Still Waters in a Storm by Stephen Haff

Author:Stephen Haff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

3

Ruler of Myself

Nearly two years into the project, in the summer of 2018, the Traveling Adventures group bases a song on an extraordinary example of making room and listening. Our hero’s travels bring us to the burial of Grisóstomo, a young shepherd songwriter who has killed himself because—he says posthumously in verse—Marcela, a young shepherdess of awe-inspiring beauty, did not respond to his love. Grisóstomo’s friends also blame the girl, calling her cruel and ungrateful, a monster and a plague.

Marcela appears at the burial on a hill above the boys, and speaks—uninterrupted, uncriticized, page after page, articulating her story—asserting that she is the ruler of herself. Marcela asks the boy shepherds to stop following her and idolizing her beauty: “I was born free,” she says, in our group’s translation, “and to be able to live free I have chosen the solitude of the countryside. The trees of these mountains are my company, the clear waters of these streams are my mirrors; with the trees and with the waters I communicate my thoughts and my beauty. The honest conversation of the other shepherd girls of these valleys occupies me. I am a separate fire and a faraway sword.”

Having promised nothing, she is not to blame for Grisóstomo’s choice to pursue her or to take his own life. Warning the boys to back off, she describes herself as dangerous: a fire and a sword.

In a book written more than four hundred years ago by a man, this—stopping the story to hear a girl speak and to allow her to refute, point-by-point, the accusations of boys—is brave and unusual. The Traveling Adventures girls seize on this rarity.

“I want to be her,” says Alex. “I want to sing her song.”

Our musical adaptation of Marcela’s speech—originally called the “Girls and Boys Song” because, says Lily, “That’s what Marcela’s speech is all about”—is based also on an essay by Alex, and results in a statement of self-determination that is equally brave and unusual. “We choose to love how we love,” asserts the Chorus, in defiance of bias against LGBTQ+ people, and Alex sings that she and her family are “dientes de león”—dandelions, from the Latin for “teeth of a lion.” The kids choose this metaphor to describe themselves, their families, and their people—immigrants—as flowers growing in the wrong place, fierce and beautiful, offering food and sunshine. “Who decides,” goes one lyric, “if a flower is a weed?”

* * *

As the Kid Quixotes start to work on the scene when Marcela corrects the narratives imposed on her by a series of shepherd boys, I ask the kids to write their answers to the question, “Am I the Ruler of Myself?” This question eventually provides the title of the song, as who we belong to—who owns us—becomes its central power struggle. “It’s obvious,” says Alex about the title, after the song has been written. “That’s the battle of my life.”

Most of the answers describe authorities in the children’s lives, such as teachers, parents, coaches, older siblings, and police, people who can tell the kids what to do and who must be obeyed in order to avoid punishment.

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