Laíz

TRANSCRIPT

It is, in general, I feel like it's like the spirit, whatever it is, that you take with you, doesn't matter where you go. We are born with nations on our backs and we have to carry this nation, whatever it is. At this point, my nation became 20 nations. I've worked so much that I encounter so many that it changed what it is. But we have to carry this, like a backpack. It becomes this invisible friend that you just have – that it can be translated into music, but also translated into arts, in general, or literature, or whatever it can come out, you know, as.

So hi, my name is Laíz. I'm 25 years old, and I am my M.C. from Brazil... also a visual artist. And I am now based in Germany. And I started migrating when I was 14, back and forth.

I left my home in Jundiai, Sao Paulo. When I was 14, I went to Berlin for a year. And after that, I followed to move to the United States. And then I came back to Brazil for another year. Then I was like, I was 18 back then. I was like, “Okay, what do I do? Do I stay? Do I go?” And then I ended up going back to Berlin. So I had two arrivals in Berlin. It's a bit complicated story.

Brazilian music, especially from the 60s, because of the big dealership, music that was produced there, it was definitely written to save a country. It was written to save generations because they had a really big program of the funding of school systems to actually make people dumber, to not know their own history, so they don't have no agency of their lives. That's something that Brazil learned very well – to hide in rhythms and in wordings and in phrases or in dances, movements – things that are trying to be erased, you know. So since the colonial times, since the transatlantic trade, this happened in Brazil. And still today this is carried on with music, with rhythm, with lyrics, if they can be explicitly told, where people are retelling these stories that we were forbidden to say. And I feel like, from early on, beginning of what people call Brazil, it was very well understood that it is in rhythms and an image that we can hide history so it can be preserved.

That colonization is this box that locks you in that allows you to see nothing and know nothing. And the more you ask questions about things, the more history is going to show you why things are the way it is.

And I think I wouldn't be where I am right now, or doing the work I do, or even with the people that I do with, if I didn't look at my history to understand myself.

So I was raised in a Jehovah's Witness family, so I'm fourth generation Jehovah's Witness. And this is an American institution. What is an American take on Luther doing in Brazil? And why is my family there? Colonization.

They came to Brazil 'round about before dictatorship, and they used to come to my grand -granddad's house. Like, you know, the Sunday visit. Knocking on the door. But he wasn't so in it. However, my grandpa started to really go very deep into it. It was one of the elders in the church.

But the thing of the Jehovah's Witnesses is that even though you're not secluded in a town, or by physicality, you are secluded mentally. And you cannot have friends that are really outside from the religion. You cannot go to parties, you cannot go to parties, you cannot go to bars. But the whole community is there, your whole world is there, there is no world outside because outside world is bad.

Even in school it was very shameful to say that you're a Jehovah's Witness, because it is seen upon as bad and seen of like a cult.... And it is a cult. I was allowed to talk to people and I was allowed to have friends, but I couldn't attend birthday parties. I couldn't attend anything outside of school And I remember one day I got this invitation for a birthday and I got very happy. Because people usually wouldn't invite me so much because I wouldn't go anyways. Because you're supposed to say, “No. Thank you for your invitation, but I cannot go. My faith doesn't allow me to.” But what kid is gonna do that? No kid is gonna do that.

When I was seven, my mom, she decided to leave the religion and then she gave this decision up to me, because it's very ingrained in your head what is the consequences of such decision. If you do leave the church, or if you don't follow it, it means that you're not gonna go to the afterlife. And this life is only a waiting room for the afterlife. So in this life, you do nothing. You go to church, you do what you have to do. And then, you reborn again in the actual life. So that meant death, because you're not going to have an afterlife – which is the actual life. It's a bit confusing, but that's how it is.

For my seven year-old head, I feel like I had a pretty good understanding of death, because it was very, like, that was the thing that was taught three times a day, like multiple days a week. So I think I understood what death was – and it was not that type of death that is a silent nice death. It was very, very scary.

So I chose to still go to church, and she would pick me up, and she would drop me off. And I wouldn't even pay attention to what was happening. I was mostly drawing or dozing off. But the fact that I was in the building, it meant a lot. Like it meant... not dying.

