BBC WORLD SERVICE: EVERYWOMAN (23 AUG 2005)
Transcribed by Gavin Chua
(??): word unsure


Anna Umbima: Hello and welcome to Everywoman.

"Ladies and gentlemen, it's our very great honour and privilege
to introduce to you now … will you please give a very big welcome to
Tracy Chapman, yes!''

(Playback of song Talkin' Bout A Revolution)

¹¹ Don't you know you're talking about a revolution[PARA]
It sounds like a whisper[PARA]
Don't you know they're talking about a revolution[PARA]
It sounds like a whisper

Talkin' Bout A Revolution. This was the moment back in 1988 when
a virtually unknown 24-year-old Tracy Chapman shot to international
fame performing at a birthday tribute concert to Nelson Mandela. By
the end of that year she'd sold 10 million records worldwide and was
known from Sao Paulo to Sydney. Tracy Chapman gives us a rare
interview on the eve of the release of her latest album.[PARA]
[STYL] But first to China and a cultural practice which only died out
there early last century. Around two billion women used to bind
their feet in order to turn them into the tiny triangle-shaped
stumps that were then seen as the epitome of beauty.[PARA]
The binding process would begin when a girl was only three or
four years old. Her mother would break the four small toes on each
foot and then wrap silk or cotton bandages tightly around the foot,
forcing the toes and the heel together. The bandages would be
removed and reapplied every couple of days, getting tighter every
time.[PARA]
This painful process not only severely damaged the foot, it could
also cause infection and disease and in some cases death. But in
spite of the incapacitating pain, the custom carried on for
centuries because of the privileges and admiration it brought.[PARA]
It started a thousand years ago when court dancers' bound feet
were referred to as ""golden lotuses'' and the practice spread
through society until coming to an end at the beginning of the 20th
century. But now the last generation of Chinese women with bound
feet is dying out, as our Beijing correspondent Louisa Lim reports.[QL]
[QL]
Louisa Lim: Yang Shuping's daughter calls her a living antique. At
81 Mrs Yang is a tiny, cheerful woman with an easy laugh. She's
dressed in a red brocade jacket and she shuffles across the floor to
greet me, her feet clothed in tiny black shoes with red embroidery.[QL]
[QL]
Mrs Yang Shuping: (through an interpreter) I was five or six years
old when my grandmother used a long, thick cloth to bind my feet so
they couldn't grow anymore. I didn't have any choice in the matter.
They wanted to bind them, so they did.[QL]
[QL]
Louisa Lim: So Mrs Yang is showing me her feet. Oh, they're tiny!
They're very very small and her toes are completely tucked
underneath her feet, so they're almost triangular shape. As her
daughter is pointing out, all the toes have been completely broken.
Her feet are probably about 15 to 20 centimetres long.[QL]
[QL]
Mrs Yang Shuping: (through an interpreter) At that time it was the
fashion. Everybody had them. If you didn't have small feet when you
got married, you'd be bullied by your husband's family.[QL]
[QL]
Louisa Lim: Even though it was incredibly painful, she couldn't cry
because her mother and her grandmother would beat her if they found
her crying. So she had to cry secretly. And every night they would
check her bandages to see if she had loosened her bandages in the
day. But actually she couldn't loosen her bandages because they had
sewn them in place to make sure that she didn't loosen them.[PARA]
So I just asked has she ever regretted having bound feet, and she
said: ""Well, what's there to regret? At the time everybody had
bound feet.''[PARA]
Li Nan is a photographer who's been taking pictures of women with
bound feet for the last 20 years and he's showing me some of the
photos that he's taken. He says each picture, each woman has her own
story to tell. You look at the pictures of each of these women
balancing on their tiny triangular feet, the pain that each one of
these women must have gone through to get to that point is quite
unthinkable.[QL]
[QL]
Li Nan: (through an interpreter) It was a very traditional feudal
society and there was a strong idea that women were men's
belongings. So why did they bind their feet? One reason was to
restrain the women and to restrict their dealings with the outside
world. Women were really men's toys.[QL]
[QL]
Louisa Lim: And foot binding catered to men's secret desires. Having
three-inch golden lotuses as they were called was the ultimate sign
of beauty. More important even than the face.[PARA]
As Li Nan puts it, the feet were seen as another erogenous zone,
the most taboo of them all.[QL]
[QL]
Li Nan: (through an interpreter) The more hidden it was, the more
likely it was to inspire men's fantasies and curiosity. And the feet
were the most forbidden zone of all. If you look at the Qing
Dynasty's books about bound feet, in old times there were 48
different ways of playing with women's bound feet.[QL]
[QL]
Louisa Lim: Here amid the hustle and bustle of one of Beijing's
busiest shopping streets is a shoe shop which still caters to old
ladies with bound feet. It's called Nei Lian Zhen and it boasts a
very long history. On its sign it says it was founded in 1853. So
I'm just going to go in and have a look at what's on offer.[PARA]
Right over here they are selling shoes for women with bound feet.
