Chapter. Taata W’abaana

Tonight we are going to keep the paying guests awake with song and drums and celebration of all our dreams. Tonight, tonight, the highway’s bright. We’ll go racing in the streets. Over the lawns minute orbs of spilt beer clinging onto blades of grass with a shine like jewels. Three hundred hungry fans sit on plastic lawn chairs, falling away from a raised stage. The stage is lit a blazing yellow. The large and extravagantly coloured logos of brewers and a mobile phone service company stand behind and to either side. In between is a bare square of wood. That is what we beam our hungry eyes at, waiting for the singers to leap up and set our fantasies to rhyme and to a clapping raga beat. To my right, the entertainment and social affairs editor of the biggest newspaper in town. “Is it true, what you write?” I ask him. “When you say, ‘the most happening party, the hottest spot in town, the biggest star’ is it true? Do these people, places and things become what you say they are before or after you say it? Are they ever what you say they are or are you lying?” He smiles a knowing smile, a trickster who cannot resist the urge to lay out the prize he has so cunningly stolen. “What difference does it make?” he asks. They are here, the singers. She is lithe and agile, much smaller in person than she appears on TV and in the posters. Less beautiful, but only marginally so. The singer smiles as if she loves us all and waves the microphone at the crowd. She is wearing a clinging lycra sheath with a long slit pointing with determination at her crotch. But keep quiet about that. Say she looked sexy and leave it at that. The generalisations, not the specifics, that is the landscape we inhabit now. It doesn’t work if we think too much. Then he comes on. Dressed in all black, dreadlocks wild and buoyant. His shirt is open to show the heavy chain with the large medallion swinging left to right. The crowd exhales a wind of applause to him. She slithers over to him and wraps her arm around him. We cheer again. Then it is time for the wind to turn. He shakes her off and, his hold on the microphone changing from a carrying grip to a commanding choke, begins to chant out the first words of their song. And the drums begin to pound. His voice is like the footballs bouncing on tarmac that we used to hear in our childhoods. It is like thunder contained and controlled so that we can listen in awe but not in fright. His song is like the power we want to have and its rhythm is like the rhythm we want to follow when we sleep with the women we want to ravish. His words are like the recklessness and the freedom and the destruction with abandon that we want to mete out at the world. He sings about the girl and swears that he will be true. She comes in with her verse, wailing and squealing, her voice flinging its clothes off. She swears she will believe him and whatever he tells her, if he says he will be true. And the crowd throws its hundreds of arms into the air and its hundreds of eyes and mouths are wet, tears and spittle and sweat spray into the air, droplets arch and then fall downwards to land with unheard tiny splashes into glasses of beer and gin. The men who came with their women and the women who came with their men move closer to each other. The men who came to find women and the women who came to be found by those men move closer to each other. The singers’ voices blend and mingle and the couple approach one another. She sways her hips while one hand is raised above her head. He licks his lips and thrusts his waist into hers. They burst into the final chorus while entangled in one another. I will be true I will be true I will be true to only you. When someone asks you what music is, will you ever be able to tell them? Or will you just give up the futile attempt to define it and just say, “Listen. You hear that? That is music.”