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/

We’re in the beginning of an Arizona/Grand Canyon Western film set, so stop after just fifteen minutes  down the piste to shoot some B roll. Bea discovers the key to the room at Gourma, so Abdul returns to Douentza while we shoot, crack jokes, get burrs in our pants, are visited by wandering Peuls, and…. finally our faithful driver  returns and we’re on our way. Taking it easier. And of course today happens to be Tabaski here (it’s a locally defined thing), so still no food.

And as we move into Dogon country something happens. As if the cliffs are living. The Telems were here first. In the eleventh century. You can sense their world – veldt, savannahs, jungle with lions, buffalo, elephants. The wild dangers led the Telems to live in impossible-to-reach cliff houses, like Chaco Canyon or Mesa Verde. You can see these astonishing dwellings in a documentary of a Dogon cliff funeral made by Jean Rouch Cimetieres dans La Falaise . I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU STOP whatever you are doing and spend 18 minutes with the Dogons. It’s in Dogon and French and awesome.

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/