Gastón: It seems like music had, and still has, a paramount role in bringing together people who suffered immense cultural fractures.

Souleymane: I would almost say that it is the element that saved us from total dispersion. There were two very serious problems as a result of slavery, which have been solved by music, or at least music has shown the way to solve them. Whether or not people choose to use that road is another thing, but the road is there. The first one is family separation. Families, like cultures, were divided. The father was taken to New Orleans, the mother to Jamaica, and the son to Cuba. Same for those who remained in Africa. We lost the experience of a life within a family structure. Those who were taken as slaves and the few of us who remained had another type of community organization for three hundred years, based not on the family but on leaving home. So many blacks in the U.S.—and in many other regions such as Guadeloupe—follow a kind of dynamic without knowing why, in which the man leaves the home. It does not matter if he is happy with his wife and sons, if he works, has a brother, or ten children; he still must go. It is a cultural impulse that comes from slavery, an ancient memory. The second product of slavery is the existence of the mulatto. Black crossbreeds were inevitably children of improper relationships between the white master and a black slave, the result of rape, and that has produced an intermediate race that was not accepted from the beginning by either whites or blacks. Even in the sixties Billy Holiday could not go to a hotel for whites, because she was mulatto, but she could not go either to the hotel for blacks because she was not black enough. Music has partly solved these two major dilemmas that even today afflict the black communities in America and Africa.

Gastón: How does it do that?

Souleymane: The music brought us all together: the orphan, the fatherless, the mulatto, the single mother, because in music if you sing and play the rhythm, you speak the language. You are part of the tradition, regardless of your skin color; you either play or don’t. In blues, jazz, and Afro-Cuban music, there has been a coming together of African rhythms, Western harmonies, Spanish melodies, Arab and Christian melodies. The music, in this sense is a very serious thing; it is not entertainment. It can be as important as a religion, as a philosophy. Like a doctrine, which brings together a community, not by fanaticism but by its power of congregation. It can resolve irreconcilable problems. Obviously, we have understood what happened also with the help of history, anthropology, philosophy, and literature, and this has made it possible to have a process of recovery of the memories lost over three hundred years.

Barcelona, March 25, 2011