"Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him"

The Homegoing celebration for my father in law Kpakpo Mensah in Accra, Ghana stretched for four days - long days, with late nights - but what most Americans would recognize as the funeral service proper was held Saturday morning at his mother's ancestral compound in Nima, a shantytown in the city center. It was, in the main, a Christian service, presided over by the Rev. Samuel Q. Anagli, with translations by his daughter Gladys. Between them, they covered three languages: English, Ewe and Twi. Effortless travel between languages is part of the everyday African intelligence.

They were joined by a songleader, Cornelius Anni. I don't believe any of the songs were sung in English - they praised God in the local tongues. I consider these to be beautiful, percussive languages, full of inherent beats and tones.

The singing began in the middle of a prayer, and I'm not sure what came in first, the uplifted melody or the downbeat of the drums. I was thrilled, as always, to hear a drumkit and hand drums applied spontaneously and appropriately as instruments of worship and praise.

There are stereotypes of African and African-American worship, and having participated in many such services, in many different places, I can testify that some of these expectations are fair enough. There can be a passion verging on the ecstatic in these traditions that is much more difficult to find elsewhere. But this was a fairly subdued service, largely somber in mood.

Whenever I hear drums in an African worship service, I remember how desperately the Christian missionaries - and the American slavers - tried to stamp out the drum. Drums and their voices had ancient ties to older faiths that the white strangers and slavers simply did not understand, and this intimidated and terrified them. The drum was targeted by the white man as a voice of the pagan past - and of native insurrection. But the drum survived and has since been integrated completely into Christian worship on the Continent and in Black America. It was always right there in the text, anyway, all over the scripture. Consider Psalms 150, regarded by sacred musicians as the Drummer's Psalm: Praise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high sounding cymbals. Let every thing that hath breath praise the Lord.

Cornelius and Gladys were joined by another woman singer whose named I failed to note. The two women voices enabled a polyphonic, call and response singing familiar to fans of African music from any part of the Continent. Hearing a small chorus of women come in behind a male lead vocal in an African language is, to my ears, one of those most thrilling sounds imaginable.

And those drummers! Lord to God. This summer I was fortunate to attend the Montreal Jazz Festival, the world's largest and most varied, and I heard no better drummer in any of those bands than these two men: Bright (trapset) and Penuel (congas). I saw Ornette Coleman backed by his son Denardo on drums in Montreal, and I am certain if Ornette heard these two guys play he would want to work with them, and would accept Bright as a very able substitute for his own son on drums.

Karley's senior sister did get a little "happy," to use a phrase from African-American worship, a bit possessed by the spirit. Nothing too dramatic, but she was feeling something that needed to be expressed - feeling the need to express. We gave her the space to do that.

I stopped Bright and Penuel on the way out of the service and told them what I had been thinking throughout their performance: that they could play with anybody, anywhere. I meant this most sincerely. Their sense of the beat - where it was, how far it could be pushed, how much it could be assumed, with what fearlessness you could play with it and tease it and explode it - was simply outrageous. As I saw them making their way down the dirt alleys of the shantytown - on their way to yet another sacred gig on a Sunday - I mused on the possibilities for a novel in a pair of African funerary drummers. I am still thinking about it.

From where I was sitting, front and center by the musicians, I also could not help but savor the intense physical beauty of these sisters, which harmonized with their voices and with my concept of God. As I wrote to my wife, soon after we met, "African woman, when I go to God, may my God look like you". Amen.

Bright and Penuel cut out early because Cornelius and Gladys had brought their own drummer, Cornelius' little brother Saint John Anni. This soulful young man also could play some drums, always in the pocket, secure.

2 Samuel: And David and all the house of Israel played before the LORD on all manner of instruments made of fir wood, even on harps, and on psalteries, and on timbrels, and on cornets, and on cymbals.

For all the rhythm and the praise, if you looked around at the mourners, you could see many people who were lost in thought and memory, not really in the mood to celebrate just yet, walking in the company of the dead, not dancing with the living.

Cornelius and company were invited to the reception, which lasted throughout the afternoon into the evening and will enjoy its own set of posts here later. During the meal, I was telling someone that I really came alive when the Christian elements of the ceremony subsided and the older traditions had their say - we are getting to all of that, trust me.

