SO FAR
After finishing Americanah, a novel set in Nigeria, I was starved for another experience of Africa, any experience of Africa. I began listening to West African-themed playlists online, and one brought me to this album by the late Malian singer and guitarist Ali Farka Touré, Red & Green. Because I don’t understand the words, the music seems incredibly abstract, built from streams of sound (some tinkling, some swirling, some pulsating) that move forward in endless, gentle surges, so that the compositions don’t begin and end so much as come and go.
Touré, who died in 2006, recorded and toured abroad, but lived his entire adult life in Niafunké, the village where he had grown up. Yet this photograph of him in caftan and trousers, leaning on his acoustic guitar beneath a concrete fence, is profoundly urban. It has the formality, and rich black and white tones, of studio portraits by Malian photographers Seydou Keita and Malick Sidibe, and also the same sense that the subject is summoning his finest self for the camera. But the way that Touré’s body, and the entire composition, open so broadly to the left, suggest that the musician is not entirely captured here, that something slips away.
It’s a strongly graphic image, with bold, contrasting patterns: the grid of the fence, the hatching on the caftan, the stripes down the trousers. These are tied together by a cluster of criss-crossing lines: Toure’s figure sloped right, his guitar tilted left, and the wall falling off to the far left. Touré wears generic twentieth-century century sandals, trousers and wristwatch, and plays a guitar that looks like one an American folk singer would. But the scene is clearly African. There is something about the low slant of the light, the bare ground, and Touré’s inscrutable expression – both remote and joyous – that tells us so. Here Touré, and Africa too, seem far away.
Photograph courtesy of World Circuit.
