Close to the Edge (25 page)
Authors: Sujatha Fernandes
“No,
chica
, we're setting up for a folkloric event later in the afternoon,” I was told by a plump woman with bright orange lip-stick, who was preoccupied with sorting through a pile of fancy pink and blue costumes.
I had no phone number for reaching Magia and Alexey, and I had to be elsewhere later in the afternoon. An hour later I spotted Magia's signature brass-colored hair and Alexey beside her as they approached the Rinconada.
“Maaaaagia, Alexeeeeey!!!!” I shouted, and we collided into each other for long-awaited bear hugs.
“So it seems like you guys aren't performing here,” I told them.
“That's news to us,” Alexey shrugged.
“Ask them,” Magia said to Alexey. She motioned to two white Cubans in shirts and pants standing behind us and talking into cell phones.
“Who are they?”
“Our chaperones,” Magia confided in a whisper. “Sent by the Youth League, because apparently we need to be looked after here.”
In a few minutes one of the chaperones came over and announced in a booming tone that the concert was to be held at another venue.
“I can't go,” I apologized. “But I'll walk with you back to your van.”
As we climbed the path out of the Rinconada, we were stopped by three Colombian rappers, who wanted an autograph from Alexey.
“You're our inspiration in Colombia,” one exclaimed in awe.
The trio exchanged fist bumps and shoulder bang embraces with Alexey. “We're all the same,
los negros
in Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, wherever,” Alexey said, in the same warm tone he used whether speaking to his mother or a complete stranger. “We look the same, we hug the same, we even speak the same.” I noticed that the Colombian crew didn't address or shake hands with Magia. She and I stood to one side as the greeting ritual took place.
T
he schedule of the hip hop summit was filled with panels on hip hop and the war in Iraq, social justice for the hip hop generation, hip hop and political prisoners, and international solidarities. It included plenary sessions to discuss where hip hop was headed as a movement. It sounded greatâin theory. But somehow, each time I showed up, I found an empty audi-torium with no participants or a completely different event. Venues were changed, directions were misunderstood, people were lost, and everybody kept missing each other.
Finally, at the end of the summit, there was to be a large tele-vised concert in the plaza of the Panteon. I arrived with Johnny and Yajaira, andâno surpriseâthe large open square was empty. The stage had been erected, complete with a larger-than-life backdrop and high-tech speakers, while strobe lights scanned the vacant grounds. This was where my eleven-year journey had brought meâto an empty auditorium in Caracas, waiting for the finale of a global hip hop summit that would never happen. As we waited, I saw the parallels to global hip hop itself. Hip hop had galvanized the imagination of young people around the world, but it couldn't erase the differences between us or the difficulties of translating lives, cultures, and political visions. We were missing each other, literally and figuratively.
Malcolm X portrait, La Vega
“We belong to the real underground in Venezuela,” Black 7 said. “What we do is different from what you hear in commercial hip hop.”
“The rap groups you see on television here, they're all plastic,” Aja added. “They wear baggy pants and jerseys, but it's all superexpensive gear because they're rich. Most of them are from the east of Caracas like DJ Trece. I'm not going to get up there and rap about being a
malandro
, because I don't live that in my reality. Me, for example, I'm a student and a worker. I can't turn into this rapper with a pistol and say that I'm the most
malandro
of all, that I live in a
cerro
and I was shot. I'd be inventing a fantasy. But that's what happens with a lot of rappers here.
“Society always wants to isolate us because we're against the system,” Aja went on, “just like our martyrs, our ideological leaders like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mandela, and Gandhi. We have suffered but we're not gonna suffer all our lives. We're going to open up paths. We're going to open the eyes of our fellow blacks. That's why we're called Familia Negra, because we try to raise the self-esteem of blacks who still today carry four hundred years of slavery in their blood.
“The constitution says that we're a multiethnic society, that here in Venezuela we don't have a defined race,” Aja continued. “We're all
indios
, blacks, Arabs, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish. It's a mixture, but unfortunately many Venezuelans continue with discrimination, and they don't realize that this is not a pure country. We look for our roots because one of the first martyrs of Venezuela who fought for independence was José Leonardo Chirino, a black who you don't find mentioned in our history books. By contrast, in the United States they have something called Black History, and this is how you learn to love your skin color and raise your self-esteem.”
