Chapter 4

A Pious Poetics of Place

Three Scenes

“I take refuge in God from the accursed Devil,” Tata Diabaté declares, enunciating her words clearly in the sacred verse of classical Arabic. She stands, clothed in shimmering green robes, accented in gold, before a bride and groom in a capacious hall at the Hotel de l’Amitié, the prominent five-star high-rise in downtown Bamako. Seated behind Tata, accompanying musicians dutifully follow her moralizing invocation, anticipating the praise song to follow. Anticipation mixes with anxiety, however, as the musicians recall party organizers’ earlier injunction to refrain from vocal praise, a plebian and vernacular practice they believe to be out of place at this upscale, cosmopolitan event. Undeterred, Tata raises her voice, microphone in hand, and proclaims her premeditated panegyric.

Elsewhere in the city, a boom box resounds under the shade of a streetside veranda. A small crowd of young men, sheltered from the afternoon sun, listens as they huddle over a boiling pot of tea. “Every soul shall taste death / What the Almighty has said, the Almighty will do,” raps Dixon, a member of the hip-hop trio Tata Pound, juxtaposing phrases in Arabic, the language of the holy Qur’an, and Bamana, the urban lingua franca. In response to these words, one of the men cups his hands together and passes them in front of his face, whispering the Arabic basmala (“In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful”) as the next round of tea is served. They sip the sugary infusion slowly, loudly, bobbing their heads as the next track kicks off. “Hey, policeman! Tata Pound’s in the area!”

Still elsewhere, in a global city far away from the riverine bustle of Bamako, a video game player listens to a recorded version of “Mali Sajo,” a staple of traditional Mande music and the “fetish” piece of Toumani Diabaté’s urban dance band, the Symmetric Orchestra. The track, titled “Tapha Niang” on the album Boulevard de l’Indépendence, is featured on LittleBigPlanet, a new game for the Sony PlayStation 3 console. What this gamer hears are not the Friday night crowds that gather at Le Hogon, the Symmetric Orchestra’s nightclub home in Bamako; not the pride of place the original piece inspires among Malian listeners, as an informal anthem, playing on the multiple meanings of the word Mali (Hippopotamus, Nation-State, Empire); and not the lyrical lament of singer Moussa Niang, who mourns the death of his younger brother, a young Senegalese soldier killed in combat. “Tapha is gone / That is why we are crying.” What this listener hears is the Qur’anic verse that opens the track, the same Sura heard back in Bamako from the rap group Tata Pound, to which Niang adds another Qur’anic verse, “All that is on Earth will perish” (Surat al-Rahman, v. 26), a reminder that his brother’s fate is one that we all share.

Three Concerns

From the three scenes just sketched, this chapter addresses three lines of inquiry that present Afropolitan ethics as a religiously motivated project. First, this chapter tells stories and makes claims about the way urban artists and their audiences in Bamako invoke Islam across diverse genres of popular music. My interest is the sense in which one “is” a Muslim in this West African city. Second, the chapter describes the principally vocal means by which such popular piety is ideologically achieved. My analysis focuses on what I call “a poetics of recognition” in which singers interpolate Qur’anic verse into vocal performances to interpellate moral subjectivity (in the Althusserian sense, of which more later) within Bamako’s Islamic public sphere. Finally, third, this chapter considers the territorial politics of this pious poetics, as moral subjects are called on—and at times contested—across multiple scales of place. My concern, here, is for a sense of locality, expressed through popular appeals to Islam, within the increasingly deterritorialized urban culture of contemporary Bamako.

I begin by situating these three concerns—for a religion, a vocal aesthetics, and a sense of place—within the social space of popular culture in urban West Africa. My argument is that part of what makes “culture” popular in contemporary Bamako is an audibly shared sense of Islamic subjectivity. My claim is that this common experience of Islamic inter-est manifests in the recursive appeal to Muslim morality through a vocal poetics of recognition in popular music lyricism. My understanding of this Islamic call-and-response in Bamako popular culture draws on Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “subjective in-between” forged in dialogue about common concerns that “constitute . . . something which inter-est, which lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together” ([1958] 1998, 182–83). Islam is, as we shall observe, is one such shared interest (born of mutual existence, or inter-est) in the popular culture of contemporary Bamako, giving rise to a “web of human relationships” that crosses—as it connects—multiple genres of expression and cultural styles through modes of speaking and singing about public piety.

I then return to the three scenes presented at the start of the chapter, developing them through ethnographic and textual analysis. In each case, I elaborate the vocal practice of Islamic interpellation, by which subjects are positioned within an ideological system (Islam) through the performance and perception of popular song, across several genres of musical expression (jeliya, hip-hop, and Afropop). My final example, however, diverges from this interpellative coherence to follow the circulatory path of a song (“Tapha Niang”) through the social media of the global culture industry. In particular, I observe how the song’s recent remediation (as video game soundtrack) has engendered a politics of misrecognition in popular media and blog reports (compare Novak 2010). This case emphasizes the precarious particularity of a what may be called “popular Islam” in Bamako, exemplifying a process AbdouMaliq Simone calls “worlding” (2001b), or a “state of being ‘cast out’ into the world” in a struggle over the possibility of local meaning and being (17).

