19

ABDO-JULIEN

ONE, TWO, THREE, WOWWWWW! We're the Mau-Mau, a group of young musicians in love with whirling, turbulent music from the depths of the desert. Blues, guux,* gabay,* and geeraar.* Wowwwwwwwww! We left the city to collect all the sonorities, the overflowing saps, sounds, singularities, songs, noises, tempests, and myths of the country. We went still farther. Alternative rock, reggae, rai, rap, ragamuffin, ska, and sega music hold no secrets for our muddy, moody, and even booted feet. We're the generation who sucked Jamaican music with the milk of our bottle; our birth coincides with the death of the long-haired prince who made the island of the Rastas world-famous. We seek the hypnosis of rhythm, language, song. The art of jubilation. You either are a revolutionary or you'll never be one, said old Victor Hugo. Our greatest reward is when we succeed in making old bodies of forty reel, like our parents, by playing them a piece of salsa, yesterday's pachanga, or a wild rumba, reminding them of the time when they were students abroad. Their tired eyes stare at the corner of a street, a sea horizon, and the unknown that lies at the end of it, a slice of life between Saint-Germain and Montparnasse. Thus we mix generations together—no small deal in this country of ours. We delve far, far down into the mysteries of the past; we bring up yesterday's ashes, delaying tactics and adjournments again and again. We often play stuff from the sixties, seventies, and eighties, old Cuban hits, the Haitians Coupé Cloué, Francis Bebey, or the latest Nat King Cole.

Only yesterday, we met a young Frenchman doing his military service by working abroad in the Coopération, a Corsican from Porto-Vecchio he had us know, who intends to introduce us to the marvels of jazz. With jazz, through the intermediary of a beautiful Steinway piano, he claims we're achieving the democratic ideal so lacking in this country. That jazz ideal is quite simply the emergence of a full, whole individual voice in the heart of a collective voice. We applauded him loudly; we're giving ourselves a few more years to taste and restore the marvels the maestros of jazz have accumulated.

In this cloistered country, we know how, yes! we know how to listen to the melodies of the sea, drink the light, open wide our hearts and eardrums. The goal of all that is to wash the intrigues, rumors, and other nauseating machinations from our fans’ ears. We know how to play the kind of music that dives double-quick into heady bass notes, slips into the meanders of our lead singer's voice, ricochets off the volcanic hills, crosses the Formica seas, dances on the edge of the horizon accompanied by an Affar flute, runs through all of this crushed land, sobs sometimes, alternates onomatopoeias and meaningful lines—putting off till tomorrow the dialectic between business and art—pleases the ear, blurs the eye, and transforms faces to reaffirm spiritual joy through song. One day soon we will succeed in fulfilling our dream: to develop a musical preface to this country in gestation, to herald the time when brand-new knowledge will suddenly burst into bloom. Somehow build a community rooted in the back country of our birth, something like a Rasta retreat camp, an anarchist phalanstery of the kind that existed in 1936 Spain, a pioneer kibbutz, a camp of Zapatistas, a Sufi hermitage, a bivouac under the stars, a Robinson Crusoe island, a cybercafe for immigrants connected to the old country, an Abyssinian monastery like the one near Lalibela, a kraal of Zulu warriors. In short, something unimaginable in the country of our fathers. We will live as rebels, not far from the muffled sound of arms because of this state of neither war nor peace, neither crime nor punishment, neither head nor tail. Perhaps you think we're going off the deep end and abandoning our roots. You are quite mistaken: we're the first band—and the only one to this day—to sing in every language of this place at the same time, and even in the same song, the same breath. We are condemned to bring together all the daughters and sons of Adam, to shed the water of our own sweat to taste the sweat of others, to trade our tears, our saliva, and our rising sap. To unstrap the packsaddle of ignorance that hobbles our fellow countrymen. Believe it or not, we're on the right path, even if it is full of stones. In every village, from north to south and east to west, we're at home everywhere, welcomed warmly everywhere, at ease everywhere, like those iguanas taking the morning sun. As it was in the first days of independence. Our emblem is the tortoise with its repulsive face and age-old wisdom, in contrast to the indolence and emptiness of man. We take over old tunes from history books and make them ours and new again, brilliant and shiny like a four-wheel drive Pajero loaded with options imported from Saudi Arabia. We sample pieces from colonial memory, like this poem from a bard who's both French and Uruguayan:

In Djibouti it's so hot,
Metallic, bitter, brutal,
They grow palm trees of metal
The others die on the spot.

You sit beneath the scrap iron
While, grinding in the desert breeze
They pile up to your very knees,
the iron filings.

But under palms that sound like trains
Luckily, inside your brain
You're free to fantasize
A trip worldwide.

To think we nearly called ourselves Hadji Dideh, from the name of the man who signed the agreement with the French when they wanted to settle on this coast! Mau-Mau, that name down from Mount Kilimanjaro, was ideal. Two birds with one stone. First of all we can take it easy, no one's going to say we're pro-Walal, pro-Wadag, or who knows what kind of crap they can come up with. Second, it's a fighter's name, inspired by the spirits of the Kenyan forest. An anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, Third Worldist warrior, and Pan-African to boot. It's revolutionary. Basta. No pasaran. It's Rasta, see. We can sing with the great I Jah Man “I Man a Warrior.” Go, youth! Avanti la musica.

The Théâtre des Salines, which was born well before I was, has the feel of an amphitheater with its stage almost square and its terraced rows of seats looking out on the port. They used to show the films of Laurel and Hardy, the adventures of Charlie Chaplin (and so a whole bunch of neighborhood kids were nicknamed Charlie either because of their duck walk or their dreamy look, and I do know a few), and films about the exploits of Pelé (the same goes for the nickname of guys who were really good with a soccer ball). Children of the poor who'd been ignored by the Republic also got their education there, and they found nothing better to do than jump the wall and infuriate the three or four policemen sent after them from the barracks. Down below are the famous salt fields that gave the theater its name, but alas alas the salt miners of the Territory who used to break their backs for a slave's salary disappeared after the parent company, Les Salins du Midi, decided to consolidate in the south of France. A neighborhood with clean housing, Einguela, was built toward the turn of the seventies over a large part of the once muddy terrain abandoned by the company from Marseilles. The capital grew considerably larger during those years, and all the empty spaces, all the oasis-like hollows, all the places in cemeteries where dusty ancestors were still lying, all the crossroads where caravans were used to kneeling got covered with cement and lampposts. Now the eyes of the city are like moving seaweed. The Théâtre des Salines is where we play for the working people of the neighborhoods.