Turn Pain Into Power
The theater at the Smithsonian was an uproar of musical and verbal rage. I was on stage with baritone saxophonist Fred Ho, members of his Afro-Asian Music Ensemble, and fellow poet Alma Villegas. Maybe we were performing Part Two of Turn Pain Into Power, Fred’s counter-quincentennial jazz opera opposing the 1992 celebrations marking 500 years since the arrival of Christopher Columbus to Turtle Island. The European invasion would eventually spread to the home of the Piscataway and Nacotchtank, which became the District of Columbia.
Alma, from Puerto Rico, spoke her oratorio in Spanish, translated here:
Today I can look you straight in the eye and feel that the strength of my people outweighed your colonizing claws, that the struggle made me strong, that I grew in battle, that immersed in your depths I feel that day by day I am reclaiming what you have taken from my people.
Turn Pain Into Power infused with Fred’s avant-garde, world fusion style, roared a militant opposition to the deadly legacies of imperialism, which could be just as well called out today as they emanate from Washington. Ongoing genocides of indigenous peoples, most savagely in Palestine, imprisonment and deportation of so-called “immigrants,” police murders of Black people, and degradation of the ecology all bring into sharp relief the past 500 years—the lies, the hypocrisy about democracy, and the reawakening of the need for resistance.
“Essay to Us,” my portion of the oratorio in Part Four, included these words:
We stand here witnessing the turning of the tide.
Feeling split in two. Which America is America?
Which way will we march? How forcefully life is
Sucked from us as we breath to a bass and video beat.
In the early 1990s, I was a new mother based in New York and I was challenged to travel to these performances with a breastfeeding infant. Fred, ever the taskmaster, registered his annoyance when I was late getting to rehearsals and sound checks. He was like a stern big brother, but also caring. He wanted me to understand the discipline required to be a revolutionary artist committed to reflecting the times in which we are living. I still hold his lessons close to me.
Years after this performance in Washington, I performed with him one last time, just Fred and me, at the 14th and V Busboys and Poets. That show was in the months before he died of cancer at his home in Brooklyn in 2014.
But the beauty of art is that it lives on and makes an impact!
Printed on the CD for Turn Pain Into Power is “Abolish Columbus Day” and since 1992, many municipalities have adopted instead “Indigenous People’s Day.” Also printed on the disc is “No Genocide,” which we certainly include in today’s protest chants, in our street oratorio of rage.
Esther Iverem is an author, artist, cultural worker and independent journalist. She produces and hosts “On the Ground: Voices of Resistance from the Nation’s Capital,” which airs on WPFW in DC, on 30 other Pacifica stations, and on podcast. Her online home is estheriverem.net