The Last Himeyuri, ひめゆり — Iron & Blood & Fog [remix]
The Himeyuri, ひめゆり — Blood, Iron & Fog [remix]
I think I made a mistake; picking to sing and record the song “Strange Fruit” and attempting to use it as a metaphor for the atrocities that occurred during WWII might be doing a grave injustice to the song and for all those for racial violence is still a part this America life. Not that I am the first person to hear the song's power and wish to use it to illustrate horror; in the 1970s the song was used (and the lyrics rewritten) as a theme for Gay Rights. Even as recently as 1998 a lesbian a'cappella group, Amasong, won the prestigious GLAMA award for their interpretation of Holiday and Meeropol's lyrics. As a member of Michigan's Triangle Foundation I fervently believe we need Gay Rights now but to sing this song with the “Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze” removed, in fact to go so far as to turn it into some torch song and sing “Here's a fruit for the world to see/ For no one to pick, running wild and free …” (113) strikes me as horrifically presumptuous.
Of course all listeners of the song come to with different experiences. I explained my own first encounter like this:
The first time I heard Billie Holiday's “Strange Fruit” was in high school (I graduated in 1989); oddly my teacher played the record during our assigned reading of “Hiroshima” by John Hersey. Thus disgust was born on several levels; the image of a victim of nuclear holocaust reaching up for help only to have the skin of her entire arm pull away in the rescuer's grasp like a “silk glove” combined with the “bulging eyes and the twisted mouth” of lynch victims in our American South that my teacher used to illustrate man's “inhumanity to our fellow man.” Both images have never left me.
Perhaps so, but does that give me license to sing it? To use it in a different context? To appropriate it for my own agenda? No.
The reason I bring this up is that the more time I spent thinking about what I did the more I came to the conclusion I was being just as presumptuous as well. I was wrong, this song isn't about the battle of Okinawa and it certainly isn't about being unlucky in love (gay, straight or anything in-between). In the same blog post where I spend some time justifying my actions I wrote: “To hear [Strange Fruit] is look oneself square in the face about the long history of racism in this country. It is not to blink, give excuses, to look the other way but to say that 'we too, have had a hand in all this.'”
Yes, I still agree to that statement (even though now I wish I was paying closer attention to what I was actually saying) because the four key words here are “racism in this country.” To try to put into a different surroundings or to try to apply it to a different group of people who have entirely different histories and experiences than you do is a discredit to those who came before us.
Also, the more I listened to other people's versions the more I returned to the source material. Really, who can sing this with more authenticity, grace and power than Lady Day? It is true we live in a culture in which the mainstream thinks nothing of “borrowing” from other people for our Art; but perhaps more people need to sit up and take note when suddenly a song that once could silence an entire night club, cause audience members to break down in tears over the memories the song evokes, is now performed by people like Sting and Tori Amos (who justified the reason she sang it by saying since her grandfather was Cheyenne that somehow “ties her to the earth” and makes it “authentic” when she sings it … this coming from a millionaire living in yuppie Taos, NM) as well as people like me in which all of my first hand knowledge and experience of the pre-Civil Rights South comes from videos, novels, poetry and songs. All three of us lack anything close to credibility so that the song turns from bearing witness to evil to one more thing mainstream America thinks it can do what it pleases with.
Ernest Hemingway once said the greatest gift a writer could have is a built-in bullshit detector. I believe that is just as important (if not more so) for musicians. Especially in an age where it is getting easier and easier to rip whole pages out of other people's histories and try to call them your own.
It's not that at some time in the future a white man couldn't conceivably sing this song with some air of authenticity, it is just that at this point that particular person has yet to be born. The director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, Dan Morgenstern, is among those who think that “Strange Fruit” belongs only to Billie Holiday. “Frankly, I don't think anybody but Billie should do it,” he said. “I don't think anybody can improve on it. … [the song] remains a metaphor for the American black experience” (120-21). This is why I am not going to use the Strange Fruit for my movie.
I hope I have not offended anyone. Thank you.
Ghost of Ushijima [fire ranging in the background]: No, don't call me back. No, don't ask me to remember. I do not want to remember …
There was fog. All day our observation posts …
[s/x: water rushing by the prow of a warship]
… reported sea fog, so much was invisible to us. The clotted sea. All day ….
… I never met the men who came to my school, who told me, who told all of us: “the Americans are going to kill you all! It is better to die for the Emperor than to be a slave for the Americans!”
Who could tell that to children? What did I know? I was a fisherman's son.
All we knew was you'd kill us. All of us, mothers, children. We were told our home would vanish from the map.
… how could I know? I was only fifteen.
Soldiers [shouting]: Fog closing in! Impossible to see!
Ushijima: I tell you, we were blind.
[s/x: fire stormy, uncontrolled]
Ushijima: I asked you not to call me. I do not want to remember a time of raining bombs, a violent sea wind, a typhoon of steel. I was burnt alive … my body broken, burned beyond recognition. Why? Because I was bad? Because I was a Jap? That is the term you used, isn't it? The term you still use.
[s/x: falling bricks, small explosions]
Ushijima: Mother! Look what has become of your boy, the last of the Blood and Iron Brigade … we watched the rockets come out of the fog. We watched while every position we held crumbled in flame, while every soldier rose up in fire, screamed, vanished … we watched it …
[s/x: gun turrets raising, clicking into place, the sound of history; missiles preparing ready to launch]
Ushijima: Mother! What else could I do?
Soldier: Enemy! Enemy battle ships sighted! I repeat enemy batt –
Ushijima: Mother! What else could I do? Mother, you are dead …
Father is dead … everybody I loved is dead … and I could do nothing.
I am sorry, I am so sorry …. I could do nothing.
Your only son … your only son failed you. Forgive me.
… I am a dog because I could do nothing.
A note on the song I used instead:
Recently I discovered a lovely children's song sung with amazing grace and skill, Hagoromo no Komoriuta (Okinawan Lullaby) by Aiko Shimada and Elizabeth Falconer from the CD Oyasumi. The lyrics are: "Na ku na yo ya / Naku na yo / an maga tu bin su / Yani kwiyun do / kumidara awadara / ya ni kwiyun do / Hei yo / hei yo / naku na yo." Since I lack both grace and skill with my ragtag voice I decided that I wouldn't even try to match Aiko's but instead to re-imagine the song more as a dirge, which fits the tone of the movie. How I sound to a native Okinawa speaker I shudder to think (I will never make fun of ABBA again, not only did they sing in a language they didn't speak but they made it sound good!) though someday I'd love to listen to other versions of this song.
Works Cited:
Margolick, David. Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song. Harper Perennial (2001)