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October 19, 2022
Anna Badkhen's Playlist for Her Essay Collection "Bright Unbearable Reality"
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.
Anna Badkhen's essay collection Bright Unbearable Reality is bold, intelligent, lyrical, and haunting as it tackles themes of grief and immigration. Badkhen captures sense of place as well as anyone writing today, and ties that to identity skillfully.
Melissa Febos wrote of the book at Bookforum:
"[A] brainy, poetic, global essay collection that feels exactly right for this moment."
In her own words, here is Anna Badkhen's Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection Bright Unbearable Reality:
Bright Unbearable Reality is a collection of essays about displacement. One in seven people has left their birthplace; boundaries of race and religion and class and gender carve communities, often lethally, often block by block. The Earth is burning, drowning, revolting against our careless abuse of her resources. It seems more and more that we live in a world of moral dislocation. How to hold on, what to hold on to on this planet? The essays are my attempt to comprehend and acknowledge what both separates and binds us.
Joseph Brodsky once described the kind of poetry he admired: that it “answers not the question ‘how to live’ but ‘for the sake of what’ to live.” For me, music often answers the same question. It is also, to me, one of the answers to the questions of what brings us together. I’m sure neuroscience has plenty explanations (Oliver Sachs, etc etc) but what I offer here is simply to listen up.
Once Upon a Time I Took a Weeklong Walk in the Sahara:
“Nour” by Malouma
Malouma is one of the world’s greatest voices, musically and politically. Once upon a time I took a weeklong walk in the Sahara, in Mauritania, where Malouma lives and sings. I had come to make sense of our splintered world, and I thought the desert would be a fitting place to think about our partings. Nour means “light” in Hassaniya, and there is such light in the desert! Stars bright enough to read by. Desert constellations made me think of how human connections may fade but never disappear, of the gossamer threads of intimacy we float behind us as we disperse. Picture the brief animation anthropologists sometimes use to demonstrate human impact on the planet—a pale, luminescent tapestry of roads, railways, pipelines, cables, air routes, and shipping lanes latticing a nighttime Earth—except instead of physical infrastructure, imagine the other ways in which the Anthropocene connects us: the poly-threaded, shimmering veil of yearning and missing and care and love.
The Pandemic, Our Common Story:
“Tezeta” by Mulatu Astatke
Tezeta is both a kind of a song, named for the pentatonic scale it uses, and a state of mind. It means “nostalgia” or “longing,” in the melancholy way of Portuguese saudade. In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym describes nostalgia as “a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.” My friends and I listened to different versions of tezeta during our road trip through Ethiopia at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. This one, by the great Mulatu Astatke, the father of ethio jazz, is my favorite.
I had come to Ethiopia for book research that has to do with Eden. The intended purpose of this trip was to ponder human origins, our relationship with place and change, the notion of the sacred, and human movement, ancient and modern. (Boym also talks about “the seduction of non-return home.”) The itinerary took months to set. But the day my friend Kabir and I landed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia confirmed its first case of Covid-19. Our journey became a real-time passage through a world undergoing a dramatic and unprecedented remaking.
Tezeta is also what Orhan Pamuk describes as hüzün, “spiritual anguish we feel because we cannot get close enough to Allah…a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.” Isn’t that lostness a part of our common story?
How to Read the Air:
“My Queen is Doreen Lawrence” by Sons of Kemet
“The Noise Came from Here” by Saul Williams
I had planned for weeks this trip to the ocean, to think about birds. And I did go. But the night before, police officers lynched a Black man in my neighborhood in Philadelphia. Then came the insult of low and constant helicopters, and cops terrorizing our streets, and curfew, and troops deployed in the city, again. So maybe I did not think about birds the way I had intended—though I did think about birds, impossible not to think about birds by the ocean where they take up all the space, where even air and water they push out of the way.
In the video for “The Noise Came from Here,” Saul Williams, the Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, and the poet Marcellus Buckley, walk barefoot around the spot in Ferguson where racist cops had murdered Michael Brown. The song is a kind of prayer, or anti-prayer, or both: “The bullets in your guns / you know we paid for it all. / The bullets in your guns / you know we paid for it all. / The bullets in your guns / you know we paid for it all. The bullets in your guns / you know we paid for it all. / You’ll never touch my love.”
