Stand up and See! 70 years of Song

Echoes Coordinator, Paul Baker Hernandez, ruminates on making 70, still with a good pair of lungs.

I was born singing, 70 years ago. Songs of struggle? Hardly. There were nightly Luftwaffe bombs, of course, but my own small WWII struggle was with bone tuberculosis, tied down immobile to prevent my spine snapping. Four eternal years later, the lovely nursing nuns set me free, an eight-year-old with a refurbished back, a crypto-Irish brogue and a lifelong interest in bondage (later heavily reinforced by the Jesuits’ brutal ferula and the Trappists’ vicious flagella!). In the school choir, “Land of Hope and Glory” and, “Soul of My Saviour” were much more to my conservative taste than, “The Red Flag”, and the primary struggle was to ignore the writing on the wall - increasingly neon – tolling the collapse of the British Empire.

In 1960 I took refuge in the eternal silences of a Carthusian hermit’s cell. At 20, that was me gone, seeking the narrow way sign-posted celestial ice cream and gold plates. The life was indeed gratifyingly strict (woken twice every night to praise the Lord, for heaven's[?] sake), but the food was unexpectedly delicious. Home made bread, fish, soup. Thus cheated of some suffering brownie points, I compensated by eating raw salt. The consequent throwing up led to the hurried throwing out (“over-enthusiastic!”) and from the wastes of solitude I found myself abruptly handed off to the entirely communal Cistercians, who served nothing but vegetables and counted every grain. These monks weren't against penance, not at all (vegetables!), they just preferred to do it in community. The weekly high point was whipping yourself with a diminutive cat-o’-nine-tails, every Friday, to ‘celebrate the Lord’s Passion’. Ouch!

Intriguingly, it was this quaint hangover from the days when monks really did things in style - iron spike belts, body lice, steamy temptations in the Sahara - that first began to undermine our ivory fortress. The fabled '60s: in Paris, students were ripping up cobblestones to make barricades; in the US, anti-Vietnam campaigners were sticking flowers in guns; and, in Nunraw Abbey, Scotland, we were suddenly flogging our beds instead of our backs, smothering our giggles any which way so as not to ‘break silence’.

Born thus in laughter, the revolution was well begun. Crucially, as our discontent mounted, my family smuggled in original Bob Dylan on a rare visit (perhaps why they were). “The Times They are a-Changin’” hit us like a wall. We had hysterics. So did Brother Oliver when he discovered us: we were supposed to be practising Gregorian Chant, after all. Luckily, God (locally disguised as the Abbot) dismissed us with a chuckled caution, ear plugs, and a studied quote from St. Augustine(!): “He who sings prays twice”. Hmm! Had the Lord never heard our raggle-taggle 'choir' in horrid song?!

At all events, it was certainly true that the monk who revolts rebels twice: once against the Abbot and once again against God unmasked. The whips were part of a whole system designed to help us abandon our own will, everywhere and in everything. The Abbot controlled how we knelt, how we drank our tea, how we crapped (well, if he could). His powers would've had any tin-pot dictator dancing in the aisles, for, although holy modesty prevented him from actually following us into the toilet, his punishments brought eternal spiritual death. So, in dumping the lash, we were playing with serious double fire. However, revolution was inevitable, for as we tried to bury our heads, the very sand was shifting under us. In the event, as we discovered real impoverishment, human rights and ecological devastation, we began to realise we supposedly Holy Joes were actually serving the Mammon of agribusiness, keeping indentured servants (lay brothers), living in unseemly security, and selling off God’s food crops to keep rich men pie-eyed on Scotch whisky.

