Dana Masters

What defines a home? Jazz singer Dana Masters, who hails from the deep south of America and has found her heart in Northern Ireland, joins us to unravel this profound question. Through Dana's lens, we explore the concept of home as a source of peace. Her story is beautifully woven with her family's legacy in the civil rights movement, offering a unique perspective on justice and reconciliation here. Our conversation traverses the connections between American civil rights struggles and Northern Ireland’s ongoing journey toward peace. Education stands at the crossroads of change and tradition, and we explore its powerful role. Inspired by personal stories, including Dana’s experience as a mother navigating a divided school system, we question whether the educational landscape here truly supports inclusivity and lifelong curiosity. Reflecting on persistent societal divisions, we ponder the transformative potential that a more integrated educational framework could bring. We also look at the role of the arts in healing generational trauma and fostering community resilience. Music and storytelling become vehicles for change, as Dana shares how her artistry is a tribute to heritage and an expression of activism.  By sharing stories like Dana’s, we aim in this series to inspire a collective vision for a more reconciled future, turning the tide towards a society that celebrates its diverse narratives and histories.

*Produced by MV4 (www.mv4.co.uk)

Transcript

--------- HIGHLIGHTS ---------

0:00:37 - Building Peace Through Business and Conversations (94 Seconds)

0:06:01 - Connecting Personal Activism and Advocacy (111 Seconds)

0:11:17 - Complexity of Historical Narratives (60 Seconds)

0:14:44 - Passion for Healing through Music (102 Seconds)

0:24:30 - Creating Vision for Future Generations (136 Seconds)

0:34:46 - Systematic Deconstruction of Black Families (87 Seconds)

0:47:02 - The Power of Music in Change (45 Seconds)

0:49:50 - A Grateful Exchange of Ideas (66 Seconds)

0:56:04 - Young People's Social Divide Concerns (60 Seconds)

0:59:35 - The Power of Arts and Creativity (118 Seconds)

0:00:11 - Jude Hill-Mitchell

You are listening to Piece by Piece back with a second series. I'm Jude Hill-Mitchell and I'm happy to tell you I've got myself a co-host this time, and she is Sara-Louise Martin and she's here. Sara-Louise, our paths crossed at the brilliant Four Corners Festival in Belfast a few years back and we really connected. Do you want to just do a little bit of an introduction for people?

0:00:30 - Sara-Louise Martin

Yeah, it's really great to be here with you and to be on season 2 of this awesome podcast. I've been really passionate about peacemaking in Northern Ireland for a long time and I've been exploring that specifically for the past number of years. And just by way of background to me, I work with entrepreneurs across Europe, in the Middle East, and my heart is really around business being the opportunity to solve some of the most complex issues that we have in our society, and I work really closely with business leaders and startup founders and I'm driven by building ecosystems to help businesses thrive.

0:01:09 - Jude Hill-Mitchell

Brilliant and it is so good to have you, and we will be reflecting at the end of each episode. But this piece is still the same as the first series and each episode will be in conversation with people who we're calling peace activists, who are out there pushing on with the hard graft of peacemaking.

0:01:27 - Sara-Louise Martin

We'll be listening in as they reflect on personal challenges and losses that they've recycled to give them the grit to keep going and to grapple with some of our most hard to have conversations Then we'll introduce a chatty part at the end of each podcast where we reflect together on some of the themes that have surfaced throughout, and the hope is that we can expand our perspectives as we work through some of these post-conflict conversations.

0:01:53 - Jude Hill-Mitchell

And ultimately, the hope is that some of this will spark conversations out in the real world, where you are. I guess we're wondering how we can all understand more of the differences in the stories of this place, expand our empathy and maybe, just maybe, piece the piece of this place together a little more.

0:02:21 - Dana Masters

I'm a black lady married to a white Northern Irish guy who comes from a Protestant background, and we decided to send our mixed children to their local school, which just happens to be a Catholic school. They were all very different reactions, but everybody's reaction was notable.

0:02:38 - Jude Hill-Mitchell

Today I'm chatting to Dana Masters, a fabulous jazz singer from the deep south in America who came to Northern Ireland because she fell in love. Dana, who toured for years with Van Morrison, calls here home, but her emotive music is currently sparking joy all over the world. To her about her family's proximity to the civil rights movement and hear how that has informed her passion for the arts and education and their capacity to bring life. She is herself a total blast of life. Guys, it's Dana Masters. Your time is so appreciated, Dana. I'm going to kick off with the familiar question that I start each podcast with, and that is really just to try and connect with the sense of home that you have. So if you could just tell us, what does home mean to you? Either a place or a feeling? What is that for you?

0:03:36 - Dana Masters

That's a really good question.

