Sometimes, the most insignificant of memories lodge themselves in one’s brain…
I must have been four or five when I overheard my Mom and her girlfriends discussing the comparative qualities of foreign singers who appeared on Soviet state TV. I cannot recall anything from that conversation except the consensus that nobody moved onstage quite as Afric Simone did. Which was true on a number of levels, if you consider that a flamboyant display on Soviet TV in that day and age could only come from a representative of an “exotic” country.
That bit somehow stayed with me forever, and the song for which Simone was famous in the USSR – Hafanana – is one of my oldest childhood musical foreign recollections.
Natasha, at some point in middle school, actually learned the words to it as part of some “peoples’ friendship” project…
