First
AIDS, now genocideÉDiamanda Gal‡s wonÕt lighten up
You might call Diamanda Galás
a singer, but thatÕd be a paltry account of it. Singers make us snap our
fingers and tap our toes, even fill us with joy and all that. Galás can
play that role, but she does it as the bearer of really bad news. Yes,
sheÕs the one they call the Beacon of Bleak, the Dark Diva of Doom ÕnÕ
Disease, all that trivializing stuff. SheÕs the sneeringly stately,
raven-haired, wild-eyed Greek-American with the ferocious four-octave vocal
range and the blood-freezing stage presence; sheÕs the one who feels true
hatred. Do not cross this bad bitch ÐÐ sheÕll slit ya face.
But Diamanda Galás is a bit anxious today.
ÒThis is such an important interview for me that I have to tell you IÕve been
very nervous about it.Ó
ÒThat makes two of us.Ó
ÒThe subject is so unbelievable, so
unspeakable ÐÐ especially at this particular time ÐÐ the resonance is
almost killing me.Ó She laughs, ambiguously.
WeÕre trying to get a fix on GalásÕ new
piece, Defixiones, Will and Testament: Orders From the Dead, a solo voice and piano
work. A typically harrowing thing based on texts related to the Armenian
and Anatolian Greek massacres of 1915 and 1922, its arcing theme is
genocide in its various guises, and its cowardly denial. Which, owing to
issues arising post-September 11, now seems a bit relevant.
Galás, the monstrously mighty vocal virtuoso
who has received both acclaim and infamy as the creator of AIDS-related
music-performance pieces such as Plague Mass, Litanies of Satan and The Masque of the Red
Death
trilogy, as usual has already gotten her serving of flak stemming from the
ÒcontroversialÓ nature of DefixionesÕ subject matter. After performances in Ghent
and at LondonÕs Royal Festival Hall, she was scheduled to perform it in
Armenia, but the powers that be got shaky.
ÒThe problem with a lot of countries that
are very impoverished,Ó she says, Òis that the ruling classes are greedy,
and in this case the director of the opera house ÐÐ a throwback to the
Bolsheviks ÐÐ he started to censor my work. He was very worried about it
even before I came there, even though it was dealing with the Armenian
genocide. And so, at the last minute, he canceled me.Ó
That was a big mistake. If youÕre going to
deny Diamanda Galás, youÕd best have convictions you can stand on, and be
prepared to defend them ÐÐ because Galás the ardent researcher/scholar will
always have done her homework. And she wasted that guy:
ÒI sent out a worldwide press release to
humiliate him. I succeeded because he said the Armenian people were too
conservative and too timid for this kind of work. He was speaking from his
own fear and his own greed.Ó
Fear and greed piss off Diamanda Galás no
end. But for her, to tell lies ÐÐ to break faith, to distort facts, to deny
history ÐÐ is an abomination.
ÒThe U.S. doesnÕt want to recognize the
Armenian genocide because itÕs going to bed with Turkey. Now is not the
time to discuss an Armenian genocide, and now will never be the time to
discuss these things Ôbecause we have our national security to think of and
that of Armenia,Õ said the Clinton administration one year ago. Selling
billions of dollars of attack helicopters to Turkey to safeguard its
national security and that of Israel ÐÐ these things get in the way of
settling an old score of minor players, so to speak.
ÒIsraeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres calls the Armenian Genocide
Resolution ÔmeaninglessÕ and says to the Turkish Daily News [April 10,
2001], ÔWe reject attempts to create a similarity between the Holocaust and
the Armenian allegations. Nothing similar to the Holocaust occurred. It is
a tragedy what the Armenians went through, but not a genocide.Õ Peres does
this while asking Turkey to support Israel against the Palestinians, and
going into business with them in their purchase and possible co-production
of the Arrow anti-tactical ballistic missile interceptor ÐÐ developed by
the U.S. and Israel ÐÐ and while discussing the sale of Turkish water to Israel.
Turkey threatens not to renew the mandate for U.S. forces using the
Incirlik air base in southern Turkey to patrol the no-fly zone in northern
Iraq ÐÐ if there is any mention of Ôan Armenian genocide.Õ
ÒWe have a lesser but nonetheless painful situation
with our leaders in Greece, who are so crazy about peace with the Turks
that they turned in [Kurdish separatist rebel leader] Abdullah Ocalan as a
gesture of friendship. It is never the time to give any kind of importance
to people of no importance.Ó
GalásÕ beliefs are in
part a byproduct of hearing her father, a Greek immigrant to the San Diego
area, tell her stories of growing up disqualified from being human in his
own country, his friends hunted down by the Turks, literally pushed into
the sea. Galás was further radicalized by her brotherÕs death from AIDS in
1986. She has taken themes of death, degradation and demoralization to
heroic extremes, in the process becoming a spokesperson for the
unspeakable, usually for those who canÕt speak for themselves. As with her Insekta piece, the particulars that
inspire the works fan out into analagous other concerns.