So there was a huge transformation. My brother moved out. My mom divorced my dad. I lost contact with my dad. My family kind of exploded. So I wanted to get out. And my mom's dream was also always to to leave, you know, to do other things. So when she gave me a choice of here – this is the most important thing in her life which was the church – “what do you want to do about it?” So I think from that moment she kind of gave me the choice to choose, forever. So I feel like kind of her dream my dream got together. And at that time was 14 we managed to find a way for me to to leave. And one of this possibilities was Germany

And I don't know, I just said, “Yeah, let's go.” So we were, for one year, fighting really hard to get me to go. And that was a very stressful period. And then I remember my mom was saying, “You know, this is too much, this is too hard. You don't need to do this.” And I was like, “No, I really want to.”

It was kind of an exchange program, but a bit different, because where I lived, it wasn't really in Berlin, it was outside of Berlin. And I think because I was young, I didn't understand how hard it was... it got harder later.

But I had the luck of being in a class that had a Colombian dude and an Indian girl. So they would sit next to me and they would translate the whole class. And they would be really good friends. And this Colombian guy, I remember he told me, he was like, “You have six months to speak English and Spanish. After this, we're cutting you, and we're only gonna talk German to you.” So it was like, okay, I have six months to gather as many information as I can about this otherwise.... And it was cool.

So, you know, people make fun of me, but actually the fun taught me more. It was tough love. Tough love taught me language, because Germany is also tough language. And I feel like that was the beginning of me understanding that what it means to be foreigner in a place because “I'm definitely not fitting completely around here.”

And I never met an Indian person or a Colombian person in my lifetime before I was only around Brazilians. And now I had this input of two different cultures. I would eat at Indrani – that was her name – eat at her house a lot, and everything was different.

So tying it up together with, like, the decision that I had to make at seven that my mom made also, to redefine the world. If your preconception of the world that is given to you by family, or by the school that you attend to, or by the neighborhood that you live in – we all, I think, grew up with a preconceived notion of what world is. And mine was completely shattered. And I was trying to rebuild it the best way I could. I came to find comfort and also some sort of – how do you say – when you see yourself in another person, on people who are completely not from where I come from? So I feel like when I built my notion of world, there was many countries being represented there, and there was many people being represented there. And there was different cultures. Or the way you eat – So how do you have dinner? Is it with the bread? Is it with the knife? Is it a fork? Or is it with your hands? You know, everything was in it. So these little things they came up in my life very young, thank god, and I feel like that just makes sense. Also for the music that I do now that it is the way it is because that's just reflection of the worldview that is, I hope, actually, the most amount of world there is.

When I was 18, I came back to Berlin and I met very little Germans. It was mostly migrants, a lot of Sudanese, Syrians, Latinos – and I love that. Because I kind of wanted to be on other people's community – also my own – but I wanted to look what other people were doing, because it was the whole world in the city, and I just wanted to, yeah, I just wanted to see what the world looks like

I was always in love with culture. And I feel like culture, it's something very, very dear to me, because it kind of replaced the word god. It's the main thing in my life... like food. And like food, you need bread, water and culture.

So I realized I wanted to be in the music world. I always loved to rap, even though I didn't do it in front of other people, even though I was ditching a lot of class to learn lyrics and learn cadences. So I would get up in the morning, make a cup of coffee, listen to music, listen to Kendrick, and just try to understand – What did he do there? How does he sound like this? What is the thing that he does with the syllable? And then I would forget that I had to go to class, and just sit and learn. It was just something that very dear to me, more like a mental puzzle. What did this man do to sound like this?

And I started to just freestyle outside. And I would do it in a park. But something very funny would happen that I would freestyle in Portuguese, and somebody would come in freestyle in Arabic, and then somebody would come in freestyle in German, and we would not understand what each other is talking, but we would be very entertained and following along... and kind of very much understanding what was happening.

Then I met Pachakuti, which is one of the co-producers of the album. He's also a second generation migrant from Colombia. So we kind of bonded there, and he was brilliant musician, and he would jam, and I would jam with him. And I did it so much with him that when he was recording his second album, he was like, “Come to the studio. Come check it out what we're doing.” And I went and I met everybody. It was very chill. I was just drawing, mining my business. And then they were like, “Come on, Laíz! Hop on a mic! Do something!” And then I started I freestyle for an hour. So at some point I looked around and there was 10 dudes sitting around me, just like in awe. And that was a good moment.

