In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Cinelle Barnes’s memoir A Way Home shares the mesmerizing story of her recovery from a ruptured brain aneurysm.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil wrote of the book:
“In this stunning memoir, Barnes emphasizes kapwa―the Tagalog word for shared humanity―writing with a clarity that refuses spectacle and showing how home is grown slowly, through attention and care, rather than claimed all at once. A Way Home is a needed reminder that even after displacement and injury, the world still offers places―often in each other―where we can rest and belong.”
In her own words, here is Cinelle Barnes’s Book Notes music playlist for her memoir A Way Home:
In 2023, I was writing the last chapters for A WAY HOME, a travelogue about journeying home to the Philippines after a twenty-year separation and finally securing American citizenship. After being undocumented for most of my life in the United States, I finally could tell joyful stories about travel. (And these joyful stories feel extra precious right now.)
But just weeks before I was to turn in the manuscript, I suffered a brain aneurysm rupture and required emergency brain surgery. I woke up from the surgery a different person: my memories and connection to my husband and daughter, our home in South Carolina, my sense of self, and my past were all erased in a blink of an eye. I had to relearn how to walk, talk, and write with ease. I had to regain stamina, cognitive function, and mental capacity, and adopt a new way of doing most things, including reading and writing.
To complete A WAY HOME, I had to remember who I was, and I did, thanks to the music my two main caregivers played through the harrowing nights and the too-quiet mornings. This playlist is a collection of songs that brought me back to my spirit, my roots, and my resilience, which is so deeply rooted in the strength of the global majority. This medley allowed me to regain not only my dynamic sense of self but the many abilities necessary to finish the book. Without these songs, I would not have been able to create what I think is a new nonfiction subgenre: the travel-medical memoir, a form braiding moments of leisure and recovery. An intertwining of two kinds of exploration. The playlist certainly mirrors this intertwining: a curation of songs that made me cry or made me laugh until I cried. I think this playlist also reflects what many of us are currently experiencing in these fascist times: the need to find whimsy in the midst of warfare and woes.
I dedicate this playlist to my personal DJ and primary caregiver, my husband Stephen, and to our daughter Anouk, who teaches me all the new viral K-pop, P-pop, and KATSEYE choreos. My two brought me home to myself and my craft through their eclectic musical tastes and agile way of loving; they just go with the flow and get to the beat.
“New Dance” by XG
Discovering this song on YouTube was a happy accident. It was early in my brain injury journey and I was still incapable of so many basic tasks: bathing independently, filling the kettle and boiling water for tea, remembering to take my meds. My then twelve-year-old understood something in our life had drastically changed, and she tried, in her own way, to cling to something familiar. We’d always introduced each other to new or new-to-us songs, my 90s and Y2K RnB to her Gen Alpha princessy picks. Just weeks into my recovery, she asked for a new song rec, and because my memory was out of sorts, I couldn’t remember the name of the song and girl group I wanted to introduce her to. On YouTube, we tried a few entries: “New Day,” “New Gen,” “New Song by Xpa.” It was rather comedic, and boy were there some truly unexpected search results. I’m so glad my poor cognition resulted in discovering XG, a Japanese girl group producing nostalgic RnB and hiphop inflected with fresh cotton-candy pop. Their debut “New Dance” was just the little bounce our family needed during a crushingly confusing time. The way I searched for the song feels analogous to the way I had to search my brain. More than two years later, I still don’t remember my original thought but it doesn’t matter. In a new life of deficits and disabilities, “New Dance” fit, and it gave just the right lift… nudging me toward A WAY HOME’s completion.
“Alaska” by Maggie Rogers
Not only does this song start off with lines about exploration, discovery, and arriving at the self — themes I ponder in the travelogue thread of the book — “Alaska” was also on repeat for me as I finished A WAY HOME because it captured the strange experience of depersonalization, a symptom I intermittently had for a year following brain surgery. Depersonalization is when someone with a neurological condition experiences life out of body or apart from their reality or receded from the plane of time. Whack, I know. In “Alaska,” Maggie Rogers’ narrator is both “you” and “me,” singing lines like “I walked off you / and I walked off an old me / oh me oh my I thought it was a dream” and “You and I / there’s air in between.” This is exactly how I felt in my depersonalized fugues.
