Next Wednesday, Joan Baez will be 72. Never has there been a more compelling need to listen to the riveting vibrato of this singer-activist whose songs (played all day by my Marxist “Baez and Belafonte”-worshipping parents) imbued my childhood with an early idealism.
Born to liberal progressive parents, Baez’s early childhood was spent in cities around the world where her father was posted during his stint as an academician and officer with UNESCO. Countries like France, England Switzerland, Spain, Canada, and Iraq (where they lived in 1951) honed Baez’s unique sense of social justice and compassion, which made her the voice of the disenfranchised in later years.
Last night, in tribute to my earliest (and perhaps only) heroine, I watched the PBS-produced American Masters’ documentary Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound, arguably the most successful attempt to record the life and times of this extraordinary woman who became the world’s conscience keeper. Four days into the new year and I could feel my faith in humanity — recently beaten and broken — stir again.
What can you say about a woman whose heroic rendition of “We shall overcome” at civil rights activist Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington became the anthem for the movement? The woman who marched side by side with King in Grenada, Mississippi, her arm around a terrified black child while they demanded the inclusion of African-Americans in all-white schools? Like the fictitious Forrest Gump, Baez appeared at every flashpoint of world history as its conscience keeper, her actions rising from the core of her belief in non-violence, peace and justice for all.
She was there in 1966 besides César Chávez fighting for the rights of migrant workers for equal wages in California. She was there marching in the anti-Vietnam war peace protests, blocking entrances to draft halls, begging enlisters to change their minds and getting arrested and spending time in jail. (“I went to jail for 11 days for disturbing the peace; I was trying to disturb the war,” she remarked)
During the USA’s Christmas carpet bombings of Hanoi, she was caught in a bunker for days (“I finally knew what it felt to be mortal,” she said of that harrowing time). She showed up in Chile, Brazil and Argentina to protest for human rights in the early ’80s, facing a state-wide ban on singing, stringent surveillance and death threats. Later in that decade, she composed “China”, a song dedicated to the victims of the Tiananmen Massacre in Beijing and to raise her voice against oppression in that country.
She travelled to south-east Asia in an attempt by human rights groups to distribute food and medicine in Cambodia, and took part in the United Nations Humanitarian Conference on Kampuchea. She opposed the death penalty at the San Quentin State Prison; she marched in support of gay rights in memorials for Harvey Milk; she recorded “We shall overcome” with a few verses in Persian to support the peaceful protests of Iranian people; she sang in the 2003 “Concert for a Landmine- free world”; she campaigned for Barack Obama when he was but a cipher, and almost five decades later her voice was heard singing loud and clear at the Occupy Wall Street protest in 2011.
But we are known not only by the causes we champion but the company we keep and the people we love. Baez dated two of the modern world’s most pathbreaking and extraordinary individuals: Bob Dylan and Steve Jobs.
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On her 72nd birthday, can there be any one more deserving of the Nobel Prize for Peace?
I think not!
Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer
malavikasangghvi@hotmail.com