Teenagers in a studio sing, embrace, and high-five each other. Images are spliced in: military helicopters and an emotionally overwhelmed soldier taking a moment on the ground. “Out of the darkness, then came the carnage, among the hardest survival,” Avril Lavigne croons, swaying her hair extensions. Halfway through, the music stops, and singing acapella is Nikki Yanofsky, the back-lit by candles Olympics poster child. In the end, white, adorable Justin Bieber sings alone in soft lighting, an image that is perniciously spliced with footage of a very blonde white woman carrying away a brown baby, presumably to safety, in a familiar paternalistic narrative sold to us by children.
From the Bryan Adams Vancouver Studios, with the help of Randy Lennox, the CEO of Universal Music Canada, and CBC propping Wavin’ Flag as “one of the most powerful songs of our times,” the video slid from its can into our collective consciousness. An entire aesthetic was revived, of studio headphones, group microphone antics, clenched fists of intense emotive feeling, closed eyes, distant gazes, crunched faces, and elaborate tree-in-the-wind hand waving. If one were to try to discern the meaning of the fists-drawn-toward-the-heart gesture from the context in which it appears in all the Wavin’ Flag videos, it could mean anything from “My team scored a goal,” to “I’m overwhelmed with empathy for Haitians,” to “I really want a Coke.” The performance reminds me of a high school drama class’s Remembrance Day play where they play “Imagine” by John Lennon, but with way more funding.
The video was pulled together in nine days, and it shows. K’Naan is almost breathless in the token pre-video interview. “It started out my song,” he says magnanimously, “Then it became their song. Now it’s Haiti’s song.” So what is Haiti being bequeathed with?
The last all-Canadian relief effort music video of this scope was the 1985 “Tears Are Not Enough.” An authoritative voice over speaks to grainy footage of Ethiopia: “Famine is at the gates of every town.” Famine, like terror, was characterized as a faceless, depoliticized monster that threatens all that is good in humanity. Now, the desperation in Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake is similarly depoliticized for the purposes of fund raising.
But “Wavin’ Flag” is not composed of depoliticized platitudes. It was precisely the fact that it contained powerful insights that operated as a tool in its redeployment.
Originally appearing in K’Naan’s album Troubadour, “Wavin’ Flag” has since been reworked as the anthem for the global Coca-Cola marketing campaign “Wavin’ Flag – Coca-Cola Celebration Mix” in support of the Fifa World Cup, and as the hit charity single “Young Artists for Haiti – Wavin’ Flag” in a video peppered with nationalistic and militaristic imagery. CEO Randy Lennox was instrumental in pulling together the project, the proceeds to which are going to Free the Children, War Child Canada and World Vision Canada.
In a similar Canadian campaign to end first world apathy and disconnection, James Maskalyk, author of “Six Months in Sudan: A Young Doctor in a War-torn Village,” an, obviously young, Canadian Medecine Sans Frontier doctor, just tied for second place of the Shaugnessey-Cohen Prize for Political Writing. He posted the speech he wrote in anticipation of first prize (“always the bridesmaid,” he writes) in which he admonishes readers to “protect life,” because, he says “It’s your bloody duty.” Aside from the fact that the “you” in this statement is unclear, and the fact that what, precisely, that duty entails depends on what bodies he is speaking to, his fist pumping appeal to duty draws straight from a discourse of Protestant work ethic and militaristic authoritarianism. Just add “soldier” onto the end and one can see the place the statement is coming from. What is left unsaid is what he means, exactly—which bodies are the active agents whose duty it is to “help” (whom he sees himself in the position to admonish) and which bodies are the ones who will passively receive this help? There is something unsettling when privileged bodies create didactic art, then adopt an uncritical stance. On his blog he advises readers to “go to where the most suffering is and avoid politics as much as you can.” On this same website, in his bio, he jabs in a backhanded way at poverty-level Canadians living in basement apartments without even noticing he’s doing it. I guess it’s only noble to be poor in distant lands.
