Protest Without Music
Rykie Belles
When Cassian Andor’s mother died, he sprung his ex-girlfriend from jail and joined the rebellion. When my dad died, I got my tragus pierced and forgot to wash my hair for two weeks.
We are not the same. But this did happen at the same time!
Some Important Dates:
October 19, 2022: My dad died. I was at his left side, sitting on a hospital chair, holding his hand.
November 16, 2022: I watched Episode 11 of Andor, “Rix Road,” in which Cassian Andor (My Beloved), finds out his mother has died.43
September 28, 2023: I got the “your proposal sounds great” email about this essay.
October 8, 2023: my friend Eddie Jeff Cahill, labor organizer and genuine dyed-in-the-wool protest singer, died. I was four hours away and had no idea he was even ill.
October 13, 2023: I sat down to start this essay.
Picture the scene: It’s the night before my dad died. Dies. Will die. My partner and I drove the five hours from Atlanta to Savannah as soon as we got the call, and though we arrived well after visiting hours, the night nurses let us in. It’s the last time I’ll see my dad coherent. My brain doesn’t know that yet (I haven’t heard the plan from my family), but my body does—some instinct, maybe, or just hearing the way my mom sounded when she said “you need to come down here as soon as you can, today if possible.” His hand is calloused and swollen, but it is alive, and it is holding mine.
The night before he died, I spent two or three hours singing to my dad. There was nothing else I could think to do. He couldn’t talk around the tube in his throat, and I couldn’t talk around the pieces of my heart. When I was a child, he taught me how to read music, how to open my mouth so wide when I sing that I look pretty silly, but sound great. He had a big voice: a bright, brassy tenor with plenty of swagger and a good amount of “fuck you” every time he nailed one of the high notes most hobbyists either don’t try, or shouldn’t.44 We sang together in church choir, at dinner time prayer, in the car, in a couple of musicals. He made up song parodies, “This is pizza! Pizza night! There ain’t no second chance unless you reach and take a bite” “Ride, ride, ride your moose/Gently down the trail/Merrily Merrily Merrily Merrily/Off to get the mail.” His guitar sits next to mine; my partner plays his old trumpet. I don’t remember a time when there wasn’t music in our house.
The night before he died, I spent two or three hours singing to my dad. I sang anything that came to my scrambled brain, mostly folk songs: Coal not Dole, The Parting Glass, Old Dun Cow, When You Get to Heaven (You’ve Got to Bring a Casserole), Puff the Magic Dragon (with the extra verse my mom added for me and my sister as kids), Times They are a’Changin, When the River Meets the Sea. And I sang Solidarity Forever. It’s a fabulous song, isn’t it? The tune is an old one, and a popular one—originally a camp song or a work song that came to be known as either Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us or Canaan’s Happy Shore, it’s also found in John Brown’s Body, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and my personal favorite, The Valiant Soldiers/The Marching Song of the First Arkansas. It strikes the perfect folk song balance between singable and interesting, a solid tune that less experienced singers can follow, with tons of room for embellishment and harmony.
And the lyrics. Listen to someone sing “We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.” I dare you not to feel something.
Dad loved Solidarity Forever. When I sang it for him, his face lit up, he smiled around the tubes. At the first verse, he squeezed my hand in time with “the union makes us strong.” He had always been strong. Though illness had robbed him of that, at that moment his grip was as powerful as it had ever been. I knew this was the end, but hope is a strange thing, and when he squeezed my hand, I found a flicker of it. Not that he would get better. But for...something.
The night before he died, I spent two or three hours singing to my dad. In the year since then, I have always been singing to my dad.
Singing to my dad is the only way I know how to keep going.