“Bakunawa” by Ruby Ibarra
A song about Filipino folklore and motherhood, Ruby Ibarra’s NPR Tiny Desk Contest-winning song is written in Tagalog, Bisaya, and English, languages I write in and about in A WAY HOME. As effortlessly as Ibarra switches from one tongue to the next, I aimed for prose fluidly linking my relationships with all three languages. “Bakunawa” was a necessary song to hear and watch on NPR Tiny Desk, performed, aptly, by an intergenerational, multi-genre assembly of Filipinx-American artists, including RnB singer Ouida, rock legend June Millington, and flautist Camille Ramirez. Why did this matter to the book? A WAY HOME is a book about resilience, and that resilience is rooted in my diverse community.
“US” by Ruby Ibarra
Is A WAY HOME a travel book? It sure is. Is it a conventional one? I sure hope not. “US” (also by Ruby Ibarra) is a protest song, one that’s as empowering as it is boppy. I wrote A WAY HOME with a lyricism that you can easily slide into and sit in the pocket of, and it’s my way of luring people into learning about Philippine history and its frustrating, forced marriage to the United States, and how these have resulted in booming, albeit harmful, Philippine tourism. At the book’s conception, I chose an attractive form (travelogue) and set out to fill it with really thinky, really feely stuff. As an early reviewer described the book, A WAY HOME is written in “exquisite, revealing, and lyrical prose” and is layered so that it will “grasp your heart, swim laps in your soul, and somersault in your mind long after you read the last page.” Thank you, Ruby Ibarra, for giving me a song that encouraged me to practice artful multitasking.
“Pantropiko” by BINI
Writing a memoir and surviving a brain injury are two of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and to do them simultaneously? It was imperative to find some fun. Better yet, it had to find me. BINI’s bubblegummy, summer-inspired global hit traveled all the way (through TikTok) from my birthplace of Manila and found me shriveled in post-surgery agony. It’s easy to understand how “Pantropiko” helped BINI become Spotify’s highest-streamed OPM (“Original Philippine Music”) artist. Three minutes and forty-five seconds long, “Pantropiko” is written and arranged for today’s distracted listener, or, in my case, someone with neurological deficits affecting focus and memory. Incorporating calypso steel drums, this song was the jaunty little trick I needed to intermittently step out of my funk and write about my tropical travels. It was a hard time, but it definitely wasn’t always sad.
“Touch” by KATSEYE
My favorite refrain from the book has to be “We have a good team,” a piece of dialogue I borrowed verbatim from my daughter. It’s not the most lyrical, artful, inventive line ever written, but it was something that held a special place and played a special purpose in the travelogue my “old self” wrote. As if the pithy phrase wasn’t already load-bearing, when I began to interlace vignettes from my brain injury life, the “medical” part of “travel-medical memoir,” the phrase lent itself as a narrative engine for the second thread. We have a good team. We have a good team. The refrain’s power became evident not only in moments of crisis but in times of play, too.
“Touch” debuted soon after we binge-watched Popstar Academy, a docuseries detailing KATSEYE’s formation through an intense K-pop-style training program. You bet my daughter taught me the choreo and pulled me into the KATSEYE girl-power vortex. Sophia, the Filipina member, was our, to borrow K-pop slang, “bias.” Just over a year later, when I was more neurologically stable and more comfortable with adaptive sensory tools, my girl and I saw KATSEYE live at Madison Square Garden. That night felt like a graduation: celebratory and also a little scary. If concerts and memoirs can’t mark our passage in time, I don’t know what can.
“NUEVAYoL” by Bad Bunny
No doubt, Bad Bunny is a prime example of the art of cultural multiplicity. Using both music and imagery to convey his “in-betweenness,” he gives us glorious tools to sculpt our own composite forms. Benito, who I joke to my husband and daughter is “my boyfriend who helps me live through these trying times,” understands that confluence is power, and that there’s a difference between “readership” and “reach.” The former is the specific, significant few for whom an artist creates and with whom an artist dialogues. The latter is the broader community, there to witness the magic of Specificity begets universality. Not only did “NUEVAYoL” harken back for me images of “Un verano en Nueva York,” motifs persistent in A WAY HOME, it also reminded me of a strength of my work: its syncretism. This new book is a mother-daughter story, an immigrant story, a story of romance amid recovery, a history lesson (the Philippines and Puerto Rico have twin histories), and a celebration and critique of travel. I can hear my two (other) loves, New York and Bad Bunny, say, “Why be one when you can flourish as many?”
