Gone to Croatan

Ode to the Drum

Jay — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 16:58:56 +0000

Ode to a drum

Gazelle, I killed you
for your skin’s exquisite
touch, for how easy it is
to be nailed to a board
weathered raw as white
butcher paper. Last night
I heard my daughter praying
for the meat here at my feet.
You know it wasn’t anger
that made me stop my heart
till the hammer fell. Weeks
ago, I broke you as a woman
once shattered me into a song
beneath her weight, before
you slouched into that
grassy hush. But now
I’m tightening lashes,
shaping hide as if around
a ribcage, stretched
like five bowstrings.
Ghosts cannot slip back
inside the body’s drum.
You’ve been seasoned
by wind, dusk & sunlight.
Pressure can make everything
whole again, brass nails
tacked into the ebony wood
your face has been carved
five times. I have to drive
trouble from the valley.
Trouble in the hills.
Trouble on the river
too. There’s no kola nut,
palm wine, fish, salt,
or calabash. Kadoom.
Kadoom. Kadoom. Ka-
doooom. Kadoom. Now
I have beaten a song back into you,
rise & walk away like a panther.

In “Ode to a Drum,” Yusef Komunyakaa enters the mind of an African drum maker as he tacks the hide of a gazelle to a drum of wood and begins to make music. On a literal level, “Ode to a Drum” takes the form of a heartfelt monologue of an artisan voicing his concerns and problems to the spirit of a dead gazelle as he performs his craft.

But a closer reading of the poem reveals that Komunyakaa has fused elements of traditional blues with the form of the ode to address nothing less than the profound political, historical, and spiritual significance of the drum to African and African American cultures. And in doing so, he has used the modest voice of a lone drum maker to create an allegory and an anthem of political and cultural renewal and rebellion.

To understand the allegorical meanings of Komunyakaa’s richly textured poem, a basic understanding of the role of drumming in African and African American cultures and an overview of the relationship of blues to traditional African music are necessary.

In his study of delta blues, Deep Blues, Robert Palmer describes how as the African slave trade evolved, several traditions and styles of African music made their ways to the American South with the slaves. In the early years of slavery, traders focused their efforts on the section of West Africa they called “Senegambia” — a region that extended from the dry northern areas of Senegal down to the northern coastline of Guinea. Because most of the area bordered the Sahara desert, there were few trees, and as a result, drums were far less prevalent than were the more Arabic-influenced stringed instruments. It was not until the slave trade moved farther south to the more heavily forested region that came to be known as the “slave coast” — the coastal regions now known as Sierra Leone and Liberia — and then even farther south to the mouth of the Congo River to what is now Angola that traders encountered Africans whose music was steeped in the rich percussive sounds and drumming that has come to define African music for most of the West.

Although Komunyakaa does not refer directly to a “tribe” or region in his poem, one can deduce from this basic overview that the drum maker in “Ode to a Drum” is from one of the more southerly regions of the West African coast. In fact, one could further deduce, though not definitively, that the drum maker is from the Congo River region and that the “[t]rouble on the river” he refers to in the poem could very well be slave traders.

The Congo River and its many tributaries allowed easier access to the inner villages of the mainland than did the difficult and dangerous African terrain, and they became the main routes to and from the ships for many traders. (Because a time frame is not mentioned in the poem, it is conceivable, though unlikely, that the poem takes place in the present day, and the “troubles” could be contemporary issues such as AIDS or another infectious disease. However, the poem’s setting does not affect its allegorical interpretation.)

In traditional African villages, drumming and music making played a role in virtually every aspect of daily life. Palmer points out that, although there were the individual shepherds who serenaded their flocks and lone musicians who played to entertain themselves, music was by and large a communal affair that was included in every activity of the village. And within each body of music that defined those activities, there was little distinction between the musician and the audience. Whether it was what we know now as a “call and response” or a method of harmonizing called “hocketing,” the forms of music Africans played relied heavily on full, communal participation. It was those communal aspects of the music, as much as the music itself, that was important for Africans.

Music kept villages close to one another, and it kept the people in those villages together. And often the drummer was the only “musician,” per se, with the “audience” turning their bodies and voices into accompanying instruments.