Aja's words resonated with me. In all my time in Venezuela, here, finally, was a perspective that I could fit into my understanding of the hip hop planet as a generation of young people across the globe who shared certain basic principles and ideals and wanted to use the music to advance a socially progressive agenda.
Black 7 found a portable boombox and played one of the tracks from their self-recorded CD. The song started with a simple background beat, then Aja rapping. I did a double take. He was rapping in English: “Yo, Black Family baby, Black 7 in the revolution, building my family / Fucking lexicon in the country jungles / Oh Latina, my color black, oh my nigga.” Then he shifted into Spanish: “Representa mi gran poder, diversidad,” and back to English for a series of phrases that were unintelligible. They sang on the chorus, peppered with American slang, “It's black emcee / Black family, once again yo / I'm a tall black powerhouse, ya know what I'm sayin'.”
They watched me expectantly. I hid my disappointment with a plastered smile. The most progressive politics didn't always produce good music.
A
ll my travels seemed to confirm the idea that just as hip hop was very diverse in its origins, so it looked different as it spread across the globe. From the revolutionary rap in Cuba to Chicago's hard-core underground, Sydney's activist rap, and gangsta culture in Caracas, global hip hop was strongly shaped by local concerns. But did that mean that we were all so different that we couldn't come together or find common themes like race, marginality, or opposition to the mainstream around which we could unite? Venezuela seemed the perfect place to explore such a possibility, with a government that was willing to fund it. In January 2006 the Bolivarian government convoked a global hip hop summit in Caracas, complete with workshops, panels, and concerts.
“Suyee, we're in Caracas,” Magia exclaimed over the phone. It had been years since I had seen my Cuban friends Magia and Alexey, who were invited to the summit. “We're scheduled to perform in the Rinconada at twelve-thirty today. Can you make it?”
“I'll be there!” I was excited to see them again and to be part of the summit that was bringing together hip hop artists from across Latin America and the globe for discussions of politics, art, culture, and how a global hip hop generation could be at the forefront of change. It fit nicely with my own quest.
Close to 12:30, I was approaching the Rinconada, a small auditorium behind the museum in the downtown Bellas Artes neighborhood of Caracas. Only a smattering of people were in the audience, and the stage did not seem to be set up for a show. I went to the front and inquired about the Cuban group Obsesion but was met with blank stares.
“No,
chica
, we're setting up for a folkloric event later in the afternoon,” I was told by a plump woman with bright orange lipstick, who was preoccupied with sorting through a pile of fancy pink and blue costumes.
I had no phone number for reaching Magia and Alexey, and I had to be elsewhere later in the afternoon. An hour later I spotted Magia's signature brass-colored hair and Alexey beside her as they approached the Rinconada.
“Maaaaagia, Alexeeeeey!!!!” I shouted, and we collided into each other for long-awaited bear hugs.
“So it seems like you guys aren't performing here,” I told them.
“That's news to us,” Alexey shrugged.
“Ask them,” Magia said to Alexey. She motioned to two white Cubans in shirts and pants standing behind us and talking into cell phones.
“Who are they?”
“Our chaperones,” Magia confided in a whisper. “Sent by the Youth League, because apparently we need to be looked after here.”
In a few minutes one of the chaperones came over and announced in a booming tone that the concert was to be held at another venue.
“I can't go,” I apologized. “But I'll walk with you back to your van.”
As we climbed the path out of the Rinconada, we were stopped by three Colombian rappers, who wanted an autograph from Alexey.
“You're our inspiration in Colombia,” one exclaimed in awe.
The trio exchanged fist bumps and shoulder bang embraces with Alexey. “We're all the same,
los negros
in Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, wherever,” Alexey said, in the same warm tone he used whether speaking to his mother or a complete stranger. “We look the same, we hug the same, we even speak the same.” I noticed that the Colombian crew didn't address or shake hands with Magia. She and I stood to one side as the greeting ritual took place.
