The Voice on Fire

On Saturday, February 24, I was invited to facilitate a day-long team-building retreat for Aswat Arabic Music Ensemble in San Mateo, CA.

On Sunday, February 25, Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty member of the United States Air Force, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., in protest of Israel’s rampant, seemingly unstoppable annihilation of the people of Gaza. As a member of the U.S. Military and a citizen of the United States, Mr. Bushnell stated, he felt he could no longer remain complicit in this genocide. According to multiple news outlets, Bushnell wrote in a final Facebook post on Sunday morning, “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”

Right then, on Sunday afternoon, I was sitting down to brunch with a group of my Arab friends in Redwood City—a group of friends I met over a decade ago when we all were members of Aswat Music Ensemble. We first came to know each other in 2011, at the start of the Arab Spring, when Aswat Music Ensemble’s co-founder Nabila Mango (may she rest in power) assembled a group of singers and instrumentalists to perform a series of “emergency concerts” for the Bay Area Arab community and its allies. Aswat’s vision then, as it was at the ensemble’s establishment in 2003 and continues to be now, was to provide a gathering place in which Arabic art and music might prevail over hatred and bigotry; a place of safety and sanctuary in which our individual and collective voices would be heard.

I chose as the theme for the Aswat Music Ensemble’s team-building retreat “Sung and Unsung Voices: Exploring the Literal and Figurative Voice.” I drew inspiration for the content of the retreat from the title of Princeton music professor Carolyn Abbate’s book, Unsung Voices. Abbate’s concept of the unsung voice is that not all voices come through the actual vocal mechanism of a human being; not all voices are sung, or even spoken. A musical instrument, a river, the wind moving through a tree, or a poem, all have a voice. Each of these voices, potentially, has something significant to say, whether or not it occurs to us to listen.

Aaron Bushnell has now added his screaming reverberations to the millions of unsung, unheard voices that are crying out in protest for all of humanity to stop; to re-evaluate; to do better. And to do it now. Bushnell’s act was a distressing symptom of a world that has truly, alarmingly, and many of us fear, irrevocably, gone completely mad. The flames that devoured his body mirror a world that is itself on fire. Yet, his harrowing gesture was in actuality a bewildering cry of hope—one last despairing declaration that he actually believed in the potential of humanity to recognize and take responsibility for its own collective barbarism. His was an agonizing gesture of faith that the human species still has the capacity to derive from this gruesome act the impetus for a profound global awakening. That collectively, we might be shocked into taking the necessary steps to change course and turn our cataclysmic failures around, forging a framework for our shared existence that is more ethical and humane. Aaron Bushnell chose to speak out against the madness. And he wanted his voice—among the throngs of unsung voices—to be heard.

The unsung voice, as a metaphor for many of our individual and collective voices that feel unheard, uncelebrated, or un-listened to, can be perceived as the narrative or the intention behind—or even the essence of—an individual or collective expression of a thing. Even when literal sound is heard, there is always something beyond or beneath the audible vibration that is felt and interpreted. This unseen but felt thing is present even before sound is released into the atmosphere. It connects us with one another. That “something” is often deeply emotional and uniquely transformative. It’s what many people are referring to when they speak of having (or not having) a voice.

The Arabic word aswat means voices. Since its inception, Aswat Music Ensemble has always consisted of Arab musicians and non-Arab members of the community who are interested in (and often have a deep, personal connection to) Arabic arts and culture. These non-Arab “allies” are the voices without whom the ensemble’s collective voice would be significantly less rich and less potent. They help demonstrate how diverse voices, united, form strong and lasting communities.

Those who don’t have first-hand experience of the importance of allyship in oppressed, marginalized, and unsung or unheard communities may not understand why Aaron Bushnell—an American Christian with no clear ancestral connection to Palestine—chose to make his voice heard by permanently silencing it. They may not understand how deeply meaningful it is to the Palestinian community when a non-Palestinian steps forward and says or does something that is brave and truthful and in opposition to the voice of what, in Bushnell’s own words, “our ruling class has decided will be normal.”

Various perspectives about Aaron Bushnell’s self-sacrifice are currently circulating in public and private discourse, as people consider whether his act was heroic or treasonous; a sign of bravery or mental illness. Meanwhile, an entire global community maintains its collusion and complicity in perhaps the greatest insanity that affects our human condition: the State-sanctioned mass immolation that occurs every time a bomb is dropped on a country and its people.

