Yesterdays segue into Afrobeat lead to some fruitful
discovery on Rdio. I found an
exceptional Fela Ransome Kuti song "Alu Jon Jonki Jon" that must have
been released 1972, or so. I’ve heard so
much of Fela’s music over the years, I get complacent and think I’ve heard
everything. But this track was new to
me. Good Lord. The groove is so muscular and complete like a
suspension bridge of unimpeachable confidence.
And the organ solo’s crescendo around the ninth minute is like nothing
I’ve ever heard from him before.
Aggressive mounting 如火如荼[1] wall
of triumphant Hammond B3 light reflected everywhere until it stops. “Hey.”
These may be the lyrics to the song translated into English: http://www.lyricszoo.com/fela-kuti/alu-jon-jonki-jon/
I posed the question yesterday, as to what cultural,
artistic tradition left China, went on to influence some other part of the
world and came back in a different form, so as to then have a substantial impact
on China. The two that I’d mentioned from
elsewhere were the flow of West African rhythmic sensibility to; for example,
the U.S. which returns in the form of James Brown to change the way West
African contemporary music was played.
The other popularly referenced example was Thoreau being influenced by
Indian philosophy, having an influence on Gandhi who then influences Martin
Luther King Jr.
A few friends weighed in off line with only partly serious
suggestions of chop suey and kung
fu. The problem is these don’t
really make it back to PRC and impact the place in a substantial way that fits
the model. If McDonalds began offering
McSuey that thousands of stores in China served . . . if Lee Scratch Perry’s
1975 album “Kung Fu Meets the Dragon” suddenly became a national phenomenon in
some Chinese Black Ark . . . But it hasn’t and there isn’t. They don’t work.
If you could identify a seminal Chinese aspect of Christian
thinking or Marxist ideology that returns with the Taiping or the Chinese Communist
Party respectively, that might be closer.
More fruitful hunting, and certainly where some affinities are desperately
in need of being built are in the relationship between China and Japan. Tokyo was, of course, fertile soil for
Chinese intellectuals like Liang Qichao at the beginning of the last
century. Japanese, borrowing Chinese
characters, created new words from the modern world that were later adopted
back into Chinese. Numerous “western”
ideas were brought into China for the first time, via Japan, where
intellectuals like Liang Qichao encountered them for the first time. And certainly the CCP continued to study
Japanese means of warfare, statecraft, industrialization, commerce etc., from
its inception until today. But the
flavor of this exchange is, since the war, reluctant and shrouded in mutual
disdain.
I am working my way back through the “Seven Deadly
Starbucks” (7DS) manuscript. In the
“Ira” chapter, Anger, I try to look at how anger works in myself as well as how
anger is channeled in China as national policy.
I describe a time I was mugged in Brooklyn and the unfortunate if
inevitable revenge fantasies that flooded my mind in the immediate thereafter
involving a golf club.
“The Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
formally cultivates a national sense of victimhood for China. Crimes generally stem from foreign aggressors
and the traitorous Chinese who collaborated with them. The enemy par excellence is the Japanese and
clearly much of what the Japanese did sixty-five years ago was atrocious. There still can be no detailed discussion of
the inhuman behavior of the ruling CCP itself, during the interim period. The sophisticated, willful propaganda effort
allows for no compromises. Everything
officially supports hatred of the Japanese.
Nothing allows for a nuanced reconsideration for actions taken since the
end of the war. Hatred, wrath and
everything short of physical violence are legitimized. To insult, to scorn to cheat, to shove a
contemporary Japanese person is to do one for the team and assuage one’s
ancestors who suffered so much unforgivable abuse at the hands of that foreign
nation. To muse on swinging the golf
club is understandable. But the national
cultivation of vengeance three generations on is a horrible, self-mutilating,
aberration. China’s civil society and
domestic forum of permissible public discourse may not presently be strong
enough, in the moment, to check that swing.
The hate loop doesn’t seem to be facilitating much healing.”
If China is ready to face some of its own recent history as
discussed two posts back in “No Time Like the Present” this will have far
reaching implications for regional relations.
A China that is only a victim, repeated over and over, with every
evening’s television, that it was victimized by key foreign powers, the most
pernicious of whom were and are the Japanese, will continue to be a nation
malnourished.
Former Red Guard who are brave enough to publicly and
without coercion ask for forgiveness from their named victims will almost
certainly approach the question of forgiveness with Japan, quite differently
than someone who is only and forever simply a victim. Clearly, there are individuals, who are
simply victims or simply perpetrators and many who may be both. But I am interested in the dialogue of civil
society, the character of the nation’s discourse as a whole. If the nation can sustain a nuanced dialogue concerning
what it did to itself, then it will be much better prepared to face and resolve
matters with a former perpetrator from overseas. China has long had its “scar” literature,
but that is quite different then perpetrators themselves, voluntarily speaking
out about their actions.
And this is only half the dialogue. As China makes its own steps towards shedding
the shrill purity of absolute victimhood, China may be able to adjust the frame
some on the legacy of the war. But the
Japanese themselves are required for a proper
dialogue. Where are the Japanese
at this particular juncture? They have a
civil society, a free press, stability, wealth . . . Japan too, must evolve in
order to genuinely participate in the reconciliation it so desperately needs.
We will talk more about Japan and of The Koreas role in this discussion, as we
continue.
This tension and the framing of intractable problems reminded
me of a fascinating editorial by Henry Louis Gates Jr. from a few years back,
concerning the slave trade, in which he explored the critical role that African
kingdoms themselves played in the prolonged horror of the ‘peculiar institution.’ http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
“In 1999, for instance,
President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in
Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americans’ forgiveness
for the “shameful” and “abominable” role Africans played in the trade. Other
African leaders, including Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, followed Mr. Kerekou’s bold
example.”
We could fill a library with all the differences
and distinctions one could note between what it means for the President of
Benin to speak to African Americans in Baltimore and what it means for China
and Japan to progress towards reconciliation in North Asia. But there is something “astonishing” about
what happens and what is possible, when the framing of an intractable problem
shifted. When someone with courage
offers something new.
The behavior of the former Red Guards, independently
asking for forgiveness is an early marker.
A nation with sufficiently complex layers of public discourse that can
allow for such discussion is evidence, I believe, of a frame shifting slightly. Brave and hopeful souls in Japan and
elsewhere should take note and look for ways capitalize on this and nudge the frame
in their own land accordingly.
A new track with a commanding crescendo.
[1]
rúhuǒrútú: lit. white cogon flower like
fire (idiom); fig. a mighty army like wildfire / daunting and vigorous
(momentum) / flourishing / magnificent
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