Miriam Makeba & the Desire in Women for a Beautiful Power

HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN IT'S GOOD POWER? by Devorah Tarrow
Presented at an Aesthetic Realism Seminar, Aesthetic Realism Foundation, NYC


I have learned from Aesthetic Realism and Eli Siegel that there are two kinds of power: one arises from a person's deepest desire, to like and respect the world, and is the source of pride and self respect. The other is completely unjust, hurts people and weakens us: it comes from the desire to be separate and superior to the world, from the desire for contempt. In an Aesthetic Realism class of 1972, Eli Siegel gave the criterion for good power:

"The way that good power can be distinguished is through asking the question: "If this desire of mine was to be successful, and I have power over this person, would the world look better and would the person himself or herself be stronger?" Any power that a human being has over another that doesn't make the person it is exerted on stronger and the world in which the power takes place more beautiful is bad power."

I’ve seen that though there are these two possibilities in us, our real power is our ability to know and value the meaning of other people and things, and to have a good and strengthening effect. A woman must have good power in order to respect herself and to feel proud. Tonight, I’m going to talk about what I learned about power for my own life and of what women are learning in Aesthetic Realism consultations. And I’m going to talk about aspects of the life of the singer, Miriam Makeba. She is from South Africa, whose government had power over millions of people in one of the ugliest ways power has shown itself: apartheid. I learned from Aesthetic Realism, that the way of seeing people had by the white South African government, which is the desire to be superior to everything different from oneself, is a possibility in every person, a possibility that will flourish unless it is criticized and changed. Learning this and what good power really is, made me a fairer and kind¬er person. Miriam Makeba's life is useful because it shows the struggle in a person between good and bad power, and that a woman can respect herself only when she chooses power in behalf of justice to the world.

I. I Learned There Are Two Kinds of Power

There is hardly a woman who wouldn't recognize the kind of power I wrote about at the age of 16:

"I swear I've never had power like this before! Tom adores me and I adore him and we're just like two birds in a nest. He and I laughed over his dates with Samantha and he told me he never even kissed her. He seems to think her fairly bad after me. Truthfully it doesn't worry me a bit, but I'd better act like it does if I want Tom to think I'm not taking him for granted. Which I do in a perfectly horrible way."

Power to me, as it is to most women, was the ability to get a man to do what I wanted him to do, to see my effect on him unmistakably, and to be able to think less of him at the same time. And I wanted to use him to look down on other people including Samantha, a girl whom I had known for many years, and who was supposed to be my friend. As I gloated over the defeat of my rival, I did not know I was going against my own deepest hope, to be fair to the world and to have a good effect on it. I didn't want to know who Tom Allen was, I wanted to use him to make myself important. I did not know that this way of using anoth¬er human being was contempt: as Eli Siegel defined, the "disposition in every person to think he will be for himself by making less of the out¬side world." And I didn’t know that this contempt was the reason, as time went on, I liked myself less and less. No matter how much I said, "I'm not worried a bit," I was worried. By the time I met Aesthetic Realism when I was 2l, though I would tell myself to stop it, I was driven to flirt with and conquer men.

I learned from Aesthetic Realism the one reason this way of going after power made me dislike myself: it was a substitute for the real power: being able to know and to like, and to have a good effect on the world. When I first read this in Self and World by Eli Siegel, I began to see a new and kind possibility for myself:

"We want to be praised, to have power, but we also want to deserve this. There is such a thing as the ethical unconscious. Well, if we praise ourselves and we know we have been unfair to outside reality in doing so, there is a nervous conflict in us....To love ourselves really, we have to love and want to know outside reality; that is, the outside form of ourselves, or the world."

Nowhere else--not in any psychology or sociology course or college I attended--did I learn that true power, good power, begins with the desire to be know the world. I learned there was something larger I wanted, and every woman wants: to like her purpose with the world, to like how we think about and see the depths of things and people, not to capture a man.

From the beginning, Mr. Siegel spoke to me about power. He asked:

Eli Siegel. You have had people affected and not been affected yourself?

D. Tarrow. Yes.

Eli Siegel. Do you feel you hurt people?