Islam, Music, and Popular Culture in an African City

For nearly a millennium, Islam has been part of the rich and varied mix of cultural forms that shape the social worlds of West African societies. In contemporary West Africa, Islam’s deep regional history manifests in a modern-day continuum of belief systems and social practices, ranging from the more orthodox and conservative to the more heterodox and liberal (see Levtzion and Pouwels 2000). Echoing along this continuum are Islam’s many West African voices—voices that inspire piety, silence dissent, engage dialogue, and reveal new paths of spiritual growth and religious identity. That these Islamic voices are strikingly musical is readily apparent to visitors to the region, particularly in its expansive cities where Islam finds its most diverse and dynamic expression (see Charry 2000b). To walk through a city like Bamako (or Dakar, or Conakry, or Niamey) is to move through a dense soundscape of social sound and urban noise. Much of the former echoes the edifying verbal arts of local Islamic practice (compare Hirschkind 2006). Against the bustle of car horns, marketplace haggling, and local industry, one may hear the muezzen call the Muslim faithful to prayer (Arabic, adhan), a mellifluous Qur’anic recitation from a respected spiritual leader (French, marabout) played on a taxicab tape deck, the cyclical chants of an itinerant Sufi brotherhood (Arabic, tariqa), or the public benedictions (Arabic, baraka) of praise singers (French, griots) amplified by oversized speakers at outdoor marriage and name-giving ceremonies. These are all part of the “multigeneric lifeworld” (Warner 2002, 63) of Islam in urban West Africa.1

In this chapter, I attend to the generically varied contributions of popular music to the Islamic soundscape of a West African city, Bamako. My emphasis is on what Fiona McLaughlin calls “Islamic popular music,” which she distinguishes from “popular Islamic music” in West African urban cultures (1997). With regard to the latter category, McLaughlin describes a range of essentially Islamic musical forms cultivated within the sectarian milieu of contemporary Senegal, where multiple Sufi orders (Arabic, turuq) coexist within a broader Islamic community. In Mali, such music from varied communities of faith is often described as zigiri (from Arabic, dhikr), encompassing a wide range of musical expressions of Islamic praise. Performed on occasions of ritual gathering and pilgrimage, and consumed through a variety of media (digital, analog, broadcast, and streaming) as an everyday sign of public piety, popular Islamic music is typically characterized by chanting to the glory of God, accompanied by electrified and acoustic instruments and dance. This popular Islamic music is consonant with a broader Sufi tradition of Islamic mysticism, which, dating back to the twelfth century, and predominant throughout much of West Africa, emphasizes religious music as a means of heightening the righteousness of the pious listener by bringing him or her closer to the spiritual world of God.

McLaughlin’s article also observes the more recent emergence of an Islamic popular music in West Africa, in which sacred themes are integrated into the secular popular music of urban dance bands. In the Senegalese context McLaughlin describes, the traditional form of praise song for respected patrons, common to many genres of West African popular music, has been transposed to the relationship between disciple (Wolof, taalibe; from Arabic, talib) and spiritual leader (marabout) that defines the social and religious order of Sufism. This creates a distinctly Islamic form of musical praise that marks a singer’s and his or her audience’s allegiance to a particular Sufi order or Way (tariqa), such as the prevailing Tijaniyya and Qadiriyya orders in the subregion. Popular among urban audiences, for whom religious identity and popular culture are not perceived as discrepant, Islamic popular music has opened up new forms of spiritual and religious expression, which local and global popular music industries make widely available on recordings, radio and television broadcasts, and in the secular spaces of concert halls and nightclubs. Following McLaughlin, I consider, here, what qualifies popular music as “Islamic” in the Malian context. Yet, I also argue that a broad and coherent appeal to (or call upon) Islam is part of what makes music “popular” in Bamako.

Voicing Afropolitan Piety

In chapter 3, I described how moral and ethical behavior and forms of vocal and instrumental expression mutually constitute an aesthetics of artistic personhood (artistiya) in Bamako today. Bamako artists and their audiences share a number of social and musical predilections, among which is the ideological hegemony of Mande social thought in musical discourse, articulating a common musical value system of embodied expression. Here, I consider a significant musical element of this ethico-moral aesthetics, the discursive and expressive logics of which are more socioreligious than ethnocultural, more Islamic than Mande. Specifically, I consider the poetic insertion of Qur’anic verse into popular music song texts as means of interpellating moral subjectivity among urban artists and audiences. Yet, my intent is not to draw a stark analytic line between the cultural and the religious as modes of being. Rather, by drawing attention to popular music in Bamako as such, I propose that the popular accrues its musical—and, more broadly defined, cultural—coherence through a common set of locally salient dispositions, including artists’ urban and professional identities (chapters 1 and 2), and expressive resources, such as Mande music (chapter 3) and, as we shall observe, the Islamic voice. All are modes of a variegated and vital Afropolitan ethics in the audible art world of contemporary Bamako.

