Genesis: The Roots of the Songtree
Tubby Hayes, Eddie Thornton, Ronnie Scott, Ernest Ranglin, Jack Sharpe, Phil Seaman… As a child I always felt that the Jazz world that I grew up in should be documented. The faces. The stories. Wild. Crazy. Tragi-comic, but beautiful. An important pioneering phase in London’s urban counter-culture, well worth remembering. If none of them could find the time to write it I might have to do it myself.
Beside that general idea of a book about the 60s-70s London Jazz scene, the idea that I might one day write a book about social justice came about just before my 14th birthday. That’s when I first read James Baldwin, ‘Go Tell …’ and ‘The Fire …’.
I knew right away that I would have to reply one day, when I was ready. Nothing to do with the London Jazz scene, this was between Baldwin and me. It took me 25 years to start formulating that reply and a few more years to complete it. The Songtree is that reply. And there’s plenty of the jazz scene in it, but much much more besides.
The book itself came about in response to a very specific situation, an attempt to kick me off a UK teacher training course because my face and cultural background didn’t fit. I didn’t think, talk, act or walk White or submissive enough. The tutors were narrow-minded lightweight muppets who could not abide the Maroon vibe and feared its power to slay duppies.
There is nothing unique in this experience, especially for the ‘Black male’. It is why all UK schools are still so deeply racist and why racism still prevails in that pallid land.
Personally, my Maroon spirit would not allow the little weakhearts to stand in my way, so I went to have words with the big chief at the prestigious university, man to man, an experience fictionalised in the novel. We spoke a little, softly. He thought hard, sensed the weight of justice, apologised; I got the green-light. The episode features in the novel, dressed in fiction of course.
That’s what made me start the book. What me complete it and publish it was the loss of a dear one at the hands of a violent racist. This blog is not the place to talk about that.
Writing this book was not just the embrace of my identity in response to such racist attacks. It was intended from the start as a definitive knock out blow against the system of colonial capitalism that spawns such anti-social and mentally defective attitudes.
The writing process began as a roll call of respect to 100+ musicians from America, Africa and the U.K. Black, White, Yellow and Brown: Calling up the second liners, ever first in spirit. Putting them on the page, the greats, the immortals of Jazz, and setting them to wail and topple the pillars of colonial capitalist racist-White supremacy.
In that first draft of the novel, the main characters and plot were drawn and the scope of influences became clear. That took a year or two.
After that, I continued developing the ideas in my spare time, with gaps of years and lots going on. The story wound around and about, gradually taking form. The novel evolved through numerous working titles and structural iterations before reaching its present, final, form. The core ideas or themes that formed the essence of the story emerged to be:
Ancestral heritage, particularly through music - an homage to Jazz and its offspring.
Child’s perspective of a very adult world.
Drugs, vice, crime and addiction - signs of deliberate human debasement taking place for profit
The need to combine philosophy, mythology and religion in order to penetrate deep-rooted social issues. Issues currently presenting as dysfunctional, as social economic absurdity in our world. Issues like power and definition, who gets to define norms and what’s what, and what’s the impact? Think media, our story-environment. Issues like commodification of the eco-system and the corporate model of infinite growth in a finite system.
The need to critically deconstruct ‘corporate religion’, one of the oppressors’ biggest tools for controlling us. Objectively it appears to logic as unspiritual and ungodly. And as inherently colonialist, supremacist and authoritarian.
The need to tell the story of the African revolution in the African hermeneutic story-tradition of Nommo: word-sound and power. The novel would have to use that generative and transformative power of language, including song (music), to spell out the revolution, to spill the beans out of one bag and let the cats out of the other.
As a Jamaican Maroon descendent, respectful of my Ancestors who stood for right, I regard any idea of god forced on us by kidnappers, human traffickers and sadistic enslavers as harmful: clearly designed as obedience training to enfeeble and pacify the traumatised and bewildered victims.
For my tribe the worst sin is allowing yourself to be enslaved! That was the message behind every musical phrase played by Tubby Hayes, Ronnie Scott, Ernest Ranglin, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Leroy ‘Horsemouth’ Wallace, Nina Simone, and the whole infinite sparkling galaxy of eternal Jazz stars.
The White man’s religion is just a way of getting Africans to put chains on and whip themselves. After 500 years of the most brutal and sadistic breaking and enslavement, gaslighting, menticide, terror and loss, who can blame most people for submitting to the massa’s all seeing, all knowing, all right and all white Jesus-eye god of hellfire?
‘The Songtree’ would need to defy the values and totems of devilish oppressors unfit to define moral norms. It’s not enough to be daring, stating different, Afrocentric, values. Those values would have to be more sound, more sane, more humane and more just than the oppressors’. Better motivated and better thought out. Not hard.
‘The Songtree’ is an act of love: It all began as a call in distress to a mother I never met. The final iteration was motivated by the need to communicate across time with my long lost dearest one.
Ripped up families, harmed children, every generation has been similarly affected since we were first kidnaped and enslaved. The definitions of the reasons may change, like clothing, with the passing decades, but the body of facts and experience remains identical, the same identities are involved: elitist destructive White supremacists oppressing disadvantaged creative global majority humans. Bewitched, the world is still mired in mental slavery.