I was saying that respect for the ancestors and the older ways connected much more with me, personally, than praising God through Jesus, which was just not my way (and I have tried it). Cornelius stiffened from two tables over and began to listen closely to me. I then approached him, and we talked for some time. He explained that in addition to the Christian music they perform at services, this group of musicians also does traditional music under the band name Echo and pop music as Melody.

Given that I have thousands of family members in Ghana and always visit for family purposes, I am hesitant to make too many of my own outside friends because it ends up being a little frustrating, always being invited to other opportunities and not being able to accept because of family commitments. But I invited Cornelius and Saint John back to the ancestral compound on Sunday for yet another reception, a smaller, family-only affair, and we began to cement a friendship that I hope will eventually yield some recordings and collaborations.

Knowing my father in law, he would think that was very "fine". Since African traditional religion teaches me I can carry on and even deepen a relationship with someone after they are dead, after their spirit has crossed over to the other side, I feel privileged to tell Kpakpo that his Homegoing celebration brought me some new friends and some new possibilities, and I know what he would say, if he could speak - almost the only thing he ever had to say to me, and always with a bright, open, dancing smile - "That is fine; fine". Not "fine" as in okay, or adequate, mind you; fine as in exquisite, fine as in fantastic.

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Pictures are by me. Click them and they get bigger.

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A fine farewell to a father in law
Family and friends at Kpakpo Mensah's Homegoing

A fine farewell to a father in law

The local undertaker in Accra, Ghana did a magnificent job of decorating the room where my father in law, Kpakpo Mensah, was laid out in state for the wake and funeral. When we talk about "going out in style," the old man went out in style. It also seemed better for him to be laid out in a family home, his mother's former home, an ancestral place, than in a commercial setting designed for that purpose. We viewed his body in the context of other, ongoing lives in the family, rather than other deaths of strangers.

Where I sat happened to have a clear sightline into the viewing room, so I could get a sense of how people interacted with the body. Many people paid their respects quietly, from a distance, but overall there was a more intense and physical response to the sight of the deceased than I can remember from attending funerals in the U.S. There was the sense of a healthy release of grief and resolution of feelings. As often happens at funerals anywhere, however, some of the more vivid displays of grief struck the inner sanctum of the family as surprising; and though this man was widely and deeply loved, one got the sense - as always - that some of the more flagrant mourners were acting at least in part out of personal need and dramatics rather than pure feeling for the man we had lost.

My wife, Karley, spent some time with the body before I arrived at the wake with our daughter. She warned me in advance, "Kpakpo has changed; be prepared for that." The choice of words seemed odd and touching. Of course, he had changed since I had last seen him - he had died. But I knew what she was trying to tell me - that the effects of his illness (pneumonia, which he at first neglected and the hospital at first failed to diagnose) and the long wait after his death until the family could gather together for the funeral had left changes the undertaker's art could not completely overcome or disguise.

And indeed, I may not have recognized him in death, had I not known who I was viewing. Mostly because, in life, he had always seemed so simple and so smiling, and the corpse was elaborately costumed and jewelled, in kente and gold, with a smile that was not quite his, if only because the smile of the living man flashed so fast and erupted into laughter, with dancing eyes, and no magic from the undertaker could make this smile do that again.

It is proper, perhaps, to array our dead like royalty, especially when so many imagine him ascended to a Kingdom, in the company, now, of the King of Kings. My father in law had been a devout believer as well. We exchanged letters when his daughter was pregnant with my daughter, and when he learned the pregnancy was difficult in a letter from me, he said he immediately broke into fervent prayer to God that mother and daughter would be healthy - would be "fine," to use a word he often used with me - and in the end they were.

Looking at his elaborately costumed and bejewelled corpse, I remembered visiting him at his own compound across town, where he would sit in the open air wearing only a pair of shorts, in no finery at all, with no need to perform to me that he had been a decorated soldier and a manager at a gold mine, that he was a wealthy, propertied, and successful man. He knew what he was worth and did not need to prove anything to anyone, certainly not to me, this son in law from another country, from another world. He would just sit with us, comfortably, in the simplest of clothes - almost simply only in his own skin - and smile, with dancing eyes, and say he hoped everything was "fine," and be delighted to hear that, in fact, so many things in our lives were quite "fine".

I will remember that simplicity, more than the finery in which I saw him last.

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All photos by me. Click on them and they get bigger.

