a little more blue

I moved to London last fall. It’s a wonderful place and I’m enchanted, but in some way I feel like I have exiled myself here. I have been a little miserable, which comes as no surprise. Anyway, this experience has brought to mind other stories of exile and the stories of others who have come to London_

Dante Alighieri

Dante spent the last 19 years of his life in exile, dying in Ravenna in 1321.

He had just finished the last canto of the Divine Comedy, Paradiso, which contains the famous couplet:

”tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta piu’ caramente

tu proverai si’ come sa di sale lo pane altrui”

(‘You will leave all the things you have most dearly loved/You will see how the bread of others tastes of salt’)

This couplet has always stuck with me, recalling the desperation one feels when far from home, when the simple act of eating bread, drinking water, any quotidians act can some how seem unbearable.

http://www.italymag.co.uk/italy-featured/firenze/very-florentine-problem-ending-dantes-exile

Dante was finally publicly rehabilitated back into the city of Florence, over six centuries after his death…

Lord Kitchener

I first heard Lord Kitchener last summer while visiting Montreal, when a friend played me the most fantastic compilation, “London is the Place for me: Trinidadian Calypso in London, 1950-1956″. Lord Kitchener, Calypso King, born Aldwyn Roberts in Arima Trinidad, moved to London June 1948. Calypso music is typically very euphoric, cheerful, celebratory; so when I heard songs like this one, I assumed that Lord Kitchener was making light of an unpleasant situation, with lyrics such as

“To live in London you are really comfortable,

because the English people are very much sociable,

they’ll take you here and they’ll take you there

and they’ll make you feel like a millionaire.

So, London, that’s the place for me!”

After doing some reading it became clear to me that Lord Kitchener really was quite a sensation in his time. Found nearly instant success, married an English woman, openned a night club in Manchester, then retired back to Trinidad in 1960 where he lived very well to the day of his death in 2000.

this video is aweful, but this is the song…

Caetano Veloso

Bob Dylan of Brazil, kind of. Was exiled from Brazil in 1969 along with Gilberto Gil during the Military Dictatorship. During this time the two hung out in London, a little bummed, but still producing music and material for other musicians including Gal Costa, Maria Bethania, Elis Regina, anyway, when they arrived back in Brazil in 1972 bigger stars than ever before. While in London Caetano produced a less-known self titled album released in Europe and Brazil in 1971,

sorry about the dumb picture show.

This album is largely sung in English. The use of English and his difficulty with the language beautifully expresses the sentiment of being in a foreign land, lost and sad. The end of the album is accented with “Asa Branca” a Brazilian folk song by singer songwriter Luiz Gonzaga, It tells the story of a man forced by drought to leave his homeland. It speaks of the sadness in leaving home and being in foreign lands.

Caetano in awesome times