Djeli Kouyaté

I’m back blogging this week about the last of my narrator’s lovers, Djeli Kouyaté. He’s a virtuosic Malian rock star - and a formidable intellectual. He studied political philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure. He generally keeps himself pretty busy.

In the span of just a couple of months in 2008, for example, he had a benefit concert for Cité Soleil with his best friend, Wyclef Jean. He also did a benefit performance at the New Orleans Jazz Festival. He was briefly back in Bamako for a private strategy meeting with Amadou Toumani Touré, the President. He spoke at the third World Congress Against the Death Penalty at the Cité Universitaire Internationale de Paris. He attended, though didn’t speak at, the Conference on Moral Particularism at Paris I. There was a documentary filmmaker who’d been following him around with a small crew. Djeli went back and forth between finding him entertaining and a pain in the ass. And of course, there was the regular media attention. This seems to flair up when he indulges himself in dinner dates with supermodels. Which happens with considerable regularity.

I haven’t spoken with him about Wyclef Jean’s possible run for the Haitian presidency. I’m sure he has mixed feelings.