What the Funk's Happening?

When I was young I caught a dose of the Funk. I was eight. It was 1970, a year when you could look up at the Moon and say, “there are people up there.” We were living in Ibadan, Nigeria. James Brown was coming to town. In the aftermath of a brutal civil war, Nigerians were ready to get a brand new bag on. All day long Alfred, my Yoruba friend and mentor, played ’Sex Machine’, and danced to and/or sang along with, “Stay on the scene, (get on up), like a sex machine, (get on up)”. In my teens, the Funk would strike again and again, like a persistent boyhood fever. “Ow!”

        The next time I was living in Dar-es-salaam, Tanzania. Aged 13, I’d already had my first puff of marijuana so why not resample the Funk. At the International School of Tanganyika, Kevin, a black American student hit me up with a triple whammy: Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions, Earth, Wind and Fire’s Gratitude, and the Jackson 5’s Dancing Machine. Sure, this was mainstream black music, tamed by white sensitivities, but it had something of the Funk to it, and a whole lotta soul. Kool and the Gang’s ‘Spirit of the Boogie’, mind you, was pure Funk. I felt it in my groin. “Cause when the boogie come to get you / You ain't got nowhere to go“. From then on I couldn’t control my dancing feet. The best discos at the Yacht Club were the ones where the Funk got top billing. I’d hear Van McCoy’s ‘The Hustle’, War’s ‘Low Rider’, George McCrea’s ‘I Get Lifted’, or David Bowie’s ‘Fame’ and get all loose and funky like a bowlegged monkey to the beats. White boys can dance.
        In 1978 the fullness of the Funk finally found its way into my ear. Trapped in Tananarive, the capital of Madagascar, for a week on my way home from boarding school in Fort Dauphin, I hung out at a clubhouse run by the Marines who guarded the US Embassy. It had a bar, a pool table, and a high-end stereo. Marines are dedicated followers of the Funk, I’d soon find out. I heard Parliament, Bootsy Collins, and Funkadelic, whose song 'Maggot Brain' was a trip, perfectly in sync with a marijuana joint. One Marine could twirl a pool cue in time to ‘One Nation Under A Groove’.
        Talking Heads’ Remain In Light, released the year I repatriated, was a turning point in the Funk, and in my own musical journey. My family record collection included Shakara, an album by Fela Kuti that is credited with being an essential influence on Remain in Light. Raised on African polyrhythms, I could relate to that ethno-funk more than I could my home and native land. When I heard to the album’s hit song, ‘Once In A Lifetime’ for the first time, I was surprised, elated and grateful. It was as if Talking Heads had heard the quarrel between my heart and head and turned it into music.

        It begins with a sonic boom, a blow to the solar plexus — drum, bass, and synth fused into one explosive note — then takes off on a fiery trajectory, driven by looping grooves, an odd time signature, and a myriad of instruments, arranged by producer Brian Eno into an exquisite confusion, like an open market in Ibadan.
        ‘Once In A Lifetime’ confronted me. “And you may ask yourself, "Well... how did I get here?” sings David Byrne, who later said the song was about the unconscious: "We operate half-awake or on autopilot and end up, whatever, with a house and family and job and everything else, and we haven't really stopped to ask ourselves, 'How did I get here?'" That certainly was the burning question in my mind at the time. How the funk did I end up feeling like a foreigner in my own country, searching for an identity? Living in the gloomy metropolis of Toronto only intensified that culture shock. But my dissonance could always be soothed by the Funk. 

        Not until it all got rolled into one delicious funk-cicle did I stand up and finally pay full attention to the Funk, tho. The year was 1985. I'd just dropped out of university and was on a year-long westward trek from British Columbia to England (though, at the time, I was oblivious to my journey's end). As before, I hung out at the Marine House. One night a funk-loving Grunt put on Prince’s Purple Rain. Raised on a diet of rock and soul, I immediately recognized the bold and brilliant act of crossover that this new, fresh funk-rock signified, and I danced my ass off to that jam. The Funk would never be the same again.

Cross Culture Odyssey: Memoir of a Repat - Prelude

“Do you suppose that you alone have had this experience? Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.” — Seneca

My passport is my most valued possession. I keep it close to hand, like a sidearm or a manifesto for a revolution that I have sworn to bring about. It is packed with security features: holograms, complex graphics and indecipherable cryptograms. It bears some clues to my identity, not just my identifying features but my actual identity. Imprinted into the pages of that thin book, in faded ink, are all the dates and places that pinpoint my life story. It has been scrutinized, and sometimes confiscated by corrupt border officials. Oddly, I identify more with failed states than I do my own passport country, whose good standing in the international community has eased my passage across the globe. I could not care less about citizenship and nationalism. First and foremost I am an Earthling. Second, I am a global nomad. Freedom of movement across the planet is what I care most about, it is the most precious thing we can have as human beings.

