1-Year Plan
Post 11: 12/12/04
Franco/Luambo
Makiadi's
Universalism
I am a subject precisely because I cannot be an absolute consciousness, because something constitutively alien confronts me.
—Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (xx)
No notion of universality can rest easily within the notion of a single ‘culture', since the very concept of universality compels an understanding of culture as a relation of exchange and a task of translation.
—Judith Butler, "Restaging the Universal" (24–25)
In contemporary avant-garde practice, there has been a decades-long use of a poetics of particularity at the crossroads where three roads meet: knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics. This assumption is so widespread as almost to seem universal in practice, though it is hardly put forward as universal. Rather, it is the result of a consensus that comes down, for many, to the critical and aesthetic traditions that align theory and the avant-garde, so that to call up names like Stein and Zukofsky, or Adorno and Derrida, is a sufficient legitimation of practices. Over the past decade, I have been at work on two routes out of what I see as the resulting impasse: to cast the poetics of particularity as historical and thus specific to situations that cannot be universalized; and to disclose the negativity that provides the occasion for foregrounding the historical and contingent. A third project has more recently emerged that is the direct consequence of these: to draw out the universals (epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical) that are invoked, but often masked, in the poetics of radical particulars.
In order to do this, I want to take up an aesthetic practice that is as different from the poetics of particularly in the European avant-garde tradition as possible: the rise of West African popular music in the eras of national liberation and global diaspora. My point of departure is the example of Franco Luambo Makiadi, le grand maïtre of rumba-soukous, a cultural figure who achieved a scale of recognition comparable to that of the major actors in the postcolonial history of Congo/Zaïre, from Kasavubu and Lumumba to Mobutu, but who achieved this recognition by means of a popular art that began with a synthesis of local knowledge and imported idioms, defined a distinctive genre at a parallel moment to national liberation, was redefined in conditions of exile and emigration, and ended with a hybrid aesthetic articulated at the scale of a social discourse. Due to historical conditions of reception, Franco's work is much less known to Americans than it should be, particularly in comparison to the Nigerian oppositional icon Fela, even while there is a consensus among historians of Afro-pop of the much greater scale of Franco's influence; part of the problem, we will see, is Franco's complicity in the Mobutu era.
In 1987, at the peak of his international fame, Franco recorded a song of universal import and address, "Attention na Sida," perhaps the most brilliant public service announcement ever made, a warning against AIDS that has been described as "the most intense 16 minutes 37 seconds ever recorded, and the most courageous," according to one online source. Many regard the work as Franco's masterpiece; it stands, as well, as the summation if not conclusion of the many moments of emergence of his work, from the synthesis of genres to the interplay of national identity and displacement to the achievement of hybrid form. As a result of its form of cultural innovation, the work both intends and realizes a poetics of universal address, from a position of postcolonial displacement, that allows us to reassess the status of universals through the specifics of history, genre, and local knowledge.
["Attention na Sida," opening to 4:56]
The politics of language is directly tied to the construction of universals here. To begin with, most of Franco's recordings are in Lingala, a hybrid lingua franca that came into existence as a trading language in the Belgian Congo in the modern period, though based in interethnic trading languages that predated colonization. Lingala is a tonal language, and hence highly adaptable to the melodic lines Franco explores in vocals and guitar solos; its vocabulary contains a wide range of importations from French, Portuguese, and even English. Of the four African national languages of Congo/Zaire, Lingala was originally a language of the riverfront and market and grew with the emergence an urban working class as villagers moved to the big city of Léopoldville/Kinshasa in successive waves of internal emigration.
Somewhat ironically, then, Lingala already is structured as a diaspora, with "islands" of local context embedded in a new, hybrid form—ironic, because, in the mid-1970s period of "authenticité," a top-down program of national identity formation dictated by Mobutu Sese Seko after visiting China after the Cultural Revolution, French names were outlawed, to be supplanted by "native" ones. Franco supported the changes, taking "Luambo Makiadi" as his legitimate name, toured the country in support of Mobutu's program, and recorded several albums under the title of Authenticité. This moment of national address in Lingala will become an element of the later, hybrid rhetoric, and the slippage is almost immediate back to a French lexicon (which is contained within the language, in any case), but it is importantly constituted by an overview of "nation" seen in spatial terms from a perspective identified with Mobutu:
In
the buses and the cars
Our candidate is Mobutu
In the trains, planes or boats
Our candidate is Mobutu
For the patients in the hospitals
Mobutu is our candidate
Even if you are in prison for your mistakes
When you are out
Remember that our candidate is Mobutu
["Candidat
Na Biso Mobutu"; 262]
This was Franco's political pitch when Mobutu ran unopposed for the presidency in 1984. Several things are important to note right away: that in over 1000 songs and 100 recordings, Franco wrote to all the other major political figures, particularly Lumumba, as well as to foreign leaders; that he also made what amounted to paid advertising spots for cars, beer, soccer teams, and particularly his own musical logo, "T.P. O.K. Jazz"; that he consistently wrote critically of local economic conditions, but always in permissible, allegorical, and back-handed forms; and that there is no question he identified with Mobutu, in both imaginary and real political terms, as in his role as the often dictatorial head of the musicians' union (also known as a fair dealer who usually paid his musicians).
