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SOUNDS
Achille Mbembe
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Notes de fond
Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds
Achille Mbembe
Ntone Edjabe
Achille Mbembe
Theodore Adorno, known for his aversion to Jazz, would no doubt have
disliked Congolese music 1. In all likelihood, he simply would not have
considered it to be “music”. Instead, one suspects, he would have thought
of it as deafening, painful noise: the discordant emission of primitive energy.
Should he have deigned to identify it as music at all, he likely would have
classified it as “low art”.
Low art, for Adorno, encompassed the vulgar in both form and content:
crude simplicity, stupefying effects, a propensity for encouraging social
passivity and intoxication. With this definition in mind, in Congolese music
the philosopher would almost certainly have decried coarse stimuli, banal
1. T. Adorno, Introduction à la sociologie de la musique, Paris, Contrechamps, 1994, p. 38. See also
T. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, New York, Routledge and Paul Kegan, 1982.
72 Cosmopolis : de la ville, de l’Afrique et du monde
emerged as a declaration of the most radical and the most immediate faith in
a life which is necessarily contradictory and paradoxical.
If this is so, the question then is to establish what actually happens in this
music. What makes it arouse, in the African subject hearing it, listening to it
or dancing to it, a force so unique and so intimate that the subject experiences
a feeling of complete jubilation? What is the relationship between this intimate
force and the idea of the beautiful? How can we understand its power, its
penetrating strength and energizing force, and hence its aesthetic signification?
What experience of joy and of life does it document and, in so doing, how does
it bring about a fusion of sound, happiness and sensation?
In responding to these questions, my starting-point is that there is neither
here 6, it is essential to remember that the latter mobilise several senses and
organs (hearing, voice, sight, touch, and further, movement and waves of
energy). There is nothing more complex than verbalizing that which involves
the non-verbal, or describing sound, which in essence is neither linguistic nor
involves the purely spontaneous practice of language. Aesthetic interpretation
here supposes that sensory material is reorganized by what might be called
the sound event, in the very process through which the latter frees the
imagination. It is such an exercise that I attempt here.
Background
rule was via arts of disciplining and cultivating the body. Complex and uneven
transformations in the economy (relations of ownership, property, labor) were
accompanied by the development of new social relations, especially in the
cities. These prompted novel uses of the body and its pleasures, new ways of
living and dying and new forms of desires 9. Social reproduction increasingly
depended not only on the availability of the means to meet human survival,
but also on a vast array of imaginary forms, on the circulation of dreams,
fantasies and fictions 10. The city as a space of heterogeneity profoundly
transformed long-standing ideas about the meanings of belonging, the
symbolics of sexuality and traditional markers of culture and identity. All of
this led to an increased self-consciousness about the “fashioning” of human
identity as a manipulable, artful process.
6. The principal works studied here are: Koffi Olomide, Effrakata (Next music/Sono, CDS 8919MD862,
2001); Papa Wemba, Molokai (Real World, LC3098, 1998); Werra Son, Kibuisa Mpimpa: Operation
Dragon (CDJPS, 2001); JB Mpiana, TH Toujours humble (Sacem, n. d.); Extra-Musica, Bon Pied Bon
Look: Champion d’Afrique (Declic Communication, 1997); Wenge Musica Maison Mère, Solola Bien!
(CD JPS, 1999); Wenge BCBG, JB Mpiana Souverain (Simon Music-Sipe, n. d.); Koffi Olomide,
Attentat (Sonodisc, 1999), Tshala Muana, Malu (CDJPS, 2002); Zaiko Langa Langa, Eureka! (CD JPS
217, 2003); Werrason, À la queue leu-leu (CDJPS 234, 2003); Koffi Olomide, Affaire d’État (Next
Music/Sono, CDS 8979, 2003); Papa Wemba, Mzée Fulangenge (Sono, CDS 8836-SD30, s. d.).