In the dictionary you might just see a photo of me cheesing away in my sweats on my sofa, because that is literally my favourite place to be. I've worked really hard over the last number of years to make the place where I live bring me a sense of peace and calm. I am so affected by my external world, I'm so affected by it, and I have learned that I need to feel deeply connected to where I live, even like the home I live in, and I need it to be really peaceful. And so there's no place that I feel more myself than when I'm in my physical home. I feel like all of the pieces of me reside here. When I'm anywhere else, I almost I'm loving life, I'm enjoying it, when I'm on stages, when I'm traveling, but I do have this sense that I've left pieces of me somewhere. I'm not completely gathered, as it were, and when I'm home, I feel completely gathered. I feel there with all the different pieces of me, and so I think that has to be the place that I feel at most peace.

0:05:03 - Jude Hill-Mitchell

It's a gorgeous way of putting it, and this is probably an annoying and quite a common question that you maybe get. But can you, just for listeners, just track out how you ended up in this part of the world?

0:05:18 - Dana Masters

Absolutely. I'll give you sort of the abridged version. I basically fell in love with a Northern Irish man in Los Angeles, California, who had no intention of staying in Los Angeles. He was only there for studying and I had no strong desire to be in the United States. I, you know I didn't. I wasn't doing anything that I felt like I couldn't live without, doing anything that I felt like I couldn't live without. So we got married and moved to Northern Ireland in the very same month, really in the very same week, and I've been here ever since. It's been 16 years. I've probably lived here longer as an adult than I've lived anywhere else.

0:06:01 - Jude Hill-Mitchell

And as you first encountered here and then encountered here more deeply, how did that link in and correlate with the activism and advocacy which seems to be so much of a part of who you are?

0:06:35 - Dana Masters

I think I took for granted that. I just thought everybody felt that sense of activism and sense of a desire to see the world around them be a just place shocked me. The similarities between the issues my people had to struggle through and the issues that the Northern Irish people were facing even in today's, in this moment in history, and so those sort of old how would you call them? Like the desire to see those things reconciled and better. I could feel them bubbling up under the surface. But it was.

The Northern Irish people are very chill in some way. They're not making a lot of noise about these things for themselves, I think, because there was this hard-won sense of peace that they got to that we've gotten to now. Sense of peace that they got to that we've gotten to now and nobody really wants to mess it up because it was so horrible and traumatising what was happening before this peace existed. So in that way I understand it. But I sometimes I do feel this sense of like excitement and energy towards this idea of justice and making things right, and I sort of feel like I'm having to calm myself down when I walk in the rooms. I don't want to scare people.

0:07:54 - Jude Hill-Mitchell

And the activism that you mentioned, and I've heard you before speak so eloquently about your family's heritage, and I particularly remember you talking about your grandmother. What was it that was, I guess, igniting you when you were in the US?

0:08:12 - Dana Masters

It's taken me this long to realise really, I could have told you this, I could have articulated it, but to really understand that the way I grew up, even within the Black community, was unique in some way. Not every Black family had the same direct ties to the civil rights movement and not every Black family had the expectation on their children and their grandchildren to somehow carry that forward. And so, but because I was very close to my family, we're friends as well as family and you felt like you were surrounded by people with like minds and who had similar values. But I think for me also, I was a child and then a teenager, and then in my very early 20s, when I lived in the US and as energising as it was to be brought up in the family that I was brought up in, it was a long time to be exposed to the struggle as it was, and my parents and grandparents did not shield us from the truth. Shield us from the truth.

I don't remember not knowing some of the atrocities and being told and also being shown video and footage and photos of horrible things that happened to Black people, particularly in the South, and so by the time I left the States, I would have said that I was exhausted emotionally and I did not even know it. And so I think there was a part of me that when I was home I was probably a lot more subdued. Because you're trying to, I was trying to conserve energy. It just took a lot of energy even just to know those things were happening and know what had happened, even in my own family. And it wasn't until I moved here that I think I had a little bit of space to sort of take a deep breath, really define for myself what it means for me to be Black because it was so defined for me in the US I didn't realise that and then to rediscover the richness and the joy of actually advocating.

0:10:26 - Jude Hill-Mitchell

Yeah, and I was just going to say, was that a gradual journey then? I suppose, bringing that civil rights lens that you had experienced then here and what was it that you started to notice about some of the abnormalities of here or some of the legacies of conflict in this part of the world?

0:10:43 - Dana Masters

Yeah, because I'm not passing through, because I've decided to put my roots down here, because I have had three children here who are all very Northern Irish and we have built our lives here. I would say that I haven't even scratched the surface of the active part of the activism because I'm so very careful. I do not ever want to alienate the people who I've come to love so deeply. The history of this place is so complicated it's far more complicated than the history of my people because most people agree what happened in the US. We know what the story is. The story is linear, the story is agreed upon, the story is documented and we have all said, yes, this is the story, this is the story of slavery, this is the story of Jim Crow laws, this is what happened here. There still isn't an agreed upon narrative of what even has happened. History is a very sacred thing to the people who it is telling the story of, and so I want to be very careful with that. So I would say for the last 16 years I have really just been honoured to be in the room and for all the people who have answered the questions that I've asked them, you know, and as far as what I see.

