Orchestras, Offside, and Outrage
How to transform rage into creative fuel for change
This week, I just need to vent. Have you ever felt like that? An accumulation of tension, anger, even rage, that just needs to come out like steam out of a pressure cooker.
Rage. That’s the emotion that was evoked in me at the end of last week. It started with a conversation with the wonderful Jo Blackwell, founder of the Midlife movement and host of the podcast “Midlife & Beyond”. We talked about rage about the systematic and often unconscious devaluation of women, and particularly women of a certain age. And then she told me about her son who went to Kabul 7 years ago to meet with an all-female orchestra, and ended up doing a documentary about it. So later that day, I decided to look for it.
I couldn’t find the said documentary (though I found an article about it), but I found another BBC documentary about Afghan singers called “The last torch: Singing for Afghanistan” (You can watch it on the BBC iplayer or YouTube). So I watched that instead. It’s only 26 minutes but it is powerful. The courage of these Afghan women using their voice to speak up against the violence and repression, and risking their life by doing so, is humbling and awe inspiring. For 26 minutes, I travelled to a different world. My heart was with these women, their pain, their struggle, their indestructible spirit.
When it finished, I passed the remote to my husband who had joined me half-way through and he switched to watching the football. If you are in Europe, I’m sure you won’t have fail to notice that the UEFA cup is on. And for those who don’t know, it is a European football tournament, the next ‘big thing’ after the world cup. Last Friday was France vs Portugal. As France is ‘supposed to be my country’, I guess he thought I’d be interested. Or maybe that’s what I thought – I thought ‘I ought to be interested’.
I watched as they sang the national anthem, flinching at the lyrics wishing for the “impure blood or our enemy to water our furrows”. My husband was shocked as I translated for him and reminded him that France is a nation founded on a revolution, tainted with blood and violence, and that the French national anthem is a revolutionary chant. I tried to get into the game, but I couldn’t. This is not the first time this happened. As I watched the players running around passing the ball between them and as I listened to the excited voices of the commentators, I felt nothing but utter bewilderment. How could one get so worked up about people running around and chasing after a little round ball? How could they feel such a range of emotions: passion, anger, despair, joy – or act like their life depended on it?
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