Nigeria's Emmanuel Iduma celebrates African music in prose

The essay covers music; the trips themselves inform the stories in his book, A Stranger’s Pose, which is scheduled for release later in the year.

As published by UK magazine The Quietus, Iduma's essay sees the writer trace his travelling life through music. He begins with the familiar sound of gospel music in Igbo from his home country. 

"Home can be found in the riff of an electric guitar," he writes. "Such as in late Rev. Patty Obassey’s pious highlife songs, collected in Ezi Nwanyi Di Uko, an album of his my family owned when I was a teenager.

"The chorus of the title song admonishes the faithful: a good woman is hard to find; she is more expensive than rubies. He’s singing in Igbo. That was the first thing that endeared me, songs in a language I understood when spoken in measured pace.

"Many words were foreign to me; his Igbo seemed older than my parents’. His melodious missives were like knotty parables, peddling the wisdom of virtue over vice, the commonsense logic of Christianity. In the hour after our family devotion, every morning while I swept the living room and kitchen in Ile-Ife, I carried out my chores in tandem to the lick of his guitar."

Now based in the US where he teaches an art writing programme, Iduma writes about the American rapper Mos Def, who raps in English; he also considers the usefulness of music in a language he doesn't understand. 

"Music is so, a way to traverse the dense terrain of untranslatable sensations. But first, it is a gift. I think now of Oumou Sangaré. In the month I spent in Sinthian, a village in Senegal many Senegalese knew nothing of, I hoped to finish a draft of my book. The days were regimented: rising early to work, but keeping the rest of the day unscheduled. I loved the villagers, since they seemed to welcome me without guile.

"One evening I chanced on a group of men and women humming along to Sangaré, forming a half-circle around a radio. Neither of us understood the lyrics; she sings in Bambara. And since I didn’t understand their local tongue either, when they spoke in Pulaar or Wolof or Serer, we found compromise in the regal sonority of the Malian queen, our affinity unhampered by language. It might have been a song from her eponymous 1990 debut, Oumou, something with the ruefulness of a dirge in it, perhaps 'Djorolen'.”

Other artists mentioned in the essay Music Is So: Emmanuel Iduma's Soundtrack To A Stranger's Pose include Yemi Alade, Don Jazzy and Youssou N'Dour. Iduma also writes about dancing badly – "I am a so-called terrible dancer, never managing to impress my friends and family, even though I am convinced by my moves" – and comments on his favourite Fela song. 

"It teaches me what prose can do within a stretch of layered composition," Iduma says of 'Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense'. "You could say this of any song in his oeuvre." 

Listen to 'Teacher Don't Teach Me Nonsense' below. Read the article on The Quietus.