Photo Carina Musk-Andersen

Mari Boines newest release has become a special and strong CD that is characterized by hope and profit.

Boine chooses the light and the joy

Oslo (ANB-NTB):

The red-billed tern flies all the way to Antarctica. Mari Boine came no further than South-Africa.

Published 22.08.2009 14:07h. Updated 22.08.2009 14:07h.

Over there, in Stellenbosch she recorded het new album «Sterna Paradisea», what is the Latin name for the Arctic tern, to which the young Mari looked furtively around every spring, because it travels the farthest of all birds – and flies back to the south when the summer nears its end.

- Almost all of my albums are recorded in Oslo, in the coldest period. I said to my band, «now we move to a warm region», she says. And tells how two of the melodies were written in velvet soft nights underneath the starry sky – including the title song.

– When I was young, I waited every spring for this bird; I stood on a gravel beach near our home. The tern arrives simultaneously with the midnight sun, that's why the Sami title of the song is «Cuovgga Áirras», which means 'the message of the light', Mari Boine tells.

On thing is that she herself has an urge to travel. Another is that she definitely chooses the light herself, she says to NTB:

Dances

– I went trough a period where everything was dark for myself, and I looked ahead only a little. Then I decided to hang on to the little light. There is enough darkness in the world. I expressed the anger I had and every now and then I sing the angry songs. But I'd rather hold the light, like a flame one has to blow air to, so it will not die out.

At the cover picture of «Sterna Paradisea» Mari Boine dances in the nature smiling, with an embroidered hart on her chest. She smiles a bit and says that at the choice of the picture she thought - «there I dance on the cover while the world is close to come to grief».

– I want to hold to joy and light. Obama won the elections because he held the hope high for the people. The media focus at the negative, think of what that does to the young people. If I would have been young, I would be terrified. But I don't want to die before I'm dead, I said – and to me it is dying if I stop hoping and believe in the light and the love.

Nice and painful

With that Mari Boines newest album, that will be released on Monday, has become a special and strong CD that is characterized by hope and also profit. She took her regular musicians – Georg Buljo, Gunnar Augland, Ole Jørn Myklebust and Svein Schultz, who is also the producer, with her to South-Africa. Down there they met Madosini Mangina together with a 12 strong man choir, Abaqondisi Brothers.

– From the moment I heard Paul Simons record «Graceland», I had a dream to get the deep, African voices on a CD, Mari Boine says.

The stay in South-Africa was at the same time a nice and a painful experience for her.

– It was painful to see the class difference that is still present. The song «Ipmilin hálešteapmi - Conversation With God» is a response to what I saw there and to what I've seen before in the third world. Why will children suffer?

Frightened

When the recordings in South-Africa were finished in December last year, Mari invited all collaborators for a big party.

– The whites didn't show, the blacks did. Several of them worked in the hotel where we stayed and sat at a table there for the first time. Things go slow. They also do in Finnmark. Maybe it is a bit like in South-Africa over there, that one wants the lowest in rank to stay like that?

Because Mari Boine got a bit of a fright the latest months from the debate that has been at the side of the Sami radio. To her – an acknowledged success, world artist and recently appointed professor in music that will soon, as first Samoyed, will receive the Anders Jahres Kulturpris – some things are easy to forget.

– In the months I followed the debate, I see the world moving forward a bit, and backwards far. It reminds me of the years 60 and 70, there is a lot of stirring and frustration towards the Samoyedic. Maybe Norwegians feel forgotten by the government? That they are so frustrated by their own life that they blame others? Maybe I should talk about their case, she says with mild irony.

Became grandmother

– Michael Moore shows in his movies how the fear for «the other» increases, it becomes a fear spiral. We all have that potential in us. In South-Africa we noticed the fear between the whites and the blacks. But if we all get scared, then the solidarity and the love, yes, the humanity, has lost.

When it concerns the acknowledgement and the respect she herself has reached, she says that that means most, that it can be an encouragement for others.

- The most important to me is that a nation has a pride.

At the personal level a new little person has become the most important to Mari Boine in the mean time:

– I became a grandmother, five months ago. I never believed I would be this silly! (ANB-NTB)

Source: http://www.helgeland-arbeiderblad.no/underholdning/article4533376.ece