Amal Was Jas!

AMAL WAS JAS! 'Amal is jas!', says the auntie to me as yet another group of colourful, swirling, swaying, costumed celebrants chase the beat climbing up into the sky around the City Hall, climaxing in an explosion of clashing cymbals, heralding horns, dueling drums, gleeful guitars, wicked whistles and spirited singing, and crashing down in sprays of suffused, saturated delight onto the spectators sandwiched behind the barriers that separate troupe and team from family, friend and fan breaking into spontaneous bursts of singing and dancing fired by the energy and passion of the men, women and children abandoning reserve and restraint as they glide, gyrate and gesticulate, quickening the pulse, heightening the vibration and releasing the rhythm of the City that otherwise seem to lurk and languish obscured and obfusticated by a plethora of political point-scoring, socio-economic straight-jackets and callous conditioning, soaking all in this beating of the heart, this soaring of the spirit, this remembering the way home. 'Amal! Amal is jas!', she repeats again, her tooth-dotted smile leaping into my knowing, her leathery wrinkles beaming her joy into my being, the sparkle in her eyes open windows to another landscape where klops and costume and ghoema means so much more than thesis and theory, her bright doekie a sky covering a world of memory and forgetting, the question marks dancing on her eye-brows demanding from me an assumed affirmation that indeed this tsunami of colour, sound and feeling answers a need, a longing, a calling that so often remains unanswered. The surging emotions she fans in me echoed by the other humans at play on this ritual stage as the beat seams to intensify almost to a frenzy and everywhere smiling, laughing, entranced faces beam their pleasure at everyone and no-one in particular, young and old caught up in the channelling of something other, ancient and also new, something that circulates in the air, spikes the water, sediments the earth. That bolsters the bones, and laces the blood. 'Amal is jas!', she laughs a last time before dancing away, immediately lost in the bright and the beautiful. I consider for a moment her choice of expression and its capacity for offending those who don't get it, and then I realize that it's not for them - that her words aren't meant as a description - that she wasn't trying to impress on anyone what this event was, but rather what it meant to her. She was mouthing her appreciation, speaking her experience, living her truth. And that if I had to articulate what this flocking meant to me, if I had to measure what this gathering stirred and loosened inside me, if I had to critique, comment or compliment on this communing, I was going to have a hard time finding a phrase that sums it up better than 'Amal was jas!' Amal was jas!!!

02. 01.2016