by Dave Nash
I first read Gassire’s Lute thirty years ago in the seventh grade. That was a particularly traumatic year for me, but the West African epic has echoed in recesses of my mind ever since.
You all should read it yourselves. When well meaning people try to summarize stories that have endured centuries, they gut the life of the story. Summaries say Gassire’s Lute is about vanity. That it’s a tale of hubris seduced by immortality. It’s about a flawed individual rebelling against society. It’s a young man’s fight against his destiny. Gassire Lute is none of those things. It’s all of those things.
I know Gassire’s Lute is about something because less well intentioned people attack its authenticity, its legitimacy, and it’s authorship. They attack Homer, Shakespeare, and Harper Lee too. I’ll have none of it. A story’s authenticity flows from its resonance – how long it remained within you and what associations you draw from it. A story’s legitimacy rests on its ability to find the truth teller of the tale. A story’s authorship begins before the truth teller tells because, as it is written, there’s nothing new under the sun. A story’s authorship continues as long as readers ascribe their own meaning to it. A story continues as long as those touched by it digest it, wrestle with it, and all of the sudden stop whatever they’re doing and question it.
What got me in Gassire Lute was Gassire’s single mindedness. His drive is epic. He persists despite losing his seven sons, his nobility, and his people. Something in the story shattered my juvenile defenses. The jaded cynicism I constructed to survive seventh grade crumbled as I read it, then listened to it, then grappled with it. Maybe it’s the tale’s relentless war, death after death, in a way that overwhelms even the most hardened adolescent. Maybe it’s how the slain son’s blood brings life to the lute and how that connects to other tales. Or maybe I was lost and needed a lifeline.
Now I read Gassire’s Lute from an artist’s perspective. I find it’s about the struggle to craft words into flesh and blood to make a work of art that sings. Because it’s about art, it’s about life, it’s about constructing meaning in suffering. Or maybe it’s about as long as we find meaning in suffering we can continue to live. Or our relentless need to tell stories to survive.
You can read Gassire’s story as a prince, an anthropologist, a student, a musician, a rebel, or a lost son. But only after you put aside your ennui will you find associations forming between yourself and the story. Only when you take a leap and enter into Gassire’s world will you see things from a different perspective. Only when you allow yourself to empathize with an element that’s working in the story will you find yourself.
When thinking about Gassire’s Lute for this note, I was struck by a false moral that the story is about the seduction of the promise of immortality. Isn’t that what the theology of “once saved, always saved” is about? Isn’t that seduction of an easy salvation story? The seduction that there’s the answer to life’s pain and that answer is written in black and white? And isn’t that the seduction tale that’s destroyed churches, families, communities, and political parties before our unbelieving eyes?
Americans seduced by immortality and by easy answers, those callous readers of parables, or not readers at all, are fighting battles every day like Gassire. Americans who like Gassire lead son after son to death. Americans who lead their sons into wars for oil, against terror, on crime, against drugs, for liberation. And then they fight culture wars, wars with no hope of a tangible win.
Driven by the seduction of immortality, they drive, pedal on the floor, towards battles of lost causes in the face of a pandemic, climate change, migration crisis, poverty, mass incarceration, and despair endemics to name a few. When will these peddlers of easy seduction and constant war be exiled like Gassire? When will their city fall like Gassire’s? And how will their lute ever sing like Gassire’s?
And there, with that question, the thought of their lute singing brings me a connection, empathy, hope. And then comes my reflection – what does it say about me that I have less empathy for my neighbors than I have for a fictional character from a centuries old tale?
So, the cycle begins again and Gassire’s Lute plays on.
Dave Nash (he/him) listens to jazz sampled by hip-hop hits while he types. Dave is the Non-Fiction Editor at Five South Magazine, and he typed words that can (will) be found in places like Jake, Atlantic Northeast, South Florida Poetry Journal, Hooghly Review, miniMag, Roi Faineant Press, Thriving Writers Magazine, and Boats Against the Current. You can follow him @davenashlit1.