T
he schedule of the hip hop summit was filled with panels on hip hop and the war in Iraq, social justice for the hip hop generation, hip hop and political prisoners, and international solidarities. It included plenary sessions to discuss where hip hop was headed as a movement. It sounded greatâin theory. But somehow, each time I showed up, I found an empty auditorium with no participants or a completely different event. Venues were changed, directions were misunderstood, people were lost, and everybody kept missing each other.
Finally, at the end of the summit, there was to be a large televised concert in the plaza of the Panteon. I arrived with Johnny and Yajaira, andâno surpriseâthe large open square was empty. The stage had been erected, complete with a larger-than-life backdrop and high-tech speakers, while strobe lights scanned the vacant grounds. This was where my eleven-year journey had brought meâto an empty auditorium in Caracas, waiting for the finale of a global hip hop summit that would never happen. As we waited, I saw the parallels to global hip hop itself. Hip hop had galvanized the imagination of young people around the world, but it couldn't erase the differences between us or the difficulties of translating lives, cultures, and political visions. We were missing each other, literally and figuratively.
EPILOGUE
Global Rage: Over the Edge
I
n Caracas we were talking about Hip Hop for the People, planning an intervention of global hip hop against war and imperialism. Meanwhile, Paris was smoldering. On October 27, 2005, two French teens of Malian and Tunisian descent had fled to their death in an electricity substation in the Parisian
banlieue
of Clichy-sous-Bous after being harassed by police. Angry local residents in the poor communities across the city burned cars and defaced police stations and other public buildings. The French prime minister declared a state of emergency, establishing curfews and deploying national riot police. By November 17âjust three weeks after the rioting had begunâthere were about nine thousand torched vehicles, and police had arrested three thousand people in one hundred municipalities on the urban periphery.
The events in Paris bore similarity to the more contained but equally flammable situation in Redfern, Sydney, the previous year. On February 14, 2004, a young Aboriginal boy, Thomas “TJ” Hickey, rode his bike a few streets from his aunt's to his mother's place on the Block to collect twenty dollars. He was chased down by officers in a caged truck who were on the hunt for a suspect in a recent assault and robbery. Hickey was thrown from his bike, impaled on a metal fence, and subsequently died from his injuries. The next evening about one hundred angry youth staged a confrontation with police officers around the Redfern railway station. The street battle lasted for nine hours. For those familiar with the constant policing of Aboriginal communities, the revolt was no surprise. TJ's aunt, Virginia Hickey, told a reporter, “There are days when I would rather be dead than be an Aboriginal in Australia. I have experienced racism right through my life. There are shops and cafes we are not even allowed in. The police surveillance is 24/7. It is hard because all the kids know growing up is police, police, police.”
1
Hickey's words echoed the rapper Ice Cube's comments after police were acquitted in the brutal beating of Rodney King, sparking the 1992 rebellion in Los Angeles: “It's been happening to us for years. It's just that we didn't have a camcorder every time it happened.”
2
In Clichy-sous-Bois, Redfern, and South Central LA, it was nothing as grand as an international caucus of hip hop activists and celebrities that had started the uprisings. It was something as routine as another act of police harassment, another young black person killed on the streets, that pushed people over the edge. It was here, at a street corner, or a railway station, that the fires of a generation in revolt were burning.
Rage was a defining feature of our times, and hip hop was a tool for expressing, catalyzing, and creatively transforming that rage into social criticism and musical innovation. Back in 1973, DJ Kool Herc created the sound system, Afrika Bambaataa launched the Zulu Nation, and Grandmaster Flash pioneered new techniques on the turntables. And around the world this movement catalyzed the passion, anger, and frustrations of young people who felt like they were living life on the edge of a precipice. Decades later “The Message” was still being echoed in the prescient raps of the French rap group 113: “There'd better not be a police blunder or the town will go up, the city's a time bomb.” The question was not, why did the riots happen, but why didn't they happen sooner? “Why, why are we waiting to set the fire,” rapped Suprême NTM from Seine-Saint-Denis.