In promoting this version of politics in the narrow sense of government decision-making and not the daily ways in which every person maintains or resists the social order, Maskalyk maintains the social order by his disconnection to the “politics,” in the latter sense, immediately around him. James Maskalyk was generously rewarded for his emotional appeal to Canadians to “let the distance fall away” and choose “action” over “inaction” –deploying monolithic abstractions and reductive binaries, for which he continues to receive a lot of back-home-pats-on-the back for “staying raw” and “living the examined life” (Globe & Mail).
The Live Aid actions of the 80’s have since been subjected to heavy critique that break down this reductionist dilemma of “give” or “don’t give,” “act” or “don’t act,” (and what constitutes legitimate action).
In Live Aid: The White Pop Star’s Burden, Nathalie Rothschild notes that, “Indeed, in arguing that armed groups intercepted all our cash, this investigation can be seen as replacing one prejudice – that Africans need the West to save them – with another: that Africans cannot be trusted with our hard-earned money.” But, she points out, “those damaging effects are in fact inevitable consequences of the charity campaigns and emotive media reporting themselves, which forego proper analysis of complex political situations in favour of simplistic, black-and-white narratives.”
Often, the reaction to any critique at all is like Bob Geldoff’s response to the documentary “Aid for Arms in Africa” in which he was “suggesting, that Live Aid should be beyond interrogation, that it is simply a ‘good cause’ and that it is cruel to question and undermine it.” Or like James Maskalyk’s response to my attempt to engage in dialogue about the racialized and gendered elements to his narrative, which was to flat out ignore it.
Whereas the first reworking, in K’Naan’s words, “invites football fans to express their optimism and passion for football through dance celebrations” the second reworking focuses on surviving hardship and oppression, “getting involved”, with wealthy people speaking for Haiti in a discourse of maturation—getting older, stronger, eventually rising out of a childlike state with "our" ever benevolent helping hand. With each variation the song is tweaked like a functional resume, but the imagery at the heart of the song remains the same: marching in formation and holding flags high. With K’Naan marching in front, he has joined the ranks of many flag bearers of a long tradition—one that goes back 25 years, when aid became the western pop stars’ burden.
“Send them your heart / So they'll know that someone cares” is one such line in “We Are The World”, written in a moment of pure emotion. Encapsulated in this line is the assumption that what someone in Africa (They) need is to know that some person in America cares about them, the assumption that what they need is your purest feelings, your heart—that what’s in your “heart” i.e, your deepest felt ideologies—will be useful to this person. Who’s it for? This collective sending of hearts? Who really feels better after such an effort? It’s spelled out baldly in the rap section of “Young Artists for Haiti,” (italicization mine): “we can be the reason that they see their flag rise again.”
And then it goes back…We Are The World Two, February 2010
And then it goes back…Tears Are Not Enough, the Northern Lights, 1985
And then it goes back…We Are the World, 1985
And then it goes back…Do they even know it’s Christmas? 1984, by Bob Geldof
Whoa-oooo-oooh.
The riff at the end could just go on forever, and so could Canadian artists, speaking on behalf of poor countries, licensing paternalism.
The video repeats not only an aesthetic, but a narrative strikingly similar to Live Aid’s “We are the World,” the second version of which has an intro by Jamie Foxx in which his gestures, meant to convey passion and sincerity, seem forced and strangely out of sync with his words. “Reach deep into your hearts…” he says, then stops for a second and speaks like a hypnotist, “and give anything you can.”
Reach deep into your hearts as code for reach deep into your pockets is a perfect example of how when people think they’re articulating their deepest, most personal, most individual heartfelt thoughts, they’re often articulating the place where the ideologies they’re shot through with have affected them the most deeply.
These lyrics, straight from the heart, seem ideologically neutral, and on the surface, empowering:
As we patiently wait for that fateful day
It’s not far away, but for now we say
When I get older, I will be stronger…
In an analysis of the intersections between gender, class, and age hierarchies, Shulamith Firestone, in The Dialectic of Sex, says, “Children, once seen simply as younger people…were now a clear-cut class with its own internal rankings, encouraging competition: the ‘biggest guy on the block,’ the ‘brainiest guy in school,’ etc. Children were forced to think in hierarchical terms, all measured by the supreme ‘When I grow up…’ In this the growth of the school is reflected in the outside world which was becoming increasingly segregated according to age and class.”
