Loading ...Book Review: Sandy Tolan’s Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land
Sandy Tolan’s Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land reads like fiction, but is a meticulously documented work of non-fiction, as the author makes clear in his introduction to the extensive source notes. While the book remains focused throughout on the main protagonist, Ramzi Aburedwan, his musical training and successful effort to bring the healing power of music to the Palestinian communities of the Israeli Occupied Territories, equal – if not more attention – is devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from the founding of Israel to the present. The stage for Ramzi’s story is never-ending physical and emotional violence perpetrated against the Palestinian people by the Israeli government and IDF. That history is interconnected with the more or less extensive stories of many Palestinians, Europeans and Americans devoted to music as the means to assuage Palestinian suffering and restore Palestinian honor and identity.
Because Children of the Stone is written from a Palestinian perspective, and although Tolan documents every reported Israeli abuse—often citing government officials, journalists and Israeli human rights activists—there is little to no sympathy for Israeli responses to Palestinian actions and reactions. Even when reporting the most egregious acts of terrorism against Israel, Tolan’s interest lies in dispelling myths that support an Israeli narrative of victimhood, finding the precipitating factors to be Israeli violations of Palestinian autonomy, honor and dream of a contiguous state with East Jerusalem as its capital. Hence, even the most liberal critic of Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza will find Children of the Stone a difficult read: the facts that emerge from the narrative and accompanying notes are often shocking—the torture of a Palestinian musician, the deliberate provoking of riots, the bulldozing of homes, the arbitrary delays and denials of travel—and certainly are horrifying.
In this sense, Children of the Stone is two, possibly three books: it is the story of Palestinian longing for a land lost to the state of Israel, and the memories that inform that longing; the story of Palestinian acts, ranging from diplomatic negotiations to violence against Israel and the Israelis; the story of Israel’s diplomatic and military responses to those acts; the story of Ramzi’s musical baptism and education, and his unparalleled, truly remarkable establishment of the Al Kamandjati (“The Violinist”) music schools in the Occupied Territories; the story of the efforts and commitments, dreams and disillusion of those who guided, supported and opposed him; the story of Ramzi’s growing conviction that music is not merely a pleasure and a balm, but a potent force to bridge enmity, and bring to Palestinian communities an experience of joy and accomplishment that transcends the daily humiliation and bitterness of settler violence, separation barriers, checkpoints, imprisonment and death; the story of conflicts within conflict, as Ramzi increasingly becomes politicized away from the humanistic message of music, breaking with every mentor who remained committed to the communicative and unifying power of music; it is, finally, the story of Ramzi’s refusal to participate in music making that ignores realities on the ground, thereby normalizing Palestinian suffering and deprivation.
Source: peacenow.org