Survive
Thoughts on songs as memory
My mom used to sing this song whenever I slept too late for her liking. This was most often on Sundays, when we went to church. Mind you, I'd already be up—I've always been an early riser. I'd wake up, lay motionless in bed, and shroud myself with the covers when I heard her footsteps near. She'd sing:
To spare yourself the performance, the lyrics:
Rise and shine
and give God the glory, glory,
rise and shine
and give God the glory, glory
rise and shine and
give God the glory, glory,
children of the Lord!
She'd sing as she marched around the room, clapping the rhythm. She'd sing as she opened my blinds, dousing my brother and I with fresh light. She'd sing as she yanked at my covers, trying to expose the deceit of my sleep. As a last resort, she'd sing as she tickled my feet. If I somehow outlasted three refrains and her entire bag of tricks, the tone of her voice would change. It would fall from the brightness of the morning itself to her proprietary mom tone: a unique mixture of fatigue, conviction, and contrition that could compel a mountain to move. "Come on," she'd say, once and only once. "Time to get up." Then on to my sister's room, as if the noise didn't carry through our shared wall. "Rise and shine..."
I haven't heard that song in over ten years. I haven't heard her sing at all in three. Yet I remember that song as well as my own name. I don't remember much, but songs always stick. My brain is covered in open wounds, and everything bleeds out except for one little lobe, where all the songs I've heard more than a few times swim around each other. Every few hours one comes up to breathe a memory into the present day.
Lately, my head has been full of songs like my mom's. I guess you'd call them folk songs—songs kept alive only by the people who sing them, adapted across contexts for generations. It occurs to me only now that I have loved these songs since the first time my mom woke me up on a Sunday, but it wasn't until college that I saw their real value. In Dr. Daphne Brooks' class Black Women and Popular Music Culture, I heard voices like Zora Neale Hurston, who in the 1930s went into Black Florida communities and practiced their songs "until they tell me I can sing them just like them".1 I heard Odetta, who "veered away from both opera and musical theater in favor of performing politically charged field hollers, prison songs, work songs, and spirituals."2 She explained why in an interview:
The folk songs were the anger, the venom, the hatred of myself and everybody else and everything else. I could get my rocks off within those work songs and things without having to say ‘I hate you and I hate me.’ In fact, it was the area of the work songs that helped heal me.
Every once in a while I'll listen to these prison songs. More specifically, Jail House Bound: John Lomax's First Southern Prison Recordings, 1933, part of a folk song archive kept by the Library of Congress.3 These songs were sung by Black people in prisons across the American South, possibly around the same time Hurston was practicing her songs in Florida. Only a few of those people are named in the liner notes. I think I listen to these songs for the same reasons Odetta did. I float in the colloid of perseverance dispersed through deep pain; I absorb it into my own blood, which is of a similar constitution. As the songs play and replay I feel myself connected across traditions and histories to a version of my identity that endured more than I can imagine. I remember the souls of people we’ll never know.
Sixty years later, Dr. Adel el Mshiti was also in prison. In 1996, he was imprisoned for providing medical care to people injured in protests of the Gaddafi regime. Amidst five years of torture, he wrote a song called “Sawfa Nabqa Huna”, which translates to "We Will Stay Here". He explained why he, too, felt compelled to sing in prison:
When I sang, all the prisoners would cry, and it was one of the things that helped us cope. After we cried everybody felt better.4
This song spread widely during the Arab Spring revolutions in 2011. Since then, it has gone viral multiple times in multiple countries as it has followed refugees from North Africa and the Middle East across borders.5
Today, it is sung by Palestinian people under siege.
I wasn’t able to figure out the first song they are singing, but “Sawfa Nabqa Huna” begins at 3:22. From social media posts, I can recognize Wael el Dahdouh (@wael_eldahdouh), Motaz Azaiza (@motaz_aziaza), and Saleh Aljafarawi (@saleh_aljafarawi) among the men pictured here. These are only a few of the Palestinian people who have been our window into the now 86-day-long bombing of Gaza (not pictured, but I am especially grateful to Bisan [@wizard_bisan1]). If you do not already follow them, do so now, and share their stories. As these people sing, you can hear them cough up the debris of their own homes. I don’t know how many are still alive.
Here it is again, sung by doctors who treat the mortal injuries of their people, poetically carrying on the work of Dr. el Mshiti nearly thirty years later.
There has been a common thread through the many calls for aid from the Palestinian people: a call to memory. In sharing their stories through posts, videos, art, and any other media, we participate in the preservation of people that still, after 86 days of bombs, stay where they are.
I've been thinking a lot about what I can uniquely bring to this work.6 One of my fatal flaws is how long I can spend thinking before doing, especially under the weight of colossal grief. I have always felt called to appreciate and share the songs that stick to me, but I can now see these interests as the work of survival. I've converted the above videos into MP3s, so I can absorb them the way I do all the other songs that constitute me. If you remember in song like I do, please download them here. In the new year, I hope this revelation will take my writing on music and other forms to new places, where I can explore not just the art itself, but "the root and branch, lateral and vertical conditions in which art is made", even (or especially) when those conditions are catastrophic.7
Free Palestine.
Notes
This is a version of Sawfa Nabqa Huna with instrumentation. I’m realizing that translation from Arabic always loses something, but I transcribed the lyrics from the video, and replaced some of the stanzas with other translations I found in my reading to get closer to the meaning. If anyone reading this speaks Arabic and thinks I should change the words or line breaks, please let me know.
Lyrics
[Chorus]
We will stay here
until the pain goes away
We will live here
the melody will sweeten
My homeland, my homeland
home of pride
My homeland, my homeland
My homeland, oh I
Despite all the enemies,
Despite all the curses,
we will strive until the blessings prevail
we will sing to raise the determination
by marching to the top and conquering the heights
let's all stand together
with remedy and pen
we are all mercy on those who suffer sickness
let's continue to walk towards higher aims
and be a truly better nation among nations
How many nights we have woken to the morning
how many hindrances we have overcome
how many bales have we kept
how many bridges we have crossed
how many tears we have wept
wishing for excellencies and highest points
spending long hours to gain broad knowledge
underrating the precious to achieve the purpose
if we get tired, we will not give up
let's walk for hope
the top of the mountains is no mistake worth it
Oh my parents, your favor surrounds every bit of me
every grief we met caused you more grief
everything we have achieved is a result of your efforts
oh father you were my support in hardships
you who have paradise under your feet
all my words and all my thanks are chained
all the meanings in all tongues
you still cannot thank them and never will
Here is the joy of our families
that cannot be quantified
when they witness my feelings, I smile with delight
my joy and cry can almost be heard by the deaf
oh stars of heaven, oh, scents of the breeze
oh clouds of hope oh birds of haram
oh thunders of winter and all creatures
bear witness that I have swornKennedy, Stetson, Herbert Halpert, Zora Neale Hurston, Herbert Halpert, and Zora Neale Hurston. Halimuhfack. Jacksonville, Florida, 1939. Audio. https://www.loc.gov/item/flwpa000014/.
https://longreads.com/2019/05/22/odetta-holmes-album-one-grain-of-sand/
It’s streamable:
Tayeb, L. (2017). Shahi al-Ḥuriya: Militant optimism and freedom tea. Communication and the Public, 2(2), 164-176. https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047317714803
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-37154613
Dr. Brooks in response to a question about “the value of a canon”, beginning at 16:45. Later in the episode she introduces the ideas of “stewardship” of art, which heavily influenced this essay.