
Culture & Community | Arts & Culture | West Haven | Arts & Anti-racism | ArtsWest CT | Music Back Then Performance Theatre
Members of the Sudanese American Society of Connecticut. Lucy Gellman Photos.
At first, it was the slow, gentle footfalls of children that brought the audience to a hush, music sweeping over the room. A joyful, sharp trill went up from a table on one side of the room, and the sound of Sudanese waza and lyre became a river, flowing down the aisles. It was a prayer, a safe place to come home to, at a time when West Haven may have needed it most.
A sense of hard-fought resilience defined the second annual All Neighbors Day, a celebration of West Haven’s diverse and expanding cultural landscape held at the Music Back Then Performance Theater on Bull Hill Lane Saturday afternoon. As singer-songwriters, poets, musicians, culinary artists and culture-bearers gathered in the space, it became a balm for the moment, and a call to action for the months and years ahead.
“It was intentional to put it after the election this year,” said Elinor Slomba, president of the community arts nonprofit ArtsWest CT. “We wanted to create a container and let the contents emerge. But there is never a bad time to strengthen goodwill with your neighbors.”
“ArtsWest CT believes community is our way forward,” she later added.
Top: Slomba addresses attendees. Bottom: Jacqueline Torres of Izzy's Sugar Rush.
And throughout the day, that goodwill flowed through the theater, where the back room became a recognition of the need for—and strength of—multicultural community. As longtime West Havener and DJ Steve Wallace kept the sound in check, baker and mom Jacqueline Torres showed off cupcakes from Izzy’s Sugar Rush, a sweet new endeavor inspired by her two-year-old son, Israel.
Two years ago, Torres didn’t have a sense of West Haven as a town: she grew up “all over,” from Puerto Rico to Stamford to New Haven, and never felt rooted anywhere. When she made the move to West Haven, she was about to give birth, and wasn’t sure what it would mean to raise her son in a new town. She worried about their future, and didn’t yet know who she would meet.
It turned out that she had no reason to be nervous.
“I see a lot of cultures,” she said. “Here, you’re meeting new people, you’re meeting neighbors who you’ve never seen before. I love it.”
Top: Miriam Magalis Cruz teaches Antoinette Brim-Bell a few moves from the Middle Eastern Dance Academy of CT. Bottom: Torres' cupcakes.
Saturday, she brought along dozens of cupcakes representing different countries, with delicate, carefully piped frosting that stood in for flags from across the globe. In one, swirls of red and green buttercream created an homage to Sudan, a nod to a small bazaar from the Sudanese American Society of Connecticut across the room.
Cupcakes with green frosting and delicate fondant flowers were a nod to the Caribbean; white and red cupcakes became a look at Japan; a burst of sunshine yellow atop a chocolate cupcake became a love letter to Jamaica. Even Mexico got its own twist, with De La Rosa peanut candies pressed gently into ruffles of white frosting.
As drummers who had opened the afternoon cleared the stage, Slomba introduced Connecticut Poet Laureate Antoinette Brim-Bell not just as a wordsmith, but also as a neighbor and longtime champion of West Haven. Two years ago this winter, Slomba remembered, Brim-Bell helped carry “Poets Are Not A Luxury” at West Haven High School. Now, she is holding fast to that message that artists are vital to the very existence of community.
“I’m so happy to be here with you meeting my neighbors,” Brim-Bell said as she cradled a hard-bound notebook in her hands. “I think the timing is perfect, because what we need is each other.”
She turned to her poem “Sestina for the Night,” which she thinks of as reserved for heavy-hearted days, she said. In the piece, a form of poetry that goes back to 12th-century Europe, Brim-Bell writes of her anticipation for the night, itself a weighty thing that is as maligned as it is often misunderstood.
I await the night/When my tears might fall up to heaven/And become prayers that ask, seek, and knock in earnest hope/That daylight will bring relief, she read, and suddenly there were words for what so many in the room had likely been feeling. Moonflowers bloom intoxicating relief/Iridescent tendrils thread together, opal trumpets that herald the night—
As people listened, they could also see the singular, strange beauty that the night brings with it. Notes of vanilla drip onto jasmine bliss/and anoint our prayers, she read. We who labor/with so little recompense/Must endure each day’s sorrow/Whatever hunger, loss, or mourning bursts through.
Attendees stilled around the room, listening with a sort of reverence. Behind Brim-Bell, strings of white light glowed against the red and purple spots over the stage, almost church like. A drum kit sat quietly, unattended, beside her. Even at the back of the room, chef Maxine Bowden stopped for a moment, leaning forward as she listened.
Top: Ermenia Gaeta (at center) with her daughter, Mary Lou Gaeta, and her friend Edith Reynolds. Bottom: Maxine Bowden of Paradigm Events with her mom, LaQuinta Gonzales. The catering and cultural outfit, which launched formally in September (it soft launched at the beginning of this year) was a "long time coming," she said. Saturday, she served up a Caribbean-inspired menu as a tribute to her grandmother, who immigrated from Cuba at 14, and her own Jamaican background.