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More in this series

Family and friends at Kpakpo Mensah's Homegoing

Family and friends at Kpakpo Mensah's Homegoing

Funerals - or, more optimistically, Homegoing celebrations - are in many respects dedicated to the living and their needs, rather than the dead. So I will begin what will be a long series of posts about the Homegoing of my father-in-law, Kpapko Mensah of Accra, Ghana, with pictures of people who attended the services.

The funeral ceremony proper was held on a Saturday in the compound that had been the home of my father in law's mother; the old man was actually living in another part of the city when he passed, and he owned properties in several places. His ancestral compound where we held the ceremony is in Nima, a shantytown in the heart of Accra, the capital city of Ghana in West Africa.

The closer family members were packed into the courtyard of the compound.

That itself was a large crowd - as large as the entire attendance I have seen at many funerals in the U.S.

People mostly dressed in traditional clothing for the ceremony, though you can see there was a mix of deep tradition and not so much, with some Western clothing sprinkled in.

These two men - Kpakpo's cousin and uncle - traveled from the deep ancestral village of Anaho in the neighboring country of Togo. My wife's family are Mina, an eclectic group of people whose common name derives from the Portuguese word for "mine," as in gold mine. Their home villages are divided between what became Ghana and Togo after European contact and conquest, and subsequent independence.

A small alcove behind where the pastor preached, and immediately before the old man's former bedroom where his body was arranged (magnificently) in state, was occupied by the widow, Mrs. Victoria Tetteh, and her family.

The crowd sprawled outside of the courtyard. These mourners are actually sitting on the property of a neighbor, a Hausa family. The Hausa are a mostly Muslim people from Nigeria who have come to dominate Nima. Nima comes alive at all hours with cries of Muezzin calling people to prayer, though our family is mostly Christian.

People were lined all down the dirt alley separating the family compound from our Hausa neighbors.

This alley would later become an important ceremonial space for one of the traditional rituals that were worked into the mostly Christian Homegoing ceremonies (come back for that later!).

Mourners also crowded into the dirt alley that led out to a paved road and, heading the other way, deeper into the shantytown.

We set out some sun cover on the paved road and piped the sound of the ceremony out there for people to hear. It is a large family, and the Mina in general have a good name for sticking together and uniting for traditional ceremonies.

My father in law was a veteran of the Ghana Army; he retired as a Warrant Officer II after more than 18 years of service, including a couple of years in the colonial service under British rule and some hot times during a coup. The Army represented well at the Homegoing.

This is my wife and her sister, Mary Magdalene Mensah, who did most of the work in arranging a very complicated and ambitious four-day set of ceremonies, and their senior sister. M.M., as we call Mary Magdalene, is a senior official in the Ghana Customs Service and knows how to get things done.

It was deeply meaningful for Karley and me that we could share this experience with our daughter, Leyla Fern. She saw a lot and participated very actively.

I had to pose Leyla Fern with one of the senior Aunties (the Mina word for Auntie is pronounced "NAH-vee") who bears a strong family resemblance to my wife. I definitely see Nahvee's features in Leyla's face.

This is Karley's oldest living brother, Eric, in a photo taken from the last day of ceremonies. Eric is a visual artist and musician - this image suggests something of his fire. The plastic bottle here contains the local moonshine we used in the more traditional aspects of the ceremonies. I have a terrific libation sequence I will post later.

Leyla with Addoley, a sister with whom Karley is particularly close because they grew up together in Lome, Togo. Karley was born in Nima, in Accra, but sent to be raised by an Aunt in Lome when she was a small girl.

Eric's son, our nephew Jesse, bears the same traditional name as my father in law, "Kpakpo," which means "first-born son". The traditional West African religions tend to favor regeneration of spirit, rather than ascendancy to Heaven. These traditions place strong emphasis on a grandson who bears the name of a grandfather who has passed into the spirit world. Jesse is well aware of all that.

M.M.'s daughter, Vida, helped her mother get through the ordeal of arranging the ceremonies and was a big help in childcare back at M.M.'s house in the suburbs, in Lashibi. She also helps to manage the beauty salon M.M. owns as a side business.

This shot of Karley at the cemetery gives a good look at one of her closest cousins, Pafio. Pafio continued the family tradition of military service, but with the U.S. Army. We often stay with his family neart Fort Bragg.

Afi is a cousin with whom we are all close, because she did domestic work for M.M. during one of our extended stays at her house in Lashibi. You also can't forget that West African women still carry their babies around on their backs as they go through the many varied circles of life.

