Tag: appropriation

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Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen

I recently came across a Louis Armstrong performance of the song, “Nobody Knows The Trouble I’ve Seen.”  The song is an African-American spiritual that was popularized by a number of African-American singers, including Armstrong. This song is a fitting anthem for a lot of the gesturing between the Black and Green that we’ve seen in the class. Frederick Douglass doesn’t know the trouble the persecuted Irish Catholics have witnessed. Seamus Heaney didn’t know the trouble African-Americans endured when he wrote about the Black Panthers in 1970. The Commitments and Roddy Doyle did not understand the trouble of African-American Soul singers when they appropriated their songs. These misunderstandings remind me of bell hooks’s quote, “White folks who do not see black pain never really understand the complexity of black pleasure. And it is no wonder that when they attempt to imitate the joy in living which they see as the ‘essence’ of soul and blackness, their cultural productions may have an air of sham and falseness that may titillate and even move white audiences but leave many black folks cold” (Onkey 26).

However, focusing too much on the mistaken gestures threatens under-appreciating the relationship between the Black and the Green. Instead of looking at how Frederick Douglass occasionally looks at Irish Catholics, we can look at Daniel O’Connell, who lobbies for Irish independence alongside an end to slavery. Foreshadowing Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quote from the Birmingham Jail, O’Connell said, “My spirit walks abroad upon sea and land, and wherever there is oppression I hate the oppressor, and wherever the tyrant rears his head I will deal my bolts upon it, and wherever there is sorrow and suffering, there is my spirit to succor and relieve” (Onkey 15). We could also look at how Synge’s “Riders to the Sea” influences Hurston’s “John Redding Goes to the Sea” or how James Weldon Johnson calls on African-Americans to find a form that resembles Synge’s to talk about their experience (Renaissance and Radicalism 484). Rather than focusing on Seamus Heaney, we could discuss Bernadette Devlin giving the keys to New York City to the Black Panthers.

At the end of the day, neither African-Americans nor the Irish can properly understand the trouble the other has seen. Yet, if any two groups can sympathize with similar feelings of oppression, it is the Irish and African-Americans. Though the Irish were never enslaved, they understand leaving home against one’s will. Though African-Americans did not experience the intensity of the hatred between Catholics and Protestants, they understood the use of religion to justify oppression. Though the oppressions of the Black and the Green were neither the same nor equal, these two peoples understood the inability to feel at home at home. This feeling of placeless-ness and not the comparison between two oppressions is the Black and Green Atlantic.

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My Soul Isn’t Your Soul

In The Commitments, Jimmy attempts to stop some band members from smoking weed because “drugs aren’t soul” (Doyle 66). When the band counters that American soul musicians smoked marijuana, Joey the Lips Fagan takes over, saying, “Not true, Brother. Real Soul Brothers say no to the weed. All drugs. Soul says no” (67). Of course, as the band attempts to prove, Joey is wrong; Marvin Gaye, possibly the most famous Soul musician in history, used marijuana extensively, for example. On one hand, this exchange shows Joey’s false understanding of African-American music and musicians, later shown forcefully through his dismissal of jazz. However, more broadly, it shows the inadequacy of transferring black music directly to the Irish context. As bell hooks writes, “White folks who do not see black pain never really understand the complexity of black pleasure. And it is no wonder that when they attempt to imitate the joy in living which they see as the ‘essence’ of soul and blackness, their cultural productions may have an air of sham and falseness that may titillate and even move white audiences but leave many black folks cold” (Onkey 26). Joey’s assertion that real Soul brothers didn’t smoke weed shows an inability to understand black pain of oppression and the memory of slavery. He can recognize the political resistance offered within Soul music but cannot comprehend the pain that creates this resistance. One of the main reasons for drug use in the 1960s was escaping reality yet Joey cannot envision reasons why African-Americans would attempt to escape reality in the 1960s.

Rather than acknowledging that the experiences of the African-Americans when creating Soul music and the Irish when singing it are different, Joey and Jimmy attempt to homogenize the experiences. A heroin epidemic causes this anti-drug stance in Ireland. Drug use was a real problem in the context of Ireland in the 1980s but not so condemned in 1960s Black America. The Irish cannot attempt to properly take from black culture without recognizing the distinct history of African-American oppression. Our class-wide repulsion at the singing of “Chain Gang” is the best example of this homogenizing of experience. The Irish did not experience the chain gang. Yet, like the example of drugs, this discrepancy is glossed over by the band and black experience is mapped directly onto the Irish experience. Through this lens, the Irish performance of Soul music becomes appropriation, forgoing the potential for creating solidarity through similar feelings of oppression and placeless-ness. Without recognizing the context, The Commitments remove the important distinctions between the two experiences of oppression on different sides of the Atlantic which are necessary to avoid appropriation.