by Valerie Ang
To tune in to the history of the marginalised, the subjugated, it is necessary to speculate—to believe that they, like us, lived and fought and died for what they knew to be true.
Years later, you will still speak of the narrow stage. That terrace of steps where you sang and swayed in your Sunday best: a phalanx of soldiers, mighty in density, packed sword-arm to shield-arm beneath the neon cross as the band played.
You will speak of how the spotlights strobed. How they kaleidoscoped across the hall, rubying the world to red. More heat than light, really; or perhaps a kind of kinetic energy, rarefying you into your component atoms. Bearing you up like hot air, like spirit, like a holy thing.
You will speak of the battle hymn. Drums that stirred your heartbeat, were your heartbeat. Bass throbbing in your bones, melody in your marrow. Always you came offstage with bloodrush in your cheeks, sweatsheen on your brow, like you’d been marching, or fighting, or killing. Like Joshua’s priests, who brought down the might of Jericho with the music of trumpets.
More than the song, though, you will speak of the singing. You will speak of Jericho.
Jericho, jewel of Canaan, land of milk and honey. Yeriho in Hebrew, Arīḥā in Arabic, fragrant, and fragrant it was. Sweet streams, rolling pastures, dates and olives and flowers and figs. By the time the trumpets called, the City of Palms had stood for eight thousand years.
The story they taught you from the Book of Joshua went like this. Canaan was the Promised Land, God’s bequest to the people of Israel, forfeit by the Canaanites themselves because their forefather had once seen Noah—he of the ark—lolling about drunk and naked, and was cursed to eternal servitude in punishment. When Joshua and the Israelites began their conquest of Canaan generations later, in the Middle Bronze Age, they started with Jericho.
They marched around the city day after day. The armed men first, then the priests, bearing their trumpets and the Ark of the Covenant. In silence they circled the high walls, the guarded gates, while the defenders watched from above. The miracle happened on the seventh day, as miracles do. Joshua gave the signal, the priests blew on their trumpets, the people raised a shout; and at the sound of that wild music, the walls of the city came crumbling down like chaff. And they utterly destroyed all that was in it, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the blade.
Poor Jericho, you thought. God forbid you ever stumbled across Noah in his nakedness. See nothing, hear nothing, close your eyes and sing.
You didn’t want to leave at first.
There was something heroic, something primal and archaic on that stage beneath the neon cross. The murky shadows of the band poised like action figures around you, their guitars like crossbows, like catapults in silhouette. War-drums pounding at your pulse points in the instant before the lights plunged on. Swelling cheers, cresting synths, the crowd of faces upturned to you. Your conductor’s exhortations: look them in the eye, sing grace into their hearts. Remember Joshua. Against God no wall shall stand.
You loved it. Not the song, the singing. You sang the lyrics unthinking, our God is an awesome God / He reigns from heaven above, over and over, the words gaining stridence till they thundered like a cavalry charge. A lockstep legion raising the battle-cry—blades bared, trumpets calling, as the walls of Jericho tumbled down, down, down. If the violence of the parable ever troubled you, you turned your gaze away.
Jericho was never meant to be rebuilt. What God had done could not be undone; the song, once sung, could not be unsung. Joshua’s prophecy lay heavy upon the smoking ruins: Cursed be the man before the Lord that riseth up and buildeth this city. He shall lay its foundations with the life of his firstborn, and with his youngest son shall he set up its gates.
Your pastor’s own pastor was in the news. A scandal, church funds misused, millions of dollars’ worth of tithes and offerings channeled into sham bond investments to fuel his pop-star wife’s singing career. All for the glory of God, of course, we wouldn’t expect nonbelievers to understand. This is the prosperity gospel: wealth is the will of the Lord for us all. Here comes the collection plate. Open your wallets, you trumpeters of Joshua, who would never look upon Noah naked. Give in faith. Give, give till your heart breaks.
The pastor is in prison now—three and a half years for criminal breach of trust. And the City of Palms sprang up again. A man called Hiel of Bethel braved Joshua’s curse to rebuild it, yielding up the life of Abiram his firstborn to lay its foundations, setting up its gates with Segub his last.
Evangelism began with an empty Kleenex box. Your youth leader handed round slips of paper, told you to list the lost souls you were going to invite to Easter service. Their names would go into the box, and you would all lay hands on it and pray. Your neighbour James, who drank and smoked and sheltered stray cats in his flat when it rained. Your classmate Lynn, who’d been with Suzanne since junior college and was still in delirious love. O Lord sing down the walls of the dollhouse Jerichos in their hearts, of all that make them James and Lynn. And they burnt the city with fire, and all that was therein. Only the silver and the gold, they kept for the treasury of the house of the Lord.
You slid a blank slip into the box, a guilty secret. Lord forgive me. Turn your annihilating grace elsewhere. Let these souls be.
You left. The song called you back, our God is an awesome God, heard by chance somewhere, a call to arms after the war was done. A mantra you once believed and still did, still do, so you returned. You left again; it called you back once more; you left; it called. But it was the singing you loved, not the song: the stage with its glitter, its glamour, its terror, its thrill. The trumpets were losing their hold on you. You left. This time the leaving stuck.
Jericho survived a hundred deaths. Sacked by Joshua, rebuilt. Sacked by Babylonians, rebuilt. Flattened by earthquakes, rebuilt. Overrun by Turks, then Crusaders, then the crusaders who fought the Crusaders. Mined with explosives in World War II. Occupied and reoccupied by Israeli and Palestinian troops. Rebuilt, rebuilt, rebuilt. The water of Jericho is held to be the highest and best, wrote the Arab geographer Al-Maqdisi, millennia after the trumpets had fallen silent. Bananas are plentiful, also dates, and flowers of pleasing odour. Jericho the fragrant, Jericho the defiant, Jericho the triumphant.
Faith is, perhaps, essentially speculative. We believe in what we cannot prove, a reality more felt than seen. Much the same could be said of history, particularly the history of the defeated, written in the margins of the stories that victorious civilisations have dictated to us over the millennia. To tune in to the history of the marginalised, the subjugated, it is necessary to speculate—to believe that they, like us, lived and fought and died for what they knew to be true.
—
Born and raised in Singapore, Valerie Ang is a writer of queer fiction and poetry, and a graduate student of Creative Writing at LASALLE College of the Arts. Her work has been featured in Cortex, the Ekphrastic Review, and Southeast Asian Review of English. She is working on a novel about the Second Punic War, and is the proud owner of a three-foot stuffed whale.