Tara Books in Thiruvanmiyur is packed with eager adults and children keenly listening to Tamil singer, performer, storyteller and educator A. Amal’s take on Babasaheb Ambedkar. It’s a talk about equality, of how one man tried to create a level playing field for everyone.
Sitting in between two towering racks of hand-stitched books, someone intently follows the parts in English. After all, equality is a word he’s grown up without, and later with, in Memphis, Tennessee. And then, plucking on the wood-and-metal Kalimba — a thumb piano said to date back 1,300 years in its current avatar — African-American performance poet and writer Arthur Flowers immerses himself in its gentle notes and the stories of the generations that inspired him, and pours forth through him to touch hearts the world over.
Arthur’s collaboration with patua artist Manu Chitrakar resulted in the evocative I See the Promised Land: A Life of Martin Luther King Jr. It’s a story he’s wanted to tell for long. The griot fondly remembers how King Jr roused in them the need for equality and freedom. He listened to his now-famous “…Because I’ve been to the mountaintop…” address on April 3, 1968. The next evening, news of the leader’s demise filtered through Arthur’s car radio. But, the performance poet continues to keep King Jr and his movement alive with his works.
Excerpts from an interview with the author:
It’s been some years since your collaboration with Manu Chitrakar. How do you look back at it?
It’s still one of my most prized texts, not only because it’s beautiful, but also because it’s a cross-cultural exercise with an artist I have come to admire, and a publishing house that has treated me and my work with respect. It is also a subject close to my heart, as the Civil Rights Movement was a defining moment in my young life; I’m a lifelong activist. We understood the connection between Manu’s struggles as a marginalised subset and the African-American struggle. Also, Manu has all these images of me as a storyteller in it (laughs).
The African oral storytelling tradition has kept alive a hoary past and a pride in collective history. How does the current generation identify with it, at a time when everything is out there on the Web?
African-Americans still respect the oral tradition in all its forms, and the artistes I know are keen on translating it to digital and other platforms, as we feel that’s part of being a relevant artiste in the 21st Century. In such a performance, there is a connection with the audience, a mutual feeding, and no performance is ever the same. I think of it as gathering the tribe around the sacred fire, illuminating them, empowering them, showing them the way. The musical accompaniment is part of establishing a connection with the audience.
Do you contemporarise your techniques to suit the audience?
As I consider myself heir to two literary traditions — the African oral and the Western written — I try to do a fusion that contributes to the evolution of both. I come from the griotic (a western African line of oral historians) tradition in African-American literature.
Could you share a little about your other works?
De Mojo Blues, my first novel, was my attempt to process the experience of being a soldier in Vietnam. It was not only the experience of war, but also being a colonial soldier in what was essentially a colonial war. I had always thought of history as happening to other people, other times, but with Vietnam, I realised that we shape the future with our everyday actions. My second novel, Another Good Loving Blues, is a love story between a bluesman and a conjure woman. I had broken my little heart playing a hard man and wanted to get a little more understanding of love, a contrast to war. I was studying with Babajohn Killens, the great griot master of Brooklyn, and he once told me: ‘Art, you a brilliant writer but with a little compassion you could be profound.’ That evolution played a large part in the next book, Mojo Rising: Confessions of a 21st Century Conjureman, part of an effort to illuminate and modernise the African spiritual systems.
How relevant do the teachings and struggle of King Jr. continue to be? Do you see them echoing across the world, wherever liberty and equality are at stake?
I do see Martin Luther King’s approach to struggle as one pertinent to all generations, because he understood, as did Mahatma Gandhi, that struggle has to be a spiritual matter; it has to illuminate and not degrade itself as struggle can sometimes do, when folk believe that the end justifies the means. In many ways, I consider this book a testimony. I was there, and wish to share with all who read this work the lessons, the joys and the challenges of struggle on a higher plane.
How was life before and after the Civil Rights Movement?
We always faced discrimination. Some of us who were ‘special’ were given access. But, those left behind had to figure their way up; many are still figuring their way up. But, you never forgot who you are. We are still committed to the rest; the ‘each one, reach one; each one, teach one’ principle applies. In a way, we are all bound by suffering, probably not as much as when we were slaves, but… And, we’ve moved from a time when we had to be Black to now, when we choose to be Black. And, that’s one of the reasons why we love Obama. He chose to identify as Black.
Does the present generation of African-Americans understand and appreciate the sacrifices of the past?
They never do, but obviously they have their own models, movements... They don’t have the tensions we faced. So, my answer is yes and no.