As one source notes, Franco contained the good and bad of humanity; over the range of his work, he attempted to be "all things to all men"—a well-known path to the universal. In the Mobutu song, one can find several political overtones that anticipate the later, postnational address. Immediately after Franco claims Mobutu has "been sent to us by God," for instance, he goes on to raise the specter of sorcery to the power elite as an evil that might be hidden in even the most unopposed candidacy: "You, members of the Central Committee / Pay attention to the sorcerers / Because they haven't given up the fight yet / When you'll have to retain Mobutu's candidature / Look each other straight in the eyes. // Mobutu, there are still wizards in the family" (261–62). Rather than taking a dialectically oppositional stance, as does Fela in opposition to the Nigerian oligarchy, Franco identifies with power and its exclusions at the same time.
There is an encoded hint of oppositional politics (obvious to his audience, who would know his biography) as well in "Even if you are in prison for your mistakes / When you are out / Remember that our candidate is Mobutu" (262), as Franco had done jail time twice—once in the colonial period for persistently riding his Vespa too fast; and once under Mobutu, for recording two "pornographic" songs, Jacky and Hélène, so explicit about "down low" sex practices that I have been able to locate neither recordings nor lyrics. Franco's mistake was to push his critique of local conditions in the vernacular to the point of obscenity, for which he was punished; in the trial, his mother was confronted with his material and asked if she thought it was obscene—she did, and Franco and several of his band did time for it. Importantly, the guitar riff that begins Attention na Sida is a direct quote from Jacky; in his universal claim, at the same time he invokes transgressions he had been punished for.
Beyond the politics of authenticité, there is thus an equally important register of Franco's use of Lingala in this connection of politically unrepresentable material to the interests of women, seen in terms of sexuality, community, and the maternal, in a society where traditional matriarchal structures are being broken up through urbanization. Many of Franco's songs deal, in transgressively negative ways, with the position of women; local knowledge is gendered when it comes to questions of marriage, prostitution, and gossip at the intersection of "contemporary morals" and "rapid urban development." In "Tu Vois," for instance, Franco and his co-lead singer Madilu System trade voices of two women accusing each other of corrupting the family through philandering and gossip; the gender identification is mixed and unstable, as in a moment of having it both ways:
I
am the one who defends you, Mamou
I am the one who knows all your secrets, Mamou
Today I have become a bad fellow, Mamou
Remember my interventions
When things start to hot up, Mamou
I am leaving you, but you will regret me, Mamou
Even if you are calling me a prostitute, Mamou [265]
Franco both invokes difference and sees himself as internalizing it; this is the source of the instability ("I am leaving you") and bad language ("you are calling me a prostitute"). Local knowledge, then, is a language of material circumstances and desire for which women and sexuality are more than a metaphor; they are the very conditions of the local. Along with his well-known interest in sorcery, sexuality occurs both as a register of the "unrepresentable" and as a condition of local knowledge that may be sung in Lingala.
Opposed to the use of an emergent lingua franca is Franco's return to French as a postcolonial world language. While to Western ears spoken French may seem to be the language of global address in Attention na Sida, and hence of global subordination, it is clearly contained within the rhythmic structures of Franco's hybrid forms, which by the late 1980s have re-integrated the imported genres of rumba and, later, disco through the structures of African polyrhythms. The speechified, oratorical French is also framed by Franco's singing in Lingala, and by the backup chorus in Lingala as well. The dominant language, then, is held in suspension as it is in process of reinscription through the local. This tension may be seen against a more usual narrative of progress and emergence in Franco's use of French; while he attended Catholic schools in the colonial period, his command of French was poor to begin with, and in the early construction of musical genres and social formations in the 1950s, Franco's O.K. Jazz was seen as a populist alternative to the "intellectual" line of Africa Jazz, Docteur Nico, and Tabu Ley Rochereau. With the politics of authenticité, Franco's preference for the local could be easily aligned with national identity; importantly, that paradigm began to slip immediately, with the gross mismanagement and hyperinflation of the Zaïrean economy, on the one hand, and the growing Francophone West African, European, and pan-African reception of the music, on the other. French, then, was the language of "making it," offering a competing register for status hierarchies that came with the entry into newly formed global markets. We might go so far as to say Franco's French is split between two moments: colonial history and globalization. The degree to which Franco's politics of language conditions the invocation of universals, of course, is the point—but we must first establish a framework in which the "universal" French has a specific history, and the "local" Lingala addresses subject matter that otherwise may not be spoken, from political opposition to sexuality.