D. Tarrow. Yes.

Eli Siegel. Are you a mingling of tenderness and harshness? Do they give you trouble?

D. Tarrow. Yes.

And he said:

"To conquer reality is the most stupid, bourgeois, loathsome thing you can do. It is not to be conquered, it is to be seen. The desire of people deeply or unconsciously is to see the world. The world is waiting to be known, not to be conquered."

This is magnificent. I had loathed myself because I wanted to conquer the world, not to know it. When Eli Siegel criticized my way of seeing the world, my whole life took a new, fairer direction. "A problem in life," Mr. Siegel said, "is how to have the power we want without hurting ourselves. Practice this line," he said, "'Have a daffodil, he bellowed!'" This sentence puts together opposites that were the cause of such pain in me: harshness and tenderness, force and delicacy, affecting and being affected.

When I learned to be affected by who a person is, to want to know and have a good effect, I felt for the first time I had a power that made me proud to be alive. I love Eli Siegel for this. I still remember practically the first time I actually listened to what another person was saying, didn't try to overpower them, and thought about what I might say that could be useful. I was able to be honestly affected by a man, to want to learn from him, and this has made possible my marriage to Aesthetic Realism consultant Jeffrey Carduner. And I was able to have a good effect on the lives of women we have the privilege to teach in Aesthetic Realism consultations.

II. Good and Bad Power Is Personal and International

In 1960 Americans heard the voice of Miriam Makeba singing Jikele Maweni on her first record album. When people heard her sing, it was the first time most had heard a South African person. She showed as she sang this song about Zulu warriors having to retreat, as she sang a wedding song, a hunt¬ing song, that South African people were real, had feelings, like the people of America. She also told of the hideous, political and economic system apartheid under which millions of native South Africans were forced to live by a white, powerfully armed minority. As she sang, and as she wanted to bring the reality of her people's suffering to the whole world, she had the good power we want to have, as Mr. Siegel said, to "make the...world in which the power takes place more beautiful." Aesthetic Realism makes clear how Miriam Makeba's life can be used to understand two kinds of power in every person, and to make the choice for justice that is an emergency for every person and nation. In l970, Eli Siegel said there is a force working now to have the profit system, by which one man uses another man to make profit for himself: "Good will is the most powerful thing in the world; it's more powerful than General Motors, Allied Chemical, and AT&T." Miriam Makeba's life is part of that power of good will working now.

She was born Zenzi Makeba, March 4, 1932 in Johannesburg, her father of the Xhosa, her mother of the Swazi tribes. Her peoples had lived in southern Africa for centuries as herdsman and farmers: "We lived in harmony with the land for so long," she writes in her new book Makeba: My Story, "we had no reason to think this har¬mony would not last forever. Ours was a marriage, a love affair the land would nurture us, and we would honor the land." But in 1652, the Dutch East India Company, and later the British, with superior weapons, brutally took the land away from the original South Africans.

Miriam Makeba saw what Eli Siegel described in lines of the poem printed in the international periodical THE RIGHT OF AESTHETIC REALISM TO BE KNOWN 787, "Slick Dishonesty, Executive, Will Be There":

"South Africa, with your denying that Africans are entirely human, what have you to do with a geographically felicitous Africa?
South Africa its miles, its fallings, its waters, its loftiness is badly covered by those ruling it, seeing the earliest Africans there as not persons."

Miriam Makeba's family, friends, teachers were seen as "not persons." Mr. Siegel defined fascism as "the unwillingness to understand as power." This is the state of mind made nationally murderous, that, in a less dramatic way, I saw I had in myself towards fellow human beings. South Africa was ruled by a white English minority until, in 1947, the Dutch Afrikaner Nationalist Party won "national" elections (whites only allowed to vote), and then began "apartheid" or aparthood. She writes of a night in the 1940s when she was staying with cousins: her father had died and her mother worked in Johannesburg and could not keep her child with her. It was at a time when men were required to carry "passbooks":

"The darkness is shattered by a loud banging on the door....the white policeman force their way inside. "Pass!" they shout....One of my uncles does not produce his passbook quickly enough to satisfy one young policeman....The youth curses my uncle and slaps him. My cousin...has to watch his father be humiliated....My uncle has to take the humiliation....Sometimes people are taken away and are never seen again....So my uncle swallows the insults, and his son watches, and learns, and remembers....I am learning a lot about the way the world is for us."

