March 11, 2011

I’m always moved by the music of the Decemberists 

It’s so beautiful and gruesome.  One blogger writes, “They write ye olde precious indie music, reveling in aggressive usage of literary devices and folksy interpretations of encyclopedia entries, and their twee performances overflow with corny vaudevillian banter, to the delight of their insufferable teacher's-pet following” 

We’ll get back to this in a minute. For now, we go to White Center. Here are our food bank homies:

These days I’m listening to stories told by people who were born in other lands.

I’ve heard some amazing stories from my White Center friends. Stories of:

• Crouching in a river holding your three little kids around you because Pol Pot’s soldiers are in your house. One of those kids will die before you get out of the refugee camp. Your husband was already executed. You are 19 years old.
•  Fleeing Sarajevo in the night with the clothes you’re wearing: leaving your life’s savings in the bank, and leaving your (grown) son in the hospital where he recovers from having his foot shot off by a sniper.
• Watching your parents run a numbers game,  trying to keep one step ahead of the bigger mafia so they can send you to school.
• Your mother putting poison in the family dinner for her, you, and your six siblings to ingest because she couldn't take the American (we call it the "Vietnam") War and its toll anymore. (She stopped short, btw, before everyone ate it. She threw the food away and the family went hungry that night. But they lived, she lived, through the desperation.)
• Successfully operating a profitable import/export business throughout the Khmer Rouge regime only to be crushed by the Viet Cong. So you leave everything behind and give birth on the way to a refugee camp. (Maybe I’ll cover some Latina, Iraqi and Somalian tales in a later post.)  

Those stories are intense, and they mean so much to me. To my friends I say, thank you for the honor of including me in your telling. 


My story, like that of so many white people, is lost. Or, more accurately, I only have this one story (and I’m sick of it), so I'm trying to patch together all these random stories about "me" and figure how they are mine.

My ancestors fled their Welsh homeland when Christians were killing Druids in the 12^th (?) century and it was obvious that they were next. Within a few generations they were identifying as English. In the states they hacked, slashed, burned and murdered their way west, that’s how long we’ve been here. First conquering Missouri, and eventually kicking ass in the Rockies and landing in Idaho.

My stories are myths, and I have to stitch them together. And I’ve got a long way to go.

Now, I don’t have kids so this might be where I get into trouble but here goes: as a parent what stories do you want your kid to carry?  Do you want your kids to know about the night in the river or digging food out of the garbage? Or do you want to shield your kids from the pain, because you don’t want them to pity or disdain you? What do you teach your kids about the bonds of ancestry?

(For the record: yes, my mother also got our food out of the garbage can for a time in the 70’s, and the only, tired story I have is, “My name is Sarah and I’m an alcoholic…”)

Since I’m not a parent I’ve got to try to understand so I listen to these stories. Here's the one the Decemberists (white, U.S. born people) tell that I like: 

The song

YouTube: Sons and Daughters

The lyrics

Sons and Daughters by the Decemberists

When we arrive

Sons & daughters

We'll make our homes on the water

We'll build our walls aluminum

We'll fill our mouths with cinnamon now

These currents pull us 'cross the border

Steady your boats

Arms to shoulder

'till tides will pull

our hull aground

Making this cold harbour now home

Take up your arm

Sons and daughters

We will arise from the bunkers

By land, by sea, by dirigible

We'll leave our tracks untraceable now

When we arrive

Sons and daughters

We'll make our homes on the water

We'll build our walls aluminum

We'll fill our mouths with cinnamon now

(We'll fill our mouths with cinnamon now)

When we arrive

Sons and daughters

We'll make our homes on the water

We'll build our walls aluminum

(Sons and daughters)

We'll fill our mouths with cinnamon

(We'll make our homes on the water)

We'll make our homes on the water

(When we build our walls of aluminum)

(We'll fill our mouths with cinnamon)

Here all the bonds they fade away (x20)