Dissonant Notes at Violin Vigil

EVENT: Elijah McClain Vigil, Peninsula Park

Peninsula Park is the perfect place for a socially distanced summer event. Hundreds of people sit on the cool grass, close but not too close to each other, and wait for the music to begin.

Overflowing from the gazebo, dozens of musicians wait to play. I count at least four double basses, several cellos, and an overwhelming number of violins and violas. The line of violinists extends out both ways from the gazebo. Many of them are children, many of them are people of color. The air is soft, the world smells of grass and flowers.

As I walk towards the event, an organizer speaks about their thought process around using music to communicate during these protests. This theme—creative self-reflection—runs through the event itself. Perhaps, for some, this is healing: the idea that suffering contains meaning, that death and creation are intertwined in this way. 

I don’t have time to fully examine why this construction makes me so uncomfortable before the instruments begin to play. The music is mournful but peaceful. The many strings meld into a conversation: each individual instrument audible, all coming together into an introspective whole. The park is silent.

As the music dies down into background noise, the organizer steps forward and speaks to us in a voice that would seem most at home in an ASMR video. They tell us that Elija McClain used to bow in gratitude every time he entered and exited a room. Encourage us to bow in gratitude as well, to embrace gratitude and togetherness before we get into arguments, before we become divisive. To remember love.

I’m in no mood to remember love. Three days previously, I marched from this very park with a large group of protesters to the Portland Police association. We were beaten, driven back, and gassed until we couldn’t see or breathe. Three journalists were arrested and charged with felonies that night. I’m still reeling from the violence of it: from the hate I heard over the police loudspeaker, the announcement that one of the arrested journalists will no longer be covering these protests. State suppression of speech, extralegal violence. 

I’m not sure that love and reconciliation are what we need right now. 

The organizer tells us that we are going to hear from Letha Winston, mother of Patrick Kimmons: a black man shot in the back by Portland police two years ago. “Let her words become our words. Let her thoughts become our thoughts.”

But how can her thoughts ever become our thoughts? How can we ever truly understand the pain of losing one’s child to police brutality if we haven’t been there?

As soon as Letha begins to speak, the tone shifts completely: from a dreamy conception of togetherness to catastrophic reality. Initial nervousness fades as she communicates her fury and sadness to the crowd. The pain of never seeing her child again. The children he left behind. Her anger at politicians who don’t listen and don’t help. This whole lousy, racist system. 

And if she goes a bit over time—if in her passion and fury she speaks to us for longer than she was supposed to—who will step in and say she must sit down? Who will take her words from her: this woman whose son was stolen? The crowd is on their feet for her. They are with her. She invites them to march with her: every Thursday at 10:00 AM.

After Letha’s speech, the strings begin another beautiful piece of music. Sound fills the park as the light fades. Again it dies down to background for a different performer: spoken-word poetry about consciousness and remaining present within black bodies. Unity. Harmony.

Again, I find myself unable to enter into this emotional landscape. When the performer speaks about Elijah McClain as a creative soul, about how this death impacts all creative souls, how he is an avatar for all of those who create, I get up to leave. Elijah McClain, as far as I can tell, didn’t stand in for any group of people. He was a boy who was young, and who was cold, and who was murdered, and who is dead. His thoughts and feelings extinguished, all his memories gone. We can struggle to find meaning in that death, we can make him into a symbol, I am not here to police the way anyone mourns or makes sense of senseless violence. But my heart does not long for unity or forgiveness. My heart yearns for the violence of change.

So I leave the violins and drive to the Justice Center