As slaves populated the American South, their music slowly evolved and not only came to incorporate the divergent sounds of the many traditions represented by the slaves themselves, but it also came to merge with classical and contemporary European music so that by the late nineteenth century the musical forms that we now know as the blues and jazz had begun to take shape.

Komunyakaa, an African American, had little access to the public culture that his white contemporaries had growing up in the segregated Deep South. For instance, although he was an avid reader as a young child, the whites-only library was off-limits to him.

However, one bit of culture that Komunyakaa had access to growing up in the 1950s and 1960s was jazz and the blues. Through his mother’s radio, the young Komunyakaa was exposed to the sounds of such jazz and blues greats as Louis Armstrong and Ma Rainey, and it is those influences that can be very clearly seen in this poem.

Blues, as the name implies, is a form of music whose lyrics and sounds are largely defined by difficult times. Originating among slaves in plantations and spreading throughout the antebellum South during years when the practice of slavery was illegal but the many practices of severe racial discrimination, including lynching, were not, the blues came to be defined by its sad, soulful sounds and lyrics. Blues lyrics often address the poverty of the musician, the law he was running from, the liquor he drank too much of the night before, and the sex that was both a source of comfort and a source of pain for him.

Yet far from being a springboard into “deeper blues” for the musician, the music he created (most of the early known blues musicians were men) helped both the musicians and their communities to deal with their difficult plights. Continuing the communal traditions of their African forefathers, blues musicians, like the griots, or storytellers of African villages whose stories, according to Palmer, came to “constitute a kind of oral history of their people,” grew to become the voices of their communities. And it was through their music and the communal voicing of sorrows that blacks could find strength from one another.

“I heard my daughter praying / for the meat here at my feet,” the drum maker tells the spirit of the gazelle, referring to the hunger his family is experiencing. And later in the poem, echoing what is a typical refrain for a blues lyric, he intones a litany of troubles he is experiencing:

Trouble in the hills.

Trouble on the river

too. There’s no kola nut,

palm wine, fish, salt,

or calabash.

The drum maker’s family is hungry, staples of his life are scarce, and trouble surrounds him. This is the blues.

Another common element of the blues, an element clearly derived from the African tradition, is the merging of the sacred and the profane — the fusion, often, of a prayer to the Lord and a reference to relations between the sexes, as described by Palmer:

Man-woman relationships, probably the most persistent concern of blues lyrics, are also important in traditional African villages, where social harmony is often considered synonymous with or dependent on harmony in the home. And the mixing of the sacred and the profane in black American song lyrics is more easily understood once one realizes that in precolonial Africa these two fields of human activity were not generally thought of as polar opposites.

Komunyakaa consciously weds the sacred with the profane in “Ode to a Drum.” The act of making the drum is a ritual that transcends cultures. Many Native American traditions, for instance, considered the drum to be a sacred instrument. In the poem, out of respect for the sacred, the narrator of the poem takes on a respectful, almost reverential tone as he addresses the gazelle. “You know it wasn’t anger / that made me stop my heart / till the hammer fell,” he tells the gazelle almost apologetically in reference to another animal he has killed to feed his child. And as he ties the gazelle’s hide to the wooden drum, he assures it that now “Ghosts cannot slip back / inside the body’s drums.” The drum maker is not only working to create a drum, but he is also performing the act of making the gazelle “whole” again.

And yet, as he describes the actual act of killing the gazelle, the drum maker evokes a crude image of the sexual act. “Weeks / ago, I broke you as a woman / once shattered me into a song / beneath her weight,” he tells the gazelle.

The incorporation of the blues with the ode is not merely an academic exercise for Komunyakaa. Traditionally, odes have been written for special occasions or to address objects or important ideas. In this case, the object being addressed is, of course, the drum, and the idea being addressed is nothing less than the revitalization of African and African American culture. By using the blues, Komunyakaa is acknowledging both the debt the blues has to African tradition and the importance of blues to African American tradition and history.

