Symbolic Mapping by K’naan

It’s easy to enjoy the music and wisdom in K’naan’s rap album Troubador, but take a minute and think about some of the imaginative leaps taking place. K’naan was born and raised in Mogadishu, Somalia, and his lyrics are filled with images from his life there. He casts these detailed memories into the molds established by gangster rap. Here are the opening lines to “Somalia”:

I spit it for my block,
It’s an ode, I admit it.
Here the city code is lock and load
Any minute is rock and roll
And you rock and roll,
And feel your soul leavin’.
It’s just the wrong dance
That’ll leave you not breathin’.
I’m not particularly proud
Of this predicament but,
I’m born and bred
In this tenement, I’m sentimental, What?!
Plus it’s only right to represent my hood
And what not.
So I’m about to do it in the music…

Spatially he’s talking about a “block,” a “tenement,” and a “hood.” these are all words that call up for us the world of inner city rap.. even if we know little about the inner city by direct experience, rap music succeeds in making these sites alive in the imagination. K’naan grew up in a place and culture that would be light years from an American urban environment, but he has laid hold of that set of symbolic spatial markers and used them to portray his own world. We could speak of this as a mapping of the spaces of one domain onto those of another.

Clearly K’naan is able to better understand his past if he thinks of it in terms of the American inner city. The lines in the above quotation about the city code as “lock and load” evokes the gang-banging images as parallel to the endemic violence between rivals in Somalia. What might come across as bewildering and senseless to a young man now arrives fully imagined with a code and a route to rise above all that and succeed through music.

This elaborate mapping between two different regions gives the whole album Troubador a surprising feel.. and makes it a real triumph of the imagination. It’s also key to his success, as it allows outsiders to approach his past through a system of values that exists already in their heads. K’naan can actually one-up the baddest of gangsters with tails of his uber-gangsterland, the meanest place in the universe.

In one interview I found on YouTube K’naan discusses where he first came across rap:

K’naan: My father moved to New York when I was very young. He was a cab driver in Harlem. He sent me Erik B and Rakim’s Paid in Full.
questioner: He sent you the whole cassette?
K’naan: Yeah, that’s the first time…
questioner: it changed your life…
K’naan: It’s the first English word I’m hearing… and so it was like revealing a whole universe. At that time I wasn’t thinking we were gonna be in America at all. The war hadn’t happened to the country. You know, no one was going anywhere.

From this it would seem as if the world of rap came to K’naan before he had experienced war and the gangsterization of Somalia. I’d be curious to learn more about the artists and albums that allowed him to understand what was going on in Somalia. I also wonder if the real heavy-lifting, so to speak, came after he himself arrived in the US and had a chance to think through his experiences (he calls his rapping “medication” at one point).

From a broader perspective, this process of mapping is culturally important. That something as conceptually local as gangster rap could come to be an explanatory key for events in Somalia and then other parts of the world, I find amazing. Likewise the music of Bob Marley, with its denunciation of Babylon and Rasta values might seem like music that could only appeal locally in Jamaica, but in fact it has become a similar key for minorities all over the world to understand their position and how they should respond.

My sense of what it means to be a literary scholar as opposed to a historian is rooted in the idea that much of the interesting stuff in our world comes from the processes of the mind by which people evaluate and find meaning in their experiences. That meaning is then expressed in symbol-laden forms (a rap song, a hymn, a novel) and those forms really do change the world as they transform the moods and motivations of a group. But to get at that requires close analysis of texts and their mapping of different domains. Some artists, while skillful, are also boring; they are repeating the standard way of understanding their world. Once in a while an artist like K’naan comes along who does something really creative in meshing and merging different cultural systems.. or expressing one in terms of another.

I wouldn’t want to leave the impression that the mapping has all been one sided either. Gangster rap has given the symbolic backbone to the work of K’naan, but then on the authority of his violent past he is able to introduce some more traditional values. This comes through in many places on Troubador. On “Take a Minute” he comes down for the importance of giving:

Dear Africa, you helped me write this
By showing me to give is priceless

Which might sound trite out of context, but his insistence on this theme is impossible to miss. It comes through most humorously in “15 Minutes Away”.. a song on the unlikely topic of receiving Western Union money transfers. This is central to the experience of an African immigrant as there is always a need to send money back to family and friends. K’naan references his own benefit from money transfers (remember his father in New York City). At the end of “15 Minutes Away” he points out his transformation from a receiver of money transfers to a giver of money transfers:

now I’m sending money to people. Generosity is the key, generosity is the key.

We thus arrive by the end to a central value of Islamic civilization: generosity. Elsewhere on the album he explicitly connects this generosity as a reason to turn away from some of the rewards of success. There won’t be much of the bling-bling in the K’naan.