You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway it’s the same old story – – –
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.

And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.

(excerpt from Mary Oliver poem, Dogfish)

I have been living in the Pacific Northwest for just over a year now, and I have had scant few opportunities to write music with people from their stories. I have reached out to many organizations that work with refugees in Seattle with limited response. I spent several months visiting a senior living center to offer songwriting sessions. I am not sure I would describe that has completely participatory in nature. Much depended on how present and aware the people were who joined the sessions. We wrote some interesting songs, some downright hilarious, and I learned a great deal from the experience. However, I wound up composing the melody and adding supporting chords and rhythm because I was never quite able to convince anyone to sing the words people shared and that I wrote on a whiteboard.

A few weeks ago, a Jewish friend called me to say that a young Gazan friend of hers would be coming to stay with her for a couple of weeks. He had been studying in Bangladesh to become a doctor and was in need a rest and had reached out to her. I know this woman because she went to high school with my mom in Detroit, Michigan and my mom connected us when I first moved to Seattle. She has an enormous, open heart and we first met in person when she invited my husband and me to join her family for a Passover Seder last spring.

I have since had many conversations with her and met up a few times. She is the reason I have been able to get my foot in the door, teaching yoga at the Greenwood Senior Center. She had invited me to cover her class in May 2022 while she would be out of town, and a couple of her students asked if I might be able to offer a more rigorous a class at the center.

She called me from the car after picking up her Gazan friend and explained her plan to host a fundraiser and support gathering for him at her house the following weekend. She wondered if I might join and play music. I was initially enthusiastic about the idea but found myself overwhelmed by anxiety when she explained that she wanted her friend to share stories about the horrors he experienced in Gaza during his childhood and to also call his family in Gaza to get updates from them.

I am a highly sensitive person, and I have been very tentatively starting to try to protect myself from situations where I am easily overwhelmed. I sat with the idea of “getting over myself” and going to the event until I talked about it with my husband. I seem to need external permission to communicate healthy boundaries.

I talked with D’vorah over the phone and explained my reticence. We decided that I could still offer my support by donating my time and the gift of songwriting with her and her friend the following Wednesday.

Wednesday morning, I loaded my ukulele into one panier and my computer and a couple of rhythm instruments into another. These both went onto my commuter bicycle. This would be my first attempt to bicycle with a ukulele in a panier. I had ridden to the senior center with the instrument on my back before we installed a rack on the bicycle. It had definitely been a dodgy experiment, as I had to keep pushing the neck of the instrument over to the side so it didn’t push my helmet forward and down to cover my eyes.

This trip was a success! I arrived and met D’vorah and Fadi in the front hall. Hugs were exchanged, and we spoke briefly about Zionism and wishes for peace in the region.

We sat down for a drink and then moved to then living room to sit by the fire. I was freezing after my ride down from north Seattle to Wallingford.

We started with D’vorah reading excerpts from notes she had taken while listening to Fadi talk about his experiences and his trauma. My hope, and one that I had expressed to D’vorah over the phone, was to encourage Fadi to share experiences without unintentionally triggering him to relive his trauma. Was there a way for this to be a postive, heart-opening experience?

As D’vorah read from a notebook, I took notes on my computer. Fadi began to chime in and expand upon the phrases, adding details and very visual imagery. I stopped them both when I fell behind on my typing to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

After filling several pages, which I had formatted to landscape with two columns, I asked Fadi if he would like to take a look at his story and begin to shape the words into stanzas, verses, and a possible chorus or refrain. He told me he trusted me, that I could do anything I wanted. I could write the melody and then send him the song.

I suggested that I would like to hear his the melody that he might sing. I could certainly come up with a melody, but I did not have a personal connection to the song. Similar to the idea that the words he spoke were a verbal, written communication of his experiences, the notes that he alone could sing would be a kind of musical language. He had the strongest connection to these experiences because they were his memories. I said I could play some chords if that might help, but he suddenly started to sing through the first line of text on the first page.

My blood is full of sadness

And then he asked if he could sing a phrase that was a bit further down on the page, revising it slightly was its original form.

My family displaced three times

He sang through these lines a few more times, and I picked out the melody on my ukulele.

