Don’t Be Afraid to Be the Remix
Lessons in Diasporic Culture Making from Black American Musicians
Diving back into your ancestral culture when you’re a diasporic person separated from the home culture (sometimes by generations) can bring up a lot of feelings.
A. Lot. Of. Feelings.
One common one that I have dealt with, especially as a young adult, was imposter syndrome. I didn’t start out that way, although I think plenty of diasporic folks do. In my case, it came from a decade in a bilingual, international city where others from across cultural backgrounds inside and outside of the States were happy to let me know that I was a “fake Italian.”
Were you born there? Can you speak the language? How much time have you spent there? Do you know about xyz tradition? Well, then what makes you a real Italian?
Oh, you mean Italian-American … emphasizing the “American” as if I had not heard the phrase before.
Sometimes, people didn’t say it to me directly. They implied it through their opinions about my food. Over the last couple of decades, more than a few chefs, Italophiles, and Italian tour guides have taught people that my ancestral food is not Italian food. At best, they will connect it to the homeland dismissively as “the food of 100 years ago.”
It’s “Italian-American” food, they said, and continue to say, to me. Which is true… we and our food are diasporic, hyphenated culture.
What is untrue is the emphasis on separation.
And the presumed outside authority over Italian-American narratives, connections and identities.
In these sorts of experiences of mine, there has been a subtext that insists some outside, greater-world forza (force) is able to perceive what I culturally am and am not with more accuracy than I am able to achieve.
To this forza, it seems critical that my relationship to my homeland is understood in terms of its separation over its connection. Its distance over its closeness. Me, my food and my community are firmly to be understood as derivative.
A quaint, funny niche food by a quaint, funny niche people.
Not to be taken seriously. Not to be considered a valid branch of “real” Italian representation. Not containing the magic or the soul of the homeland. At least, not anymore.
Without the 3-D, material proof demanded of me in order to validate my Italian soul, the outer world was to consider my claim to my identity void.
And so was I.
Absorbing these narratives was one of the greatest heartbreaks of my personal life. It has taken decades to situate myself inside the truth that if they can’t see the Italian soul in me or my food — really, truly — it’s their loss.
This return to cultural confidence is not something 28-year-old, heartbroken me thought would be possible again. Getting to this point happened with a lot of grieving and a lot of learning from others.
Like a good chunk of my general life lessons, one of the most essential teachings around this that I’ve been given came from Black American musicians. In community college, I had a chance to study a bit of Jazz History, where I learned about call-and-response.
In human communication, it is “the form of interaction between a speaker and an audience in which the speaker’s statements (“calls”) are punctuated by responses from the listeners.”
In music, it is roughly the same thing. Just replace “speaker” with “singer” or “musician”. The response can come from an audience, another singer or other musicians.
If it’s a lucky day, though, Serendipity will show up and play along in the form of something like a cat running across the stage at the very moment of a response. This, of course, sends everyone — the singers, the musicians, and the audience — into a burst of laughter.
You don’t need to take from me, a humble student. Here’s an demo on call-and-response from a couple of the experts:
Call-and-response is found in cultures around the world.
Although I am unsure if it is ubiquitous, I cannot help but wonder if the technique is so intimately linked to our bio-social wiring that it may arise naturally with the package of being human.
We are not even the only species that uses it:
Circling back to Jazz, call-and-response is particularly strong, distinct, cherished, and utilized in Black American music. Tracing your finger backwards in time from Jazz, you will find that it is linked to the Blues…
where it is used and linked back to the ingenious survival strategies in Work Songs and Black spiritual worship…
where it is used and linked back across the Atlantic to West African cultures that use the technique in traditional musical practices and, in some places, as part of democratic community processes.
The point of me reciting the facts I’ve learned is this:
Call-and-response isn’t just in Jazz. Jazz is a call and a response in and of itself.
Tracing one’s finger forward in time from the creation of Jazz, you will see call-and-response move through the Black American musicians who created R’n’B, Rock-’n-Roll, Funk, and Hip-Hop.
