“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” asked Nathanial, disciple of Jesus identified as he in whom there is no guile, even as Nat cast some serious shade his way.
While living in California and Texas, I’ve heard residents of both states ask in the same derisive tone: “Can anything good come out of San Francisco … or Austin?”
The Christian feast of Pentecost is upon us. It first occurred during Shavuot, when the Jewish diaspora from across Asia Minor, Europe and North Africa descended on Jerusalem. Streets bustled with folk of diverse cultures speaking many tongues.
In an upper room above those streets, the Book of Acts tells us, disciples of Jesus, recently crucified, cowered. Yet, filled with Holy Spirit, they burst onto those streets, sharing the gospel of love. Talk across linguistic differences magically became a sinch.
San Antonio priest Virgilio Elizondo once suggested to me that Nathanial makes his remark because Nazareth hosted such diversity year-round.
Nat’s implication: “The Messiah’s hometown ain’t so kosher.”
Does such xenophobic candor sound familiar?
If so, you may appreciate an event at St’ James’ Episcopal Church in Austin on June 7, between Shavuot and Pentecost. The theme of this collaboration of poets, jazz musicians, culinary artists and a painter, capturing the event on canvas: “Texas & West Coast Voices Joining Hands for Love of the Diaspora.” Folks from a dozen diasporas will offer a tasty poetic antidote to current bitter forces leaving immigrants and so-called DEI hires feeling unwelcome.
This is the church’s sixth annual opportunity for Texas artists to raise their voices in the name of love. Enhancing the chorus this year, Genny Lim, ninth poet laureate of San Francisco, and free jazz woodwind player Francis Wong join seven Austin poets and the Joe Morales Trio to demonstrate how our diversity in age, race, culture and gender orientation enriches our world.
Austin has been called the San Francisco of Texas. As our city has just named its first poet laureate (Zell Miller III), linking poetic hands with San Francisco, who named its first in 1998, makes sound Pentecostal sense.
I had a chance to explore the intersection of faith, poetry, jazz and the diaspora with Genny and Francis, following our shared interview on KAZI radio.
What first inspired your merger of poetry and jazz?
Francis: I unearthed a tape of Janice Mirikitani, second poet laureate of San Francisco who, as an infant, was incarcerated in a Japanese internment camp. She read her poetry accompanied by musicians. It was 1968 and a strike to include ethnic studies in the San Francisco State curriculum brought poet Amiri Baraka there to promote the role of the Black arts in mobilizing communities. When I then had a chance to play with poets at San Jose’s Poetry Center, I took it.
Genny: Inspired by that Black arts movement, young people in Chinatown launched a rebel movement rejecting the conservatism of our parents, who, due to their experience on Angel Island and their fear of reprisals, suppressed socio-political involvement. As the youngest of seven children, I was exposed to lots of literary and musical genres like the beat poets and the jazz that sometimes accompanied their reading. The connection soon began to jell within me.
How did you come to fuse Chinese folk tunes with jazz?
Genny: It was not a conscious effort. We’d been immersed in Chinese opera and folk tunes. There were basement clubs, gathering regularly; one heard them walking through Chinatown.
Francis: Like composer Henry Threadgill, asserted, “The music we play comes from our cultural context.” Black bass player Herbie Lewis piggybacked on this, saying, “Improvisation comes out of the unconscious.” Jazz provides a natural choice for merging with poetry; both mediums speak to the subconscious, where our culture embeds itself.
How does this mix strengthen Asian diasporas?
Genny: We perform in the vein of the Oakland Ballet’s Angel Island Project. It’s based on protest poems that detainees carved into the walls of Angel Island immigration station. David Guss’s “Language of the Birds” gets at the same message. Metaphorically speaking, he suggests, we lost our capacity to speak to the birds. Pressure to divide species with one dominating the other disrupts such communication. Our dominant culture separates us by reducing us to coolie labor.
Francis: The need to provide a corrective inspired my colleague Jon Jang to create the Pan-Asian ARKestra. The Asian diaspora in the U.S. is diverse but we struggle with similar disasters. We forget we’re all in the same boat. Such collaboration reminds us of what we have in common.
Is there a spiritual component to your shared art?
Francis: I’m a practicing Buddhist, but I was first moved spiritually by John Coltrane’s journey. In the liner notes of his “A Love Supreme” he commends “being a force for good” instead of a transactional tool of the music industry. Fellow saxophonist Sony Rollins similarly asked players “what are you doing in this world,” after traveling to India and Japan to pursue Hinduism.
Genny: Spirituality dwells at the center of my life. My mother was a devout Daoist, which for me felt like superstition. My siblings and I for a time embraced Mormonism. Cameron House, a Presbyterian ministry in Chinatown, offered a better way but even this, in its separation of the self from deity, failed to satisfy. For 15 years I practiced Tibetan Buddhism. Coltrane’s spiritual expression through music also compelled me. Participating in a concert mixing multiple genres, wherein the lead musician played the Arabian oud, I suddenly heard the voice of the Sufi poet Rumi. This then led me to a new Dao (“path”) — one where poetry speaks my faith.
Will joining Texas and West Coast voices matter in our current socio-political climate?
Genny: Multiculturalism rumbles the core of the Silk Road tradition that Francis and I share. It stretches from Canada to Kazakhstan. It speaks upwards of 2,000 tongues. Trauma fills all our migrant tales. Reaching across the darkness and continents to share them, can only conjure hope.
Francis: I’ve recently begun a collaboration with the Okinawan community, whose ancestors died in a devastating military campaign during World War II. Pain of this memory still radiates through the island chain. “Blossom of a Burned-Out Tree,” the mindful focus of this gathering of artists, affirms that there’s life after tragedy — life uniting and connecting diasporas.
This Pentecost weekend may we find a path to the streets to speak across cultural divisions with bold love, expressed succinctly straight out of the gate by the new pope, Leo XIV:
“God loves everyone, evil will not prevail.”
Terry Dawson is a retired Presbyterian minister and author of two books of verse: the after: poems only a planet could love (Poets’ Choice, 2022) and Pursuing the Ruin (Lamar University Press, due out in 2026).
Texas & West Coast Voices Joining Hands: Poetry, Jazz & Live painting
6-9 p.m. June 7
St. James’ Episcopal Church, 1941 Webberville Road
$15-$20, including dinner
texasandwestcoastvoices.eventbrite.com
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Faith: Celebrate diversity with art and faith
Reporting by By Terry Dawson / Austin American-Statesman
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
