double note to my progression and expected me to copy it on the fly. “You go!” I continued to play the same thing and watch his mallets, opposite mine. Then, when I understood what he was doing, I told him, “Okay, I got it,” and hoped he would go away so I could figure it out. “No!” He barked back. “You don’t get it!” He continued to bang out the double note he wanted me to integrate. Realizing he would not leave until I attempted the new part, I mustered up the courage and tried to play it with him. I fumbled. “Nah!” he said every time I hit the wrong key. I kept trying. Once I was able to reproduce the new notes a few times, albeit weakly, he moved on.

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Bacar’s seemingly authoritative behavior is not uncommon among West African music teachers of other instruments. I hear many stories in which Americans become too intimidated by the teacher to continue djembe lessons, causing some students to give up or to resort to different methods in which limited contact is the goal. But as I have already learned during my time in the Gambia, my sensitivities in tone of voice are not perceived the same way in their culture. They may simply be a way to talk and express in Bacar’s culture. I recall times when I felt alarmed by the level of conversation between Lasiné and Awa. They responded to my concern with laughter. “Hey, we are just talking! That is the way we talk.” Bacar’s demand to play the new note is also an instigation to have courage and not to be scared of trying something new. It is also an exercise in maintaining my calm in the face of a challenge. I wished I had had that vision in the Gambia when things went haywire between Lasiné and I. If I had stayed calm when Lasiné was telling me that something was spiritually misaligned on my side of the family, I might have asked a few questions for clarification. Staying calm is a very important attribute to have when things get tense. Learning balafon helped me to exercise this skill frequently.5

The Second Workshop: Learning the Time— 12/8 Rhythms There were seven of us playing balafon in a big circle in a large living room with a roaring fire in the wood-burning stove. The snow had been falling for days. One participant’s car was lodged in a snowbank, halfway up the long driveway. We did not care. We were nestled together in a cozy house with a good project. “Solí” once again. We moaned and groaned at the idea of working on it again, but in truth we could not wait to get to work, to keep practicing and perfecting. Bacar’s mission was to get this song into our bodies. I was concentrating on the same, long pattern as the last workshop, while others were advancing at their pace with Bacar’s guidance. While listening to how my part fit in with the others around me, if I could feel confident in my timing and how it played off of their notes, it energized my playing. However, growing accustomed to the distance in which the notes of other patterns related to my notes took some getting used to, because some of those relative distances in timing are not common in my culture’s music; I would think notes should align in certain ways when

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they did not, which caused me to change my own rhythm to suit theirs. Allowing for this new feeling, this new relationship between my notes and their notes in the music, is something that must be accepted in the body so that an expectation or familiarization with that feeling becomes natural to me. Bacar, perhaps sensing my struggles, fixed his gaze on me from across the room, and I felt that small pang of terror in my heart. “Hey!” He yelled out to me from behind his balafon, playing pattern one, the same as mine. I looked up at him and tried to keep playing. He started emphasizing one note harder than the rest. I glanced up periodically and tried to listen to him. The note he was emphasizing was a consistent beat to which everyone related their patterns, and I realized he was showing me the time to the music. This was not where I was feeling it, and Bacar must have sensed that by how I played my rhythm. He was giving me the antidote to correct me. In fact, I was feeling the time on the six beats per measure and he was showing me that I could also feel it in four beats per measure. That changed the way I was thinking and therefore expressing the rhythm I played. It took me a while to adjust to Bacar’s pulse. It felt funky, as if it were the drum fill in a rock song, but one that never ended. Ethnomusicologist Chernoff describes, we can say that the musicians play “around” the beat, or that they play on the off-beat, but actually it is precisely the ability to identify the beat that enables someone to appreciate the music. We begin to “understand” African music by being able to maintain, in our minds or our bodies, an additional rhythm to the ones we hear…it is a way of being steady within a context of multiple rhythms. (Chernoff, 1979, 49)

Chernoff then refers to Richard Waterman’s term “metronome sense” that describes the musical sensibility, “a sensibility necessary to play or listen to such rhythmic music, a sensibility which need not be developed for European music.” This “metronome sense,” which I refer to as the “beat” or the “pulse,” relates, metaphorically, to the “moral imperative” of Manding, perhaps all West African, people, as I would come to learn with Famoro Dioubaté. A little later, during a break, I was in the kitchen and I heard William playing what seemed like a new, catchy melody. It had a nice, easy swing to it, and I danced to it, stepping from left to right foot in an easy rock. When he stopped playing, I asked William what song it was. “It’s ‘Solí,’

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pattern one,” he responded, much to my surprise. I asked him to play the part again. It sounded different to me, and I showed him how I played it. He explained that it was the same pattern, except that one note was switched to a higher octave. Stupefied, I trained my hand to shift this one note to the higher octave and suddenly I felt Bacar’s pulse on the four-beats-per-measure. This revelation changed the way I played “Solí.” Now it became a steady, easy rock-a-bye. Hearing how my pattern related to the others changed as well. In American or European music, even in Reggae, a person can become momentarily confused as to where the “metronome sense” is, if they get off on the wrong foot. They often need to be righted. But I do not believe the intention of the music is to play with this ambiguity. As one of my balafon teachers would say, “American music is straight, straight, straight.” I would argue that West African music purposely uses these ambiguities in timing and cross-rhythms as a tactic to increase intelligence, simply because it plays purposely with ambiguity, or more precisely, shifting structures, which challenge the listener to stay on their toes. It can employ this tactic due to the particular parameters of the balafon—a limited keyboard of chromatic scale played in cyclical, repeating cross-rhythmic melodies. It was certainly increasing my intelligence and broadening my framework for how music could be organized. It was also laying the groundwork for considering how this music affects the Manding people who listen to it. I explained my hunch about the effects this music had on the psyche to Steve Pond, an ethnomusicologist who pointed me to CK Ladzekpo, an Anglo-Ewe Ghanaian musician, choreographer, and director of the African music program at UC Berkeley. He said that his music, polyrhythmic Ghanaian drumming trains the person to develop a “resolute fearlessness” and “intrepid mind” in training to play one’s own part with passion and vigor while simultaneously blending with and being aware of others in the troupe as well as the listeners. He described playing the music as having character-building traits and helping to clear a path toward developing wisdom by learning to see a more whole picture rather than the sum of its parts.6 Having played the djembe, I had felt this to be true. Yet balafon music took this characteristic found in West African music and complexified it. Because of the balafon’s melodic, 23-note scale, those experienced players of the instrument were capable of extrapolating on this theme and playing with our natural ability to hear and organize melodies according to dominant and embellishing notes (Jackendoff & Lerdahl, 1983).

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The Jigsaw Puzzle The process of learning Manding balafon from a jeli is a little like putting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together, while all such pieces are turned face down. As soon as you get a fit between pieces, you can turn it over and see the colors in the picture it is developing. And when you start to build big chunks, the figure in the picture might start to emerge with a more distinct clarity—perhaps you see the top of a building and the clouds behind it, a little preview of the whole image coming into view. Someone who knows how the picture will develop is handing you the pieces, and their system of portioning out those pieces has some sort of logic unbeknownst to you. Such is how we learned to play “Solí.” Over 6 months of balafon workshops, Bacar taught us pattern one and pattern two of “Solí,” and how the two patterns fit together. We also learned other songs, but we kept coming back to “Solí.” Once I had learned to play and feel and think of pattern one according to four beats per measure, I learned to play pattern two. Bacar taught it to us in a way that seemed relatively straightforward. I heard pattern two in terms of four beats per measure. But then, Bacar taught us to shift to pattern two from pattern one and back again. He walked us through the first two beats of pattern one and then switched to pattern two. We realized that they did not line up at the place where we thought they did. We listened and watched, then we imitated. Listened and watched. Imitated. We learned to play pattern one into pattern two in this manner, but it seemed to me that Bacar was leaving out a rest where there should have been one. I knew I was not understanding the timing properly. I longed for a verbal explanation—we all did—but none was forthcoming. When we tried to ask questions, Bacar just pointed us back to our keyboards. We practiced playing pattern one into pattern two and back again. Then we practiced playing pattern one while he played pattern two, and then vice versa. When we played the two patterns simultaneously, there was a tension that built and then resolved with each looping measure. William described the feeling as being like breathing; the tension builds as one inhales, and it decreases as one exhales. At first, we could barely maintain our rhythm while the counter-rhythm was played; I wanted to correct my pattern to align with the other pattern when it did not. We were trying to crack a mysterious code and find the way to digest and embody this complicated rhythm.

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Relating the Patterns I assumed that pattern two started in the same place as pattern one, but in fact it started on the 2 and 2/3, or the second partial of the triplet, if one were to count in four beats per measure. I had to grow accustomed to hearing the two patterns, off-kilter, or syncopated. The tension and resolution—because the two melodies do resolve—was intense. Most of us just tried to hang on to our patterns as the tension built and resolved. The dominant notes of pattern one interlace in the gaps of pattern two where no dominant notes are played. Until they line up in two places, the “4” and the “1.” We, the toubabs, were truly baffled when we came to realize that where we started pattern one—toubabs may call this the “1,” if we are to count the rhythm in 1, 2, 3, 4—pattern two also has a dominant note on the 1. And the 4. So why, we would ask one another, did Bacar not teach us to hear pattern two from the one place where it does align with pattern one? At the beginning and on the 1! In American or European music, it would seem most logical to teach pattern two where it aligned with pattern one on the first beat of the measure. To do otherwise would seem illogical or intentionally confusing. Musically, structurally, the so-called American or European 1 (or first beat in the measure) did not register the same importance as it did in the West African context. It was more important to see how the two patterns related to one another and the common beat. Furthermore, having to align with both 4 and 6 beats per measure diversified my concept of what is possible in music. But I still did not get the timing. I tried to revert to my own system of learning. I attempted to relearn pattern two by intellectually charting it out and retraining myself. Surely, well-trained musicians could read the sheet music and train their bodies to feel it that way. But there was no way for me to unhear pattern two’s melody from the 1 at this point; my mind kept hearing the melody of pattern two the way Bacar had taught it to us. I had to learn to trust and follow Bacar’s way of teaching us, and eventually it made sense. I learned to sharpen my hearing, which served as an additional tool. Allowing the countermelody to enter my aural realm pulled me off my pattern at first, but I eventually realized that accepting the other part was the only way to find confidence in playing “Solí.” I had to be sure of how my part played off of the other part. Slowly, through the

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body-in-motion and all sensory input on high, I came to understand the West African way of thinking about music by playing it myself. Musically, structurally, the so-called American or European 1 (or first beat in the measure) did not register the same importance as it did in the West African context. It was more important to see how the two patterns related to one another and the common beat, not thought of as 1-2-3-4, per se, but the same beat thought of as X-X-X-X. Furthermore, having to align with both 4 and 6 beats per measure diversified my concept of what is possible in music.

Reflections on Embodied Learning Bacar’s teaching style reflected certain values about his culture that I could not yet explain, but could intuit in the way it differed from my habitual way of learning. As ethnomusicologist Chernoff explained in the epigraph, we learn West African music, by “responding to their [our teachers’] gestures and bodily cues,” and by mimicking, which leaves less ambiguity than verbal explanations (Chernoff, 1979, 21). In retrospect, now I see that Bacar’s process, perhaps the West African way of teaching, allows the student to have her own revelations about the logic of the compositions in the act of embodying them. Of course this was similar to the ways I learned Gambian culture by syncing up and moving with locals. In Mande music, learning-by-doing, or embodied learning, has a value that verbalizing-­ prior-­to-doing lacks.7 This has wider implications for the culture at large. A few months later I was in Guinea with Bacar. I asked him what an upcoming event would be like. This sparked the conversation about a cultural difference between Americans and Africans that speaks to a different value. Bacar noted that we, the foté (the Guinean term for Euro-­ Americans), often asked him about the details of an event, prior to going, to which he would respond, “You’ll see when you get there!” Over the years, I have interpreted the African perspective on experiencing events in the future like this: There is no sense in describing what an event will be like because each person experiences it differently. Perhaps the West Africans value firsthand experience. I started to quiet my desire to ask. I learned to enjoy the curiosity and my imagination without knowing the response. I learned to be comfortable with the not-knowing. I felt there was a humility in staying quiet. I started to see my cultural way to ask questions about the future, and our inquiries about the balafon before

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learning-by-doing, as related to needing a sense of control, perhaps a false sense of control, or a desire to always be prepared. In “Knowledge of the Body”, anthropologist Michael Jackson discusses directly the importance that body praxis holds over verbal praxis, during his fieldwork among the Karanko of Sierra Leone. He notices that certain things are left unspoken and unexplained because the Karanko choose to embody it. “While words and concepts distinguish and divide, bodiliness unites and forms the grounds of an empathetic, even a universal understanding.” He concludes that not-putting-into-words is a mark of ethical preference, not primitiveness (1983, p.  340). I agree. One might even construe it as crass or redundant to ask about things ahead of time, perhaps indicating a lack of maturity and patience to let things unfold. Ethnomusicologist John Chernoff similarly noted that he knew his teachers were at their wits end when they had to resort to verbal explanations (Chernoff, 1979: 21). Furthermore, he noted his ability to intuit things about the playing long before he was able to verbalize his understanding. Paul Stoller also describes the first few times he entered the field in Niger, he asked direct questions about what he thought he knew from reading previous texts, and he received false answers. It was only after submitting to becoming an apprentice and experiencing things for himself did he truly understand Mehanna values and beliefs (Stoller & Olkes, 1987). To learn by repeating, with no verbal explanation, was a deep exercise in letting go of ingrained habitual ways of organizing the world. It required trust in the teacher, a leap of faith, because we could not see the outcome. Learning in the context of music became a significant way to deepen my cross-cultural experience through tacit, intuitive learning. Music becomes a bridge to crossing cultures. I wanted to learn balafon because I heard the music in Africa, was familiar with the instrument, and had the desire to learn it. There was something logical and admirable about the music, but it also defied my comprehension. Similarly, what happens in an African context, even in my own home state, also defies my comprehension. I do not feel in control in either situation. Having a musical practice with a native teacher is a good cross-cultural learning tool. I came to see that any artistic or skillful practice could be useful. In short, by inserting oneself into a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) in a foreign culture, one learns much more than merely the initial skill that one sets out to learn.

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Aesthetic as Cross-Cultural Tool While one is learning a balafon piece, the mind is twisted into strange shapes and forms while striving to make the kinesthetic movements to execute the sound pattern. Slowly one makes sense of the pattern through the body-in-motion, and what was uncomfortable becomes enjoyable. To embody “Solí” in its two syncopated patterns was a practice in getting comfortable with two opposing forces, to allow them to invigorate one another, and to sit comfortably in the middle of them. Each song produces a new conundrum to be tackled and sorted, in its own way. Learning balafon becomes an exercise in mental dexterity. If this is the nature of the Manding musical aesthetic, then what is it teaching us about what Manding people practice daily, and therefore, what they value? There were more patterns to learn in “Solí.” In fact, they could be infinite. Each one Bacar could break apart and recombine with the other patterns, flowing in between them continuously, in various combinations. It was a workmanlike variety of continual improvisation. The limited keyboard belied the seemingly infinite possibilities within a given song. I felt the musical composition was a poetic way to describe two, or many, equally valid human positions, or cultural positions, to coexist and complement one another. It was a way of making peace from the chaos, of creating resolution among various competing factors. I felt this tacitly. This feeling, I would learn later, was a concept that was reinforced in the oral history of the jelis since the time of Sunjata Keita and the start of the Manding Empire in 1235 CE. CK Ladzekpo explains quite precisely what I felt about Manding music when he describes his own culture in Ghana. He says that in Anlo-Ewe drumming, rhythm is “the dominant feature which, along with others, create the transcendent environment (music) necessary for the vital needs of communal communication and unification. In this communal view, rhythm provides the regular pulsation or beat which is the focal point in uniting the energies of the entire community in the pursuit of their collective destiny.” His explanation coincides directly with my experience of jeli music.8

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Reflections Applied to the Gambia My experience with Lasiné and Awa in the Gambia was an intensive practice in embodying various habitual patterns: moving in the streets, engendering a woman’s role, sharing and receiving things spiritual, ways of speaking, and much more. It took some adjustment to get my rhythm in these things. Often, I was an open and eager participant, willing to shed my habitual patterns. Yet, like patterns of the balafon, some came easier than others. At times I resisted or even rebelled because I did not understand the logic, such as not wanting to greet everyone we passed in the streets who knew Lasiné. Later, the logic to this way of being became more obvious to me when I saw how social connections worked. There was a time, or rhythm, a moral imperative (Benedict, 1934) guiding Gambian actions, a force that drove all those patterns that sometimes eluded me. I felt that it had to do with a sense of community with shared values, tied to the same fate. This was something deeply embedded in the culture, and was reinforced, and perhaps idealized, in its music. This was not something that I felt strongly in my own culture and adjusting to it brought both joy and friction. Learning balafon also gave me a more objective view of myself, and my limitations in my perceptions. This awareness of not having a correct understanding was mirrored in my financial relationship vis-à-vis-Lasiné and his family. There was a disjuncture between us that superseded the obvious difference in our economic status. How were we to relate around matters of money? I could give him everything I had, and it still would not be enough. I could give him nothing at all, but that would not be generous or appropriate on any cultural standard. How was I to navigate the discrepancy in financial power? Africa had something I wanted, but it did not have a price tag. It came freely. However, Islam in Manding culture indicated that my generosity would be a blessing for myself and all involved, like the kola nuts we gave on the day of our trip upriver. It was up to me to determine how to channel my money, and I had no clue how to do it. In the end, when my fear and mistrust overtook me, I fled the situation in the blink of an eye. But my learning was far from over. My balafon teachers would continue to teach me many things, including the myriad ways of being generous. It was part and parcel of learning the foundations of jeliya. I may have wanted to flea many times, but there was something so sweet in the people and the music that made me come back again and again.

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When playing music, however, I found that nothing critical was at stake, so there was no reason not to fully surrender myself to Bacar’s teachings. And that was liberating. A musical practice gave me the opportunity to fully explore and realize my own culturally taught patterns of thinking and acting that blocked me from understanding and appreciating those of another culture’s. Learning music as a technique of cross-cultural interaction is relatively harmless but nevertheless allows cross-cultural differences to be realized and worked through. But of course, things were not that simple. Once you get involved in one realm of the culture, you inevitably become complicated in other realms as well.

Taken for a Ride? It was 7:10 am on a cold November day when William and I landed on Bacar’s stoop in Connecticut. We knocked on the door, rang the doorbell, and called on the phone all at once. William assured me it was the only way to wake him up. Bacar missed his flight to Africa before probably because he cut last minute shopping a little too close and did not account for traffic on the FDR Drive. Would this day be different? When we drove Bacar from Sue’s farewell balafon party to his home, he made us stop at Sam Ash and K-Mart on the way. Bacar was leaving for Guinea for 3 months. William and I were to join him there in a few weeks. At Sam Ash we looked for a variety of guitar strings and mediators that we might bring as gifts. At K-Mart we helped Bacar contemplate medicines for diarrhea and colds for children of varying ages—Anacin, Excedrin, Motrin, you name it, we’ve got it. We looked for infant clothes and wristwatches. He opted against the electric shaver, and the suitcase. No suitcase? What time is the flight? That morning William and I barely readied ourselves at a friend’s house down the road before greeting the frosty morning sunrise at 7  am. We thought Bacar called upon us as the responsible Americans with the trustworthy car to get him to the airport on time. That was only a partial understanding. Alas, we were functioning on the wrong cultural framework in which we think we know what is happening ahead of time. Bacar, as it turns out, was delegating the order of events in the moment, according to his own idea, just like when he is delegating out bits and pieces of balafon parts that we are meant to just follow without questions.

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When Bacar finally opened the door, he was wearing pajamas and a freshly woken face, and he was muttering to himself. It was clear he had not slept much. Nor was he moving quickly. We waited while Bacar showered. There were a couple of open bags, mostly packed, in the corner. He returned and dressed in stages. Tee and boxers. A smoke. Jeans and belt. A couple of phone calls. No one was rushing to leave here. William gave up, and went out to fetch coffee and muffins. Bacar wandered around his bedroom pleading (to Allah?) if he forgot anything, to please let it present itself to him, in English. Over an hour had gone by that we could have been sleeping. Bacar exchanged his flip-flops for socks and Jamaican-made sneakers and said Wan Guay, let’s go, in Sousou. Really? He’s ready? William and he threw his luggage into the trunk: Two duffels and a big garbage bag of stuff. A garbage bag? Would they allow a garbage bag as checked luggage? We made it to the end of Bacar’s block, Blake Street, and he makes the first request to stop. Western Union, of course. Bacar explained that he could not pick up his money last night because he forgot his ID. It is 8:20 am. Not open. Two blocks down the road, the next Exxon, Tigermart had another Western Union. They could only give him a check. We drove another half a mile. Third try. Nope. Bacar decided that I, Lisa, would take his check and cash it for myself after he goes to Africa, and advance him the money now. No me gusta la idea. Alas, the Shaw’s Supermarket saved the day. Alhumdilila. We zipped onto the highway and cruised, thinking this time we are surely en route to Kennedy Airport. About 5 miles later we saw a Walmart on the right. Don’t look, I think to myself. But there was just no passing it. Bacar decided that yes, he really did need that shaver, after all. William and I wait in the car. And wait. And wait. William laid his head on the top of the steering wheel. I pulled out the hat I have been trying to knit. A full 40 minutes later, Bacar reappeared with a plastic Walmart bag in hand. We were already in Africa, I thought to myself, though it sure looked like the tri-state area. We crossed the Triboro Bridge at 10:35 am, surely to Kennedy now? Bacar instructed us to head toward Famoro Dioubate’s apartment, deep in the heart of Brooklyn. Famoro was a renowned Guinean balafon jeli as well, but I had yet to meet him. Would today be the day? Still, Brooklyn was a detour from the direct route to the airport. “Hey Bacar, what time’s your flight?”

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“Not until later,” he responded. As William drove, his fingers tapped out the rhythm of the balafon part along with the Oumou Sangaré cassette on the tape deck. It was the only thing that kept him sane. “Bacar, where’s the beat in this one?” he asked. Bacar guided him to it. We made it way down Flatbush Avenue, past Prospect Park, deep into the heart of Brooklyn through crowds of people with origins from many countries, especially the Caribbean and West Africa. A few blocks from Famoro’s house, Bacar told us to stop. A choice of stores boasted cheap, black luggage on the sidewalk. Within 10 minutes, Bacar came back with one. He opened William’s trunk and emptied the contents of the garbage bag into it, and pushed and shoved until he got it zipped up. William and I looked at each other in disbelief. Bacar hopped in and tapped the rooftop. Let’s go! We arrived in front of Famoro’s house, 4 hours after we had presented ourselves at Bacar’s house that morning. It was 11 am. Famoro, it turned out, was playing a gig out of town the night before, so we would not meet him. But Bacar had prearranged to get the key from Fula Flute player Bailo Bah who lived downstairs. Bacar had some things to drop off, some things to pick up. There were no questions asked. Apparently, the men had already arranged this ahead of time. Only William and I felt clueless. Bacar failed to mention, until now, that he had also arranged for “Djoss” (a formidable jeli who sings from Mali) to meet him here and take him to Kennedy. His flight was at 7:30 in the evening! Djoss appeared few minutes later, dressed in a fine suit and overcoat with a minivan. It was the first time I met him. I had heard he is a wonderful jeli singer. He shook my hand in greeting. I bet he slept well, I thought to myself. We exchanged hugs with Bacar, wished him safe travels, and promised to meet him on the other side in a few weeks. Our seemingly never-ending journey ended, and we were almost disappointed to get in the car without Bacar and head toward home, an hour north.9

Notes 1. Anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have treaded before me in using a musical practice as a methodology. Paul Berliner (1978) learned “the soul of the Mbira” in Zimbabwe, which has many similarities to learning balafon and kora in that the instrument teaches the player about himself. Katherine Hagerdorn (2001) learned batá drumming in Cuba, similar to me, she is a woman learning a man’s sacred instrument.

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2. In Burkina Faso and Northern Mali, pentatonic (five-note scale) balafons and ngonis give the music a different feeling, but I did not encounter them until many years later. For more information on varieties of balafon tunings, see Lynne Jessup’s The Mandinka Balafon (1983). 3. To tune a balafon, one shaves wood off the center or the ends of the wooden slat. A jeli might have two or three balafons tuned to different keys and will switch between the balafons when playing nontraditional songs with a band. This is a more recent development as a traditional Manding repertoire may be played in any key, thus requires only one balafon. 4. To preserve anonymity on request, I call the teacher Bacar. 5. In the first iteration of the Fieldschool for Ethnographic Sensibility (University of Alberta) in Serbia, a program I co-created, we used the term “freaking out” as an actual fieldwork method. Mindfulness around moments of fear when abroad are useful in discovering where our own inculcated habitual patterns conflict with the habitual patterns of the host culture. I guided my students to pause and take note in these moments, and we used meditation techniques to train ourselves in bodily awareness. This method became part of my fieldwork method called transformative ethnography. 6. See http://www.richardhodges.com/ladzekpo/PrinciplesFr.html, October 4, 2016. 7. Similar to a child, learning to use language from her mother through continual repetition in context, as opposed to a high school student, learning vocabulary and grammar of a foreign language, out-of-context. See Jackson, 1983; Lave and Wenger, 1991, Pink, 2015. 8. See http://www.richardhodges.com/ladzekpo/PrinciplesFr.html, October 4, 2016. 9. It is important to read the conclusion to this book in which this story is interpreted based on my experiences in working with jelis for the next 17 years.

References Benedict, R. (1934). Patterns of Culture. Houghton Mifflin. Berliner, P. (1978). Soul of the Mbira. University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press. Chernoff, J.  M. (1979). African Rhythm and African Sensibility. University of Chicago Press. Feder, L. (2007). Learning Culture Through a Musical Practice with Mande Jelis in New  York. Cornell University 3260855. https://search-­proquest-­com. proxy.library.cornell.edu/dissertations-­t heses/learning-­c ulture-­t hrough-­ musical-­practice-­with/docview/304866110/se-­2?accountid=10267 Hagerdorn, K. (2001). Divine Utterances. Smithsonian Institute.

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Jackendoff, R., & Lerdahl, F. (1983). A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jackson, M. (1983). Knowledge of the Body. Man, 18(2), 327–345. Ladzekpo, C. K. The Myth of Cross-Rhythms. In Foundation Course in African DanceDrumming. http://www.richardhodges.com/ladzekpo/PrinciplesFr.html. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press. Pink, S. (2015). Doing Sensory Ethnography (2nd ed.). Sage. Stoller, P., & Olkes, C. (1987). In Sorcery’s Shadow. University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 5

Direct Transmissions: Going with the Flow

We are the kora, with us, it just comes. (Sidiki Diabaté) I didn’t learn the kora from my father. I already had the kora in my blood. I was born into it (Toumani Diabaté (both, as quoted in Charry, 2000, 341))

The Flow in Guinea This chapter offers stories from my field journal from a trip to Guinea that I made in 2005. During this trip I traveled with five American and European dance and music students and professionals. I was the only anthropologist. We stayed at the house of a balafon teacher who resided in the United States and had created a multi-cultural music and dance group. The balafonist, my teacher from the last chapter, is called Bacar.1 Some of the professional musicians and dancers were performing with Bacar at a big cultural center in Conakry, a show that Bacar choreographed and composed himself. This allowed me to witness how culture and its integration into the global arena are welcomed as well as safeguarded by the elders in the society. Going with the flow in Guinea does not always come easily for foreigners, as I’m sure the same is true in the reverse situation. We adjust to new foods, new ways of using money and moving in time, in short, a new system of logic that is not always evident to us. In these scenarios there is a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Feder, Jeliya at the Crossroads, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83059-5_5

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dance student, a European, who represents the stereotypical misunderstandings of a toubab or foté (non-African) in Africa. She seems to go against the flow at every turn, which caused mounting tensions in the compound, until the jeli uses good diplomacy and music to dissipate them in the end. The oral transmission of jeliya is the second main theme of my experience. At Bacar’s compound, jeliya was transmitted in the environment as it is in most of West Africa.2 Elders taught younger relatives to play pieces of songs, but music was also just absorbed by myself and by the children of all ages, just by being in the environment. Becoming a temporary part of the oral transmission, foreigners like myself fall into a hybrid position as patrons who are upholding the art financially, and students who are learning the significance and musical practice. In Eric Charry’s comprehensive source, Mande Music, he breaks from his formal, scholarly descriptions of the music only in the end of his book, in order to describe the behind-the-scenes methods that he, other foreigners, as opposed to jelis, learn jeli music. On the one hand all students learn by playing “exemplars of pieces” or what I have called, patterns of a song, cyclical repeating patterns that can be simplified or complexified. Whether in balafon workshops in the United States or in a West African jeli party, students play these exemplars. We are never taught to play scales, or to read musical notes. What differs is that foreign music students and researchers generally fall into the category of patrons, who pay for lessons, “which is in effect like supporting one’s local library, museum, concert hall, and university” (Charry, 2000, 338). Part of the money I paid to Bacar for staying in his compound can be construed as a contribution to learning and supporting jeli music. Jelis, on the other hand, are born and bred in a jeli household. When asked how they learned, jelis often say they are “self-taught” which, Charry explains, does not infer “bucking the system,” but is an expression of “family tradition in which music is inherited rather than learned” (Charry, 2000, 341). The two quotes of Sidiki Diabaté, Malian kora player, and his now world-famous son, Toumani Diabaté, express this belief in the epigraph, above. However, in my experience living in a jeli household, the distinction between myself as patron, paying for lessons, and learning as jeli children do, become blurred, if only for the short time I am there.3

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Guinea: Conakry Guineans distinguish themselves by saying they are from Guinea-Conakry. This is how they limit confusion with Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and other Guineans around the world. Guinea is one of the poorest nations in the world. When we were in Conakry in 2005 there were many refugees from neighboring Sierra Leone who had fled the civil war that ended a few years prior. There was no Ebola at the time in Guinea, nor was there particular political unrest other than the norm.4 At that time, the Islamist fundamentalists had yet to take over regions of neighboring Mali, and never penetrated Mali’s capital, Bamako, nor the nearby border of Guinea. The region between Guinea and Mali is mostly of Malinké/Bambara ethnicity and language and was the seat of the Malian Empire in the thirteenth century. This empire united a variety of ethnic groups, some of which are part of the Mande peoples such as the Bambara, Malinké, Sousou, Soninké, and Dioula. There are three main ethnic groups in Guinea, the Pulaar, the Malinké, and the Sousou. They share overlapping cultures, and many people speak several of these languages. In cities like Dakar, Conakry, Banjul, and Bamako, dominant languages emerge in the city centers. Sousou is the primary language spoken in Conakry, and many of the jelis of Malinké ethnicity and language speak and sing in Sousou. Furthermore, many city-dwellers speak the colonial languages: English in the Gambia and French in Senegal, Mali, and Guinea, which are taught in the school systems and government and also mixed into the dominant native languages. Even in Bacar’s family, Bacar speaks Sousou, but his first wife Fanta, a jelimuso, or woman-jeli, speaks Malinké. West Africans are naturally multicultural-aware, and multilingual. For myself, an American who has lived in the Gambia and Guinea in three separate families, I never gained proficiency in any of the native languages. Luckily, in Guinea, I could rely on my French and the language of music which seemed to prevail and unite all of us, no matter the age or culture.

The Daily Life Bacar had two houses. The one on the hill was the old house where his first wife Fanta still lives. The second house was nearly finished when we arrived but was still under construction. Bacar’s second wife Amina5 ruled this second home. The children from both wives lived with their respective mothers but came and went daily from each house. As in the Gambia, the

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compound consisted of the one-story row of rooms surrounded by a cement wall with a dirt courtyard in the middle. Only the second house was inside of the compound walls. There was a large recreation room in which Bacar held rehearsals every day for his upcoming show at a large public venue in Conakry. The show featured Bacar on lead balafon, William, an American balafonist, and Mory, a Guinean balafonist, and six dancers—three from New York and three from Guinea. The dancers choreographed their routine combining tap dance and other American genres with Guinean and Senegalese sabar dance moves. The show preparation was the center of attention for anyone who wandered into the compound.

Safeguarding Culture The elder men wore floor-length caftans and Muslim caps. They greeted each other, almost disinterested, as they went through the ritual: How’s the family? How’s your wife? Where are the children? Is there peace? They spoke in a rhythmic, customary, back and forth, not looking into each other in the eyes. They asked the same questions more than once. No one was rushed. Younger family members hauled in plastic chairs for the elders, from which they could observe the music and dance rehearsal. They lined the periphery of the room. When the rehearsal started, all eyes were on Bacar. He held the room with ease. Un, deux, trois, siga! The balafons started playing “Lasidan,” and the dancers began dancing. Bacar yelled equally at the Africans and the New York–based dancers, but the Africans thought nothing of it. They just laughed and started again. The non-Africans seemed a bit miffed or agitated at the yelling. A crowd gathered outside the door of the large blue cement room where they played. People peeked in through gaps in the wall. None of this seemed to fluster Bacar. I guess this is how it goes in Guinea; you just keep doing what you are doing while everyone watches and judges. How would he be perceived after the show? When rehearsal concluded, the elders engaged in a conversation. They listened carefully to each other’s thoughts. One man spoke calmly at a low volume for several minutes, pausing to reflect, and then continuing. No one interrupted him while he had the floor. They each waited, like a symphony, to make sure all the movements had ended before the next elder added his part.

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I believed that the presence of the elders at this rehearsal was this culture’s method of quality control. Sharing Manding culture abroad was to be expected and celebrated, but a certain respect for the sacred properties embedded in Manding jeli music were essential to safeguarding it. I did not know what those tenets were at the time, but it seemed the elders were there to make sure things were in order.

In the Compound Meanwhile, the women and girls who were not part of the show did household chores. They cooked, swept, washed clothes, and went to the market. Bacar’s older brother Souraka, gave me balafon lessons. He was a patient and gentle man and he taught me balafon while Bacar was busy rehearsing for his show. The first song he taught me was “Kinsanfaré” from the Baga people. We spent our time sitting in an open room in the compound, playing together. He taught me without words. I just followed what he played. After lessons, I would sit in the back of the compound on a baso mat on the dirt floor, practicing my lessons with headphones in my ears. Children ran past me, laughing and chasing a ball. The lesson I first learned in the Gambia recurred: how to develop good concentration in a dynamic environment.

Lunchtime Tensions One of the dance students emerged from the recreation room, sweating, after dance class. Suddenly, I heard her yell, “Oh! No more rice!” It was 2 pm, lunch hour, and she had just spotted the preparation of the bowls, the customary lunchtime ritual of divvying rice into two or three big bowls that would be covered with the daily sauce. We all looked at her inquisitively. “What else do you eat in Africa but rice?” I thought. “I’m dancing all day!” Andrea yelled. “I need cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, a big piece of fish, but no more rice!” She was overcarbed and undervegetized. I could shift my mind back to New York and remember how I used to eat salads with fish on top. Smoothies. Perhaps a sandwich. Not a lot of rice, but it seemed like a distant memory. Here, rice was ubiquitous. Everyone went back to what they were doing and the rice was served, as usual.

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Community Tensions The next day, someone had borrowed Andrea the dancer’s lighter and she could not find it. “Where did you leave it?” Bacar asked. She retorted that there seemed to be no concept of “mine” and “yours” here. She then admitted to having left the lighter on the outside windowsill overnight. “The person who needs it will take it,” said Bacar. It was not easy to grasp the community mentality when one is accustomed to a more individualist competitive mentality. Here, people would use what was available and would share what they had with others until it was gone. Money. Lighters. Milk (a novelty that this foté struggled to hoard for her coffee). It did not matter; they shared it all. They had a level of generosity unknown in my part of the world. That is just how it was. Bacar gave the dancer a hint. “Keep your lighter with you so they have to ask you for it. Then you can make them return it to you.”

Tension in My Body Soon, I found myself in a similar position of cross-cultural fatigue. I could not eat another bite of food that had Maggi in it. Monosodium glutamate. It flavored all of their dishes, and I was sure it was the reason for my swollen fingers and feet, and that soon it would swell my heart and I would die. I had trouble breathing and thought I was going to pass out owing to both the heat and the amount of Maggi in my body. I was clearly losing my grounding. I asked Bacar whether there was any way to ask Amina, his wife, to not use Maggi in the food. This was like asking an American not to salt their food; it is such a basic flavor. I assumed that he asked her, but I was secretly suspicious and I tried to survey the fire-cooking area for any empty Maggi wrappers. I was admittedly becoming a bit paranoid.

Jeli Money Tensions Our compound invited friends to stop by one afternoon, many of them musicians. It was one of the American musician’s 40th birthday. Fanta, Bacar’s first wife, came down from her house on the hill dressed in formal African attire, a deep blue floor-length wrap skirt, matching large tunic top with yellow embroidery, and a blue headwrap. Accompanying and assisting her were some of her younger girlfriends. Years ago, Fanta was

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once a prominent jelimuso in Conakry but she had suffered from health issues and it stopped her career. We sat in a big circle in the common area outside on wooden benches and low stools and plastic chairs. Bacar played balafon; Bacar’s daughter Adama, some of the dancers and balafon students and I played along. Fanta started to sing. She sang in Malinké, addressing everyone in earshot by name. Then she sang to each of us, the visitors. I heard the words Ameriki, and Kindia and Dalaba, two towns we visited during our stay. I called out, “Abaraka, jelimuso!” a thank you as I had learned to do in Maine and the Gambia, although here in Guinea it should have been said differently, as i ni ké. She understood anyhow. We played “Lasidan,” the latest song Bacar had taught us. Fanta sang the chorus, and for the first time, I understood how the balafon parts corresponded to the chorus. Adama practiced a few balafon patterns her father had been teaching her on the balafon. At one point, she broke into song too. After all, Adama was meant to become a singer herself (and 10 years later, she did). Fanta was amused and pleased with her daughter’s effort, but Adama quickly turned the attention back to her mother. Some of us took the opportunity to film Fanta, who sang directly into the camera. As the afternoon drew to a close, it was time for Fanta to go back to her own house, up the hill from the compound. A car picked her up. Before she got in, she called me over. “Lisa, tu n’as pas donné d’argent? Et Andrea!” Lisa, you didn’t give money? And Andrea! Andrea was the name of the dancer who complained about money. I winced. This was the first time I had learned that whenever a jeli or jelimuso sings and plays for you, it was customary to give money, even a token amount. I have seen people throw money at the jelis before, floating bills, one by one over their heads, or sticking a bill on a balafon player’s forehead, but it never clicked until then that it was actually rude to not offer something, anything, to a singer, in acknowledgement of the service he or she offered. Or was she taking advantage of our cultural naiveté? Embarrassed at my lack of respect for the custom I signaled for her to wait. I went to tell Andrea of our fatal mistake. She absolutely refused to give Fanta any money. “Flat out, no!” I pleaded that Fanta’s singing was separate from anything we paid already, that this was a matter of generosity and social etiquette. There was no convincing her. So I ran to my room and dug out a wad of bills that probably amounted to $4 or $5, hoping that my generosity would help cover Andrea too.

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Fanta was already in the front seat of the car, and she opened the window halfway. I floated one bill at a time in through the window onto her lap, saying words of praise and thanks. She smiled and sang a few more lines to me. She was pleased. I took it that I was learning the custom properly, but it is entirely possible that she was just trying to make some “fish money,” as they call it, money for buying the daily fish. Either way, Fanta and I remained on very good terms throughout my stay, and she always made sure to give me special attention, food, song, and conversation when I saw her. By the end of our time in Guinea, Fanta had forgotten how to say Andrea’s name properly.

Souraka’s Transmissions It became clearer to me that I was becoming part, in a small way, of the age-old tradition of direct transmission of musical lessons across generations. Nothing was written down and little was said, yet I was learning to communicate with them through an instrument. Souraka said almost nothing when he taught me, even though we shared the French language. He just played and played. When he saw that I could not catch on, he simplified a pattern for me. I was meant to listen, observe, and join in where I could. When I got a good flow going, he added a flourishing touch, a little run or variation. He would keep repeating the variation until I had the courage to follow him. He gently pushed me by example, not with words, to keep advancing. Souraka tried to teach me a new part in Kinsanfaré and how it interacted with the old part. I played the part I already knew, and he played pattern two. Then he wanted me to play pattern two, on the fly, while he played pattern one. I did not make the switch. I kept playing pattern one. He just said one word, in French. Courage! That was enough to get me to give it a go. Okay, okay. I stopped my pattern and tried to switch to his. When I succeeded, he said, “fine, fine,” maybe the only word he knew in English. I felt proud of myself. Souraka was a kind teacher. I found out later that he was suffering from hypertension. They told him he should use less salt in the food. Aha! It is the Maggi, I think. His doctor suggested he remove the Maggi in his diet. I felt vindicated. Souraka and I had another lesson in which we did not speak. For a while, we played the same part together so I could train my rhythm. As I got comfortable, he broke into a whole intricate run down the balafon indicating that this is what I was to learn next. I laughed because he knew

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I had no clue how to follow him. He laughed too because he was teasing me through the music. We shared a joke and it was sweet.

Making Balafons Bacar took us to the family compound where he grew up, a few hours inland from Conakry. Members of his family have historically constructed and played balafons. Bacar told us that he had heard his father playing balafon since he was inside his mother’s womb, that he played before he could speak properly. The town is known for its indigo-dyed fabrics and fabrics market. As we drove into his family’s neighborhood, women were returning from the market, balancing baskets on their heads. In the compound, an elder brother sat on a low stool, busily chopping pieces of wood with a homemade hatchet. He made several hacks before throwing one piece aside and picking up the next. I recognized it as the head of the frame of a balafon. He worked quickly and with the utter ease of someone who had done this a few hundred times before. Another brother came and led us over to a dried mud structure. It looked like the four walls of a house for a very small person, with no roof, and it was smoking. There was a hole in one side at ground level, which allowed him to stoke a fire. We looked inside the structure and saw several racks with tens of packed balafon keys on them. He explained that they “smoke” the wooden keys for many weeks if not months, which affects the quality of sound. The unsmoked keys were much lighter in color than the well-­ smoked ones.

Mory the Apprentice Mory was a tall, slender, young man of about 30. When he was small, he had been Bacar’s balafon apprentice. Mory visited the compound and played balafon with us, and he was skilled, graceful, smooth, well trained, and gentle. He spoke with much admiration for Bacar. Mory told us that Bacar played the balafon before he was even big enough to pick it up. The balafons were bigger framed back then. “You needed to sit on a pile of hay to play it,” he told us. Then he told us he was about 7 when his father started sending him to Bacar’s compound for lessons. Prayer call happened at 6 am. By 6:45 am, Bacar had Mory listening to his balafon. First, he learned to shape the holes in the gourds that lie underneath each wooden key before he played.

