“When you return to Ghana, I’ll join you there”

“Hey Ama” Antoinette screams. “Today we are going to create our own song.” I looked at her in disbelief. “I think we’ll call it Lisago, so even when you leave we can remember you here and teach the Lisago to many others.” I laughed and told her I thought it might be difficult to create our own rhythms. She gave me a confused smile. “Haven’t I taught you anything yet? The drum is how we express ourselves. If we don’t create our own rhythms we keep everything inside. The drum is how we can feel things we don’t normally feel, the drum is how we remember who we are, and when we play the Lisago, we will remember the fun times we had together. This is why we play, we play to feel.” Antoinette proceeded to take my hands and place them on my djembe. “Ama, close your eyes, clear your mind, and feel the sound.” All I heard was silence as I peeked out of the corner of my eye. Antoinette then placed her hands on top of mine and told me once again to “find yourself in the drum, become one with the drum.” And for one brief second as I held my eyes tight, I was sure I could see inside myself. (Lisa Grossman, College thesis, 2001).

She tells me she sees rhythms in her sleep. When I awoke this morning she was sitting on the porch, starring off into the distance. The sun had just risen and she sat, smiling to herself. Women walked up and down the streets below carrying loads atop their heads, men beating sticks against their shoeshine boxes. “What are you thinking of?” I asked as  I sat down beside her, still a bit groggy from the early morning sounds that awoke me.

“I dreamt a new song.” She began to laugh. I remember Antoinette telling me this eight years back. “I dream of rhythms when I sleep. My ancestors send messages through me, and they wake me up at night. So I leave a recorder by my bed. This is how I create my music. I dream it.”

I was twenty when I first met Antoinette. Studying abroad in Ghana during University, her cultural group performed one of their first shows for us. At the time, I had been living in Ghana for a few months, and Antoinette was the first female drummer I had seen. Let me not call her simply a drummer. She was a master, or as they say here in Ghana, Okeryema. I can remember that day perfectly. Antoinette and the children walked on stage in tattered costumes with old wooden drums. A dim fluorescent light above a concrete slab at Mable’s Table Restaurant lit the stage just enough to make out the outlines of their bodies and the smiles on their faces. As she stood up on stage, strong and tall, she hit that drum like no man I had ever seen before. The sound was so sincere, so intense, so true, that it nearly brought tears to my eyes. This was unlike any other performance I had seen but on this day, with Anotinette and these children, under that dim fluorescent light, it was life, joy, energy, and love.

I moved in with Antoinette shortly after that. My desire to learn and study with her at the time felt momentary. Never did I expect it to shape the me that I would become eight years later. We drummed, danced, laughed, and I began to see that she was no ordinary woman. She was, right before my eyes, changing culture, empowering youth, using music to change the world.

When I returned to the states in 2001 I placed a picture beside my bed. In it, I wore a traditional drumming shirt, black and white stripes. My djembe drum in front of me, bare hands on the skin. Antoinette seated beside me, smiling. Her dress matching mine and our eyes connecting as we play together. The picture was my inspiration when I spent four months writing my Univeristy thesis about Antoinette, a narrative ethnography about the role individuals have in creating, and re-creating culture.

Time passed by and Antoinette and I lost touch. Each time I would look at this photo I would dream about the day I would return to Cape Coast on my quest to find her. I would close my eyes and try to remember the curves in the road, was her shop on the right or left hand side? And I knew that someday, Antoinette and I would be reunited.

It was February of 2009 when this all changed. A sudden urge to type Antoinette’s name on the google homepage came over me, and I nearly fell off my seat when that same Antoinette I knew nine years back, sitting in her small shop by the roadside, was suddenly starring at me on the virtual web. I began frantically emailing every address I could find, and before I knew it, I was sitting in Antoinette’s living room in Santa Rosa California giving her a promise. “When you return to Ghana, I’ll join you there.”

Antoinette and I sit on the porch, her tape recorder in hand. She sings along and dances as she listens to her new creation. “I awoke at 2am. It just came to me. The children of nyame tsease will no longer carry loads. We will sing and dance.” She taps her hands on her legs to the beat.

