The Intensity of beginning

But the constancy of my love had been forgotten. I defined myself as an absolute intensity of beginning. So I took up my negritude, and with tears in my eyes I put its machinery together again.

What had been broken to pieces was rebuilt, reconstructed by the intuitive lianas of my hands,” writes Frantz Fanon in 1962. In 2003, Ghanaian philosopher, Ato Sekyi-Otu wrote that “after Fanon, African criticism cannot feign ignorance of history. But neither can they plead captivity to its consequences.

Fanon is our pathfinder in that ‘conversation of discovery’ whose mission is to gather the voices of history and common dreams into the work of the critical imagination”. Stacked to the side of an old, rustic-looking glass and wooden cabinet is a large pile of vinyl records. Positioned in the corner of our open-plan dining room is this cabinet and therein sits my mother’s prized gramophone.

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Each Sunday, as the pot roast was thickening in flavour and the vegetables; coming alive to the steam of my mother’s Hart pot was the scratching of the gramophone pin as it moved from song to song. The room would be transformed by the raw quaver and deep register of Nina Simone. I wish I knew how it would feel to be free/ I wish I could break all the chains holding me/ I wish I could I say all the things that I should say/ Say ‘em loud, say ‘em clear/ For the whole wide to hear/ Nina Simone sings inI Wish I Knew How It Feels To Be Free.

As Bill Taylor’s lyrics reverberated through the house in Simone’s melancholic plea for freedom, a shift would occur in my then-very-young political consciousness. “The explosion will not happen today. It is too soon … or too late.” — Frantz Fanon The words propel one into the multiple postcolonial dramas that Fanon unveils to the reader as they move from one devastating line to the next in his 1952 bookBlack Skin, White Masks.

The opening gambit of the book is a dramatic entry into a consciousness searching for self within the postcolonial malaise. It is a consciousness launching its presence upwards and forwards, hoping to access the universal. “Balele/ balele/ balele omakhelwane,” intones Zoë Modiga with a syrupy vibrato on the opening track of her debut album, Yellow: The Novel.

The reverberation of her voice paints a picture: the neighbours nestled in deep sleep as she summons the melodies that will colour her introspective aural autobiography. But then an upbeat, jazzy track punctures the silence and Modiga’s mellifluous vocals float atop the bass rhythms foregrounded in her second song,Abounding Within. She starts: I know that there’s a place/ Inside of all of us/ A place that’s made of love/ Where peace and truth abound/ It’s lying there away in its dormant state/ Waiting for our souls it sits and sighs aloud.

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