What It Sounds Like by Rosemary Peters-Hill
Our lives are not our own, St. Paul tells us—a verse that seems particularly apropos in the Twin Cities context.
We’ve been watching a lot of K-Pop Demon Hunters lately, in my family, because—after its 50-day run in our living room last summer—our younger son recently rediscovered the catchy “Soda Pop,” thanks to a playlist my husband made.
This deserves an aside. My husband is excellent at making playlists, and if a career option existed where what you do is create tailored playlists for people and get paid for it, I would encourage him to quit his day job. But this particular playlist begins with the Beatles, then Wicked, and I don’t know how other people react when “Defying Gravity” starts playing, but I’m pretty sure the octave of “it’s meeeeeeeee!” is the universal cue to unbuckle your seatbelt and sing at the top of your lungs out the sunroof. If the person driving the car starts whapping at your legs a little bit or your almost-teenager pulls his hoodie over his face because “you’re being cringe,” well, let them. They’ll need both hands for the steering wheel eventually and nobody can live inside a hoodie, and by that time you’ll have soared into the western skies . . . but that’s another story, and my point is that he followed “Defying Gravity” with “Soda Pop,” and so now we are watching Rumi, Zoey, and Mira conjure their platinum blades from thin air on a daily basis; and this is marriage sometimes. I get Elphaba triumphant and he gets the jaunty shoulder hitch. And all of us, even his groaning big brother, know this child’s favorite movie by heart.
If you’re not familiar, let me give a quick recap. As the title promises, it takes place in Korea and the main characters are all members of K-Pop bands. The girl-group Huntrix is chosen across time to fight demons threatening this world. They do so with the power of music, and their harmonies create the Honmoon: a protective barrier between humanity and the demon realm. A group of demons creates a boy band to weaken Huntrix; the Saja Boys begin by stealing Huntrix’s fans, and ultimately move into stealing their fans’ souls. We learn early on that a shameful secret weighs on the Huntrix lead Rumi, something she has never told the other two; this secret unravels the group at a critical public moment, and the Honmoon tears apart. The music is catchy, with some incredible surprises of harmony and voicing; there are laugh-out-loud moments along with the drama of, you know, demons; and even if you’re not a fan of animated movies it’s worth watching just for the kimbap and ramyeon.
But there’s this scene at the end, when the Honmoon has broken. The streets are crawling with demons, the Saja Boys are leading everyone to certain destruction, and Rumi walks through a mesmerized crowd on her own, baring her secret and her soul, ready to fight all alone against the demon-wave if necessary. Her courage breaks the spell, and the people in the crowd—who had all been on the brink of losing their souls—now participate in the great battle of dark against light. Thousands of people with their hands at their hearts, cradling the small glow of their souls, sing together while Rumi slashes her demon-slaying blade through the middle of the demon king’s magenta maw. It’s a little like the singing at the end of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, all the Whos down in Whoville raising their voices together against probability and reason. The K-Pop crowd’s voices become a descant to Rumi’s melody, an echo to Huntrix’s earlier song about the best within people, and what was a dark moment of surrender turns into a beautiful statement of solidarity.
K-Pop Demon Hunters played in the living room while I was in the kitchen listening to the news, and I dropped my favorite bowl when the familiar NPR voice relayed the information that a woman had been shot, in her car, by an ICE agent. The bowl shattered in slow motion, shards of pottery skittering across the tile floor like drops of water. I don’t remember hearing it land. All my mind registered was “ICE agents fatally shot Renée Nicole Good in her car.” The most horrifying thing was that the unbelievable words didn’t come as any surprise. I swept up the pieces of my broken bowl and dumped them into the trash. There was no air in the room, no room in the world, for sorrow over a bowl. I included Renée Nicole Good’s name in our family prayers that night. We prayed for the repose of her soul, and for her family and loved ones who had to live with the loss of their mother, daughter, wife, best friend. A poet. A singer. A soul. A child of God.
The calendar shows it was weeks, but it seemed mere hours later, that the next horrifying news broke: “ICE agents fatally shot Alex Pretti.” He was on his knees in the street, empty handed. They fired ten shots. We prayed for Alex Pretti that night, my little family so far from the scene of his death, but even prayer felt helpless.
Most people I know and interact with have been walking around in a kind of daze, this bleak January, and the unspoken reality hangs in the thin winter air all around us: our government is killing people. We have known this, of course, but these two murders feel different. They happened not in Venezuela, not in Yemen or Guantanamo or Greenland, but here. Renée Good and Alex Pretti were not killed in secret, but out in the open. And they were not “worst-of-the-worst criminal elements.” They were just—people. People who dared to stand up and bear witness. It’s an age-old war tactic: make a brutal example of a bystander, quashing protest or resistance in so violent and horrific a fashion that other people will be too afraid to come forward and protest in their turn.
But Alex Pretti did stand up and bear witness. He did so after Renée Good had been shot. He stood up, directed traffic, and bent down to help a woman to her feet after ICE agents had pushed her into the snowbank at the edge of the sidewalk. And other people stood up as he was being shot. They recorded with cell phones, the only weapon that can fight the narrative of falsehood that has dominated these events, a narrative that says “dissent is treason.”