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Then, he learned to cover the holes with thin plastic cut out from baggies. They used to use spider egg sacs for the plastic, he said, but not anymore. The plastic covering the holes creates a small buzzing sound when the key is struck. Mory told us that “Bacar would play very fast, never slowing down for a second for me to catch on.”

Multicultural Transmissions Bacar gave Adama a balafon lesson. He taught her foté-style, pointing out the D and the C keys, showing her proper wrist and hand positioning. She made him change sticks with her and complained about shoulder pain. We would never! But she was his daughter, and we learned from her not to fear Bacar. Un, deux, trois, siga! She learned a simple phrase, then he taught her a song to sing over it. Bacar’s teaching style was different from my lessons with Souraka, who just played and had me follow. Bacar broke down the pieces for Adama. We realized that he did adopt a somewhat Western style. Still, he was annoyed with her when she messed up, like he was with us. She laughed at him while he reprimanded her. She did not yell back and did not seem to get frazzled. She was slow to learn and had to repeat what she did a thousand times before getting the technique right, just like me. It was then that I saw that the mixing and matching of patterns were a challenge for anyone to learn. Bacar told her he would give her 1000 francs if she got it right. She responded, “big deal.” Adama  also had trouble coordinating playing and singing at the same time, as I would. She had trouble hearing where to start playing to fit into the pattern that Bacar was playing. But one thing different from my tutelage is that she never missed the time to begin singing, as I often would. This she knows from listening to her mother. Despite the fact that some things come easier to Adama for having grown up in the culture, learning balafon appears to be equally challenging for a Guinean as it is for a foté. Playing one pattern while listening to conflicting cross-rhythms and improvisations that weave in and out is difficult for all would-be musicians, as is learning the many configurations. Whatever life lessons I was reaping from my balafon practice were something that could affect people of any culture. And that intrigued me. The next afternoon I was playing “Yankadee” on bala, and Adama came and sat with me. She wore a most excellent long robe of light cotton, deep

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green in color topped with a droopy, pointy hood that hung down her back. I told her how much I loved her robe. She loved it too. It was passed down to her. She sat with me and started to sing. She taught me “Yankadee,” line by line, and then translated it into French. It was a love song that I still sing today. The day I left Conakry she handed me the hooded robe, insisting I take it with me. I was touched by her generosity. At home, I wore it over my jeans and it enveloped me with jeli warmth.

When Children Learn Once, I watched Bacar’s youngest son Ibro, a little over 1 year old, teeter over to the rest of the kids who are tinkering on the balafon. He fell and whimpered. A passing adult grabbed his arm to right him and kept moving. He checked himself, got his confidence, and walked again, this time making it to the balafon. A brother shifted the mallets in his direction. He picked them up and swung them at the balafon. Another brother took the mallets from him and played a simple pattern. Ibro whimpered, and no one paid him attention. Then he started to dance, and kids and adults egged him on, clapping in time. When he stopped and stared at them, they all went back to what they were doing. Souraka showed me the third part of “Kinsanfaré.” He told me it would work my body, le corps, to learn rhythm. I listened to him and tried to learn the sound. Instead of breaking it down intellectually, he got me to move the left hand, back and forth, back and forth, between two notes. Then he added in my right hand, making a counter rhythm. The song came together automatically. No overthinking involved. Only body moving. If I thought too hard, it did not come. When I surrendered to the moment and relaxed, the music moved through my body. Just like the children, I thought.

Reflections on Direct Transmission In jeli music, foreign scholars, and perhaps jelis themselves, emphasize the lessons in the oral history. But I am intrigued that the lessons also come in more subtle ways, through the challenges and joys of learning the musical phrases. It was years after this trip that I came to feel the power of direct transmission, of learning the art of balafon, or any trade, from person to person, passed down through the generations. Technology has enabled

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people to record lessons, and Americans and Europeans have supposedly advanced systems of writing musical notations to facilitate learning. Neither of these is considered taboo in the transmission, but for me there would be an essential part missing if one did not learn from a native teacher. If I had merely recorded the music and reproduced it at home without having played it with Souraka or Bacar, the interpersonal experience would be lacking. Fifteen years later, when I play the pieces that Souraka taught me, I can still feel the connection we shared, his kindness, the jokes. The jokes, the fears, and the courage to overcome blockages due to fear are embedded in the music I play. My teachers have certain explanations, such as “this will work your body” for a particularly rhythmic musical phrase or “this will teach you independence” for another kind of phrase in which both hands move independently of one another. The word “courage” comes up frequently as well. I wondered whether particular musical phrases help orient particular human traits toward certain values and skills applicable to life. It seemed that this was so. I was beginning to see balafon transmission as an educational way to instill positive human characteristics such as courage, good humor, concentration, patience, and even generosity. If subtle lessons through the music come to me through my lessons with the teachers, imagine what life lessons jelis have passed down through the generations when they teach this music to their children?

Reflections on Money Matters The girls in the compound taught me dances and braided my hair. I tried using a washboard to clean my own clothes as they did. But I failed. I gladly paid them to do the task for me. I knew it was one of the few ways the girls could make a little of their own money. However, a European participant ranted about the money we paid Bacar for the 6-week stay, asking, “what did it buy us? We pay for our own water, our own laundry and soap … if we want extra vegetables in the food, we have to pay.” Herein lies the crux of a pernicious problem that could be relatively small but can grow into epic proportions. It becomes the basis for all kinds of moral judgements on both sides, African and Euoprean/American, and we do it service to bring it to light and clear it up. Unlike some of the Europeans and Americans, I do not like confrontation  around money. Recall how I tried to sidestep my discomforts about money with Lasiné in the Gambia. I lied to him that my money was gone. I did not know how

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to read the situation or what I was willing to spend. I was prepared, and at Bacar’s I knew based on previous experience to calculate the small amount of extra money it cost us for small extra things. I reasoned at Bacar’s that I was helping the girls and the jelimuso make a little money for themselves. But I am learning that my technique also sidesteps the cultural difference and that it is useful to discuss these issues frankly. Bacar gave us that opportunity, later.6

Tensions Resolving Bacar’s multi-cultural show was performed at the Franco-Guinean Cultural Center about a month after we arrived. The venue had a big lobby where we could buy ginger and bisap juice cocktails, and it had a sizable auditorium where famous stars like Senegalese Omar Pene and Youssou N’Dour have played. The audience members paid a small fee to enter and took their seats in the auditorium. The house was nearly full. The lights went down and the stage was lit. The concert began with Bacar playing a balafon strung around his shoulders and suspended in front of his body. William, the American, played accompanying balafon and drumset and other Guineans played balafon and djembe. The New York–based dancers performed several numbers, and at one point the dancers took turns challenging Bacar to call and response: they tap-danced it, and he played a similar rhythm on balafon. Then they reversed it, and Bacar challenged them, one by one. The audience clapped in approval. During one song, several of Bacar’s family members came up to the front of the stage and threw money at Bacar, which was a common sign of respect. Adama walked right onto stage, took off her necklace, and strung it around Bacar’s neck. I was surprised that she walked on-stage and figured it was a privilege of the family. I later learned that this was a normal custom. After Bacar’s show, a microphone was passed directly to El Hadj Djeli Sory Kouyaté who sat front row, center. In his 80s, he wore a grand boubou and cap in white, the holy color. He held the mic with a shaky hand. Everyone waited with baited breath. Bacar knelt down at the front of the stage, presenting himself with respect to the elder to listen to him. Djeli Sory praised Bacar for taking the traditional balafon songs into the global community, for combining traditional balafon with international dance, for training a fine American balafonist, while maintaining the integrity of the music. Bacar listened until the elder finished all he had to say. Then Bacar thanked him for his words. Then the microphone was passed to the

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former director of the Ballets Africains, a man who had trained Bacar years ago. He also praised Bacar for choreographing a successful show. It seemed that Bacar’s good work was well received by the community of elders. It was a great success. After the show’s conclusion, we, the students spent many evenings gathering with musician friends and playing balafon for hours and hours under the stars. Wives came out to watch. Children came to dance. Bacar told stories. These were the moments I had been waiting for. They reminded me of the kora nights in Borabá, the Gambia, when the family sits together under the stars and adults tell children stories that their parents had told them. Now that Bacar had time, he invited to have a session to talk about what we need and do not have. We all had the chance to explain ourselves. Bacar listened carefully, asked some questions, and suggested some things. He took a few hours to talk with us, and then he took time to consider the  perspectives. The next day he talked to his wife and commander in chief of all things domestic in the compound. Later that day we found cans of sardines and fresh vegetables in bowls. Andrea was elated, and I was secretly happy too. They offered us a fire for cooking that evening and Andrea made corn pancakes with syrup for us. Utter joy. The Guineans were not interested and could not understand why we were just reveling in this food oddity. Meanwhile, in the evenings we sat together with family and friends and played music and talked. Bacar told us a piece of oral history, shedding light on tensions and resolutions between people from 1235 CE, perhaps metaphorically relating it to the life we were experiencing that day.7 It was the story of Soundiata Keita, the man who united many ethnic groups under one, peaceful Malian Empire, with the help of his jeli, Bala Fo Ségé Kouyaté. The story is the great pride of Manding culture.8 King Soumanoro Kanté was a Sousou man who conquered and killed many Manding people as he expanded his empire (which became the Manding Empire, circa 1235 CE). During the time of Soumanoro’s rule, a man named Jimmo Duwa was wandering in the forest outside of his village. He heard strange, beautiful sounds coming from the trees and he followed the sound until he saw a jinn playing a balafon. Jimmo Duwa thought it so beautiful, he cut keys of wood for himself from the tree, and the jinn reappeared to show him how to play it. When Jimmo Duwa returned to the village, he gifted the balafon to the king Soumanoro Kanté. Soumanoro kept that balafon in his home but let no one touch it.

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If even an ant or a mouse brushed past it, the king knew and threatened to kill the creature. He instructed an eagle to watch and guard the balafon. Jimmo, who found the balafon, had a son, Nyangumang Duwa, who was the jeli of the great Keita family before jelis had balafons. Nyangumang went to Soumanoro’s house while he was not there and found his balafon. The eagle who guarded the balafon in Soumanoro’s absence warned this young man not to play it or risk death. Despite the warnings not to touch it, the man sat and played the balafon, and he played until Soumanoro returned. When the king returned he was angry and asked, “Who gave the authorization for you to play my balafon?” Nyangumang Duwa showed no fear before the king; rather he began to sing the king’s praises to soothe his temper. He said, “Hey Soumanoro, you are a big king. You are the king of kings and the lion’s king. You are not supposed to play this balafon for yourself. You should have someone play it for you while you relax. You should not do your own chores. You are king. Other people should take care of your needs.” Nyangumang then recalled all of the great people in the king’s lineage, reaffirming the king’s proper place in the world. He played the balafon so sweetly and adeptly that the king, listening to him, believed him, and he forgot his anger and made the man his personal jeli, stealing him from his rival, Soundiata Keita. Soumanoro asked the balafonist name, and when Nyangumang told him, the king responded, “That is not a beautiful name. I will give you a name.” He bestowed upon him the name Bala Fo Ségé Kouyaté. This name translates as bala, the name of the instrument, fo, to play, ségé, eagle, and kouyanté, nothing bad can happen to you. Since then, the name has morphed into Bala Faséké Kouyaté over the centuries and is regarded as the first jeli musical family of the Manding people. It is said that the Kouyatés are never scared and they always seek out instruments to play. But Soumanoro was not a kind ruler. He killed many Manding people in his battles. His biggest rival was the Manding Soundiata Keita, destined to overthrow him. Long before Soumanoro was king, Soundiata’s father had been the king. He received a prophesy from two passing brothers of the Touré family that if he married the first ugly woman presented to him, she would bear him a child who would save the Manding people from a fierce conqueror and become king of the Manding people. And so it happened that one day a very ugly hunchback woman was presented to the king for marriage. Recalling the prophesy, he accepted.

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The woman bore him a child that they named Soundiata Keita. It became clear that Soundiata had a disability at an early age. He was paralyzed in the legs. Nevertheless, his father had faith in him and he assigned Soundiata a jeli—a spiritual guide— at a young age. This was a privilege that only the wealthy, noble, ruling class merited. That jeli was Nyangumang Duwa, who had wandered into Soumanoro’s house to find the balafon. When he became Bala Faséké Kouyaté, he was held by Soumanoro Kanté to be his personal jeli. Soundiata needed to win his jeli back. Soumanoro wanted to marry Soundiata’s sister, so one day, in a ploy to steal back his jeli, Soundiata sent his sister to Soumanoro, and the jeli, Bala Faséké Kouyaté, escaped and returned to Soundiata. Eventually, with the help of his jeli’s encouragement, Soundiata got the courage to walk, and with his army of supporters, he defeated Soumanoro. Soundiata united all warring tribes together under the greater Manding Empire. The Kouyaté family of Malinké origin became the first jeli family who served the ruling Keita family. Since then, all great rulers have jelis who are part of their court. The jelis guide them in ruling justly, they sing the ruler’s praises, calm them, encourage them, and bring them news from all the people in their domain so that they make wise decisions on behalf of the greater good. Farewell Party On the evening before we were to leave for the United States, Bacar threw a farewell/house-warming party. We tried to tell him it was not necessary. We told him to save his money for more important things. But Bacar was not paying us much attention. A jeli party is always more important than a good night’s sleep, but I did not know that yet. At about 4 pm, a car came rolling into the compound’s open gates and a man unloaded huge speakers and a sound control board. Just afterward, Bacar’fa Muso, our balafon maker, arrived on his motorcycle with three new balafons stacked up on the back. Impressive. Women began coming in with huge pots on their heads and built makeshift outdoor fire pits on one end of the compound commons area. The younger men dragged in fancy wood-framed couches and chairs with velour-covered cushions from neighboring homes and businesses. We, the foté, could only watch the scene unfurl in front of our eyes, discovering how it would be moment to moment. By 10  pm, the sound system was blaring. There were three balafons lined up on the compound floor. Bacar sat in the middle with Mory on his right; William and Souraka, who rotated playing, sat on Bacar’s left. A

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handful of local jelimusos came out and shared time, singing into the microphone. The musicians played “Mané” all night, the song with a spritely rhythm to make women dance. All was amplified and turned up to distortion. They liked it that way. The distortion in the sound system created buzzing timbres of the same nature as the plastic-covered holes of the gourds of the balafon, or the metal pieces attached to djembes that made rattling sounds. It is said that the buzz somehow relays the message of the music to the spirit world more efficiently. The jelimuso sang praises to one guest or family member at a time. The honored person ambled over, with no sense of urgency, to the singer with money or a wallet in hand. Friends and family members followed behind. They either handed the money to the person being praised or placed it directly on the money tray. When Souraka Jr. was praised, the whole family gathered around him. He beamed with joy. I joined the family in support and contributed my money to the pot. We danced en ronde, in a big circle that moved clockwise. When the song ended, the family dispersed back to the sidelines and the money tray was placed in front of Bacar. I did not know whether he kept the money or split it between the singers and musicians, but I would learn how these things were done in my immanent future, when I came to witness many jeli events of similar form in New York, Paris, and elsewhere. By about 2 am, we were not sleepy anymore, we were just dazed. People crossed back and forth. Children played. Babies slept right through the noise while lying on chairs or on top of their mothers, in front of the scene. On and on the loud music continued, the distortion of ladies singing and speaking into the mic. The balafons clanging. The decibel level of the music had reached mind-shearing volume, displacing any thoughts of anything other than the here and now. Bacar woke us from our stupor when he took the mic and switched from Sousou to English. He thanked us for staying in his home and making the performance a success. He wished us a safe journey back to New York. Then he translated the speech into a longer version in Sousou for everyone else and invited us to come up and dance. We were being honored. William handed his mallets over to Souraka Sr. and joined us. The dancers and I pried ourselves up from the couches and presented ourselves in front of the musicians as they started to play. The drummers played a spirited rhythm. Adama joined us. Fanta sang for us, and Andrea, the dancer, got inspired. She ran into the center of the circle and did a fantastic African dance. People clapped in time to encourage her, everyone sharing in her joy.9

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Notes 1. My intention in this chapter is, in part, to illustrate the unavoidable dynamics that arise around money between African teachers and their European and American students. Although it is relatively taboo to discuss this subject openly in academic writing, this is not an isolated or rare incident. I believe that bringing such tensions to light is the best way to critically examine our assumptions and come to greater mutual understanding, which I continue to explore over the course of the following chapters. Because the subject is sensitive and marks early stages on the cross-cultural learning scale I have chosen to make Bacar, his family, and his guests anonymous in this chapter. 2. Eric Charry (2000) and Thomas Hale (1998) describe the oral transmission of jeliya from generation to generation. They note some recent establishment of institutes and conservatories where students learn jeli instruments in more structured classes, sometimes with musical notation (Charry, 2000, 341). While this may diffuse the music father, these musicians do not become social, functioning jelis in their culture (Hale, 1998, 182). 3. Charry talks about the benefits of using a recording device in Chapter 7 (2000), as do many other Europeans and Americans whose time is short in Africa. 4. The civil unrest and political instability is a continual concern to my informants living in Europe and the United States and thwarts us, at times, from returning to Conakry. When Ebola came to Guinea, most of my informants had no contact with it. 5. The name Aminata and all other names in Bacar’s family are fictitious. 6. One solution may be, for example, that Bacar includes a simple note *Price does not include water*, and *All meals are based on the typical Guinean cuisine which includes…* Bacar could not have for seen this issue before ­having had the experience of mismatched expectations. He was surely quite concerned with the complaints. 7. I did not record the story, and I have heard it many times over the years. I am recalling it as I remember it. If there are any mistakes or discrepancies, the fault is my own. Furthermore, when I cross-reference the story with other sources, it seems that various versions are told. 8. To read the story, see Niane, D. T., & Pickett, G. D. (1965). Sundiata: An epic of old Mali (p. 36). London: Longmans. 9. It is important to mention that after this trip, as well, this jeli teacher and I discussed creating a study abroad program at his compound. Instead, he moved away from the New York area and I met a new teacher in New York. The program was never developed formally, but again, I never forgot the intention.

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References Charry, E. (2000). Mande Music. University of Chicago Press. Hale, T. (1998). Griots and Griottes. Indiana University Press. Niane, D.  T., & Pickett, G.  D. (1965). Sundiata: An epic of old Mali (p.  36). London: Longmans.

CHAPTER 6

At Home: Lessons in Respecting Time

Everywhere there is an interaction between a place, a time, and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm. (Lefebvre 2004)

It was late February, 2005, when I met Famoro Dioubaté. I had just returned from Guinea and our cohort, fresh off the boat, decided to reunite at an African restaurant in Brooklyn. Famoro was playing balafon with a band that included Sylvain LeRoux on flute and a conga player at a small African restaurant in Brooklyn. It was the first iteration of Famoro’s soon-to-be Manding dance band called Kakande. His playing was fluid, smooth, and graceful. I spent the next 15 years learning music and culture with Famoro Dioubaté. Because my experience took place in a variety of contexts and at different levels of intensity, I have broken up the next three chapters into three kinds of experiences which relate to how jeliya and jeli music is merging from local into global culture in the twenty-first century. The themes to these three chapters relate to three kinds of spaces—all in New York City—in which jeli music happens. They are: (1) At (Famoro’s) Home. (2) Cosmopolitan New York. (3) Manding New York. The rhythms of life, as well as the music, change in these three contexts. Yet Famoro effectively bridged these cultural spaces, drawing me and others into his world while we simultaneously brought him into ours.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Feder, Jeliya at the Crossroads, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83059-5_6

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The French sociologist Henri Lefebvre expounded on the natural rhythms of the body, of people’s daily activities, of cycles of nature, as well as the superimposed rhythms of the industrializing world in a capitalist society. He discussed the interaction of these various rhythms and how they shaped spaces (1992, 26). As I moved between “my” New York, fast-­ paced life and Famoro’s house, the shift in rhythm of life was palpable, relating to two, different modalities of life, one structured more by the rhythms of the body and mind which I call “Africa Time” versus rhythms structured by a need to be efficient, productive in making money, or what I will call “Time-is-Money” mentality.1 Famoro was born in Conakry in 1965. He comes from a strong jeli lineage. On his father’s side, he descends from the prestigious Dioubaté family of the Kankan region, in Guinea. On his mother’s side, he descends from the great Kouyaté family, the first jeli family named by the great emperor Soundiata Keita. His maternal great-uncle, the late El Hajd Djeli Sory Kouyaté, was one of the world’s most renowned Manding balafonists and jeli to the former president Sékou Touré. Djeli Sory toured in the United States as well as in Africa. He even played at Carnegie Hall, as well as at Dartmouth College with Famoro and Sylvain LeRoux in a traditional Manding jeli ensemble. Famoro had big talent when he was still a schoolboy. His teachers, understanding the value of the jeli culture, allowed Famoro to miss class when he was called to play balafon for important events, and they made sure he passed his classes anyway. The teachers undoubtedly knew that jeliya was a valuable form of education, indigenous to their own culture. He had barely finished school at 17 before he fled Guinea to play music in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, in the 1980s. The music scene was exploding with the Ambassadeurs and other big Manding-jazz bands. Famoro finally returned to Guinea where he played a chromatic balafon with Sékouba Kandia Kouyaté’s private group.2 His grandfather, the famous balafonist El Hadj Djeli Sory Kouyaté told Famoro he had to go to the source, to continue to play the traditional diatonic balafon to cultivate himself further. So Famoro returned to the balafon his ancestors played, and he excelled. He was almost immediately recommended to try out for the Guinean Instrumental Ensemble, the state-sponsored classical jeli music group. Soon after, he traveled the world playing the balafon. Each time he returned to Guinea he was quickly sponsored on another world trip, sometimes under the auspices of a private foreign music producer,

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sometimes through the Guinean state. He went to Canada and New York with Guinean ensembles. He traveled to Europe, Australia, and Fiji. In 2000, decided to stay in New York, where he made his home for the next 20 years. I was embarking on my official doctoral fieldwork when I met Famoro and was about to move into an apartment in Harlem on 121st Street and St. Nicholas, about 10 blocks from his apartment on W. 132nd Street. My plan was to continue learning culture through music, and specifically, Manding culture through jeli music, in New York. Famoro was happy to give me lessons. I learned—am still learning—to play balafon, but it was not in mastering the music where I excelled. In being taught and striving to play gracefully—of which I do very little—I learned something about the power, called nyama, in jeliya, how the jeli constructs it in the notes of the music, and how jelis can use it to influence people to act. There is an anonymous saying, “Tradition isn’t about preserving the ashes, but about passing the flame.” The nyama, how I’ve learned it, is the essence of jeliya, the flame that is safeguarded and passed from generation to generation, without which jelis are just playing music merely for entertainment, or for money. In the next few chapters I will describe how I came to understand what nyama is, and how it distinguishes when a jeli is practicing jeliya, or when he is just playing his music.

Explaining Nyama There are three principal castes in Manding culture, the hɔrɔn3 or noble class of farmers, administrators, politicians, protectors, business people, the nyamakala, or the artisan class who transform one material into another, and the jɔn, descendants of slaves. The artisans, for example, make tools and instruments. They make metal objects for farming and battle; they make leather shoes and amulet cases. They mold raw material into useful objects, which, they believe, are imbued with a spiritual force by the craftsmanship that is put into it. The skilled craftsman’s final product will influence the user’s life as he performs his task with the tool. Jelis belong in this caste because they imbue words and music with charged energy, nyama, to influence the course of present events by drawing on past events in their history. It is apparent how they do this with words, but less so with music.4

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The hɔrɔn caste depends on the power of nyama, particularly harnessed and channeled by the jelis, to actualize in them the required traits of a respectable noble. These characteristics are similar in upstanding or noble people in any culture. They must be strong when things are difficult, courageous in the face of fear, humble when they succeed—because all success depends on others—and therefore, generous to the community, and particularly to their jelis who keep them centered and calm. The jelis perform their service in two ways: through their words, and through their instrumentation. Instrumentalist jelis wield nyama without words, but I have not found that scholars talk about the skill of harnessing or controlling nyama through the music, specifically. By studying balafon with Famoro, I was able to learn how this energy is cultivated, and how he uses it on listeners.

First Lesson: Djekoria Mory Kanté and Famoro Dioubaté Shortly after we had met, Famoro invited me to his house for a balafon lesson. He told me he wanted to cook a shrimp dish for me. He cooked for me and for his other musician friends who would join us. Soon Bailo Bah knocked on the door. Then Abdoulaye “Djoss” Diabaté from Mali and a surprise visitor, master guitarist and jeli Djekoria Mory Kanté from Guinea, arrived.5 Djoss was wearing a chartreuse suit with a multicolored matching shirt and shiny black leather boots. Djoss told us he was finally producing his own album but that he would have to pay Blue Monster Studios for recording, mixing, and mastering it. Then he would need to pay for making CD cover art. He was making the album piecemeal, which was common for jelis in New York who lacked the funding they needed. Soon, Famoro would struggle through a similar onerous process when making his own album, Douniya, with his band Kakande. Djekoria Mory sat down and diddled on the guitar as Famoro cooked. Playing jali-style guitar is similar to balafon; they play one note at a time in cyclical patterns and runs, which often are the same patterns played on the balafon. The improvisations are likewise linked to the polyrhythmic cycles and differ from jazz-style guitar solos. The guitar, however, has the range to play more scales and keys and can therefore blend more seamlessly with other Western instruments and bands. Some call it the transitional instrument for jalis because they can play in jali style and in jazz style. Many jali

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guitarists, including Djoss, learn and excel in jazz-style guitar playing. The balafon, however, is fairly restricted to Manding-style music because of its limited scale. Famoro served us shrimp and palm oil. He made it with tomato paste, eggplant, okra, onion, garlic, a spice called bengbe, oh, and maggi—the typical ingredients for such a dish. Famoro apologized that we were not having our balafon lesson, as promised, but I really did not mind. I felt blessed to be included in this cultural experience. They did not seem to mind or care that I was the only woman. I was used to hanging “with the guys,” but I did not say much, like a child who fears being cast out after being given the privilege of joining the big boys. After lunch, Famoro started my lesson, playing “Lasidan.” The notes were staggered differently than the version I knew. He was teaching me an old version of the song, a slow one, the one his grandfather El Hadj Djeli Sory Kouyaté used to play, he explained. Mory watched me from his position on the bed. I felt shy and I stopped playing. Mory and Famoro continued to play. Famoro sat on a chair with the balafon stretched across his lap. Eyes squinted, he watched his mallets whizz across the balafon with a sideways glance. The gourds under each key were reverberating and the overtones filled the room. Mory played guitar, his clear bright notes delicately placed. There was no hesitation, no fuzziness; the notes were crisp and clear. Famoro and Djekoria Mory’s notes danced in rhythm with the late afternoon sun, streaming in, lighting up the dust particles in a long ray, stretching across the room. The melodies weaved in and out of each other, interlacing at certain points where their common beats intersected. This composition was a conversation in which the players never lost sight of one another in their language of music, moving and shifting, using sound and silence. They drew us together because we were all following the conversation, and the overarching mood was light but exuberant. At one point, Djoss even remarked how sweet the music was. Indeed it was. When we left the apartment that afternoon, we piled into Djoss’s minivan with instruments and headed toward Blue Monster Studio where Djoss was finishing his album. “We are together,” Famoro said to me. “Wontanara.” I’m not sure exactly what he meant, but I think I felt it. On the way there, he asked if he could borrow $50 and I told him I could not help. I thought it was a lot to ask of me. My understanding would shift over the years to come.

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A Reflective Practice What had I just experienced? The music drew us in; everything had stopped and the lot of us were caught in an out-of-time moment of bliss, together. We all felt it. These moments are “sweet,” a diata, as they say in the Gambia, priceless and powerful. It is powerful because musicians have the ability to create this ambiance. Out of thin air. I would learn that the jeli intentionally uses that power, consciously to lead the listeners toward a certain, intended feeling which can lead them to action. It stems back to the story I heard in Guinea of the first jeli who charmed the angry king. For his power, the jeli is rewarded. Despite my initial experience with jeliya and money in Guinea, when jelimuso Fanta sang for us at the birthday party, it was not part of my cultural norm to be asked for money following a spontaneous musical moment. In my culture, we pay an admission fee. Sometimes we encounter a street musician, or we are in a club, where they pass the hat and we may offer our donations. But in a situation that arises spontaneously like this, in my culture, giving money seemed strange. However, in some cultures, it can be appropriate, perhaps even expected. I was stuck in an awkward position of knowing what to do, but not having the innate reflex to do it. This was an embodied moment where I felt tension and disaccord viscerally, in my body, and it indicated to me that there was something I needed to learn. Despite what could be considered my lack of respect or couth on his cultural terms, Famoro continued to give me deep lessons in the art of jeliya. Perhaps he was investing in me as a future patron, as Paulla Ebron described of one of her jeli teachers. This chapter describes some of the important lessons I learned about respect and time in the music, and good timing in life. It spans over a decade of time.

A Sort of Apprenticeship Generally, when people take music lessons with a balafon jeli, they learn the music, the notes, the timing, and perhaps the significance of the song, but they are not necessarily, not even likely, to grasp the full range of skills involved in jeliya. They might greatly admire the talent of the artist and still not be aware that he can use it to influence people. They might learn the skills unknowingly and therefore not be able to use them on purpose. A combination of several elements worked in my favor to be able to speak

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to the unusual jeli skill to harness nyama through instrumentation. My own awareness developed slowly, and Famoro, sensing my interest, helped me develop my understanding. The timing in daily life as well as music was an essential part to my tuning into nyama. Other students excel at learning other aspects of Famoro’s music. Famoro and other balafonists I know sometimes have American apprentices that play balafon to such a subtle finesse that it amazes the unsuspecting jeli. Some of these students spend several days at Famoro’s house. I know one in particular who comes from a Senegalese-American family who treats Famoro with great respect, and Famoro gives him lessons in the development of his character as well as musical lessons. Eventually, Famoro would do this with me as well. Other students are his band members, who learn to play the Manding Groove on their instruments. Each of us has a particular relationship of exchange with Famoro, and Famoro gives his loyal students custom-made lessons.6 There is a price to pay for such apprenticeship-style relationships, and it is not the simple quid pro quo pay $50 for an hourly lesson—although Famoro has students like that too. Our attention and assistance in all sorts of ways become part and parcel of the learning experience. We give our time, dedication, and respect, as well as our money to the teacher when he needs it. In return, the teacher serves as a mentor in music and in life.

Taking Time When I arrive at Famoro’s apartment for my lesson, I am winded after running from the 4-5-6 train at 125th Street to 132nd Street and up the four flights of stairs of his building. Why am I rushing? Famoro is not going anywhere. But I told him I would be there at 5 pm and I try (and usually fail) to be places on time. From a young age, being on time was instilled in me as something “good,” yet I have always struggled with it. Meanwhile, Famoro does not slip easily into the time-is-money modality, the world of busy schedules. He can show up on time when needed, and he does respect a schedule when it comes to prayer time and other things he holds in priority. However, the way he moves through the world is linked to self-respect and doing things properly. The clock does not take priority in his world. But my culture has pressed into me that time is linked to the clock; thus, my sense of time causes me to enter a state of frantic rushing before I have to be places. I get sloppy. I do not do things properly. Famoro might say that I do not respect myself. Lasiné used to tell me something of the sort as well.

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When I arrive, Famoro is sitting calmly on the couch, and only one balafon is perched between two chairs when I arrive. This is not the “workshop” format that I am used to. We chitchat a few minutes and then sit in silence. The TV is showing a soccer match, volume turned all the way down. I am anxious to learn, and after about 10 minutes, unsure of what is happening, I move over to the balafon and play pattern one to “Solí,” then pattern two. Famoro keeps watching the TV.  He does not move. When I stop, there is more silence. I do not know what to expect. Because this is not a balafon workshop format, I decide to wait, politely. I watch the TV too. A commercial interrupts the soccer match. At this point, Famoro looks up. He starts to sing pattern two and clap his hands to the beat. Suddenly, the lesson has begun. I straighten up and pay attention. I watch him clapping as he sings. I realize he is showing me where the downbeat is located in the song, the one that we always faked in B’s workshop because we did not understand the timing. Well, baby, here it is. “Be ready!” I concentrate hard, watching his hands and listening to his voice singing the pattern. I hear the last two claps line up with notes in the second pattern. I think I am making some headway, but I consistently sing it back to Famoro incorrectly. He tells me, “relax, just feel it in your body.” Yes, I think to myself, I am overthinking. Embodied learning is a must in this culture. Still, I cannot tell if his first two claps of pattern two come one-­ third, one-half, or two-thirds after the first beat of the pattern, and I am back in my head again, trying to intellectualize it. My culturally programmed way of organizing melody over rhythm kept interfering. Ethnomusicologist Steve Pond pointed me to a theory that might help explain why. When we listen to a series of notes, we determine which notes form the structure and which notes become the embellishing notes. Our typical Western approach to doing this tells us how to identify the key of a song, how to locate the tonal center for a tone sequence, and how to group notes into meaningful categories (Gjerdingen, 2000). Tonality induction, the name for this natural process, is affected by initial placement of melodies over rhythms. Unexpected beginnings to songs can throw off a listener’s ability to categorize and form structures correctly, and if you are off from the beginning, it can be difficult to ever get back in sync. Manding balafon music intentionally plays with our sense of tonality induction. The second melodic line in a song like “Solí” is syncopated to the primary melody. We want to adjust for the syncopation by aligning

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melody one and two in the same place, when in fact melody two echoes melody one. When the patterns came together on the downbeat, it caused me to hear pattern two from a different perspective than the way in which I learned it. What I heard as the “embellishing notes” previously became “structural notes” (Lerdahl, 2001) and vice versa. My mind kept flipping between two orientations each rhythmic cycle, and this prevented me from picking up on and finding a natural groove to the music. I eventually videotaped Famoro and practiced with a metronome (a device that makes an audible click in beats-per-minute), per Famoro’s suggestion, at my own home. When I was late or early with respect to the metronome, it seemed as though the metronome had made a mistake, but of course this could not be. The power of my own perception was a moment of epiphany in my reality. If I were playing with a person, I would have sworn the other person had made a mistake. Underlying this musical epiphany is the realization that my own cultural epistemology—ways of knowing the world—can influence, and even blind me to the way I perceive others. The next time I return to Famoro’s, I start singing and clapping pattern two. “Yeah, you got it,” he tells me. We move to the balafon. I play pattern two. Famoro improvises, weaving melodic excerpts in and out. It requires intense concentration for me to not fall off-kilter. He is training my mind to be strong, to embody the rhythm.7 Learning to become solid in playing the syncopated melodies of “Solí” was an inkling to harnessing the power of nyama. I played for my family and friends, and they were challenged, as I once was, by the fact that I could keep it all straight in my head when they could not. I would show them where the main beat, or the time, or “metronome sense” (Chernoff, 1979, quoting Waterman, 49) was and ask them to clap to it while I played. The beat was sometimes hidden to them; sometimes they confused it with a secondary beat. It is essential to realize that the main beat, or the “time,” whether played or not, plays a significant part in the rhythm. The unheard beat requires active participation of the listeners to keep it in their minds, creating a sort of shibboleth to those who enter the in-group. Those who know are part of a sort of secret intelligence that bonds them. The beat can become apparent to an inexperienced listener when she sees that it is danced or clapped out, or if the musician shows it to her. The fact that he can hide it from and reveal it to her renders him a sort of trickster.

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Jelis as Tricksters Ethnomusicologist Steve Pond explained in his book on Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters album that throughout Africa and the Diaspora, certain characteristics resurface usually relating to music and word games, often characterized by multiple, syncopated rhythmic or melodic lines and double entendres in meanings. The uncertainty of meaning relates to the unknowing and therefore, the divine. Henry Louis Gates Jr. names the minor deity, Esu-Elegba, “the god of divination and gatekeeper of communication with the spiritual world” (Pond, 2005: 37). Esu-Elegba plays tricks on the people of society by shifting meanings of the same object from one moment to the next. (Gates, 1988). This “trickster” character occurred to me as I learned the musical aesthetic. When I thought of a trickster, it was generally untrustworthy, bad, or suspicious, and clever. But this was my ethnocentric viewpoint. In Africa they may be clever, but their role may be to make us wise. In the music, they expose and hide the main beat, or time by playing notes and melodies just before or after the main beat, challenging us to keep our eye on the ball.

Respect the Time One of the most important lessons when learning balafon music is to respect the time, or to know where the main beat is at all times. My lack of confidence became apparent in the way my notes fell with respect to the time. “You have to respect the time,” Famoro said. He held up a hand in prayer in front of his forehead to indicate where time is in his body, his fingertips pointing skyward. “Don’t change the time.” When I fumbled in hitting my notes, I lost the inner metronome and had to reconstruct it on the fly. Even when he plays alone, Famoro has an unshakable metronome that clicks in his heart for the duration of a song. Even if he fumbles in an improvisation (it happens, rarely), he never loses the time. This, he tells me, sets him apart from many jeli musicians who often need another player to make sure their time stays consistent. Famoro teaches his students to internalize the ticking clock by playing with a metronome. One day, watching David take a lesson with Famoro, I saw that David lost the rhythmic placement and aligned with the (wrong) downbeat. Famoro shook his head. David stopped playing. David started playing where he thought he should fit in with Famoro, but he was wrong.

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Then Famoro stopped playing. He explained to David, “If you miss the rhythm, you have to stop and wait and come back into my pattern in the right place. I don’t come into your pattern. People have to follow me, because I am consistent. I cannot change myself to align with you. That is respect!” Perhaps David did not intentionally come in haphazardly, he just misread the beat. But to Famoro, to come in on the wrong time disrespects the master balafonist. This lesson in time in music was metaphoric for something more important than merely music. For one, Famoro linked time in music to respect. Respecting what is greater, older, wiser, more steady than individual desires is a lesson for life that is taught within the music. Time does not demand to be respected, but in its quiet presence, it allows the musician to discover its necessity. When we pay attention to time, when we are always aware of this unspoken, often unplayed entity, it brings us power. We play our notes in relation to it with intention, but we never get lost in the notes and forget about the time.

The Swing as Trickster One must first become well versed in the technicalities of a song before one can learn the swing, created by the manipulation of timbre, attack, vibrato, intonation, or other means, and what Charles Keil calls the “participatory discrepancies” (Feld & Keil, 1994: 104). “Participatory discrepancies” are found in subtle degrees of out-of-time-ness and out-of-tune-ness (Feld & Keil, 1994: 104). Learning to produce participatory discrepancies in another cultural medium such as Manding is almost beyond me. Like all of the patterns of “Solí”, I heard the third pattern of “Solí” according to my sensibility, six groups of four, or DGDG EBEB EBEB CGCG EAEA EAEA. The jeli, however, emphasizes the first note of every three eighth notes as follows: DGD GEB EBE BEB CGC GEA EAE AEA.  When considering the 12/8 time, the Western notation actually clarifies the sense of Manding swing here and groups them into threes. I could not help but orient my ear to the melody of the notes over the rhythm, as other American students often do when attempting to learn this part. This reinforces the stereotype that a Western-rooted cultural affliction reflects the primacy of melody over other musical elements (Pond, personal communication 2006). I practiced playing the pattern with William, an advanced balafon student, but I had to re-learn it without thinking of the melody the way I had first heard it. I over-emphasized a

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rest between the groups of three. When I went back to Famoro’s house, I hoped he would help me. As with the subtlety of learning Manding time in music, I also learned to be more sensitive about the timing and method of my questions to Famoro. I could premeditate on a question, but I would have a better chance of receiving an answer if I asked the question in the context of playing. Better yet, if I waited for the experience to unfold, the answer might present itself. I started to play “Solí” emphasizing the swing in groups of four. I wanted Famoro to correct me. He did not say a word. I stopped and looked up at him. “I don’t have the right feeling,” I confessed, using the typical Manding description. “How do you do it?” He did not have a balafon in front of him and showed no desire to get up from his reclining position on the couch. I waited. After a few minutes, Famoro started to sing out a rhythm for me with no tones, just emphasis. “Da-di-di-Da-di-di-Da-di-di-Da-di-di,” marking the beat with his hand on the Da of every beat. I caught on to what he was showing me, and I was shocked that the rhythm was so absolutely simple for me to hear because there were no pitches to confuse me. Easy! I sang it back to him in the same way, and he nodded yes. I returned to the balafon to play out this very simple rhythm, and I found that I could not do it without messing up. Like before, the rhythm that I could clearly distinguish became confused when I heard the melodic pitch of the notes. Grouping them into threes and keeping a consistent Da-di-di proves difficult when I hear the melody in groups of four.

Time to Ask Questions One day I asked Famoro why he does not answer my questions sometimes. He explained, “my spirit, the way I am when you ask the question, it is not in my head at that time. Later, your question is going to get in my head, and then the answer comes some other way.”8 It reminded me of that way that Lasiné and others spoke slowly when telling a story, without interruption. In my Western conception of the world characterized by the need for quick answers within reach of our fingertips, we tend to respond to one another quickly. This was a different sensibility than my own that I learned to embody. As part of the development of an ethnographic sensibility, I have learned to surpass my momentary frustration in not receiving the answer and

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opening myself to the unknown. It is a matter of letting go and refocusing on the objective: learning to play the music rather than moving to a meta-­ level question. The answers will come. I have to trust in the process.

Time as Moral Imperative Respect the time in music. It is rather obvious, is it not? In Western music I might have a very good sense of timing, but the cross-melodies in Manding music confuse me. The music is composed this way as a technology or learning tool to exercise our minds. Whether we are the listeners or we are learning to play, we are challenged to both comprehend and master this complex super-pattern. Patience is the key that unlocks the door. What I came to understand through Famoro’s lessons is that time is a metaphor for that which guides us, centers us. The time is this constant, calm, continual pulse. So long as we stay focused on that, everything else will fall in relations to it, and not shake us too much. I may equate a state of mind like Christ consciousness, or Buddha nature, or being true to oneself no matter the fears of what may come. Whatever inspires you, if it stays front and center, all your other moves in life will fall in relation to that. In Tomie Hahn’s experience learning Japanese dance, her teacher, Ietmoto, reminded me of Famoro. Through dance, Ietmoto guided Tomie to balance her head and body so she could “dance from kokoro,” or the heart, the soul, or spirit. Her teacher explains, “not just any way of dancing will balance the body/mind,” which Hahn interpreted as the “artistic discipline fosters a flow of kokoro, or the ability for one’s inner physical/spiritual energy to flow freely in creative expression” (Hahn, 2007, 42). When playing balafon, the time is a training principle to help you develop that steadiness in life. Like Japanese dance and other practices of wisdom, as I like to call them, jeliya is an aesthetic structure, or a technology that uses mastery of the time as the means to harnessing nyama.

