A few days ago I had the pleasure of employing the power of the Internet to connect two friends living in far off and remote lands. I had a great but brief conversation with my old friend Laura, a fellow PCV currently serving in Mauritania (See blog link to the right, she has some great posts as of late). The end of the conversation died an unnatural death when my Internet connection gave out, but oh well this is West Africa and those things happen. One of her last questions she was able to send off was, “So, how the heck are you staying so busy?”
Well...
This past weekend I spent with the crew of the YMCA Digital Studio taping a music video for a superb Wolof hip-hop group named Poetic X. It’s interesting to see West African culture move to America, morph to inner city culture, and then move back home to West Africa. Many local artists who pursue rap or hip-hop merely copy what they hear on US tracks. Copy cat rapping is a dime a dozen here, and in my opinion a kid in Gambia rapping about, “guns in the streets, hoes, and social inequality” doesn’t sound very authentic or effective. Because their sound and message was so different from a US style is one of the reasons that meeting the members of Poetic X has been such a pleasure.
The song that we made a video for, “Wulajanara,” (Trans: A place that is distant) features a famous female lead signer for the chorus (I only know this because Daboe instantly said, “Hey I know that singer!”) while the verse lyrics focus on the importance of marriage as a bond between the man, woman, and Allah.
A small digression. In historical Gambia many people were forced into marriages based upon tribal or Kingship desires. People would marry for the economic or status improvement of their family. Often these marriages were forced upon man and more often woman by a father figure who was strategically trying to improve his position. As Gambia has Westernized many have cited this practice as a reason for the increasing rates of divorce. The old forced marriages are having trouble as people embrace personal independence. Specifically as men and women begin to see each other as equals and individuals who have the ability to choose their own fate, they see forced marriage as a burden and risk rather than an advantage. A family that is built on promises not between the people but between a social gain will struggle to stand.
So how is the artistic and social community approaching this collision of worlds and mentalities? The song “Wulajanara” from Poetic X and video we have just made is one response to it. It’s the voice of a younger generation who are asking their peers to think before they marry. It’s young people deciding issues that they fear for and hope to change and finding methods to get their opinion out there. They ask us to decide if our own marriage is (or will be) built for the health of the new family itself with Allah providing the groundwork.
We hopefully will be able to edit and distribute the video to some meaningful extent. The fact that this kind of work is even going on at our lower level demonstrates a significant evolution of media in The Gambia. Increasingly there are institutions and production houses in country that are going to let the public at large bring their ideas to light. Gambia could be on the verge of the birth of a quality locally driven media market. Seeing these trends first hand makes me appreciate all the media theory and history courses I took at Indiana University, for one can visualize the pieces falling into place and reasonably predict what will happen next.
In particular to our work, I served mostly as a supervisor on this project. Three of the people that I’ve worked with to train took the helm of the project and have done an excellent job with it. Their success has been one of the most successful parts of my service, that is knowing that I played a part in helping people bringing their own visions to life.
No, I’m not teaching sexual health, I’m not building wells, and I’m not improving crop techniques. These are all things that people might think of when they think of the traditional Peace Corps volunteer’s role. Peace Corps asks us to adjust to our host environment and find where we can be most useful and that is what I’m trying to do. To all fellow volunteers currently in the field, keep up the good work, our collective whole and the contrasts that entails makes us the positive change we all hoped we could be.
No comments:
Post a Comment