Much had changed and much had happened in the eleven years since I started my journey. The world was now embroiled in the War on Terror, which heightened ethnic profiling in the metropolises. It meant the militarization of housing projects such as those in the
banlieues
of Paris; the harassment and detention of undocumented immigrants as suspected terrorists in American cities; and the creation of a Middle-Eastern Organised Crime squad in Sydney that targeted Middle-Eastern and Muslim communities. The myths of multiculturalism, social mobility, and racial democracy were being crushed under the weight of obvious disparities, and unforgiving cycles of poverty and everyday violence. Minorities were no longer to be assimilated and incorporated into the nation; their afros or baggy pants or veils were signs that they didn't belong and often made them targets of repression at the hands of the state.
My journey had brought me to various realizations. I had started out searching for the ways that hip hop culture could reignite protest politics on a global scale. I was hoping that the music could bring young people together across boundaries of nation, race, and ethnicity. And I did find moments of unity, mostly on the concert stage, as Cuban and American rappers celebrated their Pan-African identity; or a Nunga, Niuean, and Indian saw their common interest. But through the course of my travels I also saw the disjunctures between hip hop communities across the globe. KRS may have been called Kris in every âhood around the world. But Kris was pronounced differently in the truncations of a Cuban accent, the laidback slang of a blackfulla, and a midwestern inflection. And 'hoods around the world were not identical, either. Global austerity and structural adjustment policies may have created similar cycles of poverty and violence among marginal communities. Yet a housing project in Alamar was not the same as one in Caracas; the South Side of Chicago was not the West Side of Sydney.
Race and racismâcommon tropes of hip hop cultureâwere not experienced the same way in different places. Hip hop emerged in American society, where people were used to talking about and identifying themselves raciallyâin both liberatory and discriminatory ways. But the culture spread to places where race was something to be ignored or denied as a threat to the social fabric. While hip hop's black militancy gave voice to experiences that were hard to otherwise articulate, it didn't always translate into local cultural understandings of race. At its best hip hop could create strength through recognizing the parallel lines of oppression that existed across cultures. At its worst it appeared as an American export that encouraged mindless imitation and imposed one narrative of race above others.
The racial politics of hip hop did not only appeal to black and African diasporic populations around the globe. It also spoke to Latino, Asian, Arabic, and, in some cases, even white hip hop fans. As George Lipsitz has argued, hip hop allowed these groups to become more themselves by identifying with something different.
3
Lebanese hip hoppers in Sydney or Asian and white rappers in Chicago were able to mark their difference from the dominant white culture by taking on African American style and culture. But creating a broader fellowship that would unite hip hoppers across racial lines required more than the rhetoric of international alliances and cultural borrowings. It depended on the existence of spaces of mutual interaction and experiences within the working-class areas and diasporas where collaborations could be realized.
Even the idea of a “brotherhood” that hip hoppers envisioned across cultures contained its own dynamics of gendered exclusion. When DJs and producers bonded at a DJ battle in a Chicago club, or Cuban and Colombian rappers exchanged fist bumps on a Caracas street corner, there was a sense of masculine camaraderie that left women looking on from the sidelines. Open mics and freestyle battles rarely had women participants. When women did take the mic, it was often with a different kind of presence, as Magia eloquently described it: “With their things to say, with their pain and happiness, with their knowledge, their softness, with the prejudice they suffer for being women, with their limitations, with their weakness and their strength.” Many of the women artists in this book, from Magia herself to Ang 13 in Chicago and Waiata, Ebony, and Dr. Nogood in Sydney, brought this embodied awareness into their music and their lyrics. Female spaces within hip hop were to some extent separate. All-female concert series, such as the Sisterz of the Underground in the San Francisco Bay Area or the Proven Presence concert during the Havana rap festival, have been common ways to showcase women's performance.
4
But, as Magia said, separate concerts are also patronizing, as women are either “pitied or put on a pedestal.”
5
As I traveled, I learned that the global hip hop âhood was more a fantasy than actuality. But at the same time hip hoppers were invoking the myth of a united hip hop fellowship to give more power to their localized movements. Cuban rappers drew on the idea of a black planet to boost their claims for recognition. Hip hoppers in Chicago and Sydney forged integrated spaces across racial and ethnic divisions as they built creative and political collaborations. And gangsta rappers in Caracas made strategic alliances across class boundaries that allowed them access to resources and enabled them to bring their stories to a wider audience. The broader connections of rappers gave them greater leverage to communicate and share their specific experiences.
