We Sing Tizita to Bring Back Our Dead / an excerpt
Mukoma Wa Ngugi
Mukoma Wa Ngugi
Miriam claimed she was 90 years old, but I suspected she was around 70. I had done a generous story about her called “the oldest bartender in Kenya” and for that she always gave me a few drinks for free. First she lost her mother to the politically induced famine – Mengistu had used starvation as a weapon against civilians to punish the rebels. Then before they could have children, she had lost her husband to the armed struggle to oust Mengistu. That was when Ethiopian anti-Mengistu and Eritrean nationalists wanting to liberate Eritrean from Ethiopia fought their common enemy together, an enemy whose allegiances to the West and the Russians shifted with his fortunes. Then she lost her sister to the fratricidal war that ensued between the Ethiopians and Eritreans after they ousted Mengistu. Eventually she was left standing alone. So she made her way to Kenya, in “the worst kind of loneliness, of being lonely and last one standing”, she had described it. She had run into Mr. Selassie, and from their mutual despair the ABC was born.
To me she seemed like she was born the way she looked. In the last ten or so years, I had yet to see her age, or with a wrinkle out of place. Dressed in long chiffons decorated with butterflies, a hundred bangles around her wrists, she commanded a quiet feisty dignity.
Sometimes she would ask me, “Doctor,” - people sometimes called me Doctor, or Doc for short, for the stories I occasionally doctored for The National Inquisitor. “Doctor, I know why I am here – in this place. But you, why are you here?”
We are born many things and then cynicism, joblessness or revenge against a society that at some point did us wrong makes us become one kind of writer and not the other. Or we are freaks. Or harder to believe, we are led by a genuine desire for creative journalism. It boiled down to this is what we were good at – sniffing out facts from gossip, blowing up a sex scandal that might have gone unnoticed, exposing a politician’s hypocrisy who really believes charity begins at home and therefore diverts public funds to buy diamond-studded sex toys, or turning into a laughing stock the homophobic priest who whines and pines after me as I go undercover into the sexual mysteries of the African Catholic church. But that is not the kind of answer Miriam wanted to hear, she wanted something more fundamental, formative.
“I am an internal exile, a question unto myself,” I would evade, thinking of Askar, a character in Nurrudin Farah’s Maps, a novel that Miriam could have just as easily crawled from.
And then I would tell her how one weekend in 1982, my brother and I wandered out of the Intercontinental Hotel where we stayed whenever we accompanied my parents to Nairobi for one of those State House visits. We did not know what was happening exactly, there was a lot of excitement out in the streets. Someone was shooting a movie. There were green branches from fig trees laid out on the streets, soldiers and kiosk women and men moaning in pain, some even pretending to be dead. It took us a minute to snap out of our childhood innocence and realize we were not on a movie set and we ran all the way back to the hotel. My parent’s visit to the State House had just coincided with a military coup attempt and they were hunkered in a bunker plotting a way out for the dictator. I liked to think when Miriam looked at me, she saw past the Kenyan wealthy kid refusing to grow up to that kid traumatized by a history made by his parents.
But she would say something like, “You are just a rich spoilt boy – the world is not a movie” and I would wonder what it was that connected us.
If it was guilt, I had plenty of it.
“Hey Babe, how did they decide on the musicians?” I asked her as she brought me my two beers.
“Nobody tells this old fool anything – its serve beer and shut up over here,” she answered.
I laughed and started walking away.
“That doesn’t mean I haven’t heard things though– no wonder you are such a poor reporter,” she said shaking her head side to side. “You know the Tizita?”
“A little bit”
“These are the best by the best – you see that guy over there?” She asked, pointing at Mr. Selassie. “He selected them.”
I started to laugh.
“As my people used to say, just because a man’s fingers are too short to play a guitar does not mean he does not know good music,” Miriam said, moving on to another customer. That was another thing about Miriam – made up on the spot proverbs.
“You know what the Tizita is?” she asked me.
“Yes, in Boston I met her there,” I answered.
“It’s not always a her. You are, in any case asking the wrong question,” she said and waited for me to ask the inevitably right question.
“What is the right question?”
She high-fived me laughing as her wet hands sprayed some of the soapy water around us.
“The Tizita, there has never been a competition, it is degrading to the musicians – it is like asking who has a better heart, a better soul – how do you measure that?” She asked me.
“It is human nature – you want to know who the best is. Do you agree?” I said.
“We shall find out soon,” she replied.
“The Tizita, the words, what does it mean?” I asked Miriam, deciding to change tact.
“You know the most important invention in music?” she asked me with a wink.
“The electric guitar,” I answered, sounding like I was expecting to win something. Bob Dylan, moving from acoustic guitar to electric – I could not sing a whole Dylan song but even I knew the story.
“No,” Miriam said. “You are wrong – like you are always. Let me whisper it in your ear.”
I leaned in and she pulled my ear so hard that I jumped.
“What the fuck? Just tell me,” I said to her angrily.
“I just did,” she said laughing hard enough to need to lean onto the water filled trough where she rinsed our glasses.
“Your ear. Without the ear there is no music. No?”
“Well, Miriam, one hundred years’ worth of wisdom and you give me the chicken or the egg question?” I asked her as I rubbed my ear to calm it down.
“But is that really what you wanted to ask?” she asked as she sashayed to another customer who looked like he could use a beer.
“Why don’t you just tell me,” I said trying not to sound hurt.
“You know those stories about soldiers stopping a war to carry their dead and wounded, or Christmas, or something?” she asked me.