In the stories and texts that follow, my analysis focuses on spoken and sung references to Islamic thought and practice in three genres of popular vocal performance: Mande praise song, Malian rap, and Afropop lyricism. Within these genres of verbal art, I observe how Bamako vocalists invoke Islam as a sign of religious ideology to interpellate listeners as moral subjects. By “ideology,” I mean those paradigmatic systems of social and cultural hegemony (such as religion) that prescribe (without wholly determining) modes of identification in society. In Stuart Hall’s reading of Althusser, whose notion of “interpellation” I draw on here (Althusser 1971), ideologies represent “the frameworks of thinking and calculation about the world” in which subjectivity emerges as “the recognition of the self within ideological discourse” (my emphasis). In other words, ideology is “what it is that allows subjects to recognize themselves in the discourse and to speak it spontaneously as its author” (Hall 1985, 99, 107). It is precisely this interpellated form of self-recognition, expressed through popular culture and within the ideological context of Islam in contemporary Bamako that interests me here. My attention is thus drawn to the specifically (though not exclusively) Islamic morality of subjects called forth—or interpellated—in live and mediated musical expression.

In this way, I follow McLaughlin’s analysis of an “Islamic popular music” (1997) as part of a broader Islamic popular culture. Religiously marked, the popular signifies as “unofficial” vis-à-vis the “official” culture of a nation-state (Mali), defined, at least nominally, by a politics of laïcité, the ideological sign of secular society in this former French colony. While discrepant with the laïc discourse of the state, Islamic popular culture nonetheless appeals to a national audience of people who identify themselves both as Malian and Muslim.2 In this unofficial-yet-national public sphere, the popular becomes Islamic in the voices of praise singers, rappers, and dance band vocalists. Islam is, in turn, popularized through these artists’ multigeneric and interpellative verbal art. Rendered, thus, as a popular mode of expression and identification, Islam represents what anthropologist Benjamin Soares calls a “supralocal” signifier that can “promote unity between Muslims in Mali” and connect them to a broader Islamic world (2005, 238, 239).3 Yet, this global sense of Islamic “unity” is not always consonant with the local “unity” of Islamic popular culture, as my third case study will show, in which anonymous criticism from ecumenical orthodoxies abroad calls the very culture of popular Islam in Mali into question.

Still, at the local level, on which my first two case studies focus, Islam is a unifying means by which moral subjects are called into being within the heterogeneous public of popular culture in Bamako. By “moral subjectivity” I mean, once again, a mode of being through which individuals and groups make claims on customs, conventions, and norms—both as acts of personal volition and collective subjection—to socially position themselves within a larger community. In Bamako popular music, Islamic interpellation produces moral subjects through a poetics of recognition, characterized by vocal citation of Qur’anic verse in lyrical song and speech within a self-identified Muslim community. Such citations are marked (or recognized) as interpellating signifiers (constituting a poetics) in terms of language use, vocal quality and style, intertextual reference to surrounding lyrics, and lyrical placement in the overall performance—categories on which I elaborate further later in the chapter. As public acts of interpellation, there exists, however, the possibility of misrecognition, in which locally and globally circulating sounds “call on” listening subjects who misconstrue the ideological signifier and critically recontextualize its meaning. In other words, there is a politics to the poetics of moral subjectivity in Mali’s Islamic popular culture, at home and in the world.

A Call to Praise

We return, now, to the wedding party gathered at the Hotel de l’Amitié in downtown Bamako. There, the band is in the middle of a set of light instrumental music, featuring the sounds of the twenty-one-stringed kora performed by bandleader Dialy Mady Cissoko. The group goes by the name Dialyco, which, as I described in chapter 2, refers both to the Bamana jeliko (“griot trouble”), indexing the problems and struggles faced by traditional musicians (or griots) in contemporary Mali, and the title Dialy Co., describing the modern and market-driven work of such musicians. (Both senses of the name—the troubled tradition and the capitalizing modernity—resonate in the scene I describe here.) As guests filter in and converse amid the ambient sounds, Marie, the evening’s itinerant organizer,4 informs the group that the bride and groom are about to make their entrance. The music abruptly ends. Tata Diabaté, the evening’s principle vocalist, leans back to Dialy Mady to signal the song for the intronisation—the public presentation of the newlyweds. A moment later, the band kicks off with the piece, “Jeliyaba,” meaning “The Great Art of the Griot.”

A staple of the Mande repertoire in Mali, “Jeliyaba” celebrates the virtues of the identity and work of griots (jeliw) in Mande society. The song highlights griots’ status and identity as clan-based artisans (ɲamakalaw) who practice a centuries-old tradition of musical performance, historical panegyric, and social mediation (Hoffman 1995). In performance, the piece features the four principal elements of musical expression employed by these traditional bards and storytellers: instrumental performance (fɔli), dance (dɔn), song (dɔnkili), and speech (kuma). In particular, the value and virtue of vocal praise, or fasada, is valorized as a means of binding communities together through laudatory performance. Fasada describes the vocal act of establishing one’s cultural heritage (fasiya, meaning “father’s lineage” or, more generally, “patrimony”), by “putting it in place” (from the verb, da, “to place”). In “Jeliyaba,” the cultural heritage in question is that of the griots themselves. The piece is, thus, a praise song for praise singers whose “great art” is celebrated as an icon of conviviality in the Mande world.

