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February 23, 2021
Matthew Gavin Frank's Playlist for His Book "Flight of the Diamond Smugglers"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Creative nonfiction is one of my favorite literary genres, and Matthew Gavin Frank is one of its most talented writers. Flight of the Diamond Smugglers blends investigative reporting, memoir, and natural history into a compelling and unforgettable book.
Bookpage wrote of the book:
"A work of strange beauty born of personal tragedy.... An often unsettling, thoroughly researched, poetically expressed mélange of memoir, historical analysis and philosophical meditation.... The narrative’s path is not linear; instead, Frank follows the flow of his prodigious curiosity.... Frank observes... with a sharp yet sympathetic eye.... Suspense builds as the pages turn.... there’s much to marvel at, from the far-reaching aftermath of diamond mining to the ways old memories have a hold on us. Readers will empathize with Frank’s efforts to process his grief and with Diamond Coast residents’ search for glints of hope in a grim desert. Through it all, pigeons soar in the sky and alight on the ground, offering companionship, a particular set of skills and thought-provoking fodder for metaphor."
In his words, here is Matthew Gavin Frank's Book Notes music playlist for his book Flight of the Diamond Smugglers:
My new nonfiction book, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, investigates the role of carrier pigeons in Southern African diamond smuggling—the ways in which workers bring their trained birds into the mines concealed in lunchboxes, pack diamonds into specially-sewn bags, attach said bags to the birds’ feet, and set the pigeons into the air, where they fly to their homes and the awaiting hands of the laborers’ families, who unpack the diamonds and make their fortunes. The book also engages the endurance of personal grief, as well as issues of climate change, social justice, environmental destruction, eco-criticism, corporate colonialism, police brutality, exploitation of indigenous people and people of color, late-capitalist greed, and animal rights. And the book also engages…well… a love for birds. Throughout, in telling these stories, I tried to be open to wonder and horror, to mystification, to quiet beauty, and to flight and to music, actual and metaphorical.
“Pata Pata” by Miriam Makeba
Makeba’s song wedges joy and delight into an encompassing heartbreak, celebrating the drive to sing and dance and commune amid a looming oppression. As the book opens, I sit with a young diamond miner on a beach on the outskirts of the restricted mining town of Oranjemund, just on the South African side of the Namibian border. We both hug our knees to our chest at sunset, sitting in the sand beneath a sun-bleached sign that reads, NO ENTRY. He speaks to me of the many dangers facing those who labor in the diamond industry. He speaks to me of the danger he faces simply by speaking to me. He speaks to me, joyously, of the pigeons he raises in secret as companions, and as avian accomplices in “illicit” diamond smuggling. Can Makeba’s song help to contextualize this brew of danger, joy, sand and sunset? I don’t know. I do know that “Pata Pata” was the last song Makeba ever performed right before collapsing onstage on November 9, 2008, the night she died.
“Ketine” by Ali Farka Touré
This slow, droning, meditative blues manages to entrance, while—perhaps via the rattlesnake-y percussion—also managing to disquiet, to build a kind of suspense. It’s not entirely safe to give oneself over to its spell, but one is helpless to resist. One just has to hold on, and be transported, as if tied to the feet of a diamond-bearing smuggler pigeon as it takes off from the mine, and rises over the aerial ropeways, stout ladders joining the stepped catacombs and blind alleys, pyramids, plateaus, arroyos of mud; the boys and men who dig until their bodies break. One can only dig into the earth so deep before the earth decides to collapse.
“Andizenzi” by Kanyi Mavi
Urgent and incantatory, Mavi’s stew of synth, chorus, explosive percussion and wordsmith-ery evoke also an amalgam of beauty and brutality, anger and wonder. Until very recently, much of South Africa’s West Coast was owned by the De Beers conglomerate and was officially closed-off to the public for the better part of 80 years (the heyday of diamond exploration and mining in the area), plunging the local communities into a mysterious isolation. Recently, De Beers even had a shadowy agreement with satellite companies to scrub the images of this so-called Forbidden Zone from their recorded files. It was, essentially and officially, an erasure from the earth. A blank spot on the map. A redacted place. A non-country within a real country. Terra incognita-meets-planned-community. According even to the satellites, it didn’t exist. Heavily-armed security forces guarded (and still guard) its borders. And surrounding this zone is the richest bulb flora arid region on the planet— blanketed, for two weeks’ time in the middle of August, in an overwhelming kaleidoscope of orange and purple desert flowers.
