Romantic Roots
‘As Time Goes By’, the fundamental things will still apply.
Who believes in Romantic Love these days?
It’s obviously a nonsense cooked up to sell roses and diamonds, right? Like Xmas is to sell turkeys and valentines day for chocolate and perfume industries. And the whole basket of deplorable money-fest days. It’s all a scam, right?
No. Wrong.
Forget the shallow so called religious card-selling days, which are more marked by exchange of tokens than by anything such tokens are supposed to signify. Today I want to focus on Love, especially the romantic kind.
I used to think romantic love was a way of depoliticising people, making it so all anyone cares about tis their ‘loved one’, putting the private good ahead of the public good. I think the idea of that split came from the movie ‘Casablanca’ (my favourite movie ever), which is all about the tensions between the private man (Rick) and the public man (Victor): which one is more deserving, and which one can take their love to the highest level of purpose and meaning? And we all know who gets the girl in the end.
Bringing in two of my other favourite movies: Dustin Hoffman’s masterpiece and the truest movie ever made on its subject: ‘Little Big Man’; that and John Carpenter’s classic allegory ‘The Thing’: Rick or Victor, Privateman or Publicman, which kind of person is more in line with the values of the ‘human being’ in the ‘Cheyenne’ the sense, and which is more prone to produce the kind of materialistic inhuman mutant we see in ‘the thing’?
Twenty years ago I saw problems in Marvin Gaye’s transition from Publicman with the soul revolutionary vibe of his debut solo album: ‘What’s Going On’, to the personal love of ‘I Want You’. The lyrics on the second album were highly sexualised for commercial appeal, I thought. I took it for superficial egoistic exhibitionism distracting from his previously expressed profound revolutionary purpose.
Now my view has changed. Romantic Love is no longer something I see as purely personal, it reaches into the public sphere, informing and setting the tone and context for values and behaviours across a whole range of human activities from agriculture to economy to pedagogy to medicine.
Romantic Love is anything but a commercial confection of capitalism. It is in fact an important aspect of African heritage. And that is why I am focusing on it today.
The idea of Romantic Love originates in Africa, like all things human, but not necessarily like all things inhuman too.
The story? It starts with the crusades, when European leaders first encountered African life. William the Conqueror’s dad was one of the first to be enthralled by African traditions, when he visited Jerusalem around the year 1,000 BCE. They tried to dress it up in heroic propaganda of course, but he became a drug fiend, addicted to opium and other things, eventually dying from an overdose on his travels.
From then on, all the english quings became fans of certain aspects of African traditions. It was fashionable throughout the next 500 years, until racism was invented to justify the genocide and theft committed by the rulers of countries like england to this day.
(Poor england, so arrogant and stupid are its leaders and elites that they seem not to realise the whole world regards them with horror and disgust as subhumans for their continued genocides and their blatant lies of holocaust-denial. If you ever want to to know how it feels to be loveless and soulless and reviled as monsters by the global majority of humans, just be a yewkay or yewess elite. And to think some aspire to that level of self-demeaning – they may as well plaster themselves in faeces as they are so comfortable showing the world how full of it they are with all their blood money making them look like raving maniacs steeped in viscera and gore.)
It is important to understand this: english rulers between 1,000, BCE and 1,500 BCE grew to idolise African ideals like Romantic Love. It was this influence that brought about all ideas of fairness, justice and rights in the British Isles for instance.
Here’s how.
Starting around 1,000 BCE, Norman times, European elites started travelling to North Africa in search of spice, medicines, arts, science, knowledge and other resources. In short they were adventuring, looking for wealth.
Many of these adventurers were ‘knights’ who were second and third sons. In those days only the first son inherited the family wealth, all the castles and so on, the wealth was not shared between siblings. Therefore second sons who wanted to maintain the lavish lifestyles they’d been raised to had to find the money somehow: killing your older brother at home or adventuring in Africa became the normal ways for second-sons of elite Normans to make a living.
And when they travelled to Africa (e.g. Tyre, Jerusalem, Gaza, Egypt, etc.) they took their entertainment with them, just like people take their phones with them on holiday today. The knights took singers and musicians and storytellers and chroniclers (newsmen) and clowns and jugglers and all sorts.
It was the musicians who played the biggest role in our story today, they were known as troubadours.
In Africa, European troubadours encountered African traditions of music and song. This included Sufi poetry among other things.
Sufism is usually understood as the mystic side of Islam, but scholars agree it probably predates Islam. It is often thought to predate monotheism altogether, or to be the source of the spiritual aspect of monotheism, as opposed to it’s social-control aspect. Who knows, that part is all clouded in the wispy mists and whispered myths of time.
What we do know is: the troubadours loved the celebration of the female they found in African cultural arts. Back in Europe the catholic church treated women as second-class humans, and those were the lucky ones. The climate of domination and persecution grew so anti-women that witch trials arose, killing up to 1/3 of women in many communities. (This included girls as young as six years old. And it also included homosexual males, who were often put at the base of witch-burning pyres and set light to first; hence the term ‘faggots’, and old english word for small pieces of wood used to get big pieces burning: firelighters!)
The troubadours picked up on the idea of woman as queen, blessed by divine grace, made holy by the sacred beauty of their very biological (reproductive) form and function, as much as by their spiritual capacity to embody love and to stir emotions that can elevate humans to experience of the sublime. And those troubadours brought back the first ever romantic love songs when they returned to their European lands.
