LISTENING - Sounds Now

LISTENING
ELAINE MITCHENER
RAED YASSIN
ARETHA PHIRI

LISTENING
ELAINE MITCHENER
RAED YASSIN
ARETHA PHIRI

Foreword
This is the first volume in a series of annual publications planned by the
Sounds Now network.
With this series, we would like to offer a space for different perspectives
on the creation of long-term structural change through greater inclusion
and diversity in contemporary music and sound art.
The theme for our first volume is ‘listening’, and we have chosen to focus
our listening on a crucial consideration within present-day curatorial
work: decolonising our practice and discourse. The traces of coloniality
and, conversely, the presence of the energy that counters it, are not only
sonic. Therefore we conceive this listening exercise as one to be carried
out not only through sound, but also as a metaphor for a sensitisation of
our intellect and understanding.
The term ‘decolonisation’ is currently used in many ways, for example
as an attempt to frame actions of emancipation, as a critique of the
current state of affairs and as a platform for present and future change.
Decolonisation is not the same thing as promoting diversity, equity and
inclusion (DEI), whether within an institution or in our social relationships
more generally. The lack of DEI is of course a result of colonial history
and the continuation of coloniality, but it would, in theory, be possible to
have a ‘perfect’ level of DEI (bureaucratically / statistically defined) and
still not have decolonised one’s practice.
Decoloniality brings a more radical and horizontal critique of Euro-
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American modernity into play. Perhaps one could identify three
‘moments’ of this critique in the context of working in music:
1. Understanding the organic and multifarious relationship between,
on the one hand, European Enlightenment and modernity, and on the
other, colonial power. Perceiving the many ways in which this power
has been exercised, and rectifying the contemporary distortions
caused by our blindness to this relationship.
2. Understanding the epistemic consequences of this coloniality; the
eradication of knowledge forms and cultures and the establishment
of canons (in theory, research and art) that, while having specific
sources, claim universality. Consequently, making efforts to ‘delink’
from and ‘unlearn’ these canons.
3. Producing new creative work (again in theory, research and art)
that emerges from primarily local collective struggles to valorise
alternative forms of knowledge and practice.
We have devoted this first volume to further explore the complex
mechanisms of decolonisation. In order to offer perspectives both from
within and outside the contemporary music and sound art scene, we
have invited three outstanding voices to contribute.
In her essay ‘How to Remove Earwax’, vocalist, movement artist and
composer Elaine Mitchener offers personal and practical insights on the
current state of the scene, as well as eloquent suggestions for concrete
steps to change.
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Next, an interview with Lebanese bassist and video/visual/sound artist
Raed Yassin brings us his insight into the colonisation of knowledge
and history, the freedom to criticise within Islamic contexts, and recent
attempts to create digital tools free of inbuilt Western bias.
Finally, in ‘ ‘Not Yet Uhuru’: Decolonising Our Imaginations, Pushing Back
the Frontiers’, South African Associate Professor in Literature Aretha Phiri
exposes the latent expression of colonial power and racial/economic
prejudice embedded in the language of the South African authorities
in dealing with local pandemic outbreaks, how such expressions add
to wider inequities that affect the cultural and art worlds, and how
South African postcolonial literature, and a well-known pop song, offer
responses to the situation.
What connects these three pieces is a belief that real, concrete choices
are able to build and extend pathways of structural change. If we care
to listen.
We would like to thank Elaine Mitchener, Raed Yassin and Aretha Phiri
for contributing to this first Sounds Now volume, and wish our readers an
ear- and eye-opening journey.
Christos Carras and Thorbjørn Tønder Hansen
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HOW TO REMOVE EARWAX
BY ELAINE MITCHENER
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‘The struggle of our new millennium will be one between the
ongoing imperative of securing the well-being of our present
ethnoclass (i.e. Western bourgeois) conception of the human,
Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself,
and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full
cognitive and behavioural autonomy of the human species
itself/ourselves.’
Sylvia Wynter, On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and
Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of
Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project
When I was approached to reflect and respond in writing to the question
of decolonisation in Western ‘art’ music, I thought I wouldn’t find it too
difficult. Actually it has turned out to be a challenge, because I am a
performer, not a writer or essayist. I also have a problem with the word
‘decolonisation’ used within this context, because so many responses to
it are negative rather than a celebration of the universality of classical
music.
