I've always enjoyed reading accounts of people who displayed extraordinary courage and fortitude in the face of tremendous obstacles. This enjoyment might have begun with "The Little Engine that Could" but I remember most vividly reading J.F.Kennedy's Profiles in Courage in high school, which made a deep impression on me. More recently, I have read accounts of musicians in the Americas and Asia who faced incredible obstacles, threats, imprisonment and torture but who remained true to their principles.
Viewing the documentary film Tibet in Song by Ngawang Choephel brought so much of this back to me.
Choephel is a Tibetan whose mother carried him on her back across the Himalayas from Tibet to India in 1968 when the Chinese took over Tibet. He always longed to return to Tibet and found that his most important link with Tibetan culture was music. After studying traditional Tibetan music intensely he resolved to go to Tibet to note what changes had taken place since the Chinese occupation. He discovered that many aspects of Tibetan culture had been obliterated. With respect to music, the Chinese would not allow any traditional aspects of the culture to be practiced, the goal being to make the Tibetans Chinese. Of course, pop culture has also attracted the youth and made them less interested in the older music. It was only by going far into the high mountainous and isolated areas that he found traditional music and cultural practices.
While filming, recording and interviewing people Choephel was arrested by the Chinese for subversive activity and espionage (although he was never a spy and stayed very clear of political controversy). Much of his film was destroyed (he was able to smuggle some out to India). He was sentenced to 18 years in a Chinese prison. A strong campaign led by his mother and human rights organizations helped lead to his release after six years. However, he witnessed the torture and murder of many fellow Tibetans who would not relent. There were three women in particular who appeared in the the documentary who were arrested and sent to prison because they would not sing the Chinese national anthem. They miraculously survived, although a number of their friends died from the brutal torture they received. In contrast, one Tibetan female singer who has been used by the Chinese to sing songs in praise of "mother China" was highlighted as well. One commentator noted that she stands out because of her uniqueness among Tibetans.
In the music literature course I developed, I attempted to underscore the importance of music by noting certain
universal purposes or functions of music. One of these is that music helps create a sense of cultural identity. Certain musical traits are unique to particular groups of people and when those traits are gone, part of the identity of the groups is gone as well. The stronger music is in the culture, the more pronounced this effect. Such is apparently the case in Tibet. Preserving certain musical traditions becomes not mere musical anthropology but cultural preservation, in this case where the culture has been forced to change from without rather than evolve from within.
The examples of Tibetan song and dance juxtaposed against Chinese song and dance were quite striking. One quote seemed to sum up everything. To paraphrase: "Certain musical traditions had great meaning for the Tibetans. When Chinese music was introduced to (read forced on) the Tibetans it was meaningless to them. It has only gained "meaning" by its constant employment by the Chinese in Tibet to the virtual exclusion of all traditional practices . The tragedy is that what is truly meaningless becomes meaningful."
This is a powerful documentary that provokes much discussion. Should we shake our heads in horror we should remember that, not too long ago, the same practice of cultural "purging" was done to many Native American groups was as means of getting them to assimilate into mainstream American culture, whatever that is?
View this documentary if you can.
A great poem by Gary Margolis, one of the Middlebury College faculty after screening of Tibet in Song at Middlebury on Oct 9, 2010.
What Was Sung To Us
My fellow Cornwallians,
before I forget, can I ask you
to recall the songs
you heard your grandfathers
sing, under their breaths,
when they thought no one
was listening, when they were
sitting alone in the cabs
of their tractors? And the tunes
their wives, your grandmothers
sang, when they were putting up
apples, trying to put the breeze,
coming from the orchard,
lifting off the swamp, into a jar.
Can I ask you to remember
what a neighbor said near
the counter in Longey's store
that later turned into a new
hymn? Or had such a beat
you could feel it, even in your
clay-caked boots. I wouldn't
expect you to forget the tapping
a loose shutter makes, when it can't
forget the wind was made
in the nearby lake, in the leaves
the smoke sends into our ears,
we have to make something of,
even if it isn't quite the pulled bell
in the roof of the Congregational
Church. And who's to say who
didn't hear a cow bellowing in
the back field and found their own way to hum it in a low register,
to bring it to mind, even in the dead
of winter, when the power lines
are down, when they can't sing
like cicadas. Like you, my fellow
Cornwallians, who hold all your songs
in your dreams, who wake before
dawn to sing them back into the barn
and the fields the barn stores.
You, who took the story of Ngawang
Choepel to heart. May I remind you,
he was the Tibetan young man
who studied nearby for a year
at the college and returned to Tibet
to save, to record the songs and dances
of his ancestors, his countrymen and women.
Who was jailed for saving that living
music and sending it out into the world,
keeping it, too, in the mouths of his cellmates.
Who, like us, will know how to sing themselves
Awake. We, who feel how the sun is free
to raise the deer from their unforgettable,
leafy beds. Who sing back what we can't forget
what was sung to us.
