Silence and Violence- Music Therapy in the Heideveld Community
Yesterday, after the mid-year recess I started 2 new Music Therapy groups at a "safe room" in the Heideveld area in Cape Town. Heideveld is situated in the Cape Flats - an area riddled with poverty and ruled by gang violence, some 12 kilometres from Table Mountain and the pristine City of Cape Town. Schools in Heideveld are over-crowded, with pupils often hungry and edgy - and ready to hit the floor at the sound of gunshots. The music therapy groups are with primary school children, most of whom have experienced some sort of trauma: sexual abuse, death in the family, witness to shootings, and other such occurrences of daily life in Heideveld.
I struggle to make sense of this community and of my music therapy work: the pervading sense of violence and resulting hopelessness often paralyses me and I feel incapable of offering the children anything worthwhile. The reflections below are drawn from work with two groups, in the first half of this year.
Chaos and violence:
The younger group members (aged 7-9 yrs) have shown a marked contrast between their verbal and musical expressiveness. While they are afraid to talk in sessions, possibly because of fear of being victimised by the group, their musical contributions are loud, aggressive and feel out of control. Toward the end of our 8-weeks of work together, some of the children's physical movements became more violent, with a number of the boys pretending to beat each other up and on one occasion punching up a teddy-bear sitting in the corner. This feeling of group chaos left me feeling inadequate and unable to offer any sense of safety or cohesion.
It was later in our work that I understood that the way I felt in the midst of the group chaos was a reflection of how I felt about entering the physical community area. For my first few weeks there, I had felt uncomfortable and edgy driving through the streets of Heideveld and found myself watching my back within the primary school grounds. The children in this younger group were not only part of this chaotic community but also victims of its violence, and I understood that within our Music Therapy sessions, they were beginning to use musical expression (instrumental or movement) as a release, and expression of feelings to do with living in such a community. I was seeing and hearing, in musical form, a small portrayal of Heideveld - chaotic, unsafe, aggressive, out-of-control.
Space and Silence:
In contrast to the younger group's chaos and violence, the older group (aged 11-13 yrs) asked to end our first session together with some music relaxation, and this has continued ever since. Tracks from 'Enya' create a peaceful figurative space in which the group re-visits issues that have emerged in the therapy process. My understanding is that where daily life is crowded and the community's chaos pervades the children's internal realities, they need to be shown how to withdraw to a quietness that allows them to deal with issues and make decisions apart from the bombardment of everyday turmoil.
Where the younger group needed a space where they could express the violence of their community, the older group needed a space in which they could retreat from it, even if just for a moment, to re-vision their lives from a place of quietness.
At times, even when I have little sense of what Music Therapy sessions provides children from such deprived communities, it is these moments that feel precious: moments where music can carry both the loudness of fear and violence, and the silence of an imagined retreat and distance from daily life.
Cape Town
August 2002
About Kerryn Bailey
Biography
Cape Town, South Africa. (Kerryn is a graduate of the Masters Music Therapy programme at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Silence and Violence- Music Therapy in the Heideveld Community
Yesterday, after the mid-year recess I started 2 new Music Therapy groups at a "safe room" in the Heideveld area in Cape Town. Heideveld is situated in the Cape Flats - an area riddled with poverty and ruled by gang violence, some 12 kilometres from Table Mountain and the pristine City of Cape Town. Schools in Heideveld are over-crowded, with pupils often hungry and edgy - and ready to hit the floor at the sound of gunshots. The music therapy groups are with primary school children, most of whom have experienced some sort of trauma: sexual abuse, death in the family, witness to shootings, and other such occurrences of daily life in Heideveld.
I struggle to make sense of this community and of my music therapy work: the pervading sense of violence and resulting hopelessness often paralyses me and I feel incapable of offering the children anything worthwhile. The reflections below are drawn from work with two groups, in the first half of this year.
Chaos and violence:
The younger group members (aged 7-9 yrs) have shown a marked contrast between their verbal and musical expressiveness. While they are afraid to talk in sessions, possibly because of fear of being victimised by the group, their musical contributions are loud, aggressive and feel out of control. Toward the end of our 8-weeks of work together, some of the children's physical movements became more violent, with a number of the boys pretending to beat each other up and on one occasion punching up a teddy-bear sitting in the corner. This feeling of group chaos left me feeling inadequate and unable to offer any sense of safety or cohesion.
It was later in our work that I understood that the way I felt in the midst of the group chaos was a reflection of how I felt about entering the physical community area. For my first few weeks there, I had felt uncomfortable and edgy driving through the streets of Heideveld and found myself watching my back within the primary school grounds. The children in this younger group were not only part of this chaotic community but also victims of its violence, and I understood that within our Music Therapy sessions, they were beginning to use musical expression (instrumental or movement) as a release, and expression of feelings to do with living in such a community. I was seeing and hearing, in musical form, a small portrayal of Heideveld - chaotic, unsafe, aggressive, out-of-control.
Space and Silence:
In contrast to the younger group's chaos and violence, the older group (aged 11-13 yrs) asked to end our first session together with some music relaxation, and this has continued ever since. Tracks from 'Enya' create a peaceful figurative space in which the group re-visits issues that have emerged in the therapy process. My understanding is that where daily life is crowded and the community's chaos pervades the children's internal realities, they need to be shown how to withdraw to a quietness that allows them to deal with issues and make decisions apart from the bombardment of everyday turmoil.
Where the younger group needed a space where they could express the violence of their community, the older group needed a space in which they could retreat from it, even if just for a moment, to re-vision their lives from a place of quietness.
At times, even when I have little sense of what Music Therapy sessions provides children from such deprived communities, it is these moments that feel precious: moments where music can carry both the loudness of fear and violence, and the silence of an imagined retreat and distance from daily life.
Cape Town
August 2002