Brian Chikwava

Following our ‘Music and Memory’ event, part of the launch of Granta 111: Going Back, we have been asking writers to choose five songs or pieces of music which are important to them, and which bring back particularly salient memories.

Brian Chikwava

1. Billy Holiday: ‘Don’t talk about my when I’m gone’

Pre-figuring how one is remembered maybe an obsession of the powerful that even had Chinese Tang emperors commissioning their own obituaries, but for the ordinary person, fretting about how one is remembered can start as early as the end of a relationship with a lover … if you can’t say anything real nice/Just don’t talk at all … is an injunction that the heart-broken rarely obey, though few would not feel compelled to make an exception for the persona that Billy Holliday invokes here.

2. Compay Segundo/Buena Vista Social Club: ‘¿Y Tú Qué Has Hecho?’

To be forgotten by the person who left the deepest scar on one’s heart is a kind of death that few would happily face. Long after the years have tumbled by, often come the wistful moments when one mulls over the possibility of complete erasure from memory. That is usually when that time-honoured question asserts itself: does she/he still remember me? In this charming song a tree that drops a flower to a girl who carved out a name on its trunk wonders what she did with its flower. Few, man or plant, can match Compay Segundo’s beautifully plaintive baritones.

3. The Drive ‘Way Back Fifties’

Just as song preserves shared memory it is also offers a way of revisiting or reimagining the past. The 50s and 60s, the golden years of township jazz in Southern Africa, are redefined in this sprawling 70s yearn that in other versions stretches over 13 minutes. While the earlier township jazz numbers were barely longer than three minutes, The Drive sometimes went for the lengthy sun-dappled tune that nurtures entrancement, nostalgia and a redemptive reconnection with the past.

4. Bhundu Boys: ‘Tsvimbo dzemoto’

Civil conflict is not the easiest of times to find headspace for reflection, but the after years often usher in a period of stock taking, remembering the way things were and grieving for ways of life lost in a blaze gunfire. Such rumination can stir painful memories, but in this bubbly tune the Bhundu Boys found a way that enabled people to dance the pain out of their minds though not the memories. Remarkable emotional detox for hearts that can still dance.

5. The Temptations: ‘Papa was a rolling stone’

To be a complete human being may not necessarily be the same as filling up the gaps in one’s knowledge of family’s shared memory, yet it can be hard not to feel that way. While its common to live with that ache for completeness there are few people who more keenly feel such sense of incompleteness than one who seeks to know about a biological parent they never met. If your dad was a debt-dealing, store front preacher and leech, stealing in the name of the Lord and it’s impossible to untangle fact from fiction, one at least has the fortune of feeling proud of their colourful pedigree.

Brian Chikwava’s essay ‘The Fig Tree and the Wasp’, which looked at the iskokotsha dance and sexual liberation in 1970s Zimbabwe, was published in Granta 110: Sex, in print and online.