Commander of the Cool: Translating the Art of an African Woman Excerpts from Robert Farris Thompson’s Final Keynote Address

Delivered Saturday, October 15, 2011, at the Menil Collection, Houston, TX

“What is translation? Why don’t we start with bad translation? Bad translation is when John Wayne says, “Give me a shot of red eye,” and it comes out, “Dubonnet s’il vous plait.” Another bad translation: when John Wayne says, “Drinks all on the house. I’m feelin’ loose as a goose.” Subtitle in Zurich: “Cognac fur alle.” What an elegant cowboy! Imagine the late and great Humphrey Bogart kissing the forever great Lauren Bacall. He pushes her against the wall and they kiss, languorously. Lauren says, “I’ve never been kissed like that in my life.” Spanish subtitle: “Muchísimas gracias.” So, how do we avoid such catastrophes? The German theorist Walter Benjamin has an answer for you. He says, “You cannot translate anything—French into German, Japanese into Mandarin—unless you love the other language as much as your own.” And I’m here to tell you that I love Yoruba, maybe even more than English, who knows?

Imagine yourself coming in from the Eighth Galaxy and your mission is: “Check the planet. Send us back a message. Is there life?” You send a zap to Paris and it picks up by luck John Coltrane on recording. Then you hit Rio [samba drumming sounds]. Then you hit the South Bronx: Mambo! And so forth. So you send back to Eighth Galaxy: “Your Highness, I have probed the planet. There is definitely life and to judge from the sounds I am getting: they baaaad!” The point being the extra-terrestrial listened to so many forms of black music that he’s even beginning to talk black.

The big triumph is that the airwaves of our planet belong to black people. No matter where you are you’ll pick up black music. Or maybe you are in Manila and you pick up: boom-chi-boom-chick. That is, of course, Habanera sped up to become Reggaeton. Wherever you are, what’s the secret of the black conquest of the airwaves? They have something that no other musical tradition has and that’s multiple meter: 4/4, plus 2/4, plus 6/8, plus 12 and a half, plus whatever you got. Multiple meter—you can see it happening centuries ago in the fifteen hundreds in Benin [pointing at an image] . . . you can see there is one being struck with the hands in the middle drum, you can see a person is striking a counter beat with a stick on the side of the drum, and then you got another drummer. At least three different beats. Cut to Brazil today in 2011, and you’ll see the same combination of drums, each one with a different texture or different metrical pattern. Multiple meter. That’s one of the powerhouses behind the black conquest. And that conquest leads to the great invention of the classical music of our nation: Jazz.

What do you do under drum fire? How can you function when you are bombarded by multiple meter? And that leads us to something else here that we have to translate: cool. That is to say, a collectiveness of mind. You are under drum fire, in which you keep your mental gyroscope and what you do is internalize the beat. You’re no longer afraid of dancing because you are a beat of your own.

If there’s anything that black people have taught me is that people are art. Even to me Payton, the great running back who invented the stutter-step, or brought the stutter-step into NFL football, he’s a work of art, just as much as Malcolm X or John Coltrane. Just as much as “Lady Day,” AKA Billie Holiday.

Diaspora to me is a magical word. It means the impossible. It means that you recreate Africa right in the middle of the USA.