Ray Neiman. Ray who?

Call it pidgin. Call it Patois. Call Ray a new-born star

Once you've figured out the main features of the Xperia for which I heavily advertised one blog entry ago - and should really be getting paid for - do you get yourself a Bose headphone, plug it in the cell phone, surf to youtube and look for music by Ray Neiman.

Ray who? Ray Neiman, a rising star in the French music scene. His music, a perfect blend of reggae, dancehall, pop, rock, r&b and zoukh, all jazzed up with local spices, is bound to turn every wall flower into a too-hot-to-trot dance miracle.

I bet you did not know, however, that Neiman's history started some 25 years ago in Surinam, in a settlement very near to the Marowijne river. He comes from a big family (ten children and a father who was hardly in sight). Remarkably enough, he considers his first family to be the Amer Indians and regrets never having learned their language.

Soon Surinam proved too small for his ambitions, so he decided to move to the Netherland. Yet after a while he became restless again and moved on to France and the UK.

At the same time slowly but surely his musical identity has begun to take shape. He features on a remix of Shy' m's super hit Femme de Couleur and is doing gigs in France, Belgium, the UK and Switzerland, winning many awards on the way.

And don't you for one moment think Neiman has forgotten about his Surinamese heritage, as his songs breathe the spirit of the Aucan language. Okay, teacher Sharida delves into Wikipedia: Aucans are descendents of Maroons, runaway slaves in the West Indies, Central America, South Ameria and North America who formed independent settlements together.

Now, you should know that slaves frequently escaped within the first generation of their arrival from Africa and often preserved their African languages and much of their culture and religion. The jungles offered food, shelter, and isolation for the escaped slaves. Maroons survived by growing vegetables and hunting. Individual groups of Maroons often allied themselves with the local indigenous tribes and occasionally assimilated into these populations.Maroon/Marokon settlements often possessed a clannish, outsider identity. The language that they spoke has various names, but one such Maroon Creole language, in Surinam, is the Aucan language, Neiman's language.

In the years to follow, many of the vernacular forms of English, and Dutch for that matter, spoken in the Caribbean changed into different, broken languages, also referred to as pidgin languages or Patois. Jamaican Patois for instance is comprised words from the native languages of the many races within the Caribbean including Latin, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Amerindian, and English along with several African dialects. Some islands have creole dialects influenced by their linguistic diversity; French, Spanish, Latin, Hindi, Arabic, Hebrew, German, Dutch, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and others. Often these Patois are popularly considered "bastardizations" of English, "broken English", or slang.

Of course, you are now dying to listening to a few of his songs. Check out the songs Viens, Fais Moi Danser and Shake it. And try and discover how many different languages are incorporated in the songs. Neiman has a hyves page and can be found on MySpace.

Mister Ray Neiman's songs are a classic example of the cultural and linguistic richness of his background. Call it Patois. Call it Creole. Call it anything you like. I prefer to call it musical magic.

Photo credits
- First two photos from Neiman's Hyves and MySpace, as is most of the textual info on Neiman.
- Maroon photo from Ted Hill, Suriname River in 1955. Wikipedia

The Xperia Experiment

Surprise. Surprise. No matter how many sheep I tried to count, it is now half past three in the morning and the fact of the matter is that yours truly can't sleep. Insomnia. So, why toss and turn, while you could have a go at the brand new Sony Ericsson Xperia X1. It is such a sleek and sophisticated device with amazing features. It is equipped with a gigantic 3.0-inch LCD Touchscreen and comes preloaded with Microsoft Applications including Words, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Internet Explorer, and Mobile Media Player Mobile, allowing insomniacs like me to work and relax at anywhere anytime.




And it's ultra fast because of its 3G data connectivity support. There is also this built-in 3.2-megapixel digital camera, and a GPS navigation system (so no Tom Tom for me).

Yet in IMHO, one of the most alluring features is undoubtedly the QWERTY keyboard, having an arc slider design. Eat your heart out.

That said, you practically need a Ph.D to get them all to work for you instead of against you. I finally managed to access the Internet without much ado. All's well that ends well, as the Great Bard once said. ;-)

Existential pain

For those who think the following is going to be completely beyond them, stop reading right now. For all others who can do without no brainers, do continue. Checked my email and Facebook inboxes an hour ago and was surprised to see two messages about scorned love. The email had grief written all over it. The Facebook comment was cynical to the bone.

This only goes to show that pain has many faces and is just as much part of life, as is for instance, breathing. Therefore, some call this pain existential in nature. And we all deal with it in our own ways, whether you are a famous Dutch playwrite or a student about to enter university.

My dear student, you are the one who studied Greek or Latin, I forgot which one. So, know your classics, for languages considered dead might not prove so dead after all . . . Try not to be afraid of the future, because the future might actually bring wisdom and renewed happiness.

"And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God." - Aeschylus

So who the hell are you?

You can be a William Shakespeare. Or perhaps you are a Wolfgang Mozart. Oh you may prefer to model yourself after Rembrandt van Rijn.

Perhaps you are none of the above, but rather a disoverer and admirer of all those beautiful treasures called art.

According to a silly Facebook test I did recently, I was a Christobal Columbus, because of a daring and adventurous streak I seemingly possess. Columbus wanted to explore the corners of the world. Or did he, as there is a 'slight' difference between discovering and taking over, and not just in maritime or military terms for that matter ... How about the field of love? Are you the Disoverer or the Conquerer?

