On Sunday, February 19, Canadian singer Jully Black sang the Canadian national anthem at the National Basketball Association All-Star game, which was played in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
The popular singer took advantage of an audience that stretched across the entire North American continent and a considerable part of the rest of the world to make a personal statement in song. Instead of singing “our home and native land”, Black sang “our home ‘on’ native land”. By simply changing one word of the Canadian anthem, the singer gave more exposure for the struggle of the indigenous people of Canada than she could ever have imagined.
It struck home. The Canadian media buzzed about the incident and everything about “O Canada” while the indigenous people applauded with gusto.
It was an impressive achievement. But what is it with national anthems – apart from the apparent need for a people to sing together while stoking their sense of self and nationhood – that stirs up all kinds of sentimental feelings?
The records show that the ancients sang village songs, street songs, religious songs for reasons mostly to celebrate an event in the community. It was neither an anthem nor was it national.
The “people’s songs” were transformed into what we’ve come to know as national anthems with its genesis closely associated with 19th century European nationalism/patriotism. It was a time of states competing for power, commerce and the building of Empires. The songs were of monarchs, against monarchs, for and against church and religion, ethnic superiority or inferiority of others, it was about war and conquest, some were also quite insulting.
To be sure, singing together is as old as the tribe and fills a fundamental human need, and sometimes it’s a beautiful thing. There’s nothing better than to hear, for example, the Irish belting out “O Danny Boy”, or a mass choir filling the air with song. But anthems qua anthems as far as we can tell have a high content of militarism and nation to nation rivalry.
For instance, the US first played their national anthem at a sports event in 1918 at the baseball World Series to stir up the fans during World War I. They now march with flags while warplanes fly overhead as the anthem is sung with much fanfare at football games, etc.
In 1920, the Olympics started playing anthems of the competing countries although many countries did not have an anthem at that time. The Olympic committee effectively motivated states to adopt national anthems.
The playing of a country’s national anthem of course has since become Olympic standard practice, much to the distaste of viewers who prefer to celebrate the athletes as human beings who just happen to come from a particular country.
It does not help when one considers these examples: The famous American anthem “The Star Spangled Banner”, which is sung at every opportunity, was described by one writer as a celebration of the murder of African-Americans. The third verse explains why: “No refuge could save the hireling and slave/ From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave/ And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave/ O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Or, the British semi-anthem “Rule Britannia”, which had its former enslaved Africans singing “Britons, never, never, never shall be slaves.”
Those two examples of course do not tell the whole story but it represents the stench of a tradition that turned a human celebration, which was not always for the good, into something sacred and revered by all regardless of how some feel about the whole exercise; an exercise which has added little to human civilization or humanity. In general, the collective singing of an anthem, usually with an image of a flag waving somewhere, gives some people a bit of self-satisfaction, but often misdirected; it brings people together as much it separates them from others.
So, notwithstanding Jully Black’s effective use of a large platform to bring attention to a disgraceful chapter in Canada’s history, anthems are an anachronism and an annoyance, and should be consigned to the dustbin of history.
So, let’s dispense with the practice and let the games begin.