Friday night, I picked up ex-husband and drove into Durham to see Ladysmith Black Mambazo at the Carolina Theatre. I hadn't been there in more than a decade, and haven't driven in downtown Durham at night for about that long. Ex wanted to roll down the window and ask someone where the theatre was. I wouldn't let him, although the nearby windows of the YMCA were lit with masses of people on treadmills and exercise machines. I was remembering the old days, when young men would routinely set fires in the middle of the street and when at this very stoplight an old drunk walked up and urinated on my tires.
The opening act was Rhythmicity, an all-white "world" drumming group dressed in African fabrics. That morning I had heard an African-American historian of African-American history say that he saw progress in African-American history being interpreted by persons of all races. I found the statement curious, and watching Africa being interpreted by white people back to the African-American residents of Durham it seemed more throw-back than progress. In fact, 10 years ago I was a substitute school-teacher in Durham and the group that gave birth to Rhythmicity did a workshop in my school.
The crowd was African-Americans and Africans in classic tweeds and a beautiful assortment of cropped afros, blowouts and curls, and neat dreadlocks, and whites who looked like escapees from Extreme Makeover, REI Edition. Trail-worn fanny-pack, check. I had smuggled in the only Asian; ex is a citizen of India. On the way to the theatre, ex had said, "Can we leave early if they are bad?" That was an easy answer: "They won't be bad." What I didn't know was that they had won their third Grammy earlier that week. And I didn't know that as soon as they started to sing, everything I had planned to write about Valentine's Day was going to go out the window.
I had planned to write about the spiritual power of sexual union where self has melted with body, along with skepticism about whether it was most powerful spiritual experience I would ever have. Here in my current state of directed chastity (and remember that by chastity I mean not only an absence of sexual expression, but an absence of looking), the mundane sexuality that permeates every aspect of American culture is revolting. Here in the last week we've had everything from the octo-mom (whose fertility in the absence of sexuality has revolted almost everything) to, well, turn on the TV for 90 seconds. It seems certain that sexuality cannot be thee thing, but merely a thing that points out the human ability to have a something else, a greater experience. Given the absence of that something else however, I am skeptical of that as well.
And then Ladysmith Black Mambazo began to sing, and I felt something else. Ex, who has a healthy dose of spiritual skepticism born of childhood exposure to the very worst of the great religious traditions, settled into stillness beside me. This is not the Africa that Rhythmicty brings: the color of otherness, interpreted back to itself. Mambazo is the Africa that brings a wholeness to another continent which could not know what was missing until suddenly it is there. No Grammy, no applause could give recognition of what that is. Without Africa, it is as if the beauty of thousands of years of human development is lost and we still live on a flat earth. Africa is the edge we find, before we continue on and find ourselves again.
The closest proper recognition possible was given by a beautiful African woman sitting immediately in front of me who, when Rhythmicity sang in an African language giggled to her friend, "They don't know what they are saying." Near the beginning of Mambazo's act, she ululated loudly and yet somehow with such classic precision and perfect timing that even in the dark the singers knew that a beautiful woman was listening and for the rest of the evening they were mainly singing for her. She giggled, gave an African bark of enthusiasm that occasionally the singers gave each other, and at moments of supreme happiness shared these perfect ululations. When a singer would come to the front of the stage, he would try to sneak a peak through the stage lights, but she was hidden.
The songs that I heard and the dancing that I saw, for all the lyrics of peace and God, were for a woman. Mambazo is more than 40 years old and made of two generations now. One of the sons wears a wedding ring, indicating another generation to follow. For all that Mambazo is made of men, it is also defined by women on the other side of the earth and out of sight. Sexuality, yes. Pointing the way to something even more whole, also yes.
