Blues for the white man by Fred de Vries: reader impression

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This reader impression was written and sent to LitNet on the writer's own initiative.

Blues for the white man
Fred de Vries
Penguin Random House South African
ISBN: 9781776096008

The title Blues for the white man certainly grabs you, doesn’t it? Interestingly, the book appeared in 2019 in the Netherlands as Wiegelied voor de witte man, but it’s certainly no lullaby for white angst or the besieged white male, or a lamentation of the white man’s decline in society. Rather, this consistently well-written, deeply engaging, often rather poignant work of nonfiction is an attempt to understand the blues – music, form and function – as it continues to resonate through different expressions of black pain, both in the United States and in South Africa. Reading Blues for the white man is a most apposite, conciliatory, productive place to start “doing the work”.

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De Vries is a respected Dutch writer and journalist who has lived in South Africa for the past 20 years. Rather than writing entirely as an outsider about South Africa, De Vries writes from a truly interesting place, as a kind of outsider within.

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De Vries is a respected Dutch writer and journalist who has lived in South Africa for the past 20 years. Rather than writing entirely as an outsider about South Africa, De Vries writes from a truly interesting place, as a kind of outsider within. When it comes to writing about and travelling to various states in America to do his research – involving a lot of fieldwork, tricky conversations and reading leading writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates – things get decidedly unpredictable and engaging, indeed.

As you can imagine, not everyone local or in America is equally forthcoming or welcoming: you might well be surprised as to where the most productive and fascinating conversations, as relayed by De Vries in the book, would end up happening. By the end of his journey, De Vries says he still doesn’t believe that being white – or whiteness – is all that defines him or the music that he loves:

All those meetings and interviews … showed me how absurd the idea of identity is, whether invented by the left or the right …. Apart from pale, male and heterosexual, I’m a hundred other things that are equally important.

De Vries illuminates the role and importance of music and culture as a life-affirming and life-giving, vital force, energising, lamenting, philosophising, helping us to make sense of the present and past, of hauntings and contested legacies. Music, as evidenced throughout, is an instrument, a technology, that speaks truth to power. Whether it is raw or refined, moody, melancholic or aggressive, it is the asking of questions and defining of problems – more than just seeking answers – that music as a form helps us to do in the political sense.

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Music, as evidenced throughout, is an instrument, a technology, that speaks truth to power. Whether it is raw or refined, moody, melancholic or aggressive, it is the asking of questions and defining of problems – more than just seeking answers – that music as a form helps us to do in the political sense.

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In this book, De Vries is well aware that any answers are likely to be tentative and qualified: certainty in this polarised world is a luxury. Blues for the white man caters to both those interested in the music, and those keen to engage with politics and identity. With a huge crossover appeal, the subtitle takes inspiration from Abdullah Ibrahim’s Blues for a hip king: quite directly, this suggests a bridging between South Africa and the USA – with South African Ibrahim, who has to make a living and survive in exile in the USA, and with music that bridges cultures and people.

Early on, there’s an interaction – it can’t really be called much of an interview – between De Vries and Ibrahim. The latter gets annoyed with the journalist, who is white. After 11 catastrophic, uncomfortable minutes, Dollar Brand storms off. This makes De Vries wonder about his line of questioning and whether he truly gets black pain.

De Vries speaks of “[t]ricky territory”, “a form of depression that whites cannot understand or feel.” In his own words, a kind of mission statement informs this book:

It is the result of trying to survive in a world of continual repression, where you constantly have to prove yourself. To me, it sounds like the blues …. I wanted to understand where it came from – the blues, black pain and its toxic twin, white supremacy. And I wanted to know my position in this battle that has been raging for centuries. I wanted to visit the place where blues was born and write about everything that came after.

De Vries is interested in outsiders and subcultures and those who don’t quite fit in or who challenge the norm. He maps the relationship between space and place and subjectivity, between local history and individual psyches, between identity and politics, asking readers to rise to the challenge with him. He writes fully aware of his own positionality, foregrounds it and stays fully self-aware, also of his own blind spots and prejudices and imperfections.

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He writes fully aware of his own positionality, foregrounds it and stays fully self-aware, also of his own blind spots and prejudices and imperfections.

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In this quest to understand, to be a willing participant in listening and hearing in meaningful dialogue, De Vries seeks to move beyond a mere understanding of the inception and meaning of the blues; De Vries wants to know what he and other white lovers of the music – other white men – could never fully grasp about the blues, and about black pain. What is it about the positionality of the white man that (potentially) precludes him from fully understanding the black struggle? What kind of conditions and circumstances, and what kind of meeting points, would enable people with different histories and different stories to come together in understanding and hope? Are we forever doomed to dance the dance of misunderstanding, mistrust and antipathy, or can the white man truly understand and be an ally?