My friend Eddie Jeff, “Jeffie,” died about a year after my dad. They never met, but they would’ve liked each other a lot. Jeffie had a subdued baritone voice, full of the weary fire of a life-long fighter who has never given up and doesn’t plan to start now. He played the guitar like a ballerina dances—so agile and easy-going you don’t notice the miracle of what’s happening unless you know what to look for. We sang together on small ren faire stages, in jam sessions; once, the weekend before Thanksgiving, we performed Alice’s Restaurant, and made plans to do it again that we never got to see through. He was the kind of musician who turned the act of making music into an invitation. “Come join me. Let’s make music together.”
When he died, I hadn’t seen Jeffie in a few years. We met at a renaissance festival—he was on the circuit full time and I wasn’t, so we saw each other for about eight weekends a year, with some scattered in-between times. It’s amazing the kind of friendships that can develop like this, though, especially when there’s music involved. When I passed his stage, he would invite me up to sing with him (usually Fields of Athenry). When I was having a rough day, when the crowds weren’t biting, when I was ready to cry from exhaustion or imposter syndrome, when my well was dry, I’d sit in his audience for a few minutes and drink in the gift of his music, borrowing some of his courage, his never-ending stubborn hope.
Not incidentally, Jeffie had been a labor organizer and a strike leader. He’s on the IWW Songs of Solidarity album from the 80s, as Jeff Cahill. When I mentioned to him, off-hand, that I liked to close out my sets with Solidarity Forever, he lit up like a kid on Christmas, and I’d never been so proud of anything in my musical career as I was of his approval.
At my dad’s funeral, I sang Fiddler’s Green, a song about the place old sailors go “when they don’t go to hell.” At the same time, 10:00 in the morning, some of my musician friends, Jeffie included, got together to record the same song at the renaissance festival where we’d all played together. There’s a hundred lifetimes of musical skill in that short video. I can pick out the individual players—Terry on the mandolin, Cat’s whistle, of course Susan singing, Bobo’s violin, Gregg’s squeezebox, and if I listen hard, if I watch his hands, I can pick out the intricate beauty of Jeffie’s guitar. I didn’t realize that would be the last time I’d hear him speak to me (“We love you, Rykie”).
Edna St. Vincent Milay wrote the poem I read at Jeffie’s wake, Dirge Without Music, in 1928. This poem has haunted me since my dad died. It’s one of her best, with the mixed imagery of death and life, the anger and pain in every phrase, and the gutpunch of the repeated refrain: “I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.” There’s something so powerful in standing in facing the inevitable and saying “No.” Even when it’s happening anyway. Especially when it’s happening anyway. I can’t stop this, but I will try, and if I fail, still I will shout my refusal to the heavens. No. I do not approve.
At some point I’ve cycled into acceptance wrt: my dad’s death, and Jeffie’s too. It doesn’t hurt every second anymore. I still suffocate under the cruelty of a universe where we are born only to die, but only a few times a week. Progress! I can’t stop death. I can’t intimidate the Reaper into fucking off, and I don’t have the head for medical research or healthcare, and anyway, while curing disease is among our most noble aspirations, the people trying to cure death tend to be megalomaniacal billionaires, and I have a policy against emulating them. Let me be clear: I hate death. But, at least at this very second, I accept it.
Picture the scene: It is four weeks to the day since my dad died, and Andor Episode 11, Daughter of Ferrix, is airing. As a long-time Diego Luna fan, I’ve been hyped for this series since before it was even announced, and though I can’t enjoy anything right now, I’ll be damned if I’m gonna miss any more of it. I’m sitting on my couch with my partner. An actor I love is portraying a character I love finding out his mother is dead. My partner looks at me, concerned.
I can’t move. I can’t speak. I can’t look away. I’m not sure I can breathe.
Even if I could, I wouldn’t. Even if I did, it wouldn’t matter.