In “Ode to a Drum,” the gazelle, an animal of prey, has been killed by the drum maker for the purpose of bringing it back to “life” as a drum, of making it “whole” again. Once “whole,” the gazelle, in the form of the drum (which, significantly, is made of ebony, a deep-colored, almost black, wood) will help the drum maker and his people drive their “troubles” away.

In the context of postcolonial African societies, one can equate the gazelle with the Africans themselves, whose societies and traditions were nearly destroyed by European colonialists. The drum maker, in this reading, represents the power of traditional African culture, a power through which Africans can regain their former stature, not as “gazelles,” but as one of the most feared predators on the continent — as panthers.

Similarly, in the African American context, the gazelle can be viewed as representing the descendants of slaves whose culture has constantly been under attack by whites. Black culture has often been dismissed as unworthy of white mainstream consideration. In the poem, the drum, representing the music and traditions of African Americans, is used to bring life back to blacks, and it is through that music that African American culture can be revitalized.

Culture can be a powerful force in a people’s history. In repressive situations or in difficult times, cultural traditions can unify communities and keep hope alive. By evoking the ages-old power of the drum, along with African music and the blues, Komunyakaa has brought peoples and traditions once considered as hapless as slain gazelles to once again walk the earth as proud and mighty panthers. And like the gazelle, the traditions that once defined Africans and African Americans and made them strong, can one day come back to life.

Give the Gift of Rhythm and Studio Updates

Jay — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:13:43 +0000

HOLIDAY SPECIAL!!!

i am now doing gift certificates for the West African drumming
classes. The Holiday special is 10 classes for $100 or 8 classes for $80
that’s $50 off!!

if you would like to give the gift of rhythm and get your friend in to
the mix with us at Croatan–what better present than discount drum
classes? —let me know if you are interested.

Updates:

WEST AFRICAN DRUMMING:
Monday nights
Beginners:
5–7pm
7–9pm
Advanced:
9–11pm

There will be no African Drum class on: DEC. 21st or DEC. 28th

WEST AFRICAN DANCE:

SAT. at 12pm (noon)–1:30pm

besides regular saturday class at Croatan—there is an additional
dance class with Dawn on Dec. 18th at Turks Head studio in West
Chester if you want more dancin.

The class is at 7:15pm at:
780 Miles Road
West Chester, PA 19380
(484) 467-4234
(also if any of my advance class drummers want to go drum, let me know)

There will be NO DANCE CLASS ON DEC. 26th

SAMBA CLASS
Thursdays 8–9:30pm

Class will meet every Thursday at 8:00pm EXCEPT the following dates:
Dec 24th
Dec 31st

upcoming PERFORMANCES for Unidos–(samba students)

Saturday, December 19th
Calvary Church
48th and Baltimore in West Philly
Event Time: 7:30pm
Arrival time: TBD
http://crossroadsconcerts.org/

and come see..
PHILLYBLOCO!
@ World Cafe Live–downstairs!
Jan. 9th
9pm
http://www.myspace.com/phillybloco
www.worldcafelive.com

ALSO please note:
YOGA CLASS HAS ENDED. THERE IS NO LONGER A YOGA SESSION AT CROATAN.

–keep the pulse.
–ASHE

jay

World AIDS Day at Congreso

Jay — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:10:18 +0000

Reflection after last tuesdays gig)

The Healing Drum

The West African drum and dance students at Croatan Studio–were
invited by Josiah Lash to come be a part of Congreso’s World AIDS day
celebration and rememberance of the struggle this past Tuesday.

There were probably about 30-40 people total. The clients here are
HIV-positive, the poorest of N. Philly, the majority are immigrants,
and the most fun, wise people you can imagine.

Congreso de Latinos Unidos (Congreso) located in North Philadelphia,
is a very large, community based, non-profit agency founded in 1977 by
Puerto Rican activists “concerned with the social and economic
conditions of the growing Latino community in Philadelphia”.
Congreso’s mission is, “to provide leadership in the development and
operation of social, education, economic and health care services and
resources that meet the needs of Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican and
Latino community. All of Congreso’s programs, services and advocacy
efforts are dedicated to empowering members of [the] community to
confront and overcome the myriad of problems facing them, and to
reclaim the future for their families and their children”.

