BOB HOLMAN

Did you miss ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on linktv.org? Don’t fret! Here are all three episodes!

Episode 1 (http://www.linktv.org/programs/on-the-road-episode-1) follows Father and Son griots Papa and Karamo Susso and is an exploration of the oral traditions of West… Africa, roots of the blues, jazz, hiphop — and a quest to visit African American Beat poet Ted Joans (1928-2003), who lived in Timbuktu.

Episiode 2 (http://www.linktv.org/programs/on-the-road-episode-2) is a travelogue, visiting the Tamasheks aka Tuaregs, the Sahara “Blue People,” and the Dogons, the renowned mask makers of Africa. The cinematography here is incredible — Beatriz Seigne, Lamont Steptoe and Karamo Susso all contributing extraordinary footage.

Episode 3 (http://www.linktv.org/programs/on-the-road-episode-3) is the most directly involved with endangered languages, this time through the lens of the languages of Israel — Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, and Arabic. Yiddish and Ladino are both endangered. Ram Devineni’s creating a video poem in the midst of this, the five-minute rendition of a story told by Yiddish storyteller Sarat, intercut with my visit to the Wailing Wall, is a highlight. The poem, “The Feeling,” was a selection at last year’s Zebra International Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.

Sure enough, Amasaygou (Dolo, of course), is at the Castor for breakfast at 7am. We lay out the day’s plans, the week’s plans: visits with the elders, the diviners, the traditional healer, the griot, the blacksmith, and a celebration that includes masks, if all goes well. The village of Tireli, 19k’s and an hour+ away makes the best Dogon millet beer (“kunyan”) and has the best mask collection – we’ll go there and talk about throwing a party that we can film.

Maybe it’s because the diviners are such a part of life here, maybe it’s because everyone has the same last name, maybe it’s because Griaule left such a mixed heritage of scholarship and hoax (or, maybe, mistranslation). Whatever it is, the Oral Tradition is thriving in Dogon country like nowhere else I’ve seen. The tourists are here for one thing only: the Dogon way of life. Which is to say, the way spirituality is imbued in all objects. The odd jester’s hats with swinging puffballs. The landscape that makes the arcane, fantastic cosmology seem logical. And it’s not that tourists are here in such great numbers – the toilet is still a hole as often as not, and sanitary conditions are, let’s say, haphazard. Meeting Moussa in Tireli (everybody here is a Saye) is filled with these engaging contradictions – he runs the only hotel in town, which the Women’s Association started with a grant from Nobel winner Muhammad Yunus, he of the microgrant theories. Entrust Moussa to hold the money, and he’ll put together our Festival. Hmmm.

I like him, and we are encouraged that we’ll shoot here, but want to allow Sangha a chance to respond, so it’s an hour plus back to Sangha: 20 minutes on a sand piste including a 75 degree plunge into an empty river bed, 20 minutes dirt road past Amani, the sacred crocodile village, Irili, which is also a World Heritage site (truly extraordinary, Hobbit + Star Wars + Truli plus you name it – Mitterrand helicoptered here!), then a steep ascent up a rocky torture road that is intermittently paved, a road that curves alpine-like past villages, Telem caves, and wild west vistas. An NGO paved the road, but didn’t have enough money to pave it all  — paved means a cement slab is sunk into the earth. So they paved the most dangerous parts, so the story goes. If that’s true I don’t know what these nondangerous, unpaved parts used to be – the 4x4 sometimes slows to a roll as pointy rocks and potholes take their toll. Avberage speed is around 3kph. Finally we clear an incline and there’s Lower Sangha spread before us – hundreds of mostly women workers with jugs or rice sheaves on their hand, slowly walking from here to there through the green rice and onion fields of Paradise. In the distance the cliffs, the reed rock escarpment, the Telem caves. An indescribable landscape.

Turns out Sekou is also the man in charge of the Sangha equivalent of the Tireli plan. He asks me, Well, did Tireli work for you? Sure did. Then why not do that? Because I wanted to get a price from the Sangha. From you.