“More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world”45
In addition to the ass-kicking way it handles grief, Andor has been praised for its realism, and rightfully so. One of my favorite moments is when a TIE Fighter does a fly-over of the motley band of Aldhani rebels. It’s terrifying—the iconic scream of the twin icon engines has never felt so bone-jarringly real. From above, the rebels look like local shepherds. There’s no reason for the pilot to get that close, except to terrorize them. To remind them who has the power here. There are a few other Star Wars moments where the Empire seems this overwhelmingly powerful: the Battle of Yavin IV, with the Death Star lurching closer and closer; the Battle of Hoth, with the Alliance literally running for their lives; Jedha, with a wall of destruction blocking out the sky. Against all odds, these moments lead to success—the Death Star is destroyed, the Alliance regroups, Rogue One escapes, the heist crew succeeds...despite the terrible cost.
“A terrible cost.” That’s a great storytelling device, isn’t it? We love to see our heroes succeed in the face of unfathomable odds, and killing a few characters is a great way to up the stakes. When it’s a minor character, like Dak or Biggs or Nemik, it breaks the hero’s heart and spurs them forward. When it’s a major character, like Cassian and Jyn, it makes their posthumous victory all the more bittersweet. Ah, catharsis! How wonderful!
I’ve been thinking about catharsis a lot, i.e. the idea that experiencing strong emotions, like grief or fear, in a safe (fictional) way helps us process and find relief from those emotions. When Cassian Andor dies on a beach at 26 years old,46 having achieved an impossible goal, I’m sad, but I can also recognize his part in saving the galaxy, and more to the point I can recognize an incredible ending to an incredible story.
But fiction is not reality. Catharsis requires safety, and my friends, the fight for a better world is fundamentally not safe.
“Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely”47
Another Important Date: on January 18, 2023, the Georgia State Patrol shot and killed a young environmental activist who was part of the ongoing protest against Cop City.48
Have you heard about Cop City? It entered the collective consciousness of Atlanta, Georgia, a few years ago; if you don’t live here, it’s understandable if you’re not familiar. In brief, our city government wants to spend $90 million to build an 85-acre “training facility” for police in Weelaunee Forest in the southern part of the city.49 Included in the plans: shooting ranges (how fun for the neighbors), a Black Hawk landing pad (why??) and mock city buildings. For “practice.” Practicing what, I hear you ask? Well, keeping poor and non-white people in line, obviously. It doesn’t seem coincidental that this plan came into being after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.
This from a city that calls itself “The City in a Forest” and “The City too Busy to Hate,” and touts its connection to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s. Atlanta has the densest urban tree cover in the United States, tree cover that I have seen decrease alarmingly in the twenty years I’ve lived here, and the mayor and the city council want to continue to throw away our priceless green space. No, not throw it away. Actively destroy it. This despite overwhelmingly negative constituent response.
“Crowned with lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned”50
“Overwhelmingly” is not an exaggeration. Atlanta City Council meeting records were broken twice in 2023: seven hours of public comment in May, and then sixteen hours of public comment in June, when temperatures were around 90 F/32 C and constituents waiting to speak to their elected officials were not allowed to bring water. Nearly all of that time was people saying no.
Nevertheless, the City Council voted yes, and the mayor keeps pushing forward despite all the legal actions his constituents can take. There have been protests and marches and petitions, days of action, community gatherings. The petition to put Cop City to public referendum got twice as many signatures as required. It also, incidentally, got more signatures than both candidates got votes in the 2021 mayoral runoff. Combined.51 But all those actions take time. That time has been given to us thanks to the tireless occupation of the site by forest defenders.
For two years, a group of dedicated people have lived in the forest, delayed destruction of the trees, and kept the situation in the public eye, long enough for legal routes to gain a foothold. The only reason Cop City hasn’t been built yet is people willing to break the law in the pursuit of what is right. Among them: Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán, 26 years old, who on January 18, 2023, was shot 57 times by state police for the terrible crime of wanting to save the forest.
At that time I was barely feeding myself, still unable to process anything except my own tremendous grief over my dad, but I remember the Atlanta-area response. The rage. The grief. It’s been almost a year, and we are still grieving. Catharsis is finite; grief lives as long as we do.
