Street News Service
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Big Issue Australia: Torch Songs
Ghita Loebenstein
October 03, 2005
Singer-songwriter Diamanda Galás trawls history’s graveyards to compose
her dark, haunting and incredibly moving music.
“If you want to learn about Greek tragedy have dinner with a Greek
family. You’ll see an intensity among them that explains everything,”
says singer-songwriter Diamanda Galás. ‘Intense’ is one way to describe
a woman with a three-and-a-half octave range, a command of 13 languages
and an intellect best described as fierce. Her performances mine obscure
historical terrain, transforming the stories of those who have suffered
persecution, exile and tragedy into oeuvres of magnificent and
terrifying proportions.
Galás has been called the Bride of Satan, a vocal terrorist who sings
like a demon going to war and happens to be a virtuoso pianist. It is
true that she can manipulate her voice into phenomenal gothic
sculptures: guttural scowls, moans, wails, hisses and shrieking octave
climbs amplified, oscillated, echoed and threatened into shapes that can
raise the spirits of the dead. But in conversation Galás is not nearly
as intimidating. Her voice literally booms down the line from New York
on the eve of her Australian tour and much to my surprise, she has an
overwhelming warmth, sharp wit and a mouth like a trooper. Recounting a
recent fall out with the American director of an artist residency she
was attending in Italy: “I said ‘Man I’m going to f**k you better than
you’ve ever been f**ked in your life motherf**ker. So you just watch and
wait, just watch and wait, bitch!” Add to that her vampish laughter and
you’ve got one extraordinarily charismatic woman.
Galás was born in San Diego, California to American-born Greek Orthodox
parents. For over 20 years and throughout 15 staged works she has
excavated tales of human suffering, but it was the stories that had been
circulating in her family since her childhood – the Pontic Greek,
Armenian and Assyrian genocides that occurred between 1914 and 1923 at
the hands of the Turks – that compelled her to create the astonishing
album Defixiones: Orders from the Dead.
“I didn’t have many Greek friends when I
was growing up, I only heard about these stories from my father. He
would talk about the Armenian marches, perpetuated by the Turks, and the
fact that the Turks would cut the babies out of the women’s stomachs
with bayonets. I realised this is very important, that my father needs
this story to be told.”
Defixiones consumed six years of extensive historical research but also,
as with all her works, alludes to modern atrocities like Auschwitz,
Assyrian oppression in Iraq and even the internment of Afghan rebels at
Guantanamo Bay. These are all recalled as Galás exhumes the texts – in
their original languages – of authors such as Armenian poet Siamanto,
Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis, Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis and Italian
director Pier Paolo Pasolini into a ‘sacred operatic mass’.
Although Galás’ work is highly political,
her intentions are far more humanist than political. “I don’t do any of
it intentionally, I mean why would I do anything like this
intentionally? I remember an Australian guy, when I was there in 1988 to
perform Plague Mass [about the AIDS epidemic], said to me, “Come here so
you can shake us out of our complacency,’ and I said ‘Oh dear, I’m just
doing my work and I couldn’t give a f**k about your complacency,’ and
that is the truth. I’m not really motivated by politics.
“I’m motivated by paradigms that I find interesting in human behaviour.
How does an individual survive in the most absurd, excessive situations?
What kind of spirit does it take to survive? What does the person have
to tell him or herself in order to survive situations that are
impossible? How does the witch go into the fire? What is the witch
thinking when she’s hoisted from a ladder into the fire? That’s what I
want to know. I don’t know why but I do.”
In her show Songs of Exile she revives the
work of exiled authors and poets from around the world in a song-cycle
of original compositions inspired by traditional Greek and Armenian
rembetika, Anatolian style improvisation, and the music of Greek
composer Papioannou, Armenian Udi Hrant, as well as John Lee Hooker and
Johnny Cash. Unsurprisingly, Galás has a great affinity with the plight
of exiled artists. “I have felt that way from the very beginning. A lot
of Greeks will hear from their families, ‘Don’t trust the Americans, and
don’t by any means trust the Greeks!’ So you’re out there on your own.
There’s also the fact that I have always practiced what I preached and
that gets me into incredible amounts of trouble.” Like getting kicked
out of an Italian artist’s residency because she locked horns with the
“metrosexual f**k” who was “turning it into an American colony!”
That kind of intensity comes from Galás’ conviction that the right to
speak freely, and indeed live freely, is a gift she is compelled to use
to its utter, blood-curdling extreme. “I came from real Greek culture in
the sense that Greeks celebrate life. We believe that we have one life
and we’re terrified of losing it because we love it so much. That’s why
my work is about the sacredness of life and the fear of wasted moments.
Those are the things that make it so dear to me and give me a kind of
religious feeling. I feel I have the opportunity to say whatever is
important to me. So however long I have to say it, that’s a gift.”
Reprinted from The Big Issue Australia.
© Street News Service: www.street-papers.org
by Ghita Loebenstein
