In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Anna Badkhen’s essay collection To See Beyond profoundly observes and relates stories of survivors and hope in these dark times.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“Soul-stirring. . . . A quietly moving tribute to survivors of global upheaval.”
In her own words, here is Anna Badkhen’s Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection To See Beyond:
To See Beyond came together at the time of genocide and the rise of fascism, and it is a book of radical reimagining: a collection of essays that probe the ways we ward off despair and imagine the vocabulary we need for survival. In our hyper-informed digital era of patriarchal panic, climate catastrophe, and historically unmatched migration that frequently confronts unutterable violence, this book foregrounds hope as a form of resistance—or, as my poet-friend Gary Whited once put it, it tells “at least the beginning of the story of a future that is of the possible, and not the inevitable.” And so, in this playlist, I am offering you music that filled me with the most hope during the sinister months and years of writing and editing the essays in this book, and music that, I hope, offers you, too, a heartspace in which to dream differently.
- Our Years of Magical Thinking
“Atalaya” by Dezron Douglas
In the first year of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, I listened to Dezron’s record, Atalaya, on repeat. If you’ve been to Dezron’s concerts, you know that they always begin with the sonic blessing you hear in the beginning of this song. Or perhaps it is a call to attention. I want the first piece in my essay collection to serve as such a blessing or attunement, to set the tone for what we have at hand and an intention for what we are hoping to reach.
For thirty years I have been recording the violence we commit against one another, and still I am at a loss about human nature, about men deporting families and marching children to an abattoir, about a country caging children who don’t speak its language, about an army firebombing refugees in their sleep, about men walking into a village and shooting its elders dead. You might say our capacity for magical thinking is the antidote to our capacity for atrocity. But I want to believe that radical hope is more than a balancing act—that it is, in fact, a call to attention, an attunement, a setting of intention and direction. The anthropologist Paul Stoller says a sense of wonder leads us to change, because wonder helps us expand our imagination, which, in turn, takes us to a space of creativity where we can think up a better future
2. Mythologizing Disaster
“Tamir (for Tamir Rice)” by Jaleel Shaw
This tribute for Tamir Rice, the African-American child a police officer lynched in 2012, makes you rise at attention; there, it impales you. And, hopefully, it also reminds you of the singularity of every child murdered in the name of colonialism, everywhere in the world: in Palestine, in Congo, in Sudan, in Ukraine.
The title character of J. M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello proposes that to broadcast violence is obscene “because such things ought not to take place, and then obscene again because having taken place they ought not to be brought into the light but covered up and hidden forever in the bowels of the earth, like what goes on in the slaughterhouses of the world, if one wishes to save one’s sanity.” Years ago, when I first read this passage, I interpreted it as a prohibition against documenting violence. Maybe a true writer of conscience, I had thought then with moral dread, is one who never puts down a single word. Now I see that it is the last clause—if one wishes to save one’s sanity—that is the key to deciphering the quote: Why must we save our sanity? Who said we ought to stay sane? How is it even decent to remain sane in this insane world we are so recklessly and callously deranging? It is a kind of madness to always hear the keening of the dead, this hurt canticle. It is a madness not to hear.
3-5. Souvenirs of Climate Catastrophe
“Ptah, the El Daoud” by Alice Coltrane
“Afro Blue” by McCoy Tyner
“A l’ecoute du moro” by Ablaye Cissok
The seas are rising, the icebergs are melting, Siberia is ablaze, a third of Pakistan is underwater, heat-struck birds are falling out of the sky in India, and a record-setting heat wave has shrunk the Yangtze River to a record low. In Central Europe, rivers running dry after yet another heat wave are once again revealing mementos left behind by sufferers of historic droughts past. Hunger stones—river boulders that people living through droughts petroglyphed with dates and descriptions of their woe—commemorate the years of bad harvest, scarcity, high prices, hunger: 1417, 1616, 1707, 1746, 1790, 1800, 1811, 1830, 1842, 1868, 1892, 1893. One inscription, near Bleckede, in Lower Saxony, reads: “When this goes under, life will become more colorful again”; another, near the Czech town of Děčín-Podmokly: “If you see me, then weep.” On the same boulder, someone else later chiseled: “Don’t cry girl, when the field is dry, water it.” Many of the hunger stones on the Elbe River surfaced for the first time in many years in the summer of 2018, when Greenpeace, too, left a message on a boulder near Magdeburg: “If you see me, it’s climate crisis. August 2018.”