Agility in Mind and Body Every new song I learn is an exercise in mental agility. There are boundless reasons why each pattern poses new challenges for the brain. The left hand has to move quickly between two notes, or the timing starts on the second partial of a triplet, among others. All in all, learning to play balafon teaches

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me how to reorient myself again and again to a new situation, and then to move through it with grace. It is an intensive training in how to be centered, calm, relaxed, and appropriate to each new unfolding event that occurs in life. The grace that jelis exercise on the balafon translates and trickles out into other domains of life. When I played balafon, sometimes my shoulders would be halfway up to my ears, and my wrists would be rigid. When I started to become fatigued, Famoro noticed my body posture. “Hey,” he said as we play, “relax your body. Don’t be tight.” I thought that I could hold the rhythm together somehow in the rigidness of my body. I was playing “Lamban,” or the “flag song” of the jelis, as Famoro calls it. This is the lullaby that literally lulls, first and foremost, the jelis into a mood of love and sweetness. This is the song they return to time and time again during a performance to recalibrate the mood of the show. I was not creating this lovely feeling when I practiced Lamban that day. Famoro pulled his balafon out from a lineup of balafons stacked against the wall behind his couch. He did so with care, with respect. He watched what he was doing and made his motions precisely appropriate to the weight and delicacy of gourds and keys. He placed the instrument on the stand. He was mindful, graceful, and loving with the balafon. He demonstrated “Lamban,” saying “you have to feel it in your heart. People are gonna feel your feeling when they listen to you.” I tried again to sublimate any efforts and to instead let it flow. Mental effort would only cause me to tense up. I had to intend it from somewhere else. I had to feel it in my heart.

A Hard Time, 2014 Famoro is not only a teacher of novice music students like me who hope to learn and live in “Africa Time,” he is also the father of Sona and an uncle to several children who were born to African parents and raised in New York City. How to teach them the African timing of respect and love is very important to Famoro; it is something that their American urban education will not teach them. When I arrived, Famoro told me, “no balafon lesson today.” I knew not to argue, and I had come for the journey, whatever it would be. So I followed suit. We took the 4 train to 199th Street in the Bronx to visit his daughter, Sona, and her cousins. By the time we arrived, it was noon and

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the sun was hot. Sona, 16, Miriam, 10, and Fantabe, 12, were sitting in the living room. Fantabe’s mother was walking around, carrying an 8-month-old baby on her waist. These children are Guinean-American. Malinké is the mother tongue, but often the kids who go to American schools speak English to each other and to me. Miriam boasted to Famoro that she woke up just 5 minutes before we came. I figured that they must have stayed up late because it is cool in the evenings; staying up late to enjoy the cool night air is something we do in West Africa. Two fans were blowing on us and it was still steaming hot, characteristic of July in the city. Famoro asked her why she just woke up. Miriam retorted, “’Cause you never tell me what time you are coming!” Famoro responded, “Why do I have to tell you the time? I say I’m coming today, I don’t have to say what time.” “If you tell me what time you come, then I can know when to wake up and get ready!” she responds. Miriam was thinking like a New Yorker. “No, it’s not like that with me. I can visit you when I feel like it,” he told Miriam. Famoro flows through his day like a soft breeze. He never rushes. He takes his time with people. He goes where he needs to go when he is ready, and not beforehand. “Hey! I come when I want to come, and you know, I always come on Saturday!” Miriam retorted, “Yeah, but you gotta call us and tell us when!” “No!” Famoro denied this statement. He looked at her wide-eyed, eyebrows raised, with mirth rising just behind his threat. “You! Be ready!” mimicking Missia Saran Dioubaté’s latest song. He shook a finger at her. Miriam can joke with Famoro like this because he is her uncle, and this is a relationship that allows for joking and prodding. This same combative joviality could be considered a form of disrespect if ones was to argue like this with a parent. The four children surrounded Famoro. They draped over him on the two-seater couch. They jockeyed for his attention, which he lavished on each of them. Fantabe walked by, a little somber, and Famoro grabbed her and pulled her to him. She laughed and fell onto his lap. Sona gave her dad a huge bear hug. Then 6-year-old Aziz took center stage. I asked him where his Dad was, and he told me, Senegal. “Oh yeah? Your Dad is Senegalese? Do you speak Wolof?” No, Aziz told me, but Famoro knew that Aziz learned some Wolof. He took Aziz in his lap and said to everyone, “Shhhh, everybody be quiet. He gonna say something in Wolof.” Aziz squirmed around on Famoro’s lap and then stopped. He looked up into

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space. I was about to open my mouth and Famoro shushed me. “Give him time,” he motioned to me. Everyone in the room was patient and quiet when Aziz suddenly burst out, “Nnnnnnegaferi,” a simple greeting. Everyone cheered. Aziz smiled wide. Famoro said, “Okay, here comes another one.” Everyone got quiet. After a few moments, Aziz said, “Ehhhh Nanga Def!” How are you? More cheering. Famoro managed to squeeze four sentences out of Aziz and it was a glorious moment. Miriam tried to engage Famoro in a philosophical conversation about time again, and in the end, Famoro said, “Ah, you give me a hard time.” “Ah no, you give me a hard time!” They laughed while arguing about who gives whom a hard time. Miriam was upholding an American way of embodying time, one that I know well, one that runs on schedules and planning, one that runs in her school system in her home town, New York City. Famoro knew this, of course, and he was purposely being difficult with her because he wanted her to understand the value of another way of doing time, the old-school African way. That kind of time knows no priorities higher than spending time with the people you love, people and activities that you respect. As an example of something important marked by the African sense of time, to say that someone did not love you, you could say, “she doesn’t have time for me.” This is an insult if said to a person who supposedly loves you. When I was “moving” with Lasiné in the Gambia, we took time out when we were walking to a destination to greet people along the way. To not stop would be insulting and could even broadcast a lack of interest, or even humanity, on our part. Underneath the love is also a continual wisdom that people need people for happiness and also livelihood. This is human nature. Old-school Manding Africans do not forget it, but perhaps we modern city dwellers do. All human beings have a sense of some relationship between time and love. We take more time for those we love, for the things we love. But in our fast-paced city lifestyles, another precedence takes priority, something most easily described as a “Time-is-Money” sensibility, but I refer to this as planned time, or a schedule. Planned-time thinkers have a sense of control over all moving parts in our days and it is the source of much frustration when the day does not “go as planned.” When we plan all of our time, we do not allow what might naturally occur to take its course. We fight the natural pace of things. We rush. We cut short times that are meaningful, we miss chance encounters, and we show up only when things are supposedly in order, as Hall described of monochronic cultures (Hall, 1983).

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There is something valuable to time-as-efficiency, but after living in Africa I see how there is something valuable in running on “Africa Time.” It is another form of time management, not an absence of management. This is when the magic happens; the universe can present something new and unexpected. On the subway home, Famoro reiterated what he has already demonstrated: he was giving the children an African indigenous education that they would not learn in their American schools. In Africa, he said, “our parents teach us to watch. Be quiet. Observe. You see someone does something you like? Someone knows how to make good money and you like that? You watch him. Don’t jump too quickly. You see what he does. You see another person is suffering in life? What do they do to make themselves suffer? You watch. Stay quiet. Then one day you get the inspiration. I teach that to them. In New York, people jump too quickly. They don’t take time.”

Tying Up Time The music is a quieting balm that helps folks to destress after confronting the anxiety-inducing reality of life in the city day in and day out. When I tune in to Famoro’s music, like I did when he played with Djekoria Mory Kanté that afternoon, when I get in sync with the time and let the cross-­ rhythms circulate in me as he plays, I feel myself become righted, rebalanced, soothed, invigorated, and relaxed. I lose all sense of outer time and become absorbed in “inner time” (Schutz, 1951). The music is a medicine, the sounds, vibrational waves that penetrate the body.9 This sacred space of intentional listening can be thought of as a training ground, a place of meditation and power that can be harnessed, transmitted, and cultivated in real-life practices. In Barbara Browning’s Infectious Rhythms she cautions against the cliché that traditional practices like African music can cure the ills of Western society (1998). Browning’s point must be considered seriously for the same critique that postcolonial studies expert Edward Said made of the European gaze in Orientalism (1978). However, I argue that if healing, balancing, and inspiring society is the modus operandi of the practice, then why could jeliya not work on a Westerner like me? The ingredients of Manding jeli music as a corrective balm lie within: (1) the time is key; (2) all notes being composed in relation to that steady beat, the metronome; (3) the patterns in any given song having a certain

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aesthetic formula that indicates a pattern of communication, recognizable across cultures; (4) those patterns being broken up in many ways and reconfigured, all while respecting the time; (5) the swing provides a vital essence, an energy force; and (6) the intent to cultivate a feeling, perhaps a relaxed, easy, warm-hearted feeling, that can be imparted to the listener though the music by cultivating that state of mind and body in the musician as he plays. The time in the music is also a metaphor for your life vision, your purpose, your focus of activity. For example, my time or main beat right now is to write this book in a way that feels authentic and true to my experience of jeliya. Much can interfere with this or sidetrack me. I must interact with my family and friends and take care of other responsibilities like shopping for food. I can also get sidetracked by conflicting emotions, thoughts, inner fears, and insecurities about how to express myself best and about how I will be perceived. These aspects might be akin to the interweaving melodies, part of life, but the book-writing project remains front and center. Within this center, I build character. I train myself to remain relaxed, yet energized; focused, but not too rigid. Perhaps any artistic or skilled practice, when taken seriously, can do this. Jeliya is a “characteristic species of grace” (Bateson, 1972) among many. And the highly accomplished jeli, like Famoro, is a master of his practice, which he imparts to listeners and apprentices in the way he plays and teaches us to play his music. The music works on me like medicine, balancing me, soothing me, recasting the tumult of my life into a more harmonic whole. I am a willing participant. But what happens when a jeli is playing for a foreign audience who knows little or nothing about the music of the balafon, to say the least of jeliya?

Notes 1. Of course, none of us live entirely in one world or the other, and we recognize the benefits of both. But when I sync up with my African informants, even if they are fast-paced like Bacar and Gbessa Sékou Dioubaté who we meet in a future chapter, the Manding, West African society seems to encourage Africa Time, whereas in my New  York culture, the opposite is true. 2. Sékouba Kandia Kouyaté is currently (2021) the director of the Guinean Instrumental Ensemble. 3. The ɔ in hɔrɔn is pronounced as an open “o” as in the word “on.”

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4. It is important to acknowledge that my understanding of nyama comes from many scholarly sources I have read about jeliya. That, combined with my personal experience, I was able to discuss these matters more directly with my informants. 5. Jeli guitar is similar to balafon; they play one note at a time in cyclical patterns and runs, which are often the same patterns that are played on the balafon. The guitar, however, has the range to play more scales and keys and can therefore blend more seamlessly with other Western instruments and bands, thus calling it a transitional instrument for jelis. 6. This kind of individual attention may be common in other mindful practices. In my yoga practice, when I stay close to one teacher, that teacher starts to know my bad habits and psychological weaknesses and guides me accordingly so that I grow aware and improve on them. Balafon practice is similar. 7. A note about “improvisations”: In jeli music, the musician has many possible combinations of notes, or patterns, that he can break and combine with other patterns. There are also little variations and runs that connect these patterns. The structuring patterns of the song are called kumbengo and the “improvisations” or more accurately, “flourishings” are called birimintingo. What distinguishes a virtuoso is not how original he can be, something which manifests individuality. A virtuoso is one who breaks and recombines and connects the patterns with utter grace and command based on the listeners at hand. Anthropologist Michael Herzfeld describes the conceit of Europeans to think that originality is somehow higher on the global hierarchy of value. (2004, p. 39). 8. In Divine Utterances, Katherine Hagerdorn (2001) explains a similar need to develop patience around asking questions in order to not “injure myself or others through my ignorance” (2001, 89). 9. When I inquired about the medicine of soundwaves to Famoro, he had me lie on my back on the floor while he played. I noted that the lower keys vibrate more strongly in different places in my body than the high keys. The runs from high to low almost felt like a combing of the body. I did not go far into this kind of research, but it is worth mentioning. Famoro seemed to know about it, but as usual, his “telling” was through direct experience.

References Bateson, G. (1972). Style, Grace and Information in Primitive Art. In Steps to an Ecology of the Mind. Random House. Browning, B. (1998). Infectious Rhythms. Routledge. Chernoff, J.  M. (1979). African Rhythm and African Sensibility (Vol. 36). Chicago: University of Chicago press.

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Feld, S., & Keil, C. (1994). Music Grooves. University of Chicago Press. Gates, H. L. (1988). Signifying Monkey. Oxford University Press. Gjerdingen, R. (2000). Tonality Induction. Music Perception, 17(4). Hagerdorn, K. (2001). Divine Utterances. Smithisonian Institution. Hahn, T. (2007). Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture Through Japanese Dance. Wesleyan University Press. Hall, E. (1983). The Dance of Life. Anchor Books. Herzfeld, M. (2004). The Body Impolitic. University of Chicago Press. Lefebvre, H. (2004). Rhythmanalysis: Space, time, and everyday life (Elden & Moore, Trans.). Continuum. (Originally published in French, 1992). Lerdahl, F. (2001). Tonal Pitch Space. Oxford University Press. Pond, S.  F. (2005).  Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz’s first Platinum Album. University of Michigan Press. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. Wesleyan University Press. Schutz, A. (1951). Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship. Social Research, 18(1), 76–97, Reprinted in Symbolic Anthropology (ed., David Janet Dolgin).

CHAPTER 7

Enchanting Cosmopolitan New York

In the aesthetically valued object there resides the principle of the True and the Good, and that the study of the aesthetically-valued objects constitutes a path toward transcendence. (Gell, 1992, 41)

Manding Groove Bands There are several overlapping contexts in which you might find jelis playing for cosmopolitan audiences in the international arena, and jelis may move between these contexts. These musical contexts have roots in postcolonial Africa. There are classical-style, solo, or duo jeli concerts played by, for example, Malian kora jelis, Toumani Diabaté (Bamako), Mamadou Diabaté (North Carolina-Bamako), and Ballaké Sissoko (Paris-Bamako) that play in concert halls; there are Manding orchestras or bands that might take the Afro-jazz form or other modern band styles that play in world music cafés; there are traditional music ensembles like Mandekalou that are brought together for both Manding audiences and for American cosmopolitan audiences, as an ethnic, or “traditional music” concert (see Van Buren, 2001) that bear some similarity to classical concerts but feature many jelis. Many cosmopolitan spaces have been created for jeli music since postcolonization in France and the United States. By cosmopolitan, I mean the mix of different nationalities that have all come to embrace the urban lifestyle in an international hub and who enjoy © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Feder, Jeliya at the Crossroads, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83059-5_7

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similar economic and education levels, as well as similar values in shared spaces about living together in a multicultural environment (Appiah, 2006; Hannerz, 1996), and sometimes contrasted to localism (Hannerz, 1990).1 Cosmopolitan people may be well versed in hearing music, tasting foods, and otherwise experiencing different cultures in their shared hometown. Jelis, meanwhile, establish bands that cater to these audiences, the bands’ shows generally take place in world music cafés, concert halls, and festivals. Many of the elder jeli musicians living in cosmopolitan cities such as Paris, London, and New York are former participants or descendants of national and private musical groups that were created in the Authenticité, post-colonial movement toward nation-making.2 Jelis in the 1960s directed instrumental ensembles in each major region of Guinea, and the best were cherry-picked to join the National Instrumental Ensemble in Guinea, an entity that exists today under the directorship of Sékouba Kandia Kouyaté. These ensembles are akin to Western classical music orchestras, grouping together similar instruments such as ngoni, kora, and balafon. They feature jeli singers singing traditional songs with lyrics that hold historical lessons for society. When it was time for musicians to return to Guinea after world tours, many stayed wherever the tour left them. This was the case for several of my informants who came in the late 1990s. Others sought political asylum for persecution under a new government in Guinea around the same time. Interestingly women can achieve Green Card status for having endured excision, a common practice in Muslim West Africa, although it is declining recently. Achieving legal status requires the support of an immigration lawyer and often financial support from an American citizen. Some jelis achieve this rather quickly while others suffer for years as undocumented immigrants. Either way, they are not rewarded or recognized by the American government for their cultural contributions to the country, which is a shame. In France, it works differently. Jelis draw on popular idioms from the Authenticité years that mixed foreign music with Guinean music. Some of these bands, such as The Rail Band, Bembeya Jazz National, Les Ambassadeurs, and Balla et Ses Balladins, become known throughout the African world. In New  York, Manding musicians combined with Western music, often with African roots, to form various kinds of Afro-jazz and Afro-groove bands in New York. In doing so, they carve out new social spaces, a collaboration

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between their historical musical practice and the current cosmopolitan audiences that listened to them, and what venues were available to them.3 Abou Sylla, Famoro Dioubaté, Missia Saran Dioubaté, Mamady “Djeliké” Kouyaté, Abdoulaye “Djoss” Diabaté, and kora players, Yacouba Sissoko and Mamadou Diabaté, among others, are all prominent jelis in the Northeast region of the United States. Their bands, such as Famoro’s Kakande (see Photo 7.1), Mamady’s Mandingo Ambassadors (see Photo 7.2), and Djoss’s Source, in New York City, feature alternating jazz solos over a Manding groove. Sometimes Abdoulaye sings in Source, and Mandingo Ambassadors has seen a series of jeli singers come and go, including Ismael “Bon Fils” Kouyaté4 and his sister, Bébé. Sometimes a Manding groove band has no singer, and then jazz-style soloing may become the prominent feature. For example, in Manding Ambassadors, when a singer is not present, solos rotate between the horn players and Mamady’s Manding jeli guitar in the American jazz idiomatic style. Famoro’s Kakande features singing and balafon over a Manding groove. In these bands, Manding idioms such as praise-singing in exchange

Photo 7.1  Famoro Dioubate singing at Shrine World Music Venue, New York City 2013. (Courtesy of Raul Rothblatt)

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Photo 7.2  Mamady “Djeliké” Kouyaté playing with his band, Mandingo Ambassadors at Café Barbès, Brooklyn, New York in 2013. (Photo by author)

for throwing money are a rarity. If there is singing and storytelling, it is done in Malinké or Sousou, and the meaning is generally not understood. Sometimes, although very rarely, the power of nyama touches the audience. For nyama to work its magic, it needs a certain kind of audience participation.

Culture and Music with Kakande I think of Kakande, Mandingo Ambassadors, and Source as bands that form a bridge, between traditional jeliya and popular music. They can be used, if one chooses to explore the depths, as a path to penetrate the history and the culture that birthed such a music. Otherwise, and perhaps more commonly, they appeal to many cosmopolitan listeners for their danceable grooves, their recognizable jazz idioms, and their exotic-to-­ them instruments and cross-rhythms, hailing from the great continent of rhythm—Africa.

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Famoro formed Kakande in 2005  in New  York City, and they have played consistently until the coronavirus pandemic put a halt to all live music in early 2020. His band is a Manding groove dance band featuring the balafon, bass, drum set, guitar, bass, djembe, cello, and sometimes saxophone, kora, other African instruments, and vocals (see Photo 7.3). All of the songs are based on a traditional Manding jeli repertoire transposed onto European instruments. Kakande performs in world music venues scattered across Manhattan and Brooklyn. For the past 10 years, they have had a monthly standing gig at Shrine World Music Venue, a small nightclub in Harlem fashioned after Fela Kuti’s Nigerian music café. Like many of the venues where Kakande plays, it has a bar, some tables and chairs, and an intimate stage. The band is diverse, and band members dip in and dip out, although some have played with Kakande for years. Those who last have a special dedication to Famoro. Kakande’s American manager Raul Rothblatt plays cello and supports the band on his record label, Jumbie Records. Andy Algire, who has studied balafon for two decades, plays drums. Sean Dixon,

Photo 7.3  Kakande band with Famoro Dioubaté at Shrine World Music Venue, New York City 2013. (Courtesy of Raul Rothblatt)

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Famoro’s student and the owner of the studio where Famoro records his music, often plays electric bass. Sometimes ethnomusicologist David Racanneli plays Manding-style guitar. “Djoss” Diabaté sometimes plays guitar as a guest. Mamady Kouyaté played old-style Manding guitar in Kakande before forming his own band, Mandingo Ambassadeurs. Sylvain Le Roux used to play saxophone and tambim, or the Fula flute, with Kakande. He also plays in Mandingo Ambassadeurs and his own Afro-Jazz band with Djoss Diabaté called Source. Uasuf, Famoro’s Senegalese-­ American balafon student, often plays djembe. Before Uasuf, we might have seen Mangue Sylla playing djembe. Sometimes Jeli Yacouba Sissoko plays kora. Jelimuso Missia Saran Dioubaté sang with Kakande for the better part of the last decade until recently. She helped Famoro, who never sang professionally prior to Kakande, to sing with his balafon. The musicians in Kakande are trained by Famoro to play a set repertoire of Manding songs that are historically significant. Kakande plays a version of “Malisadio,” a song I learned first in Maine with Gray Parrot, then practiced in the Gambia with Mustapha, my teacher. It is a Manding standard. Several songs have been played similarly since the 1970s. Some of Kakande’s repertoire, such as “Nina,” “Souaressi,” and “Keme Bourema,” borrow from and pay homage to Guinean legendary Jeli Sory Kandia Kouyaté who died at age 44 in 1977, a loss that left Guinea in utter shock and mourning. Famoro’s grandfather, the renowned late El Hadj Djeli Sory Kouyaté, played balafon on Sory Kandia’s early albums, giving Famoro inspiration (and perhaps license) to remake this music. Kakande in 2008 released its one and only album, Doununya, which has a track of the same name. Doununya (or Duniya) is an Arabic word meaning “the world and everything in it.” It also translates as “all of God’s creation.” Kakande draws a culturally diverse cosmopolitan audience hailing from places such as Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Argentina, and Sweden, but in the highest numbers from the United States. The fans come from a multitude of races and religions, but they hold one thing in common: they have decided to call New  York City their home. Some sit in tables near the stage, some dance on the dance floor, and many more stand in and around the bar, watching from behind the tables. The balafon and the cross-­ rhythmic groove contribute to the foreign appeal of the music. As Paulla Ebron explains in her book Performing Africa, the way jelis perform for a cosmopolitan audience is quite different than the way they perform for a Manding audience (Ebron, 2002, 53–72).

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Kakande operates as a Manding groove band in which old standards are played with modern instruments and sometimes compositions are reformulated from older versions of these songs to excite and entice the audience to dance. The African rhythms played on the drums and bass provide an instantly recognizable dance beat, and Famoro and Missia’s joint enthusiasm inspire audience members to dance their heels off for most of the few hours of their performances. Dancing in this way, or in the way of a dundunba party, the dance festivities in Guinea accompanied by a djembe and dundun troupe, is not traditionally part of jeli music appreciation. It is also important to note that people pay an entry fee at the door of Kakande, Mandingo Ambassadors, and Source concerts of $10–$20. Sometimes a hat is passed during the performances as well, but it is rare that people throw money at the musicians on stage, as is customary in Manding spaces. It is Famoro’s sole goal to make people happy, and since the audience does not throw money, their active participation by dancing is a sure indication to him that he is succeeding. Famoro also engages the audience in call and response, particularly in his song “So-Si-Sa,” an upbeat dance rhythm that comes as a finale, leaving the audience on a high. African diasporic music shares many qualities with the music of their ancestors in Africa, such as call and response, lyrical emphasis on upbeats, buzzing and rattling, and vocal gestures such as grunts (Floyd, 1996; Gilroy, 1993; Berliner, 1994). These qualities to which we are accustomed in African diasporic and even American music help to bridge the barriers between strictly African and American music. Yet some things do not translate easily, such as the meaning of Malinké words or the syncopated cross-­ melodies, unless we have people who bridge two cultures who help to translate. Missia Saran sings in Manding, sometimes addressing band members or a few known people in the audience. She praises people who have helped support the jelis, and she sings passionately about Manding history and values. Most audience members do not know what she is saying, but they feel the passion and rhythm in her singing. Sometimes Missia scats or raps—and audience members respond by cheering, dancing to her rhythm, clapping, and hollering. Sometimes she sings directly to an audience member she knows. I was on the receiving end of one of her improvisational phrases recently, when she praised me in song for helping bring her brother Sékou Dioubaté from Paris to take part in the creation of her next album. Because she addressed me particularly, and because Sékou also was present

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and came to raise my hand above my head, I think that the cosmopolitan audience understood something about the power in her words. But when Famoro tells me, “Sometimes, I talk to Missia through my balafon,” I usually do not even notice unless she responds with a vocalization like, Aha! or naamu! Occasionally, Missia will translate her singing into English. For example, on December 5, 2019, at Shrine, she translated Ten fou as “do like that for nothing.”5 She gave an example, which I will paraphrase: there is a poor family and one person gets sick. One of the family members went to Europe and made lots of money. He does not return to help the sick person get good medical attention. The family member dies, and only then does the brother returns and pay a lot of money for the funeral. Why did he not help when it could have saved a life? Tenfou. “For nothing.” This is a classic jeli lesson. But these translations are rare, and usually the audience appreciates the tones of Missia’s deep singing but misses the moral message, which is conveyed in Malinké.

Cultural Sensibilities in Music During my early days attending Kakande concerts, I observed how inexperienced or American listeners appreciated a Manding aesthetic by learning how to move to this music. Because of the multiple melodies aligned with cross-rhythms in this kind of music, some folks clap and dance on six beats per measure while others clap and dance on four beats per measure. Some follow the syncopated melodies, while others know to step on the main beat while feeling the syncopated rhythms in other parts of the body. Those who know how to dance on the four-beats-per-measure—beats sometimes not emphasized—prove their familiarity with this kind of musical idiom. Dance is an essential part of learning to embody Manding music, because often the downbeat is not played or emphasized. By not playing or not emphasizing the downbeat, the musician engages listeners’ participation either mentally or physically to produce it in their minds and bodies. Inexperienced listeners generally do not know this way of engaging, and their attention will get pulled onto whatever attracts them in the moment. This may add to the appeal of the music to foreign audiences, but is not the purpose of this music. An aware neophyte listener may learn to hear and engage with the rhythms in the Manding way if she learns to align their movements with Manding people on stage or those audience

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members who are “in the know.” I trained myself to embody the Manding feeling by aligning my moves with Manding peoples’ moves, and I noticed where others did not. The song, “Paya Paya,” for example, has a polyrhythmic 12/8 meter. Famoro produces a counter-rhythm in a high register that opposes the dominant rhythm that the drums and bass sustain. The Americans, or less experienced listeners in the audience, are attracted to the high balafon part that emphasizes the three-beats-per-measure pulse. At one concert, I noted these movements and then focused on the leg of an audience member who tapped his foot in a different place from the rest of the non-­ African audience. The man tapping his foot was a Manding balafonist jeli, Lansana Kouyate, marking the pulse that a Manding person hears and dances to the rhythm, on the four count. I concentrated on the way that Lansana’s foot marked the rhythm and oriented my own body pulse accordingly. We can make generalizations with some accuracy about different cultural “sensibilities” in how we perceive and react to music. In his book on Ghanaian music, John Chernoff employs the term, “African sensibility” to describe how Ghanaians approach and feel music as opposed to Americans. While he was criticized for generalizing a whole continent as having one sensibility, in this particular case, my research in Manding West Africa does align with his notion of an “African sensibility” based on Ghanaian culture (Chernoff, 1979). In polyrhythmic music, what we choose to recognize as the point of reference for the meter is a matter of our past individual and cultural experiences. Our conditioned proclivity is so strong that even the experienced listeners, myself included, may be likely to first hear the music in “our way” before finding and shifting to a Manding sensibility. When I listen to Famoro’s polyrhythm, I can change my frame of reference back and forth between sensibilities. I learn, by being guided by a Manding person, to consciously override my own cultural tendency as my experience grows. The music feels different depending on where the listener is oriented, as I have learned in my balafon lessons. When I can maintain the rhythm without using visual reinforcement—linking my moves to those of a Manding person—then I have embodied the Manding feeling. It is sometimes very challenging. I have tested other friends of mine, both American and French, trained musicians as well, and it is equally challenging for them. It matters which beat we orient ourselves to because it alters the ways that we hear the other notes, in terms of embellishing or structuring. To

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share the Manding feeling with others, we must feel the music in terms of the same downbeat, without which the tensions and resolutions are asymmetric. But there is another benefit to hearing the music the Manding way. This music has something to teach us. If I stayed comfortably in my own cultural orientation, as many listeners do, following the bright, syncopated melody (as I sometimes do), I would try (and fail) to understand what happens when Famoro shifts the emphasis from the syncopated beat to the dominant melody, or when the emphasis shifts from the four to the six beats per measure interminably. I would miss out on the beauty that comes with staying centered on the downbeat while allowing the pull of the countermelodies to create a certain energy in comparison. Part of the intrigue for this cosmopolitan audience is undoubtedly how the musician manipulates the rhythms in ways that they do not understand. But the music remains entertainment, as much live American and European pop music is, and is not, the “classical music” of “deep jeliya for listening that is intended to inspire listeners to act” (Charry, 2000, 90). Famoro says that the purpose of Kakande is to “make people happy,” and to “bring people together,” which is part of jeliya, but “it is not [the only part of] jeliya.”

An Inkling of Jeliya But sometimes it is jeliya. The first inkling I had that Famoro could exercise his jeli skills on someone other than me was in July 2005. That summer, Famoro came to the Trumansburg Grassroots Music Festival as my guest and played balafon, solo, as a courtesy to the Art barn, a temporary art gallery where I was volunteering. He attracted a spontaneous audience there who quickly became riveted with his music, and the festival organizers then offered him a solo spot in the upcoming festival on the main stage. There was one moment that struck me while Famoro played that first time. A young child was prancing by the barn with her mother. Famoro spotted the child and shifted his rhythm, emphasizing the higher notes with a sprightly tempo that matched the child’s movements. She must have felt it because she stopped dead in her tracks and turned and looked right at Famoro, transfixed. Famoro smiled and continued playing. The child came a bit closer and started to bounce up and down to the musician’s rhythm. I watched Famoro call her and coax her over to him. Then the two entered into a conversation of sorts, Famoro using his balafon, and the child using her body to dance.

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The Politics of Representation I pause here to take a reflective look at my process in understanding and then writing this next section. The politics of representation in writing ethnography is sensitive, as I noted in a footnote in Chap. 5. We may have influence and we may open ourselves to critique from our peers. It is also important to recognize our position to expose the lives of our informants, the people we respect, but who often have no control over what we write. We may unwittingly reify prejudices, present false views, or dishonor the very people we meant to honor. Before sending this book to press, I reconfirmed with some of my informants that what I was portraying was accurate or fair. In this chapter I am portraying a side to the jeli and his influence outside of Manding culture in a way I have not read elsewhere. I called Famoro in February 2021, before finalizing this chapter, to explain to him the argument I was making in this part of the chapter, just to triple check that my observations were correct although we had discussed it before. Here is the way I phrased it to him: “I’m finishing this chapter and I want to make sure that what I am saying is correct, okay? Remember that solo piece you played in Zebulon, when you got the audience involved? You were practicing jeliya on us, the Americans.” “Yes,” he responded. “And when I first met you and you played for me, alone, in your apartment in Brooklyn. In that situation, you did it again, on me, directly?” “Yes.” “And when you play with Kakande, and everyone dances?” “Yeah, that’s not jeliya, that’s something different.” “No, it’s Manding jeli music, but it is for entertainment; it is not jeliya, right?” “Correct. You understand. You got it.” I hope that in my descriptions below, I continue to represent accurately how any real jeli would understand the same situation. Of all the books, stories, and academic prose written about jeliya, none show or explain through direct embodied experience how jeliya might affect the audience. Moreover, no one, so far as I am aware, has shown how a jeli might practice jeliya on a foreign audience.6 That is not to say that these scholars and writers do not feel it or experience it somehow when they are playing music with jelis. Anthropologist Ebron notes her

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self-consciousness in being praised in a Jaliba Kouyateh concert in the Gambia, for example (Ebron, 2002, 65). Mostly, scholars explain the effects of jeli music and words on others. In one vivid description based on a secondhand source, Thomas Hale quotes Nyulo Jobarteh, as one jeli’s verbal attempt to grasp the emotion of this music. “A talented singer is one who can ‘split the air with singing, stand before crowds without flinching, and compose words that roll off her tongue with fluidity and clarity so that her audience understands the content of the text and is moved by it’” (Nyulo Jobarteh as quoted in Hale, 1998: 164). Similarly, Barbara Hoffman explains, “I have seen many a horon’s hand quake as it thrusts forth a bill, sometimes accompanied by a verbal plea,‘ka nyama bo’ (please take the nyama away).” She continues, “it is, perhaps, even understandable that some nobles resent the fact that the jelis, ‘their’ jelis, as they say, have such power over them, power not only to stir them deeply and make them tremble, but to inspire them to part with hard-won cash or goods in the bargain” (Hoffman, 2000: 42–43). But rarely have scholars put the effects of the music into words from a firsthand experience.7 They say that jelis work with spiritual energy called nyama, that jelis sculpt sound, that jeli music is for deep listening, that jeli music is classical, that jelis influence people to act. But how? And what does it mean when that ability can be transferred across cultures? The nyama, the deep listening, the sculpting of sound to influence people to act, this is not just a Manding phenomenon for Manding people that we, the foreigners, cannot access or understand. This is cross-cultural. This is universal. Both Famoro and Mamady Kouyaté say, “music has no borders. Music is universal.” Mamady Kouyaté is proud that most of Mandingo Ambadssador’s band members are not African, and with love and attention they have been able to learn this music from him and others. Still, not all jelis practice jeliya actively on a cosmopolitan audience. But Famoro does.8 Watching Famoro reel in that child was my first inkling that jeliya was something greater than Manding. It took years of observing Famoro interacting with his audience, mixed with my own lessons on balafon with him, before I started to realize how the music can elicit and develop certain human qualities, on purpose. I do not think I would have understood the properties of jeliya in instrumentation had I not experienced how it can be done, first, on me, as a student who was learning how to play. From that point, I started to realize how Famoro used this talent cross-culturally on an unassuming audience that knows nothing of jeliya.

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The Technology of Enchantment In his article “Technology of Enchantment,” Alfred Gell (1992) delineates how art objects are technical products of excellence, a means of recreating society in “enchanted form.” He identifies the artist as an “occult technician” whose job it is to enchant us by creating a product that both defies our understanding and entices us to imagine the possibility of how to achieve the same masterpiece. In realizing that we have the same mind and body but cannot achieve the same results, we render the artist a magician of sorts. We intuit the discipline and focus it must take to become so deft as to render the work effortless, that it inspires us to consider our greatest potential, thus, “transcendence,” as the epigraph suggests above. The artist uses his body as a conduit to channel grace, a skill that we do not possess ourselves but one from which we can somehow reap the benefits by viewing or participating in its creation. The gap between the artist’s expertise and our own abilities is where the nyama lies. It is what enchants us and also, as Gell explains of the Trobriand canoes, “their purpose being to induce the Kula partners of the Trobrianders to disgorge their best valuables, without holding back, in the most expeditious fashion”(Gell, 1992, 55).9 In Manding jeli events, this means that the patrons support their jelis by handing the jeli money. Gell explains in words that equally relate to the art of jeliya: “In the canons of primitive art there are innumerable instances of designs which can be interpreted as exploiting the characteristic biases of human visual perception so as to ensnare is in unwitting reactions, some of which may be behaviorally significant” (Ibid., 46). This “primitive” art is tied to the transcendental, and separates the artist from the elite, who are his or her patrons. In the case of jeli music, the jeli exploits the characteristic biases not of visual perception, but rather of aural perception of organized sound. He ensnares us, unwittingly. The ensnarement, I claim, causes pleasure in the form of enchantment that renders us indebted to the artist. Scholars describe incidents in which Manding patrons are inspired, or coerced, some say, by the jeli’s power to captivate their minds and emotions,10 but none have mentioned how that power works through the instrumentation, and none have shown how it works on non-Manding audiences. The scenario below at Zebulon shows the initial stages of how this works on an American audience.

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Jelying an Audience In 2013, it became clear to me after watching Famoro perform for many years that he can enchant a cosmopolitan audience. He teaches people, through musical emphasis, how to engage and participate in his music much in the way that Manding people might. He does this in the act of playing his balafon. He does not use words to do this. The first time I noticed him do this to a live audience was in 2005 at a French-American-­ owned, hipster bar/cafe in the heart of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, called Zebulon. The band was taking a break, and Famoro came onstage to play the song “Lasidan,” solo, on balafon. The people in the bar were sitting at tables and standing at the bar, talking in pairs and groups. Audience members gradually shifted their attention from their own activity of talking to focus on the musician and music (quieter, and then no chatting), followed by emotional/bodily reactions to the music (vocalizations), and finally to participation in the making of the music (clapping along). Famoro reeled them in, intentionally. This is what happened. He played a long and bold introduction while people continued to have loud conversations. Then the music fell into a slow groove that I recognized as “Lasidan,” but the way that his grandfather played it years ago. Famoro lowered his volume, striking the notes more softly. Some people stopped talking. Others lowered the volumes of their conversations and continued talking. He emphasized the main rhythm connected by some frilly runs (descending scales from high to low). Mamady Kouyaté, who was watching from the sidelines, whooped. After a few moments, Famoro played a run and sped up the tempo to a sprightly, happy, bright modern version of “Lasidan,” which to me felt like someone was giggling. The audience’s attention to the music increased, although some people were still talking. After a long frilly run, Famoro returned to a pattern he played before but one octave higher. Mamady whooped again, and some audience members added to the vocal gesture with cheers and claps. The listeners became increasingly involved in conversing with Famoro instead of verbally with each other. Then, Famoro emphasized a consistent note, looked up at the audience, and smiled, while emphasizing the pulse with his body motion. One person bellowed out a deep whoop, followed by another person, and then another, which culminated in the audience clapping to the rhythm. When Famoro shifted to emphasize the two and four of the four-beats-per-measure, reggae-style, the audience cheered.

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Participants applauded, and the clapping funneled into a pulse. A few people continued to mark the time with claps on that pulse, but they fell off and reemerged as Famoro continued to improvise on the rhythm. Then he highlighted a partial of the beat, a syncopated melody to the main beat. This confused many of the clappers, and they tapered off, but one person clapped persistently on the downbeat that Famoro was no longer playing, indicating that she had prior experience in the steady pulse she maintained, despite the melodic shifts that pushed and pulled on the downbeat. Other listeners showed appreciation with whoops and whistles, although they did not (perhaps could not) maintain the beat themselves over Famoro’s improvisations. I made an audio recording of this seven-minute piece that night and listened to it repeatedly. In 2007, I once again listened to that recording, this time with Famoro. I asked him about it directly. He said, “Before I came here [to New York] I learned to attract [foreign] people. It gives you intelligence to learn American people. I developed this skill.” He told me that he watched and listened to the audience while they were not paying attention to him. He adjusted his volume, making it much lower, at times, not higher, as a technique to lower the volume of the audience’s conversations (Famoro, private conversations 2007), all of which are clinically recognized skills in forming “good communication” between people. I go slow to bring them to me, and they can understand where I am going. I give them the step, the time, I play the full accompaniment. I get the melody and time together. Quickly, you see they move their hands, they pay attention to me now. If they got me, I change, I can jump now. (Famoro, private conversations, 2007)

Once he had connected the audience to the main beat, Famoro emphasized the upbeat, still common to Westerners in rock, funk, ska, and reggae music. The audience in this case participated by rhythmic clapping. Once he held them there, Famoro started to manipulate other parts of the rhythm that are not so easy to follow. They provide tensions against the melody on the downbeat, much like a dissonant note, the sixth or the second in the scale, waiting to be resolved to the fourth, fifth, or octave note. How does Famoro emphasize different components of the polyrhythms? Famoro accentuates notes by hitting certain notes harder or softer, which consequently brings listeners’ attention to the melody-in-rhythm

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he wishes to highlight (personal conversations, 2007). He leaves notes out, he shifts from one pattern to another, he plays double notes. He can shift the audience’s concentration from, for example, the rhythm played on the left side of the balafon to the rhythm played on the right side (the base notes versus the high notes) by shifting the emphasis of the strikes. This would change the orientation from one beat to another, since the hands hit each side in a staggered way (sometimes they hit together but mostly not). He might also emphasize a melodic phrase that hits a high note (which attracts our attention) just after or just before the dominant beat. He also might play a run down the balafon and start a melody on a beat that the audience does not expect.11 This disorients listeners, much like “Solí” disoriented me, and causes them, whether they are clapping or not, to exchange the main beat for the highlighted synchronized pulse. Most of the clapping tapers off because they know something shifted. This caused listeners to whoop out because they were able to discern that the rhythm that Famoro plays off the main beat eludes them, and they showed their respect of Famoro’s artistic abilities by calling out. These moments can be exercises for the mind whereby the building tensions that recur as the rhythms cross one another simulate the stress phenomenon in life. By adhering to the main rhythm in the midst of crossing rhythms, we develop “intrepidness, or resolute fearlessness” and “an extraordinary strength of mind” that raises the human consciousness above troubles and discord. “It is by this strength that ordinary people become heroes, by maintaining themselves in a tranquil state of mind and preserving the free use of their reason under most surprising and terrible circumstances” (CK Ladzekpo).12 This description fits precisely the purpose of jeli instrumental music, particularly the balafon and kora. This music is meant to strengthen the listener’s mind, to make them smarter, to have deeper concentration, to not lose the downbeat while the player emphasizes competing rhythms, and to actually feel the energy in the tensions that exist between them. This is the introductory level of understanding how jeli music works on its listeners. This motivates the listeners to act. In this case, to act by expressing approval by applause and whoops. In other cases, this might make a Manding person throw money at the jeli. So if what CK Ladzekpo says about Ghanaian drumming is equally true of Manding drumming (djembe and dundun style) and of jeli music, then what distinguishes a jeli from any other West African musician and jeli music from any other kind of polyrhythmic music?

