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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
Comment on this article Professor of Mambo Imagine what you hear, art historian Robert Farris Thompson tells the students in his course on New York mambo, when you arrive from the Eighth Galaxy to inspect Planet Earth. “You hear drumming in Africa, you hear hip-hop in Chicago, you hear jazz in New Orleans, samba in Brazil, and mambo—everywhere.” Thompson ’55, ’65PhD, pitches his voice higher: “Your Highness! We have discovered life on this planet. And judging from the noise they are making, they are baaaad.” In short: you hear blackness. “Black music controls the airwaves of this planet. How did that happen? Let’s sample a little of the blackness of the airwaves.” Thompson slides a CD into the boom box: John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass. The saxophone surges, and Thompson calls out: “Say it, Coltrane! Say it! We’re waiting for you: say it, brother!” Next comes samba, then mambo—“¡Ya! ¡Arriba!” Thompson shouts. He begins to dance along, pale and a bit stiff-jointed in his button-down shirt and tie, khaki pants, and cloth belt decorated with nautical flags. Thompson roams the lecture hall, microphone in hand. “How do black musicians manage to do this—bing! bing!—conquer the whole planet?” he asks. “It’s because black music has a few secret weapons, among them multiple meter, that is to say, several time signatures at once. It modulates from rhythm to rhythm, just as we change keys. “Multi-metric means multi-drums. Now how can you dance to that? The second great secret weapon is that different parts of the body move in different rhythms. Multiple meter demands mastery of self.” Self-mastery requires coolness, not only in the heat of the dance, but as a way of life: “The highest value is reconciliation and generosity, to be at ease, to settle quarrels. Tranquility of mind. To be cool, wet, and silent. When you hear ‘chill,’ you’re in the black aesthetic of the cool.” So begins a first day of classes, one among 45 years of first days for Thompson, the Colonel John Trumbull Professor of the History of Art and the master of Timothy Dwight College (TD) until his retirement from that post this summer. Thompson served as master for 32 years—the longest mastership in Yale history, long enough for him to have seen the daughters and sons of his former TD students pass through the college. Now 77, Thompson has spent his life exploring the art of Africa and the African diaspora. In his teaching and books, Thompson demonstrates how the traditions of the Yoruba, Kongo, Mande, Ejagham, Igbo, and other civilizations have permeated and enlivened cultural life on this side of the Atlantic, from Brazil to Cuba to New York—the place he calls “the secret African city.” Thompson’s central contribution to his field has been his insistence on understanding African art in context, understanding what it communicates on its home turf. Because of Thompson’s keen interest in context, his take on art history encompasses not only visual art and architecture, but also anthropology, language, religion, ethnomusicology, dance history, and philosophy. His aim, says one former PhD student, is to map “the artistic geography of the African world”; another says that Thompson studies “the diversity of blackness, of blacknesses.” Cornel West, who teaches African American studies at Princeton, calls this white man from Texas “my dear brother” and “one of the greatest pioneers in the study of Afro-American culture and African culture.” Thompson wants his students to recognize how aspects of African cultures infuse not only the music, art, and dance of the Americas, but also philosophy, religious practice, textile design, everyday gestures, and even vocabulary as quotidian as Uh-huh (yes) and Unh-unh (no). According to David Doris ’02PhD, a professor of African art history at the University of Michigan, “He coined the term that became prevalent in academia: ‘Black Atlantic.’” Says Thompson, “We can’t know how American we are unless we know how black we are.” It’s Fall 2009, and 150 musicians, dancers, professors, and former Thompson graduate students have crowded into an auditorium at Boys Harbor in Spanish Harlem. Two New York City cultural centers have put together a tribute to Thompson called “Que Rico Mambo! Que Rico Robert Farris Thompson!” From the amplifiers sound the opening drumbeats of “Mambo en Sax,” by the Cuban-born mambo popularizer Pérez Prado. Thompson takes the microphone to give a