De Vries – in an easy-to-follow, spirited, entertaining style – asks a pointed, difficult set of questions against the backdrop of recent social unrest and protest movements, such as the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the USA and the #FeesMustFall protests in South Africa. In light of this resurgence of black identity politics and the concomitant frustration and anger and lack of patience to “do the work” regarding white supremacy and black oppression and pain, the writer feels the need to ask just why his empathy and solidarity with such black pain and anger feels so radically limited and bereft:

The problem, to me at least, is that “black pain” is impossible to grasp. It often gets thrown into a discussion, immediately killing any debate. It’s like the Holocaust. As an outsider, as a white person, you can’t argue, because you’ve never experienced it.

This is an essential and well-taken point by De Vries, one of many in the book. Should a lack of direct, unmediated experience mean that you automatically have to sit back and shut up? Where to after the listening part of the journey or contract has been fulfilled?

To attempt to bridge this communication gap, De Vries goes about his business in earnest, giving substance to the subtitle of the book, Hearing black voices in South Africa and the Deep South: he lets loose and departs on two important voyages of discovery – firstly, through the American Deep South, which, as De Vries makes abundantly clear, is certainly not the homogeneous, often backwards mass of place and people we are somehow led to believe it is.

The writer reads, asks questions and listens widely to a wide variety of different subjects, many occupying leadership positions in the community – with often surprising, eminently compelling results. If a multidimensional, fractious, sometimes contradictory set of impressions emerges, if the writer is treated with a measure of circumspection, wariness and even blatant hostility, that is par for the course. No one said this was going to be easy.

Similarly, in South Africa, where he has conversations with Fallists and BLF activists and makes a point of journeying to Limpopo, where he visits the 86-year-old father of his guitar teacher – who was severely injured in a farm attack, but who survived – things are rarely as simple as an “us versus them” mentality, or even an unqualified kind of anger, resentment or hate.

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The feelings might be messy, tangled and unpredictable, but this doesn’t stop De Vries from doing his work.

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The feelings might be messy, tangled and unpredictable, but this doesn’t stop De Vries from doing his work. The man is a seasoned vet, and it shows. Almost every page has a quote you want to highlight, keep safe and go over again in the future.

What results in Blues for the white man – from a clear-eyed kind of soul-searching that nevertheless resists becoming exploitative or maudlin, or painting in overly broad strokes – is a tremendously gripping account of human subjectivity and the search for meaning, which bridges the gap between intimate journal and arresting historical documentation or a kind of ethnographic research. It also offers a truly excellent and searching soundtrack.

De Vries provides a most enjoyable and thorough playlist at the back of the book, but a key caveat is that this book is interested in or concerned with music explicitly, only insofar as it resonates and connects with sociopolitical issues. Music might be the firm foundation, but De Vries is after some answers about people, and community, first and foremost.

De Vries traces and walks the footsteps of the blues, from the history of the American civil rights movement to the arrival of slaves in the USA. Importantly, he commences his journey in Atlanta, Georgia, which these days is a Mecca for hip hop – at the forefront or cutting edge – and certainly a LGBTQ+ capital in the Deep South. I found this intersection of progressive elements and the struggle for greater recognition, representation and better treatment and awareness – and the strong presence of an always socially conscious, yet often problematic and misogynistic kind of musical theatre in hip hop – absolutely fascinating, as relayed by De Vries.

Following that visit to Atlanta, De Vries visits the places that are synonymous with the musical genres that are viewed as among America’s most valuable and influential cultural treasures or export products: Nashville (country) and Memphis (soul and rock ’n’ roll), both in Tennessee; Clarksdale, Mississippi (the blues), and New Orleans, Louisiana, the city of jazz and Louis Armstrong. Again, music lovers will find so much to savour here, but equally fascinating is the kind of thick, multilayered understanding that the local people have of their own musical history and the role it continues to play today. Striking, also, are the subtle and overt differences in the racial and cultural makeup of these destinations, and how De Vries responds to each in the time spent there.

In his undertakings, De Vries becomes a fervent musical and civil rights tourist and tracker; the tensions between the supposedly neutral perspective of the outsider and the occasional impenetrability of what he encounters – what he sees and hears – make for a powerful clash. Sometimes, not being a local simply means not being able to grasp the finer nuances, even with esteemed and open guides to welcome you.

