Africa, Maine
We travel to Portland, Maine, and find a local version of the conversation around immigration and asylum-seeking. Listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
Our friend Lydia Moland, of Colby College, brought to our attention the news of busloads of new asylum-seeking arrivals from the Congo and Angola in Portland, Maine. Hundreds of people had arrived in Maine two weeks ago after an almost unimaginable journey across an ocean and through jungles. Last weekend Lydia and more than a thousand volunteers descended on the Portland Expo Center, home of the Red Claws, the Celtics farm team, to help with cooking, translating, transporting. She urged us to come up explore this story, so we went to Portland—by car, by train, by bus.
What we found was a city proudly angled forward, looking eagerly into the future. It turns out that Portland has a history of welcoming people from all over the world, for decade after decade.
It’s hard not to be impressed by the city of Portland, Maine, a small city famous for its restaurant scene. It’s a loveable place. There’s a minor-league baseball team, a bustling port, and a refreshingly hopeful attitude.
There were so many people who are getting things done locally, people like Mufalo Chitam, executive director of the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, who spoke to us at the Portland Expo building, where the recent asylum-seekers are living for the moment. She described how the local situation was moving along in ways missed by the national-level conversation.
Our angle on the story was the army of volunteers, politicians, activists, citizens, and cultural networks much closer to the scene and much more effective than the Federal government. This is the infrastructure forming a counter-narrative to the immigration story you’ll find in headlines, to the fear on Fox News. As Mufalo Chitham told us: the media is coming to Portland looking for a story that’s not there. They don’t see what they hear.
We learned a lot making this episode—about a city, about the global journeys of people who make up that city, about the experience of asylum-seeking that we too often hear about in general terms only. In Portland, we found something about the way life should be. Indeed.
Read: Tram 83
Fiston Mwanza Mujila is writer from the Congo, born in 1981; his novel Tram 83, which has been translated into English, captures the trials of those beset by neocolonial forces in Africa. Mujila says, in an interview at Africa is a Country:
It is impossible to write about the Congo. It is impossible because it is a country that still doesn’t exist. It does not exist as a place of rights, as a normal state. It is also impossible to write about the violence in the Congo and its millions of victims. The only way you can write about this is by embracing extremes, exuberance, and poetry. And my novel is like a long poem.
I wanted Tram to be able to represent a form of exploitation and neocolonialism that happens throughout Africa, not just in the Congo.
The novel opens with Mujila conveying a scene emblematic of this vexed experience:
The Northern Station was going to the dogs. It was essentially an unfinished metal structure, gutted by artillery, train tracks, and locomotives that called to mind the railroad built by Stanley, cassava fields, cut-rate hotels, greasy spoons, bordellos, Pentecostal churches, bakeries, and noise engineered by men of all generations and nationalities combined. It was the only place on earth you could hang yourself, defecate, blaspheme, fall into infatuation, and thieve without regard to prying eyes.
Listen: Music from Angola and the Congo
We heard some terrific music this week from Angola and the Congo—check out Teta Lando and Sam Mangwana. You can also listen to Angolan music over at the BBC, and here’s Joshua Surtees in the Guardian on Franco Luambo and Congolese music:
Back catalogues of outstanding Congolese music are largely ignored in the UK, yet few countries have produced such a rich seam of consistently innovative and socially meaningful popular music. From roughly 1960–1990, artists such as Franco and his band TPOK Jazz, Tabu Ley Rochereau and Zaiko Langa Langa were the biggest musical acts in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. In terms of musicianship, Franco’s music is up there with the Beatles, yet if you ask 99% of people in Europe or America, they won’t have heard of him.
Next Week: Adventures in D Flat with Matt Aucoin
We’ll air Chris’ conversation with avant garde composer Matt Aucoin from WBUR’s City Space this spring.
We’re Reading:
We’ll be remembering and forgetting with Lewis Hyde soon.
And…
Some of us are racing to finish Middlemarch before our show in a couple weeks. Catch up!
Rolling the Dice
We’re headed to Encore next week, Boston’s brand new casino. Send us your lucky numbahs! Adam’s set up a conversation with the novelist Joshua Cohen, too. Cohen’s piece in n + 1 a couple of years ago was killer: The Last Last Summer: Donald Trump and the Fall of Atlantic City.
This Week’s Ephemeral Library:
Read about an era of Congolese music. Nathan Heller’s summer podcast list. Jia Tolentino on E. Jean Carroll. Nick Paumgarten on the cult of the Masters. Anthony Lane on “Toy Story 4.” Alphabet releases the master plan for Sidewalk, Toronto’s smart city.
That’s all for this week! Tweet, share, subscribe and stay in touch.
The OS border patrol