“Yes, I have heard of the story of how a Tizita musician stopped the Ethiopian – Eritrean war. But it’s a myth – every major war has such a myth – a beautiful woman walking by, Christmas, a white dove, someone’s birthday – it’s just soldiers getting tired of war,” I answered.
“That musician, he is here tonight – you can ask him.”
She jutted her chin toward the dressing rooms. Her smile, punctuated by a few remaining browned teeth, followed my kiss on her cheek as she slipped a fifth of Vodka into my hand.
“That’s on me – you are going to need it by the time the Tizita is through with you tonight,” she said and playfully cupped a warm wet hand on my face.
I slipped the fifth into my pocket and took a liberal swig from my beer. I did not have time to argue with her about the etiquette of pulling a customer’s ears for a cliché about chicken and eggs – it was show time.
***
The musicians had started coming out of the dressing rooms one by one with Selassie making the announcements. He had the microphones adjusted to a lower pitch, to hide his rather thin voice. And so he was announcing the rules and musicians in a booming slow motion voice. The rules were simple enough for the musicians and gamblers – winners would take it all. The winner of the Tizita would be whoever received the loudest applause. The purse was 1,000,000 Kenya shillings, that and “invaluable street cred,” as he put it.
Yes, the million Kenya shillings was a good amount of change, but still, why would a successful musician, one considered to be one of the best come to a place like the ABC? I had heard of successful musicians and bands like Bruce Springsteen and The Rolling Stones occasionally giving up the stadiums and concert halls to play in small neighborhood bars. A return to the basics, to intimate spaces where they can actually interact and react to their audience. A stadium concert is about fame, to play in a place like the ABC, it was about intimacy. That, the street cred, the million Kenya shillings and playing against the best – was that enough to bring an artist worth their name to a place like the ABC? Or were the musicians slumming the slummers, a two-way spectacle?
“The Corporal!” Mr. Selassie announced.
The Corporal somewhere in his fifties was tall and thin, with the greying but good hair that we Kenyans envied so much, smoothed back. He was dressed efficiently, jeans, a rolled-up green shirt and sandals. His face confident, gaunt, wrinkling but still pulled tight by high cheekbones, he could have been an ageing runner or football player. He walked briskly and using the ropes he hurled himself onto the stage, picked up a guitar, and finger-picked in a way I had never heard it done before – thudded, muted yet vocal sequence of sounds that felt like the heavy raindrops, the kind that come before a storm and rapidly tapping on a corrugated iron sheet roof. A few seconds of guitar, and he picked up a masenko.
The Corporal, and the masenko - discordant, like the buzz of the bee, as bad as its sting but in the hands of the Corporal, as sweet as its honey - the masenko, the instrument of prayer – but it in his hands, one that can curse. The Gikuyu sent smoke from a sacrificial lamb high into the sky; if God was listening, it went up straight as an arrow. The masenko is an instrument of prayer that I imagine sent prayer straight up to God - but in the hands of the Corporal, the low bass buzzing notes were the devil announcing his presence, the sweetest most terrifying sound.
“I have a lot to miss – but when I die, what I will miss the most is music, because music is life...” He said and then started to sing his Tizita. He sounded like there was sawdust in his vocal cords. His voice trembling threateningly over the Masenko started to give way to a fear – but not the kind of trembling fear that is scared – it was more of a defiant fear – and several images flashed through my mind – a man at Tiananmen Square standing in front of an armored tank, Rachel Corrie in Palestine standing in front of an Israeli bulldozer moments before the driver crushes her, Muhammad Ali, broken jaw against Ken Norton, and, oddly, an old eagle with a stiff wing flying along a swollen and raging river before expertly diving and emerging with a fish caught in its talons.
He let out a low long growl that went underneath the Masenko, a sound I had never heard before –not a threatening growl but the sound of a voice trying to find footing from a place that was an early memory – the first sound ever made, it felt like, and then he quickly rose above, then joined his masenko and closed his Tizita in his soothing falsetto.
Where other singers try to take us to heaven or hell, he had kept us on a terrifying earth. We wanted to break into tears and jump into the abyss – a catharsis of course that would allow us to go back to the morning with all the pain and reminder it brought, but the masenko was not an instrument of flight – it was the instrument of reckoning. If you could hear your voice through the judging ears of a stranger – what kind of judgment would you give? No, we had not come to ABC to hold up mirrors. We were here to escape and he was not letting us.
The crowd of drunks, gamblers, slummers, and swingers – his degenerate audience – we punished him for denying us escape with tepid applause. He knew what he had done because he shook his head and laughed. It was only when he stood up and started walking to his seat by the ring that I noticed he had a limp.
***
“And now Ladies and Gentleman…The Diva!” Mr. Selassie screamed into the microphone.
The Diva walked in, a glow of sparkling whiteness from her diamond studded dress almost blinding, high heels taping a confident unhurried rhythm on the concrete floor. And all that to set stage, it seemed, for her beauty, exaggerated by her being tall, a beauty amplified by her bright colored Japanese doll-like makeup. She was somewhere between caricature and performer. She climbed onto the stage and slowly wrapped long silver metallic nails around the microphone next to the piano and adjusted it. She pulled the gold sheet away from the piano, sat down, smiled and started playing. And we waited and waited, waited for a voice, for that first sound – but she kept playing, and playing and shaking her head from side to side, as if each high note was dragging her along against her will. She kept leaning into the microphone as if about to start singing before being pulled away by the piano.