7. See, for example, Kazadi wa Mukuna, “The origin of Zairean modern music: a socio-economic
aspect”, African Urban Studies, n° 5, 1979-1980, p. 31-39, and “The genesis of urban music in Zaire”,
African Music, vol. 7, n° 2, 1992, p. 72-84.
8. P. Ngandu Nkashama (dir.), L’Église des prophètes africains. Lettres de Bakatuasa Lubwe Wa Mvidi
Mukulu, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1991.
9. N. Hunt, Colonial Lexicon, Durham, Duke University Press, 1998.
10. See L. White, Speaking with Vampires, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000.
76 Cosmopolis : de la ville, de l’Afrique et du monde
Disciplining the body was accomplished through labour on the one hand,
and intensive techniques of caring for the self on the other. One such technique
was the deployment of elegance and self-stylization 11. The body, humiliated
and made ugly in the workplace or at the hands of a brutal colonial regime,
could acquire a new value and be rehabilitated through various arts of making
it beautiful, through masquerade, simulation, imitation and dissimulation.
In this context, appearances emerged as powerful tools and signifiers of
action. In urban centres, the body was introduced to the rudiments of colonial
bourgeois civility 12. In this context, a new culture of taste and leisure emerged 13:
a global culture with its own spaces. Bars (nganda) were a case in point. This
global culture produced its own activities, linked, among others, to the sex trade
concerned with flawless beauty and purity of form than with its power to
act as a sign system devised to free the imagination. It was a hybrid, a bastard
child, at heart. In the 1940s the Rumba arrived from Cuba. It came by way
of gramophone records and instruments such as the guitar, the accordion and
harmonica, brought by immigrant workers from West Africa, coastmen whose
music of choice was Highlife, a fusion of American Jazz, European and
Caribbean dance styles and folk music from West Africa. New dance steps in
transit from Loango (the Maringa, Polka, Tango, Waltz and Quadrille) were wed
to the Rumba’s beats and the songs of villages thither and yon. Following in
the wake of the Bolero, the two rhythm Cha-Cha-Cha, the Merenge, Pachanga,
Beguine and Mambo, these sounds and steps were rapidly adopted in
the main urban centers, as well as among traders and migrant workers in the
diamond and copper mines, on the railways and beyond.
The first major bands (Congo Rumba, Victoria Brazza, Jazz Bohême) were
created during the first half of the 20th century in Leopoldville, Brazzaville,
Pointe Noire and San Salvador. Some combined West African and European
musical practices. In the process, local musicians learned to play the violin, the
guitar, and a variety of brass and woodwind instruments. At a later phase,
these various instruments were adapted to traditional melodies. At this initial
stage, however, Caribbean and Latin American music were all the rage. This
called for the introduction of still other instruments – rhythm and lead guitars,
double basses, clarinets and percussive instruments such as conga drums,
maracas and claves.
For decades to come, Caribbean and Latin American music would inflect
the structure as well as the innovative and creative processes of the urban
Politique africaine
77 Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds
music scene in Congo. The Rumba proved a particularly rich source of inspi-
ration, spawning a wealth of stylistic variants, starting with the Rumba Boucher,
the Rumba Odemba and Rumba-Sukuma at the beginning of World War II,
through to the Rumba Kiri-Kiri and the Rumba-Sukusu of the 1980s. These
developments, in turn, were nurtured by the availability of rich and compatible
rhythmic formulas, dances steps and body movements (Agbwaya, Nzambele,
Ebongo), as well as a plethora of stringed instruments (njenje, kokolo, likembe)
and drums (patenge) from various regions of Congo 15.
