the abuse of saudade

it's just me and the memories. there is no one around already. me and a screen full of memories. i was watching hip hop honors tonight because of tribe called quest. there were many great other acts, whodini especially but tribe broke my heart. they were my true love 15 years ago. on the video where they talk about how they came to be, phife and q-tip were on opposite sides. they brought back jarobi. he was on like one and a half albums but he was around in the beginning. phife looked run down. he looked ill. i didn't know what was going on with him. it killed me. to me he grew stronger with every album. q-tip was always the lead but phife held it up. and then from what i understand they fell out. that is the story of so many lives, so many i know, so many lives that crossed with mine.

when they got onstage it was excellent. phife seemed energetic, they were ready to go. they did it, they were alive and performing. i don't think they've been on a stage together in a decade, way more if you count that jarobi was there. i think he came back just to help hold them up. i rhymed along but i was stifling tears.

in the middle of it, i was thinking about this word that has been abused quite a bit lately by a few writers. inkaquatic knows. saudade. she says sow-dah-d, like cesaria evora and i say sow-dah-gee the way i learned in the gajillion brazilian songs i've heard and in rio thirteen years ago. there have been some writers that we respect, black american writers, that can overromanticize the romance languages and then call spics overly sentimental. well, the first i learned of the possibility of such abuse was from a black brazilian friend who was so close to me and now is a memory, like an image on a screen. she, fifteen years ago, was sick of the romance that americans, black and white alike, made of the world south, of the tongue south. she and i, like tip and phife, like me and a few great inspirational friends, have gone our ways and i see that saudade is more than nostalgia or romance or illusion, it's regret. it's shame and loss and hurt. it's someone else's and it's very mine. it's very hers and his, my friends who are not anymore. who exist in some other dimension, on some street of cracked concrete in brooklyn, on some dirt road on a mountain in brazil, going on in their own universe, as i go on in my own. the romance word is not to be abused. it's to be whispered to yourself in front of a screen like a memory, to reconstitute the disembodied you, the collapsed memory of us.