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Defixiones, Will and Testament lTHE
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Defixiones, Will and Testament lTHE
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"DEFIXIONES" refers to the warnings engraved in lead which were placed on the graves of the dead in Greece and Asia Minor. They cautioned against moving or desecrating the corpses under threat of extreme harm.
"WILL AND TESTAMENT" refers to the last wishes of the dead who have been taken to their graves under unnatural circumstances.
The concert material that Galás has included in this song cycle includes music set to the texts of the Armenian poet/soldier Siamanto; the Belgian/French poet Henri Michaux; the Syrian/Lebanese poet Adonis; the rembetika songs of Sotiria Bellou; the Anatolian Greek Amanedhes; the blues music of the American musicians Boise Sturdevant and Blind Lemon Jefferson, and the sacred songs of the Deep South. A new addition to the song cycle is a striking piece written by Galás called "The World Has Gone Up In Flames", which premiered at Royce Hall (UCLA) November 2001. Galás warns that, even in death, those that were chosen to die have not been defeated nor are they forgotten. "My death is written in a rock that cannot be broken."
The work is concerned with the poet/author living in exile, away from his homeland. DEFIXIONES, WILL AND TESTAMENT speaks for individuals who have had to live as outlaws, as they were treated as outlaws; and for those who have had to create houses out of rock.
DEFIXIONES, WILL AND TESTAMENT is dedicated to the forgotten and erased of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Anatolian Greek genocides which occurred between 1914 and 1923.
Elegant female figurine pierced by thirteen needles and found with
defixio in a clay pot from Egypt.
© Curse Tablets and Binding Spells From the Ancient World (John G. Gager)
APPROACHING NECROPOLISThe Middle Passage. The Nazi Holocaust. The decimation of the Incas, Aztecs, and the North American Tribes. Rwanda, Kosovo, East Timor. In acknowledging genocide, it’s not enough to merely provide a taxonomy of cases or a litany of symptoms. We need catharsis, redemption, and a vision to move forward. Apart from the legendary Paul Robeson, no singer has had as keen – or as empathic – an understanding of this fact as Diamanda Galás. Confronting the AIDS pandemic in 1990 with Plague Mass, Galás asked us, “Were You a Witness?” The question remains, and it isn’t just rhetorical; it’s a direct challenge to the collusion of silence and passivity within each of us as yet another pogrom is played out and marched through the media for mass consumption. In this context, the “Will and Testament” of Defixiones refers not only to the last wishes of the dead, but also to the testament of the living – those who have borne witness – and to the will to survive. With Defixiones Galás excavates the memory of the so-called “minor holocaust” of Asia Minor (the Armenian, Assyrian, and the Anatolian and Pontic Greek genocides that occurred between 1914 and 1923), long buried and perpetually denied in the name of a new European Community. By recovering these campaigns, committed by the Ottoman Turks and condoned by Allied nations to protect economic and strategic interests, Galás links their atrocities to other histories of oppression: incarceration, torture, slavery, exile, epidemics, and execution. Yet the work at hand is no simple archaeology. We need look only as far as the continued struggle for a Palestinian state, the internment of Afghan rebels at Camp X-ray in Guantánamo Bay, and the recent routing and systematic plundering of Iraq to grasp the relevance of Defixiones. This music calls upon us to continue the fight to remember and to commemorate – to keep up the fight for our ancestors, our loved ones, and ourselves. Defixiones fuses all the modes – textual, linguistic, and sonic – that have made Diamanda Galás both famous and infamous, from her formal capabilities to her radical interpretive skills to her electronic manipulations of the voice. Her spectral presence, uncompromising moral stance, and unflinching outspokenness are all abundant here. We hear the brilliance and veracity of her artistic forbears. She calls them forth even as she becomes the conduit to the persecution of her blood ancestry. Descended from the very people forced into the desert on death marches or pushed into the Aegean Sea, Galás has referred to this performance as the deepest part of her soul, just as she considers the poets whose work she deploys – each one a dissident – to be her blood brothers.
Defixiones opens with The Dance, a 35-minute opus that unveils the true horrors of political persecution and ethnic “cleansing.” Bookended by the Armenian liturgy, “Ter Vogormia,” The Dance (through Siamanto’s poem of the same name) relays eyewitness testimony to torture and human sacrifice as Armenian women are tormented then burned alive. Via Adonis’ “The Desert,” it also conveys the desolation of someone regarded as stateless in his very own land, recalling as it does Israel’s occupation of Lebanon under the charge of then-General Ariel Sharon. “You die because you are the face of the future,” Adonis writes, an assertion of the lethal consequences of cultural nationalism or the belief in racial purity. The gravity of these poems is obvious, but it’s Diamanda’s interpretation of them that’s so affecting. Ultimately, though, it’s the utter abjection expressed in “Sevda Zinçiri” that brings the specificity of individual suffering into acute and unrelenting focus. This lament is infinitely multiplied in “Holokaftoma,” where it quickly transforms into incomprehensible terror. The conflagration of Armenian brides converges with the torching of an Armenian church (its congregation trapped inside), and the drowning of the Anatolian Greeks of Smyrna, (denied refuge by Allied warships, detached sentinels floating at the furthest edge of the harbor). Diamanda spits out Pasolini’s final text of defiance (excerpts from a poem composed just before his murder) until we return to “Ter Vogormia,” its very utterance emptied now of any conviction. “The Eagle of Tkhuma” serves as a somber interlude depicting the desperation of Christian Assyrians at the hands of the Ottomans before Diamanda offers her own recitative, “Orders from the Dead.” Its incantatory refrain stretches back some eighty years, conjuring with surgical precision images of fascistic brutality and murder during the burning of the city of Smyrna (now called Izmir). Yet this threnody reverberates right up through the present moment, issuing forth in the wake of U.S. occupation of Iraq and the uncovering of mass graves holding the bodies of those goaded by Imperial forces into rising up against their ruler, only to be abandoned by their would-be liberators. The orders rising from the grave are to remember exactly how and why the body was butchered and by whom, to honor the life once housed in that body and the ceaseless mourning of its loss. Everything here is underscored by the soundscape of a humanity besieged by drumbeats of death, turning machinery of torture, and the echoing cries of carrion crows. True to her nature, Diamanda leaves no room for easy sentimentality. By the time we’ve reached the end of this march, we are left adrift in the desert amidst blowing sand.