The two principal Congolese bands of these early days, both founded by
Joseph Kabasele, African Jazz and OK Jazz, later headed by Luambo Makiadi
(best known as Franco), are positioned at the very confluence of these external
field of big band music, restructured ways of singing, integrated the tam-tam,
the electric guitar and wind instruments, classified repertoires and enhanced
the social status of musicians. Its trademark was a popular fusion of imported
and local music with a deliberate Latin flavour. Franco’s main contribution,
when he took over from Kabasele, lay in his use of indigenous rhythms and
folklore styles. Drawing on these, he introduced long stretches of purely
instrumental music – a technique Fela Anikulapo Kuti was to refine later in
his own drawn out, wordless stretches of saxophone, piano and bass guitar.
Franco also transformed the art of guitar-playing by adopting an aggressive
style which stood in marked contrast to Kabasele’s flow and the lyrical, idyllic
expansion of his melodies.
One of Franco’s early innovations was the incorporation into his pieces of
a distinctive short-long, upbeat-downbeat attack, followed by the reiteration
11. C. D. Gondola, “Dream and drama: the search for elegance among Congolese youth,” African Studies
Review, vol. 42, n° 1, 1999, p. 23-48.
12. See V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994, chap. 4.
13. P. Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1995.
14. E. Dorier-Apprill (dir.), Vivre à Brazzaville. Modernité et crise au quotidien, Paris, Karthala, 1998.
15. Kazadi wa Mukuna, 1980. The author cites such dances as the Mokonyonyon (of the Tetela ethnic
group) introduced in 1977 by the singer Papa Wemba, or Lita Bembo’s Ekonda Saccadé (originating
among the Mongo people), Empire Bakuba’s Kwasa-Kwasa (of the Kongo ethnic group) or T.P.O.K.
Jazz’s Mayeno (Bantandu people).
16. See S. Bemba, Cinquante Ans de musique du Congo-Zaïre, Paris, Présence africaine, 1984;
C. D. Gondola, “Musique moderne et identités citadines. Le cas du Congo-Zaïre”, Afrique contemporaine,
n° 168, 1983, December 1993, p. 125-168.
78 Cosmopolis : de la ville, de l’Afrique et du monde
of a single note from a dominant guitar. Important as well for the later devel-
opment of Congolese music were dissonant twinges he introduced in the first
half of a piece, followed in the second by chromatically tinged episodes of
rhythmic irregularity. Lyricism here became imbued with a brittle undercurrent,
a half-heartedness still heard in most contemporary Congolese productions.
Franco also brought into modern band music the high-register alto and falsetto
male voices that were common in traditional music and used the vibrato to
create an ornate electric guitar sound. Simultaneously, he introduced the
method of playing runs of “sixths” that has become yet another trademark
of the Congolese guitar style. This he combined with a grinding, metallic
sound which reproduced the resonance of a traditional zither. Finally, he
17. See G. Ewens, Congo Colossus: The Life and Legacy of Franco & OK Jazz, Norwich, Buku Press, 1994,
p. 94 ff.
18. See Kazadi wa Mukuna, “The hanging role of the guitar in the urban music of Zaïre”, The World
of Music, vol. 36, n° 2, 1994, p. 62-72.
19. Ibid., p. 68.
20. R. Devisch, “Frenzy, violence, and ethical renewal in Kinshasa”, Public Culture, vol. 7, n° 3, 1995,
p. 593-630, and “La violence à Kinshasa, ou l’institution en négatif”, Cahiers d’études africaines,
vol. 38, n° 150-152, 1998, p. 441-469.
21. P. Ngandu Nkashama, “Ivresse et vertige: les nouvelles danses des jeunes au Zaïre”, L’Afrique
littéraire et artistique, n° 51, n. d., p. 94-102.
80 Cosmopolis : de la ville, de l’Afrique et du monde
munication), and the hegemony of images. From this, extremely complex rela-
tionships arise. Words commonly reference a plurality of concepts. The things
they designate are multiple and their significations structurally ambivalent. The
same is true of images, be they drawn from TV series, videos or the work of
self-taught urban painters: intrinsically composite, they demonstrate an extraor-
dinary capacity not only to represent, but also to tell a story and, simultane-
ously, to make it happen 22.