It has been eight years exactly since I have left this porch; the same porch where I celebrated my twenty-first birthday, and I will soon celebrate my twenty-ninth. Cape Coast smells the same, of burning rubbish, freshly cooked fish, and salty ocean air. Fabrics of vibrant colors adorn the women and men, church songs fill the streets, and men and women can be caught dancing at the street side markets. My time away seems to have vanished, though the children of Nyame Tsease I knew eight years back are no longer children. They still remain in the group, now a bit taller, but still with the same energy and vibrancy.

The kids tells me I am also as they remember, a bit fatter, they say, but still Auntie Lisa. I can drum better now. When my hands hit the skin I can roll until they turn red, until all my troubles escape me. It is the test of transformation, the test of self-actualization. This is why I have returned. To put my bare hands on the drum, seated by the shore, across from the woman who once, eight years back, taught me to open my heart, and roll.



Woman of Rhythm

 

October 27th, 2009

Cape Coast, Ghana

They call her Shark. “Heya Shark” they scream as we drive through downtown Cape Coast with the windows rolled down, Ghanaian radio blaring from the speakers. “yo, yo, yo” she shouts back with a deep tone, thrusting her hand out the window as she waves to her fans. She turns to me in the passenger seat, “they call me SHARK.” I look at her and laugh. I can see why they call her shark, but I ask her anyway so as not to seem presumptuous. “Sharks represent strength and power, but not everyone wants to get in the water and swim with them,” a smirk appearing across her face.

She wasn’t always a shark. But as Ghana’s only female master drummer to date, her defenses are portrayed as dangerous, powerful, and sleek…shark-like. The first woman in Ghana to attempt to fight the cultural taboo, forbidding women to play the drums, Antoinette Adwoa Kudoto has managed to stake her claim in the drumming realm of Ghana, and is truly a master of the art.

We arrive at the beachfront where a group of fifteen Ghanaian youth await the Sharks arrival. Smiles on their faces, they hold out their hand to hive-five her as they greet her, “Hello Mother, Good Afternoon Ma.” Their drums and sticks, bells and shakers, line the performance space as the children prepare for their daily rehearsal. The break of the ocean can be heard in the distance, slave castles line the waterfront, and the children begin to dance. The shark takes her seat, two men to her right, two men to her left, two young boys on either end, and she begins. Gung-go-do, Gung-go-do. She pounds the animal-skin with force, determination, energy, and passion. The children dance to the beats, their sculpted arms moving to the rhythms, their feet moving in unison as Ghana’s only female master drummer shouts to them, “Left, Right. Yes, good!”

Most of them are street children, abandoned by their families, orphaned, forced to sell on the streets, many lacking education. They come to Antoinette as children, to be trained in the art of traditional drumming and dancing. It becomes their outlet from their daily hardships and as they drum and dance together their energies are directed towards letting go of their emotional distress.

Antoinette’s troupe has become accustomed to her roaring cackle. Monday through Friday, the music from the evening rehearsals echoes throughout Cape Coast town, along with pangs of laughter and song. At the end of each day the children seem to be filled with a glowing light and energy. For those three hours in time they are transported to a place void of pain. They close their eyes and sway to the rhythms, enjoying their youth once again for a small moment in time.

Over the years, Antoinette has managed to affect each and every child in the group. When they are hungry she feeds them, when they are scared she comforts them, when they are sad she wipes their tears. These maternal qualities are only a part of Antoinette’s mission. At the same time she is a woman leading a group of children in a traditionally male-dominated field. She has begun to instill traditions in the youth, traditions she has managed to change within the boundaries of culture. Using her drum to speak to these children, Antoinette is demonstrating to them that they must not give up hope. If she was able to overcome such a harsh traditional taboo, so too can they overcome anything.

Antoinette and I walk across the beach. Her smile stretches from ear to ear as she lets down her defenses. “My life has been very hard as a woman drummer. So I’ve learned to build up a defense.” She seems serious for a moment, and then begins to laugh once again. Despite a life filled with adversity, Antoinette has proven that individuals can create change. Forty years back, when women were forbidden to touch the animal skin of a drum, a five-year-old Antoinette was dreaming of rhythms and tapping her hands on the desktop. Today you can find her performing at funerals, festivals, and every weekday, laughing with her children on the beach.

A shark she is, but underneath that layer of protection remains that same five-year-old Antoinette, who laughs and dances, smiles and sings, because deep down she knows, she has won.

“As people we are all able to be who we want to be and do what we want to do.  We just need to find that drumbeat inside us all that will enable our individual selves to break free.” – Antoinette Adwoa Kudoto, 2001