No. 34 - When You Find Out Your Friend's Best Friend Has Also Read 2000 Seasons

That Ricky, a friend of a friend, a white guy, had read Two Thousand Seasons, a novel by the Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah, made me want to pause and then excavate what else we shared in common. How, I wondered, had our curiosities so cleanly merged? How had he, from wherever part of middle America he emerged now entered my mental living room, joining the other folks jostling for space on a crowded couch? [yuh living room nuh full, zing] We shared, apparently, the same interest in liberating literature, in unearthing an intuitive self, and, I learned, in implicating that self in change-making. 

In the novel, highly recommended by Alice Walker, Armah conveys the need of Africans to return to “The Way,” a primal understanding of themselves and their history, unencumbered by the “destroyers’” taste for physical and spiritual death and destruction. I had read the book a number of years ago while in the village of Medina-Baye in Senegal. There, with my mother, who had served as a midwife in the town, and periodically came back to the Islamic center to have clothes made and to have her hair done (both of which took multiple days), I read the book aloud to her. A slightly tortuous experience considering the heat, low lighting, but admittedly delicious yassa yapp. With our access to TV, radio, and the internet limited, coupled with intermittent electricity, reading kept us focused + entertained.

Back in New York, we were celebrating Khalya's birthday [hey girl, hey]. Most attendees were friends of Khalya, including Ricky, who at the time had shoulder-length blondish hair. I might have met him once before, but we hadn’t really talked until that night.

We ended up at Chocolat, a lounge on the corner of 119th and Frederick Douglas Boulevard in Harlem. I cannot quite remember how it unfolded, but we found ourselves discussing Tracy Chapman and either I asked Ricky if he’d listened to Matters of the Heart by Chapman [that’s your album zing] or maybe he asked me if I had listened to New Beginnings , but either way, both of those albums joined my listening sequence for the next few years. 

We also somehow started talking about Alice Walker, and I guess from Alice Walker, we got to Ayi Kwei Armah. I mean, I don’t see how else we could have gotten to Armah without having first spoken of Walker.

Ricky asked me if I had read 2000 Seasons by the Ghanaian author. In the moment, my eyebrows must have literally joined together in a united expression of shock. I mean, 2000 Seasons is niche [raise yr hand if you’ve read it tho, let ME know] and also because I had just had a short exchange with the author when my sister and I were visiting Dakar and Popenguine, a coastal town in Senegal. “What is Ricky, and his beautiful self doing reading Armah?” [what IS he doing, zing…don’t sleep] And then, talking to him, I realized that he was very much a person who looked at lineages of writers, who looked at those acknowledgement pages and saw who was named, who their teachers were, who their influences were. That’s really the crux of today:

What books or essays inspire you? [lately, hmm, sullivan’s the poetics of difference tho] What songs resonate with you most? [you still listening to lamar and immortal technique, and we know this ma’am] Who do those songwriters admire? Who shapes the authors you love? When you reflect on your influences and think about those you aspire to emulate, what comes up? Share, if you’d like, your favorite artist in the comments, and maybe we can explore these lineages together.

Peace y’all.

Note: Thanks to everyone who's been rocking out with the daily posts. I am trying to figure out the right pace. Wanting to write daily but realizing that maybe I’ll share more often to social media, so you all do not get inundated with email. Vamos a ver.