As a marital exordium, the choice of “Jeliyaba” was certainly striking at an event in which vocal praise had been excluded by a prior agreement—insisted upon by the groom, one of Dialyco’s principle patrons—to supplement public gifting with a nominal performance fee. Typically, when a singer performs fasada, she expects the person to whom the praise is addressed to offer a gift, normally cash, referred to as jelisɔn wari (a “gift of money for the griot”). But, with so many international guests in attendance (from Spain, Italy, and the United States), a traditional wedding with extended praise performances would not suit the cosmopolitan ethos of this modern celebration, or so the groom reasoned. He told Marie, the party planner, to ask Dialyco to limit their praise songs solely to the bride and groom. With this in mind, Tata’s song choice appeared deliberate. “One person’s gift is not a gift” (Mɔgɔ kelen ka sɔnni tɛ sɔnni yɛ), she told me later. “One person’s offering to a griot is not a lot” (Mɔgɔ kelen ka jelisɔn wari, a man ca). Because praise song and speech represent an important source of income for professional musicians at such events, in the form of gifts of cash for personalized extolling performances (jelisɔn wari), and because the reciprocity of praising and gifting is an important means by which a cultural sense of personhood (mɔgɔya) is established in the Mande world, Tata took it upon herself to moralize, through an invocation of praise, what she perceived to be a potentially immoral public.

Through the lens of my video camera, I watch and listen intently as Tata performatively invokes jeliya, the art of the griot, using a standard prefatory genre of vocal praise described, functionally, as ka kɛnɛ ɲama fifa, meaning “to sweep away the dangerous energy of a place”5 (Figure 15). Still seated, Tata intones the first theme of this verbal incantation by praising the gathered celebrants, whom she addresses as jama, a Bamana term derived from the Arabic jama’a meaning “assembly,” “congregation,” “audience,” or “public” (see Bailleul 2000).

At this point Tata comes to her feet, though she does not leave the stage. Her voice and the music rise along with her. The effect of her standing gives a subtle edge of intensity to the group’s performance. All eyes are now on her as she continues her song.

After a short pause, Tata introduces the second theme of the vocal performance, a praise song to God and His terrestrial and celestial works.

This passage begins with a citation of the Ta‘awwudh (Arabic, “I take refuge in God from the accursed Devil”), sung twice through parallel melodic descents with successive resolutions to the tonal center to emphasize its lyrical significance. This phrase is often invoked before Qur’anic recitation, or before embarking on a sacred task, which, in this case, symbolically heightens the morality of Tata’s invocation of public praise. Throughout, she treats the word Ala with aesthetic emphasis by accenting the final vowel sound either as a punctuated abbreviation (in the fourth line) or with a sustained vibrato to which she adds the cadential phoneme hu (in the second and sixth lines) as a descending melisma, indexing classical Arabic and echoing the vocal stylistics of the adhan, or Muslim call to prayer. Reserving her first praises for God—creator of heaven, earth, and of Tata herself—she concludes the passage by asking the musicians to “calm” or “quiet” their music. “This would please me,” she sings as the musicians lower their volume, employing a common vocal device in Mande music intended to draw attention to her spirited song and the vocal praise that is to follow (as described in chapter 3).

This leads Tata to the third and penultimate theme of the song, an assertion of the “moral purity” of the gathered celebrants. With instruments quieted, she begins this theme with a strident griot vocal genre known as “calling the horses” (ka sow wele), which in bygone times was used to extol gathered soldiers in preparation for battle.

The arch of her swelling song descends to the phrase, “This group is pure, oh God,” followed by an affirmation of the religious conviction of her audience, whom she calls “a group of Muslims.” The effect is to symbolically join her public to the broader Muslim umma, or “community of faith.” Following the universal Muslim declaration of faith, the shahada (Arabic, “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet”), Tata culminates her performance with the fourth and final theme of this opening movement, captured in a single line: “You will all find respect in the art of the griot” (Aw bɛɛ bonya bɛ jeliya la).

Tata’s vocal introduction of the piece, “Jeliyaba,” is composed of four principle elements: (1) a celebration of shared joy, (2) a supplication and praise to God, (3) an acknowledgment of collective belonging to a common community of faith, and (4) an affirmation of the reciprocal virtue of jeliya. The social effects of this performance are both critical and productive. Tata voices a public response to the official interdiction of vocal praise while at the same time affirming the intersubjective value of the laudatory performance. She does this by performatively recontextualizing her apparently “cosmopolitan” audience, interpellating them through a poetics of recognition in which both audience and performer are oriented toward what Tata deems the morally appropriate tradition of jeliya. This mutual orientation manifests in the reciprocal gestures of vocal praise and public gifting, with wedding celebrants called upon by the griot to demonstrate their dignity and generosity by rising up to present cash gifts for personalized panegyric. Islam is the ideological vehicle of this poetic interpellation, invoking a locally salient moral community in which the socially and economically valuable practice of jeliya can take place.