Afi's oldest daughter, Natasha, is very, very seldom this quiet - trust me on that!

Leyla and I met this niece, Gifty, for the first time on this trip. It's a beautiful family, and no one in it more beautiful than Gifty.

Gifty lives in Nima, the gritty shantytown. She has three small children and is only 22 herself - with no husband to help her.

Leyla setting out for the Homegoing with cousins and family friends. It's common for a family to decide on a fabric before a Homegoing and for everyone to have outfits sewn for the occasion - a striking show of unity that could be imitated by other cultures.

Anita is a seamstress in M.M.'s neighborhood in Lashibi who sewed the outfits in our immediate family. She has two girls near Leyla's age, so Anita and I became close on this trip as we arranged for many activities for the girls to do together before and after the Homegoing ceremonies. She is Fante, rather than Mina.

I was proud to wear a shirt sewn from the family fabric, which has a Chief motif. My father in law was not an enstooled Chief, but he was a man of status and a patriarch, and no one would question the family's decision to evoke the imagery of a Chief in celebrating him. Karley took this picture. That is our niece Agnes to my left.

Leyla took this picture of her cousin Agnes. They drew close on this trip. I think Agnes' serious look indicates something about the struggles of life growing up in Nima.

I wanted to end this funerary story in pictures with a gesture of life - Leyla clowning with family the night of the wake.

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Unless otherwise noted, the pictures are by me, Chris King. Click on any picture, and it gets bigger.

Humphrey Bogart and American dope

For long flights, I always have onboard a lengthy biography, since that's one kind of book that will keep me hooked in just about any state of consciousness and exhaustion. For our trip to Ghana over the past two weeks, I toted Bogart by A.M. Sperber and Eric Lax, a big brick of a bio I bought some years ago with a gift card.

I don't know why, exactly, I bought it. I haven't seen many films that feature Humphrey Bogart, nor counted myself among his fans. Probably I suspected his life would intersect with a lot of storylines about 20th century American culture, and most assuredly it does.

After something of a bad boy adolescence, which presumably lent depth to his future screen persona, Bogie started working in Broadway theater during the Great Depression. This passage made for fascinating reading during the current American depression.

"The 1933 season was abysmal for virtually everyone connected with the theater," we are told. "Of the 152 plays produced, 121 were flops. At the end of August only 6 plays were running." Performers groaning over declining audiences in 2009 should know that it could be much worse.

The tanking theater scene made an offer to work in Holywood attractive. After some smaller screen parts, his first "leading role in an attention-getting picture" came in 1937 with Black Legion, an expose of white supremacy in America (they don't write 'em like that anymore).

Here, Bogie's story intersects with the KKK when the Warner Bros. research department had the costume crew use a symbol that turned out to be patented. The white knights sued for copyright infringement on the film's use of "a white cross on a circular red background with a black square in the center" - which is covered by U.S. design patent 68219, filed by the Klan - but the suit was dismissed.

In addition to artists who wonder whether they should stick with their vocation through hard times, Bogie's story offers solace for aging performers. As his biographers point out, he emerged as a star when he was "undersized, rapidly balding and middle-aged" - nobody's flavor of any month. Furthermore, Mary Astor revealed that Bogie was a "wetter" - due to his nerve-damaged upper lip, saliva pooled in one corner of his mouth, making him shy away from onscreen kisses. Hardly an appetizing ingredient for a leading man!

On the other hand, Bogart's career reflects the fact (in my generation, musicians think of it as the Jeff Tweedy Factor) that, whatever your level of talent, it's the publicity machine that ultimately makes stars. Warner Bros. latched consciously onto Bogart's commercial potential after giving up on another star, Paul Muni. Studios need stars to sell pictures, and on the day Warner Bros. severed ties with Muni in 1940, the director of publicity distributed a memo: "I want you to give the utmost attention to the building of Humphrey Bogart to stardom in as quick time as possible". Cha-ching!

At that point, the FBI had been keeping a file on Bogart for four years, for doing such apparently "subversive" things as supporting striking farmworkers in California and newspaper reporters in Seattle. This union solidarity would haunt Bogart's career in the mid-'40s, when McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee targeted Communists in Hollywood.

