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

2021 The Bamako Encounters – African Biennale of Photography / Les Rencontres de Bamako, Biennale Africaine de la Photographie

I was so excited to see the recent announcement of the curatorial team for the 2021 Les Rencontres de Bamako, Biennale Africaine de la Photographie . I experienced this festival for the first time while living in Bamako between 2013 and the end of 2016, it was curated and conceived by the late great, Bisi Silva.
It is hard to put into words how amazing this festival was and the people it brought to Bamako. It was such an amazing feeling to be moving around with all these creative Africans and to be playing a bit of a tour guide since I had been in town for almost a year by the time the biennial came back around.

Although the Biennale focus was photography there were so many other art-related events around the city and even at the Musee National; I think it is was here where I met Abdoulaye Konate for the first time. I would later write a poem about 2 of his works, click here to check out the poem. It was also at this time that I become closer with a collective of young Malian artists lead by painter, Amadou Sanogo, calling themselves Atielier Badialan 1. It was an exciting time to be there.

Today all that excitement came rushing back when I saw the announcement of the curatorial team led by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung ,an amazing curator and arts administrator based in Berlin (shout out also to Anna Jager, for our awesome conversations about poetry when we met in Bamako).

My excitement went up another level after perusing the Biennale’s website and finding an essay explaining the “full concept” of the show. The overarching theme of the show is written in the Bambara “Maa ka Maaya ka ca a yere kono” which translates to “The Persons of The person are Multiple in the Person.” To see the show titled in Bambara was amazing on its own, but my eyes and heart exploded to see that the curators had chosen to open the essay with excerpts from the work of Sonia Sanchez.

This is exactly the kind of bi-directional exchange that I am hoping to support, foster and document over at Black Ekphrastic This is particularly exciting because Sanchez’s work is in a sense being used as prompt and guiding principle for the artists to think about the work they will submit.

To me this continues to drive the point that the work of African (Continental and Diasporic) creative writers are vital and can been seen ad utilized as critical texts in how we understand African art making and cultural work..

Looks like I am going to have to dust off my passport and head back over there for this one…

Shifting

I originally started this website because I had grand visions of documenting my life in Mali when Mel and moved there almost 8 years ago now. Time has flown. In a nutshell, I think I think I was too busy living to spend time documenting my life in this way. Instagram might have been a better choice…Oh well.

I toyed with the idea of merging this site with my other site fredjoiner.com and just tagging these posts at #boomforrealbamako, that may still happen at some point, but for now, I think I am going to use this space to talk about arts and creative stuff in Africa more broadly, no that I have had some time away to really think about my experiences there. There will always be an arts focus somewhere in the mix, but I might insert some other stuff in there too.

Stayed tuned…

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.

 

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.

“Every line means something”

“Every line means something” – Jean-Michel Basquiat

There must be something in the Harmattan , over the past few months as I have been thinking about written language, mark  marking , “vernacular architecture” and various aspects of how peoples make and communicate meaning from the material they have their environment.  Not only have I been thinking about these things, but something in the Harmattan wind and dust that blows over West Africa this time of year, kept blowing things my way.

Around that same time, I had been reintroduced to Ron Eglash’s work on fractals, which involved some of the complex mathematical principles at work in numerous aspects of West African life and culture. Seeing Eglash’s articulate so many things that  we have become so used to seeing, but never quite saw the complexity in it really made me think hard about other things that we take for granted yet are highly complex and involve complex thinking and being. See Eglash’s work here  , here  , here  and here 

Another string of thoughts that blew on the Harmattan’s winds came by way of a blog named Renegade Futurism run by Dr. Nettrice Gaskins, a post from a website called Another Africa ( a piece on African Writing Systems, highlighting the work of Zimbabwean typographer Saki Mafundikwa, peep his work here , here , here and here) and an online conversation I was having with another poet about the Cursive Hebrew and Kongo Cosmograms (see here and here ) in the First African Baptist Church of Savannah, Ga (where my grandma was from).

This all came to head for me when my wife and I were in Segou, Mali, for Festival Sur Le Niger, a music and art festival along the banks of the Niger River in Segou, Mali, 3 hours north of Bamako.

 

Segou , was the capital of the Bambara Empire. My introduction to Segou was from Marsye Conde’s  novel of historical fiction Segu, which I first got hip to working at the late Karibu Books. Although I never got through the whole book (I just started reading it again when I moved to Bamako), from the little bit that I did read I have been able to envision what that world might have looked like.

In addition to the obviously awesome people and music we experienced while in Segou, we had the opportunity to meet the ladies of the Sinignessigi Atelier & Boutique. These ladies specialize making eco-friendly Bògòlanfini (mud cloth) and other handmade textile items. While browsing their workshop and boutique I saw these signs that explained what the lines meant, they were translated in French, English and Bamanakan (Bambara); “every line meant something.” Although these lines made beautiful designs, it was nice clear that all the lines and patterns on these textiles had specific meanings and were a language that communicated something to the viewer and owner of the cloth. In a way I have always known that these designs had deeper and more intentional meanings, but I cannot quite explain the feeling that came over me to see it spelled out, made plain.

It was similar to the feeling I experience way back when I found out the significance of quilts as communication objects in the in the African American resistance to enslavement; every stitch meant something.

I wish I had taken pictures of the text and some of the cloths inside the boutique, but I was trying not to be so intrusive, as well as soak in the somewhat sacred moment when your receive a breakthrough, a new revelation, or when the pieces of things you have been thinking about for a long time come together in such a serendipitous manner. All in due time.

I have only been in Mali since early October 2013 and so far the experience has already been an enlightening and humbling experience…I am looking forward to the journey forward, onward and upward.

PowerShot 071
photo by my wife, Melanie Spence Joiner

Some other references:
Nettrice R. Gaskins: check out her whole blog but here are some recent highlights
 Africa in The Matrix: STEAM, African Futurism & Myth
Techno-Vernacular Creativity: Shotgun Homes & Porches
High-Tech Textiles & the Syncopated Rhythms of the African Diaspora