“Hastayim Yasiyorum” opens the second disc, its plaintiveness bringing us back into the house of suffering, longing, and despair. An Armenian song composed in Turkish (It is useful to remember that Armenians in Turkey were forbidden to speak their own language.), it is closely allied in form and content to “Sevda Zinçiri” and to the two rembetika included here: “San Pethano” and “Anoixe.” Rembetika, a vernacular Greek song referred to at times as hashish music, expresses the sorrows of the dispossessed – the lovelorn, the addicted, the tubercular, and the imprisoned. The unadorned sadness of “Hastayim Yasiyorum” gives way to the seeming resignation of “San Pethano,”in which the singer relinquishes her body to the sea. But this particular rendition is infused with enough anger to make us question just how ready the subject really is to slide beneath the water’s surface, whereupon we are launched into “Je Rame,” Diamanda’s adaption of Michaux’s “hex” poem. As with Diamanda’s entire corpus, “Je Rame” is an invective against the quiet acceptance of death by unnatural causes. “I am rowing,” goes the refrain. “I am rowing against your life.” The “life” referred to is that of death’s harbinger, the wraith who “reek[s] far and wide of the crypt.” And as oars hitting the water morph into the flapping wings of death birds, we “split into countless rowers” in absolute defiance. Rowing against a murderous fate, we arrive at the shores of forced exile with “Epístola a los Transéuntes,” its whimsical waltz offering a moment of reprieve. But this calm belies a brooding indignation. Before us are the reflections of a man stricken by poverty and illness, stranded in a foreign land, his small room a virtual prison cell as he considers his fate, depression turned to a festering sickness in the bowels, intensified by the anticipation of death’s arrival. We are spirited off by the melody as Galás proves once again her virtuosity as a pianist, the rondo accelerating to a frenetic pace as Diamanda delivers Vallejo’s closing verses. Repeated in rapid succession they decry a quintessential existential moment, the revelation of life’s randomness, a belief in non-belief arising from genuine despair. And so the angels arrive in “Birds of Death,” reprised here along with “Artémis” from the “AIDS trilogy,” Masque of the Red Death, and recast in the context of middle-eastern musics. The bottomless pit of sorrow transmitted through these two numbers ricochets back to the opening of Defixiones, exposing the limitlessness of human misery. In this arrangement of “Birds” raw anger has taken flight; the anguish is now turned inward as we are brought to the bedside of the beloved, holding vigil. Inclusion of “Birds” as well as “Artémis” is significant as it traces a clear trajectory of Diamanda’s intellectual and artistic development, and it betrays a fundamental ethos: Pain (psychic and corporeal) is administered in myriad ways. One form of suffering cannot be separated from the other. Whether it’s death caused by benign neglect or the willful slaughter of millions, establishing a hierarchy of persecution is not only useless, but also dangerous. On a more intimate level, “Birds of Death” and “Artémis” each carry forth the legacy of Philip Dimitri Galás, Diamanda’s brother who, in life and death, has continued to serve as a guiding force. Honoring his memory yet again in Defixiones could not be more appropriate. But this personal stroke is linked once more to the worldly in “Todesfugue,” Paul Celan’s poem about survival in Auschwitz, the most notorious of the Nazi death camps where European Jews (as well as Catholics, homosexuals, and other “undesirables”) were collected and summarily tortured, starved, then executed. Here the death bird has transformed into a growling beast; the master – both a dog and a man -- barks out commands to his subjects, forcing them to dig a singular grave while ashes of bodies burnt sift through the air above. Galás closes Defixiones with her breathtaking account of “See that My Grave is Kept Clean,” just one of her many forays into the blues and gospel of Black America, aggressive musical forms developed in response to slavery and racism. An astounding and literal defixio, “Grave” is both a plea and a warning to protect the memory of the deceased. Our failure to do so is indeed an immense disservice to the dead, and it’s a neglect we exercise at our own peril. Sacred or secular, the preservation of our individual histories is the only hope against those who try to oppress and condemn us. It is the key to our collective future.
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