It's mourning time, the kind of mourning that comes with the loss of people you didn't know but meant to you something. Both Burroughs and Fela died this saturday. You probably read it in the paper. And I was wondering,in what pages did your paper announce it? How many words did they devote respectively to Fela and Burroughs? I'm asking because the answer to that question tells a lot about society's interpretation of these losses.
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Although Burroughs is certain to retain the major part of the media's attention, it is Fela's death that saddens me more. First, he was younger than Burroughs, and this fact alone could justify this feeling. Burroughs was eighty three, he lived an intense and a long life, full of memorable events that marked several generations. His death is one that subscribes to natural order. He died like a king. Entombed, he will continue to shine. Fela, another king, died on the same day as Burroughs, but his throne has been shattered and desecrated, and still is.
It would have been more correct to state that Fela was assassinated. Fela succumbed after many years of humiliation and torture perpetrated by the military regime in Nigeria. His death arouses in me that feeling of injustice that we experience as children. Here is a man that stood for his rights, and paid for it with his life. His courage and determination to fight the authorities were stunning. He was the Zorro of Africa, only he wore no mask.
Fela was a gifted musician, inventor of afro-jazz, and a freedom warrior. Except for drug consumption, he had not much in common with Burroughs. Two symbols dying on the same day, that's all there is to it, really.
In "Libération", they put Burroughs' picture on the cover. Normally, there's the content on the left margin, but today there were none, and the picture got all the space. It's a picture by Mapplethorpe, you can see Burroughs covered with a hat, pointing a rifle outside the frame. It's a nice picture, one of those amazing Mapplethorpe's portraits, where you are exposed to an unfamiliar aspect of the person being photographed. Burroughs doesn't look as fierce as usual, neither as dry or as invincible. Actually, he looks like a little kid that grew old too fast. The first six pages of the paper contain articles on Burroughs. His life, his work, his cultural contributions. It is remarkable that a French paper devotes that much space to an Anglo-Saxon cultural icon.
Fela's death is covered in the culture pages. A one page article resuming his life and numerous sufferings. While there is no doubt that Burroughs has contributed and defined culture more than Fela, it is equally undoubtable that Fela's life tells us more about society and politics, Western or African, than Burroughs. What I would have liked is a joint cover story on both men. A story that would have hijacked the paper, a story about heroes and bad guys, bureaucracy and art, music and drugs, violence and freedom. But I searched in vain, there were no parallells drawn, no links established.
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When I was a kid, I got Fela's "Black President" album as a gift. The copy disappeared during my endless peregrinations, and although the blessed soul that gave me the present is shamefully forgotten, I have a clear memory of the black and yellow cover, the "ITT - International Thief Thief" song, the addictive grooves and the pidgin lyrics. I recently looked after a CD issue of that album, but it seems that it is unavailable. On itself, I wouldn't have been bothered. Today, the unavailability of many of his albums strikes me as a sign of the times.
Fela Anikulapo Kuti was born in 1938 in Nigeria. His first group, "Koola Lobitos", played a mixture of highlife and jazz, which he called Afrobeat. He toured in London and California, where he sympathized with the Black Panther movement. He became a target of the Nigerian government when he founded the Kalakuta Republic, a community in which he lived with 27 wives, fellow musicians and outcasts. His rebellion against political repression and injustice was crushed by the authorities. Police raided his house, defenestrated Kuti's mother - a political figure who had been responsible for women's right to vote in Nigeria, raped and killed women, and set the lot afire. Since then, on and off his incarcerations, he continued obstinately to spread his music and his messages.
His thin body was one big sack of scars and broken bones. Nothing made him shut up. He was such a beautiful, arrogant bastard. He had million opportunities to flee and operate from abroad. But Africa was his homeland, and he doomed himself to his roots. His fight was not limited to the Nigerian authorities, though. Fela fought for justice, big time. He wanted to hire top New York lawyers and sue the big Western powers. Like jews fighted for the reparation of the Holocaust, he envisioned to repair the damages caused to the African people by centuries of colonization and slavery.
Burroughs' books don't know the distribution problems that Fela's sixty albums encounter. Burroughs was a conscious, a guide for many. His life doesn't prove anything, except that you can succesfully recover from smack and live a long life afterwards (which revealed invaluable to David Bowie's morale). Or that you can shoot your wife by accident, and continue to collect weapons. It's Burrough's body of work that matters, his collaborative efforts in the world of art, and the pitch of his voice.
"Junky" was a beautiful book, with strong characters and an irreprochable progression in the plot. It's his only book I read from start to end. I've picked out other books, but didn't figure out how to read them, their experimental structure acted as distracting. I didn't have the discipline or the motivation to read the cut-ups, a technique he finetuned with Brion Gysin. But I will never forget the introduction to "Naked Lunch", some twenty pages of amazing reading that should be taught in school.
Burroughs and Fela never met. How could they? On the surface of things, nothing holds them togeter. Burroughs had his own Africa to fight against, a dark continent infested with conspirations and viruses, haunting demons and totalitarian ghosts. In the Interzone too, bureaucracy is the impersonation of evil, and the enemy is within. Fela would have liked him. I wish the boys to meet and have a wild time.