Bob Holman is the host of a new travel series focused on endangered languages called ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on LINK TV. He traveled to West Africa, Middle East and Asia and these are his blog stories from his travels. More information at http://www.rattapallax.com/blog/on_the_road/

As in the French, Mali being part of French West Africa, “pie-ee” or the area of the Dogons, whose epigraph as the “mask-builders of Africa” gives them mysterious purpose but is a dire simplification. A truly independent people, their cliff villages have an otherworldly yet organic complexity. Their cosmology, as revealed to French anthropologist Marcel Griaule in the late 40s, is similarly fantastic but grounded, with some Dogons believing in visits from aliens (from Sirius, to be exact: the Sigi Festival occurs every sixty years, ready or not, when a hidden moon of Sirius Dog Star appears in the heavens) and others possessing the ability to fly. And this is not to mention that Dogon villages are built above and below the impossible-to-reach cave-in-the-cliff dwellings of the tribe who preceded them in this Grand Canyon-like escarpment, the Telem, who evidently traveled home by rope. I’ve looked on this part of the Griot Trail, the inspiration for Nathaniel Mackey’s Andoumboulou (“We are the Failed Human Experiment”) poems, as dessert, the most different, the furthest away, the unknown, the essence.

Correct.

(Try one of Mackey’s poems — I consider him the greatest living jazz poet. His poems aren’t about jazz. They are jazz.)

Bob Holman is the host of a new travel series focused on endangered languages called ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on LINK TV. He traveled to West Africa, Middle East and Asia and these are his blog stories from his travels. More information at http://www.rattapallax.com/blog/on_the_road/

The Collected Poetry, Leopold Sedar Senghor. I’m a big fan of Melvin Dixon’s poetry, but his translations seem stilted, and intro, dated. But what a great object to have on hand in Dakar! With Eshelman’s Cesaire translations, we’ve got a good intro to Negritude in English.

Slumberland, Paul Beatty. DJ Darky has created a perfect beat (Think Pootie Tang crossed with a DJ Spooky satire) and is in Berlin to track down an unknown US African American jazz genius whose work he’s discovered as the sound track to porn films. It gets wilder and funnier. A couple of plot gimmicks – spies and fortune tellers – are Beatty’s nod to prose, but his whiplash wit kept me spinning throughout this joke de force.

Tropic Moon, Georges Simenon. The first of Simenon’s nouvelles dur (hard novels, i.e. not Maigret), this is a young man’s descent into lust/love/madness as metaphor in colonial Benin, 1932. Norman Rush, a totally brilliant, required reading, novelist has written a super intro for this new edition.

God’s Bits of Wood, Sembene Ousmane. Ousmane, the great Senegalese film director (required viewing), was a writer long before, and this kaleidoscopic novel of the 1948 Dakar-Bamako train strike against the French overseers is simply great history, great writing. Finished this novel today while working on the Ted Joans section of the Timbuktu shoot, came across the phrase “fine warm sand” and was struck down – it’s a phrase from the totally inspiring letter that Ted’s widow, Laura Corsiglia, sent me right before I left for the Griot Trail! Words I had selected for tomorrow’s blog. (BTW, God’s bits of wood are the native population of West Africa.) Incredibly powerful novel, which Breyten Breytenbach recommended.

The Koran, Allah. The copy given to me, Mohammed Bob, at the Senegal-Gambia border, is hardcover, gilt-embossed, and called The Noble Qur’an. Unlike the first time I read it, when I thought it harsh and finger-pointing, the  book seems quite lyrical this time through. I can see how Rumi got so revved up by it. To understand Islam, read the Koran.

Bob Holman is the host of a new travel series focused on endangered languages called ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on LINK TV. He traveled to West Africa, Middle East and Asia and these are his blog stories from his travels. More information at http://www.rattapallax.com/blog/on_the_road/

 I interview Lamont about Ted Joans. We are sitting on sofas in the middle of the desert. Bea is taking a long shot. The young man in a ski parka is bringing us our tea. Lamont is answering my question,

OK, if Ted was a surrealist—

What is surrealism?

Sana is saying good-bye. He won the sword vs stick dance and taught us an Ali Farka Toure song. He used Lamont’s cane like a ringmaster at the well. He is, like Laura described him in her letter, a tree planter. He knows the scientific names for all the species. (How surrealist is that?) Lamont wants to know if you can just get the material and build a house in the desert – who owns the desert? First, says Sana, you must build a well. Then you plant the trees.