Before turning to my second scene, I use Tata’s performance as a model to make some preliminary claims about Islamic interpellation in Malian popular music, elaborating on the vocal poetics of recognition I sketched out earlier. We then observe how this poetics applies to hip-hop and dance band lyricism in (and out of) Bamako. First, sung/spoken texts are vocalized in classical Arabic, often with lexical and/or syntactic inflections of, or code switching with African languages. In Tata’s performance, she juxtaposes sacred verse with public praise, through a call-and-response of classical and colloquial language, Arabic and Bamana. Second, Qur’anic references are clearly enunciated and often repeated, as Tata’s text exemplifies, to draw attention to the words’ sacred and, thus, moral significance. The vocalization may also reflect canonical modes of Islamic verbal art. Tata’s song, thus, evokes the Muslim call to prayer, to which we might add, in the broader field of Malian popular music, Qur’anic recitation and sermonic speech. Third, references to the Qur’an are chosen to speak to the broader themes of the spoken/sung narrative, whether in the form of public praise, as at the wedding party, or through lyrical criticism and sentimental verse, as the following case studies will show. Finally, fourth, Islamic interpellation typically introduces a lyrical passage, founding the vocal expressions that follow on an ideological edifice of sacred morality. In this way, Tata invokes Islam as a key prefatory feature of her praise song, “sweeping away the dangerous energy” at the cosmopolitan wedding party before the laudatory jeliya begins.

Bamako Hip-Hop as an Islamic Counterpublic

I turn now to the artful and ethical crafting of one of the previous decade’s most anticipated albums in Mali, the hip-hop group Tata Pound’s Revolution (2006) (Figure 16). As presented on this album, “dangerous energy” (ɲama) is not confined to a particular venue or event (like a cosmopolitan wedding), but is perceived to permeate Malian society as a whole in the form of police abuse, political corruption, endemic poverty, and a pervasive sense of moral decline (see chapter 1). Since their “underground” beginnings in the mid-1990s, Tata Pound members have been outspoken spokespeople for such socioeconomic concerns, to popular acclaim, but their subcultural criticism is also didactic—a topical vehicle of what they call conscientisation. As Tata Pound member Djo Dama Diarra explains, “A rapper is someone who is there to debate the real problems in society, to raise awareness and awaken people’s sensibilities. That is our way of contributing to the edification of Malian society.”6 As such, Tata Pound represents what might be called “a hip-hop counter-public” in Mali, using their words and beats to “provide a sense of active belonging that masks or compensates for the real powerlessness of human agents in capitalist society” (Warner 2002, 81; see also Schulz 2012).

Most poignantly, Tata Pound has frequently pointed fingers at and named names among the country’s political and financial elites, accusing this dominant “public” of perpetuating a culture of corruption. Theirs is a brazenly critical counter-publicity, in which “it is hoped that the poesis of scene making will be transformative, not replicative merely” (Warner 2002, 88). In this way, Tata Pound’s previous album, Cikan (The Message, a reference to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s classic 1982 hip-hop track), released in the wake of the 2002 presidential elections, signaled the emergence of hip-hop as a powerful medium of political critique in Mali. More generally, it established the group’s national renown, further legitimizing hip-hop as a popular art form in the country. In the title song, Tata Pound directs their “message” of popular politics to the presidency itself:

In a public gesture still widely recounted in discussions over afternoon tea, the newly elected (and now deposed) president Amadou Toumani Touré addressed the “young people of the country” on national television and said, “I have heard the message.” Tata Pound’s follow-up album, Revolution, with its angry denunciations of corruption in the police force, among Bamako’s borough mayors, and in the presidency itself, is an indication that hip-hop’s political “message” remains vital and significant.8 What the following analysis demonstrates is how this subcultural politics resounds from a pronounced moral center in Malian society. Specifically, I observe how Islamic interpellation enables Tata Pound’s edifying social criticism, qualifying their subversive status and identity in religious terms, as an Islamic counter-public.9 I then relate hip-hop’s critical lyricism to the praise singer’s moralizing poetics of recognition, drawing these disparate genres of expression together within the broader public of Islamic popular culture in Mali today.

Tata Pound’s Revolution, which saturated the sociable streetside soundscape during my year of doctoral fieldwork in Bamako (2006–7), begins with an aural rendering of urban sociability: a brief passage of densely layered, dialogic, and playful conversation, or baro. Dorothea Schulz describes such conversational sociability as “the central medium and expression of commensality” in urban Mali. Describing baro as “talk-as-action,” she emphasizes its capacity “to create sociality . . . that is crucial to a person’s being-in-the world” (2002, 811). As exemplified by the oft-repeated phrase, baro ka di, or “Talk is good,” everyday banter, stimulated and paced by three rounds of sweetened green tea, is the quintessential sign of urban conviviality in Mali today.10 It is also a vital site of ethico-moral discourse, in which the everyday back-and-forth of speech about culture and society voices the ethical and moral promise and perils of politics, economy, and sociality in urban Mali. Popular music, as it critically engages with a broader range of topics through a greater diversity of generic forms, filters into these tea-infused streetside conversations with greater and greater frequency, among larger and larger segments of the population.

Among urban, and predominantly male youths, hip-hop has, since the late 1990s, become an especially privileged locus of social, economic, and political discourse (Schulz 2012). It is from this popular center of gravity that Tata Pound introduces their album, talking among themselves about themselves, in a self-aggrandizing mimetic performance of their conversational urban audience.

