Midlife Meditation

Our time at Dzodze was drawing to a close. There were just two days of workshops and performances remaining before we would board the bus to Accra. For one of my final workshops, I chose a Level I presented by a musician from Colombia who performed under his first name: Tupac. (I never had the chance to ask him if he was intentionally associating himself with the late rapper, but I assume he was aware of the feelings that name evokes for Americans steeped in hip hop.) Tupac’s performance style is suave, sophisticated, and occasionally employs a wry sense of humor, but not of the clowning variety. Instead, watching his featured performance several days earlier, I was immediately reminded me of the Jets choreography in West Side Story . He’s very cool and smooth in what he does, incorporating elements of Latin American dance. He’s also an excellent teacher, precisely hitting the sweet spot between challenge and simplicity that I consider “Level Me.” He knew wh...

Turns out I’m not as advanced as I like to think I am. Teaching elementary music, it’s easy to forget that the main reason I appear to be so good at the skills I teach is that I’m a grown-assed adult who’s studied these things, while my students are children experiencing them for the first time. When I teach my body music unit, it usually only lasts for one or two classes before I run out of material, but that’s plenty of time for children to marvel at the speed and complexity of the rhythms I can play on my body. Similarly, as we drum and learn about African musical culture, I’m the expert in the room: I spent two weeks in Ghana four years ago, after all, so I know some stuff. That’s the confidence I brought to the International Body Music Festival, which ended yesterday (for me—I’m midway through the 36-hour odyssey of my journey home, so what day it is is a relative thing). It took just two workshops to put me in my place, and remind me that some people h...

How could they do it? How could they treat human begins as animals, as worse than animals, abusing them to the point of death, then jamming those who survived into the lower decks of ships for a weeks-long journey that would kill even more of them? Forget the inhumanity of it: who treats valuable stock like that? I was not asking these questions, though I could have. I raise them whenever I contemplate the evil my people—white European colonists—visited upon first the indigenous population of the New World, then upon countless millions of Africans. Last night, as we gathered for a banquet to mark the end of the International Body Music Festival, I heard these questions from a fellow IBMF attendee who, hours after the final cultural event of our week in Ghana, could not put it out of her mind. Visiting Elmina, one of many slave castles on the coast of west Africa, is a shattering experience. The old buildings, some dating to the 16 th century, are maintain...