We then looked at the text again. I told him he could choose from any of the words and phrases in the entire document and/or add new words. I saved the file as a new document so as to keep a copy of the original source text in case we wanted to go back at any point to look.

I also offered the idea of completing the stanza with these two phrases:

My life is full of stories

I see them with my eyes

Fadi sang through the first two lines again and continued to the next ones. I picked the melody on my ukulele and determined that he was singing in the key of A.

I mentioned that I also thought there was poignance and power in his reference to the number 18, which he repeated. In Hebrew, the letter Chai is represented by the number 18 and means life. Any number that is connected with 18 has power. Monetary gifts are often given in ?? of 18.

18 years

Four wars

18 years 18 thousand stories

I also shared with Fadi the part at the very end, which both D’vorah and I had responded to quite viscerally with heartfelt exhalation, and said I wondered if this might be an important message from the story.

My mom tells me

Call for peace

Call for love

My father tells me

Be strong and love people

Fadi agreed wholeheartedly and went on to talk about his parents and the influence of these teachings. We spent the rest of the time singing thhrough these lines. The melody Fadi had been singing for the stanza we started with now found its way to this refrain.

I tried different chords and spent quite a bit of time trying to find a strumming rhythm that would support the syncopation in the melody, as well as which points in the melody to change chords. It was tricky, and when you listen to the song I think you will understand why.

There are pauses at places where I likely would not have thought to place them, so I also was not in the habit of strumming to this rhythmic pattern. I have not studied Arabic music making techniques, but perhaps the music follows a similar rhythm pattern, one that is different from traditional western styles of music. This is something I would like to explore more.

We came to one point where I did notice that the entire story and this refrain we had been singing for some time was all in English, and Fadi was a native Arabic speaker. I asked if he would consider translating the refrain into Arabic so that we could sing in both languages. He was first reticent, explaining that Arabic didn’t match the English. I think as in many languages, sentences are structured differently and sayings that are common in one language do not even exist in the other to be translated.

Something fascinating about this process has been to notice how Fadi went from being somewhat nonchalant about it to fully taking hold of the reins (note, this could be a colloquialism that means “taking control” in English and would likely be said completely differently in in another language, particularly one that is not of Anglo-Saxon origin). We learned many hilarious turns of phrase while living in Belgium. For example, when I was teaching yoga and asked if several people with their mats in the front row might each move over just a little bit, one student told me what you would say in Dutch (when I asked) and that the phrase translates into English as “Scoot over a fart.”

After we had gone through the storytelling portion of the session, I remember Fadi suggesting that I could do whatever I want for writing the song. Any words I wanted to use were fine. I could compose the melody. I could even write the song and send it to him. Once he began to sing, however, his demeanor completely shifted. He would stop me from strumming to make sure that I was supporting the exact rhythm for the melody he was creating. He would make suggestions for changes to the wording and direct me to make sure certain phrases were on one line to show they should be sung all together.

So the original text I shared changed:

My mom tells me

Call for peace, call for love (with these two phrases together on one line)

I was instructed to do this for the Arabic translation as well. The stanza below shows the original way I typed the Arabic. Note that I typed it out phonetically in English so that I could sing along.

Om me chaketly

sell li mocheb

A buoy chakeh elli

sell li mocheb

From four lines to two:

Om me chaketly sell li mocheb

A buoy chakeh elli sell li mocheb

By the end, Fadi was actively leading the singing circle and asked if we had a microphone so that we could make a professional recording. After making several audio recordings and a couple of videos, I checked my phone and noted the time. Two and a half hours had passed since I had arrived. I said that I would have to head home. I had a very needy husky who I try not to leave for more than four hours at a time.

Fadi wanted to make sure I would send him story, and I said I would send the audio files and photos as well. Fadi relaxed into a chair, leaning back and sighing.

How do you feel? D’vorah asked him.

I feel great! Fadi said with a smile.

Note: In this piece I intentionally only shared Fadi’s first name. He was worried about impressions from other people from Gaza at the bouncy and positive melody of the song, noting there can be shame in this kind of music. I was given permission to write about the songwriting process and share the photos and video below on my website. I am not sharing them on Facebook or other social media platforms per Fadi’s request.