Bogart had no ties to the Party, but he did join a lobbying trip to Washington on behalf of the 1st Amendment; as the biggest star on the junket, he was covered on the front page of The Daily Worker, the house organ of Communist Party USA. Somewhat shamefully, Bogie caved into pressure from Warner Bros. and his partners in an independent production company he was attempting to start up, and went public with his admission that the lobbying effort was a mistake, that he was a dope - but "an American dope".

This biography is well worth reading simply for the account of the Red Scare in Hollywood and how pressures, external and internal, forced the influential movie industry to make a wide swing to the political right. In a day of Tea Baggers and fake populists protesting the proposed improvement of public health, it reminds us of dangerous fundamental patterns in American democracy.

Speaking of wide sweeps to the political right, I was surprised to read that Ronald Reagan was first announced as the actor for what would become Bogie's best-known role, that of Rick Blaine in Casablanca. It was a trial balloon, rather than an announcement of fact, and one wishes the subsequent political career of Reagan had similarly deflated in its trial balloon phase.

Before Jack L. Warner swung his studio to the right, Warner gave a speech to studio staff in August 1945, based upon a spring junket he had joined to tour the post-war ruins of Europe, including Nazi death camps. In this speech he passionately opposed immediately painting Russia as the next public menace, which he dismissed as "a racket" to keep the people divided.

Warner said, "It's a racket to keep labor, religion, everybody in turmoil, black against white, white against black, Negro, Jew against Catholic, Christian. That's what Hitler was successful in doing." So are a good many American dopes.

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Alibris has some cheap used copies of Bogart as I post this.

Bunuel: Passion, black humor, the call of the abyss

I just returned from two weeks in Ghana, where we buried my wife's father, Kpakpo Mensah. It wasn't convenient (or necessarily desired) for me to be online consistently or for long periods of time, so this blog and the Poetry Scores blog have fallen fallow for the first time since I started them last summer. Now I'll spend the next couple of weeks writing about my experiences in Ghana.

I'll build up to the funeral itself, an amazing four-day affair attended by thousands that taught me a lot about how traditional African ideas of the ancestors and the spirits are being maintained in a now largely Christian and commercial culture. But, first, books.

This was my fourth visit to the West African nation where my wife was born. Each time we have stayed with my wife's sister and spent almost all of our time in the bosom of extended family. They have in common two (sometimes, more) local languages and mostly communicate in those languages, which I can't understand. So, I am content to leave the extended family to sort out its problems in their own languages while I read my way through a small library I have packed for the journey.

First up, on this excursion: My Last Sigh: The Autobiography of Luis Bunuel. This winter I intend to make my second silent feature film, so I wanted to do some reading about some pioneers in the art, including Bunuel, a Spaniard who was intimates with the Andalusian poet Federico Garcia Lorca and the core original Surrealists in Paris.

His autobiography is a romp of bravado creativity and insider takes on a large cast of major cultural fugures from the 20th century.

Bunuel is joined on set by Salvador Dali, who spends "most of his time pouring wax into the eyes of stuffed donkeys".

He helps Pablo Picasso to hang Guernica, though Bunuel couldn't stand the piece itself.

He attempts to join Charles Chaplin in an orgy, but the young women from Pasadena leave before it gets going when they can't agree who gets to start off with Chaplin.

He defeats American boxing legend Jack Johnson in arm wrestling.

He hears from Andre Breton of his visit with Trotsky in Mexico City, where the Surrealist leader was offended when the Russian revolutionary remarked that his dog has "a human look" - "Can you imgine how someone like Trotsky could possibly say such a stupid thing?" Breton sputters.

Woody Allen asks him to play himself in Annie Hall, and resorts to Marshall McCluhan playing himself when Bunuel declines.

What stays closest with me, though, are his observations about Surrealism. Bunuel and the Surrealists would have a bitter falling out (as the early Surrealists also would have with each other), but as an old, dying man, Bunuel remembered the movement and its ideals with enthusiasm and affection.

"It was an aggressive morality based on the complete rejection of all existing values," Bunuel told Jean-Claude Carriere, who assembled the book for him. "We had other criteria: we exalted passion, mystification, black humor, the insult, and the call of the abyss."

Passion, mystification, black humor, the insult, and the call of the abyss ... where do I sign up? Better ask Andrew Torch if the contemporary Surrealist movement can use another warm body!

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Bunuel image from Tomas Sutpen's PhotoBucket.