FOR THE BLUES

16.10.04

Yesterday I went to listen to the Blues again. Kostas and I were looking for a warm and cozy place with couches to get a better sense of the approaching winter. We were looking for a place with fitted carpets and couches where we would go to enjoy our drink, listening to lounge music. We didn’t find a place like that and thus we ended up at Panormou’s well-known bar. There were neither couches nor pillows but the warmth of a guitar and a husky voice.

You can’t imagine how happy I am when I listen to the Blues. Some times I wish I was born black – really black; and have that husky voice and an old story to defend, for example the setting free of my ancestors from their slavery and of my brothers from the fields that were like camps. I’d like to have just a guitar and cross the Mississipi, hoping to find a job somewhere in Chicago in the beginning of the 1900s, on the condition that I would have no disability. It’s too much being both a black man and a disabled one. It’s not something you should be ashamed of. It’s something that brings you at the forefront of double discrimination, especially when you refer to old times.

I don’t love the Blues just because the defend freedom or difference. I love them for their religious content as well. I get the impression that these songs help me discover the meaning of being religious as well as of faith, not necessarily the meaning of God. We’re dealing with faith to something higher, the kind of faith that makes the burden of your pain equal with carrying a treasure and makes you richer in strength, resilience and knowledge. There’s no better way to learn those lessons than listening to the black people sing for the simple joys of life or for hope.

The scenery is old and this is important. That’s where the opinions of people who struggled against injustice and racism are presented, way before they created their own ghettos. Things have changed today. People don’t just sing for their traditions or for what they’ve been taught from their families. They sing about hate, war and death. They hide behind gangs and this is how they become outcast citizens. Their wealth is not counted according to their cultural traditions but on the basis of gold or money.

That’s why I love those times, even if I know next to nothing about what was happening back then. At the same time, I suspect that nothing has actually changed. I figure out that the sense of living in a ghetto existed always. Noone can manage to overcome insecurities, even when music is the gun, even if one knows how to sing the Blues. I’m confused. I don’t know what I’m trying to prove. I take a sip from my drink and let out a husky voice. What I’m listening to are just great songs. Why do they have to be something more than what they are? Life in itself is fabulous, especially when you are listening to the Blues. ‘Oh Yeahhhhh!!!’.