As of this writing, the City of Atlanta still refuses to count the referendum signatures. Despite the many things our city needs, our government keeps pushing forward with an expensive project to create terror under guise of “public safety.” Not to be glib, but have we thought about calling it Death City? Cop Star? Hmm. I’ll work on it.
When I turn in the first draft of this essay, it’ll be almost a year since Tortuguita was murdered in pursuit of a better world. Will the Atlanta city government still be employing the more palatable tactics from the GOP Voter Suppression Handbook to push forward with Cop City?52 I hope not. I hope that by then the city will at least be counting signatures on the referendum petition. I hope that by then someone with an ounce of shame will have shot down the patently absurd RICO charges against protesters and bail fund organizers.53
There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. (Nemik)
“So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind.”54
But if that hasn’t happened, the fight will continue.
In Tortuguita’s name, yes, and the ones who came before us and the ones who will come after us. And even if this city is finally responding to the people who live here, the fight will still continue, because this fight is everywhere. Nemik talks about this: “Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.” Even if the fight is unwinnable, even if all we’re doing is delaying the inevitable, what choice do we have but to keep going?
Defying the inevitable is all over Andor and Rogue One. Good characters die raising a metaphorical middle finger to the Imperial war machine, inspiring those who come behind them even though they don’t live to see the end. I love this trope so much, because sometimes being an artist feels…a bit silly.
“Art is meaningful,” yes yes, but seriously? Sometimes “I contributed to a benefit album!” or “come read my anti-fascist poetry!” feels like telling people I poopied in the potty. Congratulations, I guess, but you’re an adult now, shouldn’t you be carrying an adult’s share of the work? I know, I know, from each/to each, but being the guy whose ability is “tells stories” or “sings pretty songs” just feels cheap. Maybe that’s shame from the lingering indoctrination of the capitalist hellscape. Maybe it’s a natural function of the uphill nature of the work, because the work is so fucking hard. It’s exhausting, it’s frustrating, it feels so hopeless—like it’s as inevitable as death that the world will continue to get worse and worse, and nothing we do can change that on any fundamental level, so why bother with songs and stories?
But remember Maarva's funeral parade? The funeral that turned into an insurrection? Remember who led that parade? A goddamned marching band.
I’m not going to suggest that the mass-produced product of a lawful evil media empire is going to change the world, no matter how Diego Luna bats those pretty brown eyes, but I am going to suggest that stories like this are useful tools. If we find inspiration in them, we should seize that inspiration with both hands. Because the story is a hell of a story, and telling stories is as primal a human drive as breathing. Stories are how we make sense of the world. Stories are how we fortify ourselves for the fight ahead of us: the fight for survival, for justice, for the small measures of peace and beauty that turn surviving into living
Not long after my dad died, I got an Aurebesh tattoo on my wrist. It says "Climb," which is a repeated theme in Cassian Andor's story from the moment he climbs out of a space ship on his home planet. Nemik says it before he dies. K-2SO says it before he dies. Somebody in Narkina 5 says it before they (probably) die. And at the end, Cassian falls 50 feet down a tower, and then climbs his way to the top again, and the whole story comes full circle...and then he dies. Just like Nemik. Just like K-2. Just like Jyn, and Bodhi, and Chirrut, and Baze, and Clem, and Kino. The thing is, he was never going to survive. None of them were. None of us are, either. We may get over this next hump, through this next disaster, over this next illness, but sooner or later it's over. Death, my guys, is coming for all of us, and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it.
“So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind”55
And I hate this. I hate it. On bad days, the inevitability of death makes life feel like a cruel bait-and-switch, some kind of cosmic prank. On really bad days, I struggle to see why I should bother to keep going at all. Sure I'll start to feel better about my dad's death, but then inevitably I will lose someone else. Eventually, whether tomorrow or 70 years from now, I'll lose everyone I love, everyone who brings color and light to my darkest, grayest moments.
There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.