“Pomp and Pride” by Toots and the Maytals
Speaking of those desert flowers, I was lucky enough—during one of my research trips to South Africa— to have witnessed this brief bloom. The world seemed to have gone Oz-like, and I drove a rental car through all of this floral psychedelia, blasting some Toots. The roads, during this two-week window, are jammed. Bloom-obsessed tourists descend on the region hoping to spot and photograph as many of the 3,000 plant species as possible, and temporary “Flower Hotlines,” replete with all the latest updates, spring up. People drive recklessly in order to outrun the dusk hours when the flowers close up for the night. In the evenings, tourists fill under-prepared cafes, sip Chenin Blanc, and compare pictures, speaking animatedly of kaleidoscopes and rain-daisies. And then the two weeks are up, and the flowers die, and the land’s apparent infertility is restored. Every time I imagine the flowers opening and closing, I imagine them opening and closing to the bounce of this song.
“Police and Thieves” by Junior Murvin
When laborers affix too many diamonds to pigeons, the exhausted and overloaded birds tend to falter, and to land at random along the beaches of the Diamond Coast. When De Beers officials caught wind of this, they had it declared illegal to raise pigeons in the region. In fact, in 1998, a local lawmaker made it illegal to not shoot a pigeon on sight, should one have the means to do so. Still, so many raise pigeons in secret, and sometimes successfully smuggle diamonds using this method. If one is caught keeping these birds, the local police are given leeway to enact “unofficial” forms of punishment. Rumors abound in the region of such “offenders” having had their fingers broken, or eyes excised, or hands or ears or feet, or head cut off. Murvin’s falsetto haunts the song’s lyrical content, and yields the sort of protest that longs to ascend from atrocity, without ever turning away from it, taking to the sky, but never forgetting the blood.
“Type” by Living Colour
At one point in the book, I find myself riding on the back of a Land Rover, passing around a bottle of brandy with a bunch of gun-toting anti-pigeon militia members. Though not officially sanctioned by De Beers, these militias thrive here, contracted to kidnap people’s pets right from their coops on nighttime stealth runs, and bring them to isolated spots on the beach hidden among the labyrinth of dunes. Here, they make a game of executing the birds. As they allowed me to bear witness to the slaughter, this song—especially the live version in which Living Colour includes it in an extended melody with their (also awesome) song “Elvis Is Dead” and their cover of “Police and Thieves”— made a surprise and appropriate appearance in my head, serving to italicize my shock in the face of all of those dead birds.
“Factory” by Bruce Springsteen
In 1870, Cecil John Rhodes, founder of the De Beers conglomerate, came to South Africa from England. In diamond fields of Kimberley, Rhodes, with the financial backing of a British banking company (with whom he had familial connections), was alone in being able to afford steam pumps to eradicate the water from flooded claims, which—given that they were presumed ruined— he originally bought for a song. The miners slated for De Beers’ underground work would line up single-file by 5:00am, and trundle down the shafts to chip away at the rock with pick-axes. The workers were charged with squeezing themselves into crevices so tight that they had to chip mere millimeters from their bodies. As such, toward the end of the shift, ghostly parades of human-shaped depressions were left in the rock, hard outlines of the men who once labored there. “And you just better believe,” Springsteen sings, “somebody’s gonna get hurt tonight,” and, still today, along South Africa’s Diamond Coast, in bars called Diamond Hunters, and bars called Fortune’s, I saw knife-fights stop just short of the stabbing, because the men know they have to line up single-file by 5:00am, and trundle down the shafts…
“Dollar’s Moods” by The Jazz Epistles
Msizi, one of the young diamond miners to whom I spoke, loved jazz. He especially loved The Jazz Epistles, a 1950s Johannesburg-based band who recorded the first-ever album by a Black South African group in 1959. Msizi raised pigeons in secret, and, exhausted, post-shift, he would often go out to his coop and hum some of their tunes to his favorite pigeon, Bartholomew. “Dollar’s Moods,”—which somehow braids an elusive and subtle mournfulness into what seems to be a cheerful and exuberant primary line— is named for the volatile temper of the band’s piano player, Abdullah Ibrahim, aka Dollar Brand. After the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre (during which South African police opened fire on Black protestors demonstrating against apartheid policies, killing 69 people), the apartheid government doubled-down on their viciousness in order to discourage future protests. As part of this doubling-down, jazz was banned—the music could no longer be performed either in public or in private, could no longer be broadcast on the radio, or sold to fans. The lives of the musicians were threatened, and less than a year after recording their first album, The Jazz Epistles were forced to break up. When Msizi hummed this song to Bartholomew, the bird would raise and lower its wings, but its feet would remain fixed—evoking the machinations of flight, without rising.