And after that I was like, okay, maybe that's something I should actually think about taking to the studio and taking off the street and actually making something out of it.

And then short after that, young.vishnu, which was a guy who produced this album, he sent me a batch of 20 beats, and he was like, “Choose something.” And I chose. I made a track. I remember I called Pachakuti, and I was like, “You need to help me. What is a microphone? How do we plug in cables? What is this?” He came. He helped me, and I recorded my first track.

I sent it to a young.vishnu, and then he was like, “Okay. You know how to do this. Let's make a whole album.” And we're like, “Okay, let's go.” And that was, it was very natural, natural but also, you know, it's just life happening and you kind of take what it comes through you with curiosity.

I feel like every musician or every lyricist, they understand that it is also a mission not only to sing but to be an educator and they educate And I feel like most also of this understanding of world – because it was one thing for me to do my experiences, but to actually formulate it and think about it – it was music that taught me how to think about things that I was experiencing. And it was always something I could rest thought on. Like I said, music and I need it like I need the food.

The whole album touches a lot on very different things, but there's one song which is called Paranaue, and that one is the one that I feel like puts it way more clear what it is that it's being talked about. So it starts with a quote from Gabriel García Márquez's speech when he won the Nobel Prize for 100 Years of Solitude. And the speech, I think it broke my mind. It took me two months to calm down from listening to what he said because he starts the speech talking the story of our colonization and what he says is we live isolated in this very, very alone place where we can barely relate to other people because we are not giving the means to understand our lives or to translate our lives, even to understand what's going on. And that makes us in solitude. So it starts with that, and then we enter, which is like a war track. And I just go into it.

And I took a part of a book that was written in 1700. I found a book in the streets in Berlin, actually, and it's a Brazilian poetry book of the first indigenous writer of Brazil. I read it out loud and it was a rap. And it talks about a wanderous tribe – people who keep on walking, keep on wandering. And the fight that one has to do in order to walk, in order to fight, in order for the survival of, not only oneself, but the whole thing that you carry on your back. I start talking about this erasure of identity and this fight against the erasure that we have to do to understand ourselves as Brazilians, as humans in our history.

And I end the song saying that art can set you free and poetry can set you free and music can set you free from this war that goes on inside yourself, but only through a pirate path. Pirate path. You do it with your own boat, in your own time, with your own crew, outside of state, with your own laws, and hopefully navigating through a point that you choose to go. So yeah, that's how I try to do things also.

Putting this album together was, like I said from the beginning, things were natural. And I feel like we didn't go on the mission to bring all these people together. There was no thought in my head when we started that this needs to be a joint work of migrants. The people were already around us, like people from Madagascar, Colombia, Sudan, Germany, the Netherlands, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Colombia, Brazil, Australia and Algeria... there's so many. There's a lot, a lot there.

And I'm still young, but for me when I was more young, like 21 when I started this, 22, that was, you know, incredible. So the album, it's kind of the mirror of my early 20s, or of my whole migration history. Like I told you, like from Indirani who would take me to her house and would eat and they would translate the class and would help me out where I needed to go and finding a place that is my independent, independent of where I am or what society I am in.

The reason I want people to hear the album – even though you might not speak my language – is that hopefully it can make wheels turn inside your head and you can start asking questions of how this sound was made and who were the people who made this sound. And I feel like by listening to the album, maybe asking these questions, hopefully that can shine back to you when you can learn also something about yourself and about the place where we live. Because even though it is a Brazilian album made in Germany, it is also an album that comes all over the world, from as many countries as we're around us, and that might resonate.

And I have hope for a lot of things. I feel like the times that we're at right now are very polarized, and they're very one is against the other. And I hope, honestly, that my generation can take some steps back from this polarization and come back a little bit in history and really look through what people left us and make something out of it. And be able to sit with each other and talk and listen to good music, to go to the instruments, and go back to the dancing, and go back to the feeling free on the moment and that's what that's what I want. I want, like I say, coffee, bread and culture.

Life – that's how I do it.