Beauty in a Broken World
On January 7, ICE agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. Shock waves from those deadly, unprovoked gunshots shook our country, my heart, my home.
The next night, I participated in my first steel pan class, offered in a local community center by the Seattle Steel Pan Project. The bright sounds and brilliant harmonies made me cry. Beauty still exists in our broken world.
I found out about the Seattle Steel Pan Project when they performed at the Othello Parks International Festival several years ago. I had spent hours sitting at a booth talking to people about the importance of urban tree canopy. The music brought me to my feet. It’s impossible for me to listen to steel pan music without moving my body.
Steel pan, a modern acoustical instrument, emerged from street musicians in Trinidad in the 1930s and 1940s. African people who were kidnapped and sold into slavery brought their drumming traditions to Trinidad. After emancipation in 1834, colonial oppression of former slaves and their descendants continued. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, British colonial authorities, afraid of rebellion, first banned traditional drumming, then other percussion instruments like the “tamboo bamboo.” But musicians persisted. They created the earliest pan drums from trash can lids, paint cans, biscuit tins, whatever they had. As Jaigan McKenley-McDonald says in this video, “The idea of making something out of nothing is what human beings have been doing for years. We really are made to overcome, to grow, to develop.”
I didn’t know this history when I stepped into a former school classroom filled with steel pans that night. I just knew that the music lifted me up. A talented and racially diverse group, mostly people less than half my age, welcomed me. Behind where I stood in the room, written on the chalk board: “Before pan is encountered as music it is experienced as a form of belonging.”
For two hours a week in class, and during practice sessions in between, everything else—the war in Iran, the torture of immigrants in US concentration camps, our government’s attempt to erase trans people, my neighbors’ trauma from a vicious landlord—falls away. My mind and body focus on how to glide through a progression of notes I have just learned. Playing steel pan combines dance, percussion, and melody. The experience is fluid, kinetic. As a beginning student, I feel buoyed every time I can produce a string of shining notes that match the part I am supposed to play. I try to keep my perfectionist self at bay.
The ingenuity, creativity, and persistence of the African descendants who originated steel pan almost a century ago inspire me in our desperate present. Their work provided the foundation for a space that nourishes my soul, strengthens my body, and challenges my brain. The younger students in the class inspire me too. They will inherit the world we create from the rubble. If I can help in a small way to make that world more just and beautiful, that will be enough.