The problem with this widely-accepted-as-self-evident notion is that it draws on a discourse of life phases that places individual wholeness as well as fairness and justice in some remote day in the future. The flip side of this conflation of ideology with naturalized reproductive life-phases is evident in Tim Leary’s famous adage “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” and Bob Dylan’s lyrics in “The Times They Are a’Changin’”:
Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
Don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
The conflation of maturity and age with either success and strength, or with failure, comes from the same place, and fuels the misleading and divisive notion that political struggle is one of inter-generational antagonism.
While “Imagine,” by John Lennon, and “The Times, They Are A-Changin’” filled people’s hearts with hope for an alternative without any specifics to how that alternative might be achieved, “Wavin’ Flag” explicitly points in a direction, a meditation on the intrinsic beauty of a flag in the wind.
K’Naan, who came to Canada with his family as a refugee from Somalia during civil war when he was thirteen, writes from his personal experiences of civil war and being a refugee. His personal story, and his body, gives cred to the project. A black man from a developing country who has survived tragedy speaking for black people in another developing country who have survived tragedy seems consistent, even though Somalians and Haitians have little in common besides their skin colour.
By all means, the song is beautiful, joyful, idealistic, and full of yearning. It begins to articulate a critique of imperialism, but then collapses into the fatalism of “waiting patiently for that fateful day” of freedom. His joy is real, but that doesn’t stop it from being appropriated towards an oppressive project.
Unlike many generational anti-war, anti-world hunger anthems, like John Lennon’s "Imagine," and "We Are the World," which are decidedly depoliticized and anti-nationalistic, “Wavin’ Flag” contains an implicit critique of imperialist policy:
So many wars, settling scores
Bringing us promises, leaving us poor
I heard them say, love is the way,
Love is the answer, that’s what they say,
But look how they treat us
Make us believers, we fight their battles
Then they deceive us
Tried to control us, they couldn't hold us
Cuz we just moved forward like Buffalo Soldiers
But we strugglin', fightin' to eat
And we wonderin', when we'll be free
This critique is somehow overshadowed by nationalistic and militaristic imagery of the video—the marching, national flag waving. The reading of it could go either way --a march for freedom, or marching soldiers-- but the video suggests the latter, in that the only images we see other that the studio shots are of Canadian soldiers handing out packages of aid, lowering towards the ground in helicopters, and carrying the wounded.
Who knew what K’Naan was thinking when he wrote the song. He might just have liked the sound of the words, but its imagery is decidedly nationalistic, though vague enough to be co-optable. So why was this song, by him, chosen for this purpose, right now? Randy Lennox has since been quoted saying it was “absolutely the perfect piece of lyric for this problem.” The context of Live Aid in 1984 was the height of the Cold War, in which the Soviet Union and the US were struggling for strategic allies in the “third world.” Perhaps the reason is similar to why it was so adaptable for the purposes of the Fifa World Cup, in which it was used for rallying around sport, which is also nationalistic.
What needs to be questioned is the use of artists to market, culturally, the idea of militarization and foreign privatization, using artists to do the states’ dirty work, ie., the cultural work of nationalism and imperialism, even though the song is a critique of hierarchy and war. Jaques Ranciere, in The Politics of Aesthetics, describes this process in that art does the work of redistributing the sensible. The tactic is sophisticated: justifying the concept of foreign military intervention to Canadians through pop culture and making the case of the NGO’s, as Yves Engler pointed out in 10 Things Canada should do to help Haiti overcome last Tuesday’s earthquake.
The fixation on our own individual willingness to give seems specious in light of studies on Live Aid that showed proceeds were diverted to arm Ethiopian rebels and prolong war, the privatization of public services, and the resulting dismantling of Haiti's public sector, as well as the role the NGOs play in replacing it. All we need to do is think about what we've read about Live Aid and Band Aid money going to warlords to know that we need to fixate on more than our own willingness to give.
