How do we memorialize our mothers?

How do we memorialize our mothers? This is a question I’ve been sitting with since my dear mother, Susila Bryant, a singer-songwriter and a parishioner at Christ Church Cathedral, passed away last year after a valiant battle with ALS. She was such a kind, loving, generous spirit who helped so many people in her life that I wanted to remember her with a public memorial that would give back to the community.

After she died last year, I was inspired to organize an annual memorial concert in her memory. In the last few weeks, an amazing programme has come together through love, friendship, and community. My mother’s spirit will be alive and well at the first annual Susila Bryant Memorial concert at Christ Church Cathedral on Saturday, August 10 at 7:30 PM. Proceeds will go to the Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza City, managed by the Anglican Diocese of Jerusalem. You can buy tickets in advance via Eventbrite or pay $25 cash at the door.

I do hope you can join me and Bob York, the veteran, pianist and composer as we present an evening weaving together stories, songs, poems, world music and cabaret. In addition to accompanying myself and my mother for decades, Bob was also present at my parents’ wedding in Prince George in 1965! But you can learn more about that story on August 10th.

Joining us will be special guests Themba Tana and Shumba Saint Albert playing a traditional Zulu song from South Africa, entitled Mama Dear. Also appearing will be my mother’s old friend veteran jazz singer Lorraine Foster and Syrian Christian singer-songwriter Grace Zakko (who may well be my distant cousin – but you’ll have to come on the 10^th to hear that story!)

As I wrote the script for the performance which honours my mother and my ancestors – including those from Syria and England – I recalled a question many of us grew up with in Vancouver. Where are you from? I will be telling some stories from my childhood about this question that often hangs heavy in the colonial air, but it begs the larger question, where do we all come from? We come from that timeless space of love and creation and belonging; we come from the womb; we all come from the Great Mother.

Everyone has a mother, and we all go back to that Great Womb in the Sky made of starlight and memories.

When you lose your mother, you don’t really lose her. You kind of gain her and she inhabits you in a way that mirrors the process when you inhabited her. Indeed, there is such a connection between death and birth that after a year of mourning her loss, I’ve begun to realize that my mother is now more present in her current state than she ever was before 

The concert on the 10^th will celebrate my late great mum and mothers everywhere and we will especially remember the mothers in Gaza and the lovely Suhaila Tarazi, who runs the Ahli  Hospital in Gaza. Founded in 1882, it is one of the oldest hospitals in the city and the only Christian hospital in Gaza and treats people of all faiths regardless of ability to pay. Gaza’s only cancer hospital, on 14 October 2023, its Diagnostic Cancer Treatment Centre was damaged by Israeli rockets, injuring four hospital staff members and severely damaging two of its upper floors, with the mammography and ultrasound departments most affected.  The Anglican Church of Canada has an ongoing appeal for funds to assist the hospital.

I plan to begin the evening with a prayer for peace and for the qualities of the divine feminine – of compassion and love and creativity – to be embodied in ourselves and in the world.

Together with my “Syrian cousin” Grace accompanying me on oud, I’ll be singing a Garcia Lorca song called El Rio Guadalquivir, which I have performed with oud players many times in Iraq. 

It’s a poem by Lorca about the fall of Granada in 1492 when 800 years of Moorish rule ended and los reyes catolicos arrived and ushered in an era of inquisition and extremism.  Jews, Muslims and Christian ‘heretics’ ended up in jail together and this was where flamenco was born – or so the story goes. When I sing these romancero gitanos in the Middle East, everyone knows them because they are Arabic melodies. 

When I last sang this in Baghdad, at an art gallery, my mother’s loss was still fresh in my feelings.

I told the audience, ‘When your mother dies, strangers offer their condolences at bus stops. They say, ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ But when Iraq was bombed and looted and its ancient sites pillaged, did anybody say, ‘Iraq I am sorry for your loss’ or for that matter Syria, ‘I am sorry for your loss’ or ‘Gaza, I am sorry for your loss.’ 

So there in Baghdad, I said ‘Well, Iraq I am sorry for your loss. For Iraq, you are my mother. You are everyone’s mother. You are the cradle of civilization where language, and architecture and law were born.’

This really was a kind of epiphany for me as I’ve been writing a book as part of my PhD work at Kings College London, tying in ancient sites and contemporary culture and working with displaced peoples – Yezidis, Christians and Muslims – who were displaced by the invasion and then by Daesh. I’ve been writing this travelogue of sacred sites and discovering that everywhere in Mesopotamia there are layers. Every site is layered – so the same sacred sites have shared Mesopotamian, Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Yezidi connections. This is why a lot of the sites were targeted by extremists whether evangelical, American right-wing Republicans or Daesh. Their aim was to destroy the natural connections between people, and of course, all these sites go back to the goddess – and to the great mother goddesses; so destroying our ancient world heritage is really like destroying the Mother.

As my mother’s diagnosis of ALS bisected my research, my narratives fused. My research trips to Iraq became simultaneous quests to save ancient and sacred sites and my own mother. Sufis, priests, imams, Yezidi elders all gave me special amulets and prayers written on paper and meant to be swallowed with water – but by the time I returned, my mother could no longer swallow – so she slept with the prayers under her pillow.

Evoking the memory of my Orthodox Christian great-grandparents, who fled Ottoman purges in Syria for a village near Haida Gwai in 1906, my travelogue of sacred sites became a personal quest to save my mother, dying in Canada of ALS, and with her the matrilineal line that connects me ancestrally to the lands of bilad al shams. The prognosis was rather grim, but I persisted, guidebook in hand, as both my mother and the region, as I had once known them, began to vanish.

What the world needs now more than ever is that maternal energy, that essence of the Divine Feminine to heal and restore ourselves and our outer realities; to replace war with love and creativity.

So, God bless you, mummy and God bless mothers everywhere. Thank you, mum, for giving me your gifts of song and music and light and laughter. I aspire to inherit your generous heart, your courage, and your incredible resilience. Amen.