Victoria Chang: Wait. How could it only be personal?
Fela Kuti: I don’t want to say until I’ve done it.
Chang: To not force anything, but to just let things be and coexist with no explanation.
Kuti: I decided to try to not play games, not read books, and just try to let the time go and see whether I could conquer boredom that way—try not to think, if possible, think only of the future, if possible, think of the past, then remix it toward the future.
Chang: But what do we have left?
•••
Kuti: So I have nothing to fear.
Chang: I don’t, as you know, have much time.
Kuti: I didn’t care about the consequences.
Chang: It made me begin to wonder about the asynchronous aspect of grief.
Kuti: You know, this is very colonial.
•••
Chang: So I am from somewhere else, but that somewhere else doesn’t exist.
Kuti: I don’t want anyone to say I’m telephoning the CIA in secret [laughs sardonically].
Chang: In fact, I feel as if that is all we are here for sometimes. Nothing is really ours.
Kuti: I had some new songs that I played in my head, but I wasn’t able to write them.
Chang: Then I put them at the end of the manuscript, along with the rest of these horrible form poems.