'People are aching to tell their stories': Voices of hope and fear from a historic Inauguration Day

Lemon Bucket Orkestra is a Juno-nominated folk band from Toronto, and earlier this year, CBC Arts visited the group's Mark and Marichka Marczyk to learn more about their "guerrilla folk opera," Counting Sheep. The show was based on the 2014 uprising in Kyiv's Independence Square — where the husband-and-wife duo actually met.

This weekend, the couple is in Washington, D.C. for the inauguration. On Facebook, Mark has been sharing regular dispatches about the people he's met and the events he's witnessed. CBC Arts invited him to share a diary of his personal observations from the scene, and why he, as a Canadian artist, wanted to be there.

I came to see it all.- Mark Marczyk, artist

Yesterday, I woke up in Washington, D.C. to the Darth Vader theme song. There were two llamas outside my apartment window being led down E Street by a sherpa in a pussy hat. At the end of the street, a lone busker was leaning on a white concrete barricade that wasn't there the night before, looping the conspicuous tune on the trombone.

It was inauguration day, and I came to see it all.

Not to protest or to support, not to occupy or to celebrate, but to bear witness to one of the most shocking political turns in recent history.

Much like on Independence Square in Kyiv during the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, I sensed that humanity was gaping, that something was trying to escape or to be let in elsewhere. I wanted to let it into my eyes, my ears, my heart.

"Get ready to register," said a woman holding up a yellow Star of David cut-out and a copy of the constitution, eyeing people lined up for two city blocks to get onto the parade route at 7th and D Street. "Yeah, you. No beards. Your whiteness will not save you."

The line to the parade moves much more slowly than the one at the Make America Great Again Welcome Concert that happened the night before. There, I saw thousands of white Americans and a few blacks serving hot dogs, checking bags and selling "Fuck that bitch" T-shirts. The people lined the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool where Martin Luther King, Jr. famously gave his "I Have a Dream" speech and chanted, "Who's going to build the wall? Mexico!" 

That night, I'd run into water protectors from Standing Rock. They danced and chanted "Mni Wiconi" in wafts of sage outside an inaugural ball sponsored by DAPL funders who "sipped sparking water from plastic bottles inside," as one of the activists put it.

On inauguration day, while walking with protestors, I was told some of the water protectors I met the night before were pepper-sprayed and arrested along with self-proclaimed "anarchists" who hacked up chunks of asphalt with crowbars to smash the windows of the Bank of America and McDonald's.

From a permitted amplified protest along the parade route, I heard an organizer cry: "Media will downplay what we did here."

"Trump supporters are being brought in by the busload while tens of thousands of protestors are being held up at checkpoints!" True to the organizer's words, I saw line-ups for blocks at every entrance.

"They'll report on arrested protestors to deflect attention." It's the only news about the protests I have been able to find thus far.

"Here's the question: can we become our own media?"

I believe we can, and that's why I'm here. So long as we vigorously tell the truth about what happened today.

While in Washington, D.C. I've struck up conversations with all sorts of people. I just approach them and say hi. For the most part, I find people are aching to tell their stories. Everyone wants to be heard.

I heard the story of a father who came from New York with his daughter on his shoulders saying, "Unicorns are dope, misogyny is not." 

I met a biker from Virginia who wears a patch on his leather vest that reads: "PTSD: not all wounds are visible." He calls himself "scooter trash" and calls me "brother" as he explains to me why blue lives matter. 

I met a teacher-turned-activist who was raised with four siblings (one with down syndrome) by a single father on 14k a year. She got two masters before deciding not to teach white history anymore, and to bring her high school class to march on Washington.

I talked with a homegrown Special Forces killer turned bus driver who dreams of living in Canada one day. He served all over the world but feared Louisiana the most because he couldn't just go to the pub without "issues."

And in a Mexican restaurant, I met a waiter from El Salvador. He stood under a light fixture made of rose petals and told me that it doesn't bother him when Trump supporters come into his restaurant. "Everyone needs to eat — black, white, red, purple, whatever. You see and judge food by its taste, but it doesn't judge you." Behind him was a beautiful sight, a mosaic of clay Acapulco divers spreading their arms and soaring out of this kaleidoscope of colourful tile. 

Mark Marczyk is the ringleader of the Lemon Bucket Orkestra and co-creator of Counting Sheep: a Guerrilla Folk Opera. His writing on the Revolution of Dignity and Ukraine-Russia war has been published by Brick, NOW Magazine, Carte Blanche, and others.