I first learned this song from Paul Vasile at Village Fire in 2019. The melody is by Kerri Meyer and the words are inspired by a popular Arundhati Roy quote, which appears in her collection of essays, War Talk. Here’s the broader context of the popular quote, which I find profoundly relevant and meaningful 23 years after publication:
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
As I share at the end of the song, this song works well as a Lecha Dodi melody, for anyone for whom that’s interesting. I discovered that when I was preparing to help lead a Kabbalat Shabbat at the UT Austin “encampment” in the spring of 2024.*
I’ve also sung this song in front of detention centers, at organizing meetings and so many other places. May it serve you in all its versatility as well.
May we hear the breathing of another world,
JHB
PS Check out two other wonderful songs based on this quote — by Aly Halpert and Ana Hernandez.
*I put “encampment” in quotes because it wasn’t technically an encampment. The University’s response to the initial attempt was so infamously brutal that the best the students could manage was a “Liberation Zone” during non-overnight hours.