I gradually came to understand the appeal of “The Message,” which I had first heard as a teenager all those years ago. Expressing the everyday realities of “livin' on a see-saw” was what hip hop did best. It was why the music appealed so broadly across diverse culturesânot because everyone shared the same situation chronicled in the song but because it gave listeners an outline that they could color with their own experiences. Hip hop thrived around the world because it was a way for young people on the margins to tell their own storiesâin all their hybridity, pain, and humorâin societies where there was no language or medium for these stories to be told. The strength of hip hop was not that it formed a grand global movement but rather in the myriad local forms of expression that it made possible. This was where the seeds of change were being sown. For some, like rappers in Havana and Sydney, the music spurred them on to political action. For others, like the underground artists in Chicago and Caracas, it became a tool for commerce. The sheer diversity of voices and politics that emerged across the hip hop globe made any attempts at a unitary protest culture impossible. And maybe even undesirable. For all its emancipatory promise, music couldn't substitute for politics.
As hip hoppers started to move across the globe, they developed new understandings of themselves and others that helped to break down some of the misconceptions that had plagued global hip hop. The diaspora was a base from which hip hoppers could create broader global networks and build multiracial solidarities. In some cases this was a result of hip hop artists' emigrating from their homeland, usually to Western countries like the US or Britain. Cuban rappers in particular began to emigrate after 2005. Following Julio Cardenas's departure for New York City in 2001, Ariel Fernández also left in 2005 for New York. The rap producer Pablo Herrera moved to Scotland. Miki Flow from Explosión Suprema went to Washington, D.C., Randy Acosta from Los Paisanos went to Caracas, and his rapping partner, Jesse Saldrigas, went to England. The encounter of Cuban artists with Latino artists in places like New York provided the ground for new collaborations. Julio Cardenas co-wrote a play,
Representa!
with the Latino poet Paul Flores that dramatizes the dissonance they feel in each other's spaces. They are both minorities. But Flores is seen as a rich tourist when he visits Havana, while Cardenas has had privileges of education, health care, and social mobility under the Cuban revolution that are not easily available to marginalized Latinos in the US. The Latino-American-Cuban connection that Julio first imagined when he heard “Boricuas on Da Set” seemed to have a better chance of being realized when Cubans and Latinos could live in each other's spaces and acknowledge their differences.
In other cases hip hoppers in long-standing immigrant communities started to make contact with their ancestral homelands. Different ethnic and racial groups in Sydney had already come together in spaces such as the West Side and through the antiracism movement of the late 1990s. But in the new millennium some artists began to make global linkages with hip hop movements in their homelands. In 2002 Khaled Sabsabi made his first trip back to Lebanon in twenty-five years. He was interested in learning about traditional oral practices of improvised rhyming like
zajal
, chanting, and spoken word. He went back again a few years later to do studio training with young people across the country and in the Palestinian refugee camps. During the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah forces in the south of Lebanon, Khaled became involved with the Stop the War network. Following the war, through an installation project known as
Oversite
, he joined forces with Salah Saouli, a Lebanese artist based in Berlin, to look at how societies engage with traumatic experiences of war and how these devastating events affect the global diaspora. These two artists visited postwar Beirut and recorded the images, memories, and sounds that contributed to their artwork.
Through his travels between southwestern Sydney and Beirut, Khaled began to think about the dislocation of migration: What causes entire communities to be uprooted from their homelands, and how can they find meaning and direction outside their context? As he told Anna Bazzi Backhouse in an interview, “Living in South West Sydney is about being confronted with universal issues about migration, displacement, and the language of exilesâof diasporic communities searching for their sense of place and most importantly purpose. This is multiculturalism todayâthe ripping or legal theft of people from their lands, with the temptation and promise of a better life, away from political and economic unrest. Who is causing and who has caused this political and economic unrest in the first place?”
6
The story of the global spread of hip hop is itself one of movement. A movement of ideas, a movement of commodities, a movement of people. If there is anything that marks this moment, it is as much the motion and mobility that bring us together as it is the boundaries and borders that divide us. Hip hop is a force defined by rupture and flow, and it remains to be seen whether global hip hoppers can reinvent themselves in the diaspora and build enduring links with their homelands.