Bea is shooting a mirror in the middle of the desert. We borrowed it from Sana, where Bea shot his Tabaski goat climbing the stairs. We send a postcard to Laura, signed by all of us, and Sana too. Lunch at the Poulet d’Or includes an interview with the chef Dedeo Maigre, whose luncheon, tukassou, boiled dough in sauce (think big African dumpling in cinnamon sauce) was totally M’yum-m’yum (Karamo’s compound nickname)! Dedeo believes in Timbuktu as a hometown village, nothing mysterious about it. After lunch, he pulls out a century-old tambour and plays a marvelous, wild, desert beat. Then his son takes over (www.timbuktumusicproject.com) and suddenly there’s a monster in the room. A scary mask, made out of a calabash of course, is dancing. It’s the nonmysterious but totally artistic, Dedeo behind the mask. Bea borrows the mask and shoots him through it.

We’re saying good-bye to Sana. He’s telling us that you can know someone for three days and it’s like you’ve always known them. And then, whoever they are, they always disappear. He has been offered three times to visit Europe and United States, but he only knows the desert and Timbuktu. They disappear, but they are still family. Ted Joans brought our family together. Now I’m an old cynic who plays with ideas as if they were words, working in all order, there’s always a punch line, LOL. But Sana Sibily opened up the mysteries of Timbuktu in a way that I understand. And believe. If it’s in the footage I’ll be happy. I want you to know this place. The end of the earth. The beginning of friendship. A mystery, a miracle, a story. Timbuktu.

Bob Holman is the host of a new travel series focused on endangered languages called ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on LINK TV. He traveled to West Africa, Middle East and Asia and these are his blog stories from his travels. More information at http://www.rattapallax.com/blog/on_the_road/

Sana is going to let us scout his house. Good to have Abdul back —  we drive. Bea and Karamo hop out to follow Sana, I am slower and when I get out they’re gone. I ask Lamont where they went. He points across the street. I saunter into the compound, and when I see a woman with two children staring at me in surprise and fear I call out for Sana. Suddenly, a tough-looking guy steps out of the main house with a pistol. I say Je cherche Sana, je vous empris, and with a flick of his gun I get myself out of there. Next thing, he’s out on the street, sans pistol, and Abdul is trying to calm him. Sana comes out, tensions ease. I tell Lamont he almost got me shot. Sana says not to worry, “he is military man.” Seems like that’s good cause for worry to me.

This morning (December 8) is Tobaski, a major Muslim holiday. Lamont sees the military man cruise by the hotel in a truck marked Commissar Police. Bea calls her Mom in Sao Paulo to tell her about the nightmare she had last night, of a military takeover in Brazil. She helped an old woman over a bridge, basically carrying her. Everyone was calling the military “Crocodiles!” Her mother says not to worry – there will never be another military coup in Brazil. Because of the internet.

I am reading Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark, which posits an alternate universe where 9/11 didn’t happen and where the US is not in Iraq. Instead, there’s another civil war in the States. As always, ever-expanding writing enmeshed in great story. Please don’t kill the characters, kill the author! Etc. My headlight goes out, change batteries in light without light, man in the dark.

Over Tobaski breakfast, the same old instant Nescafe, powdered milk, round loaf of bread with butter and red fruit jam, I know something is different.

The grit is gone. How can there be a loaf of bread in Timbuktu sans sand? Must be time to head out. We’ll try for Dogon country tonight, but will probably end up at the crossroads in Douentza. Road conditions are impossible to learn in advance.

But then until last night we thought Tobaski would be two days from now, which is the date Papa Susso had told us, and we were looking forward to a Dogon el Eid (Arabic), Fete el Khabir (French). That turned our schedule around. Let me sleep in this morning. Anything could be going on in America. Last dreams in Timbuktu. 

Bob Holman is the host of a new travel series focused on endangered languages called ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on LINK TV. He traveled to West Africa, Middle East and Asia and these are his blog stories from his travels. More information at http://www.rattapallax.com/blog/on_the_road/