Griots song

Look and Listen
http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/multimed/kedo.wav

Play the link and you will hear music.If I am to tell stories and make history and songs of my people and dreaming then I will don the griots coat. This postcard came into my possession about 20 years ago, and without fail I look at it every year- I love the fabulous cloak with its rough stitches and straps and patches, the amulets for spells and memories and prayers. The griots task is to memorise the stories of his people, to tell their history, to sing their history, it is a fluid and living way of connecting people with their past both in the sense of lived history but also ancestry.It is not a linear history of the books or television programs – it explores memories and connections and instills them into the conscious mind of the present.

So now I begin- in the shifting sands of my subconscious I can see jewelerry embedded in cocagnes – the solid balls of woad that was the industry of my ancestors. The cocagnes have a smell of ammonia caused by the urine used to extract the dye from the woad plant .

On a trip not so long ago to the Haut Garonne I walked into a village market, and people talked to me in a friendly amiable way, though I had never been there before- I had the strange sensation that these people knew me, but I had never been there before. I looked more closely, into the faces of the people and to my surprise saw the faces and features of my family. I had the strange sensation that here indeed lay the roots of my ancestry. The people were small and wiry, as my great grandparents were , their faces with curious dark eyes and full heads of hair.

I started to look at my surroundings with different eyes- was this where the story began- in these mountains with its abbeys and soaring peaks?

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