‘Carry your light out into the shitstorm’ — a conversation with Joan Baez 

This article ‘Carry your light out into the shitstorm’ — a conversation with Joan Baez  was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Legendary singer and activist Joan Baez recently retired from touring, but she still sang to 100,000 people at the No Kings rally in San Francisco on Oct. 18, encouraging them to keep up their resistance.

I’ve known Joan for 35 years, and consider her one of the few well-known figures who has had a lifelong commitment to active nonviolence. I think she has been involved in more grassroots nonviolent movements than any other living person. 

Joan has also been a prolific musician, releasing over 30 albums and traveling the world to perform for 60 years, often in service of those struggling for peace and justice. She published her bestselling autobiography “And a Voice to Sing With,” and was featured in an excellent PBS documentary, “Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound.” 

I recently spoke with her on “The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast” about her close relationship with Martin Luther King Jr., the deep connection between music and activism, and her complicated thoughts on hope in these dark times.

We could talk at length about how bad things are under the Trump administration, but I thought it would be helpful to talk about your journey of nonviolence. Who or what inspired you on this path, and what role has it played in your day-to-day life?  

I guess it started probably not on a conscious level, but when my parents became Quakers when I was eight years old. Like most kids, I couldn’t stand Quaker meeting, because you just had to sit there and listen to old people talk. But when I was 16, we started meeting on Sundays with Ira Sandperl, a longtime teacher of nonviolence. The thoughts I had begun to form began to take shape.  

He had us reading Gandhi, Lao Tzu and eventually [Aldous] Huxley, and so he was opening my mind to all of it, always in the context of the Quakers and nonviolence. I have never stepped out of that. I was lucky I had that internalized nonviolence from a very young age, so I didn’t have to worry when it came around for marches and demonstrations, whether I was going to be in the “raising the fist group,” or whether I was going to be in the “nonviolence group.” I was raising my own nonviolent arm in those situations, all those demonstrations and all those marches, and so I felt completely at home with King later on.  

So, you’ve stayed with nonviolence all your life. What does it mean for you? What are some of its essential ingredients?  

I lived in Baghdad when I was 10 for a year, and it was a pretty tough experience. We’d never seen beggars eating out of a garbage can, and dogs too skinny to walk, and I was trying to absorb that. Later, I remember I was in a car traveling cross-country watching a train, and you see the train is going more or less your same speed. In that train, I saw an image of a little girl, of another me, and I knew that if somebody hurt her, it would be hurting me, and vice versa. I connected somehow with other people’s pain, and I figured that if they didn’t like the pain, I didn’t either.  

Later on, I was speaking to a crowd of raving leftists in Argentina, saying that a beating with a rubber hose feels the same whether it’s the right wing or the left wing who’s administering it. They just about blew their lids, they were so furious at me. I had to stop singing. Then Mercedes Sosa, an unbelievable Chilean singer, came out on the stage and she tamed them. She shouted at them, saying, “You don’t know anything about this woman.” Then she ended up singing to them, “No nos moveran, no nos moveran.” [“We will not be moved.”] These poor kids were beaten into submission, but she wanted to validate me, and she did so by shouting at them.  

I’ve been proposing that we need the holistic nonviolence that you see in Gandhi and King, and that requires three simultaneous practices. We have to be totally nonviolent to ourselves. At the same time, we try to practice nonviolence toward all people (including the difficult people in our lives), all creatures and Mother Earth. And we have one foot in the global grassroots movement for justice, disarmament and creation. 

On a personal level, I don’t live up to that. I think it’s a great idea, but I have a short fuse. I don’t hurt anybody, but I get pissed off instantly and attempt to keep my mouth shut, and I’m not very good at a peaceful response. It’s an effort for me.  

Part of me absolutely does all the things that you say about nonviolence, because I came to it early. Even as a kid, I didn’t like the quiet time with the Quakers, but meditation has stayed with me all through my life, and is a very, very important part of my life.  

