More studio lunacy! The momentum of music-making has given me energy and strength – even though for the past two days I’ve been running on coffee and oranges… which reminds me of that exquisite, biting Wallace Stevens poem.
I was never interested in co-writing. Making songs was always a private exercise for me, an archive of my spiritual progress (… or decline for that matter), something born in silence as a way to excavate/study/chew on my internal storms and, in so doing, set them free. Sitting down with “other minds” and trying to build, brick by random brick, something called ‘music’ always felt forced – false. How wrong I can be…
Life is always teaching me – the fiercer your grip, the more suffering you create. Think Bruce Lee… ;)
I feel as though everything important I have ever learned has in some way involved letting go. Life knows what it’s doing, Slean, trust! Flow with it. Resistance to life is not only futile, it’s a complete waste of time and energy…
So we are gathered around the kitchen table, me and my three new best friends Steve, Damhnait and Tim, shouting out verses – some great, some awful, switching chords and tweaking melodies. It is refreshing and thrilling for all of us to abandon our firm ideas about who we think are ‘musically’ and just be conduits. The present moment twinkles around us. The cameras are rolling but do not intrude. I have such affection for everyone here now. I am genuinely delighted to see them in the morning. Wedging this heart open another blessed inch…
R&B queen Miss JoJo arrives to put some of her silky vocals on our dance-hall track. She told us that the Rwandan music scene is exploding. She’s been making videos and recordings with her friends using new, easy-to-use technology… For our song she whips up a whole lyric and numerous killer melodies within an hour. Amazing.
Rwanda’s best live reggae band also stopped by – Patrick, the bass-player, patiently waded through our busy tune with numerous chords. The chart I made up for him was a full page. When I sat in on their tune (yeehoo, playing the organ part in a real Rastafari band!) he wrote four chords at the top of the page. Oh. I hung my conservatory-head in shame.
Our next field trip is to visit a successful farming cooperative situated on the sloping, spectacularly beautiful terrain of the lush eastern districts. Nope. Still not over it.
Lovely Claire will be our guide again, and the male members of our company aren’t complaining. After a ledge-hugging, heart-stopping ride through banana fields and hillside forests, we arrived at the village hub where 20 or so community members were working away shelling peanuts.
Without a beat, Damhnait jumped in to help, and the people were delighted by this gesture. Dahmnait is uniquely gifted this way – perhaps it’s the Newfie laid-back openness – but in every single situation, she would effortlessly break the cultural ice between our group and the Rwandans we were visiting. Despite an almost impenetrable language barrier, she was always able to make people laugh. Without words, you can’t do that with jokes or witticisms – she did it with her body language, her smile and her willingness to share their personal space without fear or hesitation. She put people at ease. I learned a lot from just being around her. Here the women are chuckling at the slowness of her peanut-shelling technique – when she accidentally dropped a few shelled peanuts, well, that produced a much louder eruption.
It was not unusual to see teenage boys holding hands and hugging in public. Friendship in Rwanda is a different, deeper thing than in Canada.
They are not conservative about affection, loyalty or physical bonding. Our breakfast chef Betty routinely held my hands and told me she loved me! It made me ask myself what we’re so afraid of in the west.
Germs? Betrayal? Honestly – how sad!
The children in this village were positively magical.
Their eyes – the depthless love, the universes of potential in their eyes! – will forever haunt me. They stood in a close circle around me, giggling and marveling at my weird skin and hair and features. I wanted so desperately to talk to them. A teenage boy, in heavily accented English blurted out “Good morning? Nice to meet you!” Gales of laughter. I decided to use the language-barrier trick I learned in Cuba while filming the video for Sweet Ones with an all-Spanish crew – I pointed to my nose. For a few minutes, they stared at me like “What is UP with this crazy muzungu?”
I was persistent, until one child finally screamed out the word for nose in Kinyarwandan. Then I mimicked, as best I could. Hilarious! And that set us off on a bilingual tour of the human body. (Of course they wanted to try the English words too.) The whole thing was fantastically side-splitting to them. Such easy JOY! So pure and so immediately available! They smiled and clapped so generously! I was humbled beyond recognition – like I’d burst into a vapour and was now hovering in my form, light as a feather. Just look at this little girl.
Later, the whole group decided they would sing their national anthem for us. They harmonised and sang out, richly, without reservation. We returned the favour, although our song seemed a little stiffer and, mmm, a tad too formal?
I did feel a whole-body tingle though – and it wasn’t exactly patriotism per se, it was more an intense surge of gratitude. The word ‘Canada’ caused a flood of strong, conflicting emotions. I was confronting the bald, random fact of geography – ‘this anthem I am singing is the reason that I can drink clean water (hell, I bathe in it whenever the mood strikes me), that I can make a living dreaming up art, that I can always easily access nutritious food and I can walk around (even fly around) my country without fear of violence’… How brutally causeless, this fact of my birthplace. Canada – free and safe and plentiful. Why should I receive this bounty and not her? What did these children do to deserve what they are facing? It wasn’t guilt I was feeling – guilt never served anyone or any cause. It was the injustice of it. It’s not right, and we all know that deeply. I want, in some way, to be one of the people in the world who are trying to remedy injustice. I’ve got to figure out a way to do this.
That beautiful little girl ran after our departing vehicle…
The light vapour-feeling I experienced in their presence turned into a crushing heaviness as we were driving home. All along the road, people were carrying (or tying to their bikes) big yellow containers of water from the closest well. Most of their day is spent fetching water. Every day. Fetching water, carrying wood, growing food. If all of the real wealth of human potential in the world – and by that I mean ideas, innovation, invention, cooperative action – was developed and harnessed, I can’t help but think that this world would rapidly transform itself for the better. When humans are completely and solely occupied with the business of survival, how will we face the challenges of a growing population on a limited planet? What if that man carrying a mattress on his head down the highway – what if he could be a pioneer in developing-world health care? that woman digging potatoes – what if she could have taught all the village girls how to sew, midwife, read, start businesses? Most will never know because they have to work tirelessly to feed themselves and their children. Though I agree with Tolstoy that to live off the land is indeed a noble way of life (the only one in his view), it seems to me, in this place where so many are suffering, that this kind of existence is such a waste of human endeavour. How many genii lay dormant here? I know there are repetitive, robot-replaceable jobs in North America – someone has to put the car parts together, pick up the garbage, clean the windows etc. Hey, I was a bartender at Swiss Chalet. Are these a waste of human endeavour? Debatable, but the difference is, we have so many opportunities and ways to become educated, to train and acquire skills of all kinds – so North Americans, for the most part, are freely making choices in this regard. In Rwanda, those choices are drastically limited or just plain non-existent. And I think the world pays dearly for this wasted potential… The door to betterment – the chance to develop the mind – should be freely accessible to all that seek it…
As I’m video-skyping with my fella that evening, I ask him – how is it that I can see and hear you, from thousands of miles away, over the internet, for free, in real time – and there are people who don’t have clean water ?!
Perplexing and troubling. Perhaps a naive way of framing the question, but valid nonetheless. Video-skyping is pure Star-Trek to me. It is the living future. I experience a “Jetsons”-style oddness, every time. My friend (an epidemiologist I met in France) just happened to be working in Congo this month, and he’s coming for a visit. It will be good to talk about all of these thoughts with a seasoned veteran aid-worker.
