Drums Against the Dark

It was 1972. I was newly married, living in the north but traveling south for Christmas, which was a major festival in my family. Through a series of happy accidents, my husband had escaped any danger of being sent to Vietnam so my spirits were high. Vietnam as a specter over my personal life was behind me. I was everything civilians are accused of being: involved only when personally affected. The war was not behind the Vietnamese or behind American veterans, but in a selfish betrayal of passions I had only recently held, I was no longer paying much attention.

In Paris peace negotiations between the United States and Vietnam had broken down. US president Richard Nixon had ordered Vietnam to return to the negotiating table or he would bomb them. On December 18 he did so. He ordered the start of Operation Linebacker II, a campaign that targeted the industrial areas of Hanoi and Haiphong. It was the largest bombing campaign since World War II, dropped more than 20,000 tons of ordnance, and killed more than 1600 civilians. The campaign ran from December 18th to 24th, stopped on Christmas Day (we observe the niceties after all) and began again from the 26th to 29th.

My parents were somber, putting up a brave face while they surreptitiously listened to news updates. I upheld the joyous traditions. It was not that I did not care. I did, but I was also steeled against the outrages of my own government. I had come of age with this war, with the shattering of my belief in my country’s essential goodness. I had started my own life and I wanted to live it. I wanted Christmas. (I do have a character arc, which is apparent in Seeking Quan Am.)

This year that memory plays among the rhythms of a family that now includes two grandchildren who will grow up within a new shattering. Older, perhaps a little wiser, a touch cynical, I live in the grief and dread my parents must have felt 50 years ago. In 1967 Martin Luther King said “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam.” I find myself wondering if we are living now in the future he feared. So I make the Christmas preparations because of the children but also because I believe in setting lights and joy and family against the dark.

Also against the dark I set this:

It was 1992. I drove through Ireland with my daughter who was depressed, in a teenage kind of way, and losing ground in high school. She had watched a music video of the Cranberries that showed the Cliffs of Moher and had set her heart on going there. We both took a time-out, rented a car, and learned how to drive on the left. We negotiated tiny roads in small towns, arrived in Dublin filled with optimism and got hopelessly lost in one-way streets and somehow ended up driving down Grafton Street which, it quickly became apparent, was a pedestrian mall.

After a few days we left the city, drove west and, just as in Eavan Boland’s poem, felt ourselves in a different world. We stayed in a B&B in a little town in the Burren that was having a community dance in a new hall built by someone who had, for real, won the Irish lottery. Our hostess was making ham sandwiches and invited us to help. We carried it all on trays to tables in the hall where some instruction had begun and the musicians were luring people onto the floor. It was not Riverdance, but it was better because everyone was doing it, no matter what age.

Tired from our day, we left while the dancing was still going on. The sound of the music followed us to our car but the drumming of many feet hitting the floor on the beat held us in a spell. Inside the hall were ordinary townspeople, ordinary time. Outside, under the moon, the sound conjured something ancient and powerful, a call to the ocean beyond, the moon, and the land. The call of a people. I shivered. No wonder the English banned drumming. This kind of sound is deeper than thought, deeper than fear or dread.

“They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore we will win,” says Howard Zinn.

We also, if we call them up, have drummers.