Neo Myanga’s ‘Making Grace Amazing’ is one of the online offerings at this year’s National Arts Festival in Makhanda.
… the semiotics of the slave ship continue: from the forced movements of the enslaved to the forced movements of the migrant and the refugee, to the regulation of Black people in North American streets and neighbourhoods, to those ongoing crossings of and drownings in the Mediterranean Sea, to the brutal colonial reimaginings of the slave ship and the ark; to the reappearances of the slave ship in everyday life in the form of the prison, the camp and the school.
Within the narrative of colonialism, there exist many lives that are rendered invisible and, furthermore, lives that are unheard — or rather, lives whose reverberations and echoes are felt only by those paying attention. Writerspeaks of rumours of a universal hum, an imperceptible vibration producing a sound 10 000 times lower than can be registered by the human ear. Perhaps this barely noted hum is the echo of enslaved peoples; their cries of sorrow and of joy through song.
But of course, its past is fraught. It is marred, sullied and implicated in the ugly history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The hymn dates back to 1779, when it was written by poet and clergyman John Newton; 1779 ― the same year in support of the American Revolutionary War, which sought to overthrow British rule across North America.
Tough to believe that a song of comfort and consolation was itself conceived by a slaver in the slave trade. But then again, if ever there was a song for absolution and salvation it would be this one: “I once was lost, but now am found/ Was blind, but now I see.”, soprano Tina Mene and multidisciplinary troupe Legítima Defesa, functions as an unflinching inquiry into America’s most beloved hymn.
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