This land is your land

It was past twelvemonth astir the rainy play that I stumbled upon the antecedently unreleased Woody Guthrie songs from the 1950s. Recorded successful the aboriginal 1950s, these songs instrumentality to a satellite inactive struggling with the aforesaid motivation questions of migrants, war, displacement, and societal justness that Guthrie wrote astir with specified compassion. Their re-emergence is simply a reminder that history’s unresolved injustices proceed to echo crossed generations.

Listening to those recordings, I felt a unusual tug of recognition, arsenic if a dependable from my boyhood had resurfaced to talk again successful a satellite grown darker, racist, and much divided. Woody Guthrie, 1 of America’s astir influential people singers and songwriters, was ever determination successful the inheritance of my increasing years. I retrieve him for giving dependable to the homeless, turning their suffering and resilience into songs of bonzer motivation force, peculiarly his song, This Land Is Your Land. But proceeding his “undiscovered” euphony now, astatine this fraught infinitesimal successful history, struck maine differently. Guthrie, successful 1 of those underground songs, imagines Fred Trump (Donald’s father) “stirring up radical hatred … erstwhile he drawed that color line … astatine his … household project”. His words, buried for decades, resonate successful today’s dismal Trumpian world arsenic informing against postwar American landlord capitalism that is characteristically exclusionary and continues into the present.

I recall, arsenic an undergraduate, being fascinated by Guthrie’s quality to crook elemental chords into plaintive melody. He present takes maine backmost to my idiosyncratic past of increasing up successful times erstwhile we besides listened to Pete Segger, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, voices that taught us, earlier we rather had the words for it, that euphony and meaning were inseparable, and that a opus could transportation the value of an full world’s conscience. I judge his euphony speaks to this moment, to the fractured times we find ourselves in, the taste wars, the sectarian upheavals, the casual brutalities that person travel to consciousness astir routine. These were precisely the warnings we did not perceive cautiously enough.

To me, his songs were munitions, scratched connected battered guitars with the words This Machine Kills Fascists. Even then, earlier I could afloat grasp their politics, I sensed they belonged to farmers formed disconnected their land, to workers lasting bare earlier locked warehouses, to migrants carrying their children into uncertain futures. And I recalled Guthrie’s line: “Nobody surviving tin ever halt me, / As I spell walking my state highway,” a declaration that nary wall, nary border, nary fearfulness should halt radical yearning for belonging.

And possibly that is wherefore Guthrie returned to maine successful the aftermath of past year’s floods successful Punjab. Water spilling crossed our villages carried maine backmost to stories of the rivers earlier Partition, erstwhile the Sutlej and Ravi flowed freely done lands wherever Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims lived unneurotic without suspicion. My elders spoke of a Punjab unscarred by borders, wherever onshore was not yet divided by barbed ligament oregon hatred. Partition changed that forever. Fields were abandoned, neighbours lost, representation scarred. Listening to Guthrie today, I realise that Partition was a infinitesimal erstwhile radical were uprooted not by upwind and sand, but by authorities and the cruelty of a enactment drawn connected a map.

No deed, nary fence

At the bosom of Guthrie’s imaginativeness was the condemnation that onshore belongs to nary deed and nary fence; it is made, arsenic helium sang , for you and me. It was nary saccharine patriotic hymn but a extremist critique of exclusion, of “No Trespassing” signs, and of bare radical staring astatine locked doors of plenty. I cannot assistance proceeding those words contiguous successful the cries of Palestinians, exiled from olive groves and ancestral soil. I spot farmers successful Ukraine anguished with their fields turned to rubble, their homes occupied.

Even successful America itself, the onshore Guthrie sang for, the contradiction has ne'er been sharper. Immigration policies nether Trump proceed to make a clime of fearfulness and trauma lacking successful basal humanitarian sensitivity. Migrants who harvest the fields, physique the cities, and attraction for the children are vilified arsenic intruders. Trump’s America has perfected this cruelty by ripping families apart, caging children, turning backmost asylum seekers. And crossed his recordings the refrain inactive echoes: “Ain’t got nary location successful this world anymore.”

As I listened to those “new” Guthrie songs, I felt they were not relics but summons. They reminded maine that music, similar rivers, resists partitions. It flows crossed generations, carrying representation and defiance. Just arsenic the Punjab floods punctual america that h2o does not obey borders, Guthrie’s euphony reminds america that creation cannot beryllium silenced and that euphony has its ain ways of seeping done borders astatine the close clip and the close place. I transportation this with maine arsenic some representation and responsibility. I retrieve the stories of rivers earlier Partition, erstwhile onshore was not yet turned into a wound.

And I recognise, successful today’s refugees and migrants, the aforesaid stubborn endurance Guthrie sang of, the refusal to disappear, the insistence connected belonging. Woody Guthrie’s euphony rises again contiguous not arsenic longing but arsenic foresight. It tells america that borders cannot erase memory, and that those formed retired volition ever find their song. As Lebanon burns, arsenic Ukraine bleeds, arsenic immigrants are told to permission lands they person laboured to build, Guthrie whispers crossed time: “This onshore is not theirs to hoard. It belongs to the people, successful their conflict and their hope.”

shelleywalia@gmail.com