One of their biggest fans was a french queen named Eleanor of Aquitaine. Her own dad was a great troubadour, and she was a hot-blooded rebel to the core, one of the true great women of European history, a bit like their Queen Nyabinghi or Nanny Maroon.
At 15 Eleanor married a guy called Louis who would become king of france a month later. A decade later she tired of him and got a divorce. She then hooked up with the king of england, Henry 2, who was a smitten with her as Louis had been. Henry was her toy boy, ten years her junior, and she was very much the powerful one
They lived in a big castle with extensive grounds. Think the legendary ‘Camelot’. The whole scene was like something out of a fairy-tale, full of music, arts, cuisine and culture from Africa. In her queenly castle she raised her two sons, Richard and John.
The boys grew up in a lofty world of poetry, philosophy, medicines and manners learned from Africa. They were raised by their mum to respect and venerate the creative mysteries of the feminine. Their dad, henry 2 of england, went along with it all because he needed his wife Eleanor’s wealth and power, as well as her intellect!
Her eldest son, Richard, inherited the crown of england from his dad. The youngest John inherited nothing because only eldest sons inherited. John was therefore known as John Lackland.
Richard was the second worst quing england has so far had in all its inglorious blood-curdling history. He was raised in a romantic castle-life in France, full of high-minded high-brow African cultural imports, from food and spices to song and romance. He did not like muddy, rainy, cold and clodhopping, ignorant, backward, primitive england.
In fact Richard is the quing most known for his extreme dislike of england and his refusal to abide in it. During his entire rein of over 20 years he spent no more than a fortnight in england altogether! Instead he spent all his time in Africa, soaking up the vibe he’d grown up in: full of song and food and knowledge and arts, full of world-leading maths and science and philosophy, full of high ideas and romantic notions of love.
Because Richard refused to fulfil his role in england his younger brother, John Lackland, had to step up as a kind of deputy quing. The only pledge towards equal human rights, rule of law and democratic rule that has ever been made by a quing of england was made by the only active quing who was immersed in African values of Ubuntu from childhood.
That pledge was called the Magna Carta. It stands as the single proudest moment in the foundation of modern britain, a contribution constantly cited by the english establishment as proving their divine entitlement to a world leadership role. Simply put: Any nobleness of spirit connoted by Magna Carta was a product of the African culture King John was exposed to growing up.
The refusal of english establishment academics to acknowledge this obvious fact, and their efforts to give rationales that exclude the influence of African traditions in John’s uniquely culturally pluralist perspective among english quings, merely adds to their countless demonstrations of blatant and low-brow racism.
White supremacist academics ascribe the Magna Carta to the barons as if there was ever anything new or noble about them, as if they ever acted as any kind of human rights campaigners: Ludicrous! Desperate! Clutching at straws: no fair minded person who knows about John’s culturally elevated upbringing would assume the brute english barons had higher ideas than him.
Eleanor, Richard and John were the main pioneers of Romantic Love in Europe. People may have loved one another before that, even in the most touching and affectionate ways, but the notion of Romantic Love had not been valued at all until Eleanor and her African-derived troubadour culture. The troubadours elevated personal love to a transcendent level, turning it into a gift of spiritual perfection that lends fresh meaning to life itself.
The yewkay is one of the world’s most repressive and depressed countries. (A recent study showed only the people of Uzbekistan are more miserable!) The troubadour spirit is the real reason the yewkay has any trace of democratic values at all.
At the start of this blog I mentioned my favourite ever film (the greatest film ever made?): ‘Casablanca’, how Rick and Victor represent Privateman and Publicman. In the end it is Victor, the Publicman, who winds up crowned with the glory of Romantic Love. Even Privateman Rick suddenly grows a social purpose in the end, becoming an anti-fascist too.
Indeed, we are led to suspect throughout the film that Rick is that way inclined: On the surface he may appear value-free and corrupt, but we’re shown in lots of ways that deep down he dislikes mean mindedness and injustice. Rick is loved by the community and he embraces peoples of all cultural and ethnic backgrounds with respect. He is always a man who judges people by the content of their character, not by external trappings of any sort. In my day that’s what we called a big man. A man of honour.
Rick has a ‘partner’ who is more like a part of himself. Sam is the closest character to Rick and is presented as part of his life for ever. Sam, the African Heritage piano-playing singer songwriter. Sam’s role in the film is to sing Rick’s soul. This is done with as true a love song as ever sung by any true Troubadour: ‘The fundamental things [do still] apply, as time goes by’!
Bottom lines:
1 - Romantic Love derives from African tradition, from where it was imported to a relatively barbaric Europe which was fixing to burn up to 1/3 of its own women, not romance them.
And 2 - The greatest movie ever made is ‘Casablanca’. Starring Humphrey Bogart. According to Bogey’s widow, Lauren Bacal, who was a guest at one of my guardians’ home and who was quite something in the ways of being a lady, Bogart himself said Rick was too weighed down to sing or dream, Sam sings and has wings, Sam was the angel and love was his song.
For more on all topics to do with Abracadia and its work, don’t forget to check Abracadia’s weekly spoken word offering at the ‘Bit Of Soul Podcast’. Come and say hi, pass by for a try. Be great to see you there. Just roll up anytime to listen, chill and reason at the lush and refreshing oasis that is Abracadia.
Until such time - In Ubuntu
Remi