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Balafon cross-rhythms have the same foundation as drumming, but they complexify the technology. First, it adds melodic phrases. Where in drumming there are three basic notes—base, tone, and slap—the balafon works with about 23 notes, in which the player can form “melodic cross-­ rhythms.” As Famoro said, he plays “the melody and rhythm together” to get people aligned in the same place with the downbeat, then he can change it. The jeli complexifies the melodic cross-rhythms by purposely manipulating them, by breaking them in different ways, and by emphasizing different parts of the rhythm. He may do this for himself, for his own practice or enjoyment or to show his expertise, as many musicians do when they play solos. But he may also intentionally manipulate them in order to engage and play with the listeners. When he does it intentionally to engage, to play with the listeners, and perhaps to engage their participation and challenge them, this is an act of jeliya, this is wielding nyama. There is something else, a feeling by which Famoro envelops the audience. It is invisible to our normal senses of seeing and hearing. When Famoro plays, he influences people’s moods not just by the notes he plays, but through the feeling he has in his heart when he is playing them. He teaches this to David Racanelli and I (as well as others) quite pointedly in our balafon lessons. The goal is to create an easy, relaxed feeling in your heart and body as you play, which will be transmitted to the audience. Of course, it takes endless practice to play the music smoothly, to get comfortable with the crossrhythms, and to learn the time and the swing. Then, learning to manipulate the patterns around the time is its own challenge. Playing with a good feeling is part of the timing rhythm, swing, but it is also a feeling, perhaps an attitude of sincerity in connecting with the audience, as we play. It is nothing that the audience can necessarily express so much as intuit. It is also not true that all jelis do this. Famoro intends to invoke this feeling, and when he plays solo, there is a certain grace and fluidity that other balafon players do not necessarily have. This is what makes him a “jeliba” or a great jeli, sometimes called an ngara. When he plays with Kakande, Famoro does not always turn on or amplify this loving, graceful, alluring effect. Sometimes he is playing hard and fast to excite the audience. Insofar as he manipulates these feelings quite pointedly, he is practicing a high level of jeli-cultivated skill. But if it is done for entertainment, he is not practicing jeliya on the audience.

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He says that he has a personal relationship with his balafon that interests people when they hear the both of them (the balafon and Famoro) conversing. He tells me that it is a “Fire. It is spiritual. A feeling, a tension [attention?] between me and my balafon. We converse. We share something. Some people [in the audience] they ‘blah blah’ but I have the notes to bring them to me. That is my spirituality between me and my balafon. We get together to bring people to us, our conversation with God.” In Manding culture, there are these moments in which the jeli instrumentalist plays so sweetly and adeptly that the listeners are caught up in a sort of revelry, a bliss, or a strong emotion that the musician has created. If they are singers, they praise so forcefully, gracefully, so apropos to the current situation, that they stir deep emotion in the listener. Famoro says, you “get him there.” The response in Manding culture is for the listeners to throw money at the musician. Alfred Gell describes, “the canoe board [or in our case, the jeli music] is a psychological weapon, but not as a direct consequence of the visual [or aural] effects it produces. Its efficacy can be attributed to the fact that these disturbances, mild in themselves, are interpreted as evidence of the magical power emanating from the board [the balafon]. It is this magical power which may deprive the spectator of his reason. If, in fact, he behaves with unexpected generosity, it is interpreted as having done so.” (Gell, 1992, 46) I call these moments “getting jelied,” a term that Gray and I invented years ago. Americans may feel the power of the music but we do not have, or have a weakened sense of the generosity instinct to give money. When the hat is passed for band donations, it is already too late. The listeners have come back to their reasoning and may give less than if they were to throw money in the passion of the music. In Manding culture, the jeli can ostensibly ask for money or other favors if the listeners have a relationship to the jeli. Then, knowing you had been entirely enchanted by his or her power, they feel you must give what they request, or you remain indebted to them, as we will see later.

Confirmation There is a marked difference between performance for entertainment purposes and jeliya. Most jeli musicians playing in bands for non-Manding audiences are using their high-level skills to perform and entertain. Few

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use their skills of jeliya pointedly, on an audience. Those examples that come close, to me, are often world-renowned kora players such as Toumani Diabaté from Mali, who plays solo and in duets with American and European erudite musicians. They can cultivate a feeling in the audience. But do they engage and interact with the audience directly? Sometimes, perhaps. The first time that I asked Famoro if he was able to “jeli” the American audience it was February 2013, almost 8 years to the day that I asked him in 2021. It was evening, and we were bundled in heavy jackets, walking up Malcolm X Boulevard between 132nd and 133rd, close-by his house and not far from Shrine World Music Venue, where Kakande played monthly. I felt it was so important that I caught my question and his response on video, which can be seen on my websites.13 “Do you feel you know how to talk to toubabs now, through your music?” “Oh yeah. It is just going with feeling. The music I do isn’t written. So it goes with feeling….Manding music is a little bit difficult for people. Because you have to know, you know? So if you don’t know, it’s gonna be....If I’m behind my balafon, put any people in front of me, I understand them. I’m just gonna do something to bring them to me, to share life. I know that. Yeah, I know that. Any kind of people. Bad people. Good people. I know how to get them.” “Is that part of being a jeli?” “Exactly. Yeah. ’Cause you might see some people, they’re not happy, they’re [feeling] bad. But anytime you become lovely, [you come] respectfully, and [you bring] a beautiful smile, and a beautiful thing like music, never have borders, universal, you gonna bring something. So that part? You get him there. Yeah.”

Notes 1. David Racanelli contrasts the same Manding Jeli music played in two contexts in New York City. What I call the Manding context he calls the “diasporic African context” (2014). We both call the other context “cosmopolitan” referring to a culturally diverse audience. 2. For more information about the Authenticité movement, see Counsel, G. (2008).

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3. Ryan Skinner describes how Malians negotiate “social spaces” in the diaspora in New York (Skinner, 2008) employing De Certeau (1984), Lefebvre (1991) theories on creating social spaces in economic-political contexts. 4. Bon Fils Kouyaté had a featured role in Broadway’s production of Fela, much to the pride of the jeli community and friends in New York. 5. Thanks to Barbara Hoffman for assistance with this and other Manding translations and orthography. 6. Paulla Ebron does a deep analysis of how jeli music is performed for American audiences as opposed to West African audiences, noting particularly, how American audiences pay fixed prices for entry and sit facing the stage. Alternatively in the Gambia, audience members are part of a “patronage system” that supports the activities of a jeli, and the jeli makes “status distinctions within their audience whereas Western audiences they see as homogenous” (Ebron, 2002, 60–61). 7. Barbara Hoffman refers to the effects of the music on audience members in both Griots at War (2000) when she describe the effects of Binta Diabate’s singing on the Canton Chief and in her article “Out on Malian Television” (2012) when she talks about the effects of jelimuso’s eye contact while singing to television audiences. 8. Katherine Hagerdorn (2001), among other anthropologists researching music of the African diaspora, discusses the difference between playing batá drums and dancing for the orishas in Santaría—a sacred act—and playing or dancing the same music for entertainment. It is similar to my description, “for deep listening” or for entertainment, but they are not diametrically opposed. I believe the music can slide between the two. 9. Alfred Gell is referring to Malinowski’s description of the Trobriander Kula exchange ceremony. In this ceremony, Trobrianders take time and effort to have their artists design their canoe boards. They then travel across the sea to the nearby island of their Kula exchange partners, who will give them shell bracelets and necklaces (they return the gesture in the next exchange). The Canoe boards are supposed to be so well crafted that the givers in the ceremony give their finest jewelry without holding back. 10. See Lucy Duran who speaks of jelimuso singers who “move their patrons to bestow legendary gifts on them, such as houses, airplane tickets, and even a small plane” (Duran 1989, as referred to in Charry 2000, 96). 11. Ethnomusicologist Steve Pond and my PhD Dissertation Chair commented in 2006: The melody is a descending scalar line. What throws the listener off is that she expects the melody to line up with the strong metric pulses (in 4/4 time, the understood hierarchy is on-beat rather than off-

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beat, and the beats are stressed in the following declining order: 1-3-2-4 (sometimes 1-3-4-2, as when beat 4 serves as a pick up for the next measure’s beat 1: ‘and ONE’)). It is a demonstration also that in Western aesthetics, melody trumps rhythm and meter, since the listener is trying hard to reconcile the ‘errant’ rhythm with the ‘correct’ melodic line and logic— and finding herself completely wrong (from an example of beat misalignment in ‘Tell Me Something Good’ by Rufus.) 12. I have already mentioned CK Ladzekpo in Chap. 4 when learning to play this music. The same lesson comes from listening to the music. To reiterate, CK Ladzekpo identifies a psychological benefit to cross-rhythmic drumming in speaking of his own culture’s Anlo-Ewe music in Ghana, the principles of which are quite similar. He describes cross-rhythmic drumming as “a preventive prescription for extreme uneasiness of mind or selfdoubt about one’s capacity to cope with impending or anticipated problems” (see http://www.richardhodges.com/ladzekpo/PrinciplesFr. html, October 4, 2016). 13. Websites www.lisafeder.com, www.MandingGrooves.com, and Instagram @Manding_Grooves.

References Appiah, K. A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism. W.W. Norton and Co. Berliner, P. F. (1994). Thinking in Jazz: Composing in the Moment. Jazz Educators Journal, 26, 28–34. Charry, E. (2000). Mande Music. University of Chicago Press. Chernoff, J.  M. (1979). African Rhythm and African Sensibility. University of Chicago Press. Counsel, G. (2008, February). The Search for Authenticity in the Global Age: Artists and Art Policy in Francophone West Africa. African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific Annual Conference, Australian National University. De Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press. Duran, L. (1989). Djely Musso–woman of Mali. Folk Roots, 75, 34–39. Ebron, P. (2002). Performing Africa. Princeton University Press. Floyd Jr, S. A. (1996). The power of black music: Interpreting its history from Africa to the United States. Oxford University Press. Gell, A. (1992). The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology. In J. Coote & A. Shelton (Eds.), Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics. Clarendon Press. Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso. Hagerdorn, K. (2001). Divine Utterances. Smithsonian Insititute. Hale, T. (1998). Griots and Griottes. Indiana University Press.

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Hannerz U. (1990). Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture. Theory, Culture & Society, 7(2–3), 237–251. Hannerz, U. (1996). Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge. Hoffman, B. (2000). Griots at War. Indiana University Press. Hoffman, B. (2012). Out on Malian Television. In Mande Studies. Indiana University Press. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Blackwell. Racanelli, D. (2014). Guitar Playing and Representation in the Changing Locations of New  York City’s African Music Scene. Ethnomusicology, 58(2), 278–314. Skinner, R. T. (2008). Celebratory Spaces Between Homeland and Host: Politics, Culture, and Performance in New York’s Malian Community. Migrations and Creative Expressions in Africa and the African Diaspora, 279–298. Van Buren, T. (2001). The Music of the Manden in New  York City: A Study of Applied Ethnomusicology in a West African Immigrant Community. Ph.D Dissertation, University of Maryland.

Discography Kakande. (2008). Dununya. Jumbie Records.

CHAPTER 8

Manding New York: Jeliya Bara Bang

Griots of the sons of independence have traded the gold of their profession for copper (Massa Makan Diabaté in Keita 1995, 184)

“Jeliya is finished!” says Missia Saran Dioubaté. It is May 2018, and we are in her apartment in Newark, New Jersey. She is laughing as she sings this to Famoro Dioubaté. She is devised a clever way to conjure the image. “Once, we had jelis—the left arm,” she counts it on her first finger, pronouncedly. “Once, we had nobles—the right arm,” she counts it on her second finger. “Once, we had fina [Muslim scholars]—the left leg; once, we had numu [blacksmiths]—the right leg. Now, they are all mixed up. Society is just a bunch of arms now! No one knows the difference between the nobles and the jelis. Guinea is all mixed up. Everything finished! Jeliya is finished!” She laughs as she says this. Famoro watches her, stone faced and unmoved by her powerful speech. When she is done, he rubs his head, then sits back down to play the balafon for her latest recording. She is remaking “Titriba,” one of her hits from the 1990s. On her albums, Missia sings composed songs mixed with bits of praising patrons, from Guinea to Paris to cities across the United States, who have sponsored her recently. A jelimuso, a woman-jeli, is generally a singer. It is part of her responsibility to keep society on the right track through the words she sings, poetically, emphatically. Today, she

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Feder, Jeliya at the Crossroads, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83059-5_8

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issues a warning to the people of her country, Guinea. It is a complaint that we have lost our traditional ways, that everything is all mixed up, and that this is not good. With this concern in mind, we visit in this chapter current-day jeli-led musical events in Manding communities in both the United States and the grand metropole of Paris to focus on the state of jeliya in cities outside of Africa. In a jeli-event, the people involved act out patterns of behavior that symbolize and reinforce specific values and roles in Manding society that date back hundreds of years. I notice how these events now held abroad are influenced by contemporary factors and new cultural contexts. There is greater access to US dollars and euros and a greater need to earn them. There is access to a wider variety of international products including technology, and more, that shift the form of jeliya from the way it might have been, and still is, in some rural and urban West African contexts. On the one hand, jeliya is known for its adaptability and incorporates many of these influences to further propel its purpose. On the other hand, some of these modern factors seem to be threatening the continuation of jeliya as we know it. What I perceive as an imminent threat today may have actually been long in coming. In his article honoring two of Mali’s most renowned jelis and poets, Massa Makan Diabaté and Banzumana Sissoko, author Chérif Keita describes the ideal to which jelis once upheld (1995). Both jelis claimed, before their deaths in the 1980s, that the moral integrity and commitment to truth to which jelis once strived had begun disintegrating since colonization. Sissoko placed “a high premium on moral integrity, a value which is celebrated in oral traditions through the oral expression sanun suman jeli (the griot with the purity of gold)” (1995, 185). Diabaté blamed French colonization for the eventual disintegration of Manding society that flattened the differences between the three principal caste divisions, hɔrɔn (nobles), nyamakala (craftsmen), and jɔn (slaves). In the 1970s, with the military takeover of the socialist regimes of the 1960s, they witnessed the first griots who took advantage of “credulity and vanity” of the elite for the griots’ own success. This marked a break from the role of a true jali. “To be a true jali, you have to be a sarafo, a person who will sacrifice his life for the truth” (Keita, 1995, 185–188). This chapter relates to the previous one in that jeli music is being played in New York City, but for Manding audiences. In exploring how the jeli event, which I frame as a musicking ritual (Small, 1998), is performed today I pose several questions: What are the continuities and the

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discontinuities in jeliya from the Manding real or imagined past? What are the signs that jeliya is influenced by and is adapting to Western and global realities? How do adaptations threaten the survival of jeliya?

Methodology In this chapter there is a shift in my methodology in that my embodied participation is not the focus of the study. Now I am an (embodied) observer and outsider in the events taking place, perhaps a more classic participant-observer. The shift in position is a practical one—I am not so integrated into Manding society at large that I play a primary role in Manding jeli-led rituals. My understanding of the jeli ritual in Manding contexts is based on several things: first, my prior and continual experience in jeli ritual events such as B’s house-warming party in Chap. 5; second, how these rituals relate to my experiences with “being jelied” when Famoro and others play or sing for me at home; third, my extended discussions with several jeli informants concerning their views about these ritual events; and finally, examining what other scholars have said about these rituals. My initial reactions to these rituals, admittedly, is shock, awe, and aversion, an etic view, to say the least.

Levels of Access One of the perks of being an attentive fan of Kakande and Mandingo Ambassadors, and a dedicated student of jeliya, was that Famoro and other jelis such as Mamady Kouyaté, and later, in Paris, relatives and friends of theirs, invited me to attend jeli concerts and events meant exclusively for the community of Manding Guineans. Attending such events is part of both my fieldwork experience and my duty as an apprentice and supporter of Manding culture all at once. Having a car is an asset that I can use to offer a service to my jeli friends in exchange for high levels of access to their inner world of jeliya. I am honored, because it is a sign that they trust me, trust that I know how to act and speak appropriately, to be helpful rather than a nuisance, to be patient, to not question how they roll. One night, Famoro asked me to come to his house at 7 pm. Missia was there, waiting for the concert to start in which she would be the main jelimuso singer. When I arrived, they were still in casual clothing. The gig did not start until much later. The time was not defined. I had 5 hours of unexpected hang-out time. I was sent on errands. I watched soccer. I

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watched Missia getting ready, admired her as she did an astounding make­up job with many layers of products, the last of which sparkled. I hung out with her in the bedroom where she watched Guinean pop TV. She wrapped a sparkling light blue and pink skirt around her waist. Slid a tunic over her head, tied a headwrap, all matching. Myrrh incense burned in a tray at the doorway. It was quiet in the house this evening. People were conserving and focusing their energy for the all-night event. At around 11 pm, Famoro announced, “we go.” Missia stayed behind and I did not understand why she was not coming but I did not ask questions. I waited to see what would become apparent. I carried Famoro’s balafon stand to the car. When we arrived in front of the venue, five other musicians, Famoro’s buddies, piled in and used my car as the “waiting” zone to hide out from the incoming audience. They smoked, laughed, complimented each other’s shiny new shoes, all in Malinké and Sousou. They cranked down windows and offered handshakes to people who spotted them. “A be di?” How are things? “Alhumdiliah.” Thank God, fine. Sometimes they switched to French or English to joke with me too. When they got a signal, they left me all at once, and Famoro sent me back home to get Missia. I went upstairs and she was still not ready. She told me to sit. So I sat on the couch, watching the Guinean dance show on TV. Soon she joined me on the couch. We sat together in silence, waiting for the phone call. Midnight passed. 1 am passed. Finally, at 1:10 am, the phone rang. They were ready for Missia. I drove her to the venue and escorted her through the backstage door. I helped her clasp her necklace and fix her earrings. She asked me for the final approval. I gave her the thumbs up. She stood in the wings, clutching a microphone. The musicians were already playing. She took her time. At the inspired moment, she bellowed into the mic before people could even see her. They cheered. Then she walked out onstage. A true diva.

Manding Jeli Concerts Jeli-led events, or jeli rituals, come in the form of music concerts, family-­ style baby-namings, weddings, and funerals. Sometimes they mark important political events or community celebrations, or national-level annual celebrations such as Mamaya, a festival that occurs in cities throughout France and the United States.1

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In these Manding-exclusive jeli concerts, bands may consist of 5–10 musicians and may include drumset, balafon, kora, bass, electric guitars, djembe, dundun, and sometimes, in smaller concerts, just a balafon and a drum and bass machine.2 There are usually 2–10 singers, often jelimusolu (plural), or female jelis. The concert might take place in a rented auditorium in a Harlem-based high school or a church. A sound system is rented and generally there are videographers. The attendees, dressed in fancy African fabrics, may range from 100 to 300 people. I have attended such events in rented event halls on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia, and in the Bronx and Harlem, New York, and several in the banlieux, or suburbs of Paris, from 2005 to the present (2020). The first time I attended a large-­ scale jeli concert for Manding people was unforgettable. I wrote a detailed story about it just afterward, using my video recordings to remind me.

Oumou Versus Missia The promoters of the Oumou-Missia concert printed hundreds of postcards. The cards had two photos, each portraying a sister singing individually, their images positioned as if singing at each other. Written over the pictures was the necessary information. May 21, at 127th Street between Lenox and 5th. Start time: 10 pm. The names of the marraine and parrain3 and 10 guests d’honneur were listed. These special guests were also responsible for the money to make the event happen. The ticket price was $20. The cards, written in a mix of French and English, were spread around Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx in the most popular West African restaurants. Famoro also had a stack on his dining room table. He grabbed a handful every time he left the house. One sat on the dashboard of my car, facing outward for the public to read. Another sat on my desk at home. They were ubiquitous. According to my naïve ideas of how music concerts should go, the audience members would sit in seats and maybe stand and dance at our seats while the musicians played songs for us. I assumed that Missia and Oumou would take turns singing, and perhaps sometimes sing together. I assumed that the house lights would be down and the stage lights would be trained on the musicians. I thought I would hear some high-quality balafon music like the kind that Famoro plays in a solo for American audiences. I knew there would be a band with a drum set and bass. I thought all eyes and ears would be on the singers and musicians. The reality could not have been more different.

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Inside the auditorium, the first two rows were reserved for invited guests, guests d’honneur, la marraine, le parrain, and me. Some of the finest dressed ladies I have ever seen sat there. Their grand boubous, long tunic tops with matching ankle-length wrap skirts, were shiny, sparkly, lacey, and elaborately tie-dyed with stars and dots of various sizes in eye-­ boggling patterns. They clutched sparkly purses that matched their sequined shoes, their brightly painted lips, and their eye shadow. It might be a color theme of yellows and browns, or a theme of blues and pinks. Whatever the theme a woman chose for her dress, it was highly coordinated and planned. Their matching headwraps were tied elaborately around their heads, stacked high in multi-tiers, with starched ends extending out in different directions. A certain woman of importance wore a black tunic with large, gaping sleeves. On the front was an enormous butterfly made of tiny colorful sequins that were hand-sewn to make a beautiful pattern. Her underlying wrap skirt poking out just a few inches from the bottom of her tunic was the same yellow hue, as was her eye shadow. She was a marvelous sight.4 Oumou Dioubaté, one of Guinea’s finest jelimusos, came to the stage singing “Muso de Siguiri,” one of her most famous tunes, about the hardships of pregnancy. The houselights remained on, and the room was bright. Women in the audience stood and made their respective ways to the front of the stage to dance. Oumou spotted a patron, and the song quickly turned to extemporized praise-singing. The group of women wandered to the side stairs that led up to the stage itself, and in a row, they climbed the steps, clutching purses and holding up skirts to avoid tripping, and exposing their fancy shoes. They gathered in front of Oumou on the stage. There were 8 of them, then 9, 10, 15. Oumou turned to face the women as they approached. Oumou praised the lady in front, who seemed to barely pay attention to Oumou’s emphatic, stylized speech. The lady made comments to her friends over her shoulder. She looked back at the singer, stone-faced, then she talked to her friends again. At some point, she opened her purse and collected a few $20 bills, which she held in her hand. Oumou continued singing to her, seemingly ignoring the fact that the woman was talking to others. The others behind the leading woman opened up their wallets too. Oumou sang repeated syllables percussively. Then she belt out long, drawn-out melissima notes in the direction of the one being praised. Friends handed the praised lady their piles of money, which she collected in a fistful. Eventually, the praised lady passed the piles of cash that she had collected over to the jelimuso. Oumou stopped

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praising, and the crowd of women turned on a dime and swished back to their seats, gingerly stepping in their heels so as to not catch their long skirts on the steps. When Missia came to praise-sing, her eyes opened wide. She was emphatic. She gestured to Allah, finger pointing in the air, then to Ameriki, she pointed toward the ground, to Guinée, to people in the woman’s past (she pointed behind her), to the world, douniya, (she circled her arm around). She drew a picture of the woman’s world, praising her for all she has done to bring her family here, to “Ameriki.” Sometimes a patron cracked a smile or her friends cheered at what Missia was saying. Sometimes the friends raised the patron’s arm above her head, helping the patron to acknowledge the praise. But mostly the women remained utterly nonchalant, almost blaisé to the force of power being belted out at them from deep in the lungs of the jelimuso. Their nonchalance was as remarkable to me as the power in Missia’s voice. The relationships between these two forces, the praised one and the jelimuso, creates a building tension until the money shatters it like glass and the scene dissolves. The band plays behind the singers, but the instrumentalists remain secondary, almost unnoticed. They are in the background, and I can barely glimpse them for the crowd that develops every few minutes on center stage. They play the appropriate supporting songs that refer to particular family lineages and pieces of Manding history. They play the kumbengo, the cyclical, repeating patterns of the song. Sometimes the balafonist, Famoro, plays a run down the balafon in a pause of praising. Sometimes, when the jelimuso is in between lines, the guitarist echoes the chorus. Occasionally, the djembe, balafon, or guitar punctuates what the jelimuso sings by matching or responding to a part of her phrase in notes and rhythm. But no one throws money at the musicians and the focus of the attention in the room remains on the patron-women and the jelimusos. Throughout the night, DJ Mouzbill, in jeans and sports jacket, and Missia’s jelimuso friend, a woman in a yellow boubou, run between the stage and the audience, transmitting messages from the audience to the jeli about whom to praise. Similarly, entourage after entourage of women get up from their seats and move up to the front of the stage en masse to be praised and to throw their money. Late in the night, after Missia and Oumou have changed outfits several times already, Missia comes to the stage wearing tight pants with a knit halter top, her dreadlocks in a high ponytail. She is known as petit piment, the little spicy one, in Guinea.5 A thin, tall man comes to the stage, and she

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dances with him, imitating sexual gestures. Then she returns to praising. Some men also come to the stage to be praised. They wear sports jackets and jeans with shiny black shoes. Some older men stand in the back in business suits or African traditional tunics and pants. Some people offer hundreds of dollars. One woman strings a necklace of $5 bills, sewn together, over Missia’s head, which Missia wears for a while. There are two designated money sweepers who periodically gather the money from the stage floor and throw it into a large black plastic garbage bag. People also offer folded African fabrics for making clothing, gold jewelry, even a gold Macy’s credit card (to Missia), with which she told me later, she would fill up “deux valises,” or two suitcases, of clothing. I am completely dazed by the loud decibel level of Malinké, Sousou, and French blaring from the sound system. It is irritating at first, until my head turns to mush and I no longer care. To me, the music remains a side factor; after a time, I barely notice it for the glitz, the parading of women, and the intense vocals of the jelimuso. At around 4:15  am, the singing comes to an abrupt end, the sound system cuts out, and the audience filters out without further ado. The band members count the money collected in the garbage bag and distribute it among themselves before packing up. No one wastes time getting out of there and heading home.

Reflection on My Shock This concert was a shock to me on several levels. First, the decibel level of the music distorted the quality of sound and seemed unreasonably loud. Second, I had seen a lot of African women dressed up for events, but I had never seen women dressed up to this particular level of glitz. This level of fancy dressing, I came to notice, was common in jeli events in Paris and New York. Third, while I had seen praise-singing and money throwing in Guinea at a housewarming party and at a jeli hybrid concert (mixed with American-based dancers), I had never imagined that the whole night would be a parade of women onstage expecting to be praised in order to increase their reputation, and that in return they would spray hundreds of dollars on the jelimuso in exchange.6 Money, and how it was used in jeli contexts was astonishing to me. I did not plan to join this aspect of the culture, but I still felt I had to learn something about it. Last, where was the enchanting balafon music that I expected? It dawned on me that the

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show was not so much about the musicians as it was about the audience members who attended it: the noble caste, the patrons, and their hɔrɔn. The jelis and audience members were playing out the age-old relations of schismogenesis (Hoffman, 2000) between the hɔrɔn noble elite in opposition to the nyamakala, those who wield nyama. Paulla Ebron describes the performance as a place to play out “a variety of distinctions” such as exist between jeli and hɔrɔn, but also between hɔrɔns’ individual power and prestige and their associated social networks (Ebron, 2002, 65). Sory Camara explains a “vivacious desire to be a hero, a powerful man” among the hɔrɔn is to “show it through ostentation. To show he is rich it isn’t enough to exhibit his fortune, but to show that we give little importance to the wealth we possess” (Camara, 2007, 189–190). However, in New York City, the ostensible underlying motivation to carry out this traditional and noble act—to show that money is of little importance—becomes a way for jelis to earn their living from their patrons as well.

Tracing Jeliya Over the next 15 years, I attended many more events such as this one, in which the concert mostly entailed groups of finely dressed patron women coming face-to-face with the jelimusos; the jelimusos spoke and sang extemporized praises, for which the praised ones threw lots of money. To trace this event back to the jeli story of origin helps to shed light on the trajectory that brought us to the present. In the jeli story of origin of the thirteenth century, Nyanguman Duwa, the man who would become the first balafon jeli, finds King Soumanoro Kante’s balafon. The king becomes angry when he hears his balafon being played, but Nyanguman sings of the king’s great family lineage and plays so sweetly that he charms (or enchants) the king, who forgets his anger and bestows on the jeli the beautiful name Bala Fa Segue Kouyaté, the first of the Kouyaté family. When Soundiata Keita, the first Manding Emperor of 1235 CE wins his jeli back from Soumanoro Kanté through trickery, Jeli Kouyaté encourages Soundiata to find his strength to overcome his physical disability and march to fight against the unjust Kanté and unite the Manding Empire under one democratic nation. Since then, it is believed that behind every great ruler there is a jeli supporting and advising him.

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But jelis did not just encourage and sweeten the ruling elite at this time. Jelis would praise any person in the society who did a brave and noble act. And they could also call out publicly those who committed shameful acts. They would immortalize heroic acts and praise a person who expended his wealth on the jeli for showing that personal wealth is not the most important thing in life (Camara, 2007, 191). I have been told by jelis that jelis in pre-colonial times supposedly always told the truth for the benefit of serving the totality of society.7 As the Manding Empire crumbled, jelis continued to serve the people. Jelis would specialize in certain family lineages. If your family had a jeli, he or she would know your family history and genealogy as well as the great acts of your ancestors. As life-changing events happened in your current family—marriages, births, and deaths, for instance—jelis would be present to weave the current events into the family’s history through stylized speech and song. Famoro calls jelis the “sutures” of society, or the threads that weave everyone’s stories together. Moussa Samba (Kouyaté family, né 1994, Kankan, Guinea, living in Paris) explained the term soliyo to me, a calling of the horses, a precursor to “glorify your ancestors to you” (private conversations 2018).8 He adds that “in the history that the griot told, there were zero lies inside.”9 Famoro seconded the idea that soliyo is like a greeting used only by jelis that gives spiritual power to the praises that the jeli sings. Family names are the source of tradition and strength. Great people in your family’s past will encourage you to do great things.10 In Manding culture, the term fadenya, (or father-son-like relationship based on competitiveness) is relevant here in that naming great people of the patron’s past will motivate him or her to be equal or to surpass their ancestors (Hoffman, private communication 2021). The jeli’s role in glorifying the ancestors is well respected and coveted because of its positive effects on people’s mental health and the good it brings to society as a whole. Soliyo and the praises that follow are a method or a Manding jeli technique to encourage and inspire people. Today we might relate this to life coaches, motivational leaders, therapists, spiritual gurus, or sports coaches. These people perform roles in our society to help us reach our highest potential, to believe in the benefits of positive thinking, to overcome self-­doubt, and to find courage in ourselves. One thing jeliya emphasizes that these practices may not is to exercise generosity. Most of the aforementioned, modern-day practices charge a set amount, except for spiritual or religious leaders who may similarly function on donations.

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Parallels Between Singing and Instrumental Jeliya The instrumental music has several important functions. It underscores a family genealogy. Certain noble families have songs for their lineages. Instrumental music also is associated with certain people of notoriety such as Soundiata Keita, Mansa Musa, who was a wealthy leader, and Samoury Touré, who was a Malinké warrior who resisted French colonization. The music supports the jeli singers as well. A balafonist may echo or provide exclamation points to certain sung phrases. But I must also note that the music has certain positive effects on the mental state, as I have shown previously, that serve the same purpose as the praise-singing. The music can glorify the ancestors. The music can calm, balance, and soothe the minds and also strengthen the intellect, much like praise-singing is meant to do. But in this kind of concert, deep listening to the instruments is not highlighted.

Moussa Recounts Historical Jeliya In Paris, Moussa Samba (Kouyaté), told me his version of the story of jeliya in precolonial times to which we may relate the current-day jeli events (recorded at the author’s home in Paris, October 26, 2018). Before colonization, during the time of the African kingdoms, each representative in the court gave their report on the current events of the various tribes in the kingdom to the king (or other rulers) so that they may know how to lead the people and make decisions. Moussa called the meeting “l’Assemblée Nationale, where” he emphasized, “the griots were consulted in the final position.” He explained that in their society, “the blacksmiths were there, they gave their opinion, the warriors were there and gave their opinion, the religious leaders were there and gave their opinion, the tribal leaders were there and gave their opinion. The king had representation from all the activities, because they needed everyone’s opinion. After knowing everybody’s opinion, it was the griot who was consulted, in the final position, because he knew everyone, he has the chance to converse with everyone, and he knows the history of all the families, he knows the history of all the tribes, he knows the stories of all of the wars. He was the person in first position next to the heads of power. They didn’t take his word as opinion but as advice. The jelis before did not lie. All they said was the truth.”

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Moussa explained to me that the jelis could not be bought with money in precolonial times. “They did not belong to the kings. They belonged to the community, and for their services, they were tax exempt. They received donations for their livelihood from anyone who had something to give. And they sang for anyone who was newsworthy—those who did good deeds. If the griot cursed you, your life was screwed. The griot didn’t do politics. He said the truth to everyone, all the time. He was considered to be correct by everyone. He couldn’t sing for a rich person and not for a poor person. A griot didn’t care about that. He was only interested in the dignity of people.”

The Modern-Day Jeli Event as Musicking Ritual How do these stories of origin relate to what is happening in the jeli ritual we see today? I see the modern-day jeli event as a mirror of the past but in condensed time. Whereas jelis in precolonial times drifted between villages, and presided over important events all the time, today, people must congregate at one scheduled event to play out these age-old practices together. Ethnomusicologist Christopher Small’s definition of musicking as a ritual is helpful to describe how the present relates to the past. The jeli music event, as other musical rituals like the Western symphony, is a concentrated time during which “relationships are brought into existence between the participants that model, in metaphoric form, ideal relationships as they imagine them to be. In this way the participants not only learn about those relationships but actually experience them in their bodies. They explore the relationships, they affirm and they celebrate them” (Small, 1998, 96). The patterned behaviors of a jelimuso like Missia, vis-à-vis the audience participants, directly reestablishes the supportive and deferential role of jeli to elite. The jelis reenact their role, to sweeten and encourage the nobles with praises, as they have done since 1235 CE. They do so with impassioned and emotional speech that the noble caste are not normally permitted to express.11 Insofar as the jeli does a good job, the noble rewards the jeli for her creative talent in evoking emotion. I have seen Missia take the mic from another jelimuso because she had something to say to a particular patron whose life she knew something about. Missia skillfully retold a good story from this woman’s past to her, punctuating her own speech with, “Isn’t it so?” to which the lady would nod. She moved that woman, and the only form of acceptable expression for a noble

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is to bestow a gift on the jeli for her good work. To show her approval, the noble woman gave Missia a handful of money, perhaps $700. The Manding noble ladies in return reenact qualities of the noble caste: for example, they remain calm and cool in the face of praise or blame; they are able to show their generosity.12 This technique reinforces a skill that serves the noble day today: to stay calm and cool in the face of heightened emotions that might arise in the course of life’s tribulations.13 It is the jeli’s job (as the occult technician14) to “get her there,” as Famoro said of the American audience, to make the patron “lose her cool” by evoking strong emotion in her, for which her only recourse, as a noble, is to give gifts. In theory, they have also come together to hear the good deeds and happenings of their community and to be woven into their family’s history. When the jeli tells the truth, and does so skillfully, it has great value to bond the community together around good ideals of generosity and courage. So, they have ostensibly come to be moved by the jeli’s stories about their lives, just as their ancestors have done for hundreds of years. They also come to congregate, to dress up, as we all like to do, and to enjoy time with their community that is scattered throughout a foreign city abroad. These events are celebratory moments for participants.

The Flame in Jeliya Jeliya is decidedly not dogmatic, yet manages (to some degree) to carry out important elements—the flame of the tradition—it was meant to maintain. A word about “tradition”: Anthropologists do not like to use this word. They do not like to use any word that insinuates that some aspect of culture is static. For the most part, I agree and understand this argument. Culture is created by humans, and we also have the wonderful ability to be agents in that culture, to change and press upon it, to allow it to morph to suit currents needs, desires, and dreams. A primary principle in anthropology is that culture is dynamic. The fear is that we might depict a culture as static, we may exotify it for being “traditional” and think it is spoiled when it changes. It is usually something imposed on by outsiders or by elite authorities, and it runs the risk of oppressing human freedom to sovereignty. But there is a flame to pass on. To glorify someone’s ancestors and inspire them to do brave, heroic, and great deeds that equal or surpass their ancestors, fadenya, may be a ritualized act worth passing on, particularly when those deeds are based on the betterment of humanity. For

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example, extemporized praise-singing can be intended to elicit courage and generosity in people. This is part of the flame in jeliya.15 The instrumental music, the way it is composed and improvised to draw in the listeners for deep listening and intellectual participation, is also part of that flame. But what happens when histories are forgotten and glorifications are fabricated? This harkens back to the questions I asked at the beginning of the chapter: What are the signs that jeliya is influenced by and is adapting to Western and global realities? and How do adaptations threaten the survival of jeliya? Last, why should it matter to anyone who is not part of this community? The guardians of the culture, the elders, judge their protégés on how well they are adapting jeliya to current times while keeping the flame alive, as we have seen. El Hadj Djeli Sory Kouyaté made sure that Famoro Dioubaté fully developed his skills on the traditional diatonic balafon before he tried to play a chromatic one. The same elder was present to critique the jeli musician I call B, and his multi-cultural show at the Franco-­ Guinean Cultural Center in Conakry. When Famoro was recording his first album, Dununiya, in 2007, Mamady Kouyaté, his elder and colleague, was present to assist Famoro in upholding the highest ideals in jeliya. Jelis help one another safeguard their practice, to make sure they are doing their level best to respect the culture, to tell their histories well, or to play the notes without compromising the integrity of the music. But the Manding jeli event in places like New  York and Paris indicate that sometimes the system is breaking down. Today, some jelis denounce other jelis for praising just to get money, and some patrons opt to hire DJs or listen to jeli CDs because hiring jelis costs too much.16

When the Flame Starts to Flicker Some jelis and patrons are questioning whether this kind of modern-day jeli event is really performing the service it was meant to. Some, like Missia in the introduction, believe that jelis no longer act like jelis and that nobles no longer act like nobles, that neither are respecting the roles they once maintained. “Everyone is all mixed up.” Other informants suspect that some jelis lie to patrons, exaggerating their good deeds in order to make more money, and competing with one another to praise. Likewise, patrons are accused of promising big gifts to jelis who can enhance their reputation in front of the community in events like these. Furthermore, there are

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shifts in the way that jeli music is performed, as I will explain below where we look at some of those issues and what jelis have to say about them as part of answering the question: What are the continuities and the discontinuities in jeliya from the Manding real or imagined past? Singing Versus Instrumentation Until now I have emphasized the “enchanting” effects that jeli music can have on me. At the jeli event I highlighted previously in this chapter, it was the praise-singers who held all the attention. In postcolonial West Africa, jeli singers have become more prominent than the instrumentalists, all of whom happen to be exclusively men.17 In 1996, professor of ethnology Mamadou Diawara explained that the women, jelimusolu, rose to prominence and began to overshadow the male instrumentalists (1996).18 National radio, which in the 1960s and 1970s became a new means for consumption of music, helped contribute to this transformation where women moved to the forefront. In the radio studios and over the waves, the vocalists became stars, drawing attention to the praises they sang to big political figures in order to be recognized. These singers became more prominent, while the instrumentalists became secondary, often no one knew who they were (Diawara, 1996, 10). So, with the modern-jeli event, people come for the big-name singers who can praise them and elevate them. The balafon, the kora, and the other instruments are relegated to the background. While they serve as an important foundation for the jeli’s singing, they do not occupy a place in which the musicians’ hard-earned skills and talents are used on patrons to heal and balance society. There is no appropriate alternative place for the instrumentalists as there were in African villages and cities. This, I contend, is to the detriment of modern-day jeliya, and it is no wonder that young jelis are turning more and more to singing hip-hop than playing the traditional instruments. In modern-day cosmopolitan cities, merely playing one’s instrument has neither the same moral effect nor the marketability that singing does. Both Famoro Dioubaté and Mamady “Djeliké Kouyaté have told me that Manding jeli events have fueled their desire to create bands like Kakande and Mandingo Ambassadors for non-Manding audiences that highlight their instrumental skills and give them a chance to reclaim their power.19  Cosmopolitan audiences reopen a space that instrumentation once held in Manding society for deep listening.