Everywhere he seeks out the ghosts and phantoms of political and cultural points of change and revolution; all over, he is surprised by realisations about the realities that anchor the generally accepted myths and truisms – from the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where Martin Luther King Jr was murdered, to the dusty crossroads outside Clarksdale where the blues legend Robert Johnson apparently sold his soul to the devil. For the reader, it is difficult not to be swept up in the powerful currents of myths and myth-making that De Vries seeks to uncover – which stories, which legends, which men and women remain at the apex of the ways that a people imagine their worlds?

All the while, De Vries explores significant similarities between the American South and his new home in South Africa, from a variety of perspectives. And trust me, there are many similarities: colonialism, slavery, widespread poverty, the killing of the indigenous population, political murders, devastating civil wars between white settlers, repressive laws that secure cheap, indentured black labour, a fanatical belief in white supremacy, powerful anti-communist sentiment at the level of government, troubling treatment and lack of respect for women, and white male power and domination.

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And trust me, there are many similarities: colonialism, slavery, widespread poverty, the killing of the indigenous population, political murders, devastating civil wars between white settlers, repressive laws that secure cheap, indentured black labour, a fanatical belief in white supremacy, powerful anti-communist sentiment at the level of government, troubling treatment and lack of respect for women, and white male power and domination.

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De Vries succeeds admirably in revealing just how such a fraught history, on both continents, found its way into so much astonishingly rich, affectively powerful, often politically charged music. The blues might have branched out into various directions, but it still remains furiously relevant and engaging. The blues, the black man’s lament, still manifests in a present where the divide between black and white, and white and black – in economic terms, certainly – still plays out.

De Vries would undoubtedly have been able to give more attention to the important differences between South Africa and the American Deep South, and to the far-reaching ramifications of the fact that the United States, with a black minority population, recently transitioned from a government led by its first African American president, Barack Obama, to what could be labelled a white supremacist leader in Donald Trump. The black population in South Africa make up an outright majority, and it has been 27 years since the dawn of our democracy, but questions of white privilege and structural racism still feature strongly in the discourse. The majority of South Africa, despite having the vote and supposedly being represented by the ANC, are still very much disenfranchised.

De Vries has a fair bit to say about the times and regime of Trump, but I found these sections less insightful and momentous than much of the rest of the book. The various pointed differences between the two countries, historically and in the present, could certainly have been explored in a longer and more in-depth way, but as a reader you also understand that the core focus and the questions asked and answered cannot cover all bases equally.

Following his conversations with radical black voices such as the BLM leader in Atlanta, Mary Hooks, and the FMF activist in the Cape, Ramabina Mahapa, the writer could certainly have voiced a sharper, more pointed critique of the kind of polarising identity politics of the present. It often seems that the differences in ideological stance and perspectives between different groups seem close to being intractable and all-consuming, and De Vries could have dealt with this in slightly more detail. Again, this is more a wish being expressed from a critical reader than a decided flaw in the text itself.

Time and time and time again, the “word” understand pops up in this text; where does all the travel, reflection and soul-searching lead De Vries? What is important, ultimately, is that De Vries – through making himself vulnerable to having to hear much about all that is wrong with the white man today – emerges with a fresh understanding and perception of black pain, an understanding that flows directly from the fact that De Vries never attempts to play the apologist or defend or push any kind of position:

Following the current identity politics doctrine, I shouldn’t even have been allowed to write this book. Or, at least, it would be expected that I would have restricted my research to the crazy ideas of a white woman in a cemetery in Selma and a couple of melancholic, somewhat bitter white men at a flea market in Jackson. … But then I would never have stumbled upon the similarities between country and blues, and I would have dismissed those talking about “black pain” as crybabies.

The message to white men couldn’t be much clearer: start doing the critical work; start seriously grappling with questions that do actually have something to do with you. Start taking the time to make sense of your white skin and privilege, just as my people have had to grapple with our black skins and the injustices that have been visited upon us for centuries.

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Blues for the white man provides tremendous insight into the ways that the South African protest culture – its ways of processing and performing resistance against white supremacy – is entangled in and influenced by American politics and identity politics.

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Blues for the white man provides tremendous insight into the ways that the South African protest culture – its ways of processing and performing resistance against white supremacy – is entangled in and influenced by American politics and identity politics.

De Vries isn’t trying to “expose” or judge people and play them off against one another; it’s not a book of moral condemnation or finger-pointing or self-righteousness. De Vries truly wants to know and understand. How does music travel and find its audience, and how do we perceive and celebrate music? The book avoids homogenising and flattening out differences. It’s not a heavy, earnest-to-a-fault read.

While questioning orthodoxies and received wisdoms, metanarratives and new narratives, Blues for the white man manages to entertain and instruct. A must-read.

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