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Culture Currents Wanda’s Picks
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| Wanda Sabir | |
| Tuesday, 22 May 2007 | |
Congratulations to my daughter Bilaliyah Aliyah Sabir on her graduation from the College of Alameda cum laude, Dean’s List and Honor Society! She will be continuing at Cal State East Bay in psychology. It’s Carnaval time again – this Sunday! Visit http://www.carnaval.com/sf07/festival/index.html for all the information about this year’s lineup and parade Sunday morning, May 27. Babá Ken and Afro-Groove ConneXion Babá Ken and the Afro-Groove ConneXion is the newest project from Babá Ken Okulolo, the vibrant leader of West African Highlife Band and Kotoja. On Saturday, May 26, 9:30 p.m., they’ll be at Ashkenaz, 1317 San Pablo, Berkeley. Okulolo, who came to America as the bass player in King Sunny Ade’s African Beats, created the improvisational band from studio jams with other musicians. The “X” in the group’s name symbolizes the crossroads where the world’s cultures meet through music. Afro-Groove ConneXion also features Nigeria’s Soji Odukogbe, who was for five years the lead guitarist for the late Fela Anikulapo Kuti. The new band is a scaled-down, six-piece unit playing hard-hitting Afrofunk grooves with a jazz sensibility. The Nigerian Brothers open. Visit www.AfricanMusicSource.com or call (510) 525-5054 for information. Trinidad Carnival Ashkenaz Music and Dance Center presents a night of Carnival music, Trinidad-style, Friday, May 25. The evening features two great singers backed by Double D and the Platinum Band, with Tony D on drums. Brother Resistance is one of the Caribbean’s pioneers and leading voices of rapso. He has carried the rapso message around the world, from Italy to Korea, as well as the United States. Rapso began in the 1970s, joining rhythms of Trinidad’s calypso and steel bands with lyrics in a street poetry style, arising from the social movement of a people struggling for liberation and self-determination. Visit http://www.brotherresistance.com. The party begins at 9:30 p.m., the doors open a half hour earlier. Tickets are $15 in advance, $18 day of show or $10 at the door with student ID. All ages and abilities are always welcome. Call (510) 525-5054 or visit www.ashkenaz.com. Sila and the AfroFunk Experience Once again Sila and his AfroFunk Experience is at the Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell St., in San Francisco, this Friday, May 25, at 9 p.m. To get you in the mood, DJ Jeremiah will be at the controls. Opening for the band is Rupa and the April Fishes. Visit This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or call (415) 885-0750. Ghanaian Music and Dance Kusun Ensemble returns to Ashkenaz, 1317 San Pablo Ave., at Gilman, in Berkeley, on Wednesday, May 30. The Ghanaian dance workshop is at 7:30 p.m. with a show at 9 p.m. Tickets are $15 for the whole night, $8 for the workshop only or $12 for the show only. All ages are welcome. For more information, call (510) 525-5054 or visit www.kusunensemble.com. Reflections I’ve been trying to catch up on my mail and ran across a message from a friend about a BBC article on virginity testing among South Africa’s Zulu community. The practice, which goes back to the days when a virgin brought a better price than a non-virgin to prospective marriage brokers, puts young women at risk for rape in a place where one of the myths is that sex with a virgin cures HIV/AIDS. It’s like putting a circle on one’s chest, handing over a loaded gun and saying. “Shoot me.” I think a much more proactive practice would be to set up safer sex clubs, where abstinence is an option but condom use is also encouraged for those who are secularly active. If condom negotiation is hard in the Black community, especially among adults my age, one can imagine how hard it can be in a more traditional African society where women have fewer options. Starting with the younger adults and sexually active teens, one can develop new norms. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6677745.stm. Another story was about racism rearing its ugly head in Jena, Louisiana, where three nooses were found hanging from a tree reserved for white students at Jena High to gather for lunch, after an African American student was seen sitting there. The white students responsible were not suspended or expelled, and in the ensuing year five African American students have been charged with attempted murder in an attack on a white student. These young men could receive up to 50 years if convicted. The idea that they would receive justice is absurd given the fact that all the Africans live in wooden shacks and trailers in Ward 10. None of the white residents, in a town 12 percent black, live there. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/6685441.stm. Katrina Tour Hurricane Katrina was a wakeup call for Africans in America. For those who have slowly begun to wipe the sleep from their eyes, it’s time to realize that the questions that troubled Thomas Jefferson and other framers of the Constitution about African humanity are still unanswered. Five hundred years later, it’s pretty clear we have not overcome this. Maybe never will, so what? It’s too time-consuming when we have more pressing issues at hand, like Black on Black murder. One of my colleagues’ sons is in ICU now battling for his life. His girlfriend hit him in the forehead with a two-by-four. This same colleague lost a son to gun violence, another to the prison system. Only one is still free. We might as well stop wasting our efforts to convince Jeffersonian offspring we are human beings. The greater task is convincing each other. Sierra Leone is a place where millions have died or been maimed by rebels who chop off people’s hands, fingers, arms. At the end of June there is International Refugee Day and the Refugee All-Stars will be in town at the Great American Music Hall. In a film about the band, the youngest member, Black Nature says, “There’s something wrong with Black people. I don’t know what they are thinking when they kill Black youth. They are the future.” I had a great conversation with Suncere Ali Shakur and Walidah Imarisha who have reopened the Katrina discourse via the “Remains and Rebirth Tour: Finding Common Ground,” with a stop in the Bay Area at the Roxie Film Center, Sunday, May 27, at 12 noon. Walidah Imarisha’s film, “Finding Common Ground,” will be shown with a shorter doc, “Food, Water, Revolution,” directed by Danya Abt. The 10-minute film chronicles the “2006 Veterans Against the Iraq War March” from Mobile, Alabama, to New Orleans in support of Hurricane Katrina victims and survivors. You can read more about the tour at http://badsis.livejournal.com/. To watch a seven-minute excerpt of the film, visit www.myspace.com/channelzeromedia. On more of a consciousness-raising tour than a fundraiser for Common Ground Relief, the two organizers said they want to use the 24-minute documentary to highlight Common Ground’s response to human rights abuses in New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf, not to bitch and moan but to organize a sustained resistance to such attacks. Walidah stated in a phone interview from Seattle that her film was made to highlight and debunk certain lies – that Karina was a “natural disaster” and that “Black folks were helpless victims.” “It was a man-made premeditated attack,” she said. Walidah believed so much in this cause, she put the entire seven-city, 10-screening tour, which ends in Santa Cruz, on her credit card. What’s going on in Jena, New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Region means “we have not overcome,” if equal rights and opportunity for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is an option. Walidah and Suncere have been comrades for a long while. They met at a political prisoner conference. It was Suncere who invited Walidah, a Pacific Northwest college girl, to New Orleans, where he’d been volunteering at Common Ground from just after the levees broke until early 2007. She hadn’t planned to make a film; in fact, she says, she isn’t a filmmaker — this is in no way a Spike Lee “When the Levees Broke,” she inserts as a disclaimer – but a friend sent her down with a camera and she returned with 12 hours of film and a story to tell. That story, one of “cannibalistic capitalism, economic gentrification and gender oppression,” to name a few issues, is what this film is about. Suncere, a big man who dwarfs the small minded, is a community activist from Washington, D.C. He told me he was educated by his elders, often those who were poor like he was, the denizens of the street: junkies, homeless people, gangsters. Suncere said when President George W. Bush said in a speech on CNN three days after the levees broke, “The only language Africans understand is the language of violence,” New Orleans’ real estate was number three on the Dow Jones. “As bad as it is, we are all we’ve got,” Suncere said. “So we need to get together despite our differences, tear down the walls that keep us apart.” “I’ve learned we need flexibility in life,” he said. Inspired by the work of Malik Rahim, a former Black Panther Party member who “stood up with $50 in Algiers,” a neighborhood in New Orleans that didn’t flood, to start Common Ground Relief, Suncere recalled those early days when he was head of security and established two free breakfast programs, a Saturday legal clinic and six distribution centers at a time when to be young and Black and male meant you were a target. He said when he arrived in New Orleans, 12 men had been killed in Algiers. Eight were men Malik Rahim knew. The young swollen bodies were found lying in the streets with holes in their heads. When making this film, Suncere said he and Walidah looked for comments from African community leaders. After two weeks, “The best we could do was Kanye West,” yet they jumped all over Imus, “an old man talking mess.” “We looked at every Black progressive paper. Minister Louis Farrakhan did say something in September, but right afterwards? I thought this was the Black Armageddon, our Sept. 11. I thought people would be rising up! We are the fifth richest nation in the world, Black people. We need to be responsible for ourselves. Those sandal feet, Franz Fanon quoting (suckers), they weren’t there, but Malik Rahim was. A lot of elders can’t translate the theoretical into practice. Malik put crystallized rhetoric into action. (The brother) is spiritually motivated by ancestors, but he can’t do this work solely by himself.” This is the reason Suncere jumped on board. Malik and his Common Ground