The Drowned and the Saved (feat. Arturo O'Farrill)
Keith LaMar and Albert Marquès
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You know in this country Most of us operate under the delusion That we live in the 21st century And that somehow Without actually doing the work We have overcome our history It's not true Instead of hanging people from trees We use the so-called criminal justice system to perform legalized lynchings And take this as a sign of progress We confuse form with substance When I embarked on this journey 29 years ago I was given the choice to either plead guilty to something I didn't do Or face the death penalty I was twenty-five years old And the thought that I would have to give up my life Represented a great burden to me A burden that I wasn't so sure I could bear I didn't understand back then that there was something more valuable Than simply being alive Although I intuitively understood that existing was not the same thing as living I also somehow understood that in order to live with myself I had to be true to myself And for this I would have to pay a hell of a price After I was sentenced to death I was thrown in solitary confinement It felt like I was thrown into the middle of the ocean Try to imagine it: Water as far as the eye can see And it's just you by yourself, floating That's what solitary confinement is like In situations such as this, God ceases to be an abstraction Some thing that exists apart from who you are and what you do This is the domain of the drowned and the saved Life is very real here And your senses mean more to you than they ever will What you can see, what you can feel What you can hold in your hands These are the only things that matter You begin to comprehend that, under the circumstances A piece of driftwood can be God I mean the smallest thing can save or change your life And this piece of driftwood, a book, a dream, a random stranger Has not come to inquire about your particular race or religion Instead, it has been sent to ask a more basic question Do you want to live? And what does it mean to be alive What are we doing here If you ask Nazim Hikmet, who's one of my favorite poets He would tell you that, "Living is no laughing matter" Which, to me, implies that we didn't come here to play To have fun And if that be the case then I can live right here where I am Right here on death row I needed to know that More importantly, I needed to know that it's possible to lose everything And still be saved At some point I had to be willing to accept that the vastness I was so afraid of was God Which exists inside of me, inside of all of us To accept this truth, I had to go within And teach myself how not to be afraid And what exactly did I have to be afraid of anyway Death? Hell? Well, as James Baldwin once famously said "When one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, One eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring" I amen his clarity The arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, we are told This may very well be But we, with our own hands and mind Must bend it We have to do the work People are dying who could be saved
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"The Drowned and the Saved (feat. Arturo O'Farrill) Lyrics." Lyrics.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 27 Apr. 2024. <https://www.lyrics.com/lyric-lf/7615986/Keith+LaMar+and+Albert+Marqu%C3%A8s/The+Drowned+and+the+Saved+%28feat.+Arturo+O%27Farrill%29>.
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