As an example, I will focus on Bonga's Mona Ki Ngi Xica. The Angolan singer and songwriter wrote this song when Angola was still a Portuguese colony. As a result, he got an arrest warrant and was forced into exile. This "lamento of unfathomable depth" quickly became the soundtrack not only for Angola’s struggle for independence but for all the suffering that followed.
Bonga sings about the pain of leaving his child behind. "Listen! I am in danger. I have already told you. My child will stay and I will need to go away. Evil people are after her. On a tide of misfortune God gave me this child. I brought her into the world and now she will have to stay here without me."
When I hear this song I remember Angola's war for independence and the Angolan Civil war. By the time it was brought to an end in 2002, after 27 years, an estimated 500,000 people had been killed.
When I hear this song I remember the dislocation of hundreds of thousands of people who returned from the colonies to Portugal in the 1970s as destitute refugees. I remember because I was one of them, one of the 500.000 to 1 million retornados who fled their home during the decolonization process.
I first heard this song in a Biodanza workshop years ago. The theme was "home", and - cosmic joke! - the song that represented its loss was used for the opening circle. Tears flooded my eyes. Tears for the loss of my home, my tribe, my known world. Those tears weren't mine alone; they were the tears of all the people whose lives were torn apart by war, the tears of the displaced, the asylum seekers, the refugees, and the homeless of all times and all places.
The second time I heard this song in Biodanza was in a workshop near Glastonbury. I was asked to help demonstrate a partner exercise whose objective was to dance with awareness that sometimes we lead, sometimes we follow. After the exercise was explained, the music came on... In the blink of an eye I traveled back in time, and really struggled to stay in touch with what was actually going on.
The third time was in a "poetry of touch" exercise. Again, in the flip of a second, I was thrown back into the past. I adapted the exercise to my own needs and decided to use containing touch to reassure my inner child that everything was going to be OK.
When I first shared this as an example of how certain songs can act as reminders of traumatic events and trigger flashbacks or intrusive images, I was concerned that people could lose touch with reality and re-live the event for seconds, hours or even days. In my case, I had the inner resources to deal with this, but what if I hadn't? What would have been the implications here? Not just for the person being triggered but for everyone else?
Now, years later, I can see that that song enabled me to remember, to feel, and to release past emotions in the safe space of the Biodanza group. Not only that, it was the beginning of a journey that eventually took me to offer Biodanza sessions to female refugees and asylum seekers, and to explore the relationship between music, memory, emotion. Now I would love to connect with others who are interested in healing refugee trauma. If this is you, then I would love to hear from you.