I think one of the things that has just struck me and it's something that I find myself hoping for Northern Ireland more than anything right now is a rediscovering and a reawakening of the Northern Irish imagination.

And I think from my own upbringing and what I was taught when it comes to a people group that need to heal from trauma and need to move themselves forward, is that the most valuable thing you have is your imagination, because you may not have the resources, you may not have the leadership, you may not even have the laws in your favour, but if you can imagine a better future, that is literally the first and biggest step towards that bigger future, first and biggest step towards that bigger future and then, if we can imagine it together, the power in that is absolutely astounding. So that's my, that's, I think, the thing that I hope in my bones for my children and all the children here in Northern Ireland and all the people and all the grannies and all the aunties and all the uncles, across all social and economic backgrounds, across all faith backgrounds, that there's a re-emerging of the northern Irish imagination and let's talk about your music, because that links in with that power of voice and creativity and imagination.

0:13:43 - Jude Hill-Mitchell

How does music, and your path with it, how does that, weave into your passions for here and the voice that you're trying to have?

0:13:52 - Dana Masters

I think, for me, I think we all know that music is so integral to our lives. Music provides a soundtrack, which is so funny. We never talk about it. You know there's a reason why you don't go watch a movie and it has no music soundtrack. It helps to move a story along, it helps to define the story, it helps to help us figure out how we're supposed to feel about these events that are happening to us constantly, every day. But also, I think, music helps to create momentum in our lives and in our minds towards the things that we are trying to move forward in that direction. And so, for me, it's one of the easiest ways for me to communicate with people. No one likes to be, you know, talked at all the time, no one likes to be preached to all the time, and so music is a way that I can share with other people my own story and what I'm observing, my hopes and my dreams for myself, for my family, for my community, for this country, for the world. And it's so much easier to receive that way.

0:15:19 - Jude Hill

It's almost like a carrier of messages a carrier of messages and has what you are trying to express through your music. Has that altered in the time that you've been here, in terms of just what you see and what you're taking on and what you're trying to communicate back out?

0:15:40 - Dana Masters

I mean absolutely. I think I just released my debut album there and I think it was almost like an introduction, a musical introduction to who I am, and so you hear stories that are reflective of my own family's story, my own story around love and loss, but I am currently writing my second album. Um, but I am currently writing my second album and honestly I keep coming back to this that it is going to be sort of a love note to Northern Ireland, that is, I think it's going to be applicable to to every place and every person. But Northern Ireland has absolutely inspired the content of this next album. I have such deep, profound desires for this place and I think when you decide a place is your home and you go, okay, we're living or we're dying together, whatever happens, if the ship goes down, I'm going down with it, you know, but hopefully we don't go down, but I think you start to see a place very differently. I'm so fully invested in this place and in its future that is constantly on my mind.

0:17:00 - Jude Hill

And your music making and I follow you on social media. It has taken you into so many places and spaces and it's been amazing to watch. But I suppose, with that, what do you notice? For us as a society? Music? It gives you insights and windows into all of our communities and I suppose what's on your heart at the moment in terms of some of our challenges and and what you're trying to contribute to towards then with your music making and beyond.

0:17:30 - Dana Masters

What's on my heart and I'm not sure how it fits in yet to the music making. Because at the moment, one of the things that I feel most passionate about is the children of Northern Ireland, and I think part of that stems from. You know, my grandmother was a civil rights activist and a lot of her work was done in early childhood education and it was a very important value in the civil rights movement education. I grew up being told constantly knowledge is power, like there was. No, I don't care what you decided to do in your life, there was no choice. You were going to school, you were getting an education. That was a non-negotiable in my family, because the value of learning and not just learning what's in books, but learning how to learn, learning how to be in different atmospheres, learning how to absorb different experiences, learning how to be around people of all different backgrounds and creeds and all of that. And so for me, one of the things that I just feel the most passionate about is education here in Northern Ireland. Here in Northern Ireland, I think it's the thing that has caught my eye the most in recent history, particularly the ethos and culture behind the why of the education. I have children who are around that age group where they were offered to take the transfer test.

As someone who's not from here, that was such and is such an odd thing to me. I cannot figure out the thinking behind that. Right, and I don't say that in a judgmental way. I think we all need people who exist outside of our context to reflect back to us, our lives.

Because we take things for granted, we get, you know, sort of stuck in a certain way of thinking or and we don't question some things that we always need to try and question.

And that sort of catapulted me into this question of are we doing the best we can by our kids, by our children? Are we igniting in them a passion for learning, like, are we making lifelong learners? And I think that if we follow that all the way through to the rest of life, if you have helped to cultivate a spirit of curiosity in a child that they keep for their entire lives because learning was such a rich activity for them, that automatically changes the landscape of our country, because we have a country full of question askers, you know, who don't take anything for granted, who aren't threatened by someone saying well, is there maybe a different way, a better way, or I've got new ideas, or you know all that stuff. So I think for me, the thing that I'm most excited about is I hope one day I get to be a part of creating a more vibrant educational landscape in Northern Ireland.