Though the content of this staged conversation sets up a canonical expression of hip-hop counterculture and braggadocio (see Smitherman 1997, 12–13), signifying the diasporic authenticity of this emcee trio, the intersubjective character of the exchange is firmly rooted in a local moral praxis, foregrounding the edifying space of vocal sociability (baro) in contemporary Bamako.

This dialogic “intro” is followed by the dark and ethically cautionary track, “Allahou Akbar” (“God Is Great”), in which listeners are warned of the existential perils of an individualistic and unethical life that spurns the blessings of God. In the refrain, Tata Pound members sing, and occasionally scream, the following lines:

It is the word Ala that the group sings throughout, alternating between a gently rising and an even melisma on the final a, reminiscent of singer Tata Diabaté’s adhan-inflected “call to praise.” In between these sung invocations of the Almighty, rapper Djo Dama cries out to his listeners, “God is great!” and “The Irresistible!” With the latter cry, he cites one of God’s ninety-nine names (al-Jabbar) from Surat al-Hashr (verse 23). “Everyone must know,” he then warns, “that no one is exempt from death,” echoing one of the track’s signature Islamic themes.

In the third verse, Dixon—the Tata Pound member known for his deep, melodic, and measured verbal art, reminiscent of Dub poetics—pronounces, in Bamana, that “we must fear tomorrow / We must fear God” (“Anw ka siran sini ɲɛ / ka siran Ala ɲɛ”) before citing, in Qur’anic Arabic (as phonetically spoken in Bamana), verse 185 of Surat al-‘Umran, “Every soul shall taste death” (“Kulu nafsin zayekatu mawata”)—the latter line vocalized with a slow and eloquent prosody, suggestive of the diction and delivery of Qur’anic recitation. In this passage, and in the previous refrain, the rappers’ juxtaposition of colloquial and classical language (Bamana and Arabic), clear articulation of Qur’anic text, and intertextual treatment of scripture on an Islamically themed track resonates strongly with the poetics of recognition articulated earlier by Tata Diabaté. The praise song and rap also share a critical poetics centered on an existential defense of locality. Both call upon moral subjects within the ideological framework of Islam, while at the same time calling out social forces—capitalist cosmopolitanism and unmoored modernity, on the one hand, and political corruption and socioeconomic struggle, on the other—that are perceived to threaten moral community in Mali today.

Both the praise song and rap also call up and qualify their publics before interpellating them under the sign of Islam. Tata’s performance begins by celebrating the marriage that brings her public (jama) together. Tata Pound invokes its audience through a representation of intimate urban talk (baro), the most common social space of hip-hop audition in Bamako. Just as Tata Diabaté primed her public for praise through collective recognition and Islamic interpellation, it is the two opening tracks on Tata Pound’s Revolution—juxtaposing conversational sociability and an appeal to a common faith—that provide the moral prologue for the remaining eight tracks of scathing social, political, and economic critique of Mali’s ruling elite. These critiques constitute the “revolutionary” message for which the album is named, and that have inspired both great enthusiasm from fans and public censure from the Bamako oligarchy. As such, Tata Pound lyrically interpellates both a moral listening public and the immoral subjectivity of those in positions of power. Respect is joined with criticism, much like Tata Diabaté’s affirmation of her audience’s virtue and implicit critique of her patrons for objecting to laudatory jeliya at the wedding. Yet, this Janus-faced co-presence of the moral and immoral in Islamic interpellation is not always so clearly demarcated or stable. It is, thus, to the poetics and politics of misrecognition that I now turn.

Urban Afropop in the Islamic Ecumene

In this third and final case, I track a locally popular song destined for the world music market through its various mediations and remediations. The song is “Tapha Niang,” the penultimate track on two-time Grammy Award–winner Toumani Diabaté’s debut—and highly acclaimed—album with his Bamako dance band, the Symmetric Orchestra, Boulevard de l’Indépendence (2006). “Tapha Niang” is one of the band’s many versions of the piece “Mali Sajo” (two are featured on the album), a staple of the contemporary griot repertoire in the Mande heartland. Senegalese vocalist Moussa Niang sings the song in his native Wolof, though he opens with a short citation of Qur’anic verse, from the same Surat (al-‘Umran) cited earlier by Tata Pound: “Every soul shall taste death” (“Kulu nafsin dha’ikat al-mawti”) to which he adds, “All that is on Earth will perish” (“Kulu man ‘alayha fanin”) from Surat al-Rahman, verse 26.

