I Bring What I Love
I Bring What I Love
Youssou N’Dour says in this magnificent documentary that he is bent
on transforming music, changing people through music and changing
music through people and otherwise bringing people together,
This was the critical part of Kuwame Nkrumah’s vision for Africa’s nations.
The documentary includes footage of on on sight production of Egypt
and of the enriching collaboration with with classical Arab musicians
During Europe’s dark ages was about intellectual stagnation during
large chunks of time between AD 600 to 1400 the light of learning,
art and science was not only kept alive, it thrived in Islam.
Jonathan Curial has it right when he says that Youssou N’Dour and his
documentary I Bring What I Love is an extraordinary documentary. He
enthralled Carnegie Hall audiences it could only bring about a dozen
people to the Stonestown Twin Theater seating 800-1000 in San
Francisco. I think that “big media” flopped on here. Was it because
somebody didn’t want favorable images of Islam publicized too widely?
Smiling laughing beautiful children play a major role in this documentry on every day street scenes in Dakar, Touba with its great Sufi Mosque and other Senegal towns and villages. A brief snippet caught my attention.
A little girl of 8 or 10 stares a perhaps anxiously into the camera -
when the slightest smile crosses her face.. I thought a what magical
documentary moment. There are scores of scenes just like this in I
Bring What I Love. Director Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi deserves
credit for this great work
In it Youssou N’Dour talks a lot about Ramadan. I never had much of a grasp of it until I had read the article from the 2002 Ghanaian Chronicle of Accra. I suppose it was the part about fasting in the..“scorching heat of the day in the tropics” that caught my attention. Anyhow from one computer to another this valued opinion piece from 2002 has not gotten lost between here and Ghana.
I think that Kwame Isiah’s The Ramadan of the Muslims which follows is richer and the more important to us because it reflects the every day feelings toward Moslem neighbors. Accra is a cosmopolitan town with peoples of divers tribal backgrounds and residents and visitors from all over Africa and the world.
Because I Bring What I love is a profoundly educational documentary I hope that arrangements can be made for it to shown in schools where students who want to see how we can all be brought together and in America’s prisons where there are many converts to Islam and much unrequited interest in Africa.