What other markers will we leave behind? It is hard at times to think beyond scorched forests and submerged farmlands, almost one-fifth of our planet unlivable for humans, the predicted mass die-off of at least a million species, disintegrating factories and mines leeching poison into soil, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In my mind, I try to tell my private beads of our aspirations: the ethereal Afrofuturism of Diébédo Francis Kéré’s architecture; the James Webb Space Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider; the artist Katie Paterson’s engagements with deep time and space; the unflinching bronzes of Simone Leigh; biomedical research advances that will help save hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of lives; Carlo Rovelli’s playful physics; Alice Coltrane and Ablaye Cissoko; Wole Soyinka; Beethoven; Euripides; Jay Wright . . .
6. How to Fly Kites
“Kite (for Refaat Alareer)” by Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith
It is no wonder that Refaat Alareer’s poem, “If I Must Die,” has stirred so many souls: in Vijay Iyer’s words, “a kite is, generally speaking, a universal symbol of freedom.” In this poem, Alareer—whom Israel murdered in Gaza in December 2023—forever pins a kite to an angel, pins the angel to the bomb-sieved sky, pins our grief to the most improbable, the most defiant, the most lasting wonder of hope. “He invites the reader to make a kite and fly it so that a child might see it and imagine that it’s an angel,” Iyer told NPR. “The way that it might spark some moment of inspiration or imagination in the observer is the key insight. It’s sort of like the whole poem hinges on that truth, and so it felt like the best I could do in tribute to him was to do what he asked, and to try to build a kite, a sonic kite.”
We are left, as we often are, to wonder. To receive wonder, we hold out both hands. When the wonder is too much, when there is too much wonder, we raise our arms in the air, to the heavens, as if we are tethering a kite, as if we are holding on to a kite, the pure light up there.
7. The Language of Birds
“Birds Canticum” by Dhafer Youssef
Was music the first language in the universe? I have heard an origin story in which birds teach the Creator the importance of song; according to this story, until then, apparently the Creator had not thought song necessary. The notion that music is an afterthought I find preposterous; then again, I often find myself at odds with the Creator.
8. Lamb
“Breaths” by Sweet Honey in the Rock
You might ask: how to reconcile so much death and so much hope? We can start by acknowledging that our beloved dead are the most reliable presences in our lives. I have dedicated this book to my dear friend and older brother, Rev. Yielbonzie Charles Johnson, who joined his ancestors in spring of 2023. I miss our conversations dearly, though of course they haven’t stopped just because Yielbonzie died, as he likes to remind me through one of his favorite songs, Ysaye Barnwell’s musical translation of the poem “Souffles” by the Senegalese poet Birago Diop:
Listen more often to things than to beings
Listen more often to things than to beings
‘Tis the ancestor’s breath when the fire’s voice is heard
‘Tis the ancestor’s breath in the voice of the water.
Those who have died have never, never left
The dead are not under the earth
They are in the rustling trees
They are in the groaning woods
They are in the crying grass,
They are in the moaning rocks
The dead are not under the earth.
I hope this playlist—and the book—help you do something Yielbonzie did well: listen closely, and love accordingly.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Anna Badkhen’s playlist for her essay collection Bright Unbearable Reality
Anna Badkhen’s playlist for her book Walking with Abel
Anna Badkhen is the author of eight books of nonfiction, including To See Beyond and Bright Unbearable Reality, longlisted for the National Book Award. Born in the Soviet Union and a former war correspondent, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and the Joel R. Seldin Award for Excellence in Peace and Justice Journalism, among other honors. She is an artist in residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia. For more information, visit www.annabadkhen.com.