Music renders visible the multiple juxtapositions that shape daily life. In the
process, it becomes an “archive”, a “relic”, of human experience on the streets
of Congo’s cities. Plays on length and pitch in Lingala, Kinshasa’s lingua
franca and the language in which most music is sung, foster an intimate rela-
guages, local and foreign. Borrowings and neologisms are a constant, signifying
an experience that is constantly changing, accounting for the instability of
reality and its dependence on the sound that domesticates it. Such domesti-
cation is possible only through a combination of image and text, words, sounds
and movements, the sonoric, the visual and the theatrical. To tell the story of
life in Congo’s cities, music calls on and produces heterogeneities of repre-
sentation. Here as in theatre and painting, signification takes place through the
juxtaposition of words, colours and sounds, an alchemy in which each element
both retains and loses a part of its intrinsic power. The end product, writes
Bogumil Jewsiewicki, “is more of a kaleidoscope than a fixed image 23”.
22. See B. Jewsiewicki, “Vers une impossible représentation de soi”, Les Temps modernes, n° 620-621,
2002, p. 101-105.
23. Ibid.
24. On the notion of abjection, see J. Kristeva, Pouvoir de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection, Paris, Le Seuil, 1980.
25. See the special volume edited by J.-L. Grootaers, Mort et maladie au Zaïre, Cahiers africains, vol. 8,
n° 31-32, 1998.
26. See L. Joris, La Danse du léopard, Paris, Actes Sud, 2002.
27. See F. De Boeck, “Le ‘deuxième monde’ et les ‘enfants-sorciers’ en République démocratique du
Congo,” Politique africaine, n° 80, december 2000, p. 32-57.
28. Compare with the limited range of sounds that characterizes the convention of Western art music.
It can be argued that until the development of electronic sound generators, this range remained
confined within a relatively small compass. See S. Shaw-Miller, Visible Deeds of Music: Art and Music
from Wagner to Cage, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002, p. 218.
29. On the theme of the “scream” in contemporary African thought, see J.-M. Ela, Le Cri de l’homme
africain, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1980.
30. I have been inspired, here, by G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon…, op. cit., p. 28-61.
31. On the subject of cruelty, see A. Artaud, Le Théâtre et son double, Paris, Gallimard, 1964.
32. In another context, see T. Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America,
London, Wesleyan University Press, 1994; J. Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
82 Cosmopolis : de la ville, de l’Afrique et du monde
too are noisome. “There is always the scent of food emanating from cooking-
pots or from a nganda, the smell of a car’s exhaust pipe or a sewage pipe, or
the smell of urine against a wall or a tree bearing a ‘Do not urinate’ sign 33.”
Congolese musical works dip abundantly into this culture of noise. Any and
all sounds are used, if not as a musical sound, then at least to create music. Often,
musical sounds are based on imitations of natural sounds. Onomatopeas
abound. Noise is used to modify sound understood as pure form. This does
not make music heard or composed any less instrumentally rich – quite the
contrary, as evidenced by the virtuosity of guitar riffs and the improvisational
flourishes they and other instruments bring forth. Noise adds to rhythm
spasmodic eruptions that break the stream of slow melodies. Purity of form
Any event involving sound is called music if it involves a certain surplus force.
At particular moments, carried by the imagination to the brink of intoxication,
the musical phrase takes the form of a volcanic effusion. Mixed with words,
soaring bursts from guitar, screams, percussion and melody, it is transformed
into an image of the very gates of hell – ear-punching frenzy, groping disorder
and energy. Or instead it becomes an effusion of tears, provoked by the
haunting memory of mourning or by jubilation and the unchained outpouring
of emotion. And so it reflects as much the hollow tolling of reality as the
pending fulfilment of still awaited promise, an interweaving of myriad figures,
the beautiful and the ugly intertwined in the image of life itself.