It isn’t. It wasn’t treason when Daniel defied King Darius. It wasn’t treason when Jeremiah denounced the false prophet Hananiah. It wasn’t treason when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego resisted King Nebuchadnezzar. We don’t have to go all Old Testament on this, either. It isn’t treason to protest the imposition of heavy tariffs (think Boston Tea Party). Nor to speak out against a person in power who commits evil deeds. We have whistle-blower protection laws for that reason. It isn’t treason to refuse to give up a seat on a bus.
As I write this reflection, our son is singing and dancing along with his favorite movie for the 9,000th time, and I’m listening absently, impressed by the sound of all those voices coming together to strengthen the things that protect this world.
I’m picturing the things I loved about Minneapolis during my one too-brief visit there: the corner cafés, the small blocks of walkable streets, the parking lots used for driving lessons for Somali women on the weekends. The city felt rugged and earthy—it takes a certain kind of grit to handle that much winter—and also friendly and peaceably diverse. Pride flags on porches, “COEXIST” stickers on car bumpers. A place where you could find the grumpy regulars with their black coffees and work boots, and borrow an egg from a neighbor; and also hear beautiful lilting cadences of language that make you pay a different kind of attention to words you thought you knew.
My son’s voice rises in melody, and I’m thinking about what he’s seeing on the screen—thousands of people squashed together in public, realizing they have been duped by demons, deciding to fight back.
I watch him spinning, twirling, jumping in delight as the magenta menace recedes and a delicate golden web replaces it, stitching itself across the whole sky.
We broke into a million pieces and we can’t go back
but now we’re seeing all the beauty in the broken glass
And I’m crying, holding my small boy’s hands and jumping and spinning with him, our two little voices joining the animated crowd on the TV, giving everything we’ve got for what it is worth, singing as though our lives depended on it.
Fearless and undefined, this is what it sounds like
And maybe they do. Our lives are not our own, St. Paul tells us—a verse that seems particularly apropos in the Twin Cities context. It’s a concept that resonates across time. David Mitchell’s 2004 novel Cloud Atlas, about the interconnectedness of past, present, and future subjectivities and selves, echoes First Corinthians: “Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.”
Truth after all this time, our voices all combined,
when darkness meets the light, this is what it sounds like
Cartoon hands hold palm-sized globes of pure white light on the screen, and my hands hold my child’s hands, and in this moment it feels like our souls join theirs in this song to battle the demons back out of this world, back down where they belong. It is hard work, exhausting work, and our voices are tired, and I haven’t jumped like this since I was his age probably and I have no air, my lungs are on fire, and this is what it sounds like, we give our energy into this song anyway. Because it is hard. Because it is what you do. It’s what Renée Good did. It’s what Alex Pretti did. It’s what the protestors do, showing up every day, even after two government-funded murders.
Each crime and every kindness. Each sin committed. Each gentle word spoken or swallowed. Every harsh criticism. Any time we stand up on behalf of someone whose voice does not have the breath or authority of ours. All the help we give—whether an outstretched hand in a moment of crisis, or an anonymously delivered casserole in a time of grief—makes us who we are, who we shall be. The world our children and their children will inherit.
Personally, I hope it is a world of Alex Prettis and Renée Nicole Goods. A world of Whos, singing down in Whoville from the fulness of hearts that know the Grinch (from the Old French grincher, to steal) can steal the stuff but not the spirit. ICE can take a life, but they cannot take who we are.
Mine is a neighborhood historically built for “white flight” from a city center changed by desegregation. Today we share our street with Italians, Palestinians, Vietnamese, and Nigerian families—all American, all beautiful, all legal, all children of God. I recognize my privilege—I am able to dance in the living room with my son while protestors stand in the bitter cold wondering where the ICE agents will strike next. Still, I wear a whistle on a cord around my neck, even all these miles from Minneapolis, because Minneapolis isn’t just a single geographic space; it’s us. The golden Honmoon only ripples out because of all the individuals who joined their voices to the effort. We belong to each other. We are responsible for each other.
My kid and I flop down onto our backs, breathing hard. Today, I dance. And I pray, and prepare, and teach my children and my students that speaking out is sacred, not shameful. I may never have the occasion to blow my whistle, but I will wear it just the same, as symbol and more than symbol. I think it’s important for you to know that. For now, from this table where I sit in the pale sunlight of February in the South, this is what it sounds like. ♦
Rosemary Peters-Hill is a Professor at Louisiana State University, where she teaches French literature, history, and culture. As a Fulbright scholar, she spent a year in Morocco researching St. Charles de Foucauld and crafting a critical edition of his important Reconnaissance au Maroc, 1883–1884. She is currently working on a new book project exploring imperial art thefts in Greece, Djibouti, and Cambodia, and also writing a “journey’ through the Rosary with St. Charles de Foucauld. She lives in Louisiana with her husband, children, and chickens.