Black History Month | Culture & Community | Dixwell | Music | Storytelling | Arts & Culture | Music Haven | Arts & Anti-racism | Dixwell Community Q House
Yaira Matyakubova introduces storyteller and artist Toto Kisaku. Lucy Gellman Photos.
In a gymnasium just off Dixwell Avenue, two worlds were colliding. In one, twin violins whispered amongst themselves, unbothered as cello came in beneath them. One called out in the open space, a cry at the edge of its voice. The other responded, gliding through the same notes.
Halfway across the world, a grandmother ran desperately towards a doctor, her grandchild writhing in pain in her arms. Viola entered the fray, and for a moment, the notes sounded like her footfalls. On a whiteboard behind the musicians, a line wove between the words calm, poison, and faith.
That importance of shared story—and its ability to connect people in a time of increasing global divisiveness—came to Dixwell Community Q House last Wednesday, as playwright Toto Kisaku joined Music Haven for the latest installment of “Voices: Untold Stories” and a performance from the Haven String Quartet (HSQ) and Harmony In Action student orchestra. The series fuses immigrant and refugee voices with audience participation and short improvisations.
Toto Kisaku: "Without story, we do not exist."
Musicians included HSQ members Yaira Matyakubova and Patrick Doane on violin, violist Linda Numagami, and cellist Rebecca Patterson, in for the HSQ’s Philip Boulanger. For the first time in Music Haven’s history, the concert also featured elders from the Dixwell Senior Center, who have been studying with Matyakubova for the past several months.
“What makes story?” Kisaku mused before tracing his own journey from the Democratic Republic of Congo to the U.S., where he landed with his son as an asylum seeker in 2015 (he was granted asylum three years later). “It’s the movement. It’s the breath. It’s the environment. It’s the way we are making space to exist. Without story, we do not exist.”
“Did You Hear It?”
From the moment attendees filled the gymnasium Wednesday, narrative became a bridge, building a deep, shared humanity through words and music well before Kisaku took the microphone. On a floor-turned-stage, musicians turned toward the work of composer George Walker, who died in 2018 at the age of 96. In 1996, Walker made history as the first Black person to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
A Fulbright scholar, concert pianist and graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music and Eastman School of Music, Walker became a fierce advocate for himself and fellow Black artists, offended by the expectation that his race could and would ever dictate the kind of music that he played. In over seven decades, he made that mark clearly on music, with works that ranged from compositions for voice and piano to full symphonic arrangements.
His work “Lilacs,” for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, interweaves music and voice with Walt Whitman’s 1895 “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Listen to it here.
As the quartet began his “Lyric For Strings,” first written as “Lament” in 1946, that sort of sweeping, expectation-bucking approach felt very much alive. In the work—which Walker wrote when he was just in his 20s—strings encircle each other, something throbbing and mournful just beneath the surface. Over a carpet of viola and cello, a violin breaks away, its voice laced with grief and ambition all at once. It’s then that there’s a shared breath, a gathering of sorts—something that feels like resolution—before everyone continues forward, ready to tell a short story of a life interrupted by grief.
While there is an overwhelming, elegiac weight that hangs over the whole piece—something that critics would later observe that Walker did especially well—it is more striking for its sense of calm. Strings exist beside but also within and in-between each other, as though they are capable of holding each other up. And no wonder: the piece is a meditation on the artist’s own sorrow, and the love that is inextricably tied to it. When he initially wrote the composition, Walker dedicated the work to his late grandmother, Malvina King.
“Did you hear it? Did you hear the story?” said Matyakubova, who also serves as Music Haven’s artistic director. In the front row, student Yovhani Cruz sat at the edge of his seat, ready for a performance of Maria Theresia von Paradis’ “Sicilienne” that came later in the program. “You see, without a single word, we understood each other. That’s what this is about.”
From Kinshasa To New Haven
Cruz and Tyson with Harmony In Action.
Nowhere, perhaps, was that clearer than in Kisaku’s story, which begins in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, at the end of the 1970s. As attendees took paper and pencils to write down notes on the story, Kisaku turned the clock back to 1978, as he arrived in the world on December 30 just a little after 12 p.m.
Born into a family of economic contrasts that reflected the country—his mother was very poor, and his father was very wealthy—Kisaku was raised mainly by his grandmother, Charlotte Tito. While Tito’s neighborhood struggled with poverty, Kisaku remembers it as a childhood surrounded by love, with a kindness and resolve from Tito that ultimately saved his life.
“It was like being in the middle of nowhere, but if you are kids, you cannot understand that, because of the happiness,” he said. “Because happiness doesn’t have limitations, you know what I mean? … I grew up with a lot of joy, a lot of happiness.”
For a while, Kisaku and his grandmother—and the other kids in the neighborhood—had a rhythm, including Saturday morning trips to a nearby church that sustained Tito spiritually. Then when Kisaku was five years old, the neighbor next door tried to poison him as a way to punish his grandmother. He still remembers the feeling of pain exploding in his body, and his fear that he was going to die.
In Tito’s mind at church some 20 miles away, “something just said, ‘Yeah, I have to go back,’” he recalled. “She didn’t know why she was running.”
When she found her grandson at home, already sick, Kisaku’s grandmother lifted him onto her back and began running—first for a taxi, then for a church, then for a hospital. From the hospital, a doctor referred Kisaku to a second place, where a homeopathic healer was waiting for him. He ultimately stayed in her home for two years, recovering until he was well enough to start school.
In the gymnasium, an intimate audience had fallen to a hush, hanging onto each word. Every so often, reminders of the setting edged back in: a scoreboard and basketball hoop that framed the quartet’s chairs, a chef hurrying in and out of the community kitchen, a few latecomers who slid into the bleachers and picked up the story.
