Page 129 - Esquire - USA (Winter 2020)

THE HENDRIX OF have been a fan, too. “He would have been
THE SAHARA
smoke and a sickly rumble. “It’s supposed
to be this cool motorcycle, and it’s just like
shit,” says Kirkley, who had to resort to
overdubbing a more badass engine roar.
Dust storms kept swirling out of nowhere,
blanketing the sky and equipment with dirt.
Electricity would go out for hours at a time.
Cast and crew would show up late for scenes,
if they showed up at all. Though Moctar rel-
ished the opportunity to act, shooting the
same scene over and over again felt madden-
ing. “I have to say everything ten times!” he
recalls. “That makes me so tired.” By the last
day of the shoot, Kirkley felt “on the verge
of a breakdown” and appealed to Moctar
for help. “Dude, listen,” he said. “Nobody’s
taking this seriously. If you really want to
make this movie, you need to do this stuff.”
Moctar, who’d taken to calling him “little
brother” as a sign of affection, told Kirkley
not to worry. “I’m sorry, little brother,” he
said, and he made sure they finished shoot-
ing the film on schedule.
When they eventually screened the
movie outdoors in Agadez, the audience
applauded so loudly they could barely
hear the words onscreen. The film never
reached theaters, but it garnered praise at
festivals around the world. The Village
Voice called it “a striking, gentle bliss-out of
a feature.”
It’s a clear, starry night in September at
Industry City, an outdoor venue near the
East River in Brooklyn, as Moctar and his
band play onstage, with Kirkley watching
proudly along with the crowd. Moctar’s
wearing a silvery blue robe, a long white
tagelmust, and a low-slung electric guitar
as he shreds through a song from his new
record, Ilana: The Creator, which has been
earning fans and acclaim. Lisa Coleman,
of Wendy and Lisa, the iconic duo from
Prince’s band, the Revolution, who played
on the original Purple Rain, says she’s not
sure if Prince got to see or hear Moctar
before he died, but she thinks he would
THE NIGHT THE CAPITOL
just as blown away as everyone by his play-
ing,” she says.
In the years since Moctar and Kirkley’s
film release, the desert-blues brothers have
enjoyed their own version of a Hollywood
ending. Kirkley’s label has released sev-
eral records by Moctar, as well as by a host
of others from the region, including Abdal-
lah Ag Oumbadougou, the man Moctar saw
playing guitar for the first time in the desert
as a child.
Though Moctar hasn’t broken through
wide yet, he now tours around the world,
meeting people and going to places he’d
never imagined before. After growing up
without any musical influences beyond the
Sahara, he’s catching up on artists like Hen-
drix and his newly discovered favorite. “I
love Eddie Van Halen!” he tells me after the
show. “When I see him on YouTube, I never
see anyone play like this!”
For Moctar and Kirkley, the joy of their
success comes from the power of music
to bring disparate people together. It’s
one of the reasons Moctar wears his tradi-
tional garb onstage. “I do that because I’m
Tuareg,” he says the next day as he, Kirk-
ley, and I drive down to Philadelphia for his
next gig, “and I need all the time to show
what I am, what is my culture.”
As we’re bumping along the highway,
Kirkley says, “I think it’s important to have
more representations of Islam like this.”
Moctar goes on, “You’re going to have
very nice people in black people, and then
you’ve got to have very nice people in white
people. What do you get when you mix
them together? It’s the beauty.”
Their collaboration continues to bear
fruit. Kirkley, who’s now married to
Antunes, with two young children, is still
releasing records from Tuareg rockers, such
as the riveting, female-led guitar band Les
Filles de Illighadad. He’s also prepping
another Tuareg film, this time cowritten by
and starring one of Moctar’s bandmates,
guitarist Ahmoudou Madassane. The con-
ceit: a Tuareg homage to Titanic, in which
Madassane and friends, driving across the
Sahara, break down after hitting a boulder.
Moctar wants to do more acting, too,
along with making music. When he’s not
touring, he lives in Niger with his wife and
two kids. Though his mother still hasn’t
come around to his music, he’s proud to
support her and the rest of his family. He’s
also building a school for girls, in hopes that
kids like his own will have more options for
realizing their dreams than he did. At the
end of the show in Brooklyn, he holds up his
Stratocaster and smiles at the crowd. “My
guitar!” he tells them, raising it above his
head. “She says hi!”
DID NOT SLEEP
(continued from page 54)
from which impeachment of the president must
come. Minds changed, heads turned. Around
7:00 on the night of September 25, Represen-
tative Sharice Davids, Democrat of Kansas, an-
nounced that she would support the impeach-
ment inquiry. Davids was the 218th member
of Congress to announce her support, a signif-
icant number because 218 votes is a majority
in the House, and any article of impeachment
that receives 218 votes will be sent to the Sen-
ate for trial. Twenty minutes later, Congress-
man Al Lawson, Democrat of Florida, became
the 219th.
The next morning, acting director of na-
tional intelligence Joseph Maguire testified
before the House Intelligence Committee.
Maguire was there to explain why the ad-
ministration had not transmitted the whis-
tleblower’s complaint to Congress as it ordi-
narily would be required to, and why instead
he had taken the complaint to the White
House lawyers. Maguire pleaded executive
privilege. The White House had put him in
a box, and now the Democrats in the House
were bent on keeping him there. Two days be-
fore, in that hallway of the Capitol, in front of
those six American flags, and framed in that
thin arc of sunlight, Nancy Pelosi had made
that much clear.
Everything that’s happened since—the in-
creasing focus on Rudy Giuliani and his two
henchmen, the president’s capitulation in
Syria, the hysterical activities of the House
Republican caucus, the president’s constant
lying and fantastical rhetoric, even the un-
timely death of House Oversight Committee
chairman Elijah Cummings—has been part
of the same story, because all of the crimes
and all of the sleaze are now part of the same
massive, poisonous growth, an absolute unit
of unprecedented corruption. It will be a
long time before night falls around the Capi-
tol in the usual way. Right now, with the win-
ter’s dark closing in, at the end of the work-
ing day, it goes right into being an unquiet
tomb, where a democratic republic is coming
to realize how deep the rot has set.
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