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Winter '94

DARKNESS AND LIGHT
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A Journey That Led to the Extremes of Human Kindness and Cruelty

The Muse Interview.
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Sarah McLachlan's hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia lies at the end of a deep
harbor sheltered from the windswept North Atlantic, many miles north of the
rocky tip of Maine.  In the seven years since Sarah made her debut as a
recording artist, she has followed the path that has opened before her,
leading far away from that distant eastern shore.  Having left the remote
shelter of Halifax, she has resisted the shelter of life as a popular
performer and sought to come to terms with the perspective of her new life.
Before recording her latest album, she journeyed to southeast Asia with the
Catholic relief organization World Vision to participate in a documentary
showing World Vision's efforts to assist in halting the spread of AIDS.
Sarah recounted some of her heartbreaking experiences with us and shared her
thoughts regarding social
responsibility as an individual and as a public person.
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Muse: Were you invited by World Vision to participate in the trip to Asia?
Sarah: By World Vision and Terry David Mulligan who is one of the VJ's on
the Canadian equivalent of MTV.  Terry David Mulligan had gone with World
Vision before to Africa and Brazil.  They wanted a woman to go with them to
Asia because a lot of the focus was going to be on women and children.  When
they asked me if I was interested, I jumped at the opportunity.  All my life
I've wanted to go to Thailand, and the idea of shaking myself up was a
really interesting concept at the time because I felt pretty shut down from
everything. I figured I needed my eyes to be opened up a bit, and that
certainly did it.
 
Muse: What was a typical day like on the trip?
Sarah: We only shot for nine days, and it was pretty intense because we went
to about five different places.  We spent two days in Bangkok, where in the
evening we went to the red light district, and we also went to a huge
women's hostel that a lawyer was running for women who were coming in from
the country. Basically, they were trying to get to them before the pimps
did.  One of the main places that women come in from the countryside is at
the train station.  You go there, and there are pimps everywhere.  You can
tell them a mile away. They grab these young girls and say, 'We'll give you
money, we'll give you a job; come with us.'  They get sucked into that life,
and there's no way out of it.  We talked to some of the World Vision people
there, and then we went to a fishing village near the Malaysian border.  All
across Thailand there's a huge AIDS problem because it's a very transient
place.  Fishing is the second or third largest trade, so you have all these
fishermen going up and down the
coast going to brothels every night and spreading AIDS like crazy.  So
they're trying to teach what can happen and to wear a condom to all these
prostitutes. It's an interesting way in that they're not saying, 'You're
evil, you're bad, you're a prostitute.'  They say, 'No, this is what you do
to protect yourself; here are your options.'  And from a Catholic
organization, they're pretty cool.
We went to Cambodia to Phnom Penh to the national pediatric hospital there,
to the Killing Fields and to a place that had been a concentration camp -
now a museum - that used to be a high school.  So in nine days we saw a
whole lot of stuff.
 
Muse: Like a whirlwind?
Sarah: Yeah, very much.  Everything happened too fast to deeply register.
It was all there, it was all getting put in there and it was like, 'You
can't break down now, because there's still this other stuff you have to=
 do.'
 
Muse: What kind of feelings did you have as you were preparing to leave?
Sarah: You know, I can't remember, because the feelings I had after I was
there completely overshadowed everything.  I think I had no idea what I was
prepared for.  There was no way to prepare myself for what I was going to
see.  I told myself that this was going to be really shocking, but
everything I saw overshadowed that so much.
 
Muse: As you were leaving, did you manage to find some sense of hope?  It
sounds so overwhelming.
Sarah: Well, I took my best friend Crystal with me for moral support,
knowing that I would need her, and I certainly did.  We asked to have an
extension on our ticket because I figured I didn't want to go all the way
over there to see only the negative side of the world, so we spent another
month travelling around to all the different islands in Thailand and
basically having a holiday.
 
Muse: That was a very wise decision, I=92m sure.
Sarah: Yeah, and it was really good because we didn't just go back home and
immerse ourselves back in our normal lives.  We had nothing to do but think
and talk about everything we had seen, which was really great because for a
while there, I started hating people.  How can people be so horrible?  But
you know, everybody goes through that.
 
Muse: It would be awful to leave behind an experience like that with the
kind of hopeless feeling a person might have.
Sarah: Yeah, there were moments of that certainly.  Mostly in Cambodia, I
would say, it was very, very heavy.  But there were some really, strangely
light moments too; like when we went to the Killing Fields, there's one of
many outdoor museums, and this one particular place had a monument of eight
thousand
skulls which they had dug up from the site nearby.  They had about ten
eight-foot deep graves and that's all the skulls from all the bodies they
pulled from those graves, and there was teeth and clothing and bone
everywhere on the ground, embedded.  You couldn't walk a square inch without
stepping on some of the stuff.  So, there was all this reminder of it.
 
Yet, it was a beautiful sunny day and there was a school right next door
where these children were singing. It was such a wild dichotomy.  It was so,
so sad and yet so beautiful.  It seemed peaceful.  Nothing like another site
we visited where we were within these walls, and you could see there was
still blood on the walls along with the pictures of men, women and children
who had all been
murdered.  And it just felt like their souls were trapped in there, but
outside it was a much different experience.
 
Muse: Real light shining in the midst of such darkness.
Sarah: Well, that was the children. Those children singing and happy and
innocent.
 
Muse: In the light of the experience you had, I'm wondering how you see
yourself as a person affecting a change in the world?
 
Sarah: (after a long pause) I think every day there's small moments of that.
And I think everybody has that.  You smile at a lonely old person and they
smile back; you've given them something.  You've made them smile, you know?
That's as great a gift as raising a whole shitload of money for some
charity.  Sometimes I think just compassion for human beings is something
that's really lacking in our day and age.  I'd like to think that, 'Yeah,
I'm doing some good because I have this great opportunity.'  It's wild some
of the letters I get. P eople say I've really affected their lives and
really helped them stir something.  It's a really great feeling to know
that.  And also to know that I can stand up on stage and...this is where it
gets frightening...I can be up on stage and I can sway people, one way or
another, if I wanted to.
 
Muse: You really have to admit that you're in an unusual position.
Sarah: Well, I have a big responsibility to use this gift properly.  To do
good things with it and not do bad things.  But, I mean everybody's got that
responsibility.
 
Muse: We have that choice every day.
Sarah: Exactly. In whether to smile at that old woman or not, or to help her
across the street.
 
Muse: It sounds like you feel like anyone in your position of higher public
visibility has a little bit more responsibility.  Or maybe just a different
responsibility.
Sarah: Different. I mean, it's so hard to explain.  There's so much of other
people's expectations that get projected onto you.
 
Muse: That's got to be really hard.
Sarah: Yeah, it's just weird because if you're not really strong, you start
believing what everybody else is telling you about yourself and all of a
sudden you have no idea who you are, except for what other people are
saying.  But the whole responsibility thing is so nebulous to me.  Sometimes
I feel like I have to be way more responsible than say, the gas station
attendant, but I mean...
 
Muse: ...to say that might diminish the responsibility of most people, when
really everyone is responsible.
Sarah: Exactly.  Everyone has to be, but a lot of people aren=92t.  And that
pisses me off more than anything else.  And I don't look at anybody in
the...  Well, maybe I do sometimes look at people in the spotlight a bit
differently but I shouldn't.  I try not to all the time, because I'm finally
there in their shoes and I'm looking at all the things I used to think about
them and going, 'Oh wow, it's so wrong.'  Because now I'm there and I see
where it's coming from, and it's a different place altogether.  It's=
 protection.
 
Muse: Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you're protecting yourself.

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