Nomad Souls Across Time and Space: West African Musicians as Ethnographers

Abstract

West African musicians such as Baaba Maal and Youssou N'Dour of Senegal, Oumou Sangare and Ali Farka Toure of Mali, have become known for their commitment to their constituencies back home, as well as for their appeal to non-African audiences. Fully embracing a post-colonial and post-modern sensibility, their layered musical compositions include rap, reggae, blues, and jazz at the same time as they draw on traditional instruments, rhythms, themes, and melodies. They may choose between the traditional format of praise songs of the griots and more modern messages. Cultural interpreters at home and in Europe, these ethnographers write in sound, choosing carefully their subject, rhythm, delivery, and style, depending on their audience. Equally layered, however, is the complex response to these artists in France. This paper draws on field work in Paris and in eastern France to discuss the appeal of West African music for a French audience vis a vis the mixed understanding of the purveyors of that music. West African music may open France's door to immigrants, only to shut out the musicians as they negotiate its daily life. Immigrants' individual experiences are discussed in regard to their ambivalently received personhood, on one hand, and their positively received, yet frequently exoticized, music on the other.