0:21:02 - Jude Hill

And given, then, what you've talked about in terms of your family background as well, Dana, when you look at the way our children are brought up in terms of the school system and the segregation that still exists for many young people, where do you sit with that or how do you see that and the impact of that?

0:21:22 - Dana Masters

yeah, yeah, I mean, um, we live, uh, very rurally and, um, I have always known Northern Ireland is a segregated society on some level, even if I never articulated that. But it wasn't until I had children going to school and we moved out here and our near school was a Catholic school. Now I would have never been asked the question whether I was Catholic or Protestant. In the US it wasn't Nobody's really asking that. I would imagine people in different churches had issues with Catholic theology, but it didn't stand out because people in different churches had issues with Presbyterian theology and the Methodists couldn't stand the Baptists, it wasn't so kept to two different denominations or people groups in that way, and so obviously it was a shock to move here and have that. And so then our nearest school was a Catholic school.

My husband's family I don't think he would ever say this, but would be classified as a Protestant having Protestant background and so it was other people's reactions to us sending our kids to our nearest village school that really had me realising just how segregated Northern Ireland is. And so honestly, Jude, I kind of felt this sense of I don't think this is a coincidence that I grew up in this civil rights family who was passionate about moving past the segregated South in the US and fighting for a good and better future for all the people in South Carolina. And then I move here. I'm a Black lady married to a white guy, this Northern Irish guy who comes from a Protestant background, who is himself a minister, and we decide to send our mixed children to their local school, which just happens to be a Catholic school. And I mean everybody's reaction. They were all very different reactions but everybody's reaction was notable. Very few people were like, you know, just a normal day in Northern Ireland, do you know what I mean? And so that was the first time I realised, oh, this is still very live and very real, this segregated society. And I have to say I have been very grieved by that and I think it's important not disappointed like I'm judging the Northern Irish people. Just very grieved for them because I realised how much they're being held back by these things that are still very live, these wounds that are still very infected.

0:24:30 - Jude Hill-Mitchell

You know and when you think about change in relation to that, you, you know you're charting your, your own family's experiences there on a on a very local level. I suppose, when you look wider than that, what, what would change look like? Um, bringing your, your activist side into that, how, how do we look at that more widely as a society?

0:24:56 - Dana Masters

But one of the things that I think is really interesting is challenging people to ask what they want for their children for the future, because that's the one place where I feel that most people are willing to let go of some things. If you tell them, their children's futures will be better. That's why I think education is so front of mind to me, because if you can provide for people a vibrant, alive, inspiring, exciting, flexible education for their children to the point where their children enjoy the learning atmosphere they look forward to going to school, being with other kids who aren't like them, asking people questions, seeing differences and celebrating those things, I think that the adults in the room are a lot more willing to loosen their grip on some things that I feel like we've been holding on to for fear of losing the little bit of identity we have left. Do you know what I mean of identity we have left? Do you know what I mean?

And I think people have been asked to let go of identities with nothing coming in the pipeline of saying but who are we going to be if we let this go? There's no casting of a vision like this is who we're going to be, like this is now what we're going to be known for. This is who we're going to be together. I think there's been a lot less of a casting revision and more of a demanding people let go of the little bit of identity they've had.

0:26:48 - Jude Hill-Mitchell

And Dana, where do you see, then you know the whole vision around diversity within education. How does that sit with our struggles at the moment in terms of our constant race hate headlines? You know, regularly in the news at the moment, we had the horribleness over the summer when racism really reared its head Not that that's gone away, but you know that was what we saw over the summer very visibly. How does all of that tie into how we look at ourselves in relation to racism and diversity and and just moving, moving beyond all of that?

0:27:32 - Dana Masters

yeah, you know, this is what I genuinely believe. I I'm not. I'm not startled by racism. I think it's because of where I grew up and how I grew up.

Northern Ireland has not been a racist place historically, not because it doesn't have the potential for racism. It just hasn't had the racial diversity needed to sort of develop any strong sense of racism. Racism, sectarianism, ageism all of these things are the same thing. They're fuelled by the same stuff, and so I think one of the things that would be so incredible to see is a situation in which Northern Irish people feel like they can finally somehow and I don't know how, I don't want to be prescriptive here but there is an acknowledgement and acceptance, a communal and paying attention to its own trauma, its own roots, because the moment those things are addressed, I think, at the end of the day, things like racism also get addressed, because we're no longer afraid of people who aren't like us, who don't have the same values as us. We are more curious than we are judgmental. We can be a people who know exactly who we are individually, who know exactly what our individual values are. We don't all have to like the same things. We don't all have to believe the same things. We just all need to protect each other's ability to have that freedom to explore and have identities that are different maybe from everybody else's.

