Afew weeks ago I posted a photograph on Twitter. Yellowed and cracked with age, it showed my mum as a young nurse in London, smiling, proud and starched in her puff- sleeved uniform. The Windrush scandal was raging and it pained me to hear the palpable sorrow in her Bajan lilt when we discussed the treatment of those who had been labelled “illegal”. Feeling powerless, I had taken to social media to try to honour the ways mum and her generation had carried on against the odds, fought for equality and helped to rebuild post-war Britain.
I was reminded of my mum’s old nursing outfit last week, when I saw a picture of myself wearing a similar, old-fashioned blue frock. It’s one of my costumes in Effigies of Wickedness! (Songs Banned by the Nazis). I wear it to sing a Hanns Eisler protest song that feels as fresh and pertinent as it must have done when it was written 88 years ago. Eisler’s Solidarity Song, composed for Bertold Brecht’s 1932 film Kuhle Wampe (Who Owns the World?) is one of their “fight songs” – calls to action, pleas for us all to “raise our voices” in the fight for equality, a plea for empathy and respect for everyone, regardless of race or colour.
Peoples of this earth, rise up now for this earth is now your due /… Black and white and brown stand up now / End the rule of sword and gun! / For when once you raise your voices / All the people shall be one.
This song particularly has empowered and inspired me against the backdrop of this national disgrace. I’ve found myself wanting to not only dedicate Eisler’s Solidarity Song to my mother, today, but also to her as a naive daughter of the colonies, set adrift in 1960s Hackney, forced to navigate the harsh reality of discrimination.
Eisler’s song was one of many that were labelled “degenerate music” by the Nazis in the 1930s and banned in Germany. Art, literature, films and jazz and atonal music were all suppressed for being “un-German” in a mass aesthetic cleansing campaign, and Eisler – along with many fellow musicians and artists – was forced into exile. My interest in this shameful period of European history was first piqued by news of the discovery in a Munich flat of 1,500 works of art that had been banned, confiscated and thought lost. I researched further and learned about the music and musicians who had been suppressed and silenced, too.
It felt necessary for me, as a black musician, to respond artistically and offer up a contemporary challenge. I developed a recital and toured and talked about it. Four years later, director Ellen McDougall has developed that recital into a larger, all singing and dancing (literally) cabaret-style show, which presents the terrible truths and glorious music of those stifled voices.
The Austrian-born Eisler wrote songs about resisting oppression, about disabled war veterans, about the unemployed, abortion laws, and probably most surprisingly, Jim Crow segregation laws in the US.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