“Gemini and Leo” by Helado Negro
What do you do when you feel like an alien in someone’s body, home, family, story? You dance. My experiences in depersonalization taught me that to feel present, you have to move and feel the body to you which you’ve been assigned. After brain surgery, I couldn’t always be sure that my feet were mine. I would go from feeling so connected to Stephen, the kind and gentle man who helped me into clean pants, to feeling like I was furniture in the house he owned. In the book, I described this feeling as “Two seconds too soon or two seconds too late,” like I was never in rhythm with reality. But there’s a poignant moment when “Gemini and Leo” (which I reference in the travelogue) played on our bluetooth speaker and Stephen scooped me up from the recliner so we could dance. Small, small sways. My head resting on a shoulder that in the moment indeed felt familiar. And I remembered then who we were: I’m a quick-witted, late-May baby prone to health kicks and multiple passions (personalities!). He’s a late-July peach, sweet, loving, tender, bruised in some parts. The disco-ish song goes: Gemini and Leo dancing on the floor all night.
“The Boy is Mine” by Brandy and Monica
Give me ’90s and early 2000s RnB any day, but especially on days when I can’t remember who I am. How did Stephen know how to do this? I can only suppose it’s because music from our growing up years has the same effect on him. Later in my recovery journey, when I was deep in neuroscientific research, I learned that music from our adolescence has a profound, lasting impact on the brain. People with dementia will forget what year it is or what their grandchild’s name is, but they’ll remember the exact words to the song their teen selves played on cassette or vinyl. Songs from our adolescence are hardwired in our identity formation and brain’s reward pathways, and proof of this is how I came back to Earth, so to speak, every time Brandy and Monica’s instantly recognizable arpeggio intro twinkled and blooped from a speaker.
“Hymne a l’amour” by Celine Dion, Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony
“Music is organized sound,” said a neurologic music therapist I was learning from. No wonder it has helped me with everything from speech and memory to, believe it or not, correcting my gait speed and walking cadence. Music activates so many of the brain’s networks at once, making it one of the most efficient ways to reorder the brain’s structure and wake up what’s gone dormant. Anecdotally speaking (I’m no medical expert but I’m an expert of my lived experiences), I believe listening to music allowed me to regain the lyricism and eclecticism of my writing.
Further, when Celion Dion, who lives with a progressive neurologic disorder that impacts, sometimes paralyzes, her singing, performed “Hymne a l’amour” from the Eiffel Tower at the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony, I felt my whole brain swell with awe. My scalp tingled and my knees gave, and I sobbed, knowing what it was like to fight for your ability to do that one thing you’d done all your life… that thing that allowed you to connect with other humans and with yourself. I still feel this way and I am still brought to tears when I rewatch Dion’s performance on YouTube: singing an Edith Piaf song, in her first language, in a diamond-laden Dior dress, in the night rain, at the top of the glittering Eiffel Tower. The world hushed. We were all Celine.
I was already so grateful to have survived a brain aneurysm rupture, something that kills more than half of the people that experience it. Hearing “Hymne a l’amour” performed at the Olympics by someone with a similar medical condition galvanized me to complete A WAY HOME. It also instilled a simple but profound truth: In dire times, all we have is love. I wish I had something cooler to say, Largehearted Boy reader. I wish I had a more intelligent take on music but all I have is this: In my dire moments, what I had were my Stephen and my Anouk. As the song’s starting lyrics say: Le ciel bleu sur nous peut s’effondrer / Et la Terre peut bien s’écrouler. The blue sky above us did collapse, and the earth surely crumbled, and it was their love that I needed to keep on not just with life but with living.
I end the playlist with this song so that when you, reader, are doing the dishes, walking the dog, or waiting in the carpool line in these atrocious times, wondering if you must pursue whatever it is that guards or bestows that which gives you a sense of self, a sense of here-ness, you can belt out the high notes and whole passion of this love song, letting your voice and spirit and perhaps body soar to the heights of its grand coda, allowing it to unite you, all of you, as it takes its famously dramatic musical leaps.
Cinelle Barnes is the author of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir and Malaya: Essays on Freedom. She is also the editor of A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South. Cinelle is a brain aneurysm survivor and sits on the South Carolina Brain Injury Leadership Council. She lives in Charleston with her husband, daughter, and cat. For information, visit www.cinellebarnes.com.