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Out of this world

Welcome to the third serving of CLP’s “Padkos – food for the journey”. This one’s a CD of music,
and these notes are in a booklet that accompanies it.

Art expresses and feeds our human spirit on the journey we make struggling for justice. We selected
the music on this CD as a companion to CLP’s earlier written piece: Finding our voice in the
world.

While finalising the text of Finding our voice in the world, there was a discussion between the contributors about what we meant by locating our politics and praxis ‘at a distance’ from the world as it is. Surely we don’t want to give the idea that we find truth and beauty at some safe distance from the world that is lived by the poor?; so, “how much is a distance?”. In the end we thought perhaps it is simultaneously and paradoxically both zero and infinite:

· zero (in terms of the concreteness and particularity of actual struggles) because it’s right
there/here where people make their lives;

· infinite (for the politics/thinking) because really emancipatory possibilities can only come
from a complete fundamental break from what exists/what’s known/what’s expected.

The point is not to imply that ‘struggle’ and its ‘politics’ are separate but to recognise that any
emancipatory politics must attempt to hold this distance question in tension. Only by holding that
tension (and refusing temptations to resolve it in a decision for one or other) do we properly affirm and strengthen humanity in life and in struggle. As the radical writer Arundhati Roy said in a speech entitled “Come September”:

… To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the
unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest
places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate
what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand.
To never look away. And never, never, to forget. …

G R Naidoo’s photograph on the CD cover was taken in Mkhumbane in 1956 and holds a moment
of joy in the saddest of places. In an essay called “A Rough Guide to Commons, Enclosure &
Popular Insurgency in Durban”, Richard Pithouse writes:

Places like Umkhumbane, District Six in Cape Town, and Sophiatown in Johannesburg gave
rise to vibrant and cosmopolitan urban cultures in which local practices mixed with
appropriated and reworked imported cultural idioms such as jazz. … Well-known
contemporary Durban musicians such as Madala Kunene and the late Sipho Gumede have
often spoken about their musical roots in Umkhumbane. Many people loved these places –
they became themselves precisely because of the urban cosmopolitanism of these ‘slums’.
Bloke Modisane’s novel Blame Me On History begins: “Something in me died, a piece of
me died, with the dying of Sophiatown…In the name of slum clearance they had brought the
bulldozers and gored into her body.” In places like Sophiatown and Umkhumbane people
did not achieve the right to decent housing but they did achieve the right to the city, “the
right to an urban life” and they created an urban intellectual, cultural and political commons
for which there is considerable popular nostalgia to this day.

“Out of this world” plays on this tension too. Often used to describe something that’s just
unbelievably good (which this music is), we think it also carries the suggestion that the good and
the true don’t fall mysteriously down from ‘heaven’ but emerge precisely ‘out of this world’ (which
this music does).