When the song first came out I posted it on Facebook alongside a quote by American lawyer and poverty activist Bill Quigley from Democracy Now that “the flipside of the good that they are doing is that they have substituted for the public sector, and so the public sector is not vibrant, is not there. It is not connected. It is not resourced, and the like. And the role of the NGOs…has this negative part to it, as well.” I was immediately chastened by an acquaintance I hadn’t talked to in years. “There’s a lot of work to be done in Haiti,” she posted publicly, “I donated twenty dollars today.”
In her eyes, because I didn’t blindly support the charity aid model, I was Against Haiti. The propaganda machine had done its job. After this smack-down on Facebook, it seemed that more and more people had started adopting the moral rectitude of the good Samaritan as an anti-critical stance.
By claiming this song as the voice of “Young Artists for Haiti,” it paints all young artists with the same brush: anyone not on board with the whole political project is not in support of Haiti. This version of “Wavin’ Flag” may still give me goosebumps, but I fail to be comfortable with the idea of artists’ dreams being co-opted for a state agenda of the public good that they accept wholesale with the message that we should too. I may be young and white, and female and an artist, but Avril Lavigne doesn’t speak for me, and I can’t imagine she speaks for Haiti.
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Comments
Canadians genuinely believe that colonialism is way to go?
Great article, thanks for writing! I may post a couple comments, as I have lots to say on this. It's outrageous, but predictable, that proceeds from this fundraiser will go to these organizations. Why don’t they choose indigenous Haitian NGOs, or at least regional NGOs based in Cuba or Venezuala that have been doing great work in Haiti since the early 1990s? What would it take to communicate to Canadians that organizations with religious bents are explicitly neocolonizing projects and that government projects are implicit and explicit neocolonizing projects? Do they care? Or is the real issue that Canadians genuinely believe that the constructed poor countries of the world actually NEED colonization in order to lead the ‘good life’? Sadly, I fear it is the latter. I spoke at a function once, arguing that democratic freedom is more important than economic liberalism, and one participant actually asked afterwards, “don’t you think the best strategy is to go into a country, take over its affairs until such a time as they have learned how to do things right, and then leave peacefully? Jaw dropping indeed.
Flags, nationalism, sport, and Chomsky
I very much appreciate your discussion of the song's adaptation to sport and the nationalism/militarism embued in it. Chomsky describes the nationalism implicit in competitive sport as the “irrational attitudes of submission to authority”. Sports, according to Chomsky, helps to construct necessary illusions to prevent the masses from thinking about things that are of political importance. It allows us to expend tremendous intellectual and physical energies towards games that do not challenge asymmetric power relations while keeping us occupied and (somewhat) content. Keep them occupied enough to not revolt, endebted enough to not revolt, and numb their wits with corporate programming on the tube to dull their desire to even think about revolt.
Great point re the analogy to
Great point re the analogy to the distractive role of sports - can you give me the reference for that Chomsky quote?
Thanks!
Paternalism in the song disguises Haiti's History
In the context of the patronizing imagery of the wealthy, mostly white, young Canadians raising tonnes of money to give to NGOs to save Haitians, it interesting to note that Haiti is a country that liberated itself from the clutches of slavery between the 1790s and 1800s. I believe they won in 1802, and were able to be a self-sustaining as a country, importing only about 20% of their needs. Then the French, in collussion with the Europeans/Americans and other slave owning countries, imposed a trade embargo on Haiti, cutting it off from the world economy unless the Haitian people who had the audacity to free themselves from servitude agreed to pay reparations to their former slave owners. Poor French slave-owners needed to be compensated for their hardship at the end of slavery I suppose. In order to finance this ridiculous demand, Haitians had to borrow huge amounts of money from European and American banks, starting the vicious cycle of debt. And of course, by the late 20th century and the imposition of neoliberal economics, structural adjustment programs were a must. We, the priviledged west, are thus truly at the core of Haitis long-standing historical problems. This is why when leaders like Aristide says things like, "the French should pay reparations to Haiti" Ottawa, Washington, and Paris colludes together to stage a coup and shuffle him off to Africa. I guess this is our way of liberating slaves? pathetic.