We started sending each other glances that betrayed our growing desperation to hear her voice, at least once – to know what she sounded like. But I was tipsy enough to let myself take in what she was offering instead of longing for what I wanted to hear. I let myself fall on the piano keys, light as feathers so that every time she hit a key my body fluttered with her every exertion. Her breath escaping her mouth in small bursts hit the microphone. I followed The Corporal’s old eagle along the tumultuous swollen river, dipping in and out of the water with her slow trance-inducing touch of the piano keys. But it felt like there was something wrong – her or me, her or the audience, one or the other was in the wrong place – and I pulled out of her world that was really the Corporal’s and back into the ABC. I suspected this was the Corporal’s doing – he had set the stage with his Tizita in a way that spoke to the musicians in a language that had gone over our heads. Mr. Selassie coughed into his mic and she stopped playing.
She seemed to think for a minute.
“In space there is no sound – did you know that there is no sound in heaven and space? Or words? What would music sound like?” she whispered into the mic, a bit drugged it seemed.
“If there were no words, how would you listen, Mr. Selassie?’ She asked.
He coughed into the mic again. It felt like the stage could barely contain her – and the pain or anguish of being confined seemed to rise out of her finding singular pronunciation in the low cry she let out to finally start her Tizita. Yes, reading this now, you will think I was being melodramatic, but hearing that cry that started at a high note, then made lightning zigzags, tapping something here and there until she hit the earth with a bass lower than a man’s, to hear that, to feel its vibrations, was to realize what not a just-failed song sounded like. It was to realize there was a lot more to her than what this stage, this night and this competition and us were allowing. It was beautiful, this protest that hurt.
She stopped playing the piano all together and started to sing and even though she had stopped playing it, I could still hear it, she had suggested the piano and then let us do the rest of the work while she took us through the Tizita – filling in piano keys running fast downhill when her voice soared and letting the keys climb up a steep hill while her voice dug deep into an abyss and dragged us along and beat our bodies against its jagged edges– her glamorous look and her mournful Tizita at odds. And there I felt the tremors of extreme happiness, I felt giddy. Then a singular force of all my tragedies - the night when my grandmother died in her sleep after a simple goodnight, my two grandfathers who died before I was born - hit me. My own weight collapsing in on me with the force of a black hole was unbearable. And then she was done.
And whatever that was, it was gone and bewildered relief set in for all of us.
***
“The Taliban Man!” Mr. Selassie announced even before The Diva left the stage. We went wild. We wanted something to wash our blood off the ring. We were not ready to go where the Diva was taking us. We yelled, clapped and patted each other, bought each other beer, lit cigarettes and nodded at each other vigorously.
The Taliban Man – I was going to ask him what his name meant to him and his fans. A name of defiance, I guessed – for an artist it made sense – to take on that name meant to subvert its uses, whether it was the actual Taliban or the United States and its war that had now found itself in Somalia and by extension, Ethiopia. It was the kind of a name that once you heard it, remained seared in your brain and, in time, in the recesses of your subconscious. There were the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan shooting school kids in the head, there were the Americans dropping drone bombs on school kids and weddings in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and then there was the Taliban Man, the rapper musician from Ethiopia. In the ABC, it made its own peculiar sense.
Mr. Selassie laughed into the mic.
“The Taliban Man!” He yelled again.
The Taliban Man ran into the ring dressed in a black suit, a black bow tie and military boots into which his dress black pants were tucked - he did a somersault, his tall frame making it look like it was in slow motion. He walked to the piano. He hammered a few keys with youthful energy and from the chaos order started to emerge. Ragtime. The little I knew told me that ragtime is classical music played over itself many times at the same time –where each fucking voice has something to sing along to or eventually say. Schizophrenic classical music, but the musician has to give it form, madness contained. Taliban Man was all of them and I was sure he would take the cup home. He was asking us – if you were many people with different rhythms, voices, how would you hear yourself? As one? As many? He was playing that many songs at the same time. He hit a few more bars, leaned back and laughed and into the microphone as if to say, “Just joking.”
He left the piano and picked up a guitar – he played an instrumental Tizita, the guitar clean and efficient, walking steadily underneath his voice. Then he broke into it and ran the Tizita faster and slower until he fell onto a lean steel guitar jazz tune. It was not quite working – it was like the two were clashing – jazz refusing to be contained, but the Tizita beat insisting steadily on being heard–they both overwhelmed each other, and I for one was getting disjointed. He laughed again and lifted up his hands as if in defeat.
He paused and started a slow major chord driven Tizita that he slowly drove with a hip-hop beat before breaking into rap. He rapped a few stanzas before asking us in English to clap along and repeat after him:
Life’s a bitch and then you die,
You never know when you are going to go,
That’s why we get high on… (He taught us how to pause here, letting it hang on before dropping) …love.
We rapped along like that for a while, laughing childishly at being able to say the word ‘bitch’ to each other, inflected by our various accents – mbitch, birrtch, biaaatch, bisch and so on. Eventually The Taliban Man stood up and led us through a roof raising “life is a bitch and then you die.” He thanked Nas and left the stage.
We were still hungry. We were in fact getting hungrier.
***
“Our very own Miriam,” Mr. Selassie yelled. The place went quiet and Miriam walked slowly to the boxing ring. When she got to the first stair, she started looking around, one hand over eyes until she saw me. She beckoned and I walked over and helped her onto the stage – she did not say a word – she felt light and frail. Nobody least of all me knew she could sing, let alone compete with the best of Tizita singers. She sat down and looked up at the microphone hanging down and pulled it down so that it was within her range. She took a deep breath that almost sounded like a sigh into the silence that had followed her every move. At that point we came to life and started cheering her on. She raised her left eyebrow and put her right arm out and we quieted - we knew that hand-sign, she usually did that when one was in danger of being cut off at the bar. We fell back into silence.
