Borderless Winds

Clandestino in the Park

Manu Chao & Co. delivering a powerful acoustic set at a night of solidarity organized by BelRefugees.

Last night, my wife and I took our son to see Manu Chao strumming the pulse of revolution for two and a half hours beneath the green hush of Josaphat Park in Schaerbeek, Brussels. A benefit for the displaced, but also a communion of the once-dreaming.

For a moment, it did feel like the early 2000s again: alter-globalism with all its messy joy, drums pounding with ebullient refusal, guitars speaking in Southern tongues...

Palestinian flags and keffiyehs danced like borderless winds, while voices – ours, his – rose together, not just in memory of lost futures, but in motion: remembering how to move, how to be joyful again, despite everything.

Our ten-year-old danced and sang through it all, carried by the beat like it was already his. As if the music had passed through us just to find a new home in him; as if he felt, somehow, that this music wasn’t just another rhythm, but lived resistance.