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We might draw a parallel to Western culture, where once classical music was the predominant respected musical form. Symphonies and classical music are still well respected in Western culture, but they are, likewise, suffering from a lack of support. There is a place for jeli music within the classical music idiom in Western cultures. However, many young Western musicians, in addition to jelis, are more interested in electronic music and lyrics that center on romance and sex and appeal to a wide range of young listeners, globally. Debunking the Hɔrɔn Famoro Dioubaté explains that the decline of such a trustworthy relationship is something he has witnessed in his lifetime. Hɔrɔn, he says, no longer exists. By this he means that those of the noble cast who should demonstrate higher values—calmness, humility, courage, generosity, all of which are qualities that jelis supposedly reinforce in nobles—do not uphold these values anymore. He will not even permit me to use the word unless I am referring to a time in the past. He wants me to use the word jatigi (patron) instead of hɔrɔn (noble). When I asked him whether he knew true hɔrɔns in his lifetime, he told me, “so many, the list cannot finish!” “What is a noble?” I asked him. “The noble respects what he says. Love. No problem. Just make people sweet. You are a sweet man, you are sweet to God. You are not here to do bad things. That’s hɔrɔn. No more hɔrɔn now. I say that. Right now, there is no more hɔrɔn. When some jelis call people ‘hɔrɔn,’ me, I’m like, Shaaaa! Because it’s a lie!”20 Similarly, Moussa Samba explains about the jeli singers, “in this day and age, the griots allow themselves to say this term soliyo in front of a person of whose family they never even knew, they don’t even know the name of their parents, and he starts to sing lies to the person. Your grandfather did this. And your grandmother did that. Your father did that and your mother did that. And everything he says, everything she says about this person, nothing of it is true. And that is what is happening now… no one knows their history anymore.” These jelis believe that in jeli events today, patrons promise jelis big financial rewards in return for being praised, and meanwhile they do not display the good qualities of nobles. The jelis who succumb to such financial enticement equally ruin their own practice by selling out for money. When jelis succumb to nobles’ buying praises, and when nobles succumb

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to jelis fabricating lies about their family history, they are mutually causing the breakdown of the system. Money and inflated reputations replace the ethical behavior of days past. It is a familiar reality that people in many societies, including my own, are lamenting. Mamaya, a Sign? The first indication I had that jelis were fed up with one another over a desire to make money was in 2005, at a jeli-event I attended in Washington, DC. One jelimuso grabbed the mic one too many times, and a band member pulled the plug on her, effectively silencing her. Ethnomusicologist David Racanelli similarly noted that when “bands led by a jelimusow perform,” other jelimusow (the “w” like the “u” indicates the plural in Manding languages) attend and jockey for the microphone to add their own praises, costing the patrons, and he quotes Abdoulaye Djoss Diabaté “twenty dollars, twenty dollars, twenty dollars.” Jeli Abdoulaye Djoss Diabaté believes that this kind of competition among jelis causes many a party host to choose to pay a DJ rather than hire a jeli (Racanelli, 2011). One observation I have made over the past 15 years concerns the Mamaya celebrations I have attended in Atlanta, Georgia, New York, and Paris. It warrants further exploration. The Mamaya celebration originated in Kankan, Guinea, a city known for balafon jelis, a way for the town to come together. In the 1920s, this new festival mixed the old styles of balafon listening with line dancing in age groups, something not normally done in jeli music. Participants wear color-themed damask dress and dance with canes or handkerchiefs (Charry & Kaba, 2003). On the YouTube videos I have watched from Kankan, Guinea, the Mamaya celebrations from 2016–202021 show the emphasis on the music, generally three balafons, drums, and jelimuso singers, and the long line dances, sometimes with canes or handkerchiefs, and separated by sex. None of the emphasis is on praise-singing and money. In 2007, I attended my first Mamaya event in Atlanta, Georgia, with guitar-playing elder jeli, Mamady “Djeliké” Kouyaté. At this event, there was an obvious competition between at least four jelimusolu, with each one hoping to make more money and each one trying to honor the wealthy elite women with increasingly “better” praise-singing performances. Kouyaté described this Mamaya celebration we were attending in the outskirts of Atlanta as a social “who’s who,” a shameful, ostentatious

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display of wealth and popularity (Kouyaté, personal communications, June 6, 2007). I attended other Mamaya celebrations in 2014 and again in 2015 in the Bronx, New York. The instrumental formations resemble that of Kankan, being three balafons and dundun drums. However, the women came extravagantly dressed, some representing a theme color, others in elaborate grand boubous. The women walked in, a line formation, and almost immediately the praise-singing began and hundreds of dollars were thrown to the praising jelimusos for the rest of the night. In Paris, however, Mamaya celebrations I have attended (in 2018 and 2019) resemble more closely the Kankan-style line dancing in which praise-­singing is not the main focus. In 2019, there was even a small group of French people who studied West African music and had rehearsed and danced with canes, like in Kankan. In Charry and Kaba’s chapter on Mamaya, the authors note “remarkable continuity in the tradition” up until present day, which started as age-group dances with three balafons, drums, and a chorus of jelimuso singers (2003, 202). This may be true within Kankan, but as the celebration moves abroad, it seems to take on new characteristics. Is it significant that in the United States the concentration fell more heavily on praises for money, and in France the festival adheres to singing and line dancing as it did and still does in Kankan? It may be that in France there is a much larger Guinean contingency. But it may also be significant that the cost of living and emphasis on working and accumulation of wealth is greater in the United States than in France, and that these pressures are influencing Guinean celebrations. The photo depicts a  cohort of women in the Parisian region at a Mamaya party. They are dressed in a baby blue and red tie-dye pattern, a modest but coordinated dress compared to some of the more extravagant dresses I have seen in New York (see Photo 8.1). At this party line-dancing took precedence over praise-for-money, as it might in New York. If the Flame Goes Out? These explanations all lead to a response to the question What are the signs that jeliya is influenced by and is adapting to Western and global realities? Missia recently reminded me that jelis no longer have the support system that they do at home (in Guinea) or that they did in the past to help carry out their profession. Jeliya was bred in rural and agricultural communities in which survival depended directly on the land they lived on and farmed.

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Photo 8.1  A Mamaya jeli party in Paris, France 2018. (Photo by author)

Since colonization, there has been a restructuring of the Manding social system and the agricultural system has shifted toward monocropping for European benefit. This forced the youth to move to the cities like Conakry to earn a living and send money back to their families in the country. Fifty years later, the economy in cities like Conakry does not provide enough money for families, and people are flocking to cities overseas where they can earn money and send it home. But cities like Paris and New York are expensive, and many people spend their time trying to make ends meet and get ahead.

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The need to earn money to pay rent and buy food and clothing in a society where many are struggling is the largest threat to the breakdown of the jeli–hɔrɔn patronage system. Second, Manding people in cities abroad no longer find the need to uphold traditional roles. Of the jeli children I know born in the United States and France, they become part of the national education system and have the same choices as all Americans and French students do—to pursue their career choice in a global economy. Some jeli children I know raised in the United States, witnessing the financial difficulties of their parents, opt to study business and other professions that were traditionally nobles’ jobs. The nobles, meanwhile, no longer rely on the praises of jelis to elevate their statuses in the community. It is obvious that the pressures of the global economy may have become nearly impossible to withstand.

Notes 1. See Kaba and Charry (2003), “Renewal and Tradition” in Monson, Ingrid. 2. Sometimes a musician of non-Manding origin is part of the jeli band, such as long-time apprentice Andy Algire or ethnomusicologist David Racanelli, who are students of jeli music. 3. Every West African musical event has a marraine and a parrain, translated as the godmother and godfather, respectively, of the party. They receive special recognition from the jelis and are expected to help out financially by offering the lead jelis what they need to make themselves more comfortable. 4. I heard later from the jelimusolu that she had the piece made in Dubai and it cost thousands of dollars. To me, it was a piece of art. 5. Sory Camara explains the two castes as clean (hɔrɔnya) and dirty (nayamakala) or, in the terms of Mary Douglass, purity and danger. The jelis, he explains, are allowed to express emotions that the elite are not permitted to show. This is why Missia perhaps can imitate otherwise crude sexual behavior in the public realm (Camara, 2007). 6. Barbara Hoffman comments, “the act of giving money to a griot is known in Mali as “ka jeli son.” It is a kind of alms, the same thing as giving to the poor. There is an overtone of reciprocity: the griot gives togo or reputation to the patron, the patron acknowledges the debt by offering cash or gifts as a token of respect” (Hoffman, personal communication 2021). 7. Moussa Samba, Personal communication, Paris in 2018, as well as Diabaté and Sissoko in Keita (1995), and others.

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8. Barbara Hoffman explained to me that “calling the horses,” solu yoo, is a well-known practice in the Mande diaspora, a call to attention often sung out before a jeli performance (email correspondence May 10, 2021). 9. The term soliyo comes up in jeli songs. I particularly remember it in the Mandingo song “Karunta Kelefa,” which I learned on the kora in the Gambia. Glorifying the ancestors is also a known common practice in African-American culture. This is not a familiar practice to me from my culture, but I have grown increasingly interested in my own family lineage, and the power it holds, from my association with jeliya. 10. In future chapters, jelis praise me and I feel some of the effects of it but they do not encourage me by referring to my parents or ancestors because they do not know my story. I have imagined how this would look for myself. If I were Manding, there would be a song for the Feder family. It would recount my grandparents’ achievements, then the attention would come to me, and my latest endeavors, and my ancestors’ successes would be used to instill the right qualities in my current work. The instrumental music would honor my family lineage or perhaps a moment of glory in American history. It would make me feel strong and centered, to know where I stand in the long line of history, and give me encouragement to continue in the way of my ancestors. 11. Sory Camara explains this custom in hɔrɔn caste to not express emotions. It is typical nobility behavior to me. They show self-restraint, as does the royal family of England. 12. Famoro, to this point of generosity, adds a point that stems from Islam but is also present in Christianity and other religions. Charity is one of the five pillars of Islam. He explains that if you have had good fortune in your life, it is not only by your own doings but through the grace of God. To respect that, you should give some small portion of your earnings to charity, toward the benefit of the greater community. This is generosity. He reminds me of John D. Rockefellar, one of the wealthiest men in New York history. He was an oil businessman but also a philanthropist, and he did many things to help the city of New York. We might also think of Bill and Melinda Gates and others who have followed his example. Someone who makes good money but does not give some of it to the well-being of the community will not have good fortune in their life. 13. It is important to note that the balafon music serves the same purpose, to soothe and center the listener, to give them an intrepid and wise mind state. 14. Recalling Alfred Gell’s explanation of primitive artist as occult technician who makes viewers take leave of their senses and offer more than they were willing to give (1992).

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15. An African-American editor told me that this is also a part of African-­ American culture. 16. Barbara Hoffman has mentioned to me that she heard the same kind of denouncing of younger jelis to praise for money in 1984 in Bamako. 17. Consider, for example, the American band Van Halen, named for the late guitarist Eddie Van Halen. While Eddie might have been the genius behind the band, most of us think of the singer, David Lee Roth (later replaced by Sammy Hagar), as the leading image. 18. Mali and Guinea follow a similar cultural and political trajectory, having shared a majority of Manding people, who share a common root language and musical culture. Colonization divided them into separate countries (along with the Gambia, Senegal, and others). 19. I have seen jelimusolu repeatedly turn to tell the instrumentalists to play more softly, even while their vocal mics are turned up to blaring levels. I questioned a jeli about the possible reason for this. I had heard one theory that turned-up mics to distortion may be similar to the rattle and buzz of the gourds, a means of speaking with the spirit world. This jeli did not agree. He thought it was just part of using cacophony to enact a power grab. 20. I asked Famoro what caused this breakdown. He said, “I don’t know, there are a lot of things.” Then he suggested “maybe because the education system changed since colonization. We used to have our own education system, but now it is European education.” Different priorities. People no longer learn from their elders. They do not have time for them anymore. 21. https://youtu.be/fj2l84tcl3g

References Camara, S. (2007). Gens de la Parole. Harmattan. Charry, E., & Kaba, L. (2003). Renewal and Tradition in Maninnka Music of Kankan, Guinea (1935–1945). In I. Monson (Ed.), The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective. Routledge. Diawara, M. (1996). Le griot à l’heure de la globalization. Cahiers d’études africaines, 144, 591–612. Ebron, P. (2002). Performing Africa. Princeton University Press. Gell, A. (1992). The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology. In J. Coote & A. Shelton (Eds.), Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics. Clarendon Press. Hoffman, B. G. (2000). Griots at War: Conflict, Conciliation, and Caste in Mande. Indiana University Press.

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Keita, C. (1995). Jeliya in the Modern World: A Tribute to Banzumana Sissoko and Massa Makan Diabaté. In D. C. Conrad & B. E. Frank (Eds.), Status and Identity in West Africa: Nyamakalaw of Mande (pp.  182–195). Indiana University Press. Racanelli, D. (2011). Diasporic Jeliya as a Collaborative Trade in New York City. African Music, 9(1), 136–153. Small, C. (1998). Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. University Press of New England.

CHAPTER 9

Patronage: Becoming a Jatigi

A jeli will ask you for assistance, and if you decide to offer it, it is up to you to find a way for you yourself to benefit from something that the jeli can offer, which encompasses a lot more than music. Otherwise, there can be no real respect on either side. (Gray Parrot 2007) The ingenuity of the artisan is never solely aesthetic; it always contains a component of indirection and guile. (Michael Herzfeld, 2004)

In Defense of Jelis In West Africa, jelis historically sustained their livings from those to whom they offered their services, generally hɔrɔns, or nobles. Hɔrɔn indicates a person’s lineage, an economic status, and also, in theory, a hɔrɔn demonstrates upstanding, dignified behavior. A jeli may have a jatigi, literally, a host, someone with power who can call on his client, the jeli. A jatigi can be synonymous with patron, someone who supports him financially and can therefore make requests of her jeli, as he respects and relies on her to help him “get things done” (Appiah, 2006, 92; Ebron, 2002, 115).1 But a jatigi is not necessarily a hɔrɔn.2 Europeans and Americans who interact with West Africa may unwittingly fall into the category of potential patrons. When the American music student and fan of a jeli becomes culturally enmeshed, she may be © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Feder, Jeliya at the Crossroads, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83059-5_9

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primed to become a jatigi, without understanding what rights and responsibilities this gives her. It is a hybrid role, at once a sort of apprentice, a student who respects and learns from her teacher, and a patron depended on for support. When Americans, like myself, become jatigis, things can get complicated, or even hostile. In this and the next chapter, I write true stories about very difficult situations involving  money matters between myself, as well as other Americans and Europeans (whose names I changed), and my jeli informants. In many cases, on first glance, the jeli musicians’ behavior seems morally questionable from the perspective of the European or American. However, over the course of 20 years I have started to see things from their perspective that sheds light on the whole imbalance of European/American power vis-à-vis Africa, that points the question right back us—who is it really, that is acting immorally, here?3 Jelis can praise a wise and generous patron and condemn the stingy ones, enticing them to be more generous through public embarrassment. The most ethical and talented jelis can also be crafty, sneaky, bold, and audacious, as this is part of their role in society. In the ideal, their actions, no matter how they looked on the surface, had the intention of raising the society’s consciousness toward the greater good. When a jeli’s “indirection and guile,” perhaps a characteristic trait of artisans in general (Herzfeld, 2004), manifests to the unassuming American patron, it can be misinterpreted in the worst of ways—highlighting the misunderstandings of both sides in an entanglement of African versus global in all its power differentials. The European colonization and the slave trade and ensuing severe economic inequalities between Europe/America and Africa still have devastating effects on West African society.4 It is the reason why many jeli musicians feel it necessary to make their way to toubabadou to earn a living. At the same time, Americans and Europeans can develop scorn for the musician who may seem tactless or aggressive in his tactics for getting money. Often times, the scorn, or moral judgement, is undeserved and misplaced. The problems around money cause some horrible cross-­cultural misunderstanding, but we must describe and investigate them so that greater understanding and healing can take place on both sides. Considering the history of invasions and conquest over Africa, it is astonishing that some semblance of jeliya and other West African cultural tenets still exists today. It gives testament to the pride, dignity, and strength of the West African civilization that lives on in both Africa and the United

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States and other African diasporic communities—those who carry African heritage in their bodies and spirits. We have developed a mutual dignity in our relationships, me with my jeli teachers. They have turned me into a willing patron and business partner—testimony to my respect of both jeli and greater Manding values. But it did not start out that way.

Bicultural Perceptions of Money Money is a topic that many Africanist writers and scholars tend to avoid, because for many reasons, it is uncomfortable. In the United States, our earnings and savings are by and large a private affair. People generally do not share or ask for money outside of their immediate families or perhaps their closest friends, although this is changing with the increased popularity of GoFundMe campaigns. Still there is no model in my cultural upbringing by which I give gifts to an artist or spiritual leader on a regular basis for the benefits that they impart in my life. I pay a set fee for services, such as yoga classes, life coaching, therapy, or to support a local museum or library. Other donations I may give have been anonymous. So when a jeli I know and receive benefit from asks me, upfront, to give him money, it brings up all kinds of conflicting emotions, as we have seen. On the one hand, I am all too eager to help and support. On the other hand, I have been judged for being naïve from my home community, and for promising more than I can deliver, on the African side. All of these traits may be part of me and I expose them here, somewhat self-consciously. Dealing with the discrepancies between African and American economic inequalities has made me confront parts of my personality and faults in my work with West African musicians. As a result, it has raised my consciousness to a bigger picture. Similarly, my closest informants tell me that they have trouble finding their way in European and American cultures. One informant explains that they do not come from a culture that knows how to deal with money. They may recognize the benefits in having budgets and contracts and saving accounts for the future, but it is not something that was passed to them in their cultural upbringing. Many also do not have the skills to deal with French and American bureaucracy to achieve proper papers. My informants look to me for help in these kinds of matters.

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Defining the Patron In Manding culture, artists, artisans, and particularly jelis, had, and still have, patrons who support them. This custom existed in Western Europe for centuries and was critical in the development of our arts. Patrons sponsored artists, and often controlled the form and content of what they produced to varying degrees. With the development of modern cities and capitalism, patronage was formalized into contracts and business deals.5 In my present-day culture, this kind of patronage is no longer in practical use. When I enter into such arrangements with one jeli in particular, I may be judged by my peers and family who are concerned for me. But I know what I am supporting and why I am supporting it! Paulla Ebron addresses the misunderstandings between Western scholars of jeliya and their informants in her chapter on Personalistic Economies. It is jeli business to establish good network connections to an array of patrons who may support their livelihood and careers. “Most foreign researchers” as well as other foreign managers and musicians who work with them “are tone-deaf” to the ways in which jelis “attempt to cajole us into becoming patrons” and anyway, “we rarely know how to be Gambian patrons” (Ebron, 2002, 125). In West African culture, as far as I have understood, those who have money have a role and responsibility to choose how to share it with others. Those who do not have money have a culturally appropriate way to ask for it (and inappropriate ways of asking occur frequently too). For patrons, “no,” or “not right now,” are acceptable responses. There is a formal patron–client relationship that exists between the hɔrɔn and nyamakala castes in that the former can sponsor the latter in business and artistic development. The American mentality that people are self-made through education and hard work belies our reliance on a social network. In Africa, this is made plain. Paulla Ebron explains, In the incantation of U.S. discussion of globalism and venture capitalism, everyone must be a personal entrepreneur. And in this guide, too, jali who travel in international circles are able to link up with managers and fans to create concert venues. Working with foreigners in the idiom they best control, they bring out the personalism that is so often disguised and hidden in European and North American commitments to fairness and impartiality. They force their interlocuters to admit and acknowledge the power of personal ties. Sometimes, in the process, they push too far, aggravating their

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managers just as they do Gambian patrons. Without such aggravation, however, how can they stimulate patronage?” (Ebron, 2002, 129)

At times, a jeli’s performative practice may be referred to by detractors as a “begging” (Ebron, 2002, 40). North American students may also misinterpret jeli requests in this way. Ebron reframes jelis not as “beggars” but as a role in which they set “the standards for economic relationships based on personal entrepreneurship” (Ebron 129). Sometimes they are seen as crafty in ways that they play and sweet-talk people into giving them money. Even in their own culture, jelis may be seen unfavorably. Anthropologist Barbara Hoffman points out that in much of the older literature “griots are said to be despised by nobles for their lack of material productivity and for their propensity for lying.”6 Still, she asserts that they were paradoxically indispensable to Manding society (Hoffman, 2000, 12). As Gray Parrot contends in the epigraph above, there is a give-and-­ take in a patron–jeli relationship, and if done well it can be mutually beneficial.

Jeli–Patron Relationships Crossing Cultures It is not easy to map out the Manding jeli–patron relationship onto a cross-cultural context. The terms of the agreement are different. I do not rely on jeli praises in public, nor is my reputation at stake due to the jelis’ words. So, what right do jelis have to ask Americans or Europeans for money? There are other reasons. Jelis may earn money for music lessons. They may earn money from musical entertainment. Producers may invest in them to make albums or documentaries. But American and European band members, music students, or anthropologists like myself may begin to learn how Manding culture functions, what they value, and necessarily, as they find the information interesting or valuable, they need to act in a way that is befitting and respectful to the people who hold the knowledge. This is the power that an African musician can hold over us. When this happens, we still have the financial advantage, but they can withhold further learning unless we support them, financially. It is their cultural property and they are wise to not give their information cheaply. That said, nonfixed prices for learning and mentorship are not known forms of exchange in Western cultures, and issues around money with jelis can pose serious obstacles to ongoing relationships. Tensions mount.

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People fight. Teachers and students part ways. And sometimes they make up again. The underlying issues are rarely resolved, understood, or discussed at length.7 But that is precisely the goal of this chapter. To begin, I offer an example of Jeli Saikou Jobarteh, who, rather innocently, I thought, asked me for support in the middle of a song. To me it shows the normalcy of requesting favors of your patron-students. Saikou Jobarteh was Gray Parrot’s kora teacher in the 1990s.

Saikou Jobarteh The only time I spent with Saikou was a week in 2006 together with Gray Parrot and Bakary Kanye. We met at Kanyi Kunda, 6 years after my first homestay there, and we traveled by car to a small beach village called Kafuntine, in Casamance, Senegal, where we had friends. During that time, we made several field recordings. Gray Parrot named these recordings “Archives” and “Diploma.” I considered Saikou a jeliba, literally, a great jeli. He was a master kora player and historian. He did not have a grand stature and was rather humble. He played, old-style, sitting on the floor with his legs out and the kora on his lap. He had been recognized by several toubabs over the years, who took him on tours of Europe and the United States, but usually, he sat in the Gambia and played for Gambians. When he played, there was no mistaking his greatness. Saikou spoke Mandingo and almost no English. He did not move around much, as he was suffering from diabetes. A part of his foot was amputated. But I am unsure whether that affected his daily routine much. He woke, washed, ate, played kora, and prayed. If he was sitting idly, he would have a mala (rosary) in hand. He was a devout Muslim and prayed daily. Like good jelis do, he sweetened us with his music and his words, he wove us into the oral history of the Gambia, and he followed this up with a request for help. Saikou Jobarteh sat on a mat on the floor of the family compound when he played kora. The kumbengo pattern, crisp and clear, circled round and round. The three base notes taunted my intellect and made me second guess my sense of the rhythm. Each cycle, Saikou varied the pattern ever so slightly, adding a little run or a flourishing note here and there. There was no hesitation in his fingers. Various voices interacted in the higher-pitched cross-melodies. Saikou’s kora-playing springs me to

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attention. It indicates that something great is happening here. Korying Bato, some people call it, the place where people sit. Then Saikou would sing. His voice was rustic and scratchy. His diabetes had aged him past his 57 years. The beauty in his voice does not come from highly sculpted singing, but rather from a sense of strength and assuredness. He sang a chorus that jelis before him have sung for many generations. When he broke into an improvised verse, he was recounting a story. He might have been reciting a lineage of people linked to a certain place, and then, focusing on one of them, would tell of that man’s good deeds. He would let a cycle go around and then say, “abaraka,” or thanks to God. When he was not telling, he might have hummed along with the verses he played. I usually did not understand the Mandingo meaning of his songs unless they were translated by his nephew, Mustapha, or by Bakary, until he switched to the history of which I am a part. He would tell about the time when Gray Parrot (named Ousman Jobarteh) and his wife Chris Covert (named Isatou Jobarteh) came to the Gambia to learn the culture and the music. Then he would tell of the newer members who joined the family, Peter Bogardus and later Lisa Feder. He called me by my Gambian name, Aminata Jobarteh. He said I was from America, from New York City, then he said my American name, Lisa, Lisa Feder. After reciting all of our American and Mandingo names he said, in English, “my family.” I called aloud to him, namu! (it’s true) and a ninj bara! (good job) and jeliba! (big jeli) and abaraka! (thanks and blessings) as he voices lyrics that touch me. When I listen to this recording, 5 and even 10 years later, it still draws me in and enlightens me.8 The melodies and crisp sounds of the kora circulate in my mind long after I stop listening to the music. It warms my heart and sometimes tears fall. During the week that we spent together, Gray and I would sit next to Saikou, on the floor of the cement porch, backs against the wall, and play (see Photo 9.1). Sometimes Saikou would add variations to what we played. Sometimes he taught us to sing the chorus with him. While he played, he watched the goings-on in the family compound. He would sing to people in the compound, encouraging them in their good work, and they would come by with small gifts—oranges, peanuts, kola nuts, a few coins—and say a ninj bara! and abaraka jeliba! I left the Gambia before Gray finished recording Saikou. After Gray returned home, he sent me a duplicate recording of the rest. Again, Saikou

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Photo 9.1  Gray Parrot and his teacher Saikou Jobarteh in Casamance, Senegal 2006. (Photo by author)

told the story of Gray, Chris, Bakary, and I, weaving us into a common history-in-the-making, into one family. It warms my heart and reminds me of the nights we stayed up in the cool air under the stars. Then he sang my name sweetly, Lisa, Lisa, Lisa, and as he brought this song to a close, he said, “I no have papers.” It was a plea to me, to Gray, to we who were now back in the United States to help him return there, to the place where he first met Gray in 1990. At the time, I did not take the request very seriously. He passed away a few years after we made this recording. These recordings are priceless to me now. He deserves whatever he asks for, I think as I listen to the album for the hundredth time. His generosity far outweighed my own. The point is that if a humble and great jeli player like Saikou can make a request right in his music recording, then surely there is something acceptable in doing so, at least according to the West African cultural perspective. This gave me hope to figure out my long-standing questions about Lasiné in the Gambia, Bacar in Guinea, and others.

My Jeli Teachers in New York 2005–2007 The relationship that I shared with several informants around money was a difficult but ultimately very rewarding experience for all of us. We simply did not understand each other at first. There were times when we were not sure the friendship could weather the storm. But little by little, we became

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more trustworthy to each other, and I became more open-hearted and generous toward my jelis. In retrospect, our relationship helped make us into who we are today. A good jeli needs patrons/students who believe in him and recognize his value (namu!). And a successful and dignified person in West African culture generally needs a jeli (or someone equivalent) to strengthen and publicize his or her noble qualities: generosity, cool-­ headedness, courage, humbleness, patience, respect. Jeliya has also been part of my formation as an adult. For example, I have learned to take responsibility and think clearly about where and how I invest my time and money. Money, like the jeli’s nyama, is a power I possess, and I must wield it wisely. In the early days, 2005–2007, I spent a lot of time with one jeli and his partner. I ate meals with them, took lessons from them, drove them to gigs and hung out where they spent most of their time, in their living room in the Bronx. I do not even think that there was a time that I paid for formal lessons. In my mind I would keep a general idea that an hour-­ long lesson was worth about $50. My confusion emerged in the reality that we almost never had an hour-long straight-forward lesson, and lessons encompassed much more than just the music. There were times that I would be offered a hot meal. Or homemade ginger juice with honey, which is one of my favorite West African beverages. Or atayah, the green tea ritual popular in West Africa. Atayah (an Arabic word for tea) in the West African ritual consists of China green tip tea boiled to oblivion with lots of sugar and then poured into a short glass tea cup. Sometimes my teachers played a demo from their recent studio work such that I heard it in its various stages of development. Often, I was privy to private concerts on kora, guitar, or balafon. I felt utterly blessed to be included in such musical greatness. If what we were doing required purchasing something, I would generally pay for whatever it was, the same as I would have done if I were in Africa with Guinean friends. For example, I would pay for the meal we ordered from the neighborhood West African restaurant. If we went to visit friends, or we went to the recording studio, or a gig, I might finance the cab, sometimes when I was not even there with them. Many times when I would leave a jeli’s house, he would ask me for money for necessary expenses. I would sometimes ask for how much he wanted, and it was inevitably way more than I was willing to give. Perhaps he would request $250 and I would give him the contents of my wallet, maybe $85. Sometimes I would intentionally have a set amount in my

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wallet that I was not willing to exceed, because I had a hard time making up a reason why I could not give him what he asked for. Sometimes I resented him for asking and felt awkward. Other times, the idea would come from me, and before I realized what I was getting into, I would be committed to paying. Depending on the jeli and my relationship to him, I would feel differently. It also depended on my own emotional state at the time. Here are a few memorable scenarios culled from those moments.

At War Very early in our friendship, Famoro Dioubaté and I faced our first serious hurdle regarding money. I was determined to help Famoro “make a living,” so he did not have to depend on others. In other words, I wanted him to function on the American system rather than the African jeli way. I still want this for him, and he wants it for himself. Nevertheless, it was not easy to create the circumstances. In 2006 a Guinean pop jeli star, Sékouba Bambino, came to town for a show and everyone was excited. Someone—I do not recall who—came up with the idea for Famoro to make an album with this star. I got overzealous and thought it was an opportunity not to be missed. Without knowing what it entailed, I offered to produce it. My rationale was that Famoro would rise up from his position of dependency and become successful himself, and we could all stop paying his rent. Sékouba Bambino arrived at the planning meeting like the superstar that he is. Tall, striking, confident, and well-dressed in white cargo-style pants and a green, hand-dyed button down shirt. We went into the bedroom, the best place for the meeting, considering the small size of the apartment. The four of us, including the star’s guitarist, Ibrahim, sat in a row on the edge of the bed: me, Famoro, Ibrahim, and Sékouba. I stumbled in French over my formalities. “Thank you for being here. This is an exciting opportunity. A chance to help Famoro.” Let’s play ball! I did not know the rules of the game but everyone just went along with my plan. I came to see this as the Manding way to go-with-the-flow; they let things take their course and if they are meant to work out, or not, so be it. The guitarist suggested that they rehearse for several months before going into the studio. The star said he could not stay in New  York for long. He was returning to Paris, where he was based. He agreed to return in about a month, but no one mentioned who would pay for it. Famoro

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proposed that the band rehearse while the star was gone so when he returned we would be ready. After the meeting, Famoro told me, “We must pay the guitarist for rehearsing and playing on the album.” “How much?” “$4,000 is good.” “Are you kidding?” “He is a big guitarist!” “I’m not paying him $4,000.” “Okay, $2500?” I cancelled the whole idea. I did not trust that Famoro was giving me an honest price for Ibrahim, but I had no idea, really, what to expect. I was woefully unprepared to handle this. We never discussed the budget or anything else and I was not accustomed to or prepared for negotiating in this fashion. A few weeks later, Famoro planned a recording session at the home studio of our American friend. The price changed significantly. “Two days, $600, four songs, me, the guitarist, a singer, and the recording manager.” This is way less than the $4000 plan, I thought to myself. Go on, I’m listening. We went back and forth about the price. Then I realized he was leaving out the price for the guitarist. In my (American) experience, projects are well planned and budgeted, and people agree to the terms before they begin. If the project goes “over budget,” then people decide together how to find more funds or cut spending. But I did not handle the project like that. I went with the African flow. In West Africa, I have noticed that recording projects are done piecemeal. No one knows how much money is needed because each person engaged in the project negotiates their fee differently depending on who knows who, what connections they have, and what previous favors are owed. Negotiating was not my strong point. Leaving out information, I felt, was also a technique that Famoro used to get the ball rolling in the right direction. Famoro did not give up on asking me to support his album, although I had rescinded the offer and all but given up on him. But he knew I had money to give, and he approached me in various ways, asking for it. He recorded several tracks with the guitarist, the singer, and others, and brought me a CD of the recordings so that I would give something toward the cause. In his final attempt, he asked for $300 just “for the guitarist,” and I gave it to him. He was elated. It was the most I have ever given him

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in one shot and I had no assurance of how the money was actually used, but I felt like I got away with paying very little and he got $300 toward his project. Eventually, Famoro put out an album on Raul Rothblatt’s record label, Jumbie Records.9 Dundunya was a fine album, and I secretly hoped Famoro would dedicate a song to me, but he did not. Raul sponsored the great pop jeli griot, Mory Kanté, to come from France and play in the Kakande CD release party at S.O.B.’s in lower Manhattan—this was a great honor to Famoro. One family for whom Famoro wrote a song on the album attended from the mid-West and gave Famoro a very generous gift for his praise song. For me, however, this time period was wrought with both admiration and suspicion. I thought that Famoro was trying to milk me for money, quoting me too high of a price for things. I felt I was being “scammed.” However, to him, his high quotes may have been part of normal negotiation tactics. Perhaps Famoro had an unfavorable opinion of me: Untrustworthy? Naïve? Makes big promises that she does not keep? I could only imagine. We were operating on different cultural sensibilities.

Lessons in Generosity In 2006, I went to Guinea on a work trip in 2006 and spent a few nights with Famoro’s family. Before I left, Famoro called me. “Hey, you have to go see my brother. He has something for me.” Okay, no problem. The brother told me he had a balafon for my teacher and I should come pick it up the day I leave. “A balafon,” I inquired. “Really?” When I told my teacher it was too much (how naïve I was) for me to carry a balafon home from Guinea, he convinced me that it was no problem, I could just check it in, and that his brother would pack it well. A few hours before I was due at the Gbessia International Airport, Conakry, I stopped by to retrieve the balafon. The brother and a friend were busily bubble-wrapping up not one, not two, but three balafons for my teacher. I protested. I said, Eh Allah! Là, c’est pas possible! I made a fuss and told them I was too small to handle three balafons. They just laughed and joked with me, and paid no attention to my protests. An hour later, I arrived at Gbessia in a taxi with a carload of balafons and my suitcase. Twelve hours and $150 later (for overweight luggage taxes), a friend picked up me up in my own car at JFK International Airport. It was an unforgettable, glorious moment when I stopped at Famoro’s house with

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the tree balafons in my trunk. He came bolting down the stairs with a big smile on his face. I popped open the trunk in front of him. Straight from his brother’s house. It was manna from heaven. This was a lesson to me in generosity. My efforts and the $150 I paid that I knew he could not easily come by were manageable, for me. And for my teacher, it gave him such happiness that I felt it was equally rewarding for both of us. It reminded me of the kola nuts that Lasiné and I gave to the passing woman in the Gambia before our trip. It was a blessing for her to receive them and a blessing for us to have her pray for our well-being on our journey. Generosity, it dawned on me, was a win-win situation if the giver was open-hearted in the giving. My teachers were teaching me that.

Making the Idea Seem Like It Was Mine I believe that jelis have the ability to make you think a generous idea was your idea in the first place, and then ask you to pay for it. The attempt at making the album with the star was one such case, but there were others like it. While in Guinea, I met the families of several of my jeli teachers who live in France. One of my teacher’s little daughters in Guinea had not seen her father in a few years. We became close when I showed her videos from her father’s recent shows, and from his rehearsals at home. We maintained a connection through the years. Years later, the father, a jeli informant, told me that his daughter wanted to learn English so she could go to America, where he had family. I enthusiastically supported the idea. I imagined that she could come and study in the United States one day, and thought it a great opportunity. A few weeks later, this jeli called his daughter while I was visiting so I could speak to her. Eight years had passed since we last saw each other, but she remembered me and remembered how I had brought to her a video of her father. After we hung up, the rest of my evening with this jeli passed without a word about his daughter. Later, while we walked through town, he made the request: “I want to send money to Conakry for my daughter’s school.” I understood that he was asking me. “How much does she need?” I asked him. “Gimme €200. I’m going to send it to her.” I stood at the ATM, laughing to myself because it was me who encouraged the idea, unwittingly committing myself to supporting the daughter’s school without a clue as to how much it cost and whether she would

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really attend it. I did not expect to spend €200 that night. The machine spit out bills, one by one, in €20s and I handed them to the jeli, shaking my head, in disbelief over how this process had become such a familiar routine. He too was laughing. This is another form of being jelied. The daughter never followed through on the English lessons, and I have no idea what happened to the money I helped to send. Maybe it was sent to Africa, maybe it wasn’t. Part of giving generously is that you may lose control of how that money is spent. There were countless occasions like this over the course of my relationships with jelis. Even though we may have mutually annoyed one another over money matters, I still shared special musical moments with my informants that touched me deeply. Some may think they were just using me for my money. I may have wondered that, at times, but then I have a glimpse into the power of jeliya. I was having revelations about jeliya and the power it had on people like me, who were not Manding. I felt my informants were some of the finest musicians on the planet, morally upstanding in so many ways, and that the culture from which they came was giving me something that I could not find easily in my own culture. Some of these experiences were priceless to me.

A Different Perspective It was by hearing about my teacher’s troubles from the third-person position that I began to understand the cross-cultural gap in understandings that we both had. My teacher confided in me about troubles he had understanding Americans around money matters. One friend, “Tommy,” a balafon student interested in the Manding culture, grew close with Famoro. They shared intimate stories, hardships, and glories like brothers. Tommy promised to help Famoro further his career, get gigs, do balafon workshops. One day when Famoro was struggling to pay rent, Tommy promised to send Famoro “a gift.” Famoro was grateful, and counted on it, but Tommy just disappeared for months. He ghosted him. Famoro could not understand this. People do not do this in his culture unless someone was offended. He reasoned with me, “Tommy could have told me that he ate the money he promised me,” but avoidance, for Famoro, was the worst.

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Once, his American conga player got fed up with Famoro’s pleas for money and the man lost his temper with Famoro who became distraught. “Why does he get so angry with me? Why doesn’t he just say that he can’t help me?” From Famoro’s perspective, asking is not wrong. First, they were friends, and asking between friends, especially of unequal capabilities, is permissible in Manding culture. But more importantly, Famoro was teaching this man and all of his students Manding music and spending his time and sharing his knowledge, open-heartedly. It was hard to explain to Famoro that Americans did not place a value on sharing cultural and perhaps philosophical knowledge. Students expecting to learn music were not expecting character development at this stage, although that was often what Famoro offered them. Furthermore, merely asking for money between fellow musicians in American culture can be construed as rude and damaging to the friendship. But Famoro’s suggestion that his friend could have just said no had such simplicity and grace that I decided to use it. The next time I was asked for money, I just said “no, I can’t today” and it worked. But it had to be delivered with sincerity that the asker really needed it, on the one hand, and that I really could not give it, for whatever reason, right now. There is a balance to this giving and refusing.

Jelis Learn Too Sometimes, from my perspective, jelis adjusted their understanding of American culture too. Once, I took a cab ride to the Bronx with a jeli and I offered $20 for the fare. The taximan put the meter on, and the fare went as expected, at least to me. The jeli asked the cab driver to give him a deal. The cab driver explained that it was not his cab, that he worked for a boss and that he could change the fare on the meter. The jeli did not believe him. He continued to haggle and verbally coerce the man to concede, making things tense. The driver did not know what to do. The jeli crossed the line of acceptable, and I was offended by his attitude. I interfered at that point and stopped him from pressing further. The jeli may have thought that any price was negotiable. I explained that on an official New York taxi meter, the price is fixed (and well advertised in the car). The jeli acquiesced when I insisted. Whether he meant to harass or whether it was a cross-cultural misunderstanding, I do not know. In another case, Michel, a djembe teacher, offered to help finish and sell an album that a local jeli band was self-producing. Michel distributed the

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album on his website, which caters to European djembe drummers and he copyrighted the album to his company. Michel and the jeli band together agreed that the band would receive all of the profits from the project once Michel recuperated his investment, which was a kind offer. The album did not sell many copies. When the results of all the work that went into making the album failed to produce any income for the jelis, the band leader complained to me. He told me the story from his point of view. He said that Michel had not given them their due money and that he had called Michel many times and Michel was avoiding his phone calls. He thought that Michel was dishonest. I knew Michel, and I could not imagine that he was taking advantage of the jeli band. I also imagined how the phone calls might have gone: The lead jeli, demanding money. Michel, explaining he did not make any money from the album. The jeli, continuing to call, and Michel, eventually ignoring the pestering calls. It was likely, I thought, that Michel was at his wits’ end with the band. I was the one who heard the grievances. I offered the jelis the possibility that the album may not have made enough money to cover the costs of production. Having the album for sale on a website is not enough to make it sell, I explained. I also suggested that they could ask Michel for the rights to promote and distribute the album themselves. Eventually they agreed to let me email Michel, who was more than willing to hand it over. He confirmed that he had not sold many copies and that he had lost money on the production. The jelis were mistrusting, and Michel was disgusted. Both sides based their rationale on their own cultural references. Meanwhile, I saw a cross-cultural misunderstanding and a simple solution, from the outside. My ability to settle the matter gave the jeli leader more confidence in me. He was grateful that I cleared up the matter and restored the trust between everyone.

The Turning Point There is one last situation worth mentioning. A woman I met through a jeli teacher in Paris I will call Nabou apparently fell in love with him, having met him when he played for her African dance class. She started to attend his gigs where she met a few of us, the Europeans/Americans that were closest to him. They formed a relationship, briefly. Within a year, she gave him thousands of Euros to buy and develop land on the coast of Guinea for a school of music and to help him pay rent. When she began to

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get obsessive and possessive, Nabou became more and more aloof, but it did not stop her from sending him money. Eventually he cut off communication with her. The woman got angry and accused Nabou of being a con artist and encouraged several of us who knew her to avoid him at all costs. We had been working with Nabou for several years by then and did not see things the same way that she did. But there was an ethical question in my mind: Did Nabou intentionally lead her on to get her money? Nabou and I spent hours talking about this. I asked him directly, to play out my own fears on the subject. Would you do this to me? Do you do this to me? Nabou took my concerns seriously and answered me calmly. He explained the situation from his viewpoint. He did not lie to her, but he did not refuse her money either. I knew he was in a desperate situation, financially, and to refuse money was not likely. As he spoke, he assured me of what I already knew. He always needed money. He always needed help. He would not lie. But I also had to be smart, to know what I am getting, to know what I am willing to give in my dealings with him.

Fresh Perspectives These various circumstances with my jeli teachers allowed me to understand the strained position that jelis found themselves in as they entered the global economy. In all my learning, I grew a new respect for my most important teacher, Famoro Dioubaté. We began to develop a trust and understanding between us. I was growing more self-aware from my meditation and yoga practices, and he was growing more self-aware through his Muslim prayer practices. West African-style Islam coincides with indigenous West African spiritual practices such as jeliya.10 For years, when Famoro’s phone called out prayer time, I used the time to sit in meditation as he bowed to Allah. We found that his spirituality and my spirituality were one in the same. Furthermore, the values embedded in both our spiritual systems were practiced, and the human skills developed, through jeli-style balafon lessons. On the balafon I was cultivating patience with myself, courage to continue, seeing and coordinating two independent melodies, good feeling, and generosity. Problems continued to arise, but Famoro and I now had a mutual trust in one another’s basic goodness, and we worked things out. Then he said this:

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In this world, when people see you? Respect! Before I make you mad, what is going to make you mad? I’m going to start with myself before I’m going to do that to you. If I do something to make you mad, before I do that thing to you I have to think, what I do to Lisa, I do to myself. If Lisa do it to me, is it going to be good for me? No! It is not going to be good. So why am I gonna do that to Lisa? (Famoro, private conversations, 2017)

Something changed in our relationship. I always believed he was sincere. We entered a complicit agreement, a mutual trust. If he was less than perfectly clear with me, I understood he was just trying to get what he needed (and arguably deserved) in a lifestyle where he had no financial power. I forgave him for it. This changed him. It made him want to be good to me, to keep me happy. Since that day, if he asked me for financial assistance for sustenance or artistic creation, I knew he needed it whether I could give it or not. When I could not give it to him for whatever reason, I felt genuinely sorry and prayed that what he needed came his way.11 From this point my understanding of jeliya grew deeper, and my commitment increased. People from my culture would ask me why Famoro did not work for a living instead of relying on handouts. Well, I tried to explain, they are not handouts, and he is “working for a living.” I felt that he and other jelis in my community were trying to uphold the ideals of jeliya—those that instilled good human values—while struggling to earn a living from their tremendous artistic talents. Famoro is trying to practice and safeguard one of the oldest, long-standing spiritual-community traditions and prevent its flame from extinguishing. For whatever strange reason, our paths have crossed and I have grown to understand, believe in, and feel responsible to support this esoteric practice called jeliya because I understand it for what it was, and maybe could still be.