Relief gave Suncere’s life focus. He said, now in New Orleans there is serious harassment by police. Some of the tense situations he described between him and white female shopkeepers reminded me of the events that led up to Emmett Till’s torture and murder. He also said that many white volunteers had problems listening or following Black leadership. Suncere said at night he’s afraid to take a walk. A 12-minute film, “Kibera Kid,” directed by Nathan Collett, shot last year in Kenya’s large ghetto, shows Africa’s largest slum plagued by Black on Black violence. In Congo, which now has the youngest or one of the youngest presidents in Africa, millions of Africans die each year. Let’s not even talk about Dafur, Liberia, Cote-d’Ivoire, where the same is true. Why can’t Africans connect the dots between Richmond, California, and the favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and the French Quarters in New Orleans, Louisiana. I went to a reception for Faustin Linyekula of Studios Kabako, a Congolese choreographer who premiered a work at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, “Triptyque sans Titre,” two years ago, in September 2005. He is returning with a new work, the “Festival of Lies” project, which is a collaboration that looks to bring in artists from the region. It sounded really cool, a debate over wine and political rhetoric with a musical score, the set a night club, the fourth wall collapsed as audience and performers merge and are one. I bring this up not just to alert you to put this on your calendar for November, but to note the absence of Congolese artists from the cool set at Marcel’s Black New World Stage. OK, that was Tuesday. I have been trying to get to one of the “From Bamako to the San Francisco Bay” receptions – that night was the one for the Women’s Building, Wednesday night – when I opted for Circus Baobab. It was the reception at City Hall for my friends Bayete Smith-Ross and Lewis Watts. Sorry guys. At Circus Baobab, I didn’t see the Guinea community out, but it was the first show; maybe they’ll be there Thursday, Friday, Saturday or Sunday afternoon or evenings. I hear the annual Guinea Festival of Music and Dance began this week at the Malonga Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice St., Oakland.  In its U.S. debut, straight outta Guinea, Circus Baobab presents “The Jumping Drums” May 23-26. An African circus? Yes, straight outta Guinea. The troupe flew into the San Francisco Bay early this week, with a free performance Monday at the San Francisco International Arts Festival’s Jewels in the Square, Union Square in San Francisco. I caught the group at its first set at Project Artaud. The theatre space was filled with kids from local public schools and school programs like Renaissance: Parents of Success. My friend Na’im Shabazz and founder Tempi Priestly had their teen members present. Skeptical of the program, an African circus? Soon the cell phones were coming out as kids snapped instant photos of the contortionists, acrobats and pretty lady drummers. It was cool how everyone performed to the rhythms of the drums, hence the name: Jumping Drums. Everyone sings, everyone dances and everyone drums, and since acrobatic movement is not foreign to Guinea dance, it isn’t a stretch to see aerial choreography performed from a suspended bar. I think the hall was silent as a woman was balanced on nothing more than her partner’s foot. Then when she slipped a noose around her neck and he spun her — we couldn’t close out mouths as words like trust were chosen to describe an act that became more and more daring. As soon as their feet touched the floor, they began dancing. Most of us wanted to see if the aerialist’s neck still worked. It did. The distasteful sounds turned to awe as the contortionist poetically twisted his body into a variety of shapes only to escape into another. Limber was the operative word Thursday afternoon as brothers leaped across the sky landing safely in each other’s arms. The land of Ahmed Sekou Toure is one of poverty and homelessness among teens who leave the village for the capital, Conakry – a better life, they believe until they arrive. Trapped, many kids resort to crime to survive, a situation depicted in the storyline for this tour. The village elder entreats his children to return, and they do but not before they experience the seamier sides of life. One is robbed, the girls are prostitutes, and even though there are law officials around, they don’t seem to do much good. The circus idea came from a film directed by Laurent Chevallier with an imaginary circus. Members of the community supported by Guinea’s Director of Culture Telivel Diallo and Pierrot Bidon, founder of Archaos, a leading light in the contemporary circus movement in France, came together to start a real circus as a program to get kids off the street, one of the founding company members told me that afternoon. I went to the website and learned that the company was formed in 1998, “the first true ‘aerial contemporary circus’ group to come out of Africa. In the early days, Circus Baobab benefited from the expertise of some of France’s foremost professionals in juggling, trampoline and aerial acrobatics.” When the company had developed sufficiently, they toured the major regions of the country – many areas the children