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I have decided to use this opportunity to find another way to express
some personal ideas and feelings around this currently hot topic.
There remains an active acknowledgement of and a desire for change
to address and redress inequalities, silences and biases that exist in
Western classical music. Over the last five years, the focus has been
on the under-representation of women composers which sparked many
a heated debate, pledges of 50/50 programming and suggestions of
compromised quality to fit quotas. In 2015, The Spectator’s associate
editor Damian Thompson wrote a piece headlined ‘There’s a good reason
why there are no great women composers’. Whether you agree with him
or not, there’s still no good reason why we are still subjected to the music
of mediocre white male composers, a majority of which continues to
dominate the airwaves and concert programmes. And women composers
want to be accepted as COMPOSERS, not relegated to a category. The
same issues arise for composers/performers whose heritage is BIPOC.
We don’t want to be boxed in; what we want is equity of opportunity. But
before you start compiling your defence against what you believe to be
yet another ‘attack’ on Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and their friends, I ask
you to stop and think. Think about what you are defending – and why.
‘A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it
creates is a decadent civilization.
A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial
problems is a stricken civilization.
A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a
dying civilization.’
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950)
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‘Black people throughout the world have been sentenced by
Western man to centuries of silence… It is time for them to
speak. Western man wrote his own history as if it were the
history of the entire human race.’
John Oliver Killens
Change cannot take place without acknowledging the truth of the
problems that exist, finding out why they exist, and thinking about how
we can work together to effect positive transformation. In the classical
music sector, its various organisations must move beyond their selfdenial
and accept that they have a problem with what I will call earwax. It
can be hard to detect because, as with all hearing problems, the dullness
starts gradually and can go undetected for years. This stubborn earwax is
built up after years of being taught and believing that Western European
classical music is the epitome and apotheosis of musical excellence, by
which all other music is to be judged. Anything outside of the Western
classical music canon is an add-on, exotic and without intellectual
foundation. This backward, reductionist viewpoint is dangerous and has
dominated festival and concert programming ideas, music curriculums,
etc, for too long. It has caused a narrowing of sound world experiences.
These long-held views underpin notions of musical hierarchies and
serve to undermine anything or anyone that doesn’t look or ‘sound’ like
them or what they know. Any attempt to include work usually considered
‘outside’ the canon within a programme risks causing major disruption
amongst players as well as audiences. At this point the earwax problem
is so severe that those suffering from it seem incapable of listening to
anything else and, worse still, are afraid to have it removed in case these
new sounds completely overwhelm their senses and strip them of their
assumed musical superiority, along with those power structures that
have enabled their entitlement.
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As a musician trained in Western classical music, but also with one foot
firmly in the brilliant and wonderful music of my Black-British-African-
Caribbean cultural heritage, I haven’t needed help to balance all these
musical differences. There are no musical hierarchies. I’m interested in
music that ignites my imagination, to which I have an emotional reaction
and an experience that lives on beyond the first hearing. It’s subjective,
I know, and that’s fine. What I am trying to say is that it’s as natural for
me to switch from (and I’m staying relatively mainstream here) J.S. Bach
to Burning Spear to Diamanda Galás to Umm Kulthum to Christian Wollf
to The Specials; from The Fall to Ahn Sook Sun to Burt Bacharach to
Charles Mingus to Liza Lim to Jimi Hendrix (both of whom have a piece
called ‘Voodoo Child’, by the way)… I could go on, and I’m still learning.
Learning from others who are also musically curious and share in the
wonderment of it all. You might be nodding in agreement, which is great,
but what do we do with this equitable musical experience?
Actions speak louder than words
On 2 June 2020, #BlackoutTuesday, millions posted black squares in
solidarity with the fight for social justice following the murder of George
Floyd. Western classical music institutions, swept up in the moment
and having to face real-life events, looked up, shook the sand out of
their once-buried ears and found themselves black-squaring, minutesilencing,
######-ing and sincerely pledging their heartfelt allegiances
via social media.
These public gestures of support for BLM were greeted with much
scepticism and raised eyebrows by those who have endured working
on the perimeters of Western classical music for many years. And let’s
be completely honest, the problematic issues of racial bias, inequality
and lack of representation in programming did not cross the minds of
many white colleagues working in the classical music sector in January
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2020. After 2 June 2020, with the issue now at the front of the agenda,
much handwringing was followed by calls for time to ‘reflect, learn and
change’.