tour of the piece. “The trumpet is building some sort of staircase, some sort of ecstatic staircase, and it will be picked up and change mambo forever.” Now Thompson tells the audience to listen for “a little bit of Schoenberg,” a subtle dissonance “like heat lightning in Jersey being observed from Manhattan. Pérez Prado did the impossible. He made dissonance popular. He put it into a groove.” Next, another Pérez Prado recording, “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.” As the trumpeter sustains a note, Thompson calls out: “How long can you hold it, brother? How long can you hold it? Hold it, hold it, hold it in the name of God!” Thompson as lecturer is “kind of like Jack Kerouac crossed with John Coltrane,” says screenwriter David Martino ’85. “It’s an improvisation.” New York City musician and journalist Greg Tate calls Thompson “an academic jazz musician”: “Jazz musicians know music backward and forward, but they’re completely unself-conscious in performance. When you’re on the bandstand, you want to connect, communicate, make it hot.” Furthermore, says Tate, “It’s completely consistent with the tradition he’s trying to represent. African culture is very performative.” Thompson himself says that when he lectures, “I am not lecturing. I am being lectured by the forces on the screen.” During a single 50-minute class, Thompson speaks Spanish, Yoruba, French, Hebrew, Creole, Portuguese, and Ted Kennedy. He signals a row of students to stand up and try a dance step. He approaches a young man and demonstrates a gesture of self-protection found in sculptures from West Africa: arms crossed on the chest, hands on opposite collarbones. A similar gesture appears in an early-nineteenth-century drawing from Suriname. What links them is that whether in Africa or the New World, the gesture conveys the same message: “I’m not going to let you provoke me! You don’t exist. Boom!” Much of Thompson’s research has been in learning and tracing the language of gesture. During a conversation in the master’s house at Timothy Dwight, he stands, leans onto the balls of his feet with knees bent, and flaps his knees in and out. “If you find in Kongo a guy waving his thighs like this in front of a woman, and you hear a song—‘Hey, pretty mama, I’m bewitched by your body, hey pretty mama, I’m willing, I’m willing’—it may go with this gesture. This gesture has a specific name, vwendama. Well, that gesture—suddenly we see it in paintings of Kongo societies in Uruguay. Suddenly we see it in a 1952 photo from the Palladium [a dance hall in midtown Manhattan]. Suddenly we see it on the floor of the Savoy Ballroom [of Harlem] in 1954. Again and again. It’s this frequency of occurrence that tells us how important it is. But also, it has similar meanings: it’s a flirtation step. So my method is comparative.” When Thompson finds related patterns with overlapping meanings and similar contexts, “that’s when we know we’ve hit pay dirt.” Another example: Thompson puts his hands on his hips. “In the white world,” he says, this stance is “a throwaway line. But in the black world, it’s a sign of arrogance. When it’s black, it’s associated with sassing. People say, ‘Oh, but this is universal.’ Yeah, anyone can stand arms akimbo, but what does it mean? When I lecture, I ask someone in the audience who’s black—and I stand like this—‘If you were my grandmother, what would you do?’ ‘I’d whip your ass to okra.’ That’s how strong it is.” Born in 1932, Thompson grew up middle class in El Paso, son of a doctor (his father) and an influential figure in the city’s arts community (his mother). “I loved to cross the Rio Bravo, what we call the Rio Grande, e inmediatamente la diferencia se ve, everything changes. I love cultural difference. I don’t know where that came from.” During school vacation in March 1950, his parents took him and his younger sister to Mexico City. On the first day, Thompson went walking on his own. He happened on a large plaza bordered by a majestic building and asked a guard what it was. “‘El Palacio Nacional. And if you hurry in there, you can see him.’ And I thought ‘Wow! See who?’ On a high scaffolding, there was Diego Rivera directing his assistants, indicating to his left and to his right with his brush, just like an orchestra leader” as the assistants helped him paint a mural. That evening, in the hotel dining room, “I heard this bee-DEEM-brakata, extraordinary offbeat music. I asked the waitress, What’s that? She said mambo.” On that day, says Thompson, “My life changed. Mambo irradiated me with classical Afro-Atlantic music, and there was no turning back.” For Thompson, to study Afro-Atlantic music—and body language, visual arts, and dance—is also to study Afro-Atlantic philosophy. Petra Richterova ’10PhD, one of his graduate students, explains: “In the West, Africa is seen as not having a philosophy, because what we see as philosophy is primarily text-based. In the Afro-Atlantic world, however, existential quandaries tend to be embodied in the language of gesture, dance, music, and fashion.” To understand Afro-Atlantic values and beliefs, “we have to become literate in this nonverbal language. If you want to know Afro-Atlantic philosophy, go to a Miles Davis concert.” Thompson talks about that philosophy in class, offering admonitions (“You only live once! Heart attack! Boom! Enjoy the feast of life. Treasure it. Be worthy of it”) as well as “ways to right living.” Among them: staying “cool”; practicing generosity; and showing respect without regard for social status. Cool is self-possession, composure, discretion, silence. Thompson has found terms in 35 African languages for what he describes as “that divine spark of equilibrium in the soul.” Second, generosity: don’t be a Tyrannosaurus rex, with arms too short to reach the wallet and pay for a round of drinks. Third, recognize that “the people you snub because they look small on your way up are the people you are going to meet on the way down. You can’t afford to snub anyone.” Thompson’s best-known book—art historian Doris calls it “canonical” in the field—is found in academic bookstores and in any botánica worth its herbs and amulets. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy explores how western and central African artistic, social, and spiritual traditions remain salient among black people throughout the New World. Along with Flash, Thompson’s works include nine other books and six major museum exhibitions he curated. Thompson has his detractors. He and other scholars were criticized by anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Richard Price in an influential 1976 book for what they saw as a failure to account for the transformation of African traditions in the New World. (By 1992, Mintz and Price felt that Thompson had adopted “greater conceptual flexibility.”) In a 2001 article, William and Mary anthropologist Sally Price asserts that Thompson’s sourcing methods make his evidence for links between African and New World textiles difficult to analyze. “Numerous pivotal assertions cannot be traced by readers,” she says, because the sources include unpublished works in progress, the content of phone conversations, and “personal communications.” Price takes care to note, however, that she is merely “sprinkling a few grains of salt on Thompson’s monumental contribution.” UCLA professor Donald Cosentino, whose field is culture and performance, says such criticisms derive in part from a larger divergence between two approaches to Black Atlantic scholarship: roots and routes. “The roots school would say that the most important thing to focus on is African origins. For the routes people, the most important thing is to study what happened to those inheritances in the New World. I think it’s a false dichotomy, in that I don’t think you could study the Black Atlantic without studying both roots and routes. And without Bob and his work, I think we would still have this view of Africa as peripheral. He ceased the ‘otherization’ of Africa, put it on the same level as Europe or Latin America or Asia. He changed Africa from being an object to a subject.” To some, it is surprising that Thompson did this work at Yale. In Tate’s view, Yale fosters “a Eurocentric vision of what art is, what culture is, what philosophy is: there are no Africans, no African Americans, whose vision and whose contributions are equivalent to those of the Greco-Roman tradition. Thompson begs to differ.” Thompson says that for every lecture he delivers, “there are thousands of television shows and other mass media that are giving the old vision of Africa: as remote tribal villages, when in fact the people of ancient Djenné were living in a city-state [that was] emerging at the same time the Greek city-states were emerging”—civilizations, like the Yoruba, with “standing armies, cowry-shell currency, cities.” When Europeans first visited the continent, he adds, they called the African cultures “nations”—but the nations “got demoted to ‘tribes’ in the late nineteenth century. So we have our work cut out for us.” Thompson goes to the gym three