had never seen or heard of. Their tour was a way for them to become better acquainted with their country and history. Since the circus began, many of its graduates have been hired by other companies throughout the world, like Cirque du Soleil. The company went on the road in March 2000 with a cast whose ages range from 12-70. Visit http://www.circusbaobab.org/anglais/index.html. It was hard to hear the narrator who serenaded the audience on guitar, then kora, so the storyline for all intents and purposes was lost on an audience who were having fun watching the resident gangster, Mr. Cool, snatch a cap off someone’s head and glasses from another audience member’s pocket. We didn’t know why the man with the full belly and long coat was running around, but that didn’t stop the laughter. “My, what fine muscles you have, grandma,” Little Red might have said to any one of several handsome hoodlums as he flipped and somersaulted across the stage, chased by an equally talented victim and the judge. This segment opened with the women on the aerial swings, while the contortionist did tricks on a rope which was extended from the ceiling. I couldn’t decide which one to watch. There was no intermission, but the interaction with the audience and the musical segues made the show move along quickly despite the technical difficulties we saw on stage and others I heard about later. Future shows will probably go without a hitch, but I was happy to be at the first show, when SFIAF Artistic Director Rhodessa Jones reluctantly volunteered to go on stage. She and the rest of us wondered for what, and we soon found out as an acrobat leaped over her head. We were like wow! Tickets, I hear, are selling fast, so don’t think about it. Go! It’s like being in Africa now. The rap section is straight from MTV or maybe BET – crotch grabbing, skimpy clad girls and all. I don’t recall the lyrics, so they must have been OK or in French. There were no programs, which was too bad; however, music CDs were available in the lobby afterwards. Visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDZxikhelqo&mode=related&search, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJyZoD8sz54&mode=related&search and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DSZ6eGXyBA. Other highlights of the SFIAF Last week’s panel at the San Francisco Main Library with Linda Tillery and Professor Brandi Wilkins-Catanese, moderated by Canstanza Svidler, Ph.D., on the topic “Legacies of Slavery” was excellent. Tillery, founder of the Cultural Heritage Choir, spoke about her decision to be a keeper of the culture by focusing on the African American folk arts tradition: spirituals and blues. Prof. Wilkins-Catanese used the work of Suzan Lori Parks’ Venus, based on the life of Sarah Baartman, a South African woman enslaved in Europe, to trace the Transatlantic terrain between who we were and what we’ve become. Parks said she writes or uses the stage to reconstruct our lives, to tell African people’s stories, especially those no one has. Tillery said she just loves black people, everything about them: their music, dance, skin, hair texture. This Saturday the panels are, from 12-1:30, “Mapping Bay Area Hip Hop” with Paul Flores, Julio Cardenas, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Rhodessa Jones, moderated by Hodari B. Davis; and, from 3-4:30, “Perspectives on Bay Area Dance” with Robert Moses, Joanna Haigood, Deborah Vaughn, moderated by Prof. Albirda Rose. If Brian Freeman weren’t performing at AfroSolo at 2, this is where I’d be. This weekend, Thursday-Sunday, May 24-27, in Dance en Creations, Dimensions Dance Theatre is sharing the stage program with Nelisiwa Xaba from South Africa. Xaba performs “That’s What They Think,” which looks also at the Sara Baartman, called the derogatory term, “Hottentot Venus,” because of her large genitalia. The other solo work, “Plasticization,” looks at sexuality and the barriers to intimacy as people become less stable. Dimensions perform an excerpt of a new work, “Cross Currents,” with Anthony Brown and the Asian American Jazz Ensemble. Also performing this weekend is Robert Moses’ Kin (USA), Campagnie Li-Sangha (Congo) and Mhaylse Productions (South Africa). The AfroSolo International Arts Festival kicks off Thursday evening with an international sampler followed Friday-Sunday by the full length pieces at a variety of times at the African American Art and Culture Complex, 762 Fulton St. in San Francisco, 8 pm, $15. For more information, visit www.afrosolo.org or call (415) 771-2376. Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir with Black Voices – from England – and the Bay Area Community Choir in “A Long Journey Home: Concertizing the Golden Triangle,” perform three times this weekend: The Friday, May 25, performance is free at Providence Baptist Church, 1601 McKinnon Ave., at Mendell, 8 p.m. Saturday, May 26, they’re at Brava Theater, 2789 24th St., at York, and Sunday, May 27, at Grace Cathedral, 1100 California St., at Taylor, at 8 p.m. For information, call (415) 439-2456 or visit www.sfiaf.org. Bay View Arts Editor Wanda Sabir can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Visit her website, www.wandaspicks.com, for an expanded version of Wanda’s Picks and for exciting “web exclusives.” |
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