500 years of White Supremacist world war declared by some demonic pope with his dum diversas. 500 years of diabolical pain and lamentation. Sounds bad? Imagine 1,000 years of it. It’s about that long since the Vikings took France and England, the so called norman conquest, establishing the royal and ruling houses of modern Europe as far as Russia and the Ancient Turkic ‘holy land’ where it originated. It is a set of structures that endures to this day. No one is more surprised at its longevity that the rulers themselves, who are well aware of their Karma being so ripe now.
The mind-bending evil practiced against descendants of criminal colonial genocides started with the Viking foundation of modern england and europe, systematising and formalising their brutalised and harsh Steppe-culture inheritance into complex laws and codes. What had till then been a wild anarchic force, almost something romantic, storied with Turkic Steppe Nomads like the Scythians and the Khans now became crystallised into official nation states completely sewn up by rulers who fashion rules for themselves to maintain a tyrannical monopoly on the right to use traditionally psychopathic violence.
I find it useful for perspective, to recognise that the brutal oppression inflicted on so called ‘Black’ peoples was first unleashed on so called ‘White’ folks who have endured it twice as long, and most of who have now been so utterly crushed by it that they see it as inevitable and almighty and rightful. They don’t even remember that all their land was stolen and now they rent it back.
All British land can be requisitioned by its principle owner: the crown. For the sharp end of that fact look at what happens to the land and home of any property owner in the duchy of cornwall. It cannot be willed to family, but must revert to the duke of cornwall, who happens to be the prince of wales too, the next up for the crown. Simple facts. You must buy it if you want to live there, but you can’t pass it on to your husband, wife or kids.
We can never forget when ‘White’ working class urban skinheads and teds mixed up with Jamaican working class rudeboys, that’s when we got close to unity. A unity that could a change the nation in years to come. And it was sweet reggae music carrying the swing: that magic weapon they can never take away as long as there’s a human heartbeat left on earth. And even if it’s all sent to heaven or hell, or ‘nirvana’ as the Buddhists call it, extinguished and extinct, the source of our music carries on regardless, whether there’s anyone there to hear it or not. A stream is still a stream even if there is nobody there to drink from it.
Reggae wasn’t the first. We saw it in Jazz before that, with Woody Herman’s 50s big-band the first ever to have mixed personnel. And before that it was mighty Paul Robeson with Welsh miners and it was wonderful Louis ‘Pops’ Armstrong with the whole world. Our music is the sun, it draws us all into its gravity and pulls us dancing into its pulsing orbit.
All racism is bought and paid for by the grim elites; text-book divide and rule; it has nothing to do with any ‘White’ working class experience of oppression by global majority non-Whites. There is no actual ‘Black’/‘White’ divide, just ordinary people suffering brutal oppression and division by plundering criminal elites who hate themselves and everyone else.
Our music brings us all together in that realisation, right back from Desmond Decker’s ‘Israelites’, and farther back from Paul Robeson’s ‘Ole Man River’. And the more we are together is the more we shall be free. My people of the west have stood the test, and now divested of our chains we face the best chance ever: mentally free of all unnaturally imposed divisions, we stand as one, as all Africans, genetically far more similar than any other primate group! (There’s much more genetic variation between chimps or between gorillas or between orangutans, hardly any genetic variation between humans at all by comparison. We’re just all slightly different shapes and colours, like grains of sand.)
Lighter skin shade derives from genetic albinism. Albinos in Africa can still face rejection, ejection, disaffection by complexion. That’s probably how the whole tiny migration started 100k years ago or so, spawning European peoples. Scientists reckon all humans originated in Africa from a group of 200 or so. How many of them could it take to walk off and start up elsewhere? Now, through our world-healing music, at last we can fly away home. Who can feel it can unseal it to reveal it.
That’s why I wrote the novel, to tell the story of being human, but as art not nature, as lit fic not documentary. That keeps it at a remove from our lived experience. Art must always keep reality at arms length so we can see the wood for the trees more easily.
Reading ‘The Songtree: A Windrush Tale’ is a cultural action and a liberating one. It is an act of freedom, transgressing bullies’ norms by breaking the chains of mental slavery, breaking the format of what a novel can be, breaking the clouds for sunshine to break out of its cage at the bottom of our hearts.
When Africans are free Africa shall be free! ‘The Songtree’ breaks those chains once and for all. For me personally, the next step on my freedom journey is to set up a little culture centre in Africa, with jazz bar, recording studio and workshops. That’s freedom to me. In the words of a song on the album: ‘wake up and dream’, live that dream. It is the dream of freedom, the kind of dream that is only possible where there is meaningful justice, where good triumphs over evil.
The words of Haile Selassie I HIMself are amplified by Bob Marley in the song ‘War’: ‘We know we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil.’ If you have ever heard and been buoyed by that song don’t you think others are too? Those words are a magic spell that has crept into the collective karmic subconscious of humanity, including all our false leaders and inhuman elites, now making it a fait accompli, a done deal. All we have to do is speak the truth and it will be. That is in the very meaning of Abracadia.
‘The Songtree: A Windrush Tale’ is fundamentally part of a broad tide of cultural action re-growing across Africa today. It spells out Karma and the end of imperialist domination. It spells the inevitable advance of Ubuntu livity. Join the rising tide. Buy it. Read it. Know it. Flow it.
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