As Told by the Messenger: A Guest Blog by Amanda Pascali

Houston-based singer and songwriter Amanda Pascali is delivering a captivating sound that fuses diverse genres and that finds its roots in the powerful emotional journey of the immigrant experience. She sat down to explore the meaning behind her single “Temporary Home” with Musical Notes Global in an exclusive guest blog.

I decided to be the messenger of my family’s story when I realized that if I didn’t do it, no one would.

My great-great-grandma was afraid of electricity. Electricity was a very new thing in Romania during her time. She didn’t trust it. She would never touch the light switch. Every time the lights turned on in her house, it was done so by her daughter; a young woman unafraid of the rapid technological changes. If ever her daughter was not home, she sat alone in the dark, never daring to touch the switch. In her mind, there must have been some evil behind that switch; something that electrified a million tiny cells in a circuit behind the walls, out of her control, behind her back. Until her daughter came home and on came the lights.

My grandma abhors the computer. Inspired by her stories, I brought her a laptop all the way from America hoping that she would write everything that happened during her life. The computer was wiped and updated; a blank slate. I changed the computer language to Romanian, glued the password in the space just below the keyboard so she wouldn’t forget it- and nothing. “I’ll never touch that thing,” she told me. She passed the same sentiment on to my father who refuses to write the story of his immigration to the U.S.

So here I am. And here is the story.

I picked up a guitar when I was 12-years-old. Like soccer, and the spelling bee, it was something I wanted to try. I quickly fell in love with it. I played from morning until night. I wrote and recorded my first song when I was 13, in my teacher’s garage. It was a vague song about taking action against injustice, called “It’s (never) Too Late.” Impressed with me, my teacher recruited me into his band. All of the members, except me, were grown men. Every weekend I played guitar and sang in a different bar. Some of them were biker bars. Some of them were smoking bars. Fights broke out sometimes. At the age of 13, I had a lens into a world I had never seen before.

I never knew the story of my parents until I was 15. I was an angsty teenager with a dyed-blonde pixie cut when my parents went on a business trip to San Francisco and decided to bring my sisters and me along. Because we weren’t able to get five seats all together on the airplane, my mom and sisters sat together in one row and my dad and I ended up together in another, next to a boy who was the same age as I was. My dad and I had a lot of time to talk. Eventually, the story came out.

My dad was a refugee. He had protested the government in his home country, Romania, and was exiled to a labor camp for two years. “Labor camp.” The only time I had heard those words was in history class when we studied World War II and the Holocaust. But even then, when I learned about the horrors of those historical events, in my mind they were, exactly that: historical; far away in space and time and, in my 15-year-old brain, surely they didn’t involve anyone who was related to me, surely similar events couldn’t happen in the ’80s or even the 2000s.

I listened in awe. When I looked over, I realized the boy next to us was also listening, leaning forward, perplexed. My father had carried the dead bodies of his comrades through the mountains. He had slept in rooms with dozens of sweaty, traumatized men, he had witnessed the death of his friends, and was stripped naked before his superiors. Suddenly, my father seemed to belong to another world; the world of violence; the world I caught a glimpse of from time to time when a fight would break out in a bar during my performances. When he spoke, he saw only the sequence of his own life events as they transpired before his eyes. But what I heard, was a story.

I was inspired. I wrote more. I dug deeper into my parents’ past, and their love story. How could a man so damaged learn to love? My parents met in Brooklyn, New York in 1986. My dad was granted asylum in the U.S. and picked up work in a refrigerator factory before saving enough money to go to college. He took out countless loans. It was there that he met my mother, a protestor in her own way. The youngest daughter in an Egyptian family, she was determined to study and become an engineer. She would become the first woman in her family to pursue a technical career. She worked a job and went to school full-time so she could afford a car that was so cheap, it didn’t have a floor. As the two fell deeper in love, she decided to teach him how to drive. It was the first time he had ever been at the wheel of a car. When they drove, they watched as the streets of New York City passed under their feet.

12 years later, in 1998, I was born in Queens. I used to feel sour about the fact that my parents never opened up to me and my sisters about their past. I used to feel sour about the fact that they never wrote about it, spoke about it, or shared it with the world. It wasn’t until I reached my 20s that I was able to make more sense of it. In my mind, there are two types of people: those who experience extraordinary or traumatic events and therefore, cannot view their life events as anything bigger than their own personal story, and those who are left to tell those stories: messengers. I am the latter.

I don’t believe that I am particularly talented, unique, or extraordinary. I don’t even believe that I was born with an inherent purpose, but at a certain point, I decided to build my own purpose: to be a messenger of my family’s story and diaspora. I am able to view the stories of my parents as an outsider, unfettered by trauma, which means that I am able to tell their stories through a lens that shows their semblance to the plight of many people from different backgrounds today. I have the privilege of being able to talk about war, labor camps, migration, and persecution with no first-hand emotional attachment to any of those issues, but with enough personal connection to speak with increased empathy about them.

The fact that I am able to tell others’ stories is what makes my life extraordinary. My goal is use to my privilege to the maximum; to do hundreds of years worth of work documenting the experiences of those in my family who could not afford to tell their stories, and to encourage others and their families to do the same.

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