Sitting at the Moroccan restaurant’s terrace on the Abu Tig Marina, we, the El Gouna residency fellows, became the captive audience of a Karaoke concert. The star of the show, a polyglot vocalist whose nationality proved impossible to ascertain, his accents being near to perfect, his looks, though more Mediterranean than Baltic, leaving us with a panoply of passports to guess from, began his concert with seventies standards (Eagles, Jimmy Buffet etc.), moved on to country croons, Italian and German pop; then he grew daring. Perhaps his change of register was meant to greet the arrival of burka-clad women who appeared of a sudden and now huddled around the bandstand, though this seems unlikely. He launched into 50 cent’s raunchy Candy Shop and sensing his momentary succès fou, more the naughty rapper’s than his in all honesty, next attempted to limbo-dance his tenor down to a Barry White baritone. Can’t get enough of your love, baby rang sweet in its way but lacked Mr. White’s depth. Barry was all about the boudoir, a refined antecedent to the clichéd candy shop, and few men, it should be said, have so pleasured the ladies with their voices (oh bless you, Barry!). Now our karaoke entertainer might have been deterred by the obvious falling-short, but he braved on with his repertoire. By then, however, the couscous had finally arrived and my attention turned to my plate.
At our reading at The Embassy of Knowledge, I read from a passage in The Baby of Belleville describing a club scene. My character, Jane, stumbles into the Café Chéri(e) to find the place under the rule of a DJ named Amar Le Terrible.
“…I could see the far wall, the passage to the toilets, and next to it a DJ at the massive stretch of turntable. I took a good look at our groove-grinder. Manifestly he favoured the layered look: a Ronald McDonald wig sat atop his hip-reaching dreadlocks, several shirt styles (bowling, T, tank) in micro sizes stretched across his chest…but his bottom half was best, for he bulked up in silver tracksuit pants over which he wore a gold lamé diaper with an elastic band in African tri-colour, red-green-yellow…”
Amar mixes Johnny Cash, The Clash, Cheb Mami, 50 Cent and Erik Satie as if it took all kinds to rock the world. Which it does.
The resemblance between my made-up musical medley at the Belleville café and the El Gouna karaoke artist’s does not particularly surprise me. The world as I see it is an inherently hybrid place and Sesame Street’s “one of these things is not like the other” may be well-intentioned but causes confusion in the long run. Categories mine our heads, trick our vision, set up booby traps we fall into unwittingly. The key is knowing when to shake and rattle them up so we can watch through the snow globe – the world as it is. If there is one ability underpinning what we call artistic talent it might well be the capacity to return to a state of not-knowing, to that moment in childhood, uncorrupted by hierarchies, where everything gets tasted and the mouth is our university. I believe the artist must see before she judges and perhaps it’s best she step aside of judgment entirely. Leave that to the magistrates and let playtime begin.
Both Remedy and The Baby of Belleville are generously served with language play, alliteration and references to nursery rhymes and fairy stories. This has earned the novels, Remedy in particular, the reputation of being whimsical. And so they are, to an extent. The problem lies not in their whimsicality(at least to my mind), but in our current perception of the whimsical as slightly embarrassing, or lesser or lacking in literary sérieux. If Tristam Shandy had been written today how would its flights of fancy be received by our current literary market and its literati ? Sterne was no Robert Bolano. He didn’t devote pages to the murdering of women but he knew a thing or two about obstetrics.
I suppose in the face of death, say, the lens of whimsy can seem downright flimsy, but is it really? The Taoists sages thought differently. Corresponding to a particular acupuncture point on one of the toes — can’t remember which but I can safely say it isn’t the big toe – is a Chinese ideogram that depicts a man alone in a tiny room with a tarantula, laughing. Clearly this man’s fate is decided: death will bite him shortly and yet he finds nothing better to do than to laugh. Madness? No, the sages found him wise enough to parade as an example and lodge in the foot, where the poet’s genius lay, they say. His laugh is whimsical, nonsensical, full and empty of meaning at once. It is the cosmic giggle and a possible response to the ultimate realization that, as Laurie Anderson puts it, “we don’t know where we come from, we don’t know what we are.”
I am not sure that locked in a room with a tarantula I would be apt to laugh, but the writer in me has paced that chamber, looked into the beast’s beady eyes and so far, as of today at least, the giggle has kept his bite away.
And now here’s Razinat Mohammed doing the cosmic wiggle…
Karaoke hostages