The Drum Speaks
In John Akomfrah’s Handsworth Songs (1986), a docu-collage of riots against police repression in the Handsworth District of England, Akomfrah stitches together attempts to maintain the quotidian amidst racial and ethnic strife. One of these scenes captures a dance hall rumbling with Vivian Jones’s reggae tune, Flash It & Gwan. Akomfrah cuts between dreary overpoliced streets and smoky interiors where dancers sputter like hot oil. The music is spun by dub reggae luminary Jah Shaka, who stands votive at his sound system.
When interviewed about his craft, Shaka would wax philosophical on the geographic resonances of reggae music. “The drum speaks”, he said, resounding across landscapes, oceans, and inevitably, borders. I couldn’t help but think of these words at a music festival in France last summer when me and a friend happened upon a DJ spinning reggae tracks. My friend would later tell me that her love for reggae music began in Cameroon where the atmosphere had untangled its mystery. It was hard to envision something similar happening in a crowd of mostly white and barefoot listeners, but France, along with Cameroon, the U.K., and elsewhere, are all fitting locations for a genre scarred by displacement.
Tracing the arc of these ruptures entails drawing a path from Africa to the Caribbean, eventually careening upwards to the U.K. What this constellation charts is a lineage afflicted by the inertia of forced and voluntary migration. In Franco Rosso’s Babylon (1980), the director channels this inertia through the movie’s British-Jamaican protagonist, Blue. The viewer watches Blue slough off jobs, friends, lovers, the police, and eventually his family, as he endures the virulent racism and xenophobia of Thatcher-era London. It’s ultimately through reggae and through finding community in music halls that he acquires a sense of sovereignty and the moral resolve to continue living.
This longing to be grounded similarly reveals itself in the music’s pulse. Explaining his technical prowess, Shaka spoke of the importance of cultivating a deep and “earthy” sound, evoking something tangible enough to moor yourself to. Other videos of Shaka at work, show him calibrating this sound, maintaining a steady pulse that burrows into its listeners.
The idea that Black music can offer an intervention to displacement is a far from unique one. To jazz musician and composer Sun Ra, sound too had transportive qualities. His afrofuturist musical, Space is the Place, begins with the musician wandering through the flora of a distant world and musing on its acoustics. “We can teleport the whole planet here through music”, Ra suggests. A story written by his frequent collaborator Henry Dumas, “Will The Circle Be Unbroken?”, riffs on this idea by giving its protagonist an “afro horn” that leaves three white listeners unresponsive. By the end of the story, we’re made less to feel that the listeners have died, than have experienced some sort of transportation. Perhaps a shift towards one of the innumerable places where the drum, or in this case the horn, resounds.