She started singing her Tizita acapella - like it was something she did everyday - in the shower, humming it as she served drinks, singing it as she went about the business of living. For the Diva, the Corporal and the Taliban Man, their voices in their own unique way contained an explosive power that had to be held within the vulnerable Tizita – and their Tizita seemed to work to the extent they were able to contain their powerful range within the melody of the Tizita, a melody that did not require one to hit impossibly high notes. They were working with more than they needed- the danger then being showing off. Miriam’s voice was old, and when I listened more closely, for a moment I thought I had walked into my grandmother’s house that always smelt of wood burning but underneath that, a warm sweet musky smell – like someone had eaten sweet plums, and threw the seeds and the skin on the floor in a room that rarely saw the sun. Her voice, old and hoarse from old age, smoking, drinking and yelling at customers all night at the bar, sounded like the Tizita she was singing, vulnerable and when it started cracking, I knew her voice would not carry her and us through the song.
The Taliban Man walked into the stage so unobtrusively that it was only when he picked up the guitar that we noticed him. He gestured to Miriam to pick up the krar. She did not hesitate – they whispered something to each other and he sat down on the stool as she went back to the microphone. The Taliban Man started tapping his hands on his thighs, tapping his boots on the wooden, before he started playing the guitar.
Miriam looked at him – her smile now like that of a smitten lover. She leaned back and closed her eyes and started playing the krar, with its high and low muted strings sounding like light rain, increasing in tempo until she was playing somewhere inside the Taliban Man’s guitar. The Krar in terms of range could not compete with the steel guitar, but it could improvise, take some of the energy from the guitar, or give it largesse by letting it finish what it could not with its metallic trilling sound. The Taliban Man followed her lead and started bending his notes, but just to show us he knew what Miriam was doing, he would every now and then snap his strings so that they created a buzzing sound, like a razor bent back and let loose.
The Diva joined them on stage and started humming, a low constant hum that rose and fell with Miriam’s Krar, so that they both were working inside the Taliban Man’s guitar. The Corporal walked in with his masenko – the sound he lent them was no longer the anguished journeyman between god and the devil but rather of an elder, raspy and surefooted ageing man.
I looked over at The Diva. I was expecting to see competition, or even the look that says I am better than them. Instead her look reminded me of being in primary school and that occasional class when my English language teacher Mr. Mbugua would say something so profound that we would look at each other in awe and appreciation. Like this one time when Mr. Mbugua asked the most philosophical question – what if we are actually awake and living when we slept and dreaming when we thought we were awake, and for months afterwards that is all we spoke about. She had the look that said, I am learning something, and I appreciate how it’s being taught.
I rubbed the ear Miriam had pinched – there was still a dull pain – she was onto something.
***
Onstage, the musicians were enjoying themselves too much and they left us behind. And by the time we caught up, it was to find Miriam playing the accordion, her looking so slight and bent forward that I worried about her. But she was at it, pulling, ebbing and letting out a gentle church organ sounding song, the accordion lungs expanding and contracting gently, breathing in and out layered prayers. She was swaying side to side, dipping in and out, lifting one foot in and out, wading out of the river of this Tizita that as yet had no words.
She stomped her feet, ran her right hand against her left on the accordion to create confused upside down rainbows of sound – and stopped and the rest of her band followed suit- and then a caesura. The silence transfixed the drunkards, gamblers, slummers and the believers in place. The silence moved from being expectant to bordering on being painful. At the end of that silence where the pain was turning into relief, the Corporal with the masenko came in and bowed a long devilish trembling bass, low and threatening. But the Taliban Man was not going to have us threatened, and his guitar with its clean thin sound, note for note, came in.
Miriam stomped her feet again and silence reigned once again and from that silence, she started singing, low long moans gliding above and underneath the lazy accordion. The Taliban Man’s guitar getting more urgent while the Diva on the piano was furious and the Corporal on his devilish masenko held everything together.
Then the Corporal left his post and came in with the low buzzing sound of the masenko, mourning that was amplified by the slow wail of the accordion as Miriam pulled it apart. Her voice, with a contained rasp, came in once again.
The Taliban Man came in and did a violent lead solo. The Diva’s piano jumped into the fray, playing peaceful but sharp short determined notes that threatened to undermine the Taliban Man’s work. They both went on for a while as we clapped and cheered and clapped the beat.
They played on, helping each other up when one of them faltered with the beat and timing. A few minutes into the jam, Miriam looked at the Taliban Man and he slowed down his syncopated guitar playing and the others followed suit –silence save for the low hum buzz of the masenko and the sound of the accordion slowly running out of air. She winked at me. “This once,” she said in English. And she bent low and joined the masenko:
When I dream of happy days, oh Tizita,
Wake me, so I can find you once again
I fear so much that you too will leave me
and I will forget
this pain that carries my love.
And Tizita, if I forget those I loved,
how I can remember who I am?
One day, I will be dead and gone
my grave untended
date of birth and death
on my gravestone from centuries past
And only my Tizita will remain,
Only you will remain.
The musicians clapped for each other as we jostled each other and cheered for them. Some people were patting me on my back, thrusting beer in my hand, just for that little recognition from Miriam. The last time I had seen this was when there was a sugar shortage in my hometown – a truck showed up, men in blue overalls unloaded white sacks of sugar all the while with growing rings and rings of people surrounding the store. But it was not until the grinning shopkeeper weighed the first kilogram of sugar that we rushed his counter. Fear that there would not be enough for all us? But there was going to be, we had seen twenty or more sacks being unloaded and wheeled into the store. Sugar – we could also live without – an addiction then? Had the musicians awakened, triggered something as powerful as an addiction?
