Bronx Griot: The Jali Tradition in NYC

Mar 19, 2016 @ 7:00pm

A screening of Finah Misa Kule with a Q&A by Kewulay Kamara and Steve Zeitlin. Performances by Kankaba Kanuteh and Badenya featuring Kewulay Kamara, Sa- lieu Suso, Abdoulaye Diabate, Mangue Syllla and Kalie Kamara, representing the jail tradition of Sierra Leone, the Gambia and Mali.

Last month at the BMHC we paid tribute to the blues music of Rev. Gary Davis, who played the Piedmont guitar picking style from the Carolinas. It was fitting because the music we feature this month reflects the origins of that genre, a style based on stringed instruments with roots in Africa. While many are familiar with the rhythmic drumming sources of American music from West Africa, we don’t commonly get to hear about the origins of stringed instruments from there as well. In fact, during the 200 years of the slave trade to the United States, almost one-third of the enslaved Africans brought here were Muslim. The Muslim regions in Africa used various types of stringed instruments in their music, which the American slaveowners allowed as they were similar to European instruments.1 In fact, the banjo we associate with U.S. folk music is a lute-type instrument of the African diaspora, and it is descended from several related traditional African plucked lutes among them, the banjar. The banjo is a New World hybrid, a part of the creolization process of other African social, artistic and religious survivals in the Americas. It is a distant cousin of the kora, the 21-stringed harp/lute you will see and hear at today’s performance.
The musicians performing here tonight are known as either jali (poet-musician) or finah (poet-historian). They are commonly called griots, though this is a misnomer as it comes from the French colonists of the region. In Mandeng society (a family of ethnic groups who speak Mande languages including Mandinka, Bambara and Kuranko among others), the jalilu and finahlu (plural) are a heredity musical caste with great status, known as “people of the word.” The Mali empire had a developed system of keeping records and history in which the jalilu played a key role: they were charged with matters pertaining to verbal arts, memory, resolution of conflicts, settling disputes, separating rumors from history.2 The jali Mamadou Louyate describes their role: “We are the repositories. . . Without us the names of kings would vanish into oblivion. We are the memory of mankind. By the spoken word we bring to life the deeds and exploits of kings for younger generations.”3 They would sing and recite praise poems of individuals in the community. Some of these poems were very long, for example, the epic of the culture hero, Son Jara (or Sunjata Keita), the 13th century hunter-warrior who founded the Malian empire, is 3,000 lines long. Praise poems situate a person within a larger community. The jail Kewulay Kamara explains why they are significant to tell someone’s story:
All of a sudden you are part of something much much greater, the land that you come from, the people that you come from. A child to be praised may be just a little boy—but pointing out who his father is and who his grandfather is in a praise poem elevates that person. It’s not saying that a person has made a lot of money or that he is the President of the United States, but that he is a father, or a mother or a grandfather or a grandmother—and that’s important enough. That elevates a person.4
The musicians who will perform for this program are from Sierra Leone, Gambia, Guinea and Mali, communities that since the 1980s have been growing in the Bronx. The Gambian community, in particular, has established a significant presence especially in the neighborhood around the BMHC one can find many Gambian-owned businesses and the mutual–aid organization, the Gambian Society of New York.