Dimensions of Form
Rhythm
The rhythm of Congolese music draws on that of poetry, of religious song
and prayer and of autochthonous dance. It is produced not only by musical
instruments, but by gesture and voice as well. Rhythm imprints itself on the
dancer’s body, infusing it with pulsating waves of energy. Polyrhythm is the
dominant model: bursts and sequences that are at times regular and others
intermittent. Variations between increasing and decreasing energy, and
movement upwards to a peak and then back down again, are characteristic of
most musical pieces. The energetic tension is enhanced by repetition of a same
musical phrase, over and over, by the solo or bass guitar, or by ramping up
pressure through a series of screams. Sounds, syllables and phrases, all the
while, are manipulated with increasing momentum.
Politique africaine
83 Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds
Dance
Performance is integral to the experience thus unleashed. Consider the
steps women dance to the rhythm known as Soukous 36. There are several
such steps, each with a different name 37. The aesthetic of the names is in itself
revealing. Tourniquet, for instance. The word references a set of movements
around a circle with clearly defined contours. The circle is the dancer’s body:
all movement is centred on the body itself, or, more precisely, in certain parts
of the body. The dancer lightly flexes her knees, fixes her buttocks, arches her
back and begins to turn her hips. She becomes the curves of her body, sensual,
provocative. The hips act as a chassis for the whole body, yet, like the buttocks,
remain flexible. The other parts of her frame follow, moving from this central
pivot. To dance the tourniquet then basically means to rotate the pelvis. But this
But it also includes a more agile movement of the feet, thus combining fixed
and mobile positions.
Other dance steps associated with Soukous are allumez le feu (“light the
fire”) and enfoncez le clou (“hammer in the nail”). In the first, the dancer strikes
an imaginary match. The match does not light, however, and she tries again,
fanning the flame (moto in Lingala) with undulating movements of the hips
until the fire finally ignites. But it is hot. She tries to extinguish it in a jerky move-
ment, in which she moves her buttocks and legs like a fan. Enfoncez le clou is
similar. The dancer holds an imaginary gun. She squats on her haunches and
moves from side to side, as if hammering in nails with her hips. Other dance
steps include la feinte (“the trick” or “feint”), in which the dancer pretends to
slip, again giving the impression of falling. In extremis, she recovers and again
pulsates her buttocks, just like an accordion.
Dance steps associated with the musical genre Ndombolo also derive from
a demarcation of the hips in relation to the rest of the body. One difference with
Soukous is that the body is gradually reduced to a squatting position, then
raised again. At given points, the dancer turns first to the right and then to the
left, then moves forwards and back, at a pace dictated by the rhythm of the
music. The dancer takes up a firing position as if aiming a gun. She then lifts
her heels and marches, all the while moving gradually into a squat, then turns,
rises again, and suddenly breaks the rhythm, turning abruptly to the left or right,
front or back. Drawing on this model, numerous steps have been devised:
hold-up; no way; whiplash; clear off; kung-fu style; bonda style; sequence emotion;
air-traffic controller, to name but a few.
Congolese dance is a carnal endeavour. Against platonizing ideologies that
Politique africaine
85 Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds
would cast the body as a prison for the soul, dancing here is a celebration of
the flesh. The body is absolute flux and music is invested with the power to
enter it, penetrating it to the core. Music produces psychic, somatic and emo-
tional effects on the organs and limbs, subjecting them to the rule of waste.
Music “breaks bones” (buka mikuwa) and “hurls bodies” (bwakanka nzoto),
causing women and men to “behave like snakes” (na zali ko bina lokolo nioka).
The body is not so much “harmed” as it becomes a site of transgression, the
locus of a blurring – between the transcendental and the empirical, the material
and the psychic. In addition to existing as flux, the body is also a force-field
of contrasts. Music engages in a struggle with these forces. Never simply
movement of the human form, Congolese dance embodies something that
the extreme: hardly any high-pitched trumpets ringing out, building crescendos
towards a moment of triumph, as in Hugh Masekela’s music; no brass instru-
ments with thundering resonance; no saxophone, as in the styles of Manu
Dibango or Fela Anikulapo Kuti; rarely any swaying rhythm, as in the late
Franco’s Rumba. Instead, orchestral clangings evoke the confusion of life.
