DIAMANDA GALAS INTERVIEW: TALKING HER SONGS OF EXILE
Petra Davis
The Quietus
Sept 9 2009
As long as the vulgar Greek exists in this world By Allah, my hatred
won’t leave me As long as I see him there like a dog By Allah, this
hatred won’t leave me…
Even if I crush thirty thousand of their heads with a stone Even if
I wrench out the teeth of ten thousand And throw a hundred thousand
of their corpses into the river By Allah, this hatred won’t leave me.
Excerpt from ‘Hatred’, a poem published in the Turkish newspaper
Hurriyet, immediately preceding the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974.
Watching Diamanda Galas perform on her recent Songs Of Exile tour
is a reminder that her consummate musicianship is not derived simply
from technique, but from passionate belief, albeit expressed through
perfect muscle memory. Transported, wayward light scattering her long
shadow across the audience, she calls on the ghosts of ideas in their
own languages. The purity of her intention is what holds together the
various strands of this song cycle – her trademark amanes, the ancient
lament that she has described as "the last cry of the soldier on the
battlefield"; the guttural, beautiful blues of ‘See That My Grave
Is Swept Clean’; and her spectral interpretations of the poetry of
Paul Celan, Cesar Vallejo, Adonis: disparate writers bound by their
experiences of enforced separation from their homes and cultural
traditions. Disapora – the scattered: the term implies devastation,
the advent of an irresistible force.
Galas too is an exile of sorts. As a Greek American with a complex
cultural background, she is heiress to the traditions of Asia Minor:
to the diverse cultures of ancient Byzantium, and to their dissipation
under the Ottoman Empire. Her understanding of ethnic cleansing links
the bloody conflicts of the ancient empires, the multiple genocides
of the modern Turkish state, and the spiritual exile of all those
imprisoned, tortured, or dispossessed by virtue of their identity. As
passionate and referential as her work implies, Galas in conversation
is also possessed of a wonderful gallows humour, and a rare ability
to demonstrate artistic, conceptual, and political parallels across
centuries, continents, or ideological differences.
Your subjects are esoteric by the standards of mainstream music,
and overtly political by the standards of modern classical or the
avant-garde. How do you think you’re perceived by music critics?
Oh, there’s ‘the AIDS woman’, there were a lot of magazines that
called me that. And they may consider me an elitist, because I have
technique, but of course, I consider pop singers who go up onstage
drunk, with no technique, and have very wealthy record companies,
to be completely elitist. What else? Depressing. Oh, please, if a
man sings a depressing song, they love it.
Johnny Cash! He’s 95 and nearly dead, wheel him out, another video,
pair him off with Nine Inch Nails. Oh, the pathos…five stars!
Right. Exactly. I can’t stand the sentimentality that all this
implies. I think these guys have trouble getting it up. Music is
their Viagra and they go to the pub, load up the jukebox, and then
they talk about fucking. And really, everything that I’ve ever done
is antithetical [to that]. I don’t imagine that anything I do would
be of any interest to them.
The idea of yourself as an outlaw or an exile is central to some of
the voices in your work, isn’t it?
There’s a song I perform called ‘Huparko’ – which just means ‘I
exist’. It’s the simplest form of defiance. Some people are born
outlaws, or they become outlaws because the laws literally change to
force them out. That’s what Songs Of Exile is all about. It’s mainly
focused on Asia Minor, on the experiences of exiles from what is now
called Turkey – which I do not call Turkey. The only reason that
Turkey’s called Turkey is because if you called it anything else
they would call it an insult to Turkishness and you’d be killed. It
should be called Anatolia, which is comprised of many ethnic groups
and was comprised of more until they committed the genocides, the
ethnic cleansing.
So, the song cycle that you’ve recently been performing relates
specifically to the genocides against the Armenian, Assyrian and
Greek populations within what’s now called Turkey, which the Turkish
government adamantly denies. And to perform these songs now is to
continue to resist Turkish genocide denial and also to proclaim the
cultural life of Anatolia?