The moment those things happen, then that just that deals with the whole racism thing also, and that's why I take the issues and the actions that have happened over the summer and even before that, very seriously. But I don't take them personally as a Black person because for me it's like I think this is part of your bigger problem. You know you haven't all of a sudden become racist because I showed up. These all the stuff needed for racism was already here and activated through your own story and through how you've treated one another. And so for me I feel so passionate that, like I, there's so many wonderful, beautiful voices, northern Irish voices, talking and saying these things and I hope more and more, join the chorus of we have to deal with our stuff, we have to look our story in the eye, we have to be unafraid.

I know people of a certain generation who there was a documentary came out Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland which just actually won an award or two at the Royal Television Society, I think awards and I remember my husband telling me all about this. He was raving about this. And I know people of a certain age who refuse to watch it, not because they don't think it would be good, because they just can't. They're done, they've checked, they just can't. And I don't ever want to. I think it's no small thing to have to stare your own story in the face as a people, especially people who have gone through trauma. So I don't take that lightly. But also I think is there anything that would motivate us to do that and you know, perhaps a better future for our children and our grandchildren that if we actually do the painful work of revisiting the places that traumatized us, to bring some type of closure, that maybe then our children and our grandchildren can have this Northern Ireland that exists in imaginations, you know.

0:32:06 - Jude Hill-Mitchell

I loved what you were saying there, Dana, about you know looking our own story in the face, and I suppose what I see from you is a real clarity of voice, a passion, a boldness, and just wondering, can you take us to a point in your life, a story of challenge or loss, or something that you've really had to work on, to recycle, that's contributed to the activism and the energy and where you are at the moment?

0:32:35 - Dana Masters

For me, probably the biggest heartache of my life wasn't an event, it was. I think the people of Northern Ireland will understand this when I say this. You have these traumatic events that happen to you in your life and they are your trauma and they are your events. And then you have this type of trauma that did not originate with you. It came from your mother and your mother's mother and your mother's mother and it's almost like it's so passed down and it's like every time a generation moves on, they hand the backpack to the next generation and on some level I have been honoured to carry that for my ancestors, Honoured.

But I remember one day and listen, I was not a crier, I did not cry. I remember I didn't cry for years. I used to want to cry and I just couldn't muster it up. The tears weren't there. And so when I moved to the Northern Ireland, I was just crying every day and I was like what is wrong with me? And I didn't feel a sense of depression. It wasn't that, it was like this release of emotions and I was just crying every day. And I remember saying to my husband I feel like I'm crying tears that aren't even mine. I was crying for the ones who went before me. I was crying tears of my aunts and my cousins and my great aunts and my great great great grandparents and the slaves. I felt like I was crying their tears and I realiaed in that moment I think I've been carrying grief that wasn't just mine. It belonged to many people before me and so I think that sense of the loss of like little things, like I remember when I was a kid, never really having a desire to go to the continent of Africa, because I felt like it would only make me sad, because I didn't know where I was from.

I didn't know anything because during the slave trade in the South, intentionally records were not kept of where slaves came from and what tongue they spoke. And it was the intentional breaking down of everything that you identified as so that you had a new identity as a slave, Even within the time of the slave trade. Also, it was intentional that if a family was caught and sold, they would intentionally be split up. So you can imagine, in these slave markets, as a mother, you're watching your child being sold, have no idea where they're going to go as a father, and you never see each other again, I think, and then that led to the systematic deconstruction of the Black family and it took us generations and generations and generations, as Black people, to relearn how to be together as a family.

There was an awareness of a collective loss, losses that I always carried with me because they affected me directly. You know, I didn't know, growing up, a lot of Black kids whose father still lived in the home. You know, and I didn't, you know it took me a while to connect the dots that that was a direct result of that systematic deconstruction of the Black family on purpose. It took some years when I moved to Northern Ireland to grieve things that I didn't feel like I had the space to grieve when I was home in the US. And so for me, all of those things, I think those losses, those generational losses, inform why I believe in my heart that a healthy society is necessary, but it is also possible.

I don't want Northern Irish children, generations from now, grieving the losses that their ancestors and the ones before them were not able to grieve, were not able to lay to rest for them so that they could move forward quicker. It's an incredible story. I long for the day when Northern Irish people are proud of this story because their story is a story of overcoming. That's what you want to pass down to generations. Because that part of my story, the civil rights story, the emancipation story, those are stories that actually make me feel powerful as a person. They're the reason I feel like I speak with confidence, you know, and I walk into a room and I don't have my head hung low. You know I know who I am and I know whose I am because I know the people who raised me and what they, what the hard won freedom, right. But there also are things we pass down the generations that weigh them down and that mean they cannot progress either at all or as quickly as they should.

0:38:08 - Jude Hill-Mitchell

And I know none of us want that for our children at all there is so much in what you're saying there and you mention identity so much and it it does come down to identity because the confidence that you're expressing there and the confidence in the narrative and the overcoming, and then I suppose, if you look at here and our struggles around that and our, our apologies often for who we are, it's beautiful to hear you expressing that. Um, I suppose, when you look at the US now, like, how are you processing what is happening at the moment and how are you, yeah, how are you trying to reconcile, some of the the very overt tensions right now?

