Reaching Beyond Your Grasp... and Dancing with Words

One of the most remarkable musical performances I’ve ever seen I witnessed at Eluwa Special School in Ongwediva, Namibia.  Eluwa is a school for deaf and blind students located near the northern border of Namibia and Angola, and I had gone there for a summer (their winter, our summer) to teach computer skills to a couple of classes of the students, to help the blind students learn to use software that would allow them to use computers, and to teach instructional use of computers to the teaching staff.  Eluwa is a remarkable place, and even more remarkable are the students and staff.  Students come from all parts of Namibia, and also from Angola, Botswana, and Zimbabwe.  When I was there, out of the 300+ students, about 80 were blind, the rest deaf, and a very few both blind and deaf.

My porch-conversation group

Every teacher who works there (several of whom were there as students when they were young) is required to lead an extracurricular activity with the students. When staff found out that I had an interest in the arts, there was some early competition for me to participate in theater, dance, and visual arts activities - I was, early on, invited to observe all these groups while I settled on the one I’d “volunteer” with.  Unofficially, I sat outside the visiting teacher’s housing every afternoon with a group of teen and pre-teen deaf girls, while they showed me their writings (in beautifully-illustrated diaries) and talked about their goals, and I talked to them about stories, poetry, and the female writers I admired.  These “conversations” were slow and required considerable patience, as the girls worked with me to learn, understand, and become proficient in Namibian Sign Language (distinctly different from ASL, though the signs for letters are the same). This probably benefited me more than it did them.

Because of the small size of the school, students often participated in multiple extra-curricular activities, so when I walked into the dance class, I wasn’t surprised to see many of “my” girls - my NSL-writing-porch-conversation group - in the dance group.  The teacher/leader of the group, a woman named Deena with whom I got to be great friends - explained to me that the reason there were huge amplifiers setting well out from the wall, the CD player on a stand behind them, was that the music would be played loud enough to vibrate the floor, so that the girls could feel the music through their feet as they rehearsed.  They would dance barefoot.  She offered me earplugs, which I declined.
When the music started to play, I didn’t recognize it, but I recognized the type - a solid rock beat, skillful drums and guitars, and a beautiful male voice tenor singing in a language I did not know, but I did recognize the passion and vocal range (which was impressive). The music pounded through the room, and before I had a chance to think, the girls were in formation, going through what was obviously a carefully-choreographed routine, never missing a beat as they responded to the music they could not hear, while their teacher beamed.  At the end, I broke into applause, and they blushed.  Later I was told they had twice won the National Dance Award for girls in their age range.  They did two more routines before I had to leave, and I left awestruck.

Watching these girls, seeing in their eyes not just intense concentration, but absolute joy in the music they were feeling rather than hearing, I was overcome with the resilience of the human spirit, and the absolute power of music.

When I am writing to music and the words are not coming, I think of them, and close my eyes, seeing their slender bodies,  at one moment sitting with me on that far-away porch, laughing or crying over their shared writings, and the next moment swirling and stomping, swaying and strutting to music with which they shared resonance if not audibility. Every one of them knew that there were aspects to music they would never know, but that did not matter to them - they lived the music in movement, they shared it in physical elation and embodied music in every gesture and motion.

What impressed me so much was not just the beauty of their performance - which was a thing of heart-stopping beauty - but their courage.   These young women, rejected by their mainstream society, written off by everyone but the people at this school, knowing that those who watched them were aware of something they could never share (what the music sounded like), set all of that aside - all that judgement, all that skepticism, all that rejection - and just opened themselves. They found a way for something that was supposed to be out of their reach to instead be within their grasp, and they embraced it fully  - they lived it.

I could go into a litany of all the ways I witnessed the courage of these young women, but it was all there in their dance. When I struggle with a character or a plot or even just a sense that 'something’s

wrong' when working on a story, what I need to remember to do is see those girls in my memory, see their exhilaration as they swirl and sweep around a floor, the light in their eyes, the perfection of their movements, and their delighted laughter when a routine is finished.

With each writing project I start, I create (at some point) a writing playlist - different for each story.   Lately, as I write, I’ve had a variety of music and music styles playing, and nothing has yet settled.  I often play Mozart, but also have found myself listening to The Eagles, Eric Clapton, Aretha Franklin, several different jazz albums, and things as diverse as Ray Charles and Jean-Luc Ponty.  Harry Chapin and Harry  Nilsson.  While no “playlist” is emerging for this particular story, the image of those beautiful young women dancing sweeps through the background of my thoughts, and I settle into whatever is playing, feeling and embracing it, and the words keep coming.  There may be something in the story I cannot yet hear or see, but I can cease to worry about what’s out of my reach and find what is in my grasp within the story, and dance with the words.

This is something I wish for all of you.  Listen to the music - reach….and write.