Most of them are very simple shoes. They're black cloth shoes with
thick stitched white soles. They do sell a couple of leather shoes
as well. It's about À10 for a pair of shoes. They're considered to
be quite expensive and that's because they're all hand-made.[PARA]
Mrs Liu has been working here for 16 years. So I'm going to ask
her about the type of business that they do. As she says most of the
people who now come here to buy shoes for bound feet are actually
collectors. So it really does seem the last generation of women with
bound feet is beginning to die out.[PARA]
Back at old Mrs Yang's house, I've been talking to her daughter.
Fifty-one-year-old Yang Sufang has vivid memories of growing up in a
household full of women with bound feet.[QL]
[QL]
Yang Sufang: (through an interpreter) My mother and my granny and my
auntie, they all had bound feet. And what we really hated were their
bandages. They were very very long, very wide and incredibly smelly.
It was very unhygienic. They smelled so much that none of us
children wanted to sleep with our mothers. That was what left the
deepest impression … how much their bandages smelled.[QL]
[QL]
Louisa Lim: When the communists came to power in 1949, they
criticised bound feet as feudal and encouraged women to unbind their
feet. And so Mrs Yang, slowly and painfully, undid her bindings. But
the damage was already done. And this process was often as painful
as the actual binding. But Mrs Yang got no sympathy from her
daughter.[QL]
[QL]
Yang Sufang: (through an interpreter) We weren't sympathetic. In
fact, we used to laugh at them. We'd say: ""How could you be so
stupid to do that to your own feet?'' Even my own son laughs at my
grandmother. But she doesn't think there's anything wrong with her
little feet.[QL]
[QL]
Louisa Lim: ""Small feet are better,'' old Mrs Yang repeats. ""I'm
not embarrassed about my little feet. I think they are beautiful,''
she says, with a self-satisfied smile.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: Ouch! And that report from Beijing was by Louisa Lim.[PARA]
[STYL] When the 24-year-old Tracy Chapman stepped out onto a London
stage in June 1988 for the concert celebrating the then still in
prison Nelson Mandela's 70th birthday, she had only an acoustic
guitar and her haunting voice to win over the audience. Seventy-four
thousand people at Wembley Stadium and a global TV audience of
hundreds of millions watched as this practically unknown artist
performed just a handful of songs.[PARA]
But she didn't stay unknown for long. With her debut album she
became a huge international star. Her songs are emotionally honest
and often openly political. So it's no surprise that she joined last
year's Driving Votes campaign encouraging people across America to
cast their votes in the presidential election.[PARA]
Tracy Chapman was born in Cleveland, Ohio and brought up in the
1960s with just her mother and sister. Her father had left when she
was four years old.[PARA]
Cleveland was still racially divided and like most black people,
Tracy lived in a poor part of town. Other children teased her for
her love of literature. But the world of fantasy that books opened
up to her and her early love affair with the guitar proved to be a
way out, and her fate started to change.[QL]
[QL]
(Playback of song Change)[QL]
[PARA]
¹¹ If you knew that you would die today,[PARA]
If you saw the face of God and love,[PARA]
Would you change? Would you change?[PARA]
How bad, how good does it need to get?
How many losses, how much regret?[PARA]
Makes you turn around, makes you try to[QL]
explain,[PARA]
Makes you forgive and forget, makes you[PARA]
change?[QL]
[PARA]
So we just heard the track Change. This is the first single to be
released from the album Where You Live. And the lyrics include the
line ""how bad does it need to be would you need to change''. I
suppose my listening of it when I heard it, it seems that one of the
themes of that song and many songs you do is about that feeling of
how those close to you and particularly lovers, that kind of
yearning for them to do the thing that you want them to do.[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: That's certainly a part of some of the songs. With
Change, I was thinking of it more as a reflection on how you change
yourself, what is it that makes you decide to change.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: A number of people have noted that your work recently
has been more spiritual, seems to have been more spiritual anyway.