Saboule Moyala The next time I visited Famoro, President Donald Trump had just been sworn in and installed in the Oval Office. We were sitting on the couch, having a discussion about the state of the world. Famoro told me there were few, true hɔrɔn left. Those who give jelis money at Manding events, he called them patrons, jatigi, but not hɔrɔn. Long ago, Famoro started calling me his jatigi, but he changed that. Now he calls me hɔrɔn. “Some jelis call people ‘hɔrɔn,’ I don’t agree. It’s a lie. I grow up with “hɔrɔn.” The people who really feel people. Love. Peace. Prayer. The list

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of hɔrɔn never finished. But now, you don’t see real hɔrɔn.” I translated “hɔrɔn” in my head as upstanding people, people with integrity. Not many exist in my culture either. Then he added, “Lisa is hɔrɔn.” “Me? Why am I hɔrɔn,” I asked him. “Because to me, a jeli, you never lie to me. You respect me. You have love for me. You know who I am. And you know how you are too. You make me happy. That’s hɔrɔnya. People aren’t like that right now” (private conversations, December 26, 2017). When Famoro says that he knows me and I know him, I take it to mean that we have an implicit trust. When we do not understand each other, we take our time and ask for clarity. We explain ourselves until we are in agreement. This is mutual respect.12 When I call Famoro, I can ask him to play balafon for me at any time. When I am in New York, if I want him to play at a family event, I have the right to ask him. I am sure I do not use his services as my jeli, and me as his jatigi, as much as I can, but I am still learning how to use my position to my advantage. That day, I agreed to pay Famoro’s Con Edison bill before they shut off his electricity. We walked to the post office together where I paid the bill with a credit card, in person. “Times are hard for foreigners like me now,” he tells me. “People are very scared of Trump. They tell me not to go out of the house now, to be careful of deportation!” He said that jeliya is about generosity. Islam is about generosity. If you have a lot of money, you give some of it. It is going to be good for you to help others, “like the Democrats,” he said. “The Republicans? They don’t like to give. Both sides have money, but the Republicans don’t like to help people. Then he says to me, Saboule moyala. Famoro translated this phrase as people need people.13 In other words, people inspire and support one another to become the people they are today. Famoro feels that I have helped him to grow into the person he is today, and likewise, he has helped me grow into the person I am today. Back at Famoro’s house, I complained that Americans do not understand each other and nobody wants to talk across political lines. Meanwhile, Famoro and I, who come from very different worlds, can see eye to eye and support each other. “We need jeliya in the world now! We need to come together!” I contemplated the truth to what I said, that if jeliya were a regular practice in our country, jelis might be able to help us bridge the divide.

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Seeing the truth in what I had said, he responded, “Yeah, I see that. But how are we gonna do that?” He posed the question as a challenge for me to consider. He knew I could conjure up an idea about cross-cultural projects, somehow. His question set me up to deliver my answer, a spontaneous musing. “Let’s make an album and sing jeli wisdom in English!” He responded, “Ah, but you don’t have time for that,” testing me to rise to the challenge. “When you start an idea like that, you have to follow it through!” He continues, “Trump does one thing well. He does what he says he’s going to do, even if it is bad for some people.” Then he challenged me to do what I say I am going to do. He is helping to form and strengthen my character in a way that benefits both of us, surely a jeli practice. Saboule moyala, indeed.

Notes 1. Recall from Chap. 2, Kwame Anthony Appiah explains that “to get things done…you need to be someone or know someone with the social standing to work your will. Since most people don’t have that status, they need to find someone—a patron—who does. In a society like this, to ask someone for something is to invite him to become your patron. It’s a sign that you think he has the status to get things done. And so it’s a way of indicating respect” (Appiah, 2006: 92). 2. Barbara Hoffman clarified, “In Mali, hɔrɔn is used for everyone of that caste, even criminals. It can be a value-free status marker as well as an index of dignity as in “jelihɔrɔn” for griots who are very generous and kind.” Hoffman referred to  Zobel 1996, “The Noble Griot” for another source (Hoffman personal communication 2021). Famoro Dioubaté likes to use hɔrɔn as not just the caste of “noble” but as a person with dignity. 3. To recall the relevant history: the West African peoples, Guineans in particular, were enslaved in the sixteenth century and subsequently colonized between the 1850s to the end of the nineteenth century with the defeat of the Malinké war hero Samoury Touré. After decolonization and political freedom in 1958, Guinea and other former colonies remained economically dependent on Western economic domination which has had devastating effects on their cultures—and yet they persist. 4. Mamady Djeliké Kouyaté blames the Arab invasions of West Africa before colonization and the slave trade, as the source of West Africa’s problems in development. He writes: “When all of the West began to discover this [Manding] beautiful civilization through Arab writers, one wondered why

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this civilization had not subsequently experienced a similar development to Europe’s. The cause is the Arab invasion of everything, particularly of gold and of slaves, our most able-bodied young men, which has stripped Africa of a significant part of its population, thereby damaging the civilization” (Kouyaté, Djelitomba Organization, 2021). 5. For further detail on this history of European patronage, see https:// www.encyclopedia.com/histor y/modern-­e urope/british-­a nd-­i rish-­ history/artistic-­patronage 6. Jelis in Paris and New York I know have been dishonest, saying that they did not receive their payment when they actually had, hoping to be paid twice, or perhaps hiding money or taking a larger share given to them when it could arguably be shared equally with the other musicians. I know both African and European producers who refuse to do business with them. Jelis can even be crass enough to ask for money when having no prior relationship to a person. I have been asked by jelis to finance their projects, seemingly out of the blue. To be fair, there are also jelis who do not ask me for money when I might expect them to do so, and I have offered to help a jeli in difficulty who has bashfully refused. 7. As an example, in B’s compound in Chap. 5, we resolved many of the tensions that had built up, but dealing with money disagreements was not one of them. 8. Field Recordings include: Saikou Jobarteh: Archive Discs 1 and 2 (Jobarteh, 2006a), Training Discs 1 and 2 (2006b). 9. Raul believed in Famoro’s talent as much as I did then, and he still does now. He is the other American patron in Famoro’s life, and in that, we share comradery. Raul and I are both misunderstood at times by people in our communities. However, Raul explains, he would rather support an artist he knows directly than to donate to an organization where the rewards for both sides is not immediately felt. 10. According to one jeli informant, Mamady Kouyaté, if Islam shall conflict with indigenous African values, it is the indigenous value system that generally takes moral precedent (2021 private conversations). 11. “Allah m’an son” is what people say when street beggars ask for money that people cannot/will not give for whatever reason. It is a blessing: May God give to us all (Barbara Hoffman, Personal communication 2021). 12. Lessons Famoro has taught me about time in various ways cycles back around again. “Take your time,” he says to me so that I respect myself and others, so that I do things correctly and with heart. “Respect the time” in the balafon music, a time that is intentionally challenging. Time also stands for love. Someone who has time for you loves you, has respect for you. If you take time for one another, to look deeply, to be sweet, and to try to

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understand one another, unwholesome behavior will become apparent and it will correct itself. This is the crux of the jeli–hɔrɔn relationship. Famoro and I take time to make sure we understand each other. We are witnessing the breakdown of respect for one another in our society today. When that happens, what does humanity have left? 13. Mamady Kouyaté explained the word sabou as “the means.” The phrase means “no one can become a big personality without having the means.” Philosophically speaking, he adds, this is the rule of cause and effect (Kouyaté personal communication 2021).

References Appiah, K.  A. (2006). Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. W.W. Norton and Co.. Ebron, P. (2002). Performing Africa. Princeton University Press. Herzfeld, M. (2004). The Body Impolitic. University of Chicago Press. Hoffman, B. (2000). Griots at War. Indiana University Press. Kouyaté, M. (2021). Djelitomba Association. (Statement of Purpose Recorded and Translated by Lisa Feder, January 2021). Parrot, G. (2007). Personal communication with author. Zobel, C. (1996). The Noble Griot; the Construction of Mande Jeliw‑Identities and Political Leadership as Interplay of Alternate Values. The Younger Brother in Mande. Kinship and Politics in West Africa. Leiden, Research School CNWS, 35–47.

Discography Dioubaté, F. (2014). Kontendemi. Wula Drum. Jobarteh, Saikou. (2006a). Archive Disc 1, Disc 2. The Gambia (Recorded by Gray Parrot). Jobarteh, Saikou. (2006b). Training Disc 1, Disc 2. The Gambia (Recorded by Gray Parrot).

CHAPTER 10

Living “in between” Cultures

These trickster figures, all aspects or topoi of Esu [Elegbara], are fundamental, divine terms of mediation: as tricksters they are mediators, and their mediations are tricks. (Henry Louis Gates, 1988, 27)

After 15 years working with Famoro Dioubaté and the other West Africans in the jeli community, we all found a way of living between two cultures, of navigating along the continuum between the global and the local modality. The jeli’s way, which included trickery and flattery, of unforeseen gifts and requests, of going with feeling in the moment, of negotiating everything, is a modality that prioritizes human relations and bodily rhythms over external structure (Lefebvre, 2004). This contrasts with the global business modality, where money is expected to conform to budget, projects are planned, time is structured to the clock, and prices have a relatively expected set value. This modality suits the “global hierarchy of value” where the guile of the artisan does not (Herzfeld, 2004).1 I argue here that these modalities of being exist on a continuum in which jelis and myself navigate between them. Navigating is a skill, an “ethnographic sensibility”2 that both myself and my jeli partners possess, of intuiting when to use which modality, and sensing how others are choosing between them and for what purpose. I decided to once again attempt to produce an album for Famoro in 2018 and hone my ethnographic sensibility of the between. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Feder, Jeliya at the Crossroads, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83059-5_10

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The precedent of an anthropologist or cultural scholar being instrumental in producing a product and launching a career—in a new market—of a traditional or folk artist had long been set and to great result. I considered, for example, the success of Toumani Diabaté, the famous Malian kora player produced by the ethnomusicologist from London’s SOAS, Lucy Durán. I had already been living in Paris, France, for several years when we embarked on the album-recording project. When I told a seasoned French colleague who works in the Manding region of West Africa that I was producing an album with jelis, his response was, “How can you afford it?” I was already starting to wonder that, myself. Famoro already requested I bring people from Paris to New York. Nevertheless, I insisted that there were unexplored marketable ways to share jeli music with communities outside of Manding West Africa. I was confident that I had learned how to work with jelis and to give this music the recognition it deserved. I considered my naïve, former attempts to produce an album for Famoro. We were different now. We had more than 10 years of experience behind us. We knew how to cross cultures. Some say that failing multiple times is necessary to succeed. May this then be a story of the messy, 10-day endeavor to produce an album cross-­ culturally as an example of my lessons in failing, again, and learning. I explain the project in detail to illustrate just how difficult things can become. In this story, Famoro, Sékou Dioubaté, and I exist in “the Between,” the liminal zone where one can access two coexisting cultural sensibilities. Existing in “the Between” can provoke anxiety and fear, or strength, imagination, and creativity (Crapanzano, 2003, Jackson, 2012, Stoller, 2009). Navigating through these two coexisting realities becomes a strategic endeavor for myself and for my Manding cohort, one in which we both wield our power and creative visions, succumb to our anxieties, and fall back on our own cultural and habitual patterns. Over the past decade, Famoro has placed me in the category of hɔrɔn, or noble, for several reasons. It was clear that I was not going to become a highly skilled balafonist right now, and I am not a jeli for the obvious reason that I was not born into that culture or family lineage. But I do strive to learn and uphold the morals and values that jeliya teaches as part of my apprenticeship, and I was beginning to “see like a jeli.” Furthermore, I was starting to get visions for how jeliya could integrate in the globalized environment. For that reason, I was willing to financially invest in supporting jeli music.

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Famoro undoubtedly sculpted me, creatively and strategically, from that liminal zone of not Manding, but not not-Manding, into a hɔrɔn-like person, a position from which we mutually benefit, in theory. My acceptance of that role has been ambivalent. At times, I feel greatly inspired, and at times, I feel beaten down and defeated. But the 10-day project exposed all I had failed to learn. I spoke with a lack of grace, quite unlike the behavior that would be befitting of a hɔrɔn, broke down in tears on more than two occasions, and showed a general lack of good character and high values that jelis are meant to promote in their patrons. The troubles began with the first request. Famoro convinced me to bring Sékou Dioubaté from Paris with me to help with the recording process. Bringing Sékou, including his wife, Hadja, and his iMac computer: those were just the beginning of the requests.

Bringing the Parisian-Based Artist to New York It was not the first time that I had financed a visa and trip to the United States for Sékou Dioubaté. About 40  years old, he is a sharp-thinking, talented musician who currently plays bass in Sékouba Bambino’s band and is building a formidable name for himself as a solo artist in the Manding circle. His African-produced videos are growing on DJ IKK’s YouTube channel, and he is often flying between various countries for music. However, he has little to no presence among the French community where he lives. Sékou is also a master jeli in writing lyrics, the words that accompany jeli songs. This is important; Sékou knows family genealogies such that he can praise the most prominent patrons, raising their reputation in the society and a sure way to receive financial compensation. Last time I flew him to the United States to help Missia Saran make her recently released album. Jeli events like these can generate thousands of dollars for the singers and musicians. Nevertheless, they complain that costs for the party are dear and they complain that they do not make profit much from such endeavors. Sékou’s wife recently said to me when I mentioned the handsome donations, “Yes! But it is never enough!” (private conversations with Hadja, August 2018, Paris). Now I realize that what she said was true. Sékou wanted to bring Hadja this time. Their relationship of 20 years caused quite a scandal for almost just as long. Hadja’s family is of the noble class, and Sékou’s prominent status as a jeli makes their relationship

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taboo. But Hadja is a strong and independent-thinking woman and she married Sékou anyway. Hadja and I got along well from the start. I applied for visas for both of them—a laborious process. We were rejected the first time we applied for the wife’s visa. Excited by the success of receiving the visa on our second attempt, I bought Sékou and Hadja’s plane tickets together, on my credit card, with the understanding that Sékou would pay me back for Hadja’s portion. I should have known better than to rely on reimbursement. Sékou asked me to bring his iMac, speakers, microphone, and keyboard with him to New York and pressed me hard on the matter for the next few weeks. He had Logic Pro X, a type of recording software on his iMac and wanted to do the whole recording job from Famoro’s house. I imagined it might benefit Famoro somehow, to record in his home, but I also expected to work in our regular studio in New York. Dixon’s studio on the Lower East Side was convenient for me, but they said that Dixon’s schedule was not good for them. I understood much later that they wanted to work late hours of the night in the privacy of Famoro’s home with no outside influence. Sékou insisted that I call Delta Airlines in front of him to hear whether it was possible to check the computer in his suitcase. I did not want to take on the responsibility of it breaking, of customs issues, or of paying overweight fees, and I tried to convince him not to check it. Delta said there was no problem if it were packed in a suitcase, and I felt I could not refuse Sékou anymore. So I insisted that I would not pay the extra airplane fees or deal with customs about it. Still, I wrote a general letter to the American customs agent that Sékou carried with him, that would hopefully help him avoid being charged a tax on arrival. Then, quite unexpectedly, tragedy struck and Sékou’s older brother, who lived in Paris, died. That came with unplanned expenses, of course, and became the reason why Sékou would not be able to reimburse me for the wife’s ticket. Famoro implored me to give Sékou €100 as a sign of courtesy, to help him manage the funeral expenses, a reasonable request by African standards. I did. Sékou was pleased and Hadja was shocked; she knew I was already incurring a big expense for the trip. Keeping a positive attitude, I reasoned that Hadja could work off the cost of the plane ticket for me by translating Malinké to English during or after the recording process, if necessary. This did not happen.

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Planning Prior to New York A few weeks before commencing the project, I did not have any clear idea of what kind of album we were to produce, I only knew that I wanted it to be marketable in my French and American cultures. Famoro had recorded his band Kakande’s album “Dununya” in 2008  in a pop-jam-­ style featuring the balafon. It was for his New York–based audience. He recorded another instrumental album, also for non-Guineans, that never made much headway because it was not promoted well. My main objective was to get the message of jeliya out into the world—ideals and values that could help bring the international community together, a bit like a back-to-the-roots Bob Marley à la Guinée. It would also not hurt if we could begin scraping together a living for Famoro and myself. I had no idea how to do it, but I figured I would find the way as we went. That is the Manding way, anyway: stay in the moment, not a lot of planning ahead. Still a small amount of preparation is prudent, and so I planned. Just prior to New York, I brainstormed a short list of general ideas. • Famoro starts with a simple balafon pattern and builds out the song so Americans can see how simple moves to advanced patterns. • Add in other instruments slowly, like a building symphony. • Have Famoro and Sékou play and sing cameo pieces. • Include other New York–based jelis. • Let the singing be soft and soothing, not gruff. • Play “Lamban,” the flagship song for jelis, several times on the album. • Include “Soundiata,” the song for the first Manding Emperor. • Include a prayer to connect us to the spirit world, to important ancestors. • Play and record a track in Central Park. • Make a music video of one track. • Have Peter Bogardus take professional photos I thought my wish list was a sensitive combination of global business and local jeli modalities, a creative combination of the best of both worlds. Then I was instructed by Sékou to buy a microphone screen and a second mic. He also wanted to bring his keyboard. I texted Sékou with a choice of keyboards I had found for him in New York to discourage him from bringing his own. To no avail, he insisted on bringing his own. I calculated Hadja would do some work, maybe by cooking and translating

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Sousou and Malinké to English, to make up for her plane ticket. I rented a car and figured $160 for 8 days of food at $20/day. This is as far as I reasoned the money. Although Famoro and I previously had had a discussion about to how much it would cost for the other musicians, he would not give me a figure. I pressed him a little. He threw out $3000. I conceded, adding, “make the musicians happy, but not too happy.” I was flying Manding-style, a little loose on the hand controls, staying in the present moment, and letting the universe unfold as it will.

Planning in New York The recording project was to take 10 days. Ten songs in 10 days. I thought it was ambitious. I went to Famoro’s house the day before Sékou and Hadja were due to arrive to do some planning, or at least share ideas. To my American sensibility this was certainly leaving things to the last minute, but Famoro creates based on inspiration in the moment. Still, I reasoned, he must have some ideas, or a concept? How did he envision Sékou and some other artists? Did he like the idea of a building symphony of the extra musicians? Which audience were we targeting, Guinean or Euro-American? There were many idioms to choose from, but pop jeli music Guinean style was not one that would appeal to Americans as some other West African pop music (like Niga) does. We needed to create a new sound. When I arrived, Famoro was in pain from a hurting tooth and not too conversant. I asked him what songs he would play, having a few of my own in mind. He told me he did not know, but that the right song would come to him when he got to the studio. It depended on his inspiration, as I assumed. It reminded me of anthropologist Edward Hall’s statement that, “Matters in a polychronic culture seem in a constant state of flux. Nothing is solid or firm, particularly plans for the future” (Hall, 1983, 47). Sékou and Hadja arrived the next day. It was an exciting moment and I snapped a photo for posterity (see Photo 10.1). I picked them up in a rental car and drove them to Missia Saran’s house in Newark, New Jersey. He had the computer in his suitcase and the keyboard in a case. He told me he had to pay €280 to check the extra equipment. He implied that I should pay for it. Within hours, Sékou had his studio set up, and had me running into NYC to find the missing parts to fill in. He also asked me to loan him €1000 for his dedicace or CD release party in Paris in August. I thought it

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Photo 10.1  Fatmata (Hadja) Naby and Sékou Dioubaté arrive in Kennedy airport, New York, 2018. (Photo by author)

a bit presumptuous and told him let us see how the recording goes first, and that Famoro was my main priority right now. Sékou worked on Missia Saran’s music the following day. Missia was revamping her two hit songs, “Titriba” and “Maguikoma.” I thought that perhaps they were including Missia Saran’s hit songs on our Famoro album. Out of the blue, another Kouyaté jeli from Detroit dropped by to record a song. I tried to imagine how they would fit into Famoro’s album, but I was disoriented and could not get a good handle on what was happening and left it to them. West Africans were running this show and

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setting the cultural tone for the process, even though we were 10 miles from where I grew up in Bergen County, N.J. Sékou had anointed me La productrice, the producer, but I had no control over the outcome. I could only trust. This was a deep ethnographic experience, indeed. Or so I hoped. I also named Sékou, calling him “the New Yorkais” after watching him display hard work and great skills one afternoon. Then Famoro popped the first question and shifted my mood. “Hey, can we give Sékou a little money to make him happy for his work?” “How much,” I asked. “$1000 dollars.” “I already paid for Sékou’s wife’s ticket!” I said, maybe a bit too quickly. Famoro did not miss a beat. “Okay, then $500, and I’ll tell him that you already gave him the other part.” Somehow, I said yes to this. Famoro made it seem logical that due compensation for the studio technician is appropriate, but we had never discussed this arrangement prior to that moment. I could have refused. I was under a different assumption that Sékou was family, that I facilitated bringing them together to make this happen, that we are all here to help Famoro—it was enough! I never even tried to argue how I saw things. Too late. Famoro told me to give him the whole $500 in one chunk so that “he knows we are serious.” Like a good and noble hɔrɔn. Or la productrice, as Sékou started to call me. I did not realize I had a formal title until then, but this was a clever way of turning me into a producer. They played between the jeli sensibility and the global business sensibility in which paying for the studio and technician is the norm. Still, with no idea how to be a real “productrice,” the production remained entirely in their hands. I just held the money. Anyway, handing over $500 all at once did not happen. I felt rather slighted by another additional, unforeseen cost, and I became more tight-fisted for the rest of the production.

Learning to Be a Productrice On day three, they decided to move the production to New York. So we packed up the rental car and carted everything to New York, to Famoro’s very small, one-bedroom apartment. Because his place is quite small for what we needed to do, I sent emails and made phone calls to locate a more suitable studio. I sought the advice of musical friends, including an

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ethnomusicologist, and gathered that the best way to handle this production was to get all the musicians in one room and record the songs, live, rather than recording single musical tracks, one by one. This would surely generate the spirit of togetherness that I hoped for. When I proposed moving to a studio where we would have more space to record live, Sékou and Famoro were opposed to the idea. Furthermore, Famoro explained, jeli musicians are jealous. He did not want to work with a live recording. “Here in New  York,” Famoro explained, “there is a lot of competition. Everyone is trying to do their individual thing here.” It seemed that the New York spirit had overtaken the jeli spirit in this case. This was a bicultural bricolage, and it did follow a certain logic, perhaps polyrhythmic in nature, like the music that I had to uncover as we went. Were they purposely hiding the beat to the music from me to keep the control? I felt waist-deep in nyama and that the tricksters were doing their thing. By the time I returned to Famoro’s apartment the next day, Sékou had the studio set up, and they told me they finally had a song for me to hear. They played me one song featuring two balafon tracks and two lovely back-up singers. Then Famoro asked me for $400 for the two singers, $200 each. I felt the heat rise in my body as our two ways of seeing the reality again came into conflict. “No way!” I responded. “Are you crazy? I’m not paying $400 for the back-up vocals on one song!” Perhaps I was abrupt, but I thought the request was ridiculous. Then I told him I would give him $50 for each singer now, or wait until the project is finished and we could determine how to split the money. I clearly was not pleased. He backed down and said, “It’s okay. Don’t worry, we will wait.” He does not like to upset me. But he also gives me a cultural lesson. I have helped him a lot over the years and he takes good measures to maintain a good understanding between us. As for me, I was still reeling from the financial agreement for Sékou and started to feel that pressure. Is this a jeli-swindle-for-money? Or is there another way I can see this? I was sorry we never made any agreements or contracts regarding money. The next day, when I arrived, Famoro and I sat on the couch to discuss things and ease some tensions. Sékou saw how we communicated with respect. He began to talk in a kind voice; it was a jeli-style speech about how I had come into this life on a mission ordained by God to serve as Famoro’s messenger between two cultures—the traditional African world

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Photo 10.2  Sékou Dioubaté at Famoro Dioubaté’s home in Harlem, New York. (Photo by author)

and the modern world. Sékou addressed his speech to Famoro in French so I could understand, and Famoro validated what Sékou said in parentheses. They allowed me to film the moment. The photo below is a freeze frame from that video (see Photo 10.2). “Lisa is a missionary that God has sent you to guide you, (Exactly!) to orient you, to wake you up, because you’ve been in a slump with all your problems. (Exactly!) You’re not getting out of it. And it is not by accident that God put Lisa in your path. (Voila!) I have a feeling that you will be the happiest man.” Then Sékou turned to me. “I told him yesterday, among the millions of balafonists, you won’t find a person like Lisa behind them. And how many balafonists are there in Guinea? You are the only one who has a support like that, in spite of the fact that the United States has not recognized you as a person of value. I understand your problem, your stress. Imagine, 21 years you have been blocked here, and you have a young professor, an expert in balafon at large, and all of Guinea recognizes you, but you have to be restrained here in this big country. That hurts. I understand! That breaks your morale. You ask yourself, me, what did I do wrong?”

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Sékou’s words recall the jeli’s role as an Esu-Elegbara of sorts. “Each version of Esu is the sole messenger of the gods (in Yoruba, iranse), he who interprets the will of the gods to man; he who carries the desires of man to the gods” (Gates, 1988, 27). His words appeal to my deep, heartfelt desire to do something about this problem whereby no one in the United States has recognized the true value of Famoro or of jeliya. Sékou effectively took my negative feelings about our money relations and shifted my mood to inspiration and motivation, just as Famoro’s music can affect people’s moods. He is “making me sweet.” It is also tricky, because it is this same talent that convinces me that giving them money when I was not intending to, was a good idea. This is part of the jeli sensibility, using our emotions to influence our actions. Then the days started to blend together. At some point, Famoro readdressed how I acted over the $400 request for back-up singers. He instructed me on how to act better. He told me to relax, that I should talk sweetly to him, that I should tell him, “Hey, we have a long project ahead of us. Let’s go slow with the money and make it last because we don’t want to use it up too quickly.” I agreed with him. He was training me in how to be graceful, gentle, and noble-like, the Manding way. I told him I am not African and it is hard for me to go along this way. He pressed, “You? You African lady!” and then added, “come on!” with disappointment in my lack of volition to try to embody this role. To my own inculcated ways of doing business, which are rather naïve and transparent, I am upset that he would even suggest $400. Clearly, he will skim off the top, if not take half for himself. Why does he not just ask me directly? Mine is an American perspective, indicating a particular way of seeing the world. In contrast, I can see things from the other side, as a hɔrɔn. Famoro is giving me an essential life lesson: how to react calmly. Stick to my needs, but express them gently, to negotiate in a way fitting of a noble. Even an aristocratic noble in Downton Abbey or The Crown never loses his or her cool and commands respect. It makes sense in any culture. Cool-­ headedness in the face of contradicting ideas—a culturally relative position that expands to human wisdom that transcends cultural boundaries. As we approached day five, we had not made much progress. By that time I had only given Sékou $100 of the promised $500, in very American fashion: Do not pay until you receive the final product. He knew that to get the rest, he had to get Famoro to produce something I wanted.

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The Negotiating Sensibility About halfway through the project, I had invited Hadja to dinner at my father’s house in New Jersey. We came with Hadja’s delicious African meat stew to meet my Dad. I explained to Hadja in the car how it is difficult because Famoro and I understand each other on so many levels, except around money. I explained how he always gives me high prices for things. We had a lovely night with my father and Hadja. At some point, the discussion turned to the different ways of operating with money between Euro-America and Africa. My father was explaining how his lawyer fees are fairly nonnegotiable, but that he lowers them, or even offers them for free to people who need his help and cannot afford it. Otherwise, there is an hourly rate and he bills accordingly. Sometimes it takes a long time to collect. He also noted that when he works with some cultures, they want him to throw in extra freebees to be comped into the cost that he quoted them. He has to insist that it does not work that way. So I asked Hadja. “Is everything negotiable in Guinea? If you go to the market, can you negotiate the price you pay for vegetables?” I could not remember anymore. “Everything is negotiable in Africa” she said, with the vegetable vendor, the lawyer, what-have-you. If you go to a lawyer, he or she, but generally he, will quote you a high price. It will take days if not weeks of back and forth explaining stories, qualifications, and hardships before the two parties may agree to a price. This may be characteristic of polychronic cultures, according to anthropologist Edward Hall, in which negotiation and social interaction takes precedence over fixed prices (Hall, 1983). I started to see that this negotiation, this dance around money, is not just to try to get the highest price for the seller and the lowest price for the buyer. It is a way for two people to have a connection with one another; they have to do the dance. A lot has to do with human connection, to feel that you want to give this person the set amount of money. And the seller will reduce the rate if he can feel he has some sort of invested interest in you or your cause. Human-to-human relations trump the detached business-­as-usual mode of functioning. If I can understand it in that light, it makes it more palatable to me. These negotiations take time. Moreover, you do not have to compromise your worldview. I could have refused a request for money, but it must be done with gentleness and grace, and with good reason. I have difficulty saying no.

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Anthropologist Michael Jackson explains that in taking on a “favorable attitude,” as I attempted toward negotiation, albeit reluctantly, we may “relinquish our own habitual ways of thinking and acting, and open oneself up to alternatives” (Jackson, 2012, 169). This is putting the embodied methodology of doing anthropology into practice. It is precisely in accepting these alternatives that anthropologists slip into that uncomfortable “between.” Can I pause when my culturally engrained reactions surface and switch on an enjoyment of the negotiation process? Can I not balk at Famoro’s requests, take time to consider them, and propose a counteroffer? My balafon training—embodying jeli timing and feeling—was a training in syncing up with a new sensibility, or modality of being. I had yet to embody the role gracefully. On day six, I came to Harlem and Sékou and Famoro presented to me the five songs they recorded the night before: two tracks of Famoro playing instrumental balafon. They were lovely and lilting and traditional and similar to another instrumental jeli album I knew. The tracks are unfinished, he told me. They are cyclical, repeating kumbengo patterns, and some introductions. Okay, now we were getting somewhere. I went out to buy snacks and returned with a bag of in-the-shell peanuts for Sékou. I put $200 in the peanut bag. He was pleased with his gift and started eating peanuts right away. I brought him a bowl for the shells. On day seven, they had summoned talented djembe and dundun drummers to record percussion tracks over the balafon. At the end of their session, Famoro told me to come quickly so I that I could pay them before they left. I asked him how much. $200 each, he tells me. This again? I refused, but calmly this time. He immediately lowered the price to $150 each and then said $100. I say okay to $100, each. I bargained. Hooray! On day eight, I returned to find that Sékou and Famoro had stayed up late, again, to record four more double balafon tracks. “We are finished,” they declared, contented. The tenth and final song would be entirely a balafon solo. They sat me down on the couch and played me the music from Sékou’s computer (see Photo 10.3). I was pleased with the sound. As we listened to one track, tears ran down Famoro’s face. When I inquired, he told me that this song had been coming to him for a long time. It is a very old, deep love song that he knew years ago, and it had just resurfaced. He is moved by his own inspiration. Another song was called “Mamadou Boutiqui,” a homage to a rich patron that has been remade by other jelis before. Later, Famoro told me that the song was dedicated to me, named after a very compassionate and

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Photo 10.3  Famoro and Sekou Dioubaté playing back their recordings for me at home in Harlem, New York, 2018. (Photo by author)

famous patron from generations past, reworked in my honor. I initially thought he ignored my request for “Lamban.” But Famoro explained that the ninth (and my favorite) track called “Djelibolo” means “the jeli’s hand,” was a shorthand title for “Lamban” used among jelis. The final song would be an instrumental balafon piece. And with that, I gave Sékou the last and remaining $200 I had promised and told him so. He looked at me, inquisitively. So I explained, $100 when we arrived in New York, $200 in the bag of peanuts, and that was the last $200. He told me that he never saw the money in the bag of peanuts. Really? How could you have missed it? I went on a rampage for the next hour, with little help from others, to search for the missing $200. I

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looked in the plastic bag that held the remaining peanuts. I searched a bit in the garbage with Famoro’s help. I took out all of the stored plastic bags from the kitchen cabinet, opening each one. Nothing. “C’est ta faute!” Sékou reprimanded me. “It’s your fault,” stinging words that may be true. I wanted to hear him say it again, so I said, “qu’est-ce que tu as dit?” “What did you say?” unsure whether I was challenging him or digesting his words and the reality of the situation. He said it again, even more firmly, and our eyes locked. I did not make certain that he saw the money, and I knew it. I was crushed. Then something happened to break the tension between us. Here is how I remember it: I am crouching down near the white linoleum kitchen floor, looking in a plastic bag at last resort, and he is towering over me, pointing a finger. Just then the buzzer rings, as if on queue, and a stately Guinean man with glasses, dressed in a dark blue business suit with a red tie and flashy diamond-­covered watch, enters the apartment. A hɔrɔn, indeed, of the noble class. His presence is palpable and at once Sékou and I stop arguing and everyone greets him. He takes a seat on the couch. Famoro sits to his right, and Missia Saran, to Famoro’s right. No one sits on his left, which has an open space. Sékou sits on a chair next to Missia Saran. Then the well-dressed man begins to give a speech in Malinké. Everyone is muttering responses, looking down at the floor. He then reaches into his inside pocket and fans out a pack of bills. They are $100 bills. I cannot quite count them all before he hands them to Famoro, but I remember being impressed that there are more than I thought. $700? $800? Could it have been $1000? I was not sure. Famoro passes the money to Missia Saran, who passes it to Sékou. Sékou tries to pass it to Hadja, but she does not touch it. The man leaves just as quickly as he arrives, bidding everyone farewell as they thank him. Apparently, Sékou’s family of jelis was linked to this man’s family of hɔrɔn, and he was doing an honorable deed by bestowing his jeli with a gift, but I did not ask details. The whole scene seemed to say to me: “And That Is How It Is Done!” On day nine, Sékou gave me a speech of sorts while he spent an inordinate amount of time transferring the music files from his computer to my hard drive. He explained to me again and again what form they were in, and where they are kept. He called me “la productrice,” over and over again, as if to hammer in my role as the producer of the album, as if to add, act like one! Yet I still exercised no control over the musical production, my fault, entirely.

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I gave Sékou the lost $200 when I had first arrived. He started to talk about the way things are done in France, as if this was not my very own American sensibility. “Ce n’est pas negotiable!” he told me, referring to the way things are done in America and France. The price of a studio, the cost of session musicians, and the mixing and mastering have set fees on both sides of the Atlantic in some societies. I was working in another modality, one in which family members help each other out. I thought that buying the plane ticket and getting Sékou to New York was a gift to Famoro, that payment for his service would not be in question. They put me in a position where I had to refuse their request, and I could not. I was caught “in between” and made a mess from every angle. Next time, I thought, I will plan better. Next time, the American/French business plan. On that same evening, I switched my mentality into the business sensibility and constructed a budget, with the help of my friend, in Excel. She thought that showing them a budget of what was spent would help to clarify things. I revved myself up the next morning, day ten, on my way to sit with Famoro and Sékou before he and Hadja departed that day. I showed them the budget. I included the money I had spent on Hadja’s ticket and the extra $500 in red to show the unexpected costs. The jelis have a way of quickly disarming any posturing you think you have effectively created. I came with croissants and cookies, juice and Perrier for good measure, forgetting that Ramadan had started the day before. Famoro was not eating, but Missia Saran happily grabbed a croissant and an orange juice and took the treats to the couch to enjoy them. Sékou and Hadja did not eat, but he started in again, dramatically describing how the tracks were saved. I tried to divert the conversation toward my budget. I brought a folding chair to the center of the room and set up my MacBook Air so it could be displayed to everyone. I already knew I was breaking a code here. Famoro would expect me to discuss any and all money issues with him first, in private. But I was now beyond respecting any need to be private. Moreover, Sékou understood more than Famoro the costs of things. From the moment I got to the red numbers, Sékou stood up and started talking. “Who told you to pay me $1,000?” I pointed to Famoro. “Aha,” he responded, as if to shift the blame? I was not sure. “How much does a studio cost in New  York?” he asked me. “I don’t know, about $300 per ½ day,” I responded. “Aha,” he answered. Without further ado, he commanded, “You have to bring us to the airport!” As if that ended it. My budgeting plan came too late. To plan ahead of time,

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like a good American productrice, to make details clear ahead of time, that would be proper form. To do so after the fact was not fitting in either cultural system. The night before, I had told Famoro I did not want to bring Sékou and Hadja to the airport but that I would pay for their taxi, of course. This was not acceptable, but Famoro understood that I was having a hard time with the whole thing, and told me he would skip his work in Newark and take them himself. My American friend echoed this concern, explaining that if I was the producer, it was my responsibility to pick them up and send them off well. Sigh. I was getting the lesson from both cultural orientations. Utter lack of grace, any way you cut it. Adding to issues around money: Sékou had still expected me to pay for the €280 fee he had incurred checking in his luggage and also expected me to cover any extra costs for returning to France. I asked him for the receipt from the travel here. He did not respond and never produced it. Another falter in his New Yorkquais American sensibility. I never paid for it. I guess we were even. I brought him and Hadja to the airport, paid their $100 over-luggage fee. We parted on ostensibly good terms. But we still did not have a finished album.

Reflections I am caught in between two systems of being, two worldviews: my organized, preplanned, fixed price system, and the old ways that Famoro has taught me—to be in the moment, go where your heart moves you, be gentle and cool-headed in the face on conflict, to negotiate well, for this is what it is to be wise. If it is true, as Paul Stoller suggests, that “other systems of knowledge contain much wisdom, that we have much to learn from the likes of the Azende or the Hauka, and that such learning can be personally transformative” (Stoller, 2009, 24), then our personal transformations are proof that culturally relative wisdom can transcend cultural boundaries. But when acting in the “between,” it is not always clear. Adding Sékou into the picture, I could see how he worked skillfully in both sensibilities to his advantage. I still had much to learn. I was trying to go with the flow, to leave things in Famoro’s hands and let the cards fall as they may. The mutual trust and respect between Famoro and I told me to step aside and let go of controls, which allowed Famoro and Sékou their sacred space to create inspired music. And that might have been for the best, in this situation. I am not a producer, not yet.

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However, I also reflected that Sékou and Famoro purposely did not explain to me beforehand why Sékou wanted to bring his recording studio to New York and that I would pay the expenses for that and for his work. This was “sly and cunning” to my American perception, and an example of how they earned the unfavorable or less-than-moral reputation among non-Africans. But it was a flawed view. Two years later I had several conversations with Famoro about this incident. I started to see that “cunning” or “sly” was their way to get their real needs met. There was no way I could understand all of the intricate reasons as to why Sékou and Famoro wanted to work together in this way. Because I have the economic power, I can say “no!” and they will have no choice. That is my power. So, they have two possibilities to make what they want happen. They can be sly and cunning and crafty to get what they need, as they are expected to do in their culture, or they can be totally upfront about all costs and ideas, and keep asking until someone who understands them and has sympathy or belief in them pays the bill. Unlikely. So they use their skills and talents, their trickster modality, without being dishonest but perhaps obfuscating the entirety of their big plan, to mediate between the global and the local and make things happen in their favor. In their defense, they are the ones at the disadvantage, financially. I hold the money and, ultimately, the power to decide. This is their way of balancing the power. I will not judge them anymore for being sly or cunning. Rather I will strengthen my own discretion, ask more questions, understand their vision and how it differs from mine, and most certainly draw up a budget and consult with them ahead of time. We are negotiating between two cultural modalities and drawing on either one creatively to get the job done to everyone’s satisfaction. In jeli style, there is a sensibility I learned to intuit, a modality of living in the moment and going with the flow, or rechanneling the flow if it is taking too much from you. In the global business sensibility, preplanning and agreeing to the terms before production begins is the norm. Either way, the values that Famoro tries to instill in me—to remain cool, negotiate your case, be sharp, and be gentle and kind while doing so—are valid in any modality. He embodies these values himself. And for that reason, I strive to lend support to his endeavors with the confidence that I am supporting something undervalued in my own society, something precious that the world is losing. Edward Hall says that monochronic time is arbitrary, imposed, and learned so thoroughly that we, who were inculcated in

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that system, treat it “as if it were the only natural and logical way of organizing life. Yet it is not inherent in man’s biological rhythms or his creative drives, nor it is existential in nature” (Hall, 1983, 49). At stake is the value of human interconnection, of “cutting things short just when they are beginning to go well” (Ibid.) It was Sékou, ironically, who reminded me that I needed to use the global business modality, to be as clear as possible when dealing with financial matters. Plan it out ahead of time. Know what the well-defined rate is. Without this classification system, “it is doubtful that our industrial civilization could have developed as it has” (Ibid.) Both have their merits. In either system, I showed a lack of generosity, perhaps a lack of courage, not in the amount of money I spent or did not spend, but in my attitude in offering or refusing it. I talked sternly when I did not agree. When I agreed, I was reluctant, and hesitant in distributing it. I lost part of it by being vague. I did not want to spend it. I felt swindled. I am learning to communicate everything clearly and assume nothing. I am learning not to be so quick to say yes, especially to a jeli; they are skilled in pulling emotional strings and catching people in the moment. However, if you do say yes, follow through with firm conviction in your actions, even if it hurts. That was my lesson to learn. Indeed, these are all the lessons embedded in the jeli ritual that still exist across Manding communities worldwide today. Ultimately, I believe the lessons that Famoro (and sometimes Sékou) continue to teach me in upholding the grace befitting of a noble. The sensitivity I continue to gain as a good apprentice serves me equally in the Manding and the American cultural realities. Two systems. Both yield results. In the present, jeli, perhaps Manding, perhaps West African, and generally polychronic modalities that privilege human interaction and negotiation are at risk of being devoured by the global economic norm. This should not be. There are benefits of negotiating everything, of engaging in face-to-face interpersonal interaction to determine the way things will flow. The patron–jeli relationship teaches me values such as cool-headedness, community, generosity, and inter-­ human relations. The global business modality is more structured, fixed, allows both sides to know what to expect. But it does not cater to the natural human flow of events in their moment-to-moment occurrence and therefore can stymie creative processes. There are advantages and disadvantages to both modalities. We—Sékou, Famoro, and I—work in both worlds, and it takes skill and practice to navigate between them with utmost integrity.

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Notes 1. If these two modalities were fixed, they conform to Edward Hall’s description of monochronic and polychronic cultures that I referenced in Chap. 3 (Hall, 1983). 2. “Ethnographic sensibility” is a term I developed with anthropologist Marko Zivkovic (University of Alberta) to describe how an ethnographer intuits, senses, feels in the body, how a foreign culture functions. It is a skill we teach in our study abroad programs. Likewise, my informants and any people who blend into a foreign culture may develop an ethnographic sensibility, as well as my jeli friends surely exhibit in this chapter. Other social scientists have use the term as well. See Pacheco-Vega (2016) and Mcgranahan (2014).