Congreso’s vision is to provide a bilingual and culturally sensitive
comprehensive network of services to support and empower residents to
create positive solutions to challenges they face daily. As a holistic
human service agency, Congreso offers a wide range of adult and youth
services including: truancy intervention, out-of-school time youth
development programs, workforce development, drug and alcohol
counseling, housing counseling, health education, teen pregnancy
prevention and intervention, maternal and child health programs, and
HIV/AIDS services.

The drummers and dancers at Croatan do a lot of different kinds of
events–trying to bring the drums to empower and celebrate and
educate, and many folks just don’t seem to get it. It takes a long
time for a connection to be made–or it just gets viewed as a
“cultural presentation”.

Not this time.

The folks at Congreso knew what was going on and responded immediately
with dancing and smiles and clapping and shout-outs. Most of them
came from cultures that know the drum is used for healing and for
getting the people together. We have so much to learn from them.

We are all born with a drum in our chest.

The beat of the drum resonates with the human heartbeat. In a world so
confusing and torn by evils very few of us understand– how better to
find balance and center than to connect to the heart essence? If we
can do this personally it is personally beneficial. But when it
happens communally it is world changing. Drumming for me is prayer.
The same holds true for personal and communal prayer.

Everything is rhythm. From the microscopic atoms vibrating around the
nucleus to the planets spinning around the sun. Rhythm is vibrations
repeated and everything that is alive is vibrating. Rhythm tells us
how and why. When we are off rhythm–we get sick. When we get
communally off–rhythm we create epidemics and oppression. To
understand the rhythms then–is to be engaged in healing work.

We dance through time as a group. We must learn how to synchronize our
personal rhythms with those of our fellow creatures.

If “religion” means to bind together, then a religion that works is
one that binds together the many rhythms that affect us by creating
spaces and atmospheres and rituals that attempt to synchronize the
three dances–the personal, the cultural, and the cosmic. When this
happens, the reward is a new dimension of rhythm and time known as
“the Sacred”.

I felt like we were in a very sacred space this past Tuesday afternoon
down at Congreso.

All the boundaries were crossed here and we created a common humanity
in grieving and celebrating together. There were people of many ethnic
nationalities, huge gaps in age ( from 2 years old to 70!)–gender,
sexual orientation, and class and we were all dancing together. We
were united against a disease that doesn’t discriminate and we were
able to show that solidarity with each other in a defiant gesture of
life because of the drum.

To be in a room with a few dozen folks who most people think are
“dying” and “poor”. and to feel and participate in the healing
passionate aliveness that came through in their dancing and fellowship
is nothing less than the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God.

It was an honor to be with those beautiful souls and if we can provide
the backbeat for that kind of transformation and healing to happen–we
have a mighty gift in the drum.
–jay

-SPECIAL EVENT THIS FALL AT CROATAN-

admin — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 13:05:42 +0000

-SPECIAL EVENT THIS FALL AT CROATAN-

Three-Day Conference SeriesGathering Around the Unhewn Stone

Biblical Explorations of Nature, Civilization, and Feral Faith

Keynote Speaker: Ched Myers

-activist theologian and author of Binding the Strongman,

Say to this Mountain, and The Biblical Vision of Sabbath

Economics

Dates: October 16, 17, 18 2009

(opens Friday at noon, ends Sunday at 1pm)

Location: Circle of Hope

2007 Frankford Ave., Philadelphia, PA 19125

Contact: Jay Beck

jay@psalters.org

(734) 717-0771

Description: The conference will focus on Biblical themes of Sabbath/hunter-gatherer economics, rewilding and resistance with a focus on re-reading our biblical origin stories that will shed light and give hope to our current economic and environmental crisis. There will also be panel discussions and presentations on topics such as primal parenting, practical rewilding, musical presentations by Theillalogical Spoon and Psalters, and a report from a women’s anarcho-primitivism and Christianity conference held this spring.

Cost: It is free to attend this event. All meals will be potluck- please bring food to share and your own dishware.

Accommodations: Those coming from out of town are welcome to sleep in the building. Please bring your own sleeping ware if you plan to do so.