The system in which we struggle to live, the system created to squeeze every single drop out of us and then discard us, feels just as inevitable, as unstoppable as death. All the marching, voting, leafleting, occupying, direct-actioning we can do, is it ever going to work for real? Do we, as a collective, ever get to rest?
And I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe the best efforts we can put forth are nothing but a delaying tactic, and maybe the sun will never rise on a world completely as it should be. But here’s the thing I keep coming back to, the lesson I’ve learned from the stubborn motherfucker56 who was my dad, and the stubborn ray of sunshine who was Jeffie, and the stubborn blorbo-from-my-shows who is Cassian Goddamned Andor: I will keep fighting anyway, because fuck you, that’s why.
The fight will keep going, and there will be music. There will be art. There will be poetry, and love, and fists and bricks and whatever else there needs to be, and by fuck, there will be music. Because we are human, and that’s what humans do. Because this work is hard, and it is frightening, and it is dangerous, and it is never-ending, and maybe it’s the job of the guy who sings pretty songs to keep us in time as we march forward. Maybe it’s our job to tell the stories of hope and triumph. Maybe it’s our job to give everybody else a little peace, a little rest. A little hope.
That’s why I “climb.” That’s why I got up this morning, despite how very much I would rather not have woken up at all. That’s why I still open my mouth when tears try to lock my jaw shut. If we’re all just shouting into the void, well, fine, but I’m still gonna shout. I’m going to stand on both feet and sing as loud as I can, until my voice is gone and my throat is raw, until my lungs collapse, until my heart stops.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old.
Remember this: Try.
They think they do what they want, and a lot of times they can, because they have more power, more money, more everything.
I know.
But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Fuck the Empire. Cop City will never be built.
43. December(ish?), 2022: Diego Luna’s father died. Hashtag twinning.
44. I somehow wound up with a light, pure soprano, almost treble-like in its sweetness, exactly the opposite of my speaking voice and nothing like the throaty alto I still believe is my birthright.
45. Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Dirge Without Music”.
46. I know Andor has stated a different age. Don’t “well actually” me. I know more about Cassian Andor than you.
47. Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Dirge Without Music”.
48. Shoshana K. Goldberg, “Remembering Tortuguita”, Human Rights Campaign, 2023, hrc.org/news/remembering-tortuguita-indigenous-queer-and-non-binary-environmental-activist-and-forest-defender
49. Which is actually in Unincorporated Dekalb County, which, fun fact: residents of Unincorporated Dekalb don’t get any legal say in the decision to build this shit in their backyard, because the City of Atlanta owns the land.
50. Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Dirge Without Music”.
51. Votes cast in Atlanta’s 2021 mayoral runoff: 71,020. Referendum Petition Signatures Required: 58,231. Referendum Petition Signatures Reported: 116,000. A “statistical analysis” of less than 1% of those signatures found “nearly half” of the sample could not be validated. How fortunate that the Associated Press would never stoop to sensationalist headlines and buried ledes—oh, wait.
52. R.J. Rico, “Activists furious Democratic leaders haven’t denounced plan to check every ‘Stop Cop City’ signature”, Associate Press, 2023: apnews.com/article/atlanta-cop-city-referendum-signatures-cd116086ae553d30840a6ae68a8af413.
53. Christopher E. Bruce and Hina Shamsi, “RICO and Domestic Terrorism Charges Against Copy City Activists Sends a Chilling Message”, ACLU, 2023: aclu.org/news/free-speech/rico-and-domestic-terrorism-charges-against-cop-city-activists-send-a-chilling-message.
54. Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Dirge Without Music”.
55. Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Dirge Without Music”.
56. Picture the scene: I am freshly 19 years old. My dad and I are in the car, arguing about something stupid. Finally, in a fit of I’m-an-adult-ness, I call him a “stubborn motherfucker.” He gets deathly quiet (I swallow hard and make my peace with God), and then he turns, looks me dead in the face, and says: “Yes, I am.”