I first met Niang in 2000, when he was one of several singers who performed with the Symmetric Orchestra every Friday night at a downtown nightclub called Le Hogon. At this time, the group had been together for nearly ten years and developed an extensive and well-established repertoire of electrified Afropop, mixing modern Western instrumentation (including electric guitars, drum kits, and synthesizers) with traditional instruments of the Malian countryside (such as kora, jenbe, bala, and ngoni). Over the next few years, the band would refine its translocal, traditional-yet-modern sound (see chapter 3) in preparation for the 2005 recording sessions in Bamako that would result in Boulevard de l’Indépendence. Yet, the commitment and rigor of the band’s work ethic was, at first glance (or listening), tempered (or, rather untempered) by what could often be unruly and always raucous performances at Le Hogon. Indeed, “loud” does not begin to describe the Symmetric Orchestra’s sound, heard late at night (around one or two in the morning), with all members assembled, playing at full volume—amplified by a fair amount of on-stage socioacoustic rivalry (fadenya). Though, according to bandleader Toumani Diabaté, there was musical method to this occasionally ear-splitting madness:

And, audiences did come, from near and far, and by the hundreds, to hear the Symmetric Orchestra’s hot and lively sound every Friday night; that is, until Le Hogon was shut down in the summer of 2008. At that time, the nightclub’s landlord decided to evict the club manager and rent the property to a private Islamic group that wanted to turn the space into a zawiya, an Islamic prayer lodge tied to the Tijaniyya Sufi order. The decision to close Le Hogon was apparently financially motivated, with weekend concerts unable to sustain the popular venue. Though, from an aural vantage, replacing the nightclub with a zawiya has produced a dramatic remixing of the neighborhood soundscape, with Friday night jam sessions replaced by Friday afternoon prayers and chants of the Muslim faithful. Still, the show goes on. The Symmetric Orchestra now plays, as ever on Friday nights, at Le Diplomate, an addition to the Bamako club scene (as of 2007) located north of the city, along the road to Koulikoro.

“Mali Sajo” remains one of the group’s signature pieces—a crowd pleaser, to be sure, but also a frequent vehicle of Islamic interpellation, as we shall observe. Traditionally, the song is a lament, mourning the loss of loved ones. In all variants (of which there are many), the symbol of such loss is the hippopotamus with white dappled feet (a mali cajo, in the Khassonké vernacular from which the name derives), an animal that lived peacefully with the people of Bafoulabé (“the town where two rivers meet,” in western Mali) but was killed at the hands of a foreign hunter. In many versions, this hunter is a French colonial officer who bears the surname Sauvage.11 Rendered, thus, as an act of “savage” colonial violence, the death of the hippopotamus—whose Mande name, “Mali,” is also that of a postcolonial nation and a precolonial empire—represents a profound loss of sovereignty within an imperial hegemony.

In the chorus, vocalists sing:

In one of Toumani Diabaté’s earlier versions of the song, titled “Mali Sajio” and recorded for the album Songhai 2 (Diabaté, Ketama, and Soto 1994), griot vocalist and renowned traditionalist Kassé Mady Diabaté sings the following passage:

Beginning with a phrase, sung phonetically with a heavy Mande accent (heard especially in the line’s characteristic voweling), from verse 78 of Surat al-Rahman, (in Arabic, Dhi-l-jalali wa-l-ikrami), Kassé Mady reflects on the transience of life that spares no one, not even great kings. (The Mande term for Alexander the Great, Juru Kara Nani, is derived from his Arabic name Dhu-l-Qarnayn, meaning “the two-horned one.”) Here, again, Islam interpellates the morality (and mortality) of its listening subjects through the spirited voice of Qur’anic verse.

In Moussa Niang’s version, he sings of the passing of his younger brother, Mustapha, a soldier in the Senegalese Army who died in the contested southern region of Casamance (Figure 17). At the song’s outset, Niang calls on Islam and bonds of family to confront his grief. “Tapha is gone,” he sings. “That is why we are crying.” Through the same poetics of recognition that preceded Tata’s praise song at the wedding party, the social criticism on Tata Pound’s Revolution, and the traditional lament in “Mali Sajo,” Niang invokes Qur’anic verse to morally ground his vocal dirge, situating himself and his listeners in a pious sociomusical space. Following this sacred incantation, Niang publicly addresses his sadness, a sadness shared, moreover, by all those who have experienced loss. “This is what Tapha Niang shares with Mali Sajo,” he tells me, describing the setting of his lyrics to this Mande classic. “When the hippopotamus is killed by the French soldier, it represents a loss for everyone.”13 Like Tata Diabaté’s vernacular apologia and Tata Pound’s popular call to arms, Niang’s lyrical lament suggests, once again, a defense of local sense and sentiment, articulating the universal mortality of all living things (“All roads lead to Rome,” Niang likes to say) with the personal experience of mourning in the wake of loss. Niang’s reference to internecine conflict in Senegal echoes Mali Sajo’s (post)colonial critique of imperial militarism; both are contexts of war that transcend as they envelop the local and both are expressed in deeply personal terms. “I am crying, [and] I am crying again,” Niang sings. “I am alone.”14

Yet, Niang’s lyrical piety and personal grief resonate beyond this local elegy. On an album destined for global audiences, the invocation of scripture is also, as bandleader Toumani Diabaté explains, “a way to attract and inspire people toward Islam” (as cited in Totilo 2008). Such public affirmation of faith is an integral part of Diabaté’s musical persona, and serves as a reminder that songs like “Tapha Niang” are multivalent, with multiple claims made on their musical content.15 For Niang, the song’s meaning is profoundly intimate, and he employs Islamic interpellation to moralize and publicize this intimacy, through a poetics of recognition (the vocal interpolation of Qur’anic verse). To this, Diabaté adds a touch of Islamic evangelism, representing the religion in positive terms to an international audience largely outside this community of faith. As Diabaté’s record label, World Circuit, states, “Toumani never performs without speaking about God, either before, during or after the performance” (Totilo 2008). Of course, for many world music fans, reference to Islam signifies no more than an appeal to the exotic (Said 1978), an allure that sustains the international careers of groups like the Symmetric Orchestra. For such audiences, this version of “Mali Sajo” is attractive and inspiring not for its personal and positive invocation of Islam but for the “African-ness” of its global pop groove: its upbeat tempo, catchy horn riffs, dense texture, and complex syncopated rhythms.16

