"The More Names You Can Call for God the Better"
Hassaun Ali Jones-Bey on musical storytelling and imagining peace
“Around the late 1990s, a lot of people were writing things online about the end of the world, or the end of life as we know it. They were saying scientific and religious things that didn’t make sense to me. So, I started an Imagine Peace musical storytelling project to try and communicate in ways that made sense, to me anyway. At times, it seemed to make sense to a lot more people also….
Perhaps it is best understood for me now, upon waking up after seven decades of life, to realize that what I call “me” is really just an interface between what is inside of me and what is outside of me. As if what religious scholars describe as monotheism is really just a “mono-we-ism”: a story of one life. I and all else are part of a life story that can be told in narrative cycles called generations.
The generations are like stanzas in a piece of music. And for those who point out that there are many countless pieces of music, I respond laughingly as my mother used to with one of her favorite sayings, “The more names you can call for God the better.” I started writing songs and telling stories a little over 25 years ago. Actually, at the time, I picked up a musical storytelling thread I had dropped a decade and a half previously.
I wrote my first song in 1979, the same year my spouse and I had our first kid. I called it the “Ant-stronaut Song” because it was about an ant that was going to cross the universe.
Listen:
Ant’s the smallest fella that I can see
Universe the largest place I know to be
But that ant’s gotta cross it if he wannabe free
Trudge on sweet ant, trudge on.
Chorus:
An ant’s gonna cross the universe
Press on sweet ant, press on
To satisfy an insatiable thirst
Trudge on sweet ant, trudge on
No time to figure how to get there first.
Drift on sweet ant, drift on
But if he stays here, it can only get worse
Right on sweet ant, right on
He don’t know what’s on the other side.
It’s definitely nowhere to just go and hide.
But he do know it gonna be a heck of a ride.
Drift on sweet and, drift on.
Chorus
No ground to walk on, no air to breathe.
No ant hills to sleep in, no other ants to greet.
Ain’t a darn thing up there but a very cool breeze.
Drift on sweet ant, drift on.
Bridge:
Ant takes a giant quantum leap
And breaks loose from the earth.
There ain’t no turnin’ back now
So just stroke for all you’re worth.
Go forth in search of God and Love
And celebrate your birth.
Chorus
When I wrote this, I was also aboard ship on my first tour of sea duty. The late 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis would scuttle the plans my spouse and I had made for me to leave the ship in Hawai’i to return home for a Lamaze delivery. The world started changing for me then. I used to think that wars came from inevitable ego contests among national leaders. All of a sudden it seemed that we were preparing to fight for oil company profit margins.
It felt incredibly gross. The people at home, who were running the petroleum industries, now felt threatening to my family and to what I understood then as the American way of life. More so than the Iranians we were supposed to be protecting everyone against. Even God seemed like the biggest gangster of all. But all of that is another story…”
This is an excerpt from Hassaun Ali Jones-Bey article, “Imagine Peace: A Reason to Keep Living,” which appeared in our recent special issue, The Power of the Pluriverse. The essay considers awakening to deeper meaning twenty five years after an Imagine Peace musical storytelling project that Jones-Bey undertook.
He writes, “Realizing that it was already going on long before I got here, and it is still going on today, [in this essay] I examine a basic function of human existence: people being who and what we really are. We are not commodities. We are the sacred stuff that gets worshipped and locked away for safekeeping. The crises of the day clearly indicate—as they have for some time now and may have always indicated—that it is time to stop locking the sacred away. It is time to wake up and start being it.”
Hassaun Ali Jones-Bey has masters degrees in biomedical engineering, science journalism, religion (focused on the Black experience), and music (focused on Black sacred musicology). He has worked as a product development engineer, a US Navy pilot, a production line manager, a magazine editor, and as a musical storytelling, afterschool and summer program instructor and substitute teacher. He is also a grandparent. Previous publications include Better Than A Thousand Months: An American Muslim Family Celebration; A Heart at the Heart of Life: Negro Spirituals, African Cosmologies, and Optical Physics in a Contemporary Search for Common Ground; and The People Danced: a sacred river of AfroAmerican community crosses a global road of Euro-American commodities.