These calls have resulted in music colleges, arts organisations, concert
halls and opera houses around the world having to take a long hard look
at what they’ve ignored in the past, and to consider what they need to do
now with their curriculums and programmes to present work that reflects
the rich and varied musical voices in classical music today. How can
they be more representative? How can they embrace the decolonisation
of classical music and allow it to liberate and open up the genre to the
benefit of all?
It’s not enough to shove in a few works and ‘tick that box’. We need to
be completely honest, because to be effective these changes need to
be meaningful, and this requires a huge amount of self-reflection and
humility. There will always be some pushback against new ideas and
the need for change. And there will be plenty who disagree and who will
actively work to resist challenges to the status quo, but we should not
allow those dissenters to act as obstacles to progress. In fact, we need
to hurdle them.
‘Universality resides in the decision to recognise and accept
the reciprocal relativism of different cultures, once the colonial
status is irreversibly excluded.’
Frantz Fanon
So, I’d like to suggest that we start by banning the preposterous notion
of the ‘genius’ composer/artist/conductor/artistic director, etc… Let’s
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unburden these individuals of the heavy tasks laid upon their genius
shoulders and replace it with collaboration. By collaborating, we draw on
the expertise of all and therefore widen the circle of artistic experience.
What about job titles? Well, what about them? What’s in a name? I
understand the need for them in large organisations but being an Artistic
Director doesn’t equate to having the best ideas, or good leadership skills.
In my experience, the best directors aren’t afraid to seek opinions or
advice from their colleagues; will publicly acknowledge their colleagues’
ideas; and when called upon in times of difficulty, will shoulder the
responsibility of taking criticism and share the ‘glory’ with the team.
Deep work. Inner work. Deep work. Inner work. Pause and reflect:
Do the work: ‘Childlike’ behaviour
Let’s rewind the clock and be ‘childlike’ for a moment. Children are
completely carefree. They’re inquisitive, they’re unafraid of admitting
that they don’t understand, or of asking for help. They hear music and
respond to it with immediacy, directness, and honesty. In other words,
they express their likes and dislikes. Analysis and so-called ‘deeper’
questions of whether music is good, bad, culturally appropriated,
colonised/decolonised, etc aren’t obstacles to the pure enjoyment of
what they’re hearing. The music they experience is of itself. A ‘childlike’
listening approach can be a portal to incredible musical journeys. So be
childlike.
Do the work: This might hurt
‘Fuck Classical Music’: these three words, uttered by a friend, left me
reeling for a while. Until that point, I hadn’t realised the extent to which
I had placed this genre on a very high pedestal. I prided myself for not
having an either/or approach to music – treating it as an egalitarian,
equal music. However, fuck classical music felt like an assault. And that
led to much self-reflection on why I felt the need to defend this institution,
which has been shored up by colonisation, imperalism, conquest and
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aggressive globalisation at the expense of indigenous cultures.
It is indefensible. On top of which, Western classical music’s significance
and relevance is declining, and will continue to do so as long as those
in positions of influence continue to prevent other voices from being
represented within the canon and failing to create a new canon that
connects to the 21st century.
The backlash against decolonising classical music has been going on for
a while. It’s driven by a misunderstanding of what decolonising actually
means, and a belief that it requires a Year Zero approach to Western
classical music. This isn’t helped by alarmist media accounts which do
their best to stoke the ‘anti-PC’ fire. For example: ‘Musical notation has
been branded “colonialist” by Oxford professors hoping to reform their
courses to focus less on white European culture’. Not at all.
So, what can be done?
Create a platform for change. And what better platform is there than the
performance stage? Artists and composers, check your privilege and use
these opportunities to effect positive change. As for ADs and curators,
check your privilege and your egos and trust the ideas and suggestions
of the artists you invite to present work and support them. Don’t let fear
of box office numbers, bums on seats or disgruntled patrons chain you to
the purgatory of middlebrow, mediocre, same-old same-old programmes.