0:38:56 - Dana Masters

That's a massive question how I processing it. I feel more okay than I've ever felt around my home country. I think it's because, if I'm honest, I think a lot of me had to let go of who I thought the US was. The thing is that when you grow up in the US, or when I was growing up in the US, we were very heavily indoctrinated, you know it was. I never questioned having to get up every morning and say the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag. It's pretty like intense when you think about it, but I never questioned that. I went to private school also for a long time and a lot of private schools in the US are Christian based and we also had to say pledge of allegiance to the Christian flag. I never questioned any of this like this very intentional indoctrination and I don't say that as a good or bad thing, it's just it was very intentional. How we learned about who we were.

I remember hearing very little, if anything, about the story of the Wild West in America the way you all would have heard it. Our story was very different. We celebrated the settlers and the early pioneers in a way that we had no awareness really of the problematic way that these settlers sort of moved through the United States as we now know them and what that meant then for the indigenous people there. I remember in 2016, I was actually in Liverpool by myself in a hotel when Donald Trump won his first presidency, and I hate that I was by myself, because what that did was the avalanche of the reality of who America was hit me and it was so different from the America I was taught about. I don't want to make this about Donald Trump, because actually this is more about who America is. There's no one person that can shoulder that load and it took me a while to sort of really process that villainizing the United States. It's just we weren't taught to look at it realistically. We love a hero narrative in the US and and we were the Disney heroes of the world, you know, and that's what we were taught Like, and so when you have to let go of that, we are always the good guys and we are just trying to bring goodness and peace to the rest. I mean like literally I know it sounds really stupid when I say it like there are no good guys. Like most of the major world powers have, you know, wreaked havoc in the world, globally and for themselves. So this isn't me trying to villainize one country over another. And so for me, how am I processing what's happening in the US?

I remember in that 2016 election, I called my aunt who is still carrying on the work of justice and fighting for equality in communities and things like that and I called her and I was like can you believe it? This is horrible, this is who America is. And she said I'm going to stop you right there. She says your generation got soft and you thought that it ended with us and we did all the work for you. She's like you have a job to do. You still have work to do. When you're done crying, get up, pick up your shovel, pick up your hammer, pick up your ax and get to work.

And I thought to myself what a healthy way to you know to look at that is is that. I think, at the end of the day, no matter how painful it is, it's better you know the truth about things. It's better because when we start from the truth, we can always move forward, knowing that whatever we produce from there on is honest. There's no point being annoyed about this election or anything. This is who America is at the moment, and this is what we have to deal with, and there's a reason I don't want to villainize anybody for whatever choices they made. And we this is good that we know this. And now, what will we do with this information? How will we move forward?

And I think that's the thing that I long for here in Northern Ireland is just an uncovering of the way things actually are. There's almost a protection from reality in order to make sure everyone stays connected and peace is kept. For people who, in very recent history, experienced some of the most traumatic events that a society can go through, together, needing peace to be kept, needing that. I think there's a need that you know, everybody wants peace, but I think here, the things that people saw, the stories that people have shared with me, I get it, and yet I do pray for the grace to be able to look at the pain and at the trauma with open eyes, not trying to call it anything that it isn't, not even trying to blame, just to call it what it was, to say the names, to tell the stories.

0:44:45 - Jude Hill-Mitchell

I'm gonna bring it back to your aunt's quote, which I love, about picking up your shovel or your hammer or your microphone. I guess, when, when we do feel that sense of discouragement and we think, is this ever going to change? And just bringing it back then to what you're trying to express um through your music at the moment and that voice that you um, the voice you're having and the, the atmosphere you're creating um through that. Yeah, what is it that you're turning your attention to when you talk about your dream for here? What's the home that you're trying to create through the music you're making and the voice you're having and the words that you're speaking over people?

0:45:31 - Dana Masters

I think for me trying to infuse a bit of life and color back into people's psyches. I want people to dare to imagine. I want to talk to an eight-year-old or a 13-year-old and ask them what they want to do with their lives and then tell me something really ridiculous that they truly believe is going to happen. Do you know that I have never asked a child here what they want to be when they grow up? And they've said the prime minister. I have never said now, literally like every American kid wants to be president at some stage. Do you know what I mean? And I don't want to compare it to America, because there's a reason I don't live there and I don't I think we can do better for ourselves but that, that wildness of just carefree dreaming, I feel like I want to infuse that sense of vibrancy in almost anything as possible and I feel like the Northern Irish people have been limited so much for so long. I just want to sort of loosen the ties a bit and go let's use all of our faculties again. On one level, you're like what in the world is music going to do to fix this? However, both Black Americans and Northern Irish people and Irish people know, rightly, that music partnered with a struggle or a cause is so powerful. I mean, even in.

