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Carol Barnett
Carol Barnett (Beady Eyes)
Voyager Dust (from Longing for Home)
Voyager dust, the essence of the home we carry with us, instantly recognizable by other voyagers, a promise to return…
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Longing for Home
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Jerusalem
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Mother
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A Letter to Marianne Moore
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Dancing Toward the Promised Land
Mezzo-Soprano, piano
from the cycle Longing for Home
What a wonderful opportunity: to write a musical evocation of places as far away as Beijing, Guanzhou, Damascus, Aleppo. And who could resist the challenge to create the scene of lighthearted children’s play – running underneath a canopy of wet scarves, feeling the spray of water as they are shaken out – and then to contrast that with the somber realization that the poet is in exile, only hoping to return at some future time to beloved places.
Composer’s Notes
Mohja Kahf is a Syrian-American poet, novelist, and professor. In 1971, Kahf and her family moved to the United States. She grew up in a devout Muslim household. She graduated from Douglass College in 1988, and later received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Rutgers. Since 1995, she has taught at the University of Arkansas. I was intrigued by the possibility of evoking places as far away as Beijing, Guangzhou, Damascus and Aleppo with musical gestures, and by the opportunity to write a musical scene of childhood play – running under the canopy of wet scarves.
Voyager Dust is the third of five songs comprising Longing for Home, a cycle written to celebrate Source Song Festival’s fifth season. The texts all reference homecoming in various ways – the enduring wish to return to a place remembered with love and longing, as well as the uncertainty, the impossibility of doing so.
Text
Voyager Dust
When they arrive in the new country,
voyagers carry it on their shoulders,
the dusting of the sky they left behind.
The woman on the bus in the downy sweater,
I could smell it in her clothes.
It was voyager’s dust from China.
It lay in the foreign stitching of her placket.
It said: We will meet again in Beijing,
in Guangzhou. We will meet again.
My mother had voyager’s dust in her scarves.
I imagine her a new student like this woman on the bus,
getting home, shaking out the clothes from her suitcase,
hanging up, one by one, the garments from the old country.
On washing day my mother would unroll her scarves.
She’d hold one end, my brother or I the other,
and we’d stretch the wet georgette and shake it out.
We’d dash, my brother or I, under the canopy,
its soft spray on our faces like the ash
of debris after the destruction of a city,
its citizen driven out across the earth.
We never knew
it was voyager dust. It said:
We will meet again in Damascus,
in Aleppo. We will meet again.
It was Syria in her scarves.
We never knew it.
Now it is on our shoulders too.
– Mohja Kahf (b. 1967)
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