Walter Wallace Jr., the man whom Philly cops murdered on October 26, 2021, was twenty-seven, barely older than my children. They killed him in front of his mother. Doreen Lawrence is the mother of Stephen Lawrence, a Black British teenager who was murdered by racists in London in 1993. She is the same age as my parents; Stephen would have been a year older than me. Your Queen Is a Reptile is one hell of an anthem album (not least because of the brilliant Theon Cross on the tuba), and “My Queen is Doreen Lawrence” is one hell of a protest song: “Don’t wanna hear that racist claptrap / Anybody chat that crap gets clapped back / Don’t wanna take my country back, mate / I wanna take my country forward.”
Landscape with Icarus:
“Fleuve - Fleuve Saint Louis” by Constantinople and Ablaye Cissoko
So much musical gorgeousness flows through Senegal. I picked this particular tune because it is about the Senegal River, whose delta forms the islands that make Ndar—Saint Louis, as the French renamed it: once the capital of colonial French West Africa, from which many African people were trafficked during the Transatlantic Slave Trade; now a major port from which now many African people, mostly boys and men, try to flee to Europe in search of better opportunities.
By the way, I saw the magnificent Ablaye Cissoko perform “Fleuve” in Ndar the night before setting out for that weeklong walk in the Sahara. You see? We are all connected.
Forgiving the Unforgivable:
“The Virus” by The Halluci Nation, Saul Williams, Chippewa Travellers
In 2017, an Apache family in Guachochi, Mexico, held what they called a Ceremony of Forgiveness in a mountain forest outside of town. They invited their neighbors and relatives, national dignitaries, international observers. They invited Crown Dancers and their drummers from the White Mountain Apache Tribe’s reservation in Arizona. They lit a ceremonial flame and handed out pieces of paper and pencils, and asked the attendees to write down their grievances and toss them in the fire. One of the organizers, Bernarda Holguín, explained her idea for this: “It is a ceremony to ask God to forgive, in the name of our ancestors, the perpetrators and the victims. We will ask for forgiveness for the wars against Indians. For the turbulent times the consequences of which we are still suffering today.”
I guess forgiveness means making peace. But I did not think it was my place to make peace (“and do not forgive truly it is not in your power / to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn,” writes Zbigniew Herbert). Then Bernarda’s sister Hilda said to me, “I, too, didn’t have anything I wanted to forgive or reclaim in the fire. But my sisters really wanted me to write something and burn it. So I did. For my sisters. Because it is important to them, and they are important to me.”
Jericho:
“Work Song” performed by Nina Simone
“Posthorn Gallop” performed by James Tappern on trumpets found in Tutankhamun’s tomb
“Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho” performed by Paul Robeson
“Blue in Green” by Miles Davis
“Beirut” by Ibrahim Maalouf
The song Cheikh Baye Fall and Friends performed in Ndar
Like the rest of the book, this essay ponders our oscillation between violence and beauty, but I wrote it specifically about music. It begins with Nat Adderley’s “Work Song,” performed by Nina Simone; the song permeates the piece, runs through it like a base line. The essay segues to the heartbreak of the 1939 BBC recording of the bandsman James Tappern of the 11th Royal Hussars playing the oldest trumpets known to man, which were found in the pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb and are more than 3,300 years old. It quotes from “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho”—I choose the Paul Robeson version because he was a hero. It mentions Miles Davis’s “Blue in Green” and the impossible quartertones of Ibrahim Maalouf, and alights, finally, on the shores of the Atlantic, in a waterside terrace in Ndar/Saint Louis, where two men are casting their voices into the night, a baritone and a falsetto. The human voice was the first musical instrument. No musical instrument, according to the ninth-century philosopher and musical theorist Abu Nasr Muhammad ibn Muhammad al Farabi, is more perfect than the voice. Maybe the ancestors of the Nina Simone and Paul Robeson, too, had sung on these shores.
The musicians’ names are Cheikh Baye Fall and Ndoffène Diouf. Their set begins with a song that, in turn, begins with the Shahada, the foundational recitation of faith. Most people in Ndar are Sufi, and Sufi Muslims believe that music can help you achieve proximity to God, that the ultimate truth can be found in the obliteration of the self through high mystical ecstasy, and that mystical ecstasy may be achieved through song. The men hang the diaphanous net of their song in the dark where it coruscates, glitters. It is like holding your breath, like holding a bird in your hand. Over the terrace in Ndar a full moon rises, a seawall yields to the surf’s embouchure, and I understand.
Anna Badkhen was born in the Soviet Union and is now an American citizen. She is the author of six previous books of nonfiction. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and a Joel R. Seldin Award from Psychologists for Social Responsibility for writing about civilians in war zones.
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