// song as direct connection to ancestors >>
I talk about music or a song, rather, as something that arises or rises above the surface. The music is always present and sometimes it enters the realm of the heard, but it is not that when there is silence there is “no music”, or, when there are words that are not readily identified and qualified as “music” in the dying over-culture, that means that there is no song. There is always song. Song is entered and re-entered like river water.
Like identity in many ways (the where are you from?, question), Genres have done me great damage artistically, but more importantly, spiritually. Genres have stifled and confused me. Genres have contorted and broken me into pieces because I believed the lie of their primacy.
Like the Berlin “conference,” genres used to confuse me out of understanding my connection to South Africa, the fact that the Bantu people are all over Africa, not just in one part, as Gogo has shared. Not just the western part or the southern part. All African people are nomadic. Nomadicism, the fluidity of the movement of my people, leaves me free—restoring my ability and my right (right as in the correctness and as in justice) to do that in my own life: to enter and re-enter a never-ending current of song. And to answer to call to sing.
I am called to Sangoma and Sangoma to me.
Pan-Africanism is a fact because Ubuntu is a fact.
This is the embedded, embodied knowledge beyond national and international borders. Beyond the borders of the body. Songs live on sound and water waves and carry through Time. Songs carry us back, through, up, and onto our knees for prayer.
Songs have saved my life.
