Unlike in the West where the dance begins in the feet and moves up the body, here in the city of the abyss the dance begins in the shoulders, the part of the body made for bearing a weight, shoulders shimmying as though to shake away the burden of human time before the dance moves down to the clasped hands that lurch forward in a frenzy to cast something off, down to the legs galloping to catch up with whatever gauntlet the hands have thrown.
To Viv the music isn’t african in any sense with which she’s familiar but a bizarre blend of funk, swing, big band, cabaret, manzuma, armenian soul. It’s a rhythm and blues from the future that’s spiraled round the sphere of time to come back up through its birth canal. Beginning seventy years ago under the rule of Mussolini and sung down through the communist Derg, the songs have become a code: “Wax and gold,” the Ethiopians call it, when the golden messages of liberation and revolution are hidden inside the wax of the outer lyric and melody; and through the century the songs have been passed bearing the secret songs inside. In the swept ballroom of the Addis hotel tonight the band begins to play “Tezeta” and dancers break off in circles, partners claiming the center in order to dance each other into submission. As the small wrap slips from her bare shoulders, the white woman with paling blue hair finds herself vortexed into one of the circles with a young Ethiopian woman who smiles at her; ululations rise from every throat around them. Eighteen hours from now, under the English Channel thirty-six hundred miles away, Zan will think to himself how music plummets into the personal and emerges as politics on the other side of confession.