“Birdland” by Patti Smith
John James Audubon on watching flocks of pigeons pass overhead: “A thundering storm of beating wings and dung like melting flakes of snow.”
A song about the role of dreaming and self-delusion in the endurance of grief and a persistent sense of estrangement (in a Didion-esque “We tell ourselves stories in order to live” sort of way), “Birdland” can serve as a sort of soundtrack to many of our myths in which pigeons and diamonds intersect. (In drafting FLIGHT OF THE DIAMOND SMUGGLERS, I had to eventually cut so many of these myths out of the book!) For instance: Indra, the bright red and four-armed Vedic deity, possessed as his weapon of choice the fearsome vajra, a thunderbolt coated in diamond dust, making it both indestructible and irresistible, the pointy ends of which were used to ritualistically eviscerate the ignorant. The vajra was forged by Tvastar, the artisan of divine gizmos, who had the ability to take the form of a dove and who would do so in order to sing angry birds to sleep. Indra’s mount, Airavata the albino elephant, was blindingly white, and generously endowed with four tusks and seven trunks, and was descended from a great serpent—the same one responsible for producing—after eons of Darwinian evolution, of course—the pigeons. As if a bird, Airavata hatched from an egg, which was nursed and pacified by the quiet hymns of the creation gods, and when this egg cracked, it yielded, along with the white elephant, an ocean of milk, which itself served as an amniotic bath to which earthbound mortals in need of hope could aspire to return, as if wayward homing pigeons to the comfort of their coops.
“Imayini Yase (Coalbrook Mine)” from This Land Is Mine: South African Freedom Songs
In one of the most ethereal dirges ever performed, a group of South African refugees commemorate the 1960 collapse of the Coalbrook Mine, which killed 408 people, at once memorializing the dead, and condemning the apartheid regime responsible for the labor laws that devalued the lives of Black workers. Though the apartheid government officially fell in 1994, many of its atrocious policies simply evolved and still haunt aspects of South African life, including those pertaining to the diamond mining industry. Oftentimes, still today, the Black security officials working for the diamond mining conglomerates have to patrol the mine on foot, while the White officials make their rounds from the comfort of white pick-up trucks, lording over the laborers who are charged with extracting diamonds from what one poetic and dystopian (and anonymous) local journalist referred to as, “A vast heaving crater. A world of dust, drought, dysentery, and flies, disease and despair, where some dig up a fortune, and others dig their graves.” And overhead, some of their diamond-smuggling pigeons fly, and some of these birds will make it home, and some people’s lives will get better and some will get worse. And did you know also that in her poem, “Pigeon Post,” Sylvia Plath wrote, “I split my soul/into twin pigeons/and hurled them hard…//With homing spiral/one drops from heaven…//my other bird,/plump-fed, admired/from an elegant nest/in the fields of hell…”? And did you know that, in Hebrew, the word yownah, or “dove,” also refers to the holy warmth generated by an act of mating? And did you know that the ancient Greeks called pigeons peristera (the female form of pigeon) and named their prettiest islands after them?
Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of the nonfiction books, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America’s Food, Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer, Pot Farm, and Barolo; the poetry books, The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop, and 2 chapbooks.
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