Aesthetic Realism shows a child has a choice to make about how to use what she sees: will she like the world or dislike it, will she find her power in going out to meet things and try to know them, or to go into herself and say this world is not good enough for her? Miriam Makeba saw the greatest horror: people seen, as Mr. Siegel said, as less than human, and she had to do something about it. Whereas my way of power had been to assert myself in a world I didn't like, it seems Miriam Makeba's way was to retreat from it. I was affected that she said over and over in her autobiography that she who could sound like she did in "Jikele Maweni" was shy. "I am very shy by nature," she writes, "except when I sing, then watch out!" She also was known for her very soft voice and recessive manner. I believe as a little girl Zenzi had a tendency to want both to go out to understand this world, and also to retreat into herself. Mr. Siegel so beautifully understood how a woman can feel in his great essay, "A Woman is the Oneness of Aesthetic Opposites":

"Towards something is in the feminine mind importantly: the future as outward and to be visited and had. But how much retreat is in woman, too, the unseen sinking, the leaving for a previously chosen background."

How much "unseen sinking" has been in Miriam Makeba, I do not know, and it is a miracle at all that anyone was able to bear what the South Africans did. Yet, women have been confused about how to use what they have met, and this has been talked about in Aesthetic Realism consultations. I’m grateful, and the women who study Aesthetic Realism are, because Aesthetic Realism wants to know and understand what they have undergone as they have met actual prejudice and inhumanity. Women have been criticized and passionately en¬couraged to use what they have met to know this world, to value what truly has value, and to fight for justice. The Three Persons spoke to Alicia Young of Chile, whose family had been through agony as rulers of her country tried to protect the profit system. Her grandfather was jailed and never seen again. Though she had a quiet, sweet man¬ner and voice, inside herself she was superior and furious. She was also very against herself. She said "I'll welcome my relation to the world only if it brings me some peace." My consultation trio, The Three Persons, asked her:

TTP. Do you want to feel so disgusted with the world, you can just go into yourself.

A. Young. Yes, I know it isn't right. But I say people are never as nice as I am back! Why do I do that?

TTP. Do you think there is a victory in that?

Alicia Young. Yes, I think there is. What is the victory?

TTP. Do you think there is anything better for you than what is named Alicia Young? Are you superior and within yourself?

A. Young. Yes!

The Three Persons. Do you think you show an opinion of the whole world in your soft voice you're a nice girl and everything else is terrible?

A. Young. Yes.

Mr. Siegel asked me, a girl different from Miss Young and Miriam Makeba, if I was always going to sound like a little girl lost in a forest? I saw I got a bad kind of power this way. Alicia Young began to see she had used what she had met to feel she was superior to everything. The way this had showed itself in her was by being, as Mr. Siegel said in a line of poetry, in her "own majestic booth." Once she saw this, she began to change. She saw there was a greater power she wanted much more: to be able to know and like the world.

There was something in Zenzi Makeba too that wanted so deeply to like this world, and it was in how she felt about music. She studied music in school, sang in the church chorus. She writes about herself at the age of 10, watching the Bapedi people dance:

"Music is a type of magic...It can make sad people happy. It can make dull people sit up and pay attention...Music gets deep inside me and starts to shake things up....The Bapedi stomp and sing out in the field, and there I am, on the edge, singing with them, apart from them but sharing their joy. Who can keep us down as long as we have our music?"

In his book SELF AND WORLD, Eli Siegel gives the great and beautiful
explanation of what was happening inside Zenzi Makeba that would have her sing in such a way that the whole world was moved:

"Through merging with things, the artist has become deeply independent. In feeling things he has controlled them and been controlled by them. He has come to power by undergoing the might of things and giving them form through his personality."