Sometimes literally. I perform one text called ‘Exo Unane’, which
translates as ‘Get out, Greek’… ‘exo’ means ‘get out’ in Greek,
and then ‘unan’… it isn’t a Greek word, but it means ‘Greek’, it’s
an insulting word, it’s what we’re called by the Turks. There are
two voices in the text: first I’m singing ‘Exo Unane’, and my tone
is inhuman. Then I sing a beautiful text which comes from Trebzon:
I found a recording of men, women and children singing this song,
lamenting the deportations. [When I perform it] I sing those verses
and then in between I’m doing these interjections in Turkish, as
though on a bullhorn: here are your orders. Get out.
How important is it to you for your audience to understand that moment
of realisation – the moment when you become aware that the state is
against you, that they’re coming for you?
Well, it’s very normal to people from Anatolia or other places where
genocides happen, and completely incomprehensible to those outside
of it. How can I put this… there’s a poem called ‘Hatred’, which
is unbelievable. It’s probably the perfect illustration of what I’m
talking about. It was published in a Turkish national newspaper, just
before the invasion of Cyprus. It’s very famous. All it talks about
is the desire, in the name of Allah, to decapitate as many thousands
of Greeks as [possible]. [laughs] It’s a very badly written poem, but
it’s proof that that was the aim. Open up the daily paper, there it is.
OK – I want to read that. I’ll google it now.
OK, I’ll drink my tea while you look. Did you find it?
Oh my god. I’m reading it now.
Great, well there you go.
It just goes on and on! Decapitate this many, pull their teeth out,
throw them in the river…this guy is a busy little bee.
Oh god. I love it. You’re such a fucking drag queen.
I’m going to take that as a compliment.
You should! We female drag queens are a rare and ancient breed.
This poem is so terrible! There’s something undealable-with about
it. It has the attention to detail of a serial killer, but the epic
scale of a general. It’s so evil it’s almost self-parody.
Yes, absolutely. But it’s real, those murders happened. I use the
work of many writers and singers and musicians who were martyred –
Siamanto, for example, the Armenian writer, who was assassinated, or
the Assyrian poet, Dr. Freidoun Bet-Oraham, one of the most significant
writers in his tradition, who was executed. So many writers and poets
and musicians were executed or committed suicide. I go to these places
and spend months researching the texts of the murdered and then I
come back to New York and I think, ‘Ah, you whining motherfuckers,
man, have you ever been to a place where there’s no food?’
But the people who have been through that kind of extremity are stoic
like you wouldn’t believe! I had the same feeling when I was working
with asylum seekers from Iraqi Kurdistan, Afghanistan, the Congo. They
had been through experiences I had no way to conceptualise. I felt
I had had an extended psychic adolescence, as a white girl who grew
up in a post-colonial social democracy, and then dealing with this
was my rude awakening. I had no time for my friends’ minidramas any
more. They’d phone me up crying, ‘I broke up with my boyfriend,’
and I’d just hang up on them.
HA.
Seriously, they made a joke about it – ‘If you haven’t been vaginally
tortured with a hairdryer, she doesn’t wanna know you anymore.’
[laughs] But don’t you find it astonishing that anyone could be
[so self-absorbed]? The only thing I can think of is that they
have never, ever experienced any physical pain in their lives. Real
pain. Over here [in the US] the most intelligent people are driving the
cabs. I’m serious – they’ve got like, major degrees in astrophysics
and chemistry, and they’re driving cabs for these disgusting little
bitches on their cellphones, talking about when they’re gonna see their
boyfriend next or something, it’s truly unbelievable, and it’s so sad.
Presumably then, seeing those kinds of unequal, almost colonial
relationships in US culture is another reason diasporadic voices are
so important to you?
Yes. The voices of the diaspora are extremely important. The diaspora
of Anatolia is huge, and often the diaspora are preserving cultural
or artistic forms and texts that are outlawed or destroyed in the
country of origin, actually. People like me in the diaspora of Greece
are creating works that it might not have occurred to us to create
if we were living on the mainland. Many of the great innovators are
writers or artists from the diaspora. I mean, El Greco lived in Spain!