By this I’m not referring to the mainstream canon; it can equally apply to
contemporary new music repertoire. And before you say ‘but…’, I am going
to leave Julius Eastman out of this because after more than 30 years in
the desert, he is now well and truly part of the new music family (props to
those who championed him long before he became ‘fashionable’ – you
know who you are!) ‘What can we programme that shows we’re woke if
it’s not a commission?’ is the anguished cry, to which I respond: do your
research, ask for advice. There’s nothing more disheartening than the
sound of tumbleweed following the euphoria of a premiere. Do the work.
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An example from the archives:
Hans Werner Henze composed El Cimarrón (The Runaway Slave) during
his stay in Cuba in 1969-70, having read Miguel Barnet’s Autobiography of
a Runaway Slave, about Esteban Montejo. Montejo was born into slavery
in Cuba and eventually escaped. He was also a veteran of the Cuban
War of Independence. El Cimarrón premiered in Berlin in 1970 with the
avant-garde African-American operatic baritone William Pearson as El
Cimarrón, and the soloists Karlheinz Zöller (flute), Leo Brouwer (guitar)
and Stomu Yamash’ta (percussion) under the direction of the composer.
To my surprise, I learned that the UK premiere was in June 1970 at the
Aldeburgh Festival with the same forces. This information is of great
importance and significance in terms of legacy and understanding how
artists can and have worked to decolonise music with the support of
institutions. I can’t understand why El Cimarrón isn’t performed more
regularly. The work was most recently revived in 2019 with Davone Tines
(bass-baritone) in the title role as part of a series curated by (soprano)
Julia Bullock during her season-long MET Residency. Like Henze and
Pearson before them, Bullock and Tine are artists who have chosen
to use their privilege in an effective way to present political work and
question the canon, without the need to apologise for their choices.
Of course, Henze is not the only composer who was unafraid to express
his politics in music, but I cite this work as an example of a white
composer whose ‘artistic credo was that music ought to have something
to say about human emotion and to contribute to contemporary society.’
In a conversation with George E. Lewis, Georg Haas spoke about his
2014 piece I Can’t Breathe, composed in response to the police killing
of Eric Garner: ‘… it’s not my job to protest in the streets. It’s my job to
protest in the arts.’ In other words, you don’t have to be a BIPOC to call
out racial injustices.
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Note to commissioners: the life experiences of BIPOC composers are
as rich and varied as those of white composers, and should be allowed
room to be expressed. If this is enabled, audiences will be able to engage
with works for what they are, without the stress of ‘searching’ for:
• ‘hidden meanings/messages’ of the [fill in the ethnicity] composer
• ‘fear’ of ‘getting it wrong’ or
• ‘discomfort’ due to uncomfortable topics being explored. As a side
thought: I wonder whether those works by Henze and Haas would
have been commissioned if they were by BIPOC composers? Just
putting it out there.
Returning to William Pearson, the baritone who sang the lead role in El
Cimarrón: like his colleague and collaborator Ben Patterson, he enjoyed
a good career, based mainly in Europe. Embarrassingly, their work and
output were unknown to me throughout my time studying at music
college, and they remain largely unrecognised even in 2021. I know this
through my teaching experience at conservatoire level. It’s impossible to
know everything, of course, but there’s no excuse for musical agnosia.
Neither artist was on the fringes or margins of the contemporary new
music scene in their time: Patterson (who died in 2016) was one of the
founders of the Fluxus movement, and Pearson (died 1995) was the
favourite baritone for ‘dada evenings’ hosted by European composers,
and whose vocal expertise and extended range incorporating falsetto
was instrumental to the development of what later became known as
Vocal Theatre. Along with Henze, he worked with new music luminaries
Mauricio Kagel, György Ligeti and Silvano Busotti. Hardly on the outer
limits of the scene, and as a Black British vocalist studying at music
college a thousand years ago, it would have been inspirational for me to
have known about such iconoclasts as Pearson, Patterson, Julia Perry
and, yes, Julius Eastman. The fact that they’ve been silenced speaks
volumes.
