The annual Lotus World Music Festival here in Bloomington usually inspires a number of Thinking Meat ideas. The way people gather to share each other’s music is one of the very best things about humankind, in my opinion, and the joy, beauty, and meaning that are created and shared each year always move me. It was at Lotus several years ago, long before I thought of this web site, that I first thought that maybe music was one of the ways that people deal with the difficulties of being thinking meat. This year’s festival was held this past weekend, with a great line-up and all kinds of musical pleasure to be had.
Probably the act that made the biggest impression on me was a group called Sidi Goma. the Black Sufis of Gujarat. All I knew going into it was that there would be Sufi trance music and dancing. When the group was introduced, I was enchanted to learn that in their chanting and dance, they are honoring the spirit of their “saint of joy”, Bava Gor. I was raised Catholic so I know of quite a lot of saints, but most of them are patron saints that you call on in some extremity or another (lost objects, lost causes, toothache). St. Francis Assisi, of course, is patron of the animals, and there is a patron saint of music, St. Cecelia. My mother was named for her. But I don’t remember ever hearing about a saint of joy. (Garrison Keillor pegged a certain Catholic mindset quite well when he named the Catholic church in Lake Wobegon “Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility”.) So the idea that these people were going to dance in order to get closer to a saint of joy, and to share that joy with us, was delightful.
This was among the most overtly psychoactive music I’ve ever encountered. It began with a call to prayer and then some slow drumming, and as the music went on the drumming and chanting grew and developed until it filled the stage with sound and rhythm and, indeed, joy. It was utterly absorbing. The dancing started out small, one performer at a time going to center stage and doing some stylized moves around the stage while his comrades kept playing. But toward the end, several of the group came out in face paint and exotic costumes (skirts made of peacock feathers!) and did a much more complicated dance, complete with the smashing of coconuts on a couple of dancers’ heads.
I don’t know that I interpret the sacred in the same way as the Sufis do; I tend to see it as something inherent in ourselves (likely not supernatural) that we can foster or stifle. However you define it, though, this performance definitely involved tapping into something that goes beyond the everyday and transcends the life of any single person. I found this use of music and dance fascinating, and I enjoyed where it took me.
I wanted to learn more about who these people were so I dug around on Google a bit. I learned that the Sidis of India came from East Africa to India around eight centuries ago, some of them as slaves. Sufism is the mystical tradition of Islam, and music and dance are one of the ways that Sufis use to attain a state of contact with the divine. One of the time-honored roles for the African Sufis in India has been that of itinerant performer of sacred dance and music, and it’s that tradition that Sidi Goma comes from. They have been in India so long that they speak Hindi and Gujarati, but some of what they sing is in Swahili. I wasn’t able to find out much about the meaning of some of the gestures in the dances; they seemed to be telling a story but I’m not sure what it was. I also couldn’t find much about Bava Gor, the saint of joy. Maybe the library has something.
This BBC article describes their visit to Zanzibar in 2003, which I saw described elsewhere, in an article that now appears to be defunct, as “a homecoming to a place they had never been to.”
