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Doctor makes music that crosses cultural divides

Physician and singer Rupa Marya is on a mission to break boundaries musically and nationally.

The meeting with Tlapa was even more touching, Marya says, because it clarified for her the limitations of her work as a doctor. "When I met him, Roman had still not been seen by a physician." Even now, months later, Marya, recently appointed associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, can't hide her incredulity. "He was three weeks out of his injury and still he was not going to get an x-ray or surgery, even though he clearly needed medical assistance. He will never walk properly again. To me, it was the greatest feeling of impotence as a doctor—to be there and to feel like I have nothing for this patient. It was a very powerful feeling of powerlessness."

For years, she's been ignoring advice to pursue a single career. Marya nods at the thought of it. "What I'm writing about comes from being a doctor," she explains. "It allows me to not see the separation between Jews and Muslims, or between black and white people, and see life at its most bare level—everyone has the same concerns about matters of life and death. If I were only a musician, where would I feel the sense of intellectual and practical satisfaction? When I go to the hospital and make sure my patients have their medications set up, it brings a certain level of satisfaction that I just don't feel as a musician, no matter how great the gig is."

Not all Marya's songs are about breaking down barriers. Inspired by the life stories of her patients, she sings about love, loss, hope and pain—universal themes, sung from an infectious sort of naïveté. It's no coincidence "April Fishes" refers to French slang for idealists so caught up in the beauty of the newly arrived spring that they believe the impossible is possible—a wonderful life motto, she thinks.

Marya often finds herself caught up, too, by whatever fuels her passion. "It wasn't like I wanted to be a border-busting musician visiting shelters for rejected immigrants," she explains. "But what's always driven me were the transitional zones, the space where two things rub against each other and smash up." That's visible in her medical work, which forces her to deal with issues of life and death, and in her musical work, as she mixes the sounds of countless traditions in an attempt to "build bridges between groups to reflect and give voice to a more complex shared global identity," she says. "I think we all need to find the space to carve out our own identities, realize who we believe we are and discover our place in the world—literally."

Read Rupa Marya’s blog posts about the Mexican border tour here.

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