That’s what I noticed about the poets you choose to use in your work
as well, people like Paul Celan, or Cesar Vallejo, or even Pasolini:
that apart from being astonishing writers, they were all exiles in
different ways. It implies that you think of exile as a spiritual as
well as a physical condition.
Yes, in different ways. Celan was exiled to Austria, Vallejo lived
in self-imposed exile in Paris, for example. Celan’s parents were
deported, imprisoned and executed by the Nazis, and Celan was put
in a labour camp and eventually committed suicide. Vallejo, when he
was living in Peru, witnessed the virtual slavery of his people on
the sugar plantations. Pasolini lived as an outlaw in his culture,
as a homosexual. And ‘Be Sure That My Grave Is Kept Clean’, which
is also part of this cycle, that specifically is a reference to the
AIDS epidemic. Because there’s no-one who lives more as an exile
than someone with AIDS in any country he or she lives in. When I was
recording Defixiones [her 2003 album based around the modern Turkish
genocides], it was inescapable and quite parallel, the links between
genocide and the killing of gay people – all the articles I would
read about how gay people were buried alive into walls in Egypt and
Turkey. And they continue to do this.
I was reading just yesterday some news from Iraq, about the torture and
execution of gay men who have their rectums glued shut with specialist
surgical glue and then they’re fed drinks to induce diarrhea.
WHAT???
I’ll send you the link.
Oh I wish you would! Oh my God!
They’re given drinks to induce diarrhoea and then they drown in their
own diarrhoea.
Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! You see – I
consider myself completely anti-monotheistic. Monotheism to me is a
closed brain, it’s a person who has read one book and is a servant. You
know why most world leaders are atheists? They don’t believe in God
because they believe they are God. They are their own book. And this
is what happens. Are these executions happening in prison?
No, this is at roadblocks. It’s almost as though the larger conflict
is just repatterning itself in all the social tensions that are within
that culture.
Corr-ect! Corr-ect! That’s exactly what’s happening in Iraq now, larger
conflicts promote smaller conflicts. It’s like an ecosystem. Take
the Kurds in Iraq, who themselves were subject to ethnic cleansing:
they are now eradicating the Assyrians. And the Assyrians, because
they’re the smallest minority group, are fleeing, with nowhere to
go. This is the oldest culture of Iraq, and it’s a culture that’s
now going to be lost, because it’s being systematically destroyed,
and that’s being overlooked in the story of the Iraq conflict.
And the real story is nothing like what’s portrayed from either side
in any case.
Right. Who’s telling the story of Western interference in the
oil-bearing nations anymore? You’ve got the US media portraying it as
an issue with Islam, which it is not. And then you’ve got Osama Bin
Laden filming his recruitment video in the Regency hotel with imported
sand, acting like he’s in the desert. Aside from how totally pathetic
that is – he’s nothing to do with the issue! He’s from Saudi, his
family has links to the US government! You know his sister’s trying
to get a rock ‘n’ roll gig with a fuckin’ facelift and a nose job
in New York? But nobody wants to hire a Bin Laden to do Alice Cooper
songs anymore. Maybe she’ll entertain the troops. [laughs]
Diamanda Galas plays the dates below during October. For a series
of exclusive downloads on her own Intravenal Sound Operations label,
visit Diamanda Galas’ website
October 1 Pop Montreal Music Festival Concordia University, Montreal,
Canada Talk as part of HIV/AIDS Lecture Series
October 3 Pop Montreal Music Festival Theatre Outremont, Montreal,
Canada Diamanda Galás in Concert: Voice and Piano Tickets are $35
October 6 New Hazlett Theatre, Pittsburgh Tickets are $20 for adults,
$10 for students
October 22 Carousel: The Songs Of Jacques Brel featuring Diamanda
Galas, Marc Almond and more Barbican Centre, London
October 23 Warwick Arts Centre Carousel: The Songs of Jacques Brel
November 24 Pallas Theater, Athens (Greece)