The Language You Cry In

  A story of ancestors...thanks to Facebook's Suppressed Histories

The Language You Cry In

This amazing 1998 documentary shows how the Gullah descendants of Mende people from Sierra Leone preserved an old mourning song in the Georgia Sea Islands, in their ancestral language, though they no longer understood the words or the meaning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0OirdYGdlY...

In Harris Neck, in Georgia's coastal islands, in the 1930s, Lorenzo D. Turner recorded a 50-year-old woman singing. Her song preserved the longest known text in an African language in the North American diaspora. It was later recognized as Mende by a grad student from Sierra Leone, on the basis of a single word, kambei, which had funerary significance, and he published a translation of the song.

The singer's grandmother had been born into slavery, a descendant of many West Africans trafficked to Georgia because of their expertise in rice cultivation. Slave traders paid a higher price for people with this skill, shipping captives from the rice-growing countries from Senegambia to Sierra Leone and Liberia. More than 45% of those trafficked to Savannah were taken from Sierra Leone, out of Bunce Island which was used as a holding area prior to the Middle Passage. The channels these Mende people dug for rice plantations still remain in Georgia.

A group of Gullahs returned to Sierra Leone, and performed this melody for their African hosts. They discovered that one word, tombei, could be traced to a specific place. Anthropologists took recordings of the song around that region, and at first people recognized one or two words, but not the song. The researchers finally gave up, disappointed. Later, Cynthia Schmidt decided to try one more place, just outside the boundaries of the area they had searched in. To her amazement, people began to sing the song, which included the words “Everybody come together, the grave is restless, the grave is not yet at peace.” (starting around 15:25 in the video at link)

This was a song that Mende women sang at burials, in a funerary rites called Tenjami, Cross the Water. Bendu Jabati describes how her grandmother taught her how to perform the mourning rites, kneeling and making gestures to the ground with outstretched hands. (And it seems that the grandmother foresaw that her descendant would be the one to preserve this knowledge, and the connection that it would make to distant kin.)

The ceremony began with a call to the ancestors to accept the dead person. The women went in procession, their faces painted with white clay, dancing while bent over. They then cooked at the grave side (three days after a woman’s death, and four days after a man’s). They performed ritual crying and lamentation at the grave, and bid farewell with rice mixed with palm oil and meat. The ceremony ended when the pot was upturned over the grave, the final farewell.

The ceremony lapsed after World War II, according to the narrator, when soldiers brought back Islam and Christianity; but this one woman Bendu Jabati had been charged to remember by her grandmother, and she kept the knowledge and the song alive.

Back in the Georgia Sea Islands, Amelia Dawley taught this song to her daughter. Living in a remote area, without TV or radio, she was able to preserve it. (Hear her sing it around 26:00 in the video) The anthropologists visit and play the recording of her grandmother, telling her of the historical importance of her family legacy, in its connection to African roots.

Thanks to Hannah Ekberg for this link.

Source: Suppressed Histories Archives Facebook page