Eshu is the orisha of the crossroads. When the Yoruba scattered across the water, Eshu traveled in the hold. He learned new languages. He learned to be the Catholic saint in masks.
Fanon asks: what happens when Eshu arrives and the land already has guardians? What happens when slaves meet indigenous people, displaced people meet those who never left, ancestors of the water meet ancestors of the mountain?
The answer is not harmony. The answer is not a multicultural festival. The answer is the very act of solidarity in the struggle against a common enemy.
The indigenous peoples of the Americas recognized the Africans. Not because they shared blood. Not because they shared culture or gods. Because they shared the colonizer. The gun that pointed at the Andean also pointed at the Angolan.
The doctrine that declared Africans soulless also declared the natives incapable of thought. This is not a basis for unity. It is a basis for solidarity, which is harder, colder, and more enduring than simple unity. Unity requires sameness. Solidarity only requires that we recognize the same enemy.
Your music is not unity. Your music is solidarity.
The word Newsletter is a colonial technology. It descends from corporate internal communications, public relations departments, direct mail marketing. A tool designed to push product, optimize open rates, segment audiences into demographics. It is the linguistic equivalent of the shipping container—efficient, standardized, cold.It assumes you are a consumer. It assumes we are a brand. It assumes communication is a funnel at the end of which you purchase something. We refuse this container. This is not a newsletter. his is a signal from a crossroads.
Not a newsletter. A transmission from thirty years of encounter—basements, squats, record shops, the moments where music became connection. DJ Garrincha and Dr.Sócrates have been collecting addresses since 1995, one by one, the way Eshu weaves a web. No optimization. No segmentation. Just signals, when there is something to signal.
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