To me she seemed like she was born the way she looked. In the last ten or so years, I had yet to see her age, or with a wrinkle out of place. Dressed in long chiffons decorated with butterflies, a hundred bangles around her wrists, she commanded a quiet feisty dignity.
Sometimes she would ask me, “Doctor,” - people sometimes called me Doctor, or Doc for short, for the stories I occasionally doctored for The National Inquisitor. “Doctor, I know why I am here – in this place. But you, why are you here?”
We are born many things and then cynicism, joblessness or revenge against a society that at some point did us wrong makes us become one kind of writer and not the other. Or we are freaks. Or harder to believe, we are led by a genuine desire for creative journalism. It boiled down to this is what we were good at – sniffing out facts from gossip, blowing up a sex scandal that might have gone unnoticed, exposing a politician’s hypocrisy who really believes charity begins at home and therefore diverts public funds to buy diamond-studded sex toys, or turning into a laughing stock the homophobic priest who whines and pines after me as I go undercover into the sexual mysteries of the African Catholic church. But that is not the kind of answer Miriam wanted to hear, she wanted something more fundamental, formative.
“I am an internal exile, a question unto myself,” I would evade, thinking of Askar, a character in Nurrudin Farah’s Maps, a novel that Miriam could have just as easily crawled from.
And then I would tell her how one weekend in 1982, my brother and I wandered out of the Intercontinental Hotel where we stayed whenever we accompanied my parents to Nairobi for one of those State House visits. We did not know what was happening exactly, there was a lot of excitement out in the streets. Someone was shooting a movie. There were green branches from fig trees laid out on the streets, soldiers and kiosk women and men moaning in pain, some even pretending to be dead. It took us a minute to snap out of our childhood innocence and realize we were not on a movie set and we ran all the way back to the hotel. My parent’s visit to the State House had just coincided with a military coup attempt and they were hunkered in a bunker plotting a way out for the dictator. I liked to think when Miriam looked at me, she saw past the Kenyan wealthy kid refusing to grow up to that kid traumatized by a history made by his parents.
But she would say something like, “You are just a rich spoilt boy – the world is not a movie” and I would wonder what it was that connected us.
If it was guilt, I had plenty of it.
“Hey Babe, how did they decide on the musicians?” I asked her as she brought me my two beers.
“Nobody tells this old fool anything – its serve beer and shut up over here,” she answered.
I laughed and started walking away.
“That doesn’t mean I haven’t heard things though– no wonder you are such a poor reporter,” she said shaking her head side to side. “You know the Tizita?”
“A little bit”
“These are the best by the best – you see that guy over there?” She asked, pointing at Mr. Selassie. “He selected them.”
I started to laugh.
“As my people used to say, just because a man’s fingers are too short to play a guitar does not mean he does not know good music,” Miriam said, moving on to another customer. That was another thing about Miriam – made up on the spot proverbs.
“You know what the Tizita is?” she asked me.
“Yes, in Boston I met her there,” I answered.
“It’s not always a her. You are, in any case asking the wrong question,” she said and waited for me to ask the inevitably right question.
“What is the right question?”
She high-fived me laughing as her wet hands sprayed some of the soapy water around us.
“The Tizita, there has never been a competition, it is degrading to the musicians – it is like asking who has a better heart, a better soul – how do you measure that?” She asked me.
“It is human nature – you want to know who the best is. Do you agree?” I said.
“We shall find out soon,” she replied.
“The Tizita, the words, what does it mean?” I asked Miriam, deciding to change tact.
“You know the most important invention in music?” she asked me with a wink.
“The electric guitar,” I answered, sounding like I was expecting to win something. Bob Dylan, moving from acoustic guitar to electric – I could not sing a whole Dylan song but even I knew the story.
“No,” Miriam said. “You are wrong – like you are always. Let me whisper it in your ear.”
I leaned in and she pulled my ear so hard that I jumped.
“What the fuck? Just tell me,” I said to her angrily.
“I just did,” she said laughing hard enough to need to lean onto the water filled trough where she rinsed our glasses.
“Your ear. Without the ear there is no music. No?”
“Well, Miriam, one hundred years’ worth of wisdom and you give me the chicken or the egg question?” I asked her as I rubbed my ear to calm it down.
“But is that really what you wanted to ask?” she asked as she sashayed to another customer who looked like he could use a beer.
“Why don’t you just tell me,” I said trying not to sound hurt.
“You know those stories about soldiers stopping a war to carry their dead and wounded, or Christmas, or something?” she asked me.
“Yes, I have heard of the story of how a Tizita musician stopped the Ethiopian – Eritrean war. But it’s a myth – every major war has such a myth – a beautiful woman walking by, Christmas, a white dove, someone’s birthday – it’s just soldiers getting tired of war,” I answered.
“That musician, he is here tonight – you can ask him.”
She jutted her chin toward the dressing rooms. Her smile, punctuated by a few remaining browned teeth, followed my kiss on her cheek as she slipped a fifth of Vodka into my hand.
“That’s on me – you are going to need it by the time the Tizita is through with you tonight,” she said and playfully cupped a warm wet hand on my face.
I slipped the fifth into my pocket and took a liberal swig from my beer. I did not have time to argue with her about the etiquette of pulling a customer’s ears for a cliché about chicken and eggs – it was show time.
