Felicitations Diébédo Francis Kéré! Kéré has won the 2022 Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Although Burkinabe architect Diébédo Francis Kéré is not Malian, his work holds a very special presence in Bamako, the capital of Mali. Kéré’s firm was engaged to breathe new life into the Parc National du Mali back in 2010 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Mali’s independence.

The centerpiece of the park’s refreshed design is the restaurant that sits embedded into one of the rocky hills of the grounds of the park. One of Kéré’s trademarks is using elements and materials that are a part of the context they are in. You can see this a work in every project his firm works on, not just in Bamako.

The Parc National du Mali holds a special place in my own life because I spent A LOT of time there with my oldest daughter when she was a baby. Although we did not go into the iconic restaurant a lot, we did spend go the to Tea House a lot to chill, drink tea and eat some of the best croissants I had ever had until my first stay in Paris (a story for another day).

After sitting with his work for a while it is very easy to see the 5 principles Kere says make “great” architecture:
1. Involve the community
2. Innovate with local knowledge and materials
3. Use minimal resources
4. Design with regional sensibilities and traditions
5. Build architecture that improves equality

You can read the full article here.

I hope to do a Kere tour to see all the projects he has built, I think it would be dope to do an architecture, culture, and cuisine tour of his works…

Here are a few links to more of Kere’s work: HERE ,HERE, HERE, & HERE

A. Chab Touré on Malick Sidibe, Malian Photography, Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, & on & on

I post these links because I think it is important to hear what Malians (and Continental Africans, on and of the Continent) are saying about their own work and their own artists. I think it is particularly important to hear from the those who are still on the ground and trying to get more visibility and build craft and critical capacity of the artists of their country(ies).

Bamako Encounters 2015: Tradition and change in Malian photography

Mali’s Era of Independence, in Photos originally published on Creative Time Reports

Midnight in Bamako: In search of the late Malick Sidibé and the rhythmic roots of his legendary photographs.

a few video interviews with A.Chab Touré

L’esthétique en Art – Rencontre avec Chab Touré from les inachevés on Vimeo.

Chab Touré nous parle d’esthétique, de la naissance de l’Art (4’40”), de la relation Art – Religion – Pouvoir (7’28”), de la naissance de l’Art Moderne (9’14”), de l’oeuvre et de sa valeur symbolique (12’00”) et de l’Art Contemporain (14’20”).

Art et concept – Rencontre avec Chab Touré from les inachevés on Vimeo.

Chab Touré nous parle de:
– L’Art contre la culture, contre le société
– La conceptualisation, une prise de distance avec la réalité.

Long time

Yeah…I know it has been a looonnng time since I have been here, but life has kept me quite busy lately. Trying to keep up with 2 little ones 2 years old or younger is not an easy task, but I am loving every minute of it.

I just wanted to jump on here and share a little bit of news. A poem that I wrote here in Mali, entitled Currency, has been published on PRIVATE.

It seems like a great publication, I have been following them for some time now and I hope to collaborate with them on some projects in the near future.

Check it out when you get a chance—>PRIVATE.

 

Another sad day for Mali

Image courtesy of Janet Goldner’s Facebook Page

In the first few months of my time in Mali, I was blessed to meet ad fellowship with some people that have made my trip here all the more pleasurable Kandioura Coulibaly, was one of those people. Coulibaly passed away last night. Coulibaly was one of the founding members of Groupe Bogolan Kasobané, which is an artist collective who focus is to preserve the textile and craft traditions of Mali.

While visiting his home he showed me some of the amazing jewelry, textile pieces and some of the amazing contemporary bogolan work he (and his collective) are doing. Coulibaly also showed me some really amazing Malian antique sculptures, beads and other items that his collective have been stewards of for many years. Some of the marking and inscriptions on these items only Coulibaly, his collective and other initiates know the meaning of; they are vital to the preservation and promotion of Mali art and culture.

I left his home that day inspired not only by what I saw, but also because of what I learned and conversation we had. Although Bamako is a large city that sometimes it feels very much like a small village, I would randomly run him at different art events and the like. The last time I saw him was a few weeks ago at the RENCONTRES DE BAMAKO and everything seemed fine, but we did not get a chance to talk at length, beyond greeting each other. Now I wish I had made the time to speak to him a little longer.

As Mali attempts to weather the winds of some tough times ahead, the loss of an artist of this caliber is really a horrific blow, one that unfortunately the politicians will not feel. The worst part of this lack of recognition of Mali’s cultural treasures and social fabric are some of the most powerful tools that  Mali has to combat the current realities here on the ground.

Click here for Janet Goldner’s essay from Poetics of Cloth, which talks a little bit about Groupe Bogolan Kasobané.

I will be adding more links as I dig them..so stay tuned…

Below as Above (cross-posted from fredjoiner.com)

A few days ago I found out my poem was chosen as the winner for The Divine Comedy Poetry contest at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.

The contest is one the events connected to the new exhibition,  The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists.  

