I first heard the rapper K’NAAN when visiting my friend in New Mexico. Driving to the school she taught at we listened to raps on Somalia while barren and beautiful stretches of New Mexican desert went by. I often put K’NAAN on my headphones when cycling into town or to the next village and the other day while visiting a Canadian Ph.D. student she played a podcast for me in which K’NAAN was interviewed.
K’NAAN moved from Somalia to Toronto when he was 13 and was interviewed about his music, the process and about his lyrical activism. At one point the interviewer asked K’NAAN if he was an angry person. K’NAAN has plenty of reasons to be angry, but he responded with, “no, he wasn’t an angry person, but he did tap into a collective anger.” I was impressed by his response. He seems to recognize that so often personal anger is more debilitating than constructive or helpful. Yet, he still acknowledges anger in the collective which he is tapping in his own lyrical quest for justice.
I feel if more people thought more about a collective anger they would be less inclined to act out in irrational, violent ways that are often motivated and fueled by personal and isolated anger. Tapping into a collective anger is already claiming more responsibility and recognizing your anger as something that involves and has provoked many. When I have worked in prison, the facilitators worked to prompt some sort of communal attachment to a collective anger versus the usual internal anger that comes out in fights pitted against one another rather than an anger that has the possibility of tying them together.
We often worked around the theme of “transforming power,” not denying the power that got most of them into prison, but recognizing the power and transforming it to something more constructive that goes beyond gangs, drugs, and violence. I feel recognition and attention to the collective anger is part of transforming the power. Prisoners are almost encouraged in prison to forget and bury their anger, to move on, forgive, apologize, and become a different person. In order to truly move on, to rehabilitate, the inmates I interacted with needed to know that their anger was real and in some cases justified, but acting on this anger in the form of crime and violence damages the collective and in that way denies a collective anger, and with this denies a part of one’s own anger, never allowing it to be addressed and for a healing to take place. This blocks a true way to rehabilitation and a way to truly unite or claim responsibility to the community. The question I have now is what happens when there is no collective anger to be tapped?
Malawi is on of the poorest countries in the world, in fact it made the top 7. The government makes many a promise about roads and education and both the money and promises seems to get lost and slip through the cracks. The president buys a jet and hosts an extravagant wedding for himself, yet so many schools remained unbuilt and so many roads unfinished.
I already have recognized a growing anger in me even though I always have a way out. It scares me sometimes how even though I know I can leave at any point, and will someday leave, I still harbor a lot of anger that not only exists inside of me, but that comes out. Back in the States, I would have never kicked a pet, but my cat the other day was eating my eggs, and I need protein, and don’t have a lot of resources to continually buy protein, so the eggs I buy are precious and she was eating them so I kicked her, I kicked her hard. But even if my cat keeps eating my sources of protein sources, I can always leave; in fact I can ask to get on a plane at any point.
But Malawians aren’t as a whole that angry and they know there here to stay. Granted they kick their animals as well, but outside of that their anger rarely even extends to disparaging remarks about their village chief not to mention their government or president. People of course get frustrated and upset, but there’s not a lot of anger.
And when I think about it, Malawians or at least the Malawians I have come in contact with in rural areas, just don’t have the time. A struggle amongst Peace Corps volunteers is how to mobilize and instigate sustainable change, when most of the villagers live day to day, they think about tomorrow, and maybe the next day, because they know its quite possible that they day after that will not come. Why by angry at your government or even the wider community when you know you won’t see them tomorrow?
The president is not coming to Kawaza tomorrow, so better to direct your frustrations at your neighbor at the price of eggs, because angry or not your children will be hungry tomorrow, so better to use your frustration to feed them. I of course can’t fully understand this; I don’t have anyone to feed but myself and my thieving cats. Of course not all Malawians have this point of view. A student I met the other days wants to be a lawyer and defend the rights of Malawian women. She sees not only year ahead, but change within those years.
In one of K’NAAN’s songs he sings “When I grow older, I will be stronger, they’ll call me freedom.” So what if people don’t think about getting older, because this week is all they can handle? In order for any change to take place, people have to mobilize beyond their dreams, but another challenge is presented when it’s hard to find those dreams to ignite.
Tags: africa, anger, K'NAAN, malawi, peace corps, power, rap, transform
