The Song of the Nightingale

By: Qelsi Qualls

Chorus: And sometimes the trees and the sun come out and places of dialogue make themselves known. Connection points Duende Santeria Yoruba The History/ The Herstory They start coming together And two seconds aint enough. 1st Verse: There must be bridges to cross/ There are connections to be made. There are points to be located. Points to be found. There are moments to be found. Lost and found. Lost and found. The seesaw of life. When Miguel and I were placed together for this project, there was a distance. There was a barrier between our different lives, which made the element of time more constraining. Along with the fact that we had a hard enough time coming to a place where we could find an issue that there was no real room to disagree or agree with it. It was just there. We had to deal with whatever came up. It didnt help that there was only two weeks to grapple with this issue that we couldnt even begin to try to disagree. This was an issue we couldnt critique. What is really interesting is that the issue that presented itself wasnt really an issue. When we finally came to a place where we could dialogue openly, the issue that the presentation would be on became a conglomerate of ideas that had to do with the bridges we had to connect. The Atlantic is deep and it is wide, and very still. The bridges were the most obvious, hard to find bridges I know. Audre Lord says so eloquently,

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken. (Audre Lord, 44).

Chorus: And sometimes the trees and the sun come out and places of dialogue make themselves known. Connection points Duende Santeria Yoruba The History/ The Herstory They start coming together And two seconds aint enough. 2nd Verse: We found a bridge/and it was a bridge that was most obvious but seemingly shaded over by the topic of the class. We found it under the trees in the park on a sunny day when birds fly low and try to snatch the crumbs off the ground in one fell swoop. And pigeons graze like cows on the nonexistent grass shielded from pedestrians. This is where we found our bridge/ But it seemed we had opened Pandoras box. And one second wasnt enough... While at first, I felt we were in a funk because of the distance, now I felt we were in a time warp because of the possibilities. I still feel this way. The bridges to be crossed cannot even be fathomed. I fear we have only reached the obvious ones within the time that was allotted us. I know that this was not supposed to be the depth of all depth. However, I feel dissonant in a bad way to this. There is no justice in doing things this way and things remain uneasy and waiting to be solved. In any case, the connectors that came were duende (spirit incarnate), gypsy, and Diaspora and all these are heavy and quite full. They are still waiting to be unpacked. The cloud ever waiting to cry. These concepts came to explain Aretha Franklin, Maria Jimenez and Rocio Jurado. They started to overlap and we became confused with what we were trying to present and where we had to cut it down at. Where did

these experiences begin and end? And now that we are aware of these bridges can we take them apart and live in the fashion we had been living prior to the day that the pigeons grazed the earth like cows? I think not. The layers became so thick that they became polyphonous and rang out together in a field call. Chorus: And sometimes the trees and the sun come out and places of dialogue make themselves known. Connection points Duende Santeria Yoruba The History/ The Herstory They start coming together And two seconds aint enough. 3rd Verse: So Aretha, Rocia, and Maria started blurring together. Their treatment of the music and the dark sounds of Lorca come calling out. There are separations but at this stage there are more connections. We cant stop finding bridges. There is a field of them. A field of lush bridges. It seems like the line for it puts in a different perspective. Like Amazing Grace of Aretha Franklin for me/ I have always admired Aretha Franklin but she has always been a figure of the past, no matter how present she makes herself. Now by no means do I look at her as dead but as a woman of another generation. She is always someone who belongs to the generation that has my mothers voice, to me. That was until I heard Amazing Grace: The Complete Recording. That was the day Aretha saved my life/ When I heard the album, I thought of the good ole days of my childhood, when I used to think that church was good because they sang in it. The choir was the only reason why I liked going to church back then. When I heard Arethas recording, it reminded me of that. I listen to it all the time now. I often think that it is a true synthesis of the concert style singing and gospel/spiritual music. It also helps to know that

Aretha is partner in the arrangement of that album. I love it cause its deep and dark, like the Atlantic. The darkness I am speaking of is indicative of a place where the black sounds of Manuel Torre come from the essential, uncontrollable, quivering common base of wood, sound, canvas, and word (61).. The duendes arrival always means a radical change in forms. It brings to old planes unknown feelings of freshness, with the quality of something newly created, like a miracle, and it produces an almost religious enthusiasm(Lorca, 61 & 53).

Chorus: And sometimes the trees and the sun come out and places of dialogue make themselves known. Connection points Duende Santeria Yoruba The History/ The Herstory They start coming together And two seconds aint enough. Bridge: (Langston Hughes says from the poem entitled prayer from From Fine Clothes to the Jew.) I ask you this: Which way to go? I ask you this: Which sin to bear? Which crown to put Upon my hair? I do not know, Lord God, I do not know. 4th Verse:

There are bridges filled with silence, waiting to be spoken and two seconds wont do it. There are bridges full of spirit that havent been spoken, and how unfortunate for we live our lives though having never known knowledge. Ever. Amen/ I had to find the bridge and I felt like I opened up the space to talk about me (being black, a woman, and most definitely spiritual). I had to reach out and incorporate so that those walls that make things so stifling can be broken and I feel I did. This is the Black Womanist Experience. Or at least part of it. There is a ferocity on our part to show everyone how they are just like she/her (even though she/her is at the bottom of the rung). To incorporate and show similarities and contrasts sometimes are all we have. As a matter of fact, most often thats all we have. After all, when there is no power, there is always the metaphor and the simile. There are the bridges. There are the experiences (which, by the way, are most often how Miguel and I got a point across this conceptual bridge). There are these bridges. What I am not saying is that Miguel and I got it right. What I am saying is that Miguel and I started down the road, and it is a road that I am willing to be wrong about. We started down this road and two seconds just aint enough.