References Crapanzano, V. (2003). Imaginative Horizons. University of Chicago Press. Gates, H. L. (1988). Signifying Monkey. Oxford University Press. Hall, E. (1983). The Dance of Life. Anchor Books. Herzfeld, M. (2004). The Body Impolitic. University of Chicago Press. Jackson, M. (2012). Between One and One Another. University of California Press. Lefebvre, H. (2004). Rhythmanalysis: Space, time, and everyday life (Elden & Moore, Trans.). Continuum. (Originally published in French, 1992). Mcgranahan, C. (2014). What Is Ethnography? Teaching Ethnographic Sensibilities Without Fieldwork. Teaching Anthropology, 4. https://www.teachinganthropology.org/ojs/index.php/teach_anth/article/view/421 Pacheco-Vega, R. (2016). On Having Ethnographic Sensibility. http://www. raulpacheco.org/2016/09/on-­having-­ethnographic-­sensibility/ Stoller, P. (2009). The Power of the Between. University of Chicago Press.

Discography Diouabté, Famoro Dundunya (2006). Jumbie Records. Dioubate, Missia Saran. Signodiouba (2017). Dioubaté, Sékou. (2019). Paris.

CHAPTER 11

Paris 2015–2021

As Western history becomes more solid day by day, Africa’s history trembles as it destabilizes from day to day, thanks to the disregard of their children who continue to Westernize rather than Africanize. (Mamady Kouyaté, 2021)

Going to France, for me, is really a side factor. Me, I don’t really take it into consideration. For me, it’s just something that helps me to live better. But the life? It’s here [in Africa]. (Drame & Senn-Borloz, 1992, 57)

Moussa Samba Kouyaté Moussa Samba Kouyaté and I sat in my local haunt, Café de L’Industrie, in the 11th arrondissement just a stone’s throw from La Bastille.1 We were casually talking about jeliya. Moussa, who was 23, had come to France 4 years prior. He had not returned home since. He wore jeans, a backward baseball cap, and a silver small hoop in his earlobe. In Paris, he is known by the name “Moussa.” On social media and for his music identity, he has dropped the “Kouyaté,” replacing it with his late mother’s first name, Samba. So now he is Moussa Samba. This name inspires him. Kouyaté does not. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Feder, Jeliya at the Crossroads, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83059-5_11

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I cannot get over the fact that he has dropped the Kouyaté from his name. Kouyaté, as all African surnames, is an identifier. It signifies who you are by your caste and profession, by your family lineage. The Kouyaté family is the first and most prestigious jeli family name of the nyamakala caste in Manding West Africa. All of the musical and other Manding values are maintained through his family lineage. I consider Kouyaté a source of cultural pride. But Moussa is not proud of the name “Kouyaté” anymore. Jeliya is something he no longer believes in. He was born and raised in Kankan, the third-largest town in Guinea, that is known for having been a commercial center along trade routes that connected the coast to Mali to the Middle East. They are also known for the Mamaya festival featuring balafon music and line-dancing. The famous almamy Samoury Touré, a legendary figure in Manding history who resisted French colonization, controlled the town in 1881 before the French colonists conquered it in 1891. Moussa knows his history, all of the battles and major events, as a good jeli does, and he upholds many of the tenets of jeliya by nature. As we chatted, he summed up the meaning of life in one word: “Business,” he says. “This is all that matters now.” Moussa is an independent thinker. From the stories he has shared with me, I tend to think he always was. When he was a boy, only about 8, he traveled the region of Haute Guinée with his father to see the “original” Sosso balafon in Niagassola—the one that belonged to Soumanoro Kanté. The balafon that is more than 800 years old. The one that the Kouyaté family safeguards as the symbol of Manding values and culture. The one that is a UNESCO World Heritage site. That prestigious, world-renowned bala. I tell him that “my first teacher, has taken many students there, and I am still hoping to make the trek one day.” Moussa heard me out calmly. Then he told me his version of his trip to the Sosso bala. As a boy and member of the Kouyaté family, his father took him on the pilgrimage there, much like my Dad took me to Philadelphia to see the cracked Liberty Bell. On assessing the condition of the balafon, he announced to the guardians, extended members of his family, and to his Dad that he did not believe that it was the original one Soumanoro kept at his house and that the first Kouyaté, Sundiata’s jeli, came to play it. “The wood could not have been preserved to last for 800 years,” he told me with conviction. “They don’t have it airtight. They don’t have the technology to preserve it.” I started to doubt the legend myself. Moussa is not afraid to shock people and go against the grain. Perhaps this is part of being a Kouyaté.2

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Moving to Paris I moved to the 11th arrondissement in Paris, France, a few days after the terrorist attacks of November 2015 occurred.3 Bataclan, the large music venue where the shootings took place, was just a few blocks from my new apartment. When the shattered glass was cleaned up and people stopped trembling, Parisians ventured back out to their local cafés. It is hard to keep the Parisians from their cafés. It brings a regularity to life; it is a ritual, if you will, like the West African greeting. They have lived through bloody revolutions right here on these same streets. The French have an intrepidness about them. Life goes on—for the living. All of my jeli informants are Muslim, and all of them were horrified. “They are not Muslims!” Famoro said, speaking about the terrorists. “They are not Muslims!” he reiterates, with disgust at the thought. Then he tells me about a story he saw on Facebook in which a young suicide bomber has a prise de conscience before committing the act and decides to blow up the people who trained him instead of the innocent people in the street. Islam, the way I have experienced it in my 20 years of work among the Manding people, has been peaceful, generous, and open-minded to other ways of life. Famoro sent me to Paris with Gbessa Sékou Dioubaté’s number and had told me that he would introduce me to the jeli scene there. This is the same Sékou of the New  York–based recording project of the previous chapter. Born in 1980, he stands at the crossroads of the older and younger generations of jeliya. When I called him, he took the RER4 from his apartment in Massy, a Parisian suburb, to Place de la Republique to meet me. We drank a coffee on the square, facing the bronze statue of Marianne, the symbol of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the stated values of the French Republic. He invited me to his rehearsal with Sékouba Bambino for their upcoming show at the Pan Piper. I soon learned that Sékou was a master composer and a lyricist. He spends a lot of his time working in his home recording studio, helping jelis record their music, when he is not rehearsing and playing gigs. His home studio provides a small source of income. It also served as my entry portal to jeli culture in Paris. Because of its colonial past, France receives a large number of West African immigrants. Interestingly, compared to the United States, it is against French policy to note racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds among French nationals. The only statistics, therefore, consist of those who achieve legal immigration status as visa-holding residents of France.

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Navigating the French bureaucracy is complex, as I can attest from personal experience. But with a bit of assistance and money, it is noticeably easier for West Africans to get working papers in France than it is for them in the United States. France offers a “talent visa” among others, which applies to many West African musicians. According to Statista, in 2016 there were about 40,000 Guineans, mostly between the ages of 25 and 54, living in France. According to French government statistics, in 2015 there were 76,500 from Mali, 67,000 from Senegal, and, they assumed, about 3 million French nationals of sub-Saharan Africa living in France. Also of interest is the amount of remuneration from the diaspora back to Africa. They estimate in 2016 that remittances from the diaspora sent an astounding €429 billion to the African continent, “playing a very significant role in reducing poverty and contributing to growth in countries of origin.” In considering Arjun Appadurai’s global flows (1996), West Africans contribute a sizable amount to ethnoscapes and finanscapes. Compare this with the United States, where Guinea, Mali, and the Gambia have low immigration rates. In 2010, New York City estimated that about 10,000 Guineans and Guinean-Americans lived there, with other sizable enclaves in Atlanta, Georgia; Indianapolis; Ohio; and Washington DC. The Guinean population in the United States also contributes significantly to the welfare of their families living in Guinea. Clearly the population and culture of Manding people and, thus, jeli music in France is much stronger than it is in the United States. West African culture in general is thriving and mixing with Parisian culture, almost like Latino culture in the United States. The influences are present in the current fashion (African wax print fabrics are big in French fashion), the music (such as Aya Nakamura, French of Malian origin, and MHD (Mohammed Sylla), who created a new sound called “Afro-Trap,” which is widely popular on the radio, in French dance clubs, and on social media), and the food. To be sure, West Africans living in France maintain their own social and economic systems—one can find just about any food product, sundries, fish, meat, vegetables, household item, clothing, music, hair salons, and more as a normal course of life, particularly in the Chateau Rouge area of Paris, that one can find in Conakry or Bamako. A West African’s life in Paris can range from an almost completely Manding circle to a completely French one, but most people live “in between,” especially the musicians. They represent, as do West Africans in the United States, a perfect example of translocality, those communities that maintain cultural ties to one

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another in countries abroad, and to a homeland. There is a continuity of safeguarding their culture through various forms of communication, while simultaneously they and their host cultures interpenetrate one another.

Translocal Jelis Professionally, West African jelis in France exist in and move through various kinds of spaces, creating places and neighborhoods (Appadurai 1996) across the globe, maintaining translocal connections (Hannerz 1996; Neidenführ & Steinbrink 2020) with regard to jeliya and Manding culture at large. They play their music in all-Manding events such as Mamaya, babynamings, and weddings and funerals in rented halls, continuing the role they have played in West Africa for hundreds of years. Simultaneously they function as cosmopolitan musicians, playing in local cafés and clubs in Paris and the suburbs. One context informs the other, as I have shown in Chap. 8. Jelis in France have more options than they do in the United States. They may play a repertoire of anything from centuries-old standards to Manding music mixed with jazz, Afrobeat, Latin, or anything else as they move through different contexts in Paris. Venues range in size and prestige from someone’s home to large arenas. For example, I have seen my informants play at Le Studio de l’Ermitage in Ménilmontant which seats about 250 people and charges about €20 per entry. Le Café des Sports, on the other hand, is a local bar with free entry and a small stage where jelis sometimes jam with French musicians. I have seen some jelis, such as Ballake Sissoko, play in duos with French classical musicians at the prestigious theater, Châtelet, and I have seen jelis like Mory Kanté and Sidiki Diabaté, the son of famous kora player Toumani, play in large-scale Malian popular concerts at the Paris Accor’Hotels Arena. Jelis are in continual communication via Facebook posts and livestreaming, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facetime, with their compatriots scattered across France and Europe, the United States, Guinea, and worldwide. In this sense, they practice their profession—they share, safeguard, develop, and transmit it—through translocal connections via the latest regular technologies available. I also play a small role in connecting jelis translocally. I often pass around my iPhone, to people in jeli-led events, connecting them with various American-based jelis—rehearsals, weddings, studio work. I, as an American living in Paris, influence the translocal Manding community and they influence me.

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My Access and Methodology Over the past 5 years, I have come to participate in the West African jeli culture in France through a select number of people and circumstances. I spend time in Gbessa Sékou’s home studio, ostensibly overseeing Famoro’s music projects. There, I remet Djekoria Mory Kanté (from Chap. 6) and Moussa Samba Kouyaté (from Chap. 8), who have both become friends and interlocuters of mine in Paris. I also reconnected with Jelimuso Aïcha Kouyaté, a jeli singer residing in Germany, among others. Because of my history in learning to play jeli balafon, I have contact with handfuls of jeli balafon teachers from Guinea, Mali, and Burkina Faso, particularly Seydou “Kanazoé” Diabaté,5 and have become part of several enclaves of French music students learning West African jeli music on both balafon and n’goni. In my naturally occurring conversations that happen during work projects and balafon classes, I gather pieces of these jelis’ stories that tell the hardships of living in France as African musicians. These jelis give snapshots of the reality of jeliya and jeli music as it exists today in the diaspora community in France. In many cases, I have recorded the important conversations sometimes on video, sometimes on audio, on my iPhone, with the speaker’s permission and sometimes with their filming participation. Their stories as I present them here are incomplete images based on my limited experience with select individuals, but they are stories that open the path for further research and discussion on the transformations of West African jeli music and culture as it merges with European culture and the world. The two topics of interest that emerged from our conversations are: How are the conditions in which jelis recreate their culture changing as a result of living in Europe? Secondly, what choices are they making to adapt to the current reality? Lastly, what do those adaptions indicate about the future of jeliya? Our discussions revolved around our mutual current interests and concerns. The dialogue tended to grow organically. My relationships with these five jelis were characterized by feelings of familiarity, openness, and trust, whether through a mutually shared, trusted circle of friends. In none of these cases would we consider one another strangers, which allowed me a fairly high level of access and contributed to a friendly atmosphere in which they willfully disclosed information.

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Chez Gbessa Sékou In the previous chapter I discussed the intimate details of working “in between” two cultural modalities in New York with Famoro and Sékou in May 2018. The experience, as difficult as it was for me, brought a level of intimacy to my relationship with Sékou and his family. We were learning from one another how to bridge the difficult divide between our economic disparity. The key: we both believed in one another’s best intention and shared love for the values upheld in jeliya. In October 2018, I took the RER to Massy, to Gbessa Sékou Dioubaté’s house, yet again, to build on and arrange the recordings that Famoro and Sékou had begun under my auspices in New York. On this particular trip, I came with Djekoria Mory Kanté, the reputable guitarist who I met in Brooklyn at Famoro’s apartment in 2005 when I had just met Famoro. He was now living in Paris and playing in the famous Mory Kanté’s world-touring band. Djekoria Mory laid down guitar tracks over Famoro’s recorded balafon (see Photo 11.10). In Sékou’s living room studio, jelimuso Aïcha Kouyaté, also from Guinea but residing in Germany, sits on the couch, waiting her turn to record her own album later that day. We speak a bit, and she inquires about getting a visa to the United States. I inquire about whether she might sing for me. Djekoria Mory warns me that if I ask the jelimuso to sing, I must pay her. Recalling my past experience, I knew it to be true. I decided to wait until next time. Djekoria Mory laid down lead, supporting, and solo tracks. We went about recording over the next few hours, and near the end, the music once again made me cry. I felt how the ancestors were with us, how they linked the two musicians together. How can I explain this? I have been listening to this music now for quite a few years: the Gambians, the Malians, the Guineans. Plugged-in, acoustic, on CDs, in Africa, in the United States, in France. I have listened to some of their grandparents play, and I see the young children learning. I am suddenly struck by the beauty of this orally transmitted tradition, how it is passed from generation to generation. I can feel the roots stretching back hundreds of years. I felt all of this in the very lines that Djekoria Mory plays on his guitar, the way it interacts with Famoro’s balafon, whose physical person is more than 3000 miles away. I felt my own role in the connections I have formed between people.1 The power of it all made me weep.

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Photo 11.10  Djekoria Mory Kanté recording at Sekou Dioubaté’s home studio, 2018. (Photo by author)

Sékou saw my tears and said, “Toi, tu es jeli!” When they finished, they put the music on playback and we started to chat. I asked them whether I could ask some questions while I record on my iPhone. They agreed. I started with Djekoria Mory. But before I even asked a question, they had started talking. They were reminiscing for me. Djekoria Mory starts to tell about how life used to be in Guinean-Conakry, before they came to Paris. “Griots are family,” he told me. “One big family. Whether you are from Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, we are all family. Ninety percent of our generation learned jeliya in Conakry, in a neighborhood called Coléah.” Sékou chimed in. “His house,” he says to me, indicating Djekoria Mory, “that was the central meeting point. The Café des Artistes.” “With Bala Kala Diabaté.”

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“Right. That was the central meeting place for the musicians, for the jelis. Every day, you started your morning there and ended your evening there. If you weren’t seen there, then you had the feeling that you didn’t exist, as a musician. That was around 1998.” Djekoria Mory took the relay and told me about Sékou. “Sékou had his first recording studio back then. He recorded all of the artists at that time. Sékou did many compositions for artists. In Coléah, we had many release parties for albums at the time. We had all the instruments, Guitar, balafon, we played outside.” Sékou then put the conversation in the greater context of things. “The elders, in music, in the history of griots, are those who tell us what we are supposed to do, what is in store for us in the coming days. Because today, money has destroyed music. The Western culture has destroyed the family…. there are no more connections. Every morning, before anything, you had to pass by his house or you didn’t feel like a griot. Europe has destroyed all of that. Money has destroyed everything. Now we have to work … before we play music. All is lost!” He says this with seriousness and mirth at the same time. I asked them both whether they thought jeliya would continue. Sékou said, “We will continue! But Europe is diminishing it in a bad way. The youth are right! Whatever the intelligence of the youth, we can never reach the echelons of our elders. That has become impossible. Music is like that. It is a category where whatever level of intelligence you have, your elder will see what makes you sweat. But he won’t be sweating because he sees ahead. He knows something. And nothing has changed in the music. It is we, the youth, who are contorting it ourselves.” Then I asked, “Can you make money and still maintain jeliya?” Both of them said, yes, of course, and Sékou continued. “That’s life! That is the world of globalization. When we started our studio in Conakry, we were using analog tape and vinyl! Now,” he turns to his iMac, “it’s all in the computer. You know this well. This little black (app), that’s Logic. Things have modernized. We can earn money while being a griot. It’s okay, because even in jeliya, we have to modernize, but without abandoning our own culture, our own music.” Djekoria Mory then said, “The jelis, they are here in France from Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, but we all know something, we are one family.” He also said that when he prays here in France, he prays that the jeli people maintain their connection, because they live far apart now and they do not meet regularly like they used to.

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Sékou had a CD release party a few months earlier in which I accompanied his family and was one of maybe three Europeans attending. It was a typical jeli event for Manding people that consisted of extemporized praise-singing and patron donations. Sékou praised over a playback of his new CD. At about 3 am, he brought me up to the front and announced to his audience that I helped him obtain visas to travel to America so he can work on Famoro and Missia Dioubaté’s music. He explained that I am a manager and promoter of Manding music through my organization, Manding Grooves (not quite true yet). He connected me into the Manding social network in Paris. We carved a pathway for future opportunities for the advancement of Manding and jeli music through my participation. Then, Sékou gave me an example of the importance of the simple greeting, the greeting that Bakary Kanyi taught me on my very first trip to the Gambia in 2001. Just by the way that people greet each other, the greeting partners gauge a level of respect. “My culture taught us that we don’t offend someone, even in the way we greet them! So even today, when you greet someone older than you, you must greet him in a respectful manner. You show to that person that he has something in his head [worth knowing] and that you, the younger one, have something to learn from him. That is the difference! Our culture is losing that now.” Then I ask him one last question. “Before, you said that I am a jeli. Why did you say that?” At this point I passed my iPhone, which was still recording, to Djekoria Mory who started to film Sékou and I. I explained myself, “I had a moment where I saw you here now, but I saw how you bring your ancestors with you. You continue the culture, and it’s alive. You bring generations with you to this present moment. Another thing, when you play well, there is that sweetness. That gives me a feeling in my heart, I can’t even explain. It’s overwhelming. That’s why I love jeliya. We don’t have something like that in my culture. I respect that.” They sat and listened to me speak, patiently, without interruption. When I finished, Sékou responded. “You are jeli because, you have that feeling in your soul. The person who has no heart is not going to feel it. You are a person of heart. It comes from your genealogy. Your own capacity becomes bigger than yourself. That’s why you respect the jeli. That’s why you are a jeli. You feel the melodies, you feel what we are living. You feel the African way.” At that point, Aïcha, who had perked up when we started this conversation, suddenly broke into a full praise, a cappella, with all the force of a jelimuso, directed at me. “Ah Jeliya! Allah la ké ke jeli ananda!” Ah, jeliya,

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it is God who made the jeli! I thought she would stop, at this chorus line, but she did not. Her chorus led to extemporized singing, for me. After about 4 minutes of her song, Djekoria Mory passes me my iPhone, still recording, and got up to dance while they clapped. Sékou took me by the hand and raised it above my head, to help me acknowledge my praise. “Ah Lisa!” Djekoria Mory says. “We are happy!”

Postcolonial Development The conversation we had that day indicates a fundamental shift in the way jeli life is changing as West Africans migrate to Europe (and the United States). The best of the musicians, many of them jelis, are the ones who tend to get the opportunity to travel to Europe, to try to develop their musical careers in a multicultural French-based environment, and to send money back to West Africa. In France, jelis find homes across the suburbs of Paris and other French cities where housing is more affordable. As a result, the cultural hubs that they had once formed in face-to-face urban centers like Coléah, Conakry, no longer exist. In the metropole of Paris, they meet for rehearsals before Manding concerts, they meet at each other’s houses at times—Sékou’s home studio serves as one of those small hubs—but the central meeting point for musical artists to share on a daily basis is lacking. Furthermore, they face financial constraints and pressures that focus their attention on things outside of musical creation. These are the post-colonial effects of the dominant global pressures shaping the local-turned global culture.

Direct Oral Transmission, a Trajectory London-based ethnomusicologist Lucy Durán made two films in her “Growing into Music” series that focus on the jeli children of Mali and Guinea (2009–2012). On the one hand, the films show some of Mali’s jelis, including the late Jeli Kasse Mady Diabaté and Jelimuso Bako Dagnon, training their grandchildren in the art of jeliya, a reassurance that the flame continues to be passed to the youngest generation. On the other hand, Lucy Durán’s films expose the difference in learning jeliya in the country village of Niagassola, for example, compared with learning in the cities of Bamako or Conakry. In Durán’s films, the children and adults explain that in the city, people are busier, they watch TV, they have homework to do, and they might not grow up in a music-playing household or

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community. In the village, however, balafon music and singing may be part of everyday life. The next logical documentary in this series might be to investigate how jeli children living outside of Africa continue to receive training, and how jelis living in Europe continue to transmit their knowledge to children back in Africa.

Transitioning from Africa to Europe with Kanazoé Diabaté In France, I encountered jelis from Burkina Faso for the first time. Burkina Faso is a landlocked country nestled into a nook under Mali and Niger, with 50% Manding ethnicity and 50% Voltaic ethnicity. The Manding people share a common history, language group, and culture with the Malinké, Mandingo, and Bamana peoples of the greater Manding Empire and overlap in values and histories of the Malian, Guinean, and Gambian jelis. People from this country are called “Burkinabè,” or “people of integrity,” named by their former President Thomas Sankara, who governed from 1983 to 1987, when he was assassinated. Kanazoé Diabaté, a Burkinabè, comes from the Sambla ethnic subgroup of Manding peoples. The Sambla people are part of the greater Manding linguistic and cultural group. They play a pentatonic balafon as well as the Guinean diatonic Sosso bala. Kanazoé teaches balafon classes and workshops throughout France, and he also tours France and Western Europe with his band, Kanazoe Orchestra, which is signed to Buda Records, a Parisian-based label created in 1987 that “represents traditional music worldwide, and pop music still tied to history and traditional music.” Born in 1982, Kanazoe grew up in the village of Tolonso with his balafon jeli father where he received direct oral transmission on balafon. Today he has a pop dance band that features traditional jeli instruments and singing. I take week-long balafon workshops with him and attend his concerts. In February 2020, I invited Kanazoé to my house to speak with me and a French friend on camera after his gig at the Paris 360 Music Factory’s festival Au Fils des Voix. It was the last of the gigs before the Covid-19 shutdowns. Stéphane, my French friend, asked questions about the jeli culture according to his curiosity and the natural flow of conversation (signified as [S] below). What resulted was an interview that elucidates through Kanazoé’s experience the transition from childhood

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apprenticeship in a village to a jeli’s life in the European context, a fairly common trajectory in essence, for all of my jeli informants. I have edited the order of the conversation at times and added my own explanations to paint the picture. By the age of 7, Kanazoé’s father had begun to give him intensive balafon training. Kanazoé trained and accompanied his father to his ceremonies and celebrations, as young apprentice jelis do in West Africa. He remembers playing balafon all night long for parties before he was 10. His balafon training was about as intense as it could be then. “Sometimes there were sacrifices, we’d play for one week straight! If we took a break, it was really a little break, you know? So it was really a crazy education. It’s hard to understand the level of study. I didn’t have a choice. I had to do that. Before, it was hard when I was studying and it took so much energy. You are little, but you have to work. It required too much work! Your father makes you do it. But I lost my father when I was only 10. You see? So he gave me something before he left this life. I only had that in my life. I didn’t go to school. There was no one else in my life. I only had balafon. If I didn’t succeed in that, then my life wouldn’t have gone well. So, I did all I could to make it work well. Today, I say, I am so happy.” Kanazoé, like many other young musicians, dreamed about going to France. At the time, he thought that he could tour around Europe as a great musician, make good money, and return to Burkina Faso. Although his band has some popularity and good representation, becoming a star was not so easy. France was also not the paradise he imagined. “Before traveling, the way I imagined France and the reality when I first came here, it wasn’t the same thing. I was disappointed! I thought it was going to be paradise, but it isn’t. Many sad people. They don’t joke around. In Africa, we joke around! Even if we’re hungry, we joke! Even if life is difficult, we joke. “If you watch the TV, they’ll show you Africa, you’ll see just the shit, just the false things, the people are not well, they are sick. That’s not Africa! You have to come and see for yourself that it isn’t like that. In Africa we are united! We are all together. If you don’t have any money and you come to my house, you will be welcomed, you’ll eat well, we joke around, we enjoy! Because we are here today, but tomorrow we might be gone. “Luckily, it’s been good for me, here, because I started to do my Kanazoé Orchestra directly. I’m not someone who plays a lot, but I know

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a lot of young people like me who are talented, and it didn’t go as well for them.” Many young and talented musicians who make it to Europe encounter difficulties in getting legal working papers but also in orienting themselves to life in a foreign culture into which they do not integrate easily. It often depends on the French people you meet and who believe in you to help you along the way. [S] Do you feel something inside you that says, I have to be useful, I need to transmit my history, the value of my country so we don’t forget? “Yes, I feel that seriously! As we sing in Bambara, in the concerts [in France] we don’t have the time to explain everything. ... If you listen to my CD, you’ll hear there are a lot of things that touched me. Even in my songs, I denounce some things. I denounce, but in sweetness, the things that don’t please me. There are many pieces on my CD that are engaging about life, all the changes. Africa has suffered too much, and we still suffer. It’s as if we came into this world to suffer. I am African, and I am proud to be African, but at times, I ask myself why, what have we done wrong in this world? Why are we still suffering! There are things that happen that are dishonest. And we can’t say anything. If we say something, it won’t go well. Meanwhile, it’s my job as a griot.” [S] I see your heart when you play the music. I see what you do. The majority of musicians are shit. They don’t have anything to say. “Yes, that’s my job! On my CDs, we talked about things that happened in Burkina. We criticize the rice! The rice we have there in our little village, it’s organic. But now it’s exported to I don’t know where! France? We are from there, and we don’t even eat it. We eat the shitty rice from China! I denounced that in my first album [the song ‘Fantanya’ on Miriya]. And they slowed it down a little in Burkina.” Kanazoé Orkestra has two albums on Buda Records, “Miriya” and “Tolonso.” The lyrics, mostly sung in Bambara, are written in French in the liner notes. His songs may criticize both Europe and Africa. For example, “Djoroko” (Chains) on his Tolonso album speaks about how Europe still enslaves Africa. “The Whites say that slavery is finished. Meanwhile we still see it in Africa. Slavery has not been finished even for one day. How many years have you reduced us to slavery?” They also celebrate Women (“Mousso”). They tell of the difficulty of traveling overseas, far from home (“Tama”). He discusses the importance of working hard (“Bara”), and the problems plaguing the world such as poverty (“Fantanya”), war (“Kélè”), and money (“Nafolo”). For me, Kanazoé is successful in spreading his

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important message in the vein of jeliya, for French-speaking fans. But the enticing factor, the reason people come to his concerts and buy his albums is because of the success he has had in translating jeli instrumentals (balafon and n’goni) and vocals to a modern dance band sound with saxophone, drumset, and bass, all while maintaining the feeling of his African music. “Lots of people know me, but still, people don’t understand my music all the time. They don’t understand my message yet. It’s the language, but it’s also my instrument. … I’ve changed a lot of things in the balafon. I brought a lot. I want people to understand.”

Changing Jeli Music for a European Audience Kanazoé Orkestra is only the second Manding groove dance band featuring the balafon that I have ever seen; the first was Famoro’s Kakandé back in New York. Kanazoé Orkestra features three Burkinabè men, Kanazoé on balafon, a second balafonist/kamal n’goni player (Mamadou Dembelé), and a Burkinabe singer (Zaky Diarra—although I heard Diarra has left the band). The rest of the band is French and consists of a saxophonist, a bassist, and a conga player and percussionist. Many of the songs maintain a tight, fast groove, over which Kanazoé plays his balafon in a new style. Rather than the complex polyrhythms made up of melodic eighth-note strikes that alternate between keys every note, Kanazoé often sustains a linear melody by repeatedly hitting the same note quickly as if to create quarter-notes, half-notes, or sustained notes in time. In this sense, he is not using the traditional balafon techniques that Famoro Dioubaté on balafon, or Toumani Diabaté on kora, maintain. Rather, Kanazoe is creating a new sound with the balafon (see Photo 11.11). I asked the opinion of another balafonist, 15  years his senior, about Kanazoé’s style. The elder recognized Kanazoé’s traditional training and praised Kanazoé’s expertise, but he also noted that Kanazoé does not adhere to the traditional style of playing balafon. I interpret from this critique a concern that the wisdom gained in the mixing and matching of cross-rhythmic phrases (that I discussed in Chaps. 4 and 6) may drop out of jeli musical skills if too many people stop playing the music in the traditional way. It is important to put this into the context of oral transmission. For example, El Hadj Djeli Sory Kouyaté had warned his grandson, Famoro Dioubaté, in the 1980s not to play the chromatic balafon before he mastered the traditional diatonic balafon, because it would change the

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Photo 11.11  Seydou “Kanazoé” Diabaté playing with the Kanazoe Orkestra at 360 Paris Music Factory, February 2020. (Photo by author)

style of playing. Famoro heeded that advice and never strayed from his traditional style. Today, he plays pop dance music with his European/ American backed band, Kakande, all without straying from the traditional rhythms.6 Each musician must make his own choices, and these are the choices that jelis are making as they move into cosmopolitan cities and play for new people.7 How do they stay true to themselves and also appeal to Europeans? This is a question for further study on the topic of Jeliya at the Crossroads.

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Creating Music Schools Kanazoé explained his biggest dream, one that I have heard other jelis share. “Three years ago, I returned to Africa, as I do every year. An Italian lady came to take a class with me. We’re in the courtyard, and there were all the children, all the songs I taught, as soon as the course was over, the children ran after me to learn the same songs.” He pauses from the emotion, and continues. “You see? That got me. Because when I was young, there were many teachers. But today, everyone wants to come to Europe. Because if you play the balafon in Africa, it’s really difficult to live from that, in this day and age. Before, our parents lived well, they had everything. But today it’s really difficult to live well if you play a traditional instrument, to make a living it’s really a mess.” [S] Is it a change of taste? “Now they listen to American music and French music. It’s global. They start to suffocate with the old music. The children, they want to learn and there are no more teachers. Not a lot. They all want to come to Europe and the US.  I really want to make a balafon school in Burkina Faso. That’s my real dream!” Kanazoé is not the only jeli who has spoken of the problem of jeli “brain drain” to Europe and the United States. In the United States, both Abou Sylla and Mamady Kouyaté have expressed to me the idea of taking young jelis from the United States and Europe to Guinea to the historical jeli villages. Marseille-based kora player Prince Diabaté, with the support of the Guinean government, began construction of the Prince Diabaté Academy of Music in Guinea, which is slated to open in 2023. The idea is to create an international school in which European and American students as well as young Guineans can come to learn traditional Manding music, particularly string and flute instruments. West Africa relies on European economies to push their cultural development further. But Europe relies on Africa to recall the importance of human-to-human connection, propagated through the arts and music. Some jelis who manage to make it to Europe and the United States make good lives for themselves. But many Americans and Europeans have a false notion that African immigrants are so happy to live in our so-called developed countries. The reality as far as I know it is that many of the jelis, and drum and dance teachers in Europe and the United States, express the desire to live between home, where human relations feel sweet, and Europe, where they can seize opportunities for a living. There is another

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benefit to creating music and dance schools in Africa. American and European students and musicians who travel to West Africa to attend these schools help to support the local economy. Furthermore, as Kanazoé exhibits, the foreigners may also inadvertently inspire the African youth to continue their musical studies. And perhaps most importantly, the Europeans and Americans have the chance to get “hooked” on the sweetness of life in Africa.

Moussa Samba I am getting used to the fact that Moussa dropped his surname. One afternoon, in April 2019, I sat with him just outside of a rehearsal room at the Geode Studios in the 18th arrondissement while jelis from across Paris and Europe came together to rehearse for a large jeli event in Paris, a celebration of their profession. Even the famous Guineans Sékouba Bambino and Mory Kanté came and performed. During rehearsal beforehand, Moussa stood outside with an air of slight disdain for what was occurring inside. It was the typical example of fake soliyo (glorifying the ancestors) that he hates. Nevertheless, Moussa still attends and plays in these jeli events. It is a chance to get together with his community. Meanwhile, over the past 7 years that he lived in France, Moussa slowly self-funded his own album. He does not ask for financial help. He makes business deals, but only if he can keep all of his rights to the music. The album is finally finished, but not yet released. He has only let me hear a few samples. The album contains Moussa on lead guitar and vocal, with a band. They play Manding music mixed with samba, salsa, jazz, and more. The small, recorded clips and cameo private performances he has shared with me are promising. He is more than a guitarist. Trained by the well-­ known late guitarist Manfila Kanté in Conakry, he is also a composer, arranger, and lyricist. He tells me, “We have to move out into the world now, to modernize. We cannot stay solely in the confines of jeli music if we are to make it.” He directs and plays with his French Jazz band which draws on many styles of music, centered on jazz. He also dabbles in other genres, including punk. But he also sings and plays ballads about his country, one is an acoustic homage to his birth town, Kankan. He holds the values of jeli culture in his heart and in his actions, but he feels no obligation to adhere to jeli culture, and his community is a global one. His Manding jeli values, he says, he will find in all kinds of people across the world. He is a global jeli.

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Global Jelis Interestingly, Mamady “Djeliké” Kouyaté, an elder guitar jeli in the United States, who is president and founder of the Djelitomba Organization8 of the Americas, and an advocate of defending the tenets of jeliya in its ancient form (see Photo 11.12), expresses a similar sentiment that jeliya is global, that it is a state of mind and heart. The organization unites jelis across the Americans and is dedicated to preserving and passing on the profession of jeliya to the younger generation living outside of Africa. Mamady ends the closing statement of the American jeli organization, poetically, like this: There is also, most definitely, something that people readily forget: The words that we, the griots pronounce, (we, the Manding traditionalists and not the everyday singers), we say that you do not have to be necessarily African to pronounce them! It is not a question of continent. We hear true words said often, from people in many other continents. We do not try to hear them in a very precise manner. We comprehend them all the same.

Photo 11.12  Mamady “Djeliké” Kouyaté in an interview at Café Barbès, Brooklyn, New York. (Photo by author)

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In this search which concerns all the people, white, yellow, black, or red, people of the ineffable) in their close union between heaven and earth, the planet revolves around itself with all of its inhabitants, and that planet revolves around the sun. African science9 is not apart from that truth, rather our truth is relevant to everyone. Even across the modern and industrial age which bounds us together, we share the same fate, our common future. This is for those who share our common destiny, the destiny of being human. Our mysterious destiny includes everyone. This destiny is for Earth’s voyagers, as we are all on Earth’s journey. Signed, Mamady Kouyate Head of Djelitomba Organization on the American continents

In this sense, Mamady is claiming that jeliya is a state of mind and spirit, a commitment to the highest ideals of humanity, to the ability to inspire people to put the greater good of society above one’s own individual goals.10 This echoes the most well-respected jeli poets of the last generation, Massa Makan Diabaté and Banzumana Sissoko, who exemplified in their work that jelis should be concerned with the community and the nation, the truth above political and individual desires, above all, with purity equated to gold (Keita, 1995). If anything, the jelis that have spoken through this book are claiming that this work is not just the work of Manding people, and that jelis should be concerned not just with the community and the nation, but the world.

Notes 1. Moussa Samba is a fictitious name to protect subject’s identity, per request. 2. The name Kouyaté literally means ko yé an té in Malinké, or in French “un pacte inviolable entre nous” (Mamady Kouyaté, personal communication 2021). In English it means “an unbreakable pact between us”. “That is why,” Kouyaté continues, “a true Kouyaté does not violate his word of honor” (Kouyaté, 2021). 3. This multi-sited terrorism event, claimed by Daech/ISIS, happened on November 13, 2015. Three men blew themselves up outside of a Saint-­ Denis soccer match. Just after, several gunmen drove through the 10th and 11th arrondissements opening fire on busy cafés, while simultaneously several gunmen opened fire on an audience of 1500 people in a rock concert at the Bataclan Theater. 4. Hybrid commuter rail and rapid transit system connecting Paris and its suburbs.

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5. Gbessa Sékou Dioubaté (né 1980, Kankan), Djekoria Mory Kanté (né 1972, Kankan), and Moussa Samba (né 1994, Kankan). Mory Kanté (1950–May 2020), born in Albadaria, Guinea. Kanazoé Diabaté (né 1982, Tolonso near Bobo-Dioulasso) from Burkina Faso. 6. In another example of guarding tradition, the same El Hadj Djeli Sory praised Abou Sylla for combing his balafon music with European dancers, without changing or compromising the integrity of jelis-style playing (Chap. 5). 7. Ethnomusicologist David Racanelli described, “as a diasporic trade, collaborative jeliya embodies varying degrees of innovation and hybridity which emerge in several types of collaborative relationship and in various contexts” (2011). 8. There are griot organizations like this in West Africa, normally named Djelitonba with an N. When the association was created in America it was spelled with the “M” so the president, Mamady Kouyate, has chosen to keep the orthography. 9. Earlier Kouyaté states that African science is really art, poetic, not precise in statistics, but precise in sentiment, and that this is what is important. 10. For a description of another similar organization, see Barbara Hoffman (2017) “The roles of the griot in the future of Mali.”

References Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at Large. University of Minnesota Press. Drame, A., & Senn-Borloz, A. (1992). Jeliya: Être griot et musicien aujourd’hui. L’Harmattan. Duran, L. (Director and Producer). (2012). Da Kali: Pledge to the Art of the Griot. Growing into Music Series. [Motion Picture]: SOAS. http://www.growingintomusic.co.uk/mali-­and-­guinea-­music-­of/films-­of-­growing-­into-­music.html Duran, L. (Director and Producer). (2012). Dò farala a kan: Something Has Been Added. Growing into Music Series. [Motion Picture]: SOAS. http://www. growingintomusic.co.uk/mali-­a nd-­g uinea-­m usic-­o f/films-­o f-­g rowing-­ into-­music.html Hannerz, U. (1996). Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. Routledge. Hoffman, B. (2017). The Roles of the Griot in the Future of Mali: A Twenty-first Century Institutionalization of a Thirteenth Century Traditional Institution. African Studies Review (60) 1. Cambridge University Press. Keita, C. (1995b). Jeliya in the Modern World: A Tribute to Banzumana Sissoko and Massa Makan Diabaté. In D. C. Conrad & B. E. Frank (Eds.), Status and Identity in West Africa: Nyamakalaw of Manding (pp.  182–195). Indiana University Press.

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Kouyaté, M. (2021, January). Djelitomba Association. Statement of Purpose Recorded and Translated by Lisa Feder. Neidenführ, H., & Steinbrink, M. (2020). Africa on the Move: Migration, Translocal Livelihoods, and Rural Development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Springer Geography. Racanelli, D. (2011). Diasporic Jeliya as a Collaborative Trade in New York City. African Music, 9(1), 136–153.

Discography Kanazoé Orkestra (2016) Miriya.. Buda Musique. Kanazoé Orkestra (2019) Tolonso.. Buda Musique.

CHAPTER 12

Duniya: Weaving Pasts and Futures

When we “breathe in the creative air of indeterminacy, we can find ourselves in a space of enormous growth, a space of power and creativity.” (Paul Stoller, 2009) Duniya bɛ ten né jomí ela bah lon. The world is like that. No one knows how it will end. (Famoro Dioubaté, Dununya1 2008)

Representing Duniya “the Pattern Which Connects” Famoro played me a pattern I knew on the balafon. Catching my interest, he then complicated it, adding a note here and there, changing the emphasis of the rhythm. Then, instead of playing pattern two, he grew pattern one, adding and dropping notes, into pattern two, migrating from the base notes to the midrange notes. The pattern which connects, an idea that Gregory Bateson put forth to describe all of nature and culture, came to my mind. I gasped. “Oh my God, it’s Duniya,” I said. “Exactly.” Duniya is a term in Arabic used by all cultures that practice Islam. It means “the world here on earth and everything in it.” It is similar to what Bateson called “the pattern which connects” all of nature and mind (or

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culture) into one great entity composed of zillions of interrelated patterns (1979). Jeli music, in all its interweaving patterns, represents duniya in metaphoric form. “This,” he said, “is the key to jeliya. When you know how to do that, you can do anything on the balafon.” In the prologue to this book, I quoted Saikou Jobarteh, Gray Parrot’s Gambian kora teacher: “What we meet in our people, our parents, [the kora] is like them; they talk a lot. The instrument preaches to people, about God and prophets and things good for the future, humanity, and the environment, togetherness” (Saikou Jobarteh “At Home” 1995). Twenty-five years later, I understood a bit more about what Saikou meant.