Abdoulaye Konaté b. 1953, Mali Dance of Kayes from La Danse series 2008 Textile, each: approx. 246.4 x 170.2 cm (97 x 67 in.). Collection of Saro León

Abdoulaye Konaté
b. 1953, Mali
Dance of Kayes from La Danse series
2008
Textile, each: approx. 246.4 x 170.2 cm
(97 x 67 in.).
Collection of Saro León

My poem was in response to Malian textile artist, Abdoulaye Konate’s 2008  Dance of Kayes from La Danse series, as seen above. Read the poem here.

I choose Konate’s work not only because he is Malian, but because his exhibition at the Institut Francais of Mali , was the one of the only art of a Malian artist I had seen other than Malick Sidibe, Seydou Keita, Alioune Bâ and a few others – all photographers.  Painter, Amadou Sanogo, was the other Malian artist’s work that I had seen, aside of the famous Malian photographers.

I also chose Konate’s piece because of the cool colors he chose to represent Kayes are not what I expected given that the Kayes region is one of the hottest places on the planet, so the contrast was quite striking.

I was asked to read the poem at the Museum’s Divine Poetour this summer on July 2. Split This Rock’s DC Youth Slam Team and NMAfA’s Teen Ambassadors, will be reading their works that engage the The Divine Comedy exhibition.  So come out and support the DC Youth Slam Team and NMAfA’s Teen Ambassadors. Peep the flyer below…

The Divine Poetour, July 2nd @NMAfA

The Divine Poetour, July 2nd @NMAfA

I am excited to be a part of The Divine Poetour, it looks like it will be similar to a project that I did afew years back as a collaboration between The American Poetry Museum and The Phillips Collection.

 

Back in Bamako

A piece from an exhibition called KAWRAL: Malian Visual Artists contribute to Mali’s Revival curated by Janet Goldner

It is good to be back in Bamako…So much has changed here and I come back to Bamako 4 months later a changed person, a father…a family man. Everything looks different now, even the blank page, screen, canvas or looking through the viewfinder of a camera. As it should be…

me & Naomi

me & Naomi reading My Baby by Jeanetter Winter

My Baby by Jeanette Winter

Coming back to Bamako is always a little tough, particularly while trying to be a grad school student and now a father…I will spare you the details. That said, I would not change a thing. In a lot of ways, I feel like I am staring all over again, but this time around I feel like I have  found a community here too (more on that later) and that helps tremendously. No community will ever replace my DC folks, but I am starting to build a group here of cool folks.

Anyway, it has been a while, but i just wanted to let you all know I am still here I just had to take some time as the sands started to shift…

Stay tuned…more soon come

A Late Ellingtonian in Bamako: An Ellington Birthday Meditation…

bamakotoboola

This map shows where Boola, Guinea is in relationship to Bamako, Mali

I came to Ellington late in life. Despite the fact that my Pops worked with him and Mercer. It was like that with most jazz music, I was late.

When I did catch on I had a whole library of music at my disposal to really get down with, but I can say without a doubt the 2 albums that really caught my attention and held it for quite some some time. One was, an IMPULSE! release,  Duke Ellington & John Coltrane  and the other was Money Jungle with Mingus and Max (United Artists 1963, Blue Note 1987 and 2002). If you are not familiar with these recordings…do yourself a favor…

Pops told me about Duke and told me how he had traveled the world as musician with the US Government. I later came to find out it was with the US Department of the State’s Jazz Ambassadors. In this program Ellington and his band traveled throughout Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

While listening to a segment of Christopher Lydon’s Radio Open Source, Lydon’s guest Harvey Cohen author of  Duke Ellington’s America. In the segment Cohen talks at length about Ellington’s  Black, Brown and Beige, which was first envisioned by Ellington as an opera. The opera’s main character was a timeless African American man named Boola and the music of Ellington’s band was written as a companion to Boola’s 39-page narrative in verse, where he talks about his life from the belly of a ship to the present (Ellington’s day). This really piqued my interest so I do some Google searches. What I found further piqued my interest and set off more questions. Turns out that Boola is the name of a region in Guinea. This made think that perhaps Ellington in his travels met someone from Boola, or maybe someone told him about the region, whatever the case; I don’ think it was coincidence that he named this character Boola, nor that Boola’s experiences became the basis for Black, Brown and Beige and many of those compositions are meant as “tone parallels” to the Boola’s monologues.

A few days ago as I was preparing this post, I found that in addition to Black, Brown and Beige, Ellington made other albums that expressed his interests and gaze toward Africa, The Togo Brava Suite is one such recording. Ellington may not have articulated it as such, but it appears that he was creating work that was pan-African. I wonder how far Ellington would have taken his pan-African efforts and how would that have affected our understanding of African music as classical music (not Classical music)?  Was Boola’s verse narrative the first perform-a-form?

Over the 3 years that I will be here in Africa, if I get a chance to visit Boola I will report back on what I find…

 

The Power of Language

The English language has power, plain and simple. I have been observing this more and more in my efforts to re-learn French and to learn Bamanakan ( and hopefully Fulbe and Wolof too).

