S.E. Rogie Listening Session: Palm Wine Music

Artist and musician YATTA will guide us through a listening session that will contextualize pioneering Sierra Leonean palm wine musician S.E. Rogie's place in the palm wine genre as well as its long conversation with country and American indie music genres. West African Palm Wine will be served.

Through Rogie’s musical legacy, YATTA explores the entanglements of Blackness, land, leisure, and extraction, asking what becomes possible when the psychic weight of labor, migration, and extraction is, even briefly, set down. Drawing on palm wine music as a balm for the psychic wounds of the transatlantic slave trade, YATTA considers whether Black wandering might offer a healing reversal to the fraught relationship between Black people and U.S. landscapes that are steeped in forced migration and labor.