Is that true? Do you think it's a reflection of some of the changes
going on for you?[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: Well, I don't know. I've always been interested in
what you could generally call spirituality and religion and the
nature of belief. I think some of it may be inspired by
circumstances in the United States right now and that religion is a
part of public discourse and dialogue and it's being injected into
the government.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: How do you feel about that … religion in what professes
to be a secular society, religion seems to be way up there and even
in the political agenda?[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: Well, I think that there should be. I think the
Constitution of the United States calls for separation of church and
state. People should have freedom to express themselves and express
their notions of belief. But I really don't think it has a place in
government.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: Was that also the idea for the song Before Easter
because I know you talked about him there: ""I won't let Jesus find
me.'' What was going through your mind while you were writing that?[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: That was part of the idea in that song. It's a song
in which the character has a fairly low place in life but even from
that place is defiant in a way in saying, I may not allow myself to
be saved.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: You say the character in the song. When you write a
song, are you saying that it's not necessarily about you because I
think for most people who listen to your song, they think this woman
is communicating directly with me about something that is personal
to her?[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: Yes, that's what I'm saying, it's not necessarily
about me. I mean in the same way that Fast Car wasn't
autobiographical. That was a work of fiction. I don't see myself in
that song as the main character, but there's one part of the song
where the character said ""I'll let you be the one to try to redeem
the sins of men''. And that's where I see myself … I feel a
responsibility to try to do what I can to be of service and to help
people, and I think that maybe we can and maybe some might want to
look to faith to address some of the problems in the world but that
we should look to each other.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: That's very interesting, the song America, which I'm
going to read the lyrics here because I don't quite understand what
they mean but I hope you'll explain: ""The ghost of Columbus haunts
this world, you're still conquering America. The meek won't survive,
inherit the earth, 'cos you're still conquering America.''[PARA]
Who's conquering America? What does that mean?[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: When I wrote it, I wrote it right after the
presidential election in 2000. And that was an election in the
States that was contested, it was very controversial. There were
irregularities in the voting process in many places in the United
States, and particularly in Florida. And the Supreme Court stepped
in and selected a president.[PARA]
And it was a very disappointing, frustrating and difficult time
for many people, and for me especially as an African-American
because many of the people who were disenfranchised in that process
were people of colour and poor people. And it just made me start to
think of how there are myths about America, about the United States
that conflict with the reality, in that there's a notion that
America is a place of opportunity, of second chances, of justice and
freedom, and that we do certain things better than other countries
in the way that we conduct democracy.[PARA]
But then this was a blatant example of how that clearly wasn't
true. And so I started thinking about what does seem to be true
about America, and the truth is that there is this legacy of
conquest that started with Columbus when he came to the new world
with the purpose of securing wealth for himself and for his sponsors
and also with the purpose of spreading religion to native people.
And I feel like we're at a time right now where that part of the
history of America is actually more obvious, especially with this
administration in the first term and now in the second term. It's
clear that, like I said, we have a government that's now trying to
inject religion into politics in a way that it hasn't been in the
past.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: Do you feel it really important that musicians take a
stand, that they speak out politically?[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: I think everyone should take a stand. I don't exempt
myself because I'm a musician. We all make our choices and we can
choose to be engaged in the world and we can choose to try to be
informed and then try to exercise whatever power we have to bring
about the world that we want to see.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: I wonder where your political beliefs got formed? Did
they start when you were really quite young because you grew up in
industrial Cleveland which even though isn't in the north of
America, there was a lot of racial tension, I think there was even
school segregation when you were growing up?[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: I think, yes, it's possible that that environment was
a determining factor. My grandfather worked in a meat packing plant.
And at one point my family was on welfare. So it could be that those
circumstances made me a bit more conscious of the struggles that
people face in the world.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: When did music start playing a part in your life, a
strong part in your life?[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: Earlier on I was drawn to music from probably as soon
as I could talk, I was singing. Someone gave me a ukelele when I was
really young and that was my first instrument. And then we had an
organ and I started writing songs very early, I think when I was
about seven or eight years old. So it was always a part of my life
as long as I can remember.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: But were you playing in your bedroom or you were
playing out in public to people?[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: Mostly playing at home in my bedroom and playing for
my sister who's my biggest supporter.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: And then you went to college where I think you were
voted the girl most likely to marry her guitar. (laughs)[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: (laughs)[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: And then university where you were starting to play out
in public. Is that right?[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: Right. I mean I had a few performance experiences
when I was in high school. I even took a train once to New York with
a friend of mine and we played on the steps of the public library in
New York City, didn't make any money.[PARA]
And then once I went to college in Boston, I was also playing
while I was going to school. And during that time I developed a bit
of a following. My friends would come and see me and then bring
other friends. And a classmate was a fan of mine and he would come
to various shows. And at one point he approached me and told me that
his father was in the record business, and he thought that I could
make a record and that they could help me do it. But I wasn't really
thinking at the time that I was going to devote myself to trying to
be a professional musician. I was thinking that I was really going
to pursue my studies in anthropology and ethnomusicology.[PARA]
But they were serious, this classmate, and his father. And after
I graduated, I signed with their production company and then they
got the contract for me with Elektra Records.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: So there you are, you've got your first album out. And
then it's like another bit of stardust because it was very soon
after that, as I said in the introduction, it was your performance
at Nelson Mandela's 70th birthday concert in 1988 when he was still
in prison that propelled you to stardom, if I could put it that way.
