Fatoumata Diawara Still Finds Solace In Her Music

The first time I ever met Fatoumata Diawara, it was entirely by accident. I was in the lobby of Novotel, a chic, upscale hotel in the heart of Abidjan, waiting to interview a few artists performing at this year’s FEMUA, where she was a headliner. When Diawara made her way into the lobby, it took me a minute to realize it was her. On stage and in her music, Diawara offers a fierce, powerful version of herself. She is fiery, combining dance with energy, energy with strong socio-cultural messaging that isn’t afraid to offend, and messaging with intensely grounded musicality. Yet up close, Diawara is a calm, majestic presence. She responds warmly when I greet her and agrees to take a photo with me. From afar, she could pass for a stately woman out to enjoy a simple lunch. 

She had just come off a run at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, barely six months after performing in South Africa at Joy of Jazz. There, she moved through transformations on stage — a guitar maverick, a vocal powerhouse, a masked doyenne dancing her way toward freedom. She sported the same beads and isicholo (the Zulu women's headdress) she wears in the video for “Djanne,” and carried a coolness that filled the auditorium.

I met with Diawara again a few weeks later. This time, we are merely voices over a virtual call. Diawara is back in Italy, where she leads an intentionally secluded life in the mountains. Like the first time I met her, Diawara is also a calm, easygoing presence. Her latest album Massa — out now via the label NØ FØRMAT! — was only a few weeks away, but she was already feeling the fatigue of promotions, tours, and performances. 

“On stage, you give a lot. So when you come back home, you just want to be by yourself and your family, and that's it. Eating African food. You start recharging your energy for the next show,” she reflects. 

Yet, behind the cool, calm, self-assured exterior we encounter on stage, in music videos, and in interviews lies an intensely guarded, private individual. Diawara was born into a polygamous Malian family — her father had four wives and twenty-five children — and from early on, she understood herself as marked out within it; a black sheep who didn't quite fit the mold. Yet her father saw her and made room to treat her as singular and unique. 

"He always treated me like a special baby," she recalls. "Even if he had four wives and we are like twenty-five children, he had a time to treat me as a very special child." He was the person she called about her dreams. He was, in her words, her best friend.

His death unsettled a critical aspect of her life and derailed the small recognition his presence once held in place. "Since my father passed away, it's getting worse, because he was the one who could understand who I am properly when I was a kid," she says. Without him, the family's perception of her has no shield, just a force pushing against her being. "I [don’t feel] understood by my family," she continues. "They treat me with no respect, like an animal sometimes. And it is sad for an artist."

So, solitude helps. She has put a literal mountain and an entire ocean between them: to keep her grounded, to protect her peace, to shield her from the more unsavory aspects of proximity to family members. "There's nobody here," she says of her home. "The children go to school, so I'm alone. No noise, no cars. Only nature is very deep. Far from everything." 

Diawara does not call friends. She prays. She cooks Malian food. She talks to her mother, but only briefly. From that literal and proverbial mountain, she writes songs about wanting to come home. She also lives in the contradiction: of wanting distance, yet desiring connection; of missing her foundation, yet actively resisting the impermanence of its dictates. 

"I've got that ‘stranger’ feeling with my family," she says, "but at the same time I'm always talking about how to be connected with the family. That's strange. It's a big fight. I still have to believe — to love." 

The Healing Method 

Music is where all the grief, the heaviness, and the dislocatedness find a home. It’s where the feelings of un-belonging, of being an outsider, find their abode — a dwelling minted in guitar riffs and pop melodies and desert blues and Malian folksongs and folktales. MASSA explores themes of faith and motherhood; of healing and resistance; of the mundane and the supernatural. With French producer, -M-, handling production duties, the result is a staggering accomplishment, a mantle that atones for our wrongs and celebrates our rights. 

Album opener “Djanne” draws from the same well of funk that informed Daft Punk’s work with Nile Rodgers; “Sigui” takes the feeling of traveling the long path and distills it into a bluesy cut about connectedness and belonging. 

“The song makes me cry every day, because sigui means living in a big family. You know, like four wives all living in the same house, and that tension on the children. My brother said, 'You won't see an artist at your age talking about this kind of subject — the polygamous family — and talking about it so directly, with no filter'," she tells OkayAfrica.  

Diawara is careful not to hand her audience her sadness raw. She has a method, worked out over years of touring, for what songs are supposed to do once they leave the studio. 

As she tells OkayAfrica: "When I'm writing the songs, even if the meaning is very painful, I will always think of my audience. I say, okay, you are not going to go on stage by complaining only about problems. Keep talking about your deeper feelings, but in a positive way, because people should dance to your problems. Then your show becomes a hospital. A therapy."

Diawara has watched, with growing impatience, as a generation of African artists has converged on a single sound, a single language, a single template that travels well across platforms, and this is why she insists on Bambara as a primary language.

"All the music is similar," she says. "You can listen to ten artists, the new generation, with the same beat. They go to the internet, they take the same beats. One will add maybe a different keyboard, and another one will add just a little guitar. That's all that they will bring as new."

The insistence carries an inherent trust in one’s audience that they will ‘feel’ the subject matter. "When you don't understand, you can imagine anything. You can fly, you can dream, you can really feel the ancestors from the voice of the artist," she says.

This well-worn theory has been tested across every continent her tours have taken her to. In Cape Town, as in Johannesburg, she was one with the audience, vibrating at the same frequency, existing in similar liminal spaces and dissimilar linguistic registers. 

"You can study, you can speak great English, or French, or Chinese. But when you're speaking in your native language, you are somebody else," she concludes.