Back in Kinshasa, Kisaku jumped to his teenage years, as he watched his mother struggling to stay economically afloat. At 16, he started selling loose cigarettes before and after school, setting up a booth in the mornings and evenings before class. While he was a good student, Kisaku’s side hustle complicated his college plans: he started smoking cigarettes, then marijuana, and struggled to keep up in school. He dropped out just short of getting his high school diploma.
This time, it was his mother who saved him. One day when he was 20, Kisaku remembered, he came home to chairs set up around the table, with a bottle of water set out for each of them. By then, he'd been selling cigarettes for three years. The two talked for six hours, during which she told him his whole life story. She pulled no punches: she spoke about her courtship with his father, about his birth and early childhood, about his adolescence and her dreams for him. It rocked his understanding of the world as he knew it.
“Before that, I thought my story was my family’s story,” he said. “My country’s story. My continent’s story. I realized my story was the one my mother told me … it was like a piece of a puzzle. After that story, I told my mother, I will continue with college. I will go to live with myself.”
It was a decision that set him on the path—although he could not have known it then—to artistic expression, to sharp-tongued political theater, to a brush with death at the hands of corrupt government leaders, and ultimately to seeking asylum in the United States.
From that conversation, Kisaku enrolled in Kinshasa’s Institut National des Arts, where he studied theater before founding his own company, K-Mu Théâtre, in 2003. In and outside of the classroom, he could feel a sharp divide between the arts education he was getting and the experience he had lived as a poor kid in the same city. It became his goal to reconcile the two in his mind, and in his work.
“I just realized, I have to love human beings,” he said. “I have to help human beings.”
He began thinking about the thousands of children living on the streets of Kinshasa, many experiencing abuse and exploitation in addition to homelessness, hunger, and extreme poverty. Not that long ago, he knew, “maybe I would find myself in the street as well.” In his research, Kisaku discovered that there were 25,000 children in the streets of Kinshasa. Through a community survey, he learned that many of them had been falsely accused of witchcraft.
“The government was a part of that,” he said. “They were using … how can I say that? It was like, the more kids in the street, the more there is no future for the country. There is not people who can think. They cannot work. They cannot invest in education. The government was a part of that.”
The level of corruption, which extended to several houses of worship across the capital city, incensed him. In 2009, he finished and premiered his play “Basal’ya Bazoba” as a way to speak truth to power. He knew that it could—and did—put him on the government’s radar. What he did not expect was that it would almost cost him his life.
In 2015, Kisaku was kidnapped and tortured by the government, an experience he has since recalled in vivid and gut-churning detail in his play Requiem for an Electric Chair. He knew, at some point, that the soldiers supervising him planned to kill him. But when one recognized him—”after shooting several people who were with Kisaku”—he pulled a gun away from Kisaku, and fired into the air instead.
“I cannot kill you because I know you,” Kisaku remembers him saying. It saved his life a third time. He came to the U.S. as an asylum seeker shortly thereafter.
A decade later, he and his 15-year-old son are still adjusting to life in Connecticut, where they have made a home. In his work, Kisaku said, he still thinks constantly about how to hold power to account—wherever it may show up. Even in times of political turmoil, he added, he is grateful to be in the U.S.
“America taught me about individuality,” he said. “It is a really good way of being individual and taking care of yourself and fighting. It’s not something I learned a lot from my country. In my country … people are struggling to do something, to create something. But over here, people are fighting. In a good way, that’s what I learned.”
“Something To Carry With Me”
Eddie Tyson, Ella Smith and Gwen Grady with Matyakubova and Kisaku.
Before concluding, HSQ members graced the gym with short improvisations drawn from Kisaku’s story, on which the audience had been scribbling notes throughout the program. Building on a handful of terms, the quartet flowed back into music, letting the instruments do the talking. At one point, the word rich prompted Matyakubova to announce “Give me money!” in a growl so fierce and unexpected that even musicians lost their composure momentarily.
But it was Matyakubova’s three new students, all regulars at the Dixwell Senior Center, who ultimately stole the spotlight at the end of the show (watch their performance with Harmony In Action here). In interviews after the concert, all three noted the importance of story in their own lives—and the lessons they will carry from their lessons going forward.
“I’ve been wanting to play for such a long time,” said Gwen Grady, an elderly services specialist with the City of New Haven who picked up the cello last summer. “There was something about the cello that I just liked.”
Growing up, Grady watched her twin brothers, Edward and Bruce Butler, excel in music. As they grew up Edward went on to Julliard, and Bruce became a trumpet player. Grady, meanwhile, stayed right where she was.
For years, she knew she loved music—but the only practice she had was in the church choir. She loved the cello so much that she ordered one a year ago, and tried to teach herself using videos on YouTube. Then a year or two ago, she was filling in for a colleague at the Atwater Senior Center when Matyakubova called. Grady asked if she’d consider teaching.
“It’s such a blessing for her to teach us,” she said as Matyakubova worked to tidy up the gymnasium before Thursday’s snowstorm.
“This is doing something different,” added Eddie Tyson, who has been studying the violin.
Beside him, Ella Smith (or as she is known around these parts, simply Ms. Ella) agreed. As a girl growing up in North Carolina, Smith studied the piano for close to 10 years. But when her family relocated to New Haven, the instrument didn’t make the trip up North, and “I couldn’t get back to the music,” she said. Now, decades later, she’s learned that it’s not too late to follow a dream. She, like Tyson, has been studying the violin for several months.
“I love music of all kinds,” she said. “It gives me a sense that I am owning something. I have something I can carry with me.”