PEARLS written by Sade; performed by Sade and performed in contrast by India.Aire

The India.Aire performance is more enchanting romanticized verse of Sade's Pearls. The two versions one sung by Sade it's author and the other by India.Aire can best be understood from the personal experience of the metaphor of new shoes and how they do hurt the feet. Sade was born in Nigeria and lived there in the earlier part of her youth. For people all over the world this metaphor is striking and deep. When we compare the importance of shoes in our society as a need to the reality that shoes are mostly not worn in rural parts of Africa where so many people women and child spent large portions of their time traveling long distances with a load on their head and perhaps added a child on the woman's back. New shoes American style shoes sent there would be unwelcome, only from the fact that they hurt like hell when you get a new pair of shoes sent to you that wasn't fitted to your foot. My mother-in-law, God rest her soul, I was told, she would take off her new shoes and carry them in her hand whenever the family had to walk to town or to church. The value of the new shoes was that it showed she had them and the value of them. However, the pain they caused her feet to try to walk in them for miles was so painful that she CARRIED AND cared FOR them in her hand. As her son stated she didn't like wearing her shoes. Sade's version of this song really express the fact through this metaphor that we who are All "Africans Abroad," measure everything we don't experience, that we lack truth about, we measure people's needs by our own priorities. We see people without shoes walking in Africa for miles and miles we immediately think they lack something that we need, because we have lost any adaption to walking bare feet. So when we see Some Africans in tou tous, or g-wraps we think of sexual things or we think of poverty rather than culture. So We don't really know what the people we are looking at need from there point of view. African that was naked or barely clad were clothed, and African that was clothed and arrayed in fine clothe were stripped and all that were in this condition and shipped out or left at home in Africa, Asia or Europe, or the America's could only be judged, and dealt with through the eyes of others away from their reality regardless of color, creed or nationality. Together the two version gives you what is the two sides to the lives of the people all around the world that we either just romanticize or criticize. India.Arie tell of the times that we smile through our pains and have the sensuality of our being human and ourselves as sexual sensuous mankind. Sade tell of the experience and the understanding of why shoes is not the important need of these people. But the pain of their daily lifestyle to hard work, long trips just to get basics like food and or to sell and trade goods for survival on ones head, while the disputes between the lies and lines draw by indifference of mankind to the human rights of all living things sharing this planet Earth. What do these people need that we cannot see or measure by our own needs? I can't speak for them, but I can communicate with them if I listen to the pounding of my heart and I know that it can hurt with or without new shoes. LOVE AND PEACE. (C)"1980 Africans Abroad," by I.M. Alleyne A work-in-Progress. www.theannalsadn.com and www.jdhspeducationalitems.vpweb.com