We can hear a bit of that performance now.[QL]
[PARA]
""Radio One broadcasting live from Wembley. This is the moment
I've certainly been waiting for … the young singer from Boston,
Tracy Chapman, accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. And she's
just getting underway now.''[QL]
[QL]
(Playback of the song Why?)[QL]
[PARA]
¹¹ Why do the babies starve[PARA]
When there's enough food to feed the world[PARA]
Why when there're so many of us[PARA]
Are there people still alone[PARA]
Why are the missiles called peace keepers[PARA]
When they're aimed to kill[PARA]
Why is a woman still not safe[PARA]
When she's in her home
Love is hate[PARA]
War is peace[PARA]
No is yes[PARA]
And we're all free[PARA]
But somebody's gonna have to answer[PARA]
The time is coming soon[PARA]
Admidst all these questions and contradictions[PARA]
There're some who seek the truth[PARA]
But somebody's gonna have to answer[PARA]
The time is coming soon[PARA]
When the blind remove their blinders[PARA]
And the speechless speak the truth[QL]
[PARA]
So that was you playing at Nelson Mandela's 70th birthday concert
back in 1988. How on earth did it feel for you to go from someone
who was, as we say, just kind of playing fairly locally and there
you are, you're stepping out on the stage at Wembley Stadium in
front of thousands of people? You were just 24. Were you terrified?[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: Oh completely. I was completely terrified. It was a
pretty overwhelming moment. And the one good thing about it, I think
the one reason why I wasn't completely paralysed is that I didn't
have time to get too nervous about it because they called me on very
short notice to tell me that they needed me at the stage, and so I
needed to run in with my guitar and trailing the guitar cord and
just being almost literally pushed on stage and then just having to
play, to perform.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: It wasn't any old performance though, was it? It was
one that, I mean I remember it myself, it's like, W-H-O is that
woman? And I mean millions of people all over the world felt that
because that record just shifted off the shelves really really
really quickly.[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: Ya, it was a significant moment.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: So I guess when that happens to you, your life changes
forever. You go from being someone who's anonymous to someone who is
famous. How did you cope with that? Have you coped with that?[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: Well, it has its good and bad points being a bit of a
public figure. Initially it was difficult because I don't think
there's any way for one to prepare for receiving that kind of
attention. I was often pursued by people.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: You mean people running down the streets after you?[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: Yes, yes, running down the streets, showing up at my
door, and that sort of thing. So that was hard at first.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: But I suppose out of that also came that first album
with songs like Fast Car and Talkin' Bout A Revolution. I mean in
homes that I've been to from Tokyo to Timbuctoo, that album, CD, is
on the shelf and gets played. That must make you feel immensely
proud.[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: Oh it does, it does. I mean that's one of the
wonderful things about having that kind of success. I made music
that I love to make and many people took it into their hearts and
that makes me very proud.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: Now, we're getting to the end now, but I don't want to
leave people with the impression because with so many songs about
love and loss, people may get the impression that Tracy Chapman is
someone who is pretty unhappy in love. So can I ask you, are you
currently happy or unhappy?[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: (laughs) What, in general? Oh in love? In love...
(laughs) Well, that's kind of a personal question. I would say just
in general, yes, I'm a happy person. The truth is that I've had some
experiences in my life that have been difficult.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: So I'm going to play out the programme on maybe your
choice, a song that captures that essence, the full emotional range.
Which one would you choose from the album?[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: Well, let's see. I'll choose 3,000 Miles. It's a
serious issue about life and looking at one's place in the world.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: Sounds like a great song.[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: Thank you.[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: Tracy Chapman, thank you very much indeed.[QL]
[QL]
Tracy Chapman: Thank you.[QL]
[QL]
(Playback of song 3,000 Miles)[QL]
[QL]
Anna Umbima: And Tracy Chapman's latest album Where You Live is out
next month on Elektra Records.[PARA]
And that brings us to the end of this programme. So from me Anna
Umbima and the rest of the Everywoman team here in London, it's
good-bye.[QL]
[QL]
[QL]
Ends[QL]