Almost everyday I meet people who speak or want to learn English, sometimes at the expense of losing their mothertongues. As someone whose family has close ties to the Gullah language, I am particularly sensitive to people losing or giving up their mothertongues; because once we give them up they tend to disappear forever.

While I am living and traveling in West Africa, I am determined to learning as much about the languages here as I possibly can, not in an effort to “save” or “preserve” these languages, but in an effort to gain more understanding about where the richness of the art and culture come from.

Over the past 7 months that I have lived here in Bamako I have been blessed with the opportunity to conduct a few writing workshops at both The American School of Bamako and  Lycee Francais Libertie. Both workshops were great fun and I feel like I really connected with the students with the  material I covered.

The last of these workshops I had the privilege of working with some students who had just returned from a trip to New York City, visiting Harlem and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Their teacher had been teaching them about the Civil Rights Movement and she asked me as a writer and a African American to come to her class and to help them with their presentations and to share some poems with them.

Although the bulk of my library is back in DC, I do have a little stash that I brought with me. In that stash was Joseph Ross’ Gospel of Dust and Dr. Jeffrey Lamar Coleman. It was a pleasure to share the work of people that were not only friends of mine, but have produced and edited collected work that engages the world of ideas that illuminates a very important period of American History.

This is the second time (the first was in Northern Ireland) while traveling internationally I have been told and witnessed how important the Civil Rights Movement was to people outside of the United States.

Gospel of Dust by Joseph Ross

 

 

On Civilization

On Civilization

Living abroad and trying to learn all that there is to learn about your new environment is already quite a challenge, but trying to relay that experience to someone who has never been to the part of the world you are living in, or to someone who is misinformed is another experience entirely.

 

About a week or so ago (around the time of the Michael Dunn verdict), I was on a phone call with the customer service department of the company that provides my support for the alarm system in a property I own back in DC, the conversation went something like this:

Me: I apologize if my voice is breaking up, I am calling you on Skype from West Africa.

Customer Service Rep: Wow, that’s quite a ways from DC! What area of the countr… I mean continent…I always for Africa is a continent. What country  do you live in?

Me: I live Mali, in a city called Bamako.

Customer Service Rep: I know Nigeria, South Africa…Now where you are is it civilized?

Civilized?

Civilized (sĭv’ ǝ – līzd’) adj. 1.

This question gave me pause, because I had to really think hard about what he was asking…I had think about what his understanding and assumptions about what “civilization”is.

I paused for what seemed like an eternity, but to be totally honest I did not feel rage that I thought I would feel at such a badly worded and ignorant question…I answered with a very short, but polite “Yes, quite civilized.”

The call did not last much longer, the rep was able to pull up the necessary screen to update my account and the call was over.

Later I could not help but re-visit that question of whether or not where I was was indeed “civilized”, this obviously made me think about the idea of civilization in general and what it means to be a civilization. How does a civilization care for all of its citizens? How do those citizens experience justice? Does the body of the civilization do what the mouth says? And what of a civilization’s imagination is the civilization who they think they are?

Civilized…I thought…if I had not been so stunned or once I recovered from being stunned and if I had the courage…I would have said something like, “Oh Civilized..you mean like having enough wealth to care for the homeless and uninsured but just choosing not to do it , like stop and frisk and end up dead, civilized like being found guilty attempting murder, but not committing murder, civilized like pretending your skin color means you are pure?

To be quite honest since being here in Mali, I have witnessed some of the best examples of civilization that I have experienced anywhere I have been so far.

On the night I arrived in Bamako, my driver drops me off at my apartment building and the security guards would not let me carry any of my bags, they insisted that I was too tired to carry anything. Before I could really get through threshold of the door, the other security guards called out to Naa Yaa dumunike (come to eat with us!)…these people have never seen me before and here they are offering me to come and literally from the same bowl they are all eating from – this is not to mention the fact that the little bit off food they had was barely enough for them.

Other examples are the culture of salutations and greetings. A typical greeting here consists taking the time to ask someone not only how they are doing, but their parents, their children, their work or crops, etc. Greetings for some can take up a long time depending on how long you have known the person, how long you it has been you had seen the person last or how many blessings you give them. These greetings are expected even in normal business transactions like going to buy something at the store.

Here is a typical morning conversation greeting

Ee nee sogoma. Good morning.

Mbah. Ee nee sogoma. Male response. Good morning.

Hair-ray serra wah? Did you have a peaceful night?

Hair-ray. Peaceful.

Somogo bedi? How is your home?

Tor-ro-teh. No problems.

I musso ka ken-nay? Is your wife well?

Tor-ro-teh. No problem.s

Denmisino ka ken-nay? Are the children well?

Tor-ro-teh. No problems.

Nsay. Female response.

Mbah. Male response.

To hear to Bamanakan speakers greet one another sounds like an old song that everyone knows and sing together whenever they meet… 

I hope that those who think we in “the West” are the most “civilized” get a chance, at least once in their lives, to experience the type of civilization, authenticity and care from a unknown place, from a person or apeople that don’t like like them or don’t live exactly like them. I hope that they get to sing a song with with strangers that starts with hello.