My practice is like many of my friends: 20 or 25 minutes in the morning, and then guilt for the rest of the day that I haven’t done more. Since the second Trump administration, I’ve upped it to 45 minutes a morning, and sometimes an hour.  

Maybe you could offer one or two memories about Martin Luther King Jr. that might encourage us. I get the impression that he was born naturally nonviolent, that he was a gentle person down to his bones.  

I agree with that. I think he was way more patient and gentle than myself, for instance. You know, too, that he was very funny, which people didn’t get a chance to see because he kept it under wraps. I’m sure he thought he would be discounted one more time, for one more thing, if he was funny while he was giving a speech. But I was able to enjoy that. It was part of the release when he wasn’t in front of the crowd and we were laughing and making jokes and talking like regular people.  

I do know that before he ever did anything, he’d spend a long time on his knees the night before, trying to get his own still small voice within to speak to him.  

You have said that every time you were with him in the 60s and heard him talk about nonviolence, you cried because it was so beautiful. Can you tell us a little about that? 

I met him when he spoke in my high school [in the late 1950s] and gave the annual talk. I started to cry at the beginning of his speech. I cried all the way through because this was a man who was doing what I’d been reading about. He was doing what I’d been thinking about. 

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I [later] traveled with him to demonstrations and heard his speeches in churches and one time, he said, as he was preaching, “I love having Joan Baez sitting here with us because I know the minute I say nonviolence, she starts to cry.”  

During this time in the mid-1960s, you started a school of nonviolence.  

I knew how much I got from Ira Sandperl about nonviolence and it occurred to me that we could expand what we were trying to get across to each other to other people. So together we formed the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. It was not trying to promote public action; it was for the study of nonviolence in every sense of the word.  

A lot of people had their first acquaintance with nonviolence during the silence we had. One time each day, we had an hour of silence. You didn’t get to read or walk around or do anything. People were just shocked. But I’ve had people come up to me later on and say that they’d been at the school and the thing that made the most impression on them and stayed with them the longest was this practice of meditation with nonviolence, basically shutting up for an hour.  

What can you tell me about your friend Thomas Merton, the monk and popular writer, and also Dorothy Day? 

I have brief memories of Dorothy. In the early 1970s, we were with the farmworkers in Southern California, and she was about to get arrested. And I remember her just sitting there with a very peaceful look on her face in a chair while everyone else was bustling around. I didn’t get arrested with her and it would have been nice to have been. But I just remember that elderly calm that some of us have. I almost have it sometimes.  

I didn’t spend a lot of time with [Merton], but the fun part was thinking, “I’m going to a monastery, probably going to have to eat brown bread, with nuts and grains.” But he wanted to go out to lunch and have a hamburger and a milkshake. He probably never wanted to see any brown bread again in his life. He was just sweet and funny. I don’t know if he talked about anything in depth or whether he was just relieved not to have to.  

Do you have any story or event that stands out for you in terms of nonviolence, from your time in Prague with Vaclav Havel — the dissident who became the last president of Czechoslovakia in 1989, before he became the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003? 

The one that always pops to mind is the one that I felt I’d actually made a difference. I was told that it made a difference from Vaclav Havel — and that was from a stunt that we pulled. 

I was waiting for him to come from Prague to Bratislava and he would be in a bus with other dissidents. I had a concert that night and it was going to be filmed and shown on national TV, always a risky business. Finally, I get this phone call. He says, “Havel, this is Havel in lobby, very many police.” That was my introduction. So I said, come up. They all came up. They all started smoking and drinking beer.  

Then he and I started what he called “mischief.” That’s why my art, all my portraits in acrylic, are of “mischief-makers.” We started planning what we would do. He carried the guitar and we met the security at the doors of the stadium. They said, “We’ll take him from here.” We’d say, “No, he’s our guest.” They tried to get him. We held on, we got him up in the balcony where it would have been difficult for the police to get at him. Then I sang a regular concert and the TV would click on and off whenever I said something they didn’t want to hear.  

I knew that I was going to say something about him. I said his name, and I knew that the TV would shut down. So I just suddenly said, “And now I’d like to dedicate a song to my good friend Vaclav Havel.” The microphone went off.  

