Saturday, January 08, 2005

thoughts on music and genocide

this morning i was reading adam's blog about soundtracks for his life. i love this idea. back in the day, when i thought my life was really so fascinating people would want to read & then create a movie based on my journals, i created a sidebar list of songs that should be played in the filming of any particular entry.

i imagined it like a scene from "my so-called life." like an episode when claire danes' character, angela, came home frustrated with jordan catallano, frustrated with her parents, and agonizing about who-knows-what, marched upstairs to her room and shut out the world with a slam of her bedroom door. the cranberries mourned her loneliness over the stereo while angela stared at the wall and let her mind wander.

i love music. besides fireworks, candles, fireflies and stars, there is little else that moves me like music does. it can capture everything you don't know how to express. songs like Meshell Ndegeocello's "Fool of Me," Fiona Apple's "Never is a Promise," and Over The Rhine's "Suitcase" reach me in places i forget even exist until i listen to them. what else can do that? i would never say no to music. ever.

and then last night, after watching "Hotel Rwanda" about the Rwandan genocide of '94, i sat in the theatre seat paralyzed. i could have stayed there for hours, silent. as the credits rolled, wyclef's rwanda song came on. and it made me a little sick to be honest.

the song's lyrics are great, and i like wyclef as much as the next person, but that song .... i don't know, something felt wrong about playing a song like that after that (i can't call it just a movie - it happened only 10 years ago! real lives! real people! ah, i can't talk about it). it felt like, "okay, now that you've seen a glimpse into this horrific atrocity, it's time to listen to this moving-forward music, let's all be peaceful and love each other, and collect your garbage and get out of the theatre." what?!?!?

kat and i came home, barely saying anything. and normally, i fall asleep to music, but last night, i mean, what do you play? here i am, lying in my comfy double bed in my spacious apartment in preppy wrigleyville, UNAFRAID, and i need a song to lull me to sleep. i'm not trying to make anybody feel bad, i just think, how did that happen? how did a million people die, chopped with machetes, raped, beaten, killed? how? how?

i sponsor a rwandan girl who is 11 years old, born june '93, the oldest of 5 kids. i wonder if her parents were hutus or tutsis. i wonder if they ran, i wonder if they hid, i wonder if her father killed anyone, i wonder if their family members were murdered, i wonder what she knows about the genocide. i wonder how many more genocides we'll face on earth before God calls everything to an end.

come soon.

4 Comments:

At 11:04 PM, Blogger allan said...

I lay in bed on Sat morning thinking about the movie. Thinking about when that happened, I was all excited about graduating high school while this was happening, so unaware... 2days drive away. I now feel so overwhelmed in analyzing global suffering; in my mind I hear this voice saying, "Do something". Where there is a wound we must try to heal it.

 
At 6:31 AM, Blogger Mary said...

beautiful poem, david. where did you find it?

 
At 3:30 PM, Blogger Adam said...

Hey Mary...

I can't tell you how much I enjoy your writing...you are amazing...

about rwanda

have you ever listened to Rob Bell? He's a pastor in Michigan...I have him linked on my site...but he has a sermon series on suffering and in the first one, Suffering 1, he talks of his visit with rwanda and it's very encouraging and discouraging at the same time...you'll understand when you listen...

 
At 10:38 AM, Blogger Adam said...

I was wrong...it's actually suffering 2... sorry

 

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