It is precisely this musical alterity that made “Tapha Niang” a featured track on the PlayStation 3 video game LittleBigPlanet,17 providing the soundtrack to the “Swinging Safari” level on the game, an auditory and visual fantasy of primitive Africa. Here, the game’s scruffy protagonist, an anthropomorphic puppet named Sackboy, runs, jumps, and swings through a cartoonish African wilderness filled with safari animals, tribal iconography, and percussive instruments aplenty. “Tapha Niang” plays in the background, turned down slightly in the mix to let the game play resound. With a well-timed jump or smash of a gong, Niang’s poetics of recognition might easily be lost to the gaming world’s “invention of Africa” (see Mudimbe 1988). The vocalized Qur’anic verse became, however, more than just an exotic sound bite when, on October 16, 2008, it was heard anew. An anonymous Muslim gamer revealed the Islamic reference in an open letter to Sony and game designer Media Molecule after noticing “some very familiar Arabic words from the Quran.” Citing the concern of “certain Arabic hardcore gaming forums,” the gamer states, “We Muslims consider the mixing of music and words from our Holy Quran deeply offending. We hope you would remove that track from the game immediately via an online patch, and make sure that all future shipments of the game disk do not contain it” (Luke K 2010). Within days, Sony had recalled the game from retailers and delayed its release. This triggered lengthy debates about political correctness, artistic censorship, and the practice of religious piety in the public sphere on popular gaming blogs (see, for example, Graft 2008). It also drew critical attention to Toumani Diabaté’s particular blend of faith and music. “In my family there are two things we know, the Koran and the kora,” he told the BBC, referring to the Muslim holy book and the Mande harp (cited in Michaels 2008). Describing this musico-religious sentiment to me two years later, Diabaté raised his left hand, forming an O-shape with his index finger and thumb with the remaining three fingers raised. “You see?” he asked, indicating the correct hand position to hold and play the kora. “It says, Allahu,” suggesting that musical performance and religious piety go, literally, hand in hand.18 Yet, the event had taken its toll. “I don’t want anybody to joke with . . . and [disrespect] Islam,” Diabaté told the BBC, acknowledging that the controversy had left him “sad” and “disappointed” (Michaels 2008).

At Home in the World?

What this incident reveals is the real possibility of interpellative misrecognition in the mediated space of global culture, in which decontextualized voices “call on” consumer publics who (mis)apprehend the vocal sign—in this case, an apparently “unorthodox” expression of Islam—and (re)assess its value and virtue. It also brings the vital though increasingly precarious experience of locality in urban Africa (addressed in chapter 1) into greater relief. In Bamako, Diabaté’s musico-religious fusion is part of a broader Islamic popular culture, in which moral subjects are interpellated through a multigeneric poetics of recognition. As the case studies presented have shown, this poetics is defined by the juxtaposition of classical and colloquial language registers, stylized vocal expression with resonances of Islamic verbal art, lyrical intertextuality of scriptural and poetic themes, and a prefatory function in performance, live or mediated. When Tata Diabaté invokes this poetics, she refuses a salaried, cosmopolitan art world by interpellating her public as moral participants in laudatory jeliya. When Tata Pound calls on Islam, they do so as a cautionary prelude to a revolutionary critique of postcolonial statism. And, when Toumani Diabaté defends Moussa Niang’s religiously inflected lament against conservative critics, he also demands that the poetic voice of Islam in his music be recognized for what it is—a rooted expression of faith—and not denied, as an ecumenical aberration. In all cases, Islamic interpellation through Qur’anic interpolation testifies to the ethical and aesthetic vitality of popular culture in Bamako today, becoming a vocal icon of locality—a pious poetics of place—against the social, political, and religious orthodoxies of globalization and the myriad forms it takes in everyday life.

In the following two chapters, I interrogate such global orthodoxies further, moving from questions of cultural aesthetics and public piety to those of cultural policy and political subjectivity. In chapter 5, I examine the historically emergent category of intellectual property, rendered as le droit d’auteur in French copyright law and interpreted within the shifting politics of culture in postcolonial Mali. Beginning with widespread anxieties about the social and economic value of the arts in an era of private markets and decentralized politics, I present a genealogy of music copyright and its criminalized corollary, piracy, from the late colonial period to the present. Emphasizing the production, circulation, and performance of music, this history reveals the long-standing and steadily deepening economic precarity that has shaped the subjectivity of most contemporary Malian artists. In the final chapter, I consider the extent to which one may consider such artists and their music to be “Malian”—political subjects of a postcolonial nation-state—in a time of regional crisis, internecine conflict, and ongoing statist abuses.