Interruptions are fast and frequent. Furious dancing, especially by women, is
interspersed, here and there, with melancholic vocal phrases, the sombre notes
of a guitar, and, now and then, flowing sequences of elegant sound.
Everything suggests a relationship with the body made up of derision and
excess, tamed fear, rage, blows and insults, extreme parody, all at the centre
of an aggressive mass of sound, interrupted from time to time by a guitar
sequence. Still, for all its torrid heat, Ndombolo aims to transform the body
into a figure of life. With ugliness and abjection all about, the goal of the noise
is to compel the body to escape from itself. To allow for this exit, the music turns
the hips and buttocks into a pendulum. The flexed posterior becomes a
parachute, then a vacuum-cleaner and a suction pad. It is transformed into
a semi-autonomous force, in touch at every shift and sway with the world
of sensation 38.
The other path to serenity is through listening to the music itself, its melodies,
rhythms, tensions, and lyrics. The very notion of serenity assumes that each
subject is an ego endowed with the ability to act on its own body. Subjects can
dispossess or rid themselves of their bodies, even if only temporarily. Thus,
38. See G. Rouget, La Musique et la transe. Essai d’une théorie générale des relations de la musique et de la
possession, Paris, Gallimard, 1990.
86 Cosmopolis : de la ville, de l’Afrique et du monde
in Congolese urban dance, the opposition between body and mind becomes
blurred. Dance emerges as the site of a “dual life”, wherein all truth, all beauty
has multiple meanings. In a sociological context where misery, anguish, trauma,
terror and horror are not only daily realities, but also constitute the state of the
subject, dancing becomes a way of journeying outside the self.
scream of an atalaku: “Atalaku, Zekete: Regardez ses fesses. Voyez comment elles
bougent!” [Watch her buttocks, see how they move!]
A number of other Congolese bands followed suit. The scream became a
central feature of music produced in cities across Congo. It was developed as
a technique and underwent significant transformations over time at the hands
of charismatic atalakus – men by the name of Dolce Parabolic, Bill Clinton, Tutu
Kalondji, Celeo Scram (Animation Maison-Mère); Al-Patchino (Animateur Nouvelle
Ecriture); Robert Ekokota (Wenge Musica); and Theo Mbala Ambassadeur.
Atalakus draw their names from multiple universes: the world of medicine
(Gentamycine, Animation Wenge BCBG); of military operations in the age of
globalization (Djuna Mumbafu Colonel Bradi, Animation Delta Force); high-tech
communications technology associated with secret operations (3615 Code
Niawu); or Egyptian mythology (Shora Pharaon). Each atalaku strives to forge
his own style, but all make use of folklore. They endeavour to coordinate
screams and musical instruments to produce an effect of calling out and to the
dancers, harmonizing sound and movement: the atalaku screams, instructing
the dancers as to what step should be performed.
Screams infuse the musical performance with a torrid and turbulent
atmosphere. “The words, the phrases, in crude flights of oratory, burst forth
intuitively from the mouth of the atalaku like lava from a volcano”, writes one
commentator. The atalaku cheers on the dancers and incites them to further
passion, creativity and technical brilliance… They embellish the dance, loading
it with fantasies and trills of sound, raising it ever closer to the pinnacle. The
rhythm of the percussion has no sooner faded than it is replaced by the hys-
terical animation of the atalaku. This time, the atalaku is accompanied by a
Politique africaine
87 Variations on the Beautiful in the Congolese World of Sounds
brisk and lively chorus, and constructs the phraseology of the screams around
a theme parallel to the main text of the work, riding on the back of the dancer’s
skill in a mysterious journey between gesture and being.