The song actually brings me to tears at time, the contradiction and horrible imagery of this. “….but we patiently wait, for that fateful day, it’s not far away, but for now we say “ When I get older, I will be stronger, they’ll call me freedom, just like a waving flag” It ravages me because I see in my head the utter frustration of a child seeing mass injustice – rape of its mother or sister, murder of loved ones, false promises of hope, and then feeling incapable of doing anything. But “when I get older I will be stronger, they’ll call me freedom JUST LIKE A WAVING FLAG” it illustrates the vicious cycle of nationalism. Very tragic
Sports, Perverse Histories, and One's $20
I agree with you, Bahtman, that it's not enough to pay one's $20 to some abstract notion of aid without asking which NGOs (why not indigenous Haitian or regional NGOs) and why not investment in a strong public infrastructure, as Bill Quigley points out. I also appreciate your pointing to the history of French (as well as Canadian and US) policy towards Haiti. It's a history made perverse by such unselfconscious humanitarian efforts as "Young Artists for Haiti."
For some complicating responses to Chomsky's point about sports, one might turn to American Indian scholars. For Dakota Sioux historian Philip J. Deloria, "Sports served as a meeting place of transformation and persistence; for distinct, even mutually exclusive Indian and white interpretations; and for shared understandings." This process may be most important in countries like the US in which sports is linked to nationalism. Hopi scholar Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert has written in moving terms about a time when white Americans were surprised (but shouldn't have been) to find Hopis winning national and international running events, including the Olympics.
Your guilt is your prism and your prison.
Seems to me that the writer of this article is so utterly consumed with her own white guilt that she is incapable of feeling empathy for those who participated in the creation, performance and production of this video (and the former Live Aid-types of benefit concerts). Arguably, her lack of empathy towards its creators is indeed "cruel", as Bob Geldof suggests.
feeling guilty is different from examining your privilege
Hi Malcom, thanks for your comment. I'm interested in what made you think this was about white guilt. Not that this was about my feelings, but now that you brought it up, guilt was not the emotion that I was feeling when i wrote this, and when I thought these thoughts. Can you explain what made you think that?
Hi Krissy, This is a really
Hi Krissy,
This is a really interesting and thoughtful consideration of the song and its implications, and I think you make some excellent points. I want to follow up on the longer section of lyrics that you've quoted here. It's quite interesting to me that this portion is excised from the Young Artists for Haiti version, as that further depoliticizes it. I also think the Buffalo Soldier reference is intriguing, because (to me at least) it implies a totalization of the black experience--perhaps foregrounding the black Somalian-Canadian speaking for black Haitians.
I also think the focus on the "Young Artists" to be bizarre, particularly given that it's a misnomer. The first time that I saw the video (as part of a news clip), the only two faces I found immediately recognizable were Tom Cochrane and Jim Cuddy. (This makes me feel, at the age of 28, inordinately old.) While they are the two most obviously older contributors, they certainly aren't the only ones: Jim Creegan, Colin James, Hawksley Workman, and Sam Roberts are all over 35.
I look forward to reading more from you in the future.
Thanks rhiannon. You know, I
Thanks rhiannon. You know, I re-watched the video a few days ago and realized that the longer section I quoted was from the original and not from the Young Artists version and had a moment of panic that it would ruin my argument. I didn't want to get rid of the quote because the original was interesting. I was trying to figure out what to say about it without having to get rid it, and wondering if anyone would notice. But you're right. It further depoliticizes it. Maybe best to compare them.
Thanks for having such a sharp eye/ear and letting me know.
I think the Buffalo Soldier line is still in it at one point? have to check again. great analysis on the totalization of the black experience that it implies in this context.
yeah, the Tom Cochrane thing. I didn't want to say it because I thought I sounded mean. random fact, but guess what song was the unrivaled top hit on much music for months before Smells Like Teen Spirit came out? It was Life is a Highway, by Tom Cochrane. Weird hey? It seems like years passed between those two songs being popular. Talk about sudden change happening on some fateful day.