So I sang “Swing Low” to him without the microphone. It was quite a moment. That song soars. He said later that that concert was the last drop before the chalice filled over and launched the Velvet Revolution. Ever after that, he called himself my roadie.  

In 2003, I remember looking for advice at the start of the war in Iraq, and you quoted Gandhi to me, who said, “Full effort is full victory.”  

I have another quote for you from T.S. Eliot: “For us, there’s only the trying. The rest is not our business.” 

Can you talk about the importance of nonviolence right now? 

With this second round of Trumpism, I’ve heard the word “nonviolence” used by young people more than I have in a while. They started their demonstrations. They really were not only doing nonviolence, but talking about it, which I thought was pretty extraordinary.  

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It’s going to take forever for people to not misunderstand the word, to get beyond their image of passivity, of somebody giving up and lying down on a train track. It takes a lifetime. I’m sure we could convert everybody in the world to nonviolence if we could just meet them one by one, one at a time.  

Tell me about the connection between music and movements. Did the music inspire your activism? Does the activism inspire you to sing?  

It goes both ways. People ask me if I think music is important in a movement, and my answer is, “I wouldn’t be involved in a movement that didn’t have the music, because it’s the life support.” The music is what brings us together, and helps us cross boundaries and borders. I was saying this to Mercedes Sosa, the great Chilean singer, who is a very large woman and very funny. I said, “Music crosses all boundaries.” And she said, “Yeah, music and food. The two essentials.” 

Once, late at night after a concert, I remember asking you, “So where are you finding God these days?” You almost fell out of your chair, and laughed, and then you got serious and said so beautifully, “in the music.” That was 25 years ago.  So, forgive my impertinence, but where are you finding God these days?  

As we’re talking, I’ve started to polish a little apple. I’ve got four apple trees in my yard, and the last one is now popping them out. This has got a lot of red on it. Where do I get inspired? In this apple in the yard. Nature totally does it for me these days. I have a little creek at the bottom of the hill, and I go in there each summer, four days a week, and walk the creek. There are wonderful rocks in that creek. You pick one up, and it’s got these extraordinary designs on it. I don’t know where to put them, but I started harvesting them. And to me, being down in that creek is being God-centered.  

The week before King was killed, one night in Memphis, he started to talk about hope and said, “Hope is the final refusal to give up.” What do you think about hope? 

I have a terrible time with hope. Someone suggested to me that hope is a muscle, which is helpful. I need to get to the gym, because I’m not terribly hopeful. I never was. Could I read you a poem I just wrote? It’s called “This Is Not Optimism.” 

I just wasted a day and a half writing a long-winded response to the question, ‘Are you an optimist?’ Really? In this shitstorm? Are you kidding me?
The simple answer is, No. I’ve never been an optimist.  
Does that mean I ever gave up the fight against tyranny? No, I never did.  
Most likely, I never will.  
I used to be a pessimist until someone suggested it was a waste of time.  
So I’m trying to quit.  
Being an optimist may be a waste of time too, but at least it’s less depressing.  
Be an activist instead.  
Carry your light out into the shitstorm.  
Keep your eyes on the prize and shout, “Glory, hallelujah, goodness will prevail!”  
This is not optimism.  
This is a dance.  

I think you have a choice: just keep on keeping on and talk to people when you can — and keep your eyes on the prize and keep dancing. 

Is there anything else you’d like to add as we wrap it up?  

I learned this during the civil rights movement. [She breaks into song]: 

“Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around, turn me around, turn me around. Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around. I’m gonna keep on walking, keep on talking, marching up to freedom land.  

Ain’t gonna let this administration turn me around, turn me around, turn me around. Ain’t gonna let this administration turn me around. We’re gonna keep on walking, keep on talking, keep on singing, keep on swinging, marching up to freedom land!” 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. To hear the full conversation, visit The Beatitudes Center for the Nonviolent Jesus or whatever podcast platform you use. 

This article ‘Carry your light out into the shitstorm’ — a conversation with Joan Baez  was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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