***
The musicians had started coming out of the dressing rooms one by one with Selassie making the announcements. He had the microphones adjusted to a lower pitch, to hide his rather thin voice. And so he was announcing the rules and musicians in a booming slow motion voice. The rules were simple enough for the musicians and gamblers – winners would take it all. The winner of the Tizita would be whoever received the loudest applause. The purse was 1,000,000 Kenya shillings, that and “invaluable street cred,” as he put it.
Yes, the million Kenya shillings was a good amount of change, but still, why would a successful musician, one considered to be one of the best come to a place like the ABC? I had heard of successful musicians and bands like Bruce Springsteen and The Rolling Stones occasionally giving up the stadiums and concert halls to play in small neighborhood bars. A return to the basics, to intimate spaces where they can actually interact and react to their audience. A stadium concert is about fame, to play in a place like the ABC, it was about intimacy. That, the street cred, the million Kenya shillings and playing against the best – was that enough to bring an artist worth their name to a place like the ABC? Or were the musicians slumming the slummers, a two-way spectacle?
“The Corporal!” Mr. Selassie announced.
The Corporal somewhere in his fifties was tall and thin, with the greying but good hair that we Kenyans envied so much, smoothed back. He was dressed efficiently, jeans, a rolled-up green shirt and sandals. His face confident, gaunt, wrinkling but still pulled tight by high cheekbones, he could have been an ageing runner or football player. He walked briskly and using the ropes he hurled himself onto the stage, picked up a guitar, and finger-picked in a way I had never heard it done before – thudded, muted yet vocal sequence of sounds that felt like the heavy raindrops, the kind that come before a storm and rapidly tapping on a corrugated iron sheet roof. A few seconds of guitar, and he picked up a masenko.
The Corporal, and the masenko - discordant, like the buzz of the bee, as bad as its sting but in the hands of the Corporal, as sweet as its honey - the masenko, the instrument of prayer – but it in his hands, one that can curse. The Gikuyu sent smoke from a sacrificial lamb high into the sky; if God was listening, it went up straight as an arrow. The masenko is an instrument of prayer that I imagine sent prayer straight up to God - but in the hands of the Corporal, the low bass buzzing notes were the devil announcing his presence, the sweetest most terrifying sound.
“I have a lot to miss – but when I die, what I will miss the most is music, because music is life...” He said and then started to sing his Tizita. He sounded like there was sawdust in his vocal cords. His voice trembling threateningly over the Masenko started to give way to a fear – but not the kind of trembling fear that is scared – it was more of a defiant fear – and several images flashed through my mind – a man at Tiananmen Square standing in front of an armored tank, Rachel Corrie in Palestine standing in front of an Israeli bulldozer moments before the driver crushes her, Muhammad Ali, broken jaw against Ken Norton, and, oddly, an old eagle with a stiff wing flying along a swollen and raging river before expertly diving and emerging with a fish caught in its talons.
He let out a low long growl that went underneath the Masenko, a sound I had never heard before –not a threatening growl but the sound of a voice trying to find footing from a place that was an early memory – the first sound ever made, it felt like, and then he quickly rose above, then joined his masenko and closed his Tizita in his soothing falsetto.
Where other singers try to take us to heaven or hell, he had kept us on a terrifying earth. We wanted to break into tears and jump into the abyss – a catharsis of course that would allow us to go back to the morning with all the pain and reminder it brought, but the masenko was not an instrument of flight – it was the instrument of reckoning. If you could hear your voice through the judging ears of a stranger – what kind of judgment would you give? No, we had not come to ABC to hold up mirrors. We were here to escape and he was not letting us.
The crowd of drunks, gamblers, slummers, and swingers – his degenerate audience – we punished him for denying us escape with tepid applause. He knew what he had done because he shook his head and laughed. It was only when he stood up and started walking to his seat by the ring that I noticed he had a limp.
***
“And now Ladies and Gentleman…The Diva!” Mr. Selassie screamed into the microphone.
The Diva walked in, a glow of sparkling whiteness from her diamond studded dress almost blinding, high heels taping a confident unhurried rhythm on the concrete floor. And all that to set stage, it seemed, for her beauty, exaggerated by her being tall, a beauty amplified by her bright colored Japanese doll-like makeup. She was somewhere between caricature and performer. She climbed onto the stage and slowly wrapped long silver metallic nails around the microphone next to the piano and adjusted it. She pulled the gold sheet away from the piano, sat down, smiled and started playing. And we waited and waited, waited for a voice, for that first sound – but she kept playing, and playing and shaking her head from side to side, as if each high note was dragging her along against her will. She kept leaning into the microphone as if about to start singing before being pulled away by the piano.
We started sending each other glances that betrayed our growing desperation to hear her voice, at least once – to know what she sounded like. But I was tipsy enough to let myself take in what she was offering instead of longing for what I wanted to hear. I let myself fall on the piano keys, light as feathers so that every time she hit a key my body fluttered with her every exertion. Her breath escaping her mouth in small bursts hit the microphone. I followed The Corporal’s old eagle along the tumultuous swollen river, dipping in and out of the water with her slow trance-inducing touch of the piano keys. But it felt like there was something wrong – her or me, her or the audience, one or the other was in the wrong place – and I pulled out of her world that was really the Corporal’s and back into the ABC. I suspected this was the Corporal’s doing – he had set the stage with his Tizita in a way that spoke to the musicians in a language that had gone over our heads. Mr. Selassie coughed into his mic and she stopped playing.
