My sister Eunice took us to the Museum of the African Diaspora a couple months ago, knowing that I’ve been reading voraciously about Afrofuturism. I was moving slowly through the exhibition so Jellybean doubled back to highlight things ahead. She retrieved me to see the top floor before we had to leave even though I hadn’t yet reached a side room, assuring me I wasn’t missing much. I skimmed the top, pausing to soak in the aura of Gustavo Nazareno’s triptych, “The Secret Matrices of Creation,” depicting orishas from Candomblé as planetary bodies. Then I went back down to do a five-minute scan of the side room and walked into IÉMANJA ! ! !

The room was all about the water goddess, Mami Wata, often conflated with the orisha Iémanja. I had to laugh at the fact that Jellybean pulled me away from the one thing I would have most wanted to see at MoAD. I’m all about mermaids and Iémanja!! 

Two weeks later, I was feeling bummed that I had just missed an ancient mermaid workshop. I was also beginning to think that Iémanja listens to anyone who calls on her—not just those of Yoruba descent—and was listening to Angelique Kidjo sing the goddess’s name at a stoplight, when I looked up and saw the license plate frame ahead of me.

Black mermaids! 

A blessing.

(mer)folk music

While organizing notes for my futurisms binder, I was re-reading that in Dogon (ethnic group in Mali) cosmology, there’s “a race of amphibians akin to mermaids and mermen who visited Earth thousands of years ago” (Ytasha L. Womack). Ocean humanities writer Melody Jue points out that “the arrival of the aliens does not mark a break with indigenous cosmologies and traditions, but rather a continuation of them.” 

Mulling this over, my eyes wandered to the heading I’d typed at the top of the page: merfolk.

Then it clicked. (Mer)folk music would be an accurate description of the music often marketed as j*zz. Maybe another way of saying Black American Music, (mer)folk music is from people of the crossing, folks taken across the Atlantic to start new lives in an other-than-human form, enslaved in America or underwater in a Black Atlantis. 

I’m sure I learned about the Middle Passage in school but it was too horrific to comprehend and reading about it now is shocking. (Mer)folk music or (mer)folk arts not only unscrambles the origin of the art form but embeds the graphic history in its name.

I don’t really play jazz anymore but I still consider myself a musician of the (mer)folk tradition, having come up on songs of folks of the Middle Passage. In a duo performance on Thursday, June 18, at the Burbank Public Library, I’ll be telling stories about merfolk and going home to the moon. I plan to either set a story about Iémanja to music or do a cover of one of the many songs about her. 

I’ve been trying to find an Iémanja song from a Brazilian music compilation CD I grew up listening to but have come up empty-handed. It goes something like this:

If you know what it is, please let me know!

As for my bossa nova project, after discussing some of the ideas with Dre, I realized that the core of the album isn't bossa nova after all. I want to go deeper than the shallow time-traveling concept I started with but don’t know where I’m going. I have gotten as far as landing in the ocean with its merfolk and c(h)oral. I need more time to workshop ideas and to listen, like to the stunning essay “Being Ocean as Praxis” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, which reads like a song. 🪸 

Where will the tide take me?

🔊 Listening to Angelique Kidjo’s Iémanja