Carnegie Hall

The Grammy-nominated Fatou (2011) may have introduced Fatoumata Diawara to global audiences, but she was no stranger to the African diaspora or Europe. She’d already established herself as an actress and performer in France, working with notable African filmmakers such as Cheick Oumar Sissoko and Dani Kouyaté. Her performance in Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Timbuktu contributed to its incredible raft of accolades, including being proclaimed by The New York Times as the 12th best film of the 21st century so far. I simply dare you to listen to her perform the song “Timbuktu Fasso” from the soundtrack and try to remain unmoved.

The music of Fatou grew from Diawara’s ability to balance places, sounds, questions, and histories. She was, for example, born in Ivory Coast but spent much of her life between there, Mali, and France. And while balancing these spaces and their attendant experiences, she juggled acting with her commitment to music. Word has it that she’s the first female solo electric guitarist in Mali—and if you don’t know by now, Mali (along with Niger) has become central for reinvigorating and redefining electric guitar–based music. Watching her play that instrument on stage is a riveting experience.

Diawara is also, most obviously, a vocalist of tremendous depth, power, and subtlety. Covering topics that range from female genital mutilation to gender empowerment, war, and political instability, that voice anchors the emigration of new waves of people from the African continent. And though she could easily court a European audience by performing in French or English, Diawara sings largely in Bambara, the national language of Mali, which is key to the textures of culture, migration, and history in her music.

Most important for the Afrofuturism festival, that first album emerged from the often cliché but still quite real need to balance indigenous cultural traditions with post-colonial necessities, something that shapes many artists from the African continent. As such, Fatou featured Fela Kuti’s groove-master and legendary drummer Tony Allen, but also John Paul Jones, of equally legendary British rock icons Led Zeppelin.

That album was explicitly rooted in the traditional and popular sounds of Mali and Francophone West Africa, but her second album, Fenfo (Something to Say), expanded the palette of sounds and influences considerably because the future was clearly on her mind. For example, the imagery and video performances associated with the album are in direct conversation with the iconography emerging from continental artists associated with Afrofuturism like Aida Muluneh, the Ethiopian photographer with whom she collaborated (check the album’s immediately iconic cover and the video for the single “Nterini,” directed by Muluneh).

Fenfo and Diawara’s more recent work are most definitely the music of a world to come, or in the process of becoming. It is not just about the future of African music but the soundtrack of a future where balancing between Africa and the West—or tradition and what used to be called “modernity”— is revealed to be a false if not meaningless opposition. This is certainly the case for peoples actively transforming all of those dichotomies within themselves and the countries in which they find themselves.

Louis Chude-Sokei—a member of Carnegie Hall’s Afrofuturism Curatorial Council— is a writer and scholar whose books include The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics and the memoir Floating in a Most Peculiar Way. He is a professor of English, holding the George and Joyce Wein Chair in African American Studies, and director of the African American Studies at Boston University. He is also editor of The Black Scholar, one of the leading journals of Black studies in the United States, and founder of the sonic arts and archival project Echolocution.

Photography: Fatoumata Diawara by Aida Muluneh