What brings together Lingala and French in Franco's universal address is that which cannot be spoken, the subject matter of the song: AIDS. In using both languages, Franco invokes two opposed scenarios of denial, both of immediate concern: the global denial of AIDS in Africa; the local denial of AIDS in the community. Using both languages is, to begin with, an attempt to rectify both: Franco speaks from and to the perspective of the UN and WHO, while addressing the broadest audience possible in Europe and Africa, in his use of French; he can modify the potential alienating appeal of the former colonial language by using Lingala, and speak directly to the knowledge and denial of the disease in that context. Even more important, however, is the reinterpretation of each language through the total form, where colonial, "authentic," global, and hybrid elements are mutually redefined and reinforced.
It is the musical synthesis of the song, from the guitar riff signifying the transgressive sexuality of Jacky at the outset, through the complex polyrhythms that offset the orated French and sung Lingala (both solo and chorus), to the extended, open percussion/guitar sebene or free improvisation at the end, that provides the syncretizing framework for alternate languages. Exactly in this sense, the song's declamatory opening ("oh le Sida, ce terrible maladie") follows immediately after the guitar riff that cites unmentionable sex practices that can transmit the disease. The first universal is, precisely, the scope of the pandemic: "A disease which spares nobody . . . a plague / Which leaves doctors impotent" (266)—the definition of a disease that exceeds category. In response, the chorus in Lingala invokes reciprocal, collective, local knowledge: "Look after your body, and I'll look after mine / Protect your own body, I'll protect mine," going beyond "discrimination" in an appeal to "mothers" and "fathers" of the nation as a whole. Franco follows with a plaint, in Lingala, of AIDS's destruction of community through talk as much as disease: "Those who used to eat and drink with me / Have started to ignore me / They say I have got the AIDS sickness / All my friends are cutting me off / Who can I complain to?" From here, the song constructs a three-part conversation between choruses in Lingala, advising reciprocity; solos in Lingala, decrying the actual conditions of the disease; and solos in orated French, appealing to universals.
The universal is invoked in the "monologic," sovereign position of Franco as the Francophone speaker, who speaks the objective truth of the disease, and in the invocation of a discourse of universality that maps the disease across the globe ("AIDS is ravaging all the peoples; they are frightened / Europe and the USA accuse Africa of being / The source of AIDS / Recently Asia and USA were invaded by the illness" [266]); names those affected ("Babies, children, youths, adults, the old") as equivalent within a discursive formation; appeals to the nation as a moral standard ("Youths, beware, AIDS can attack you / You are the life force of society / If you let it kill you, who will lead the people? / Avoid dangerous sex. Students beware unknown partners"); calls on religious and secular authorities ("Teachers, instructors, professors / At school, in class, at home / If you have a free moment discuss it / It is part of your scholarly obligation" [268]); and finally, reproducing what amounts to the entire infrastructure of nineteenth-century colonial administration writ large as a global response ("Doctors, be like Pasteur, Fleming, Curie, and the other / Geniuses of the last century / Now is your turn to conquer this plague which / Terrifies humanity and defies medicine" [269]). The buildup of this universal address, emerging in its dialogue with solos and choruses in Lingala, is sublime, overwhelming:
["Attention na Sida," 10:40–13:40]
Along the way to this sustained address to all the people, in all times and places, Franco breaks periodically into Lingala asides; one is particularly poignant: "All my family have run away from me / Because I have AIDS. I am left with only my mother, / Who has to suffer again all the sickness of my childhood" (268), as in 1987 Franco was in the early stages of a disease, widely rumored to be AIDS but which he publicly denied, that killed him in 1989. As well as being widely known for his sexual appetite, Franco ate after the style of Louis XIV, having once tried to consume an entire goat in front of his band; his rapid weight loss, from a peak of about 290 pounds, in the late 1980s, and his final, pathetic performances and canceled dates before his death, helped reinforce the rumors. If so, "Attention na Sida" is doubly overwhelming, not only as a grand overview of humanity in relation to disease, but of a man facing up to and naming the cause of his own death.
The song offers a poetics of displaced universals that I want to bring into relation to a poetics of particularity, which might be seen as divided, in this example, between the local conditions of the disease and the global mobilization against it. This fusion of two series of particulars, across the gap between them, constructs a hegemonic discourse that, although evanescent and unstable, solves Ernesto Laclau's paradigm of "two nations": the mutually exclusive form of discursive formation that yields black and white races, red and blue states, East and West in the Cold War, North and South zones of global economy. In Laclau's later formulation, what can elevate particulars to the status of universals is never in the nature of particulars themselves, which are always differentially organized in terms of their constitutive lack—something like a chain of signifiers lacking a referent, something like the politics of the Democratic Party; something like Language poetry. What binds particulars together is the differential and overdetermined field constructed between them, which nothing in particular can symbolize; only an "empty signifier" can stand for the form of discursive construction—a flag, a totem animal, an empty politician. In my work on the 1960s, for instance, I find such empty signifiers in the displaced icons of the counterculture, from Allen Ginsberg's chanting in Sanskrit to Yellow Submarine.
