The Plurality of Being [a response to growing intolerance]

I am sitting in my car in a mostly empty car-park, taking advantage of a few empty minutes in a typically relentless day, listening to the hubbub of the city around me, road noise, sirens, noticing for the first time that I can see the hills in the distance from this vantage point, a rural closeness that has appealed to me about this place since first moving here several years ago.

I am a teacher and mentor, guiding a revolving cohort of students, some eager, some not so much, through a difficult time in their lives, always walking the line between important musical discipline and the danger of destroying the simple joy of making sound, alone and in company with others. The Western classical pedagogical model is a troubling one for me, but a system with which I’m well-acquainted, and which equipped me with certain tools that have expanded the borders of my lived experience beyond my wildest dreams, and so it plays a role in my own positioning as teacher. If I can only give these young people a hint of this endless realm of extraordinary possible, then they’ll hold tight to this fertile lifeline and I won’t have failed.

The students in turn enrich my life. They come from all over, literally and metaphorically. They have vastly different backgrounds, and provocatively different understandings of the world. They learn in their own ways and at their own pace, often challenging me to better explain myself and my ideas, sometimes drawing awareness to my own blind spots, prejudices and mindless practices. Every moment I spend with them, I am changed and we are changed together. For a time, we become each other, taking these new versions of ourselves into our outside lives, changing others in turn.

I am a boy from a quiet suburb in Birmingham, who went to primary school with a beautifully diverse body of pupils at a time when such things were not considered the norm. We all looked different, spoke differently, followed different faiths, went home to unjustifiably different economic realities, but we existed together in relative peace, always playing, often comforting, sometimes hurting, learning in and outside of the classroom, largely immune to the baffling frustrations and occasional aggressions of our parents, guardians and teachers.

I am a student who has benefitted from some of the most glorious guidance that modern life has to offer. My teachers have come from Russia, North and South India, America, Britain, the Netherlands, Armenia, France, Greece, Poland, have given compassionately and generously of their time and wisdom, constantly shaping, reframing, augmenting, alchemising the musical voice that is me. I have disappeared for hours into joyful symbiosis with instruments from Ghana, Japan, India, Australia, Zimbabwe, Egypt, China, whiled away endless moments listening to music from here, there and everywhere, pored over videos of people passionately describing and sharing their own hard-won revelations and learnings. As a conservatoire and university student, I have been surrounded by amazing individuals from the world over, many of whom have changed the course of my life, welcoming me into their personal and creative lives, leading me by the hand through the veil of otherness, into new and unimagined spaces and places.

I am a reader. I have hungrily consumed millions of words covering a span of thousands of years, words which constantly rewrite my own narrative. I have escaped from the grind into other times and distant universes, been a wizard, an orphan, a time-traveller, an anarchist on the moon, an unlucky, disfigured soul, betrayed by society and recast as villain, a torturee-turned-torturer, defying simple binaries such as good and evil. Every time I have felt myself growing confident in my convictions, I have been unceremoniously ripped from my hubris by thoughts flowing jaggedly across the pages of some previously undiscovered volume, once more setting sail into entirely unfamiliar, potentially dangerous waters. I have been a Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Taoist, a Sikh, a Hindu, an Atheist, an Agnostic, a fundamentalist, a feminist, a psychologist, a scientist, a mystic, a mathematician, a freedom fighter. I have wept and I have rejoiced, I have been enraged and I have been reminded that each and every human is Buddha, that far more connects than divides us.

I am a person living in a country founded on principles borrowed from Ancient Greece, themselves built upon ideas first established in Ancient Egypt, a country rich in wisdom from the historic Middle East, a country which has left an inescapable stamp on the global landscape, instrumental in establishing certain fundamental rights and liberties, priding itself on its sense of justice, a country full of contradictions which refuses to acknowledge its significant part in an overwhelming story of suffering, oppression and inequality, a country of Saxons, Romans, Vikings, a country of multiple languages, some new, some old, a country which enslaved and pillaged, but which was fundamentally transformed in the process. A country of kings and queens, of trade-union political movements, presided over by one of the oldest political parties in the world, a country in which aristocracy never really went away, just went into hiding, a country of public schools and old-boys networks and illegal fox-hunts hosted by prominent (and cartoonish) politicians. A country defended by the Gurkhas and Indians and Jamaicans and Trinidadians and Hondurans and Nigerians and Ghanaians and Kenyans and Ugandans and Malawians. A country that sits in the lap of luxury, that enjoys the fruits of outsourced labours, watching from a distance as others suffer unbearable tragedy at the hands of war, famine, climatic disaster, tyranny, drought, rampant neoliberalism, a country whose citizens are capable of extraordinary waves of heartfelt charity and collectivism, a country often implicated in those very humanitarian crises about which it professes to care deeply.

Plurality is our reality. We are the totality of our experiences, and those experiences are legion and infinite. We are consistently enriched and enlivened by our interactions and relationships, however small or seemingly insignificant. Change is the only truth; to fight against it is pure folly, like trying to hold back the ocean with an umbrella. Britain is a complicated and conflicted place with a muddled history in which ideas of purity, ownership and nationalism are misguided and ultimately groundless. In closing our borders, we cut ourselves off from the rich and varied international community which has been instrumental in establishing the gorgeous tapestry of our modern-day state. To lock ourselves away is to begin the process of unlearning, of regression, of unravelling. It is to foster division and discord and disharmony. The visceral sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’ starts with borders but does not stop there, leading ultimately to total isolation, hence absolute meaninglessness, and finally destruction.

We must not allow ourselves to be twisted and warped by a vile, cynical and self-serving political class of profiteers, criminals and charlatans. The warning signs grow by the day. Comparisons with horrifying historical periods are alarmingly clear. A country which vilifies people who have made perilous journeys, who have lost everything, who have fled murder, torture, rape, imprisonment, a country which sheds not a tear as men, women and children drown in desperate flight, knowingly presenting inflammatory, inhumane and feeble solutions, feeding on media-fuelled racism, bigotry and xenophobia, is a country in which every single sane and compassionate voice needs to shout to the rooftops, to demand constructive dialogue, international collaboration, and heartfelt tolerance. Humanity’s salvation lies not in separation and individualism, but cooperation and togetherness, unity, solidarity, connection. We are only as good as each other, and therefore our responsibility is always collective. Let us recognise plurality as the ground of being and hand-in-hand build towards a global society in which people are not forced to risk everything simply to access their basic human freedoms. Stop the slogans, not the boats.