SongWriter Season 6 Continues with Ina Carino & Alex Wong
Photos by Sass Art & Alex Berger
SongWriter is a podcast that turns stories into songs, featuring David Gilmour (Pink Floyd), Joyce Carol Oates, Steve Earle, David Sedaris, Susan Orlean, Craig Finn (The Hold Steady), and Questlove.
Poet and musician Ina Cariño’s first winter in America was hard. Having grown up in the temperate mountains of the Philippines, they had never experienced a snow storm. In a new poem that Ina wrote for SongWriter, the memory of that chill connects with the ways they first experienced America.
“People were cold to me, perhaps for being brown, or other, or different,” Ina says. “The Filipino culture is known to be more friendly, hospitable than a lot of other cultures.”
Ina recalls that it was their grandmother who taught them how to connect with, and care for, others. Ina wrote the new poem, “Words That Don’t Have to Be Spurious,” as their grandmother was dying, and it is in part a tribute to her.
Researcher and singer Sarah Nila was close to her grandmother as well, and similarly credits her with teaching Sarah about caring for others. But Sarah’s experience of empathy in the West was different than Ina’s. Sarah studies how empathy is learned and taught, and says that the people she met in the United Kingdom were no more or less empathetic than those back home in Indonesia. The difference, as she sees it, is more related to cultural ideas of privacy.