means something that is too
small to be seen ÐÐ itÕs perceived as invisible, because itÕs no longer
there,Ó she says. ÒItÕs something, but because you donÕt see it, itÕs
perceived as invisible to us, and therefore it doesnÕt exist. ItÕs like
people talking about anthrax here, and all of us in the AIDS community are
saying, ÔAnthrax? Those are just drugs coming from the graves of the dead
of AIDS. Come on, give me something to be scared of!Õ You deal with an
insane situation for 20 years and grieving for people for 20 years, you
gotta try harder to scare people like us. You gotta try to scare ÐÐ you may
make us very sad, but youÕre not gonna scare us with shit like that.Ó
For members of the Eastern Orthodox
religions, attacks like those on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
are nothing new. Defixiones addresses, among other things, the devastation on entire
cultures as inflicted by the Turks, among others. ItÕs a scenario that has
been played out in Armenia and Greece, in Assyria and with the Kurds for
hundreds of years. While GalásÕ piece has actually been in preparation for
several years, its premiere at this time seems prophetic.
ÒYou know what kills me? What is truly horrible is to create work
that very few people understand, or people think youÕre fuckinÕ nuts doing,
and then feel the prescience of it. It just drives me ÐÐ I canÕt sleep,
because all these things, these realizations, they co-exist in my mind. I
see, in the case of the Greeks of Asia Minor and the Pontic Greeks, the
Assyrians and the Armenians, as well as the Hindus, for that matter, what
many groups of people have suffered through for centuries ÐÐ this idea of
purging the infidel, jealously coveting what he has and wanting to destroy
him, but wanting to retain the unseemly creations and ÔparasiticÕ
enterprises of this Ôenemy of God.Õ
ÒThe Armenian Genocide Resolution was
blocked by the combined interests of Turkey, Israel and the United States.
The same genocide denial will occur with the Anatolian Greeks and the
Assyrians, who were starved to death and slaughtered in death marches under
the guise of deportation. [More than one million Greeks were forced to
leave their Asia Minor homeland in 1922-1923, during the Greek-Turkish
exchange of ethnic minorities.] Now that the Eastern Christians have been
finished off, the Kurds have become the new irritant to the concept of the
national [Turkish] order. When the Turks buried the Greeks in mass graves,
they said, ÔWe donÕt know what happened to these people. You are
exaggerating the numbers of deportees.Õ And we know what happened to the
Greek Cypriots: Los Desaparecidos.
ÒSome of the Greeks in power, they donÕt
need the Turks to fuck them, they fuck themselves. They just say, ÔOkay, we
want to be Europeans, too,Õ and a lot of people I know who are Greek
activists, Armenian activists, Assyrian activists, Kurdish activists, we
have to fight that all the time, because itÕs like saying, ÔOkay, I accept
you killing my culture.Õ The analogy is very close to the way the Indian
culture was killed by the Spanish culture: ÔYou donÕt exist, you donÕt
exist. We are raping your culture, you donÕt exist.ÕÓ
These are the biggest, saddest
of themes, and require music of wide extremes. And one of the strangest
facts about music and art that addresses horrific subjects is that, in
order to persuade, it has to be pleasurable at some level. So the startling
thing about Diamanda Galás, whoÕs currently without an American record
label, is the exhilaration one experiences upon witnessing her onstage. To
have any performer deal articulately with topical monstrosities is rare; to
have such a badass musician saying it is a gift from God. We know Galás
reigns as the queen of extended vocal technique, a voice that has only
gained in power and versatility over the years (she trains constantly, like
a boxer); she has also, in recent years, become one of the greatest, most
original piano players on Earth, with a strong
lower-two-octave/highest-octave attack that perfectly stabs the drama of
her lyrical concerns.
So, yeah, Diamanda Galás is katharsis ÐÐ
since the worst human conditions call for new harsh responses. SheÕs also someone
from whom anyone looking for new inspired music can derive maximum thrills
ÐÐ whether or not he gives one big shit about human suffering. Chances are,
however, that he wonÕt remain unscathed after hearing it.
Diamanda Galás says: ÒI
never, never do work because I feel that people are going to relate to it.
I do it because I feel that I need to do it. I could say I have my own
religion during this time ÐÐ the truth of my own convictions. I think one
has to search oneÕs soul very, very, very much. IÕm not sure how many
people do that. But IÕm willing to search my soul. I expect everyone else
to do the same.Ó
