“Distance is a relative notion”, says the chorus. I think it goes pretty well to describe Nadia and Saeed’s relationship: While they were separated because of the war in their country, they shared an intense intimacy thanks to their phones; once they share their daily life together after “moving”, this intimacy slowly but certainly goes apart…
Also, I’m questioning about the video clip. I love this song, but I just discovered the video.
About that, maybe I should mention a “TW blood” for the end of the video (after 3mn).
I’m questioning because if on one hand, I find it very beautiful, with a great direction, on the other hand, the thing is that it’s showing a violent gang of young Asian people in Saigon, whereas none member of the band is Asian, neither the directors… So yeah, the producer and the shooting team are Asian, but you know…
It’s probably an important question to ask why a band made of French White guys present a video aestheticizing violence in another country, especially a former French colony.
I came across this song “Black Rage,” by Lauryn Hill. It encompasses the themes and hardships of Pao, which includes, rage, uprising, crumbling economics, and the pain of progression in an unjust world.
I chose this song for, “Exit West” because of the love and resolution that exists within the song. I do not think Saeed and Nadia’s situation is anything magical, but I guess there are aspects to the story that are magical. The doors, to the different places and the magic in their love as they suffer together. At the end of the novel we see Nadia and Saeed meeting with each other as previous lovers and fighters.
I chose this song because of the lyrics and the sound it produces. The lyrics tell a story of longing, love, and distance. This is fitting for the Princess and Matthew’s love story. He spends his time during the novel thinking, dreaming, wishing and longing for the Princess to come back. He even goes through a phase of forgetting/ denial which reminds me of the line “and you deny yourself,” in the song fruit. The sound produced is futuristic maybe even playing on
the “Orientalist.” Accompanied with a basic beat that resembles drums.
“Chan Chan” is a bit of a circular love song. Not quite a ballad, instead occupying a liminal musical movement—though it does move. The song opens with a throaty guitar—a cuatro—and right away the singers circle: they go from the town of Alto Cedro to Marcané, arrive at Cueto and go on to Mayarí and then they are in the loop, circling, swaying, swinging back Alto Cedro, bringing the listener with them to Mayarí again.
Buena Vista Social Club should not be here. But they are. The collaboration which launched them nearly did not happen and the group (despite the success of their eponymous album they are hardly a band as we would conceive) was a get-together of sorts. Buena Vista Social Club is a relic, not just in their sound (which is actually what made them so huge), but each band member is as well. After the Cuban Revolution ended in 1959, Fidel Castro promptly had Cuba’s music venues and clubs closed. The men had each had their Hey Day in the fifties. They are relics.
The clubs weren’t the only thing in decline and retreating into history as Communism was ushered into Cuba. According to Kathleen Lopez, author of Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History, “[a]fter the Communist revolution, many middle-class Chinese Cubans fled the country, along with other Cubans. Some moved to Cuban-American enclaves in Bergen County [New Jersey], where they still live. But in Cuba, there are so few Chinese-Cubans many refer to “a Chinatown without Chinese.”[1] It was the shared plight of the musicians who comprise Buena Vista Social Club.
There is irony in the fate of post-revolution life. The island-nation’s Chinese aided in the support of the revolution, and the suddenly-hushed sounds of the island’s musical culture was carried across the Caribbean, informing not just the myriad regional musics, but global as well—yet both were disappearing. Still, there is “Chan Chan,” and the interpolation that draws on “the feeling of stepping into a world on the verge of disappearance,” of bringing back some of its whispered historicism is a mystic gesture of sonic archeology.[2]
“Chan Chan” is circular…it ends right where it starts, that throaty cuatro and the wandering from Alto Cedro to Mayarí. In Tagalog mythology, by the way, Mayarí is “the goddess of Combat, War, Revolution, Hunt, Weaponry, Beauty, Strength, Moon and Night.”[3] Whether moon or revolution, history follows and it brings us back to face it…to hear its whispers on us today.
“‘I want to get up every morning and know that I’m going to go do something honest. I want to stop chocking on my food because I know where the money come from. I want to stop worrying every time somebody knock at the fate that maybe it the police that come to take you or Zhang or the whole lot of us to lock us up in some stinking Jamaican jail and never again see the light of day. I want to stop thinking that maybe one day the blacks going raise up and just come murder every one of us as we sleeping in our bed at night. The Indians, the Chinese, the Jews, the Whites.”
