Pygmy Gytar
Dear Jonelle,
I am afraid the trip I have in mind with you is to some rat-bag hotel in Venice where you can hear the water lapping and where they bring the almond fizzy soda with sandwiches on a tray, and I viddy you explaining what being pretty has meant to your life, and of course at some point the sun comes out and you are on a balcony and you start singing without accompaniment and I manage to make it look ravishing, beautiful, until you break it off and wrap your sweater around your shoulders and say, "It's too cold for this kind of thing" as you walk back inside and then the camera picks up a trio of musicians, idle, in the shadows across the canal, on a smoke break, and I say into the microphone softly, "Funny how musicians can never finish what they start."
And maybe in an airport -- Salzburg, Palermo -- I tell you a story about a musician nobody knows, a musician other musicians could never know. A story about a 32-year-old who has made his own guitar with some kind of wire strings, and plays with his buddy on a hollowed-out bamboo for bass while another buddy shakes his crumpled can filled with broken bits of nails and a few pebbles as the entire percussion, and how this kid with his homemade guitar is a displaced pygmy from a forest named Bwindi which he was kicked out of at five years old to make way for the tourists and their gorillas, and how he sneaks the ten kilometers at night fearful of being shot by a sentry to hear snatches of songs on a tinny radio, barely audible in the barracks of the army protecting the gorilly, and how the next day he arranges the whole village including all the old ladies to do new harmonies and new vocal arrangements on any one of the 500 songs he's written in his life, each of them as complicated as anything on that album by Paul Simon which the Africans still bemoan, that snapshot called Graceland which might as well have been made by all white boys for the interest Mr. Simon showed in the life behind or beyond the fences and security gates which made it safe for him to bring his family when he visited in search of profit. 500 songs! No support, no influences, and a daily diet of yams and rice which is slowly killing him, and when I viddyed one particular astonishing orchestration I made the mistake of saying that one day I would be back from America with a guitar for this genius, who is a reprimand to the practiced derivations foisted on the world by my weary music friends, despairing that they won't make it, instead of making it, the music, the rhythms and the melodies they cannot possibly imagine, which is the only music worth making, a tune you cannot imagine, rather than a sound you can hear anywhere, anytime, as long as you have electricity and a few minutes of time.
I say my promise to come back with a guitar was a mistake, because right there on the video is the whole village applauding, giving me the ovation after their performance, and that village waits on that hillside still, and every three months when a white man braves the mud and the trek to get away from his scrambled eggs and jam at the Ambercrombie & Fitch gorilla basecamp, the guitarist and his people are flushed with hope. How many disappointments have I personally caused?
Enough said. I'll let you know how it turns out if I have the guts to go back to the Congo.
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