“Baby, do you see how this girl rolls her hips? I can hardly contain myself, look, but look, look…”
“My brother, we have to collect the crumbs they have left us. Let’s go, come, if you refuse,
what shall we eat?”
“Can you feel it, this emotion? Let us destroy the elixir, right now”.
“My young brother, I cry every day, because where are we going to live? In Europe they
want no more of us, and here at home, there is nothing but trouble”.
“Comrade in exile, why do you stab me in the back? Should we distrust our childhood
friends?”
That the technique of screams was introduced in the 1980s is not coincidental.
The 1980s in Congo were a time of multiple crises. Music, in this context, was
transformed into an instrument of social revolt. Revolt, however, always went
hand in hand with uneasy compromise. A number of musicians thus found
themselves singing the praises of “Saddam Hussein”, the nickname given to
Mobutu Sesse Seko’s son, who was the patron of various bands in Kinshasa.
But the music nevertheless remained an expression of hate. Instruments
– drums, beating faster, synthesisers, bass guitars – took to mimicking the
winds of destruction howling through the country. Sounds of suffering and
social fragmentation echoed through the music. The spectacle of bloodshed
and dismemberment that was Congo became the spectacle of the song. Such
is the source of the screams, cries, moans and groans – all forms of utterance
that resist language – which litter Congolese music at the close of 20th century.
And so the scream, like melody, rhythm and percussion, becomes a bridge
between pain and its expression as language 39.
39. See E. Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford, Oxford University
Press, 1987.
88 Cosmopolis : de la ville, de l’Afrique et du monde
guitars and voices. The musicians are dressed in black and white uniforms.
Werrason, wearing a leather shirt and trousers, appears in the middle of a
song. The solo guitar is unobtrusive, leaving space for the lead musician’s
voice, which in turn alternates with the voices of a chorus. The song proceeds
as if in a Christian litany. The names of artists, both dead and alive, are called
out, accompanied by faint gestures, in deep communion with a tradition
hailing back to Franco. The drums are almost inaudible. Now and then, the
guitar seeks to take the lead, but half-heartedly, and is immediately drowned
out by the singing.
Suddenly a group of women appear dressed like soldiers. They sport
striking hairdos; some are redheads, others blondes. They are wearing a variety
the rump is thrust violently backwards, then projected forward and back
again.
They feel for their testicles, black bodies swamped in sweat, gleaming
under the effect of the lights and the vivid colours. They pretend to tickle,
then to caress themselves, then halt and let out a deep sigh. The buttocks are
held in a position enhanced by the dancer’s plump flesh. They pretend to
introduce the penis into an imaginary vagina and then withdraw. They perform
somersaults. They place their feet in imaginary stirrups and mount, before
setting off at a fast trot. They wring their hands in joy. Then, as in a saddle, they
sit bolt upright, closing the legs and enjoying an intense, sensual friction.
They twist and turn like satisfied grass snakes, letting out cries as they thrust
unconscious desires. It keeps all the senses on high alert. Images and scenes
that are the stuff of life itself scroll past behind the spectacle. Everything with
a rhythm is appropriated by the sound – a bird’s song, the staccato of a
submachine gun, their cadences linked and superimposed. The tone changes
constantly. Each construction is temporary.
The body remains at the centre of the performance. Certain parts of the
body, more than others, play a predominant role as the turmoil of sound
increases. The dancers retreat further into themselves, seeking to become one
with the sound. At the same time, the dance distances them from themselves;
their existence onstage takes over: they are no longer who they are in “real”
life. The dance takes place at the very centre of this alienation from the self.
40. C. Accaoui writes: “Music is above all an art of time: It shapes time and time shapes music.” See
C. Accaoui, Le Temps musical, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 2001, p. 8.
90 Cosmopolis : de la ville, de l’Afrique et du monde
41. F. Nietzsche, La Philosophie à l’époque tragique des Grecs, Paris, Gallimard, 1989, p. 181-184.
42. F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, full cite in English.