on I chose this song because Rihanna is from the Caribbean (Barbados) and this song has a heavy Caribbean influence to it. The video was shot in Jamaica and I think a lot of the lyrics combined with the video kind of helped me visualize a bit of what the setting of Pao might look like because I’ve never been to Jamaica before and don’t think this video portrays “tourist Jamaica”, but more so what the books we’ve been reading would be referencing.
on I’ve no way of asking Nenes what the inspiration was—or the decision, as it were—to come to Bob Marley & The Wailer’s seminal hit “No Woman, No Cry” and remake it. It’s been done before, with some success I would say. The Fugees pulled it off and given both the Caribbean affinity and collective experiences of the group, the remake made sense.
Too, there is the question of ownership. “Ownership” as in rendering the song as if there’d been no predecessor, making it ‘yours’ even as the nod is made to this being a return to a place before the current rendering. The Fugees pulled that off. Wyclef took artistic liberty and, instead of Bob Marley’s looking out from the government yard at Trenchtown “observing the hypocrites as they mingle with the good people [they] meet,” Wyclef rasps about “observing the crookedness as it mingled with the good people [he’d] meet.” There is also the moment when Marley’s confession that his “fear is [his] only courage” becomes Wyclef’s “drinks [his] only remedy,” and both are responding to the immediacy of their predicaments, each twenty years removed from the others’. Subtle turns of phrase yes, but only two among others that make The Fugees’ version worth pouring out a little liquor with.
Still…the Nenes version. I asked someone once about what inspired her to take on a monumental translation project and she said it was the wish that she had “written the original.” And maybe in that wish is the matter of ownership—of a piece of music speaking so intimately to the listener that when they sang it (be it along with the radio or in a dark studio booth), what was coming out was not another artist’s pain, but their own. In this, I can hear The Pagoda’s Lowe singing a likewise personal version of “No Woman No Cry.” Singing about the hypocrites even as some of them mingled with the good people trying to put the fire out in his shop.
Maybe though there isn’t even a wish for having “written the original.” Maybe it’s the initial intimacy and the thank you that comes from having finally been given the words that we have choked on silently. And maybe it’s not ownership that happens in the reiteration but, instead, a chorus, a singing in unison about a shared experience and a collective trauma. Maybe this is the thing about Afro Asia, that there need not be the frenzied embattlement, the cultural reproach but, instead, the knowing that the wrongs were communal and that “in this great future you can’t forget your past,” so it is render as it’s been experienced: a trauma we shared that echoes, rings in a history more intimate than we often dare acknowledge. And, sometimes, that acknowledgement, that concession can carry us through. Sometimes.