Fatoumata Diawara
Sete means powerless ... It is the word for what a small girl is on the morning the older women come for her, and Fatoumata Diawara has now written that morning down twice ...
The first time was on her first record, in 2011, when she was new and could say anything ... Then she left it alone for a whole album ... "You have to go slowly with a society like Mali's," she said ... She was born in Ivory Coast to Malian parents, raised in Bamako, and ran away to France as a young woman to act, so she knows exactly how far a girl can run and how far she cannot ... When London Ko came, in 2023, made in London with Damon Albarn among the producers, she went back for it ... "I absolutely had to talk about it again," she said, "because it's a practice that's still going on" ...
What she put beside her own voice is a choir of children from Brooklyn ... the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, singing without instruments under them, a wall of young voices behind a Malian woman's guitar ... a griot's line, which is a line that carries news, set inside the harmony of a Western children's choir ... the children are the point ... they are the age she is singing about, and they are the ones singing back ...
She is not powerless now ... she has a guitar, a record made in London, and a room full of children who learned the song ... that is what the title is for ... to name the thing once more, out loud, so that it is a little less true ...