Cultural Democracy: The Arts, Community, and the Public Purpose

1. Communion

1 Communion Early in my career as a facilitator of community cultural programs, I thought it might be possible to build some social bridges between Portland’s African American community and our newcomer population of African refugees.1 They are all of African descent, I figured, so they must share some common cultural roots. Surely, the African Americans will have an interest in probing a piece of their own heritage; and the Africans, I imagined, would have a compulsion to connect with their American cousins. We convened a planning meeting in the basement of the local AME Zion Church, inviting everybody we knew in both communities. It quickly became apparent that building consensus within the group about what kind of project to develop would be difficult. An African American proposed assembling a program around percussion traditions from both sides of the Atlantic. But a Nigerian countered with a demand for “real drummers”— drummers from Africa. Gary Hines energetically leading the Maine Mass Gospel Choir. Photo by Tonee Harbert. 24 / Cultural Democracy “What do you mean, real drummers?” came the heated response. “Do you think our drummers here are somehow less than real?” “Everybody knows the best percussionists in the world come from Africa ,” the Nigerian flatly stated. “Why settle for anything less?” Ultimately, the meeting swung away from the conflict around real percussion and into the hands of a pair of preachers—one African American , one Congolese. With my enthusiastic support, they agreed to bring their respective choirs into a large mass chorus that would perform both American gospel and African hymnody. Together. To lead this new ensemble I hired two of the most inspiring singers and teachers I know—Gary Hines, director of the Grammy-winning gospel group Sounds of Blackness, and the supercharged South African singer Thuli Dumakude. Each artist was engaged to spend three weeks in Portland over the course of a year, culminating in a public unveiling of this new collaboration. At least that was the idea. In reality, nothing worked out as planned. During the first week of rehearsals with Hines, the pastor of the African Fellowship turned up for one session—but he was the sole participant from the refugee community. Where, I wondered, were all the Africans? Their pastor was equivocal. Many of the refugees work nights and can’t attend. Child care is always a challenge. They’re busy with other things. Soon we followed up with a second residency, this time with Thuli Dumakude . The results were even bleaker. Only two African Americans, out of a large group that had just enjoyed a fabulous experience working with Hines, showed up for the rehearsals. Where were they? I demanded. Their pastor was more straightforward. “They’re just not interested in singing in African,” she explained on behalf of her choir. “They love the gospel music, but they just don’t want to have to sing something that is strange and they can’t understand. Bring back Gary Hines and they’ll be there. I promise.” But that wasn’t the worst of it: no African refugees showed up this time, either. What went wrong? In my naiveté, I’d made a series of mistaken assumptions about the prospective participants. I violated the first rule of anyone who has ever tried to do any kind of community organizing: know your community. The African American singers were simply not interested in African music. They sing gospel with celebratory abandon, but a song in Zulu was well outside their comfort zone. And Gary Hines’s brilliance was irrelevant to the Africans, most of whom harbor a deep ambivalence about African Americans in general. Hines’s artistry simply doesn’t show up on their cultural radar as something worth pursuing. Neither did they care about Thuli Dumakude’s South African songs. Most Communion / 25 of Portland’s Africans come from the horn countries—Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia. Sudan is twenty-five hundred miles from South Africa, about the same as the distance between Madrid and Moscow. I would probably not have assumed that a Spaniard would have a passion for Russian music, but my own cultural blinders allowed me to assume that as “Africans” these diverse ethnicities would have something in common. They don’t. I had failed to perceive where the insiders draw the boundaries around their communities. And those communities provide the context in which culture is invented and sustained. Without an understanding...