III. She Finds Her True Power

In 1953, the Manhattan Brothers, a popular black singing group in South Africa, heard her and asked her to join them. In 1959, she appeared in an anti government film, "Come Back, Africa," made secretly by an English filmmaker. Makeba was allowed to visit and sing in America, sponsored by Harry Belafonte. But when she applied for her visa to return home, her passport was stamped "Invalid." She has never been able to return to her homeland.

Here she was, a new celebrity: she could have gotten power by continuing simply to be, as she herself says, "the darling of the newsmagazines and the music industry." Instead she made a choice, to have a good and strengthening effect on people. At a time when the Civil Rights Movement was just beginning and there was cruel opposition to it, at a time when no one knew what was going on in South Africa, much less protested it, and in South Africa without fear of death Miss Makeba began to speak out, to have a kind of power she never had before. In 1963, she spoke for the first time at the United Nations:

“My country has been turned by the Verwoerd Government into a huge prison....I must urge the United Nations to impose a complete boycott of South Africa. The first priority must be to stop the shipments of arms. I have not the slightest doubt that these arms will be used against African women and children."

Miriam Makeba was doing that which every person, every woman, wants deeply to be able to do: to stand honestly, passionately for justice, to make the world more beautiful. She writes of what she felt to herself at that time:

"Miriam Makeba is no longer just an African singer. I am a symbol of my repressed people. To be in such a position is to live with a great responsibility. It is as if I am more than myself."

IV. A Woman Learns What Her Truest Power Is

It gives me great pleasure to say a little of what has happened to Alicia Young's life because it shows the enduring power of Aesthetic Realism. Through her study, she has seen how she has hurt herself feeling other people could never understand her, weren't good enough for her, and that she should go within herself. But she saw what was in this: we asked her, "Do you think there is a power in being recessive?" "Yes," she said. The Three Persons, in a consultation, asked her to make a wide gesture with her arms, something Eli Siegel had asked a young woman to do in an Aesthetic Realism lesson, and say, "All you out there I want to know you!" She did it, and it was lovely.

TTP. Write every day something someone does you respect. You don't see the victory yet in having a good effect on other people. But it is your greatest ambition.

Miss Young was a woman who would cross the street in order to avoid meeting a man. As she studied the opposites in men, she began to see men with more thoughtful respect. We asked: "Do you want to conquer a man and use him to make a secluded world for yourself, or do you want to know a man who is interested in truth, including the truth about you?" "Truth," she said. One of the reasons I hope Miriam Makeba studies Aesthetic Realism, is because of the hopes and the pain she has had about love. I believe her marriage of 10 years to Stokely Carmichael was part of her desire for good power because he had an energy for justice that I think she felt strengthened her, made her more passionate.

But when she married Stokely Carmichael, Miriam Makeba was blacklisted by the music business. She met terror that justice might come to all people in America. But she didn't stop her marriage they moved to Guinea at the kind invitation of its president Sekou Toure. Yet I think there was pain with her husband she didn't have to have.

Ms. Makeba should be able to know that her deepest questions and her deepest hopes are answered in the art she loves. Eli Siegel stated "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves." I believe this is what we hear as Miss Makeba sang the South African national anthem, in the Paul Simon Graceland Tour in Zimbabwe. She has beautiful power as she merges with thousands of others, calling for the freedom of all Africans. She both sinks and rises as she sings: she yields to join with others and then asserts herself to sing one verse. Aesthetic Realism beautifully shows, that as she puts opposites together singing here, she is answering her deepest question, and every person's deepest hope about how to have good power.

I want her to know of what Ellen Reiss wrote in TRO 787:

"The force of ethics working through years has brought things to such a point that the contemptuous use of man for profit, the contemptuous ownership of the earth by only some people, can no longer function....South Africa will be owned differently in keeping with this statement, mighty and true, from Eli Siegel's Self and World: 'The world should be owned by the people living in it. Every person should be seen as living in a world truly his.'"

People throughout the world have the need and right to know their deepest hope is to make stronger and more beautiful every person and the whole world. Alicia Young wrote: "I want to be in the world liking it, and using myself to have other people like the world. If I can accomplish this my life will have the meaning I want it to have."