If (when) there is some newer genre of Black American music I don’t know about, I can still almost completely guarantee you will find call-and-response there too.
Each distinct genre contains elements and essentials of older musical incarnations brought forward in time by newer generations of Black American musicians. Each of those generations has employed call-and-response both as a technique inside of individual compositions and as a way of developing the new genre itself.
Like a time traveler sliding back and forth through spacetime, call-and-response goes through Black American music and musicians. Each genre expressing its unique beauty, each generation of musicians expressing their unique genius.
Do we doubt the cultural soul in these creators and creations?
Not for a second.
There are many lessons that can be gained from understanding this. Among them was one I needed in order to boot cultural imposter syndrome:
Don’t be afraid to be the remix.
What you do with your ancestral culture — how you express it, practice it, honor it, remember it, engage it — may not meet an outsider’s standards. It is, however, valid and beautiful anyway because it contains the most essential element of living culture and culture-making:
An honest expression of cultural soul. For many of us that means an honest expression of diasporic cultural soul.
Diasporic cultural soul contains not only where that soul comes from, but also where it has journeyed, what it is navigating, and where it is heading.
Don’t be afraid to be the remix. It feels good to say it to yourself.
Being an Italian-American remix in my life looks like:
- Making my father’s Sicilian Fish Stew with Yuca. The yuca, or cassava as its known in many places in its native African range, is as a tip of the hat to personal Cuban connections. Nudging the ingredients around with a classic wooden spoon, I find myself reflecting on Africans in Italy today, the injustices they face, and inklings of how a peaceful future culture in my homeland may show up in the food.
- Pondering Persephone’s Return to the Underground from an Italo-Floridian viewpoint. In the subtropical ecosystems of the Seminole-Miccosukee Peninsula, the end of summer does not set off the same enviro-cultural queues as more Northern places. Writing around this mixes a bit of Indigenous land learning with solarpunk to imagine how Euro-diasporic cultural tales may harmoniously adapt and reflect the places they now live in.
- Fiddling with the half-dozen pizzica dance steps I’ve learned over a Tribe Called Quest. Because that’s what 14-year me would have done if I had been handed (had not been robbed of) a more intact culture.
- Contemplating the joy and the relationships that have formed the Ciabatta Bagel
This whole writing endeavor is a cultural remix. A response based on Italic & Sicilian elements that I have enough cultural feeling and familiarity with to form a solid-enough creative foundation.
This is my response to a call that was a response to a call that was a response to a call that goes across an ocean and a sea. All the way back to the Sicilian Stepping Stone & the Italic Land Bridge.
Don’t be afraid to be the remix. Sometimes I just like to say it to myself.
If you are unsure where to start, here’s some questions that may help open up possibilities:
- What elements of your ancestral or inherited culture(s) do you already familiarity with? Are there any you are uncovering? These elements can be familial, collective, personal, ancient, modern, from the homeland, out of the diasporic experience, connected to the place you live, etc.
- What cultural elements do you already love? What single bit of cultural thread do you have on hand? What elements do you feel nudged towards? Which ones feel accessible, authentic, in your wheelhouse?
- Where can that piece (those pieces) of your culture be expressed in your life today? For instance, is there a story that could be shared with family or to friends? A poem that could be played with? A pattern that could be stitched? A game that could played? A single saying that could practiced in the old tongue or translated into your current one? Is there a way of fishing? Or running the mountains? Of carving wood? Growing plants? Playing sports? Or saying goodbye to guests as they leave your home?
- What elements of your everyday life today could you incorporate that/those elements into? What feels easy to incorporate? Or worth the effort?
- Who could you get together with to make something, speak something, do something with these beloved elements?
If you are already in this process,
- What is it that you are creating? How do you nurture it? How can it grow?
- How might it be used in service of a greater good like healing, health, peacemaking, or community-building?
- With whom could you share it? How will you pass it on?
The possibilities are endless. Say to yourself one time and remember who we learned it from. Don’t be afraid to be the remix.
There is a call out there waiting for your response.