For Franco, there is a specific turn to this empty signifier: AIDS is what holds together the universal, not as a groundless positivity but as what could be universally destructive. The Cold War, and the global politics that followed, of course, provided many examples of total destruction worked into the logic of empty signifiers; Slavoj Zizek, in focusing on the exclusion or antagonism that sutures discourses, will posit the negativity of a "missing X," the sublime object of Real, as that which stabilizes as it displaces universal anxiety. Such a "missing X" would certainly be AIDS; and in this way, the disease as symptom would hold down, as would the points de caption of any ideology, an illusory map of the whole. For Franco, the results for both politics and aesthetics would be fatal: the attempt to create a mobilization against AIDS would be merely to reduce one's subjection to it. It is here one can conceivably locate an objection to Franco's universals; while his work does away entirely the notion, often heard on the Left, that universals in postcolonial contexts work to restore master narratives, hence narrative histories of mastery, it can identify the coherence of the universal only with that which destroys it absolutely, beyond languages rather than between them. Not much for agency would be left but a grand lament.
While debates in feminism and postcolonial theory have been at work on the nature of universals for the last fifteen years, motivated by the question of how a particular gender could accede to universals, on the one hand, and how a universal discourse could recognize an excluded particular, on the other, the positions brought together in the conversation between Laclau, Zizek, and Judith Butler push the debate in several directions. Where Laclau makes a strong case for the necessity of a politics of the particular, even in its empty and abstract form, as that which constructs the universal, Zizek stresses the negativity of the particular in logics of constitutive denial or ideological suturing. Butler, continuing their thought, rethinks the "two nations" model of discursive construction as more akin to the "work of cultural translation." Where Hegel refuses to see any abstraction as entirely transcending its production in "customary practices" or "local knowledge," Butler concludes that "any attempt to establish universality as transcendent of cultural norms" would be doomed to failure. Neither of Franco's languages would represent the universal; perhaps an act of translation between them could. For Laclau and Zizek, this can only take place through negative means, in the space between organized particulars. Butler asks two questions that move beyond this result: "First, what precisely does it mean to find the universal both in the relation among particulars and inseparable from that relation? Second, must the relation among particulars . . . become one of cultural translation if the universal is to become an active and operating concept in political life?" (34).
It is between the positivity of Butler's act of translation as establishing universals, and Laclau and Zizek's negativity of the particular as defining the field of the universal, that the aesthetic and political example of Attention na Sida lies. The work is obviously, in its internal orders, an act of translation from global metanarrative to local knowledge. At the same time, neither subordinates the other due to their contradictory deployment of particulars, and the empty signifier or antagonistic kernel that binds and undoes them at the same time: AIDS. As Butler notes, "The assertion of universality by those who have conventionally been excluded by the term often produces a performative contradiction of a certain sort" (38). Franco's polyrhythms are the masterful performance of this, constantly offsetting one rhythmic structure, one perspective, one language by another. In so doing, he raises to the height of eloquence the constitutive denials that concern him—of the postcolonial world, the space between languages and forms of life, and AIDS itself.
If "universality belongs to an open-ended hegemonic struggle" for Butler (38), or an act of translation across nonhierarchized languages and cultures, this is good news for us. It means that there is no privileged time or place of the universal, that it is always on the way and not yet here. It means that exclusion from prior claims to universality provide, exactly, the grounds for reinitiating those claims. It means that the act of cultural translation is the primary source for articulating the forms of abstraction that transcend them. It also means that a deferred and negated logic of particulars might be exactly the ground on which we stand. Franco's universal imperative to defeat AIDS, "Vaincre ce mal qui terrorise l'humanité," is deployed neither against an unreasoning master narrative nor an encompassing form of destruction; rather it is organized in and among embodied knowledges, practices, rhythms into which it must be translated, and which give it value. A moving anecdote concerns the popular reception of the song, which was met with a huge response in West Africa and danced to with repeated cries of "Sida, Sida." It is this argument for universality that I find both in the song's closing invocation and the absolutely danceable two minutes of melodic guitar lines and polyrhythms that translate it.
["Attention na Sida," 13:40 to end]
[Images from the Smithsonian Museum and the Museum of Fine Art, Boston. Text copyright © Barrett Watten 2004. Not to be reprinted without permission, except in short excerpts in electronic media.]