In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman A. Waberi

And we are granted a close, affectionate view of Lily Williams, his grandmother, who cared for him until he was twelve. We meet his self-sufficient mother and his Jamaican-born father, a soccer player who disappears early in his son’s life to play abroad, first in the UK and later in Brazil. Against this canvas our narrator sketches out the details of his subject’s life, his family, and his influences. The course of the impassioned account Paris proceeds to deliver is framed against the closing months of Sammy’s life: his last musical adventures in Europe, and his final days back home in New York. And a most unusual biographer prepared to tell it.

This Sammy, to whom Paris is devoted, is the brilliant, yet deeply troubled, musician Samuel Kamau-Williams, a man whose life shares the outlines of that of African-American singer, composer and writer, Gil Scott-Heron-an echo, an homage, a point of reference perhaps, but with a story of his own. And for me, that other brotherly face is above all Sammy, the mage who burned his life at both ends. In other words, helping others, the brothers and sisters you meet along the way. Life is beautiful on the condition that you serve it. Life is beautiful despite its vagaries and my nine lives show this clearly. He knows he does not possess the power to protect his charge from adversity, but he can, and will, bear witness-a mission he attends to, from the opening pages, with a blend of spiritual wisdom and street (cat) sense: In an earlier incarnation Paris was a Persian named Farid, companion to Mawlana, a venerable Sufi master whose teachings continue to provide guidance in his present role as the self-described guardian angel to a most unlikely soul. Yes, you heard that right, the narrator of The Divine Song is Paris, “an old bachelor cat on the threshold of his last life.” A Sufi cat, no less. Yet, it is clear from the outset, that this is no ordinary musical journey we are about to embark on-it is, instead, the story of one man’s life with its genius and its frailties, woven into the broader tapestry of African American literature, music and history, orchestrated by one singular feline. Waberi’s imaginative novel The Divine Song. This is the nature of the world as we are invited to experience it in French-Djiboutian writer, Abdourahman A. Or, one could say: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was put to Music and Song was born, and thus the song came to be the driving creative force of the universe.

“With us, everything begins with a song and everything ends with another song.”

In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman A. Waberi