They did not stamp my passport when I arrived. It seems they no longer stamp passports upon reentry. Entry stamps used to be an art form. Travellers in the 1970s were subjected to an array of clever acronyms. Best known is the SHIT stamp: Suspected Hippie In Transit. Scruffy undesirables that trailed across Southeast Asian borders would have ‘SHIT” stamped in their passports. They never stamped it in mine. While I was travelling solo through the region in the mid 1980s, two of my passports were stolen in six weeks. The authorities suspected I was selling them and put me on a watch list. I imagine they still have a dossier with my name on it. In Kampala, after drinking one too many Extra Strong Brew’s, I lost a third passport to stupidity. And on a wild and windy night on the Kenyan coast —while I slept in a four poster bed on the second floor of my friend’s ocean-front villa with the bedroom’s beveled glass doors wide open to the elements, as waves crashed against coral cliffs with a steady, fat beat, and palm fronds danced like ravers in the wind, and all that aural delirium was reverberating through my unconscious mind — a stealthy band of thieves snuck into my bedroom and made off with my MacBook Pro, my portable speaker, and a travel wallet containing US dollars and my passport. 

When I discovered the theft, I called the police. Two hours later, a pot-bellied officer and his hijab-wearing adjutant showed up to launch an investigation. They took my statement and particulars and inspected my room. They quickly deduced that the thieves had climbed up the outside wall of the house and entered from the terrace. Searching the grounds for any clues the robbers may have left behind, we followed a set of footprints to an adjacent beach. There, laying face down on the soft white sand a few feet from the surf, like a drowned migrant, was my passport. For all I knew, the cops were in on the crime and had simply dropped it there while I was not looking. Sykes monkeys might have taken it. Who cares? I had my damn passport back. 

Big boots. Small planet. Once I collected all the expired passports still in my possession and made a spreadsheet from the dates and places. By the age of 21, I had lived in seven countries on three continents and travelled more than 100,000 miles, circling the globe thrice.

Not everyone wants to travel. Some people never leave the town they were born in. Some only travel within countries that resonated with their own beliefs. These days people avoid travelling by air because of terrorism, viruses or climate change, and will travel as far as they can by rail, road, and sea instead. Psychonauts travel in their own minds. Refugees travel through no choice of their own. Migrants choose to travel and arrive just as weary. Stoics like Seneca shunned travel as a distraction from one’s self, fleeing the life one has created. Travel is not for everyone. But like it or not, we all travel. Even if we stay put, we travel. Because as it moves through space, the Earth is always in motion: rotating, wobbling, and orbiting the Sun. Your position on Earth creates a pattern in space, what I call your chrono-spatial trajectory. Even if you stay put, the planet’s motions ensure you will have a chrono-spatial trajectory, one that resembles one of those coiled telephone cords from 30 years ago. Remember when one of those got so tangled it was impossible to restore it to its original shape? That is my chrono-spatial trajectory.

My whole life I have been in orbit, spinning around the planet, unable to return home. I am like a forgotten ape aboard a rusty space capsule launched in the early years of the Rocket Age. I have been falling to Earth ever since. But every time I get close to reentry, a solar flare, or a piece of space junk, or that bone that the man-ape hurls in 2001: A Space Odyssey pushes me back up into orbit again. I may never return to Earth. Growing up in Africa and Asia during the 1960s and 70s turned me into a terminal global nomad. They say variety is the spice of life, but I have yet to find a recipe that palatably blends the disparate cultural ingredients to which I have been exposed. I am my own melting pot. And I have a backstage pass to the world.

Like my father, I am not a joiner. My allegiances are few, except to the causes of rationality, enlightenment, and truth. I have lived all over the world. Those experiences have given me rare insight into the workings of our planet. I cannot be swayed by the knee-jerk polemics of myopic people who see less than I do. I am not into alternative lifestyles. Green tea, yoga, and veganism are not going to fix my life. I am. I do not need help. I eat healthily, make ethical consumer choices, and try to keep my carbon footprint small. Globetrotting is incompatible with finicky dietary needs. Nothing offends a host like turning your nose up at their fare. Otherwise, I make my own decisions and do not allow those who I do not love to interfere.

I do not believe the planet needs me. But I need the planet, like a junky needs smack. As someone who has dropped out of three universities, lived on four continents, and had five careers, I do not fit any social profile. I once believed there would be an end to this nomadic life, that I would one day repatriate to my home and native land and be sedentarily content. Usually I am quick to adapt to a new surrounding and can fit in anywhere. So why not Canada? 

It may sound ungracious of me to bellyache about an upbringing as rich, diverse and exotic as mine. It shaped my worldview, made me a world citizen. Sure, I bounced from school to school but I still got an exceptional education. And if I could go back in time, I would not change a bit of it. OK, maybe a bit. Knowing what I know today, I might try to harbour less grief, not rebel when it serves no purpose, and stay in touch with my passport country, maintain better ties with my kin. Being a global nomad, a Cross Culture Kid, a hidden immigrant is a double-edged sword. Nothing good comes without a price. Mine is homelessness. 

This book is about my struggles with repatriation, with making a home in my homeland. It is a memoir about the uneasy transition I have faced, again and again, in returning to my passport country, and the reasons why global nomads find it so damn hard to repatriate. In transitioning to repat, after a lifetime as expat, I confront some of my poor choices, understand the reasons for them, and try to discover who I really am. My hope is that, as I begin to take some agency in my life, I will get over myself, regain my integrity and become a better man.

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