Songs of Soil and Blood

2006

Songs of Soil and Blood is an archive of songs about home, sung by displaced people. The displacements may be forced or voluntary, literal or figurative.

Home has become a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows anymore. How hard can we expect even a pair of magic shoes to work? They promise to take us home, but are metaphors of homelessness comprehensible to them, are abstractions permissible? Are they literalists, or will they permit us to redifine the blessed word?

- Salman Rushdie, At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers

Songs of Soil and Blood, Sangklaburi was compiled in the spring of 2006 in a small town on the Thai-Burma border. Nearly everyone in Sangklaburi, Thailand is from somewhere else. Some of us arrive here by chance and by choice, others are driven here essentially by force. Oppression and economic instability in Burma push people over the border. While westerners are free to come and go as we please, those from Burma can’t return home and can’t travel any further - they are essentially stuck. Whether it is the military checkpoints or something else that keeps us here however, we are all very far from home. And whether our ultimate goal is to go forward or back we are all, for the moment, making a space for ourselves in between.

We are disconnected from the geographies that molded us and the communities that nurtured us. None-the-less, we carry home with us in many invisible ways. We weave it into the patchwork communities we establish in our new context; we project it onto new landscapes. One element of home which can never be taken from us or left behind is the music that we carry in our memories; the songs that spring unprompted to mind at the most unexpected moments. They trigger memory and transport us to times and places passed. When we sing these songs we create a temporary hybrid space. The past and the present, the far away and the immediate, mesh. We are reminded that we may leave home, but home can never leave us.

The Sangklaburi collection includes songs about:

Mudon Township, Pangkamar, Mon State, Burma
New York/Colorado, USA
Panga, Thanbyuzayart, Mon State, Myanmar
Levanger, Norway
Welkale, Thanbyuzayart, Mon State, Myanmar
California, USA
Marwlaryine, Mon State
London, England
Kaw Bein Village, Karen State, Burma
Oslo, Norway
Mudon Township, Mon State Burma
Tulua, Columbia
Kyainnseikyi, Karen State, Burma
Holland
Mudon, Mon State, Burma
Pittsburgh, PA, USA