I think of the music my mom made me listen to all growing up was basically her. The protest music, you know. You think of Marvin Gaye. What's Going On? You know, all of these like incredible things that we just sort of sing globally, that we don't realize were the birth out of the Black struggle and it was music meant to fuel the imagination. You know, I remember at Christmas time I always listened to. I think it was Stevie Wonder's.

Someday at Christmas, someday at Christmas, everyone's going to be free. Someday at Christmas, and he's like casting this vision, he's having his own, like Dr King. I have a dream moment. You know, what does that do for a whole people? To hear that beautiful music and go, yeah, someday not. This is the way it's always going to be.

Someday we're going to be a society where we celebrate each other. It's going to be a hard one. We got some things to go through and talk about, but someday. Someday we're going to have politicians that we are proud of. Someday we're going to hope our kids go into politics because it's a great place to be. Someday we're going to have community schools that are vibrant because the whole community is invested in them.

Someday we're not going to have to worry as much about the kid maybe who needs foster care, because we know our community shows up for the parent list, they show up for the kid. They see a kid in need and they go wait, we're parenting this kid Everybody's, everybody's muck. Someday I'm going to ask a Northern Irish kid what they want to be when they grow up and they're going to say prime minister, without a bit of irony Someday, and I just think, yeah. I think that's why artists and musicians, that's why we're so important, and that is also why it is so important for us not to get bogged down in discouragement, because once we're discouraged, who in the world is making the soundtrack for the someday? Someday I try my hardest to stay excited, you know, and to um, to live in my imagination of what I know I can be.

0:49:50 - Jude Hill-Mitchell

Tina, honestly, I have tears in my eyes and just to say, and to you, thank you for this conversation, because you are a signpost to the colour and the vibrancy and the boldness, so just keep going with that. We need more of that. So thank you. Thanks so much for this conversation.

0:50:10 - Dana Masters

Yeah, thank you for having me. It does my heart good when I get to have these conversations, so thank you, have these conversations.

0:50:20 - Jude Hill-Mitchell

So thank you, sarah Louise. I am so keen to chat to you about that conversation with Deanna. So much in it Love her, love her voice and just that mix of challenge and inspiration she brought there. So, yeah, just really curious to find out what connected with you in it.

0:50:37 - Sara-Louise Martin

I was really interested in this conversation because I thought it's going to be so interesting to have the perspective of somebody that hasn't grown up in Northern Ireland to to demonstrate kind of what she's experienced of being here post post peace, as we like to talk about it. Um, and she you know she named this herself. She said it could be very easy for people to say she hasn't grown up here, you know. So what? What on earth would she know about northern ireland? But but she put it so beautifully, people outside of our context can often be helpful because they have the ability to reflect our lives or ourselves back to us. I think she has so much legitimacy because that deep and rich heritage that she's come from, um, growing up with the link to the civil rights movement in the US, and it's really traumatic for anyone to have to live through anything like that but there is such a level of understanding there that activism has been a big part of her family story. I mean, there's so much in this episode. Yeah.

0:51:43 - Jude Hill-Mitchell

I think what you said there about her own rich backstory and that civil rights activism that obviously her family was completely steeped in and the strength that she's gained from that, and I thought that scene where she described arriving in Northern Ireland and then the dam broke and she just couldn't stop crying and she figured out that that was because she was feeling all these like layers of history and pain that her family had. And I thought that message around owning your story, your backstory I'm wondering like what is it that could be a conversation starter for communities here around that, like in terms of walking that out?

0:52:27 - Sara-Louise Martin

and she had the phrase of looking your own story in the eye we all have our own story and our own experience of what it has been to grow up in Northern Ireland and sometimes we get so bogged down that we are a bit deadened to the hope and the possibility of what the future could look like.

We don't have an agreed narrative of the past, of what happened, and as a consequence of that we're stuck. And because politics is so entrenched and there has been very little movement I think people have just checked out and so, because the law of the land is what tends to move a society forward, when there hasn't been the opportunity in that environment, it can then leak out to apathy and just people completely shutting down. And and yet she brings this beautiful perspective as a musician, as an artist, as a creative to see it differently and to invite us to to look at it differently. What does it look like? To have a moment of wonder? And that might sound really airy-fairy to some people, but actually we don't have hope. Then we're kind of lost.

0:53:39 - Jude Hill

I think she she grounded a lot of it in then her own story and how her family are walking some of this out, which I thought was really interesting, and I suppose it's like an agreed narrative is highly unlikely, let's be honest here. But, um, how do we each get a sense of a greater acceptance of all of the narratives then, and how do we be healthier in our reactions to different people's narratives? And that story of then Dana's family choosing where to send their kids to school, I thought that's actually a really that's a perfect example of something that is quite hard to talk about here. But actually, her, the choices they made really dissolved the segregation. They did it in their own context and I thought that's a really cool conversation starter like where, how can we dissolve the segregation or something like the separateness that we experience or the sectarianism, like that sort of sense of personal responsibility, the different reactions they got to it. Then I thought that's actually something that we could all probably think about in our own context.

