I’m milling around a dance studio with twenty other barefoot women, but the minute the drums start, we line up like soldiers. Rink-a-dink-a-dink-dink goes the break, the signal that the West African rhythm sinté is about to be begin. Dinka-dink-dink! goes the djembe, a round drum played with slapping hands. Ka-doon-chuk-chuk! booms the big dundun under mallets the size of hammers. My arms and legs know just what move goes where in the complex syncopation: I’ve danced this one before.
I wasn’t always so familiar with the dig-a-doon of tribal music. In the strip mall culture where I grew up, it was Bell Biv Devoe, Motley Crue or Garth Brooks, each with a wardrobe to match. I never quite fit into just one clique, and instead drifted around to all of them, wearing striped tights under my cheerleading uniform, smoking cigarettes with the kids on the curb on my way to AP biology class. Five years at a huge state university didn’t bring any more sense of belonging, though I did “hippie,” “coffeeshop poser,” and even “sorority girl” for a few months each. After graduation I set off in my VW van to keep looking for something that felt real, that felt like me.
A few weeks after the van broke down in near San Francisco, I stumbled into an African dance class – literally. I had taken ballet since I could tie my shoes and thought I grooved pretty well under a disco ball, but good lord, that first class I was a complete spaz, sliding left when everyone else was hopping right, ending up on my ass a few times. Looking like a fool’s never stopped me from much, and I kept going back, leaving every class sweaty and overjoyed. The live drumming had ignited something deeper than any music ever had, and those ancient rhythms eventually worked their way down into my muscles so I hardly had to think about the choreography anymore. The more I learned, the more I felt I belonged.
After class, the drummers and dancers would meet up for hummus at the local falafel joint – a merry band tapping out funky meters with the salt shakers. I studied with master teachers, men and women who grew up in Ghana, Guinea, Senegal, the Congo. I learned the steps but also the meaning behind them – kuku is the dance we do to celebrate, yankadi is only for the women, soli is for the boys’ circumcision. I dressed in colorful fabrics and jingly belts, decked myself in jewelry made from cowrie shells - powerful talismans according to African lore.
My mother found this hilarious. “Honey, we’re Jews. Our tribe doesn’t dance for life events, we eat.” But she took to calling me her “Jewish African Cowgirl” and bragged to her friends what an interesting person her daughter had become now that she’d left the suburbs.
I wasn’t the only klutzy white girl among these Africans and African-Americans, but race hardly seemed to matter. Sure, there were the tough, proud girls in the Oakland class who’d push you out of line with a well-placed hip, but if you stood firm and let your arms fly and showed how high you could jump in time, they’d grudgingly give you space. The joyful circumstance of all of us dancing together seemed to transcend the painful history that had brought the rhythms to these shores in the first place.
After nine or so years of classes and camps, I began teaching African dance at local gyms and schools, driven by the belief that the African tradition of dancing for any and every occasion could cure mainstream society of its ills: depression (it’s impossible to be sad while your head is bobbing,) isolation (nothing builds community like a circle) and obesity (if we replaced one hour a day of TV with a little kuku, we’d all be ripped.) I saw again and again how dancing created connections among people who’d never touched a drum before (the old ladies at the Jewish Community Center swiveling their hips to Olatunji’s Drums of Passion provided one heck of a spectacle, let me tell you.) To me, the dances themselves acted as a metaphor of what all humans have in common, a bridge to awakening what has been lost.
Then I moved to the South. Metaphorical became literal where not even two centuries ago ships returning from the West Coast of Africa docked with people stolen from their homes and sold as if their families and traditions never mattered at all, where many of their descendants still live. Suddenly, my love of African dance seemed complicated, fraught with the implication that I had no right to practice traditions of a culture so far removed from the one into which I was born. There was context where there had been none before, and it’s understandable that the white girl with her complete collection of Baaba Maal CDs might be considered something of an idiot.
I didn’t want to offend anyone, so I kept my fancy footwork on the downlow. Already lonely for my family on the West coast, I grieved for the loss of one of my primary ways of connecting with others and I longed for the simplicity of being able to dance again without feeling like I was encroaching on someone else’s legacy. I spent a lot of my first year here jamming out with my CDs and my djembe in the living room with my kids. (And those Jewish African Cowchildren can throw down sofa like no one’s business, all right?)
But I still believed in ba-ba-dunk-thunk that activated something below my skin, deeper than my bones even, to the level that connects us all. Yes, the rhythms and moves come from a place I’ve never been, from people who don’t look like me, yet my kinship with them feels undeniable. So I decided I would continue to seek my tribe in spite of my fears of rejection.
I figured it was best to start slow, so I convinced my son’s first-grade teacher to let me teach some creative movement. Like I said, I’m used to looking like a fool. I showed up in my favorite purple lapa (the traditional African wrap) and explained that we’d be doing a dance from Guinea. Blank stares.
“It’s in Africa,” I offered, knowing they’d just learned about the continents.
Silence.
One girl eyed me warily and frowned. “You ain’t African.”
I had prepared for that. “You’re right, I’m not. Not even close. But my teachers are. Do you want me to show what they’ve taught me?”
Once the drumming started, the skepticism evaporated, just like I’d hoped. We rollicked through a half hour every Friday for the rest of the year, me and a bunch of six-year-olds, leaping in the air like giant happy frogs.
“Check my sinte, holmes!” “Oh yeah? Can you do this?”
Nothing warms my heart more these days than when those kids, now sprinkled among the second-grade rooms, come up to me in the hall. We snap our fingers and pound our feet until the bell rings, bomba-dun-duning in a world where we all belong.
Jessica Leigh Lebos is the editor of Skirt! Savannah/HHI.