Jeliya as an Indigenous Educational System The skills that a jeli develops while learning to play balafon are the same skills that make the jeli a good mediator, advisor, and diplomat, in short, one who conditions the society toward the greater good. Pop musician and kora jeli, Mory Kanté captured the jeli’s responsibility succinctly: “The group may think they are correct, but when the reasoning of the group could have a higher correctness, it is the job of the jeli to say it” (Mory Kanté, personal conversations 2019, on video). Their musical and historical training gives them the tools to recognize the greater good for their community. Becoming a master of balafon requires training in self-control. In the process of learning, the student goes through a set of psychological challenges that help in developing human skill and values—respect, patience, generosity, courage, confidence, humbleness, good memory, good listening, and clear speaking, to name some. In discussing this with Famoro Dioubaté, he told me that El Hadj Djeli Sory Kouyaté used to say that he could see a person’s character by how he played the balafon. Likewise, a good teacher like Famoro can help the student develop his character through learning to play. Famoro sometimes says that you can feel when someone’s “heart is clean.” In my view, jeliya functions as a “system of education and practice, passed from elders to their students, that helps sculpt wise, or realized, or upstanding people.” Let me describe how I see it in my words. A student jeli studies during the same years that an American student would generally attend school, from age 7–18. Boys learn instruments, girls learn singing, through which oral history that glorifies good deeds is imparted. A balafon student, for example, needs good focus, concentrated

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energy, and enthusiasm to learn. If he does not have the concentration, the balafon will help him to cultivate these qualities.2 He learns to self-­ calibrate, to practice mindfully. The pace at which he plays is important. He develops listening skills. He has to hear the melody and the rhythm that the teacher plays, to listen carefully and repeat it until he gets it right. This has practical application in life. To listen to someone and repeat what they say correctly helps you to have understood them well.3 Jelis apply these skills when mediating between groups that have tensions between them. In subsequent lessons, the teacher complexifies the student’s ways of seeing, develops body coordination, and helps quash weaknesses that may manifest as fear, or lack of courage, or laziness. As he progresses, the student develops respect and confidence in himself. His confidence is tempered because there is so much to learn. Each time he is presented with another piece that challenges him, and he relearns patience, courage, ways of seeing and hearing, and coordination at a more advanced level. Each challenge humbles him, and each success develops him into a more self-­ aware human being. Direct oral transmission is important to the survival of this practice. Learning from recordings, online, or otherwise, without a physical live teacher, a student could miss some of the important lessons. If the student is me, for example, she could misunderstand the subtle complexities in a swing, or not work various kinds of swings. She may have inequalities in arm strength resulting in a slower left hand, for example. In person, the teacher might make her tap the keys harder—to hear her mistakes clearly, to correct them, and to play with more courage. There is also something shared from heart to heart, between teacher and student. Each teacher I had gave me something special. Their instruction supersedes individual volition as it is part of a system that was passed to them before they pass it to the student. The student learns to respect something greater than herself. The respect in the tradition is represented by “the time” or main beat in the music. It is always there and must always be held in the player’s body or heart while he plays notes on, and all around it, sometimes hiding it from view, but nevertheless, aware of it. At the most advanced stage, the jeli sees how to break different patterns and combine them with other patterns at will. He knows how to imbue the music with feeling. He knows how to capture the listener’s attention. In doing so he may emphasize different melodies and parts of the rhythm. When he is an expert, he does this intuitively and with the inspiration of

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his forefathers who have done it before him. This is how a jeli grows the ability to wield nyama, or spiritual energy; to be a trickster, as well. But many young jelis are not learning to this level today. This is how I have come to understand jeliya from years of piecing experiences together with all of my teachers, and primarily from Jeli Famoro Dioubaté, Guinean balafon master living in New York. Obviously, I did not come anywhere close to this level of playing myself, but my lessons gave me enough to become an active listener, one that is moved by the power of nyama, which generates spontaneous gratitude, which culturally can be expressed by generous donations and other gifts to thank and encourage the jeli in his practice. This is why jeli music is first and foremost “classical music for deep listening.” The singing practice of jeliya is the same as that of the instrumentalists, although I have had much less experience with it. The jelimuso mother teaches her daughter a song. It is a song that recalls a particular time and person in history who did a heroic deed, or otherwise a social lesson, like a pattern on balafon. Not only does the student jelimuso learn the history, the music also serves as a mnemonic device, as well as an emotional and spiritual link to her mother and her ancestors. She learns her important role in conveying the message in her song to her society. A talented jelimuso will not only sing it, but she will understand the meaning and importance of the message, be able to express it with her own “authentic” inspiration and deliver it when it is needed in society. When she is successful, she wins the support of her listeners. The message she conveys is at once aesthetical and ethical. Famoro has confirmed to me that the music imparts, metaphorically, the same moral lessons that the verbalists speak and sing. Becoming a good jeli is not a given. One may be a superb musician and not have good skills in assessing and correcting society toward the greater good. A good jeli is determined by the society’s vote of confidence. People exclaim, “Naamu!” which is a confirmation of what the jeli says.4 Jelis that reach the highest levels of their practice are called ngara. Their level is not just mastery of their instrument, but they also act with utmost ethics. Moussa Samba said that in the past, jelis never lied. They always told the truth. Whether real or imagined, it is an important standard to live by. Jeli supporters have claimed them to be “faultless.”5 What is it to be faultless? To be utterly graceful in the practice of your art. To be in

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balance of rational and intuitive (or spiritual)6 mind. To exude confidence and power with little ego. Power used for the good. Generosity. Vibrant energy, while calm and level-headed. Dignity. Respect for oneself and respect for the people in the community. By sculpting these qualities in oneself, the jeli can impart them to his or her listeners through their verbal and musical art. This is why the kings and ruling elite kept jelis close-by.7

Pressures of the “Global Hierarchy of Value” The jelis I know that appear in this book try to live by the values that their ancestors imparted in them while making their way in the global economy. The pressure is sometimes intense, temptations can be great, and people, any people, can break down. Believing in the basic goodness of jeliya, and Manding culture, encouraged me to strive to understand my teachers even when we encountered difficulties in cross-cultural communication. I began to understand the pressures around money in a new light.8 I considered how European colonization and slavery in West Africa threatened to destroy the Manding social system, and how post-independence, the global economy kept Africa in utter desperation and dependence on the former colonizing countries. West African countries like Guinea entered into abject poverty, precipitating an exodus from the countryside to capital cities like Conakry to find work for money. The shift from the rural to the urban cities in West Africa slowed the efficacy of direct oral transmission in jeliya. Yet jeliya adapted and transformed to the new reality. Turn the clock to the twenty-first century, and the difficulties in making a livelihood in West Africa are nearly impossible to withstand. Immigration to Europe and the United States has increased dramatically due to the lack of economic opportunities at home.9 The youth protest that there is no work and no money to be made in African capital cities.10 The most talented musicians find sponsorship to travel abroad, but when they arrive, they struggle for the recognition and status that they had in their own culture. In Paris and New York, jelis have entered into the “global hierarchy of value” in which artisans have low status on the spectrum (Herzfeld, 2004). In the global system jelis are pressed to make difficult choices under duress of constant scarcity in a world that does not prioritize values in the same way as their local culture once did.

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Sitting at the Crossroads A few months after Aïcha Kouyate sang for me, a young jeli informant in his twenties assisted me with my field videos. He translated the words Aïcha sang: God created the Jali. It is a game. It isn’t for nothing. To turn a small jali into a grand jali, it is the noble who does that. I’m speaking of Lisa, a merchant. I am calling on the merchant. Kala Djula, Mamiyanka [alternative names of the Dioubaté family]. The griots who want to be seen, only have to make friends with the merchants. Not everything works for everyone. Lisa is a true merchant. If you see Djekoria Mory and Gbessa Sékou in the United States, it is you who made their visas. Lisa, have confidence. Jalimuso. It is not the color of your skin. Thank you for Djekoria Mory. Kanté. Ten years with one word. He loved you for everything. Those who love you rid you of the people who don’t love you. Gbessa Sékou, Sangbei Mamiyanka [alternative name for Dioubaté]. The wife of Sékou, Hadja Nabay. Nothing is good without reason. Nothing is good that is damned. A merchant who becomes a griot but does not accept the critiques of the griot, if you hear a big griot, that depends on the words. That which you say you will do, you must do it! That which you start, you must finish it. Mutual respect is what makes jaliya in the Manding Empire. Good evening to Famoro—the merchant, on the road to the United States. [More Dioubaté names]. He who has put money in the well, he pulls up bread and gold. And he who puts gold in the well, he pulls up money. Merchant, you don’t walk just anywhere in the world.11

This was the first time someone had translated a praise of me to me. I found that the translation did not necessarily add much to what I already felt without having the Malinké to understand it. I already knew that she was praising me for recognizing the basic goodness in jeliya and for helping her jeli brothers. I also knew that Aïcha sang because she was moved to sing for the goodness that was happening between us that day. She did not do it for money. But I gave her €50 anyway. My assistant thought I should not have. I understood his point of view, but I did it because I knew it would bring something pleasant to her stay in Paris, where she was visiting. When my assistant came upon the video of Sékou calling me a missionary sent from God, here to help Famoro on his path (Chap. 10), he rolled his eyes. He had taken the perspective that these praises are lies in order to extract money from, or influence me, saying it was all business.

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It would have been so easy to agree with him. To me, his view aligned with many European and American criticism and judgements I have heard over the years. He had become jaded with his own culture and did not believe in any of it anymore, sincere or not. But I did not agree with him, in full. It may be business, I conceded, but it is good business. Sékou’s words encouraged me in life—he is skilled at that, and he makes him a good jeli, in my opinion. Sekou “sweetened me” again at his CD “dedicace” in Paris where he told people I created Manding Grooves, a company that I had not yet started, but is curiously now in the works. Did he plant a seed based on his intuition of my heartfelt desire? How astute! Did he say it because he thought it would benefit him somehow? He could not possibly know that, but he was building the bridges in our relationship. While the paradigm of patronage may not last, the creation of business opportunities for jeli musicians may be the path of the future for me. I started to think about how I got to the position I am in, in the first place, and what I was willing to do in the future. It was clear that my role as “the patron” was not sustainable, but I felt supporting jeliya as it transitioned to the global arena was something I was meant to do. I found myself sitting at the crossroads with my jeli informants. We might have come from different directions, but we were meeting here, at the transition between local and global. I recalled Paul Stoller’s description of the crossroads in “Crossroads must be approached carefully and negotiated with the greatest of care” (Stoller, 2002: 23). I needed to make some decisions in my own life as well. I began to reflect on the biggest points of conflict between those representing the European American perspective including myself, and our friends, the West African musicians. I thought about my own difficulties in reconciling the sweetness and hospitality with the requests for money. On my first and second trip to the Gambia, I remembered my host families’ love and generosity in welcoming me into their homes, and their patience in teaching me through my misunderstandings and faux pas (Chaps. 2, 3, and 5). I remembered how Lasiné and Mustafa and all the musicians struggled so hard to make ends meet in a virtually nonexistent economy in Africa in Chaps. 2 and 3. And then I thought about those who have come to Europe and how they struggle in a very often cold and unwelcoming environment with people that are not as patient, many who misunderstand them, as Kanazoé explained in Chap. 11. The fact that my jeli friends do

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not give up only attests to the level of desperation in West Africa and their commitment to help their families and community back home. My assistant’s perspective made me reflect again on my experience in B’s compound in Guinea (Chap. 5).12 Perhaps my assistant would have agreed with Andrea, that we were under no obligation to give money to Fanta who sang, unsolicited. This view represents the global value system that no one can demand payment for services unsolicited. However, the local value system would take into account the great imbalance that Fanta vis-à-vis myself and Andrea had to wealth, and would also consider the cultural norm in which tipping the jelimuso is customary. Americans could be judged in the Manding system as stingy and ungrateful reflecting poor character. But, it was an honest cross-cultural misunderstanding and I think our hosts understood that. Furthermore, our African teachers, like us, go through a learning curve in understanding what their foreign students expect of them. We have made a lot of progress over the past 20 years in mitigating some of these road bumps and there is still room for improvement. What my unfiltered experience with Lasiné did give me however, and this is important, is an experience of the unsheltered reality of a different cultural paradigm particularly with regards to money and power. I had to face the gross economic disparity between Africa and the West head-on, and discover my responsibility in it, if I were to learn from jeli teachers. Of course, the economic disparity is obvious to most of us, intellectually. However, having to embody and assume the role of a patron vis-à-vis my African informants and friends was altogether a transformative and awakening experience.

The Embodied, Reflective, Transformative Practice This brings me to the importance of my field methodology, the embodied, reflective practice. Let us recall the balafon workshops in Chap. 4. Neither the logic in the musical composition nor the way that be taught it to us was easily accessible to me. It was like an optical illusion that kept tricking my eye. It required a difficult process in letting go and trusting the teacher to instill his music in my body before I could realize for myself the intelligence in the West African musical systems and its implications in society. A deep respect began to grow. My next 15 years’ learning with Famoro Dioubate took these lessons to a new dimension. Several deep realizations heighten my respect for this

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indigenous, centuries old practice. It was through the music that I came to understand the important role of the trickster in society—the Esu Elegba—the one who sits at the crossroads between the spiritual and earthly realms. My admiration for the artist who enchants us and inspires us towards our highest potential served as a gateway to dealing with a difficult and sometimes contentious relationship that my jelis and I had around money. It was not a conscious realization, but rather an intuition or tacit knowledge that comes from an embodied practice that kept me engaging with my jeli teachers even under the most trying of circumstances. I knew intuitively that any stereotypically negative perception I may have had of them as cunning, sly, beggars, cheaters, liars, could be incorrect. (I saw how my own ear could trick me with regard to the music.) I knew to question my intellectual assumptions because I sensed their basic goodness,13sincerity, generosity, and love—their sweetness.14 They shared with me the intricacies of their music and culture, in spite of my undoubtedly disrespectful behavior at times based on my misperceptions. They knew their music was a medicine for us, as it is for them. They knew it would sweeten us where we had become hardened. As my informants say, music has no borders. So now when I look back at some of those difficult moments I can see them from a new perspective, perhaps sometimes their perspective. None of my informants has ever lied to me or cheated me. They have only asked me for what they need, perhaps not revealing the full picture. Recall how B had us drive him “to the airport” in Chap. 4, or when Famoro and Sékou convinced me to bring the recording studio from Paris to New York. They may use guile at times, but it does not necessarily reflect bad character—in their culture it can be an accepted method. It is important to note that West African patrons also get their feathers ruffled by the jeli’s guile, and when it is overdone, the jeli can burn bridges. However, the American/ European judgement of guile is based on the global hierarchy of values that dismisses another way of seeing things. Here, I want to expose some of the various forms of ignorance and ethnocentric views to clarify them.

Misperceptions: Giving, Patronage, and the Trickster There is an ancient practice of “giving” that the Buddhists call dana, the generous giving of support to members of society who uphold and teach the highest morals.15 Spiritual teachings are given freely which is why there is no fixed price to receive them. The recipients give from the heart based

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on what they can afford and how they appreciate the teachings. Jeliya, in the collective jeli memory, functioned on this system of faith during the Malian Empire. The relationship of patrons to clients may have emerged from the system of dana. In African society, as well as in Europe long ago, nobles and aristocrats supported artists, often the painters, whose works captured the spirit of the times and the people. They were commissioned for their art which rendered a service to the society. The jeli–patron relationship does not translate easily to the global system. I mentioned the jeli as trickster first in Chap. 6 in his ability to expose and hide the time, or main beat in the music, with syncopated notes and melodies. They are also skilled in winning our admiration and provoking awe with their musical talents, and then ask for money. This may be why patrons remain relatively cool and calm in the praises of a jeli. It is a training to stay balanced—to not lose one’s head when emotionally charged, and also to be generous. But from the European and American perspective, this behavior may be misperceived as cheating. We must also consider the context of the global imbalance of power. Europeans and Americans often overlook, when faced with it on the personal level, that Africa is still suffering oppression and dependence. It is not that I personally feel at fault for the past history but it is my responsibility to recognize that I live and benefit from that history, and that the inequalities still exist and are continually perpetuated, whether on the individual, national, or global level. The fact that the jelis have guile in their bag of tricks, and I can be fairly naïve, they may feel it is fair to use it in unassuming circumstances in order to shift the balance of power in their favor. Of course, there is a very fine line between “con artist” and “trickster.” The difference is in the heart of the trickster. Is he intentionally being evil or is he doing what he needs to do, not meaning to cause harm, to get what he needs. So in the worst case scenario, a young woman who falls in love with an African musician and either holds her support back (myself in Chap. 3) or gives too generously (the admirer described in Chap. 9) can be construed as naïve, either way, and the trickster can appear. I have taken these moments as teaching points to strengthen my character. They are lessons that help me in all parts of my life, not just in West African contexts. 1. Learn to say no. I can always change my mind later. Once I say yes, I cannot go back on my word, not all the way. This relates to Famoro’s lesson in Chap. 9, you must follow through on your word, to do what you say

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you will do. Another lesson I have learned is to ask people for what I want and need as part of the reciprocal relationship. Jelis are very good at asking for what they need. I am not so good at asking them, which creates an imbalance in our mutual respect. If I treat myself as worthy, they will also see me as worthy. My jeli friends respect themselves, their work, their talents as musicians. As we learned in Chap. 9’s epigraph, it is “find a way for you to benefit from something the jeli has to offer” (Gray Parrot). Look at how it might have gone with Famoro and Sékou in Chap. 10: Famoro asks me to pay Sékou €1000 for his services after we had already started production. I tell him no, I already paid for Hadja’s ticket. Famoro then has to defend his position. I take my time. I listen to his argument. Then I might have said, “Not this time. Sékou deserves to be paid for his services and he works well, but this time, I was not expecting this expense. Next time, we’re going to talk about paying Sékou.” This might maintain respect for Sékou and his value while also defending my position that there were already many unexpected costs not pre-arranged. When these moments of tension occur, I try to discuss them with my informants as soon as I have gained some composure and reestablished the innocence of the other in my heart. This seems to work well for me. It clears the air, puts things straight, and re-confirms our mutual respect. Considering the perspective of the jeli musician trying to make it in Paris or New  York, I have a lot of respect now. I believe that Famoro, Kanazoé, B, Sékou, Mamady, Mory, Aïcha, Moussa Samba, and many more prove unfathomable dignity, determination, and faith. They struggle to earn a living in a foreign culture that often misjudges them for poor character when the pressures of the global economy and their unfair position in it make it very difficult to succeed. Famoro admits that my culture knows how to handle money in this global reality that his culture did not teach him. He looks to me for guidance in these matters. I now see my continued interactions with jelis as a mutual give-and-take in which both cultures must learn, share, teach, and mutually benefit from the relationship. Cross-cultural music and dance programs, for example, can enhance the possibility for improving cross-­ cultural literacy. If prices are not as cheap as one might imagine, recall that European and American students who travel to Guinea may be helping to contribute to the continuity of jeli and other music education for African children in the off-season. The music industry in Paris and New York is also tough on African musicians who are forced to sign contracts with labels under difficult terms. Perhaps there is an opportunity to create an

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Africa-based cooperative music production environment that uses the strengths of budgets, planning, and contracts, with room for a more democratic process in which jelis can take part in the creative process and share in the profits, as they might in African circles. I hope I have a role to play in both of these endeavors.16

A Note on Representation The politics of representation as the anthropologist are tricky, sensitive, and important to consider. Anthropologists do well to reveal some of these hidden secrets behind the ethnography to their students. The process of doing so only helped me to clarify my message, and to represent my informants more clearly as the upstanding people that they are. The messages in this book were present, but only crystallized in the end, when I asked some of my informants to allow me to reveal delicate information and details of their lives. To some, I sent the chapters that addressed their lives. To others, I explained the stories I was telling about them. I did not have a customary way to do this. It opened a can of worms. People had doubts. West Africans are very private people. Some my informants wished to remain anonymous. They were understandably concerned for how both their own people and scholars and students in American and European universities might view them. Those who did let me use their real names did so out of trust that I have understood them and would represent them fairly. I felt an enormous responsibility to not disappoint any of them, whether they gave me permission to use their names or not. In the end, the responsibility they put in me made the book much stronger. If I have failed in any way, I will be disappointed, but it can only be another learning lesson. It is also important to remember that we are all growing, learning, and striving for greater mutual understanding and respect across the social, economic, and cultural boundaries that seemingly divide us. During the past 20 years, my jeli informants and I have sat at the crossroads between two worlds, carefully weighing the possibilities for collaboration so that we may set an example for future generations as we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors and living elders who have come before us. From my own, American academic culture, I have learned from Paul Stoller and others who have sat at these crossroads of Africa and the West before me. Paul writes, when we “breathe in the creative air of

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indeterminacy, we can find ourselves in a space of enormous growth, a space of power and creativity” (Stoller, 2009), inspiring words. In the words of Famoro, inspired by his elders’ wisdom, Duniya bɛ ten né jomí ela bah lon. “The world is like that. No one knows how it will end.” Naamu!

Afterword Famoro Dioubaté Famoro was one of the unlucky immigrants that did not get legal working papers for two decades. There were a series of starts and stops over the years, but for a combination of issues, it did not happen. For that reason, Famoro had to be careful in the public eye, and we, his American admirers and students, could not support him directly. In 2021, his American daughter turned 21 and was able to provide a legal route for him to obtain a green card. His closest American cohort came to his support and as this book goes to press we are waiting his temporary card that will enable him to return to Guinea after more than 20 long years in the United States. He miraculously maintained patience and sanity in the most trying and upsetting of circumstances during this time. Famoro made a decision every day to stay and wait in New  York. He counted on a community of friends from both cultures to support him to not lose faith, more important than money. If he had returned to Guinea before obtaining his papers, he would risk being stuck in dire straits in Africa with little chance for musical success and no way to help his aging mother and family there. And so he stayed in New York, but it broke his heart. Meanwhile, I, a doctor of philosophy in anthropology from a top university, Raul Rothblatt, politically active in Brooklyn, and other friends, ethnomusicologists, and musicians with good reputations in the United States had no way to make a convincing case to the United States government that this man was a tremendous cultural and artistic asset to our culture. Famoro found a way to work in a Newark public school with the support of a music teacher there. He taught Raul’s children. He found ways to share his culture at every chance he could. We booked private gigs for him in people’s homes. And yet, the United States had no legal path for a man like this to earn an honest living, pay taxes, and contribute to our

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society as he would have liked to. And we, the supposedly powerful elite of our country, willing to support and vie for him, had no legal way to help. I see this as a fault in our American system. I am sure there are a million arguments against my point of view, but I have to call it as I see it based on this particular situation. Gbessa Sékou Dioubaté spoke directly to this problem in American culture at Famoro’s house during our recording sessions in 2018. He wonders how it is that a tremendous artist like Famoro Dioubaté, so well respected in Manding culture, can get stuck in such a position for 20 years. Right after naming me a “missionary from god” to help Famoro (Chap. 10), Sékou and Famoro told me a story about the previous night of recording the song Nnamé. Famoro had sunk into one of his states of defeat and distress, and he just could not sing for the recording of “Nnamé.” Sékou had to coax Famoro, talk to him sweetly, “doloter” they said in French, to restore Famoro’s hope that things would work out for him. Eventually Famoro found his inspiration to sing, and that is the recording we launched on social media.17 Famoro sings: Febina tem muna duniya. “Everything has it’s time in this world.” E duniya wongala wombo rho rha duniya. “We have to trust one another in this life.” These lines are apropos to Famoro’s situation, and they reflect Manding values that are reinforced, through the jeli’s music. In Manding culture, as I have shown through my own experiences in the Gambia and Guinea, patience is encouraged, and people try to keep faith that life will unfold as God wills it. Sometimes when things do not go as we had hoped, we have to trust, wait, and see, and count on one another for support. Famoro’s patience in waiting for his green card is testament to the fact that he practices what he preaches. His time is coming, inshallah.

Notes 1. Duniya and Famoro Dioubaté’s Kakande album Dununya is the same word with different spelling. 2. I use “she” because I am extrapolating from my experience, but in Africa most balafon students are boys. Many singers, who have a similar experience, are girls. 3. Similar to the method of nonviolent communication, NVC, pioneered by Marshal Rosenberg. 4. Like many artistic systems, the skilled artist does not necessarily excel in the ethical behavior that accompanies the practice, but it is available to them.

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In Africa, jelis are judged according to their musical ability and their ethics. They go hand-in-hand. 5. Lucy Durán (2007) relayed this description of the ngara as “faultless.” 6. Jelis speak about jeliya in terms of a spiritual practice. Some Westerners, not understanding what “spiritual” means, do not like the term. Perhaps one can understand it by recalling when solutions to problems, or otherwise brilliant ideas, seem to come not when we ruminate on them, but when we forget, and the answer comes spontaneously. In my family, we use this skill when doing crossword puzzles. Or when the word is “on the tip of your tongue,” you forget about it and it will come. Where does the idea come from? In my culture, we underestimate the powers of the nonthinking mind. 7. John Chernoff explained that African music is “aesthetic and ethical” (1979), a point that Alan Mirriam challenged, asking whether Chernoff was confusing his own spiritual quest with the reality of how Africans experience it. I argue here that Chernoff is correct and that it is due to his embodied practice in Ghanaian drumming. Merriam could not understand that from the outside perspective. 8. For an ethnographic account of West Africans struggling to make a living in New York City, see Paul Stoller’s “Money has no smell.” 2002. University of Chicago Press. 9. Again, see Paul Stoller’s “Money has no smell.” Also, see statistics: From 2010–2018 sub-Saharan African immigration increased by 52%. “Sub-Saharan African Immigrants in the United States.” Migration Policy Institute, November 6, 2019. This follows a general trend that migration from Sub-Saharan Africa to Europe and the United States has been rising since 2010. (“At least a million Sub-Saharan Africans have moved to Europe since 2010” Pew Research Center, March 22, 2018). 10. In desperation, some West Africans walk to Libya and attempt to board unstable boats for European shores. If they are not taken as slaves by Libyans, they may not survive the border crossing. Today, in Senegal, a relatively democratic and peaceful country compared with Guinea, the youth have taken to the streets to protest the government. “Antigovernment protests rock Senegal,” March 27, 2021, BBC News, https:// youtu.be/Bk8Lzhpot1c 11. Thank you to my assistant who chooses not to be named. 12. Chapter 5 caused great distress for B, which is why I changed his name yet still included it in the book. Resolving the cross-cultural tensions in Chaps. 5 and 10 are the crux of this book.

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13. In Buddhist philosophy we are trained to recognize the “basic goodness” in ourselves and in all people. It is similar to the Manding system of respect—a basic trust that all people know how to be upstanding and dignified. 14. Note: It could have been different. There are cases in which African musicians take terrible advantage of Americans and Europeans. There are troubled people with compromised morality on both sides. But I do not believe it is the norm. 15. This is not such an ancient practice. In the United States, some meditation centers use the Dana system to thank teachers for teaching the dharma, which comes freely. In Israel, the ultra-Orthodox are government-­ subsidized for their religious studies; they do not work or do military service. 16. As an engaged anthropologist, I may use Participatory Action Research, as I have learned it from Davydd Greenwood, my mentor at Cornell in future endeavors with jelis. 17. The song is posted on my websites, www.lisafeder.com and www.mandinggrooves.com with my translation of the full lyrics.

References Bateson, G. (1979). Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Vol. 255). New York: Bantam Books. Durán, L. (2007). Ngaraya: Women and musical mastery in Mali. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 70(3), 569–602. Herzfeld, M. (2004). The Body Impolitic. University of Chicago Press. Stoller, P. (2002). Money Has No Smell. University of Chicago Press. Stoller, P. (2009). The Power of the Between. University of Chicago Press.

Discography Diouabté, Famoro Dundunya 2006. Jumbie Records, New York. Dioubate, Missia Saran. Signodiouba, 2017. New York. Dioubaté, Sékou. 2019. Paris.

Index1

A Accor’Hotels Arena (Paris), 213 A diata, 38, 106 Afro-jazz, 16, 121, 122, 126 Algire, Andy, 125, 162n2 Alhumdililah, 14, 17, 51 Allah, 14, 43, 46, 50, 51, 56, 57, 76, 149, 183, 218 Ambassadeurs (band), 102 Appadurai, Arjun, 7, 212, 213 Appiah, Anthony Kwame, 35, 122, 167, 186n1 Atayah, 175 Authenticité, 122, 139n2 B Bala Faséké Kouyaté, 96 Balafon, vii–ix, 1–4, 11, 15, 30–33, 50, 52, 61–77, 81, 82, 84, 85, 87–97, 101–114, 118, 119n5, 119n6, 122, 123, 125, 126,

128–130, 132, 134, 136–139, 143, 146, 147, 149–151, 156, 157, 159, 160, 163n13, 175, 178–180, 183, 185, 187n12, 193, 197, 198, 201, 202, 210, 214, 215, 217, 220, 221, 223, 225, 229n6, 231–234, 238, 244n2 Balanta (ethnic group), 31, 64 Balanyi, 3 Balla et Ses Balladins (band), 122 Bamako (Mali), 8, 83, 121, 164n16, 212, 219 Bamana, 220 Bamba Bojan, 30 Banjul (the Gambia), 22, 23, 83 Bateson, Gregory, 4, 5, 45, 231 Bembeya Jazz (band), 63 Birimintingo, 119n7 Boraba (the Gambia), 36–38, 94 Brazil, x, 3, 21, 25, 34, 54, 62 Buda Records, 220, 222

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Feder, Jeliya at the Crossroads, Palgrave Studies in Literary Anthropology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83059-5

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INDEX

C Camara, Lasiné, 29, 41 Camara, Sory, 7, 151, 152, 162n5, 163n11 Casamance (Senegal), 41, 172, 174 Characteristic species of grace, 4–5, 118 Charry, Eric, 2, 6, 7, 39n9, 82, 98n2, 98n3, 130, 159, 160 Châtelet (Paris), 213 Coléah (Guinea), 216, 217, 219 Conakry (capital of Guinea), 23, 81, 83, 84, 87, 89, 91, 98n4, 102, 156, 161, 178, 179, 212, 216, 217, 219, 226, 235 Cosmopolitan, 4, 9, 11, 101, 121–139, 157, 213, 224 Covert, Chrisse (Chris), vii, viii, x, 23, 25, 27, 29, 33, 36, 39n10, 41–43, 57, 173 Covid, 11 D Diabaté Abdoulaye “Djoss” (Djoss), 77, 104, 105, 123, 126, 159 Massa Makan, 144, 228 Seydou “Kanazoé” (Kanazoé), 12, 62, 64, 214, 220–224, 229n5 Toumani, 82, 121, 139, 190, 213, 223 Diawara, M., 7, 157 Dioubaté Famoro, 11, 67, 101, 104–105, 123, 143, 176, 189, 211, 231 Gbessa Sékou (Sékou), 118n1, 127, 190–199, 201–207, 211, 214–219, 229n5, 236, 237, 239, 241, 244 Missia Saran (Missia), 12, 115, 123, 126–128, 143, 145–150, 154–156, 160, 162n5, 191, 194, 195, 203, 204, 218

Oumou, 12, 147–150 Djelitomba (Organization), 227 Djembe (jembe), viii, 30–33, 53, 61, 63, 66, 68, 93, 97, 125–127, 136, 147, 149, 181, 182, 201 DJ Mouzbill, 149 Dunduns, viii, 53, 127, 136, 147, 160, 201 Duniya (dununya), 126, 231–244 Dununya (the Album), 193, 244n1 Durán, Lucy, 15, 190, 219, 245n5 E Elders, 12, 17, 44, 51, 81, 82, 84, 85, 89, 93, 94, 122, 156, 159, 164n20, 217, 223, 227, 232, 242, 243 Embodied learning, 5, 11, 58n5, 71–72, 128 research, 45, 58n9 Embodiment (embody, embodies), 5, 56, 69, 72, 73, 109, 112, 128, 129, 199, 201, 206, 229n7, 238 Engaged anthropology, 9 Esu-Elegba (Esu-Elegbara), 110, 199 Ethnographic sensibility, 78n5, 112, 189, 208n2 Ethos, 4, 45 Eyre, Banning, 8 F Farafenni (the Gambia), viii, 50, 51 Feder, Lisa, ix, 4, 62, 163n10, 173 See also Jobarteh, Aminata (Lisa Feder) Feld, Steven, 111 Fieldwork, x, 3, 4, 7, 8, 12, 13, 16, 18n2, 21, 42, 43, 57n2, 58n4, 58n7, 59n11, 62, 72, 78n5, 103, 145 Fina, 143

 INDEX 

249

Foté, 71, 82, 86, 90, 96 Franco-Guinean Cultural center, 93, 156

Hoffman, Barbara, 2, 6, 7, 18n4, 132, 140n5, 140n7, 151, 152, 162n6, 163n8, 164n16, 171, 186n2

G Gambia, vii, viii, x, 1, 2, 4, 11, 12, 21–38, 42, 43, 45, 47, 49, 50, 52, 54–57, 57n2, 57n3, 58n5, 58n8, 61, 64, 66, 74–75, 83, 85, 87, 92, 94, 116, 126, 132, 140n6, 163n9, 164n18, 172–174, 179, 212, 237, 244 Gell, Alfred, 133, 138, 140n9, 163n14 Global hierarchy of value, 7, 119n7, 189, 235, 239 Greeting(s), 23–27, 30, 38n3, 44, 45, 75, 77, 116, 152, 211, 218 Guinea, vii, 1, 2, 4, 11, 15, 22, 62, 63, 65, 71, 75, 81–84, 87, 88, 98n4, 101, 102, 104, 106, 122, 126, 127, 143, 144, 148–150, 152, 159, 160, 164n18, 174, 178, 179, 182, 186n3, 198, 200, 210, 212–217, 219, 225, 229n5, 235, 238, 241, 243, 244, 245n10

I Inshallah, 14, 17, 51, 52, 244 Islam, 14, 17, 49, 50, 58n6, 74, 163n12, 183, 185, 187n10, 211, 231

H Habitus, 4, 57 Hadja Saran Sylla, 194, 203, 204, 241 Hahn, Tomie, 5, 113 Hale, Thomas, 2, 7, 98n2, 132 Hall, Edward, 45, 58n8, 194, 200, 206, 207, 208n1 Hɔrɔn, 2, 35, 103, 104, 118n3, 144, 151, 158–159, 162, 163n11, 167, 170, 184, 185, 186n2, 188n12, 190, 191, 196, 199, 203 Hɔrɔnya, 162n5, 185 Herzfeld, Michael, 7, 119n7, 168, 189, 235

J Jackson, Michael, 43, 72, 190, 201 Jarabi, 30 Jatigi, 158, 167–186 Jɔn, 103, 144 Jelied “being jelied,” 145, 180 “getting jelied,” 138 Jelimuso, 83, 87, 93, 97, 106, 140n7, 143, 145, 147–151, 154, 157, 159, 160, 162n4, 164n19, 215, 218, 234, 238 Jeliya, viii, 1–8, 11, 12, 15–17, 37, 62, 63, 74, 82, 90–91, 98n2, 101–103, 106, 113, 117, 118, 119n4, 124, 130–133, 137–139, 143–162, 168, 170, 175, 180, 183–185, 190, 193, 199, 209–211, 213–219, 223, 224, 227, 228, 229n7, 232–237, 240, 245n6 Jembe, 1 Jimmo Duwa, 94 Jing Ab, 48 Jobarteh, Aminata (Lisa Feder), 98n5, 173 Jobarteh, Basiro, 36–38 Jobarteh, Isatou (Chrisse Covert), 37, 173 Jobarteh, Ousman (Gray Parrot), vii, 173

250 

INDEX

Jobarteh, Saikou, viii, ix, 12, 36, 172–174, 232 Juju, 54 Jumbie Records, 125, 178 K Kaba, Lansiné, 159, 160 Kakande (band), 12, 101, 104, 123–128, 130, 131, 137, 139, 145, 157, 178, 193, 223, 224 Kankan (Guinea), 102, 152, 159, 160, 210, 226 Kanté Djekoria Mory, 104–105, 117, 214–219, 229n5, 236 Mory, 12, 178, 213, 215, 226, 229n5, 232 Kanyi, Bakary (Bakary), 23–30, 33, 36, 38, 41, 42, 46, 172–174, 218 Kayapo (tribe in Brazil), x, 21 Keme Bourema, 63, 126 Kindia (Guinea), 87 Kinsanfaré, 85, 88, 91 Kisliuk, Michelle, 13, 57n2, 58n10 Kora, vii–x, 1, 2, 12, 15, 18n5, 29–33, 36–38, 63, 77n1, 82, 94, 121–123, 125, 126, 136, 139, 147, 157, 163n9, 172, 173, 175, 190, 213, 223, 225, 232 Koriŋ Bato, viii, ix Koumbassa, Youssuf, 22 Kouyaté, Aicha, 214, 215, 218, 236, 241 Kouyaté, Bala Faséké, 95, 96 Kouyaté, El Hadj Djeli Sory, 93, 102, 105, 126, 156, 223, 229n6, 232 Kouyaté, Mamady “Djeliké,” 12, 16, 123, 124, 126, 132, 134, 145, 156, 157, 159, 186n4, 187n10, 188n13, 225, 227, 228, 228n2, 229n8, 241

Kouyaté, Moussa Samba, 152, 153, 158, 162n7, 209–210, 214, 226, 228n1, 229n5, 234, 241 Kouyaté, Sékouba Bambino, 176, 191, 211, 226 Kouyaté, Sékouba Kandia, 102, 118n2, 122 Kouyaté, Sory Kandia, 126 Kuku, 63 Kumbengo, 119n7, 149, 172, 201 Kuran Bisan, 30 L Ladzekpo, CK, 68, 73, 136, 141n12 Lamban, 30, 63, 114, 193, 202 Lasidan, 63, 84, 87, 105, 134 Learning culture through a musical practice, 4, 62 Lessons (music), 23, 25, 27, 29–31, 106, 107, 171 M Maguikoma, 195 Malinké (Ethnic group, language), 3, 63, 83, 87, 96, 115, 124, 127, 128, 146, 150, 153, 186n3, 192, 194, 203, 220, 228n2, 236 Malisadio, 126 Mamaya, 146, 159–161, 213 Manding Empire, 64, 73, 94, 96, 151, 152, 220, 236 Mandingo (language), vii, viii, 22, 34, 35, 54, 163n9, 172, 173, 220 Mandingo Ambassadors (band), 12, 16, 123, 124, 127, 145, 157 Mané, 63, 97 Manneh, Kebba (Kebba), 31, 32, 48, 50, 52, 64

 INDEX 

Mansana Cisse, 30 Market, 12, 31, 33, 36, 42–44, 47, 48, 85, 89, 190, 200 Method (methodology), 4, 5, 9, 42–45, 57n2, 58n5, 58n7, 62, 66, 77n1, 78n5, 82, 85, 112, 145, 152, 201, 214, 238, 239, 244n3 Metronome, 109, 110, 117 MHD, 212 Miriya (album), 222 Money, 7, 10, 14, 16, 17, 29, 33–36, 39n5, 47–49, 51, 53, 54, 74, 76, 81, 82, 86–88, 92, 93, 96, 97, 98n1, 102, 103, 106, 107, 117, 124, 127, 128, 133, 136, 138, 147–151, 154–156, 158–162, 162n6, 163n12, 164n16, 168–171, 174–185, 187n6, 187n7, 187n11, 189, 194, 196, 197, 199, 200, 202–207, 212, 217, 219, 221, 222, 235–241, 243 Moral imperative, 4, 45, 67, 74, 113 Muslim, 14, 32, 37, 50, 84, 143, 172, 183, 211 N Nakamura, Aya, 212 Namu!, 173, 175 Negotiation, 39n6, 178, 200, 201, 207 negotiating sensibility, 200–205 New Jeshwang (The Gambia), viii Ngara, 137, 234, 245n5 N’goni, 214, 223 Niagassola (Guinea), 62, 210, 219 Nina, 126 A ninj bara!, 173 Numu, 143

251

Nyama, viii, 103–104, 107, 109, 113, 119n4, 124, 132, 133, 137, 151, 175, 197, 234 Nyamakala/nyamakalou, viii, 2, 35, 103, 144, 151, 170, 210 Nyangumang Duwa, 95, 96 P Pan Piper (Paris), 211 Parrot, Gray (Gray), vii–x, 12, 21, 23, 26, 27, 29, 30, 33, 36–38, 39n10, 41–43, 57, 64, 126, 138, 171–174, 232, 241 Patron, 7, 10, 12, 33, 35, 39n9, 82, 106, 133, 140n10, 143, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154–159, 162n6, 167–172, 175, 184, 186n1, 187n9, 191, 201, 202, 207, 218, 237–240 Paya Paya, 129 R Racanelli, David, 137, 139n1, 159, 162n2, 229n7 Rail Band, 8, 122 Respect, 13, 16, 17, 26, 35, 85, 87, 93, 106, 107, 110–111, 113, 114, 116, 131, 136, 156, 158, 162n6, 163n12, 167–169, 175, 183–185, 186n1, 187–188n12, 199, 205, 218, 232, 233, 235, 236, 238, 241, 242, 246n13 Rothblatt, Raul (Raul), 125, 178, 187n9, 243 S Saboule Moyala, 184–186 Scholars Feld, Steven, 111 Hall, Edward, 116 Keil, Chris, 111

252 

INDEX

Sensibility African, 129 American, 194, 204 cultural, 128–130, 178, 190 ethnographic, 78n5, 112, 189, 208n2 negotiating, 200–205 Serekunda (the Gambia), 22, 23, 36, 42, 44 Shrine World Music Venue, 121, 122, 125 Sissoko, Banzumana, 144, 228 Small, Christopher, 144, 154 Solí, 63, 65–70, 73, 108, 109, 111, 112, 136 Soliyo, 152, 158, 163n9, 226 So-Si-Sa, 127 Sosso, 62, 210, 220 Sosso balafon, 62, 210 Souaressi, 126 Soumanoro Kanté, 62, 63, 94–96, 151, 210 Soundiata Keita, vii, 63, 73, 94–96, 151, 153 Source (the band), 124 Sousou (susu) ethnic group, 63, 76, 83, 94, 97, 124, 146, 150, 194 Studio de l’Ermitage (Paris), 213 Sweetness (sweetening), 10, 21–38, 47, 114, 218, 222, 226, 237, 239 Sylla, Abou, 123, 225, 229n6 Syncing up, 4, 45, 52, 71, 201 T Technology of Enchantment, 133 Tenfou, 128 Time Africa Time, 102, 114, 117 bala, 48 monochronic, 45, 206

polychronic, 45, 58n8 respect the time, 110–111, 187n12 the (time in music), 113 time-is-money, 102, 107, 116 Titriba, 143, 195 Tolonso (album) (village), 220, 222, 229n5 Toubab, 23, 24, 27, 29, 31, 34, 38n2, 41, 42, 44, 51, 52, 70, 82, 139, 172 Tounkara, Djelimady, 8 Touré family, 95 Kunda, 33, 39n8 Samoury, 153, 186n3, 210 Sékou (president of Guinea), 102 Transformative ethnography, 5, 6, 78n5 practice, 238–239 Transformative ethnography (practice), 5, 6, 78n5 Translocal, 213 Transmission direct, 4, 11, 15, 81–97 oral, 4, 82, 98n2, 219–220, 223, 233, 235 Trickery, 151, 189 Tuning in, 4, 52, 107 U UNESCO World Heritage site, 62, 210 Y Yankadee, 63, 90, 91 Z Zebulon, 131, 133, 134