0:54:50 - Sara-Louise Martin

There's so much that is gained and learned from an environment where you're mixing with people that are different to you, and I went to a school that was mixed probably not very mixed but I find that to be very helpful.

I think my mum was quite deliberate in where she wanted us to grow up. You know, breaking down those barriers in education, I think, is a really healthy way to move forward because you realise very quickly like we've got so much in common and the said the, the segregation thing still being very live and very real is really sad. It it does really exist and it costs our community so much more money in those very kind of interface areas where you're having to have two of everything two swimming pools, two leisure centers, all that kind of stuff. Like what does it look like to actually look at education and break down the barriers that are completely unnecessary? And there are many people who have done that in a really brave way. I think of Linda Irvine in East Belfast who has started that language school. Like that was a really bold decision for her and how she's living out a real legacy of honour and difference in a beautiful way. I think that is one of one of the most heartening stories.

0:56:09 - Jude Hill

I mean, I could go on, but I would love to hear what you thought as well yeah, I think I feel a real devastation around the, the separateness that still exists for young people.

And I've been involved in youth work in the past and I'm thinking, even in the last few years, even within journalism, of speaking to young people who live in pretty monolithic communities maybe besides some of the, the walls um the dividing walls in Belfast, and like I can picture these young people sort of saying to me like we're doing less cross-community work now because of funding cuts. We want to do that, we want to be able to freely move in a sort of a normalised city, but yet the structures, some of these walls, the schooling restricts us. That breaks my heart, because why are we still allowing these restrictions to be placed on our young people? And that's where I think Dana's voice is brilliant, because she, she is bringing that civil rights lens going. Why is this still happening? She's pointing out the abnormal and she's she's bringing us into it in a way that opens up the conversation by saying what do you want for your children, what do you want for the next generation? And I think that does open it up for people.

0:57:24 - Sara-Louise Martin

That's a different question and that's my hope that that's something that we could take and use in our own circles, absolutely the other thing that she put really beautifully was, you know, talking about her own story and her family story, that there was a lot of generational trauma through the civil rights movement and how, as a parent, you're almost handing the backpack on to the next generation, and she touched on the generational element of that, and I think a lot of us maybe don't understand the impact of generational stuff within our family and how that can play out in a really negative way as well. And so what does it look like to be a cycle breaker? What does it look like to say, ok, the buck stops here. This may have been the story up until now, but this is not how I'm choosing to carry this on, and that I, I think, goes into what do you want for children in the future, future generations? I think about my nephews, I think about what I want for them, because we're so far down the line and and peace has been so hard won, almost I think people don't want to do anything to rock the boat in case something erupts, because, as we all know, it is so thin beneath the surface, and so I think that's partly people don't want to do anything.

That seems too revolutionary, and yet you know a lot of people are just like that was a. That was a time ago. Time has moved on. Nobody wants whatever that stood for and we have to think about. You know, what is it going to take for us to thrive? How are we going to try and drive the community for the economy forward? You know all of those things that impact how we live life and how we live. How we live a life that is honoring to our heritage but also is future focused. We need a better economy. We we need companies to want to invest here. Companies that have come here have stayed because they're like brilliant people, great attitude, hard working, good fun.

0:59:35 - Jude Hill

I love that, leading into the humor, um, the imagination, and some of this stuff can sound like it's not, you know, the hard stuff of life, but actually it is the magic, it's the things that move us on and that's what I think I took actually ultimately from Dana just the way she spoke about music. She was like you wouldn't be watching a movie without the movie soundtrack, moving the story on, and I suppose that's that's it. She's pointing back to the value of music, arts, and it's it's stuff that's real. She talked about protest songs and the links between Irish people and and you know that black American music and that's a very unifying um and expressive um thing and ultimately that is what this conversation, I think, really pointed to. How do we articulate both the the pain, but equally the imagination and that forward thinking? What do we want this place to be?

1:00:31 - Sara-Louise Martin

we need more funding for artists and creative people, because they are actually the people that deeply sense what's going on. So it's the artists that create the art, create the music that actually sets the culture and when that is hampered or strangled in any way, the the opportunity to express, you know, for a nation, is dampened down. So I think there's a lot of freedom and fruitfulness that can come when we really invest in the arts and and creative people, and I've seen that in so many places. But we have such a deep and rich heritage of poetry and writing and music and storytelling. It is just in us, it's who we are at our core and the opportunity and wanting to find that point of connection with someone. We're always trying to find the link and that's a beautiful thing, love that.

1:01:38 - Jude Hill

You've been listening to Piece by Piece peace. Thanks so much for joining us. Our big hope here is that these would spark conversations in the homes and worlds we live and move in, as, peace by peace, we figure peace out together. We'd love to bring peace by peace out into the wild and host conversations in your community. If you're interested in sponsoring this venture and adventure, then please do get in touch.

Transcribed by https://podium.page