Flower Funeral Surrey

Friday evening across London can be remarkably similar. The streets are dotted with old style pubs, new glitzy bars or just the neighboring drinking holes, each packed with men and women getting tanked up for a night of revelry after five days in the office cubicle. As the evening wears on, drunken teenagers, office goers and the homeless become unrecognizable forms on streets and corners, a strange reflection of modern Britain.

London, however, is never a singular narrative. And even this friday, as it became more and more difficult to negotiate through the narrow lanes of Covent Garden, across the historic morning market, an ongoing revolution was finding another outlet. At the Africa Centre, a crowd that had been gathering through the evening was now bursting at the seams.

It was straight out of the Indian homes with leafy courtyards where people gathered in summer afternoons. The balconies ran all around the courtyard and had people looking on to the stage. Finding a seat with not a bad view of the performance, I was taken into another world, the walls of this courtyard pushing away that drunken, madness of weekend London. Translations was a celebration of Africa and its languages, across the medium of music, literature, dance, and movement. At one moment we were focusing on the persona and aspects of the Voodoo trickster and god, Legba and the next we tried to understand Lfe (love) and its meaning.

I remember watching the last performance, which stressed on the narrative aspects of songs where diverse instruments had come into play. The kora comes out of the rich musical tradition of East Africa, through the pain of the people of Senegal, Mali and Chad. The muted trumpet makes you think of the jazz virtuoso Miles Davis and the seedy streets of Chicago nightclubs. The pain of the black people, the angry rhythms of an African past had travelled in time and across continents and found its own expressions in a side street off Covent Garden. All great cities allow for multiple expressions. And if this be true, London must be one of the greatest. It refuses to be tied down to a boring middle-class white hegemony. The streets erupt with buskers from every continent, myriad countries. Clowns come from across Latin America to make Londoners laugh, the great practitioners of African beats struggle for expression in North London clubs, the South Asian rude boys make ground breaking sounds in drum and bass.

And if you are wondering whether the traditions of English literature, the great works of art we are familiar with, still exist, I went to Oxford to see a staging of through the looking glass by that wonderful master, Lewis Caroll. The familiar world of logic took a back seat as chess pieces spoke, as flowers sang and we tried to make sense of the poem Jabberwoky. With Alice, the audience moved into a world which was once so familiar and yet with age and reason, left so far behind that it appears nonsensical. In this world, plants and animals speak to you, the white and the black queens ask impossible riddles and Humpty Dumpty is an entertainer par excellence. I came out thinking of Dostoevsky's The Underground Man, who while agreeing two plus two is very good indeed cannot understand why sometimes it will not make five. Why not, indeed?

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