This is where Ethics enters the scene and why reinvent a brilliant train of thought if some chap already said it before? So here goes:

'Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. This is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.' - Albert Schweitzer

There is no particular need to immediately sail out and discover the world. Start by exploring and expanding the corners of your own mind. Academic studies will broaden your mind only so far. But poetry, or poetic prose or prosaic verse ... aahh my dears, poetry will allow your soul to switch back and forth from being a hedonistic pleasure dome to a temple of grief and sensing, breathing, living all the motions in between.

'We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.' - from the 1989 motion picture Dead Poets' Society

And on this brilliant bombshell, I bid thee farewell. Or to rephrase this: later mate.


picture credits
London: Anthony Blond, 1968 (English translation), Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, Ltd., 1990 (Spanish version)

What came first:

human beings or human rights?

And a very good morning to you, too. Were you there yesterday, in the pretty Dutch town of Middelburg in Zeeland, to commemorate the abolishment of slavery (1st July 1863)? While listening to all the stories and watching all the visible reminders of this past, another story came to mind, the story told in a poem by Kenneth Patchen (1911 – 1972).


‘Nice Day for a Lynching’

The bloodhounds look like sad old judges
In a strange court. They point their noses
At the Negro jerking in the tight noose;
His feet spread crow-like above these
Honorable men who laugh as he chokes.

I don’t know this black man.

I don’t know these white men.

But I know that one of my hands
Is black, and one white. I know that
One part of me is being strangled,
While another part horribly laughs.

Until it changes,
I shall be forever killing; and be killed.

Photo credit: NAACP announcement that a man was lynched yesterday

Monday morning . The sunlight forced itself through my curtains, melting away the dreams I did not wish to dream, making way for a new day of doing things I might never have done before, making way for ... new dreams.

John Frederick Nims' Love Poem

Came a across this 'forgotten' extraordinary love poem from the American poet John Frederick Nims (1913 - 1999). Usually such poems mention the good qualities of your other half, your better self. Not with Nims who starts off this poem by telling the reader that the woman he loves is no good at all. The second stanza explains why: she is an expert in much more important things in life. She helps people that are not helped by others. Nims is not trying to change her. In fact, he is willing to change himself.

'Love Poem'

My clumsiest dear, whose hands shipwreck vases,
At whose quick touch all glasses chip and ring,
Whose palms are bulls in china, burs in linen,
And have no cunning with any soft thing

Except all ill-at-ease fidgeting people:
The refugee uncertain at the door
You make at home; deftly you steady
The drunk clambering on his undulant floor.

Unpredictable dear, the taxi drivers' terror,
Shrinking from far headlights pale as a dime
Yet leaping before apopleptic streetcars—
Misfit in any space. And never on time.

A wrench in clocks and the solar system. Only
With words and people and love you move at ease;
In traffic of wit expertly manoeuver
And keep us, all devotion, at your knees.

Forgetting your coffee spreading on our flannel,
Your lipstick grinning on our coat,
So gaily in love's unbreakable heaven
Our souls on glory of spilt bourbon float.

Be with me, darling, early and late. Smash glasses
I will study wry music for your sake.
For should your hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break.

The days after ....

July 2 has gently eased into July 3. It is still stifling hot outside and The Famous Unknowns are again giving a brilliant performance in my living room. Me is once more burning the midnight oil, until I am so tired that all I can do fall in a dreamless sleep, with no risk of being haunted by that nagging anguish of the last ten days.

The good part about July 2 was that I saw so many of my former students at Het Baken this afternoon, from the geniuses of Hugo, Dominique, Laura and Judith to golden boy Jesper a.k.a. Mr Hystorectomy, to Bollywood Sana, to DJ Joa, to funny Wesley, to so many other lovelies, all receiving their A-level diplomas. Well done and a very deep bow from thy former teacher! A whole new world is about to unfold for you, taking you wonder by wonder. Explore, my adventurers. Be inquisitive. But most of all, be you.

Other good things on July 2? Well, how about having dinner with friends at Gandhi, a fabulous newly opened Indian restaurant in Hilversum. The owners are the Indian couple Mr and Mrs Gupta who have several restaurants and take aways in the Netherlands. As an extra advantage: eating out proves an effective remedy to forcefully drive out unpleasant thoughts and memories, especially if you choose extremely spicy.

And then the early hours of July 3 arrived. Should have been in bed a long time ago and in a few hours the hot eye of heaven will replace the crescent moon, meaning it's time for me to get up again and prepare for another day at the office. Well, I have to anyway, since July 3rd will be all about the preparation for next Tuesday's radio broadcast, this time not at the public library in Amsterdam (OBA), but at Desmet Studio (near Artis Zoo).

That last broadcast from OBA led to some nice pics taken from the video stream. BTW, Tuesday's broadcast will feature a very special main guest: Khadija Arib. So stay tuned to that radio (5) and join some 20.000 other listeners.

Yes, those glasses conceal more than simply lack of sleep, but who would know... Only the observing reader and/or viewer? Or the ocassional passer-by who actually dares to fathom the dark corners of my soul...?

p.s. Laura, you honoured me greatly with your entry in the year book. Thank you so much, although I really do not deserve this.

Djamal


Wesley


Sana


Djamila


Jesper