times a week. “I think weight-lifting is the only fountain of youth that’s left,” he says. It might be working. “He can leave on a Friday and go to Buenos Aires and come back on Monday and teach on Tuesday,” says Karen McGovern, who was Thompson’s assistant at TD. Doris says, “This guy has lived the lives of seven people. He’s almost 80, and he’s done more fieldwork in three months than I’ve probably done in my whole life. He’s nonstop.” Thompson says he’s visited nearly all of Africa’s 47 countries and much of South America. But choosing a favorite place, he says, is like choosing a favorite child. (He has two children and four grandchildren. He and his wife divorced in 1982.) Thompson speaks fluent Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian; intermediate Yoruba and Ki-Kongo; and snippets of other languages. He can shift effortlessly from standard English to African American English. He likes to delight taxi drivers and African Yale parents by greeting them in their native languages. “I’ve heard him tell jokes in Japanese,” says Tate. “When he translates them, they’re funny.” TD student Eric Levine ’13 says Thompson asked for a tutorial in Hebrew insults, and took notes. Anyone who has taken Thompson’s class or has lived in TD during the past three decades knows at least one Yoruba word: “àshe” (ah-shay). Àshe essentially means “make it happen,” and for the roughly 3,200 students who passed through TD during Thompson’s mastership, it became a motto and a battle cry. Filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn ’85, whose documentaries have twice been nominated for Academy awards, says Thompson’s message to TD students, “which is one I have returned to again and again, is that the only thing you have to be is yourself. And to find your own voice. It sounds like such a simple thing. But it’s not.” Thompson would roam the college courtyard and ask students what they were doing, Kahn recalls. “He was a person you’d want to have a good story to tell when he saw you.” And he always reassured newly arrived students who worried that they might not fit in at Yale. “One of his gifts of God as a teacher is not to dismiss students,” says Thompson’s close friend C. Daniel Dawson, a New York University professor. “This is particularly true toward athletes. Universities use them in certain ways, and there are certain presumptions about them that Bob never has. When they lose a game he’ll tell them the Kongo phrase: ‘Through humiliation comes grandeur.’” Businessman Bill Donahoe ’82, ’86MBA, who was a varsity football player in TD, says he was a lackluster student until he wrote his midterm for Thompson’s course. Thompson complimented Donahoe on the test and left a book on slave religion in his mailbox. Thirty years later, Donahoe still remembers the inscription: “For Bill Donahoe, a hellified student of Afro-American studies.” His suitemates teased him, but, Donahoe says, “Deep down, I thought, ‘Wait a minute—maybe I am measuring up.’ That was a breakthrough. I went from being a C and B student to a mostly A student. Master T saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself.” “What he taught was very important,” says screenwriter Martino, who was in TD. “But who he was, how he carried himself as a person, his way of being himself—I learned more from that than from his tremendously rich subject matter and scholarship. It’s impossible to think of TD without him.” Tributes on and off campus have marked Thompson’s pending retirement as master. In March, 260 TD alumni gathered for a dinner at the college. In the fall, Yale held an all-day symposium called “Flash of a Spirit.” Among those who attended was David Byrne, of Talking Heads fame, who wrote the preface for Thompson’s 2006 book on tango. When Thomas Jaffe ’71 lent a collection of Southeast Asian art to the Yale Art Gallery, he asked that the new gallery planned for it be named after Thompson and Thompson’s late colleague Professor George Kubler ’33, ’40PhD. And at TD, the wall above the south common room fireplace has a new inscription: “The Robert Farris Thompson Room—ÀSHE.” On July 1, Yale College admissions dean Jeffrey Brenzel ’75 took over as master. Thompson plans to spend a year working on his longtime book project, Staccato Incandescence: Mambo in History, and then return to teaching. Mambo will keep him going, he says. From the music, he has received “the gift of exaltation.” African Art in Motion was the most exciting and entertaining class at Yale.
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