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| 1 |
ID:
180326
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| Summary/Abstract |
It was hard to shake off the dread in the summer of 2020 as Covid-19 ravaged the United States. My husband and I focused on keeping family members safe, which was something that, at the time, seemed manageable. Widening the gaze to the country and the world left me drowning in tragedy. Then one morning a story in my Twitter feed stopped me in my tracks. Someone I had never heard of had died in Zimbabwe of Covid-19. Cosmas Magaya was a mbira master.1 I had to Google “mbira” to know what that was: a wooden board with metal tines, and “a family of musical instruments, traditional to the Shona people of Zimbabwe.”2 Ethnomusicologist Paul F. Berliner, Magaya’s co-author, friend, and collaborator, wrote in a University of Chicago Press tribute that Magaya was “one of the world’s great musicians, mentors, and cultural ambassadors,” and “was universally loved by his following.” He was a farmer, a village headman, and a preserver of Shona culture. Magaya had a global reach, and, with his ensemble, performed at New York’s Washington Square Church two weeks after 9/11. This was “profoundly healing,” Berliner remembered.3 The essay moved me to tears.
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| 2 |
ID:
158507
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| Summary/Abstract |
They came just after dark,” American war correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote from London in December 1940, about a German bombing raid. “Somehow I could sense from the quick, bitter firing of the guns that there was to be no monkey business this night.” From a balcony, he watched “a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire.” With dark buildings illuminated by the glow of hundreds of fires, balloons visible against pink clouds, a star peeking between them, it was “the most hateful, most beautiful single scene I have ever known.” Pyle thought of the day when he would be able “to tell somebody who has never seen it how London looked on a certain night in the holiday season of the year 1940.”
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