—Relief is reserved for the humble/The debased/Relief is for those who await the darkness to blot their sorrows on the rough sleeve of night, she continued. These many sorrows we carry in wallets, purses, and pill bottles each day/ In our bodies and minds—
When Brim-Bell left the stage minutes later, fellow artists and attendees kept that sense of wonder going. Speaking from both the stage and the audience, Slomba and social justice activist Elaine Kolb introduced the “Let's Get Together Translation Project,” which seeks to translate the chorus of Kolb’s 1978 poem “Let’s Get Together” into as many languages as possible.
As if on cue, Ermenia Gaeta and Esraa Khild took the stage one at a time, to read the chorus in Italian and then Arabic. At a table nearby, Sisters With A New Attitude (SWANA) Founder Deborah Elmore listened as she showed off a display of items from different countries in Africa, which have helped her feel more connected to her roots. A
s a first-time participant, she praised the festival as helping to bring the community together.
Top: "I just need to say, we all need to recognize each other," Elaine Kolb said through tears, describing the song "Let's Get Together" as a gift that came to her a year after an accident left her with a physical disability. "At this point in time to have all that's going on in the world today and have this moment ... our differences are interesting. Let's appreciate that we really are in this together." Bottom: Deborah Elmore.
She was far from the only one. Translating for a group from the Sudanese American Society, longtime Connecticut resident Abdul Nassar Mahmoud said that events like All Neighbors Day help to teach community members about each other.
“We are here to share our culture, absorb other cultures, to get known in the whole community of West Haven,” his hands dancing over a table heavy with falafel, basta, baklava and carafes of gongolez or baobab juice and hibiscus tea. “We are spreading our culture, dance, language … spreading community.”
“We have a huge community across Connecticut,” and yet very few people know about the history and culture of Sudan, he added. That extends to the current moment, in which ongoing civil war has created a vast humanitarian crisis. For Mahmoud, who grew up in Omdurman, it’s a chance to teach the country’s culture. For instance, he said, very few Americans know that Sudan is home to over 100 languages, or that different regions of the country lay claim to different climates and cuisines.
Members of the Sudanese American Society of Connecticut.
“We have to let people know who we are,” he said. After moving to Connecticut three decades ago, he made that part of his mission. When he isn’t working—he has run a grocery store and a pizza restaurant, and now works in transportation—he’s trying to preserve and promote understanding of Sudanese culture thousands of miles from home.
Saturday, he added, students lived out that mission as they performed a traditional dance about safely coming home—a reality that remains far away. In Sudan, there’s no place that is currently safe from violence and fighting. When he hears the mellifluous call of the lyre and the undulating vocals that soar above it, Mahmoud thinks about his own family members who are still there, a constellation of siblings, aunts and uncles, and cousins.
“My heart is always over there with my people,” he said.
Back on stage, Kevin Diaz and members of Movemiento Cultural Afro-Continental had assembled, ready to close out the afternoon with the heartbeat of resistance. Leaning towards a mic, Diaz explained that Bomba originated in Puerto Rico, birthed from the pain and the horror of the Afro-Caribbean slave trade.
Top: Diaz, whose configuration Saturday also included performers Nitzie Judith Sanchez, Jeanette Anyalitz Aguirre-Ramos, Rita Marie Valle Shastri on cua, JessMarie Ramos, Lissette Valle, Izaiha Valle,, Miriam Magalis Cruz, and drummers Pedro L Amaro Ruiz (primo), Kyle Matthews (primo), and Reinaldo Cruz. Bottom: Cowes.
The form, in which drums, dance and voice form a call-and-response with one another, has lasted centuries, still used as a form of protest in Puerto Rico and across the globe (including in New Haven and West Haven).
As he listened, attendee Richard Cowes soaked it all in. A member of the Golden Hill Paugusset Tribe and GED facilitator at New Haven Adult Education—where students hail from nearly 80 countries—he stressed the importance of knowing one’s own culture, and also appreciating those that make a place more diverse.
“It’s important to know which parts of you exist,” he said. As he spoke, he motioned to two necklaces made of quahog shells gathered at the West Haven shoreline. The jewelry is meant to honor both his mother and his great uncle, who was a chief.
“If we are who we are, as Turtle Island, we have to embrace that,” he said. In future years, he added, he would be interested in sharing drumming and music in the Algonquin language.
Nearby, The Building Complex Co-Owner Sylvia Yanez said she was also glad to be there. Saturday, she had brought a sort of portable ofrenda, or traditional memorial altar, in honor of her grandfather Mario Yañez-Ortiz, who died in Castaños, Mexico two years ago.
Growing up, Yanez visited the family in Castaños each fall, in time for Día de Muertos, or Day of the Dead. In 2022, she was there with cousins, parents, aunts and uncles, and family elders to see Yañez-Ortiz pass into the spirit world. Since that time, her work obligations have kept her from returning. On the altar, she had assembled hot peppers, sugar skulls, marigolds, and a cowboy boot.
“It means a lot to me,” she said. “It makes this feel more like home.”