Pao is narrated from a rather interesting perspective. It is a book written in English, but narrated by a Chinese immigrant who lives in Jamaica. Because of the “language barrier”, a lot of the English in the story is broken or not completely grammatically correct. This is showcased in a majority of the book from subjects and verbs not agreeing to runoff sentences to possession not being acknowledged. This is no-one in the books fault, as they all are trying to communicate to the best of their abilities and knowledge; however, not being able to fully articulate due to “language barriers” may make it difficult to get a point across.
In this passage, Xiuquan uses parallelism and repetition to showcase his strong beliefs. He is trying to get a specific and meaningful (to him) point across, and this comes off very strongly through his word choice. In the passage, the repeated use of “I want to” is used over and over again and this allows the showcasing of the strong passion that Xiuquan has on this topic. Rather than using a lot of different words and lengthy sentences to portray his point, the simplest use of repetition allows the reader the same effect. The use of parallelism also allows for Xiuquan to continue to showcase this strong emotion and feeling, shown through his use of “I want to” and when he names the different races, “The Indians, the Chinese, the Jews, the Whites”. He is achieving a passionate connotation that might otherwise be very difficult to showcase tot he audience considering his diction and vocabulary.
This song’s focus on homemaking and the necessity of coming back home reminded me of Miu’s insistence she move back to Jamaica as well as Pao’s deep feeling that Karl and Miu should remain with him. This stanza is particularly emblematic of this: “‘Cause now, after it all, I’m just standing here to call/ My dad, my dad I feel so broke up, I wanna go home/ No, I feel so broke up, I wanna go home.”
By the mid 1950s Jamaica was on the up, especially because they discover the bauxite. But the big profit was going to the overseas aluminum companies who invested in the mining, because up to 1954 Busta’s government let the bauxite ore be shipped out for 10 cents a ton. When the government change in 1955, Norman Manley negotiate a new royalty and tax at $1.40 a ton. It was a pittance when you compare it to the profit the aluminum companies was making but still Jamaica was earning and people had jobs and training. It was good but it didn’t stop me from noticing that the whole thing was just like the same way the plantation profits gone to England back in the old days. It was just like a new version of that, including them passing some laws to secure the special rights and status of the foreigners to make them feel more confident, that is how they put it anyway. (Young 89)
This passage contextualizes Chapter 14, showing the reader the critical ways in which Jamaica was changing. The winds of neoliberalism and neocolonialism were again catching up to Jamaica, turning the island nation economy into one dominated by the drive for profit and captured by foreign powers. Young uses a metaphor and italicization to indicate the severity of these issues that would envelope Jamaica and change the direction of Pao’s life. First, Young compares 1950s Jamaica to the plantations “in the old days.” Specifically, the plantation profits went to England. The historical context behind this metaphor is extremely deep, given that Jamaica’s history is marred by its inability to gain independence against a backdrop of forced settlement, slave importation, and resource extraction by the British. The thought of bauxite mining transported back to the “Old World” of the British empire conjures many of the same ideas of colonialism, indicating that the narrative has changed little.
Second, the italicization in the last sentence of the paragraph indicates Pao’s understanding that the “laws to secure special rights and status of the foreigners” were not just to make the foreigners feel more confident. This typeface conveys to the reader simply how ridiculous that laws that protected the rights of foreigners were being passed while Jamaicans were being hurt in a variety of ways by colonialism and everyday interpersonal violence. Both of these literary devices are an example of well-researched writing that brings the historical context of Afro-Asian intimacies in Jamaica to life.
I chose this song due to the portion of the book when Pao is offering assistance to several people: in particular, the part where he is giving assistance to the young girl who got pregnant by one of the soldiers. The lyrics of the song relate possibly to the feelings of the different people he’s tried to help and also himself.
This article appeared on my Facebook Timeline, and I thought it was a pretty good news, especially regarding what Jota Mombaça tells about Anti-Blackness in Brazil for example.
For sure that doesn’t resolve everything, nor erases violence and systemic racism, but I guess that’s part of a good path in terms of “present Futurity”…