Aaron Bushnell chose, as his final act of service, to sacrifice his own body, his own life, in hopes that his one voice might help to make heard 30,000 unsung Palestinian voices that have, since October 7, 2023, been sacrificed against their wills and without having any choice. And those 30,000 unsung voices sing the unsung voices of millions of oppressed and silenced others who are screaming—to little avail—to be heard.

In the days since I heard the news of Aaron Bushnell’s act of self-immolation, I find that I am repeating in my mind a phrase I often recall from Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things:

“…things can change in a day.”

It’s a phrase I find myself thinking when someone I love abandons me or dies; when I’ve made a careless mistake that is hurtful or damaging and that is fundamentally irreversible and irremediable; when an unexpected tragedy leaves me feeling not quite as secure or as hopeful as maybe I was once was. A sort of silence sets in that is both locked in place and simultaneously returning toward itself as a redundant echo, moving through my past and my future like a voice that is ceaselessly singing but never is heard.

When we create art, we are attempting to give voice to this silence. We are attempting to offer a vehicle for the expression of something that either can’t express itself, or can’t express itself in a specific way, to a specific audience, without going through the medium of a particular artist or art form. The artist, as creator, takes on the responsibility to transmit the voice that would otherwise remain unsung. In other words, that voice would be silent, or, in some cases, as is the case with people who identify with groups that are marginalized or oppressed, that voice would be silenced.

While I am not equating Aaron Bushnell’s final act to a work of performance art, per se, there are certain parallels, in the sense that certain types of art—as with certain types of sacrifice—function as sacred offerings to the god(s) and, also, as sacred transmissions of the god(s). That, for me, is what art is and does: it seeks to express its own forms of prayer and sacrifice, in communicating that which represents us as individuals and that which reflects our broader collective experience. The artist functions as an intermediary between this world and worlds unseen, unheard, and unknown. The activist, similarly, is attempting to bridge the gaps of our willful ignorance, urging us to see, hear, and know where we are failing in our humanity—where we have fallen out of alignment with the deepest parts of ourselves and, also, where we have lost touch with our duty to aid and protect that which will serve the greater good.

Those of us who are artists at heart and are “othered” in our communities often have no choice but to combine and conflate the personal and the political, to offer our protest by voicing our commentaries on violence and injustice through art as action and resistance. For evidence of this, just look to the works of any number of Brown or Black, Queer or Female, Minority or in any other way marginalized writer/poet/activists who have ever lived. The personal, for some of us, is always political, whether we’d like it to be, or not. For Aaron Bushnell, the political became unexpectedly and profoundly personal, and it compelled him to use his voice and his silence to express a truth that would otherwise have remained unheard and unexpressed.

It's been decades since I read Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Decades since I, tragically, lost my patience for reading fiction. When I returned to the novel just now, in order to re-read that refrain that repeats itself for me its original context, I found it poignantly relevant:

“Perhaps it’s true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house—the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture—must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.”

How hauntingly synchronous that this paragraph speaks through the metaphors of fire and bone, body and home, resurrection and memory…for this is what voices do. They smash and reconstitute, charr and rekindle the events of our lives, whether large or small, audible or silent. Each person has to choose where and when and how and if their voices will be heard. Each person must choose the medium through which they feel most comfortable, authentic, or effective when expressing themselves, whether on behalf of themselves, or as representatives or allies of entire people or nations.

Yes, we each do have a voice, and, in some sense, it’s always speaking and it’s always singing,

whether or not we choose to say anything;

whether or not people are listening;

whether or not we are ever heard;

whether or not anyone chooses to do anything

with all that is spoken or sung.

Things can change in a day. For the sake of the righteous and the innocent, for the sake of beauty and of art, I hold the same hope that Aaron Bushnell died for—the hope that the unsung voices of morality and integrity, of decency and sanity will prevail in demanding respect for all human life. In honor of the voice of Aaron Bushnell, and in honor of those whose lives have been taken namelessly and senselessly, heartbreakingly and egregiously, I hold the hope that this change will happen now. May he, and the 30,000 people in Gaza whose voices have been silenced in this hideous onslaught, rest in peace and power.

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