She seemed to think for a minute.
“In space there is no sound – did you know that there is no sound in heaven and space? Or words? What would music sound like?” she whispered into the mic, a bit drugged it seemed.
“If there were no words, how would you listen, Mr. Selassie?’ She asked.
He coughed into the mic again. It felt like the stage could barely contain her – and the pain or anguish of being confined seemed to rise out of her finding singular pronunciation in the low cry she let out to finally start her Tizita. Yes, reading this now, you will think I was being melodramatic, but hearing that cry that started at a high note, then made lightning zigzags, tapping something here and there until she hit the earth with a bass lower than a man’s, to hear that, to feel its vibrations, was to realize what not a just-failed song sounded like. It was to realize there was a lot more to her than what this stage, this night and this competition and us were allowing. It was beautiful, this protest that hurt.
She stopped playing the piano all together and started to sing and even though she had stopped playing it, I could still hear it, she had suggested the piano and then let us do the rest of the work while she took us through the Tizita – filling in piano keys running fast downhill when her voice soared and letting the keys climb up a steep hill while her voice dug deep into an abyss and dragged us along and beat our bodies against its jagged edges– her glamorous look and her mournful Tizita at odds. And there I felt the tremors of extreme happiness, I felt giddy. Then a singular force of all my tragedies - the night when my grandmother died in her sleep after a simple goodnight, my two grandfathers who died before I was born - hit me. My own weight collapsing in on me with the force of a black hole was unbearable. And then she was done.
And whatever that was, it was gone and bewildered relief set in for all of us.
***
“The Taliban Man!” Mr. Selassie announced even before The Diva left the stage. We went wild. We wanted something to wash our blood off the ring. We were not ready to go where the Diva was taking us. We yelled, clapped and patted each other, bought each other beer, lit cigarettes and nodded at each other vigorously.
The Taliban Man – I was going to ask him what his name meant to him and his fans. A name of defiance, I guessed – for an artist it made sense – to take on that name meant to subvert its uses, whether it was the actual Taliban or the United States and its war that had now found itself in Somalia and by extension, Ethiopia. It was the kind of a name that once you heard it, remained seared in your brain and, in time, in the recesses of your subconscious. There were the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan shooting school kids in the head, there were the Americans dropping drone bombs on school kids and weddings in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and then there was the Taliban Man, the rapper musician from Ethiopia. In the ABC, it made its own peculiar sense.
Mr. Selassie laughed into the mic.
“The Taliban Man!” He yelled again.
The Taliban Man ran into the ring dressed in a black suit, a black bow tie and military boots into which his dress black pants were tucked - he did a somersault, his tall frame making it look like it was in slow motion. He walked to the piano. He hammered a few keys with youthful energy and from the chaos order started to emerge. Ragtime. The little I knew told me that ragtime is classical music played over itself many times at the same time –where each fucking voice has something to sing along to or eventually say. Schizophrenic classical music, but the musician has to give it form, madness contained. Taliban Man was all of them and I was sure he would take the cup home. He was asking us – if you were many people with different rhythms, voices, how would you hear yourself? As one? As many? He was playing that many songs at the same time. He hit a few more bars, leaned back and laughed and into the microphone as if to say, “Just joking.”
He left the piano and picked up a guitar – he played an instrumental Tizita, the guitar clean and efficient, walking steadily underneath his voice. Then he broke into it and ran the Tizita faster and slower until he fell onto a lean steel guitar jazz tune. It was not quite working – it was like the two were clashing – jazz refusing to be contained, but the Tizita beat insisting steadily on being heard–they both overwhelmed each other, and I for one was getting disjointed. He laughed again and lifted up his hands as if in defeat.
He paused and started a slow major chord driven Tizita that he slowly drove with a hip-hop beat before breaking into rap. He rapped a few stanzas before asking us in English to clap along and repeat after him:
Life’s a bitch and then you die,
You never know when you are going to go,
That’s why we get high on… (He taught us how to pause here, letting it hang on before dropping) …love.
We rapped along like that for a while, laughing childishly at being able to say the word ‘bitch’ to each other, inflected by our various accents – mbitch, birrtch, biaaatch, bisch and so on. Eventually The Taliban Man stood up and led us through a roof raising “life is a bitch and then you die.” He thanked Nas and left the stage.
We were still hungry. We were in fact getting hungrier.
***
“Our very own Miriam,” Mr. Selassie yelled. The place went quiet and Miriam walked slowly to the boxing ring. When she got to the first stair, she started looking around, one hand over eyes until she saw me. She beckoned and I walked over and helped her onto the stage – she did not say a word – she felt light and frail. Nobody least of all me knew she could sing, let alone compete with the best of Tizita singers. She sat down and looked up at the microphone hanging down and pulled it down so that it was within her range. She took a deep breath that almost sounded like a sigh into the silence that had followed her every move. At that point we came to life and started cheering her on. She raised her left eyebrow and put her right arm out and we quieted - we knew that hand-sign, she usually did that when one was in danger of being cut off at the bar. We fell back into silence.
She started singing her Tizita acapella - like it was something she did everyday - in the shower, humming it as she served drinks, singing it as she went about the business of living. For the Diva, the Corporal and the Taliban Man, their voices in their own unique way contained an explosive power that had to be held within the vulnerable Tizita – and their Tizita seemed to work to the extent they were able to contain their powerful range within the melody of the Tizita, a melody that did not require one to hit impossibly high notes. They were working with more than they needed- the danger then being showing off. Miriam’s voice was old, and when I listened more closely, for a moment I thought I had walked into my grandmother’s house that always smelt of wood burning but underneath that, a warm sweet musky smell – like someone had eaten sweet plums, and threw the seeds and the skin on the floor in a room that rarely saw the sun. Her voice, old and hoarse from old age, smoking, drinking and yelling at customers all night at the bar, sounded like the Tizita she was singing, vulnerable and when it started cracking, I knew her voice would not carry her and us through the song.
