Life in the Time of Covid–Winthrop R. Holder

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July 28, 2020

“One good thing about music, when it hits (you feel no pain).” Bob Marley, “Trench Town Rock.” 

                                                         “All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” Jorge Borges

Though the town where I reside was one of the first in New Jersey to ask residents to self-quarantine–at my wife’s behest–I ventured out fortnightly to deliver groceries and pick up dirty linen from our two adult offspring. They live in Brooklyn and Harlem, where Covid-19 was wreaking havoc among Blacks. Both were working from home, so we figured not dealing with the laundromat and facing grocery “lines [that] wrap around the entire block” would be an additional cordon sanitaire.

Driving through Williamsburg in Brooklyn, a predominantly Jewish area, and observing the relative lack of social distancing made me reflect on my actions’ rashness. Still, I considered my chore an essential service. In mid-March, when I attempted to do our traditional greeting at my first delivery, I could see the pain in my son’s masked face as he pulled back and offered one of his feet for a shoe bump! It was as if he were telling me that we should act as if living during the 14thC Black Death: “Fathers did not visit their sons, nor sons their fathers.” 

Subsequently, I became the impersonal delivery boy. I sat in the car: opened the trunk; son and daughter removed packages; put in or took out linen; waved from a safe distance. Sometimes, I wondered if my actions weren’t driven by a desire to escape for three hours-plus from being a caged bird at home than by altruism.

Driving on the near-empty highways, I noticed the speeding cars. The emergency room was the last place anyone should want to end up during the pandemic, so I was as cautious as possible. Still, on June 15, I ended up at New York University Hospital, and my stay there led to these reflections.

Music Therapy

I realized how central music was to me. As Kim Johnson notes in The Illustrated Story of Pan, “The operative principle underlying the music Africans brought to the New World is that it must help people live” and heal. He continues: “music must strengthen the bonds between people because only with and through others do we become fully human.” 

This sense came into full view when I received “Why Bob Marley Music Sales Surged in Pandemic & Racial Unrest, ‘Legend’ Album Back at No. 1” from a colleague on June 23. Before receiving the article, my daily wake-up mantra was Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds,” followed by Michael Boothman’s “Saying it With Music” and “Song For My Soul” from his stunning but hugely uncelebrated album “Heaven.”

This revelation only came to me when I faced extreme pain and discomfort. But then, I remembered G. W. Allport quoted in holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, “‘What alone remains is the last human freedoms’– the ability to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.” So that’s what I did; engaged in the rich, expansive tradition of African-derived music to temper my pain, especially after remembering a friend telling me of the kaiso therapy in his mother’s similar experience. I recalled my long Southern trips in the 1980s and 1990s when calypso and reggae transported me emotionally while the car did so physically.

On Father’s Day (June 21), a friend sent me “Song for My Father,” which could not have been more uplifting. It reconnected me deeply with my father: A grassroots philosopher and humorist who provided my cultural and moral education though not completing high school. For instance, as a seven-year-old, I didn’t understand how cricket was played in Australia when nighttime in Trinidad. In response, my father used a worn world map and provided my first geography lesson about latitude, longitude, time zones, and Greenwich Meantime! 

He also introduced me to the university concept early on via a bulletin from the University of New Brunswick, hoping that perhaps one of his five children would attend university. Indeed, my father’s eldest son visited the university campus to honor our father’s vision.

Out Of Breath

In the hospital, every day, when I took the nebulizer, which sprayed a mist into my lungs, I reimagined it as a chillum pipe. As such, I transported myself–away from the posh private room, with its stunning view of the East River and its 65-inch T.V., which I didn’t engage with–to the hills of Jamaica for a reasoning session by listening to Peter Tosh’s “Legalize It.” Not surprisingly, its refrain, “Singers smoke it/Doctors smoke it/Nurses smoke it/Judges smoke it,” resonates still.

Sometimes when taking the medication, I would think of Shadow’s “Hills Over Yonder,” where “The trees on the hills more wonderful still/The clouds in the sky/the birds flying high.” Thus, once it came time for the nebulizer, a few of the youthful, competent, and multicultural staff would laughingly remind me to search for Tosh on YouTube. Connecting with patients’ eccentricities made me feel that at NYU, Black Pain Matters! 

The staff’s compassion and stellar service made me recall my earlier visit for a Covid test. I stopped at a lunchtime demonstration, at NYU’s Main Entrance, by a broad cross-section of staff; service and security personnel, cafeteria workers, nurses, social workers, doctors, and others supporting Black Lives Matter! I knelt too but left after 4 minutes 36 seconds–which seemed like an eternity–to make my appointment.

Alternatives

I had to find pain alternatives since I had forfeited a right to Caribbean folk medicine, such as woman piaba, known for its “pain-killing properties” (1). So I found new sources and sounds on YouTube, which served as therapy, sometimes being more effective, in my mind, than even the PCA, a device that allows patients to self-administer painkillers.

By capturing the spirit of the times, Tanya Stevens’ “Do You Still Care?” and “The Other Cheek” featured on my playlist, along with Earl Rodney’s classic and tellingly resonant “Friends and Countrymen,” with its seemingly discordant sounds, kept me focused on the pan rather than pain. 

When, amid the tension, a player in the chorus says, “I want some ice water,” it echoes my cry. All I could have was ice chips during the fourteen-day hospital stay–and I received them sparingly. However, my Road March was a ‘spiritual’ to which I was exposed in a Jamaican pastor’s eulogy, “What A Hard Man Fe Dead: You pick him up/You lick him down/Him bounce right back.” Indeed, Sparrow captures this resilient spirit in his offering, “Man Will Survive”! with its declamation, “nothing conquers the will of man.”

Hugh Masekela’s “If There’s Anybody Out There” forced me to reflect deeply on the Uprising in the streets. Hearing from my hospital bed the youthful sounds of demonstrators in the streets–despite Covid-19–I was delighted that this generation was weaponizing Kwame Toure’s (Stokely Carmichael’s) manifesto: “Our grandfathers had to run, run, run. My generation’s out of breath. We ain’t running no more.“

EndNote

1. West Indian Weed Woman: Indigenous Origins of West Indian Folk Medicine, Erneslyn Velasco, and Lawrence Waldron.

Tags: #calypso #reggae #caribbeanfolkhealing #musictherapy #music #musictherapist #musicians #selfcare

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W. R. (troppy) Holder, an emancipated NYC public educator and a founding member of the Caribbean Awareness Committee (N.Y.), is co-editor of BigDrumNation and the author of Classroom Calypso: Giving Voice to the Voiceless.