THE JAZZ PHILOSOPHER’S CULTURE FACTORY:
WRITINGS, MUSIC AND SPOKEN WORD ARTS
Enter the zone of the brave new word
Upward gravitating, inner elevating,
Remi D welcomes you to
ABRACADIA
Cultural action uplifting the spirit
Pushing the ceiling and raising the roof
Culture
The
Factory
Cultural Action: Sparking the conversations that transform reality.
Recovering sources of value and meaning. Exercising positive mission and agency.
Abracadabra: chanting objects into being
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Arcadia: the ancient name for earthly utopia
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Abracadia: chanting utopia into being
‘Until the lion tells the story the hunter will always be the hero’.
(African proverb)
Hear the roar! Abracadia is the lion’s story!
More than any other field of human activity, the art of the griot has a history of creatively resisting the cultural genocide of colonialism. This is because when intellect and soul combine, a form of wisdom is produced against which customarily genocidal colonialism is impotent. It is the power of humanity’s nobleness outshining corruption like a candle lights up darkness.
The spirit of the griot is found in the Jazz family of popular musical forms like Reggae, Soul, Hip-Hop, Rock and Roll, Blues, Samba, Rhumba and more. Such styles have long been the last refuge of cultural integrity in popular music, performing a much more profound role in society than mere entertainment.
And storytellers from Homer to Sheharazade to Aesop to James Baldwin and Maya Angelou have all conveyed that musicality of language, those harmonies of truths and imagination that defines homo as sapiens. Remi D is a griot in that line of thousands whose work denies oppressors their desired monopoly on meaning!
Portal from a whisper to a scream
Abracadia was founded by Dr Remi David in 2006 as an education consultancy in culture and behaviour change and as an urban griot edutainment service. It was inspired by the discovery of his 9 x great grandfather who arrived in Jamaica as a griot with the Ashanti royal Naquan, and by the discovery of a Maroon minstrel grandfather who kept the Ancestral tradition going into the 20th century.
A true revolution in style, content, strategy, vision and spirit, our mission is to bust fake negatives with real positives of art and culture. Our task is made easier by this universally recognised fact: The anti-human values we denounce represent a lack of moral fibre that spells the downfall of the system that promotes them.
Truth is a thing like wind and water and fire, it is elemental. Truth flows and it will always seek a way out through the portals of the human heart. Truth will out.
Our heartbeat carries the eternal flame, each generation passes it on: James Baldwin and John Coltrane, Bob Marley and Benjy Zephaniah, Remi D and YOU! One truth, one love, one heart in Ubuntu.