Sticking like limpets, burrs are nature’s time bombs. So the songs. They became burrs of revolution: “How many times can a man turn his head, pretending ...? What have we done to the rain … ? Buddy, can you spare a dime ?” Suddenly, they detonated: “How many homeless people would fit into this huge palace?” “Why are we monks ruining the Earth to make people drunk?” And the all-time favourite, “What exactly is so wrong with girls, anyway?” Everything came under the hammer of our new-found fervour: the Christian bible, the monastic rules, silence – our vows, above all: obedience, chastity and poverty. Dylan-driven, I obsessed over a guitar. A monk has no money, and anyway a £100 guitar to sing about people living on £100 a year - what kind of poverty is that? Luckily our garbage dump sprouted a rich harvest of broken tables, ends of chapel floor,ng toilet seats (retired!). Sudden inspiration, luck by the truck load, et voila! – my faithful companion of the past 40 years, this beautiful guitar.

The rest of the story essentially belongs to her. First, she taught me something of the profound silences of Flamenco, the Cante Jondo, contemplation by any other name. Then she carried me abruptly out of the monastery to become 'another Dylan; only quieter' (lots quieter: early efforts had one listener gushing: “We mums loved the songs. Your voice was so gentle all the babies fell asleep.”[!!]); into Queen Elizabeth's castle at Balmoral (with a posse of bishops protesting Margaret Thatcher's nuclear weapons); to Los Angeles to help fight off Salvadoran death squads operating even there; and, finally, to Chile, to join Víctor Jara's family in reclaiming the stadium in which the great singer/songwriter had been tortured and killed.

And now, suddenly 70, I find myself writing from Nicaragua, surrounded by family and community, digging eco-drains in the barrio, completing my latest sure fire hit: ¨That Expletives-deleted Mobile!”. Mrs Thatcher is a horrid historical footnote, the US has a black president, and the oppressed countries of the Americas are uniting to challenge northern greed and to heal the planet with all its peoples. Re-membering, re-singing, the great songs of this wonderful journey, only half begun even yet: “What Have We Done to the Rain?”, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, “We Shall Overcome”,, “Nicaragua, Nicaragüita”.

It's not just the songs, of course. But they were – are - a vital part of any lasting movement to make justice happen. More than half the world's people read only with difficulty, if at all. They live through their ears, and, especially in struggle, through their hearts. For, at the last, soaring high above both the tragic and the trivial, music's poetry encapsulates our human greatness, the vision shining clear even in the worst of times. Martin Luther King's, “I have a dream”; Joe Hill's, “Don't mourn – organize!”; The World's, “We Shall Overcome!”

“Gracias a la Vida: Thanks to life” was one of Violeta Parra's last songs. Amen to that. Waking with love in my heart and a song on my lips, how can I have been so fortunate? Poor Violeta was not so lucky; she died tragically, abandoned, hanging alone in her folklore tent. But she passed on her spirit and her guitar; to Victor Jara, above all, who went on to write some of the finest and most moving songs ever to come out of the struggle for peace, justice and beauty. He too died horribly, of course, his hands smashed, tortured and shot to death by Pinochet's men in a ghastly charade of Russian roulette. But not before he too had passed on the spirit.

In these last times, then, when we're finally beginning to learn that true independence, personal and of nations, comes only through interdependent shared commitment to our one, beautiful, exquisitely fragile planet, let the last word lie with him. Born of a peasant family and part Mapuche Indian, Victor loved nature as profoundly as he hated injustice. In the wonderful festival we had to reclaim the stadium where they murdered him and his companions, we sang together in the echoes of the surrounding silence: “Levantate y mira la montaña - Stand up and see the wonder of the mountain: source of the sun, the water and the wild wind.” Violeta and Víctor, Rosa Parkes, Gandhi, Arlen Sui and Pablo Neruda, they’re all still with us, singing …

Paul Baker Hernández

Originally from Britain, Paul is a musician, writer and organiser. He lives in a marginalized neighbourhood of Managua, Nicaragua, working on community eco-projects, writing cheeky songs about mobiles, dictators, even the sainted Starbucks, and coordinating Echoes of Silence, an international network of 'artists with broken fingernails'. For information, to support Echoes' of Silence work, and/or book presentations/events or tours, please copy http://echoesofsilence-ecosdelsilencio.pbworks.com to your browser or write: echoespaul@tortillaconsal.com – Thank you. Paul is on tour in the US march 2 – 24, 2010; and in the UK in September/October