The Taliban Man walked into the stage so unobtrusively that it was only when he picked up the guitar that we noticed him. He gestured to Miriam to pick up the krar. She did not hesitate – they whispered something to each other and he sat down on the stool as she went back to the microphone. The Taliban Man started tapping his hands on his thighs, tapping his boots on the wooden, before he started playing the guitar.
Miriam looked at him – her smile now like that of a smitten lover. She leaned back and closed her eyes and started playing the krar, with its high and low muted strings sounding like light rain, increasing in tempo until she was playing somewhere inside the Taliban Man’s guitar. The Krar in terms of range could not compete with the steel guitar, but it could improvise, take some of the energy from the guitar, or give it largesse by letting it finish what it could not with its metallic trilling sound. The Taliban Man followed her lead and started bending his notes, but just to show us he knew what Miriam was doing, he would every now and then snap his strings so that they created a buzzing sound, like a razor bent back and let loose.
The Diva joined them on stage and started humming, a low constant hum that rose and fell with Miriam’s Krar, so that they both were working inside the Taliban Man’s guitar. The Corporal walked in with his masenko – the sound he lent them was no longer the anguished journeyman between god and the devil but rather of an elder, raspy and surefooted ageing man.
I looked over at The Diva. I was expecting to see competition, or even the look that says I am better than them. Instead her look reminded me of being in primary school and that occasional class when my English language teacher Mr. Mbugua would say something so profound that we would look at each other in awe and appreciation. Like this one time when Mr. Mbugua asked the most philosophical question – what if we are actually awake and living when we slept and dreaming when we thought we were awake, and for months afterwards that is all we spoke about. She had the look that said, I am learning something, and I appreciate how it’s being taught.
I rubbed the ear Miriam had pinched – there was still a dull pain – she was onto something.
***
Onstage, the musicians were enjoying themselves too much and they left us behind. And by the time we caught up, it was to find Miriam playing the accordion, her looking so slight and bent forward that I worried about her. But she was at it, pulling, ebbing and letting out a gentle church organ sounding song, the accordion lungs expanding and contracting gently, breathing in and out layered prayers. She was swaying side to side, dipping in and out, lifting one foot in and out, wading out of the river of this Tizita that as yet had no words.
She stomped her feet, ran her right hand against her left on the accordion to create confused upside down rainbows of sound – and stopped and the rest of her band followed suit- and then a caesura. The silence transfixed the drunkards, gamblers, slummers and the believers in place. The silence moved from being expectant to bordering on being painful. At the end of that silence where the pain was turning into relief, the Corporal with the masenko came in and bowed a long devilish trembling bass, low and threatening. But the Taliban Man was not going to have us threatened, and his guitar with its clean thin sound, note for note, came in.
Miriam stomped her feet again and silence reigned once again and from that silence, she started singing, low long moans gliding above and underneath the lazy accordion. The Taliban Man’s guitar getting more urgent while the Diva on the piano was furious and the Corporal on his devilish masenko held everything together.
Then the Corporal left his post and came in with the low buzzing sound of the masenko, mourning that was amplified by the slow wail of the accordion as Miriam pulled it apart. Her voice, with a contained rasp, came in once again.
The Taliban Man came in and did a violent lead solo. The Diva’s piano jumped into the fray, playing peaceful but sharp short determined notes that threatened to undermine the Taliban Man’s work. They both went on for a while as we clapped and cheered and clapped the beat.
They played on, helping each other up when one of them faltered with the beat and timing. A few minutes into the jam, Miriam looked at the Taliban Man and he slowed down his syncopated guitar playing and the others followed suit –silence save for the low hum buzz of the masenko and the sound of the accordion slowly running out of air. She winked at me. “This once,” she said in English. And she bent low and joined the masenko:
When I dream of happy days, oh Tizita,
Wake me, so I can find you once again
I fear so much that you too will leave me
and I will forget
this pain that carries my love.
And Tizita, if I forget those I loved,
how I can remember who I am?
One day, I will be dead and gone
my grave untended
date of birth and death
on my gravestone from centuries past
And only my Tizita will remain,
Only you will remain.
The musicians clapped for each other as we jostled each other and cheered for them. Some people were patting me on my back, thrusting beer in my hand, just for that little recognition from Miriam. The last time I had seen this was when there was a sugar shortage in my hometown – a truck showed up, men in blue overalls unloaded white sacks of sugar all the while with growing rings and rings of people surrounding the store. But it was not until the grinning shopkeeper weighed the first kilogram of sugar that we rushed his counter. Fear that there would not be enough for all us? But there was going to be, we had seen twenty or more sacks being unloaded and wheeled into the store. Sugar – we could also live without – an addiction then? Had the musicians awakened, triggered something as powerful as an addiction?
Mukoma Wa Ngugi is an Associate Professor of English at Cornell University and the author of The Rise of the African Novel: Politics of Language, Identity and Ownership, the novels Mrs. Shaw, Black Star Nairobi, Nairobi Heat, and two books of poetry, Logotherapy and Hurling Words at Consciousness. He is the co-founder of the Mabati-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature and co-director of the Global South Project - Cornell.