Chorus: And sometimes the trees and the sun come out and places of dialogue make themselves known. Connection points Duende Santeria Yoruba The History/ The Herstory They start coming together And two seconds aint enough. Ad lib:
(From Alice Walker, The Color Purple.)

Man Corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He trying to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he aint. Whenever you trying to pray, and a man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say shug. Conjure up flowers, win, water, a big rock. But this hard work, let me tell you. He been there so long, he dont want to budge. He threaten lightning, floods and earthquakes. Us fight. I hardly pray at all. Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it. Amen.

I throws those rocks so that I can see the bridges.

Annotated Bibliography

Davis, Angela(1998), I Used to Be Your Sweet Mama, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Vintage Books: New York. This chapter is about the blues woman as the free woman. Davis speaks about how African-American people, in general, had the freedom to choose the way their sexual lives in practice and in theory. She points out in this chapter that that was a big transition. She also points out within this chapter that the blues woman epitomized the free woman because she was not bound by traditional norms.

Franklin, Aretha (1999) Amazing Grace: The Complete Recordings, Atlantic/Rhino, R2 75627 The actual recording. Griffin, Farah Jasmine (1996) Introduction. Who Set You Flowin?, Oxford University Press: New York. Griffin, Farah Jasmine (1996) Reasons For Leaving The South, Who Set You Flowin?, Oxford University Press: New York. Talks about the migration north through the songs that were made. Explains through the context of the lyrics the reasons for African-Americans to leave the south where slavery was worst to go to the industrial north. Hughes, Langston (1927) Prayer, Fine Clothes to the Jew, Alfred A Knopf: New York. A poem in a book of poems that was not received very well when it was written. I am most interested in the form of this book because it resembles not only call and response but the other breaks and pauses of a black church service. This poem is situated as the title indicates, a prayer. Hurston, Zora Neale (1934)Characteristics of Negro Expression, Negro Anthology, Ed. Nancy Cunard. London: Greenwood Publishing Group. This reading by Zora Neale Hurston is about the different ways AfricanAmericans express themselves. It includes commentary about way speech is adorned by the use of metaphor and simile (double descriptive, etc.), angularity, dancing, culture heroes, and originality to name a few. Lorca, Frederico Garcia (1998). Play and Theory of the Duende. In Search of Duende, New Directions Publishing Corporation: New York. Lorca explains in great detail about duende. He likens it to the dark sounds. He explains that duende is gremlin, goblin (etc.) and that we should not look at that description in a Western context for it loses the meaning he is giving it. He explains that duende is spirit (almost in the way of possession, if not possession.) Lorde, Audre (1984) The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,* Sister Outsider, The Crossing Press: New York. Talks about facing death and having to break the silences that have kept her from saying the things that she feels she needs to say. Time is a grave factor in this because she is writing while she is dealing with cancer so the issue of time and her silence are joined in this essay. Mackey, Nathaniel (1997) Cante Moro, Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical

Technologies. Ed. Adelaide Kirby. University of North Carolina Press: Chanel Hill, NC. This is a explanation of Lorcas piece as perceived by a African-American man. He ties it more directly to the Diaspora. He is most specifically trying to tie the New American Poetrys Spanish connection. Milligan, Patrick (1999) Producers Notes, Amazing Grace: The Complete Recordings, Atlantic/Rhino, R2 75627 Patrick Miligan talks about the revisions to the recording, as in what is live and what is not. Nathan, David (1999) booklet inside CD, Amazing Grace: The Complete Recordings, Atlantic/Rhino, R2 75627. Talks about Aretha Franklins history as a recording artist not only as a gospel artist but as a R&B artist. It is part of the liner notes for the album. Sojourner, Sabrina(1995), From the House of Yemanja: the Goddess Heritage of Black Women. My Soul Is A Witness. Ed. Gloria Wade-Gayles. Beacon Press: Boston Part of Section 4: Praying at Different Altars. She explains that Yemanja is the mother goddess of the Orisha. She is trying to bring out the fact that because there is not much literature on the Black Goddesses doesnt mean there is none. She is shedding light upon this issue. Walker, Alice. The Only Reason You Want to Go to Heaven is That You Have Been Driven Out of Your Mind (Off Your Land and Out of Your Lovers Arms)- Clear Seeing, Inherited Religion and Reclaiming the Pagan Self [Part 2 of 2], http://bart.prod.oclc.org:3058/FETCH:recext=html/fs_fulltext.htm%22:/fstx98.htm Examining religious belief because of tradition. She wants to work with the issue of those traditions that may be blinding rather then offering salvation, if you will. The resistance against the patriarchal system is very prevalent because it is this system that has set up these traditions to be played out as they have been.