Ghana!

Forewarning: excuse the negativity...just haven't gotten over my high school ineptitude with social studies:

Passing down history is an art that seems to be estranged from our western culture. In many of the countries we have visited, thousands of years of history are celebrated through songs and dance, artwork, architecture, festivals and traditional rituals. The Japanese light incense to honor thousands of generations of ancestors every time they walk into a temple. The Chinese spend decades mastering ancient techniques of calligraphy before creating their own styles. The Vietnamese have celebrated Tet for hundreds of years with one full week of family time and rituals, including burning bills of Dong so their ancestors can have money in the afterlife. Every tradition has a meaning behind it. All we have is thanksgiving and July 4th, when we fill ourselves with turkey and watch football, and light fireworks to celebrate a document signed three short centuries ago.

I was enamored by my field lab in Ghana. For Global Music, our professor took us to a market where we watched local artisans build large drums by carving designs and traditional symbols into their wooden sides, fasten antelope and cow hyde over the top surfaces and scrape them to get to a thin, pure layer on top of the drum- just like their ancestors have been doing since forever. In the afternoon we got to watch about a dozen Ghanaian drummers perform for us for an hour. They played twenty minutes songs with various rhythms matched with loud chants and elaborate dances that were choreographed by the oldest of ancestors and have continued ever since. But here’s where I gained a new perspective on ancestral celebration: Between performances our Ghanaian host spoke to us about the chants and meanings behind the dances and discussed the techniques of drumming. He explained that these rhythms, chants and dances are not performed to celebrate traditions of ancestors, but rather the exact opposite. The reason their ancestors created these performances was so that their relatives in future generations can transcend time and share a common experience. It’s like pretending that you and your hundredth-great grandmother share a favorite restaurant. It wasn’t about a connection through honor, it was about a connection through experience. Let me explain it this way: the people that have done Semester at Sea can share a bond even without being on the same voyage. The common experience is enough to bring people together, to feel closer to knowing who each other is as a person.

It’s crazy to me that in a country so young, I feel way more distant from the colonial experiences of the beginning of our culture, when there are countries like Ghana, whose culture shares experiences with ancestors from thousands of years ago. The problem is, there is a fundamental distinction between how we conceptualize the “past” compared with other cultures around the world, and it has to do with the difference between roots and beginnings. Other countries learn of the past as where they came from, or their culture. We, on the other hand, learn of America’s past as history, as human affairs that occurred long ago and are distant from us. We don’t practice our history like they do, we just celebrate it. We learn about the American Revolution and the rest of the wars, Paul Revere and Abraham Lincoln, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights movement and everything in between. The word “history” has become such an alienating word that constructs a great gap between what is present from everything that happened before the day I was born. Everything before the turn of the century is taught to show the “different times” they were.

This had me thinking pretty hard about what makes us so different. Besides how fresh off the press we are compared with practically every other nation, and our lack of a central cultural, religious or philosophical system, we have such a drive to advance. One of my textbooks quotes Frances Fitzgerald, a journalist, who once said, “Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing at the cutting edge it as representatives for all mankind.” She’s so right. America is all about trends that come in and out, and being the first one to create them or join them. It’s always about what is new. We have blinders on the road ahead, using the past only as a launchpad into the linear path of development and progress that doesn’t look back, leaving our roots in the dust, rather than the root of our growth that is still very much attached. You wont see anyone dressed in bellbottoms jeans or a leather fringe vest until society deems it as “cool” again. Even technology- whoever still uses floppy disks should really get with the program. That’s just how our culture is designed. We develop things to drive culture, unlike Indians who wear sarees to be part of it, or Ghanaians who drum to experience it.

Anyway, the point of this post wasn’t to be totally cynical which it totally is…rather it’s a great explanation to why I’ve always been so bad with history. I learn best when things either interest me, or when they’re relatable; and throughout grade school, history was always been presented to me in neither interesting nor relatable ways. While it’s of course important to learn about and appreciate national and political events that have gotten our country to the freedom and prosperity we have, we more often focus on the barren facts rather than the experiences. And it’s not totally our fault- our culture is like Times Square compared to Greenwich Village. It’s just too new, too overthought, too overwhelmed with anxious people running around everywhere, instead of the mellow, boho-chic neighborhood with hipsters and artists. The next hundred years will be interesting to see how far our culture will go, and where it will end up.