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This isn’t about either/or, good/bad, accept/reject. It’s about balancing
and equity of opportunity. It’s also about the acknowledgement by those
in charge – the ‘gatekeepers’ – of their own shortcomings and how
short-sighted, blinkered viewpoints have misrepresented the canon. All
is not lost. It can be rectified. Drawing on my own modest experiences of
curating and presenting work, I have welcomed the expertise, knowledge
and experience of my colleagues who devoted their time to work with
my ideas of mixing up programmes. The most recent opportunity was
in April 2021, with my debut at the Wigmore Hall in London performing
work by Charles Mingus, Louise Bourgeois, Christian Wolff, Jeanne Lee,
Ben Patterson, Katalin Ladik and myself. I smiled at a preview in The
Telegraph newspaper, which billed the concert as ‘Jazz’. It certainly
wasn’t – but it’s OK, people find a way in...
I am grateful to the openness and support of Wigmore Hall’s AD John
Gilhooly, who embraced my programme and was enthusiastic all the
way. I experienced the same with Björn Gottstein (SWR Donaueschinger
Musiktage), who supported my concept of a movement performance
work based on the writing of Sylvia Wynter, and involving a singer (me),
a quintet, two dancers and a choreographer, plus five commissioned
works (by Jason Yarde, Tansy Davies, George E. Lewis, Matana Roberts,
Laure M. Hiendl). All of this resulted in On Being Human As Praxis, which
premiered during the pandemic at the festival in October 2020. I believe
it was the first time the festival had ever commissioned work by Africandiasporic
composers in its 100-year history. My idea for the piece was
to be able to present what I understand to be contemporary new music,
with its myriad voices standing equally together, and the universality of
human experience being the driving force. Three years ago, I performed
Vocal Classics of the Black Avant-Garde at the London Contemporary
Music Festival. The audience reception of this concert of experimental
or ‘free’ jazz music of the 1960s/70s was incredible and proved that it
is possible to present this kind of work (normally heard within a jazz
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context) in a programme of contemporary new music and experimental
performance/sound art. LCMF is no stranger to provocative/controversial
programming and is equally loved and loathed for it. And its rogue ‘fuck
it’ sensibility is refreshing in the increasingly risk-averse atmosphere of
the classical sector.
And if it requires a ‘fuck this shit’ approach to redress the balance and
present a more considered, more true and representative approach to
the canon in schools and colleges, concert halls and opera houses, then
so be it. If people leave their institutions because they can’t face the
change, or they feel their ‘power’ slipping, or the ability to have a childlike
openness has deserted them, or they won’t fix their earwax problems, or
they feel on the margins – then that’s OK too. It’s a simple choice: step
aside, or be the change.
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INTERVIEW WITH
RAED YASSIN
BY ENDRE DALEN
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Raed Yassin is an interdisciplinary artist working in the fields of visual
arts, writing and sound – everything from turntablism to science fiction
to the music of his band Praed. In this interview, he discusses colonial
documents such as field recordings produced by Western ethnographers.
Yassin is especially interested in our collective history through the lens
of pop culture.
In his 1995 book Memory for Forgetfulness, the Palestinian poet
Mahmoud Darwish describes the Israeli invasion and siege of Beirut
in August 1982 – in beautiful, poetic prose. You grew up during the
Lebanese civil war, in which the state of Israel played a terrifying role.
What do you remember from that time?
I remember the invasion. I remember that Beirut was under siege for over
three months. It was terrible. No food, no electricity, trash everywhere,
and the country was bombed. I remember that we fled to the south of
Lebanon, because Beirut was so dangerous. In the south, the Israelis
had still occupied the land but the conflict was not so heavy, as the focus
was on Beirut in 1982. That’s what I remember. I was very young, but I
still have some flashbacks from that period.
By contrast, in an article in Autre, you describe the ‘Swinging Sixties
and Super Seventies – a time of pleasure and paradise in Beirut, when it
was the designated erotic capital of the Arab world.’ It sounds a bit like
an orientalist fantasy, a dream, or perhaps a nightmare, and I’m trying
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to imagine what that was like. Even in places like Mogadishu, Tehran
and Kabul, you could find a youth culture of disco-funk music, afros and
miniskirts in the seventies. What was Beirut like back then?
Knowing the context of that article and the context of my art practice
would help you understand that statement better. I’m equally an artist
and a musician. In my art practice I use fiction, as well as in my narrative
stories. That fiction is based on consumer culture and pop culture from
the Arab region. For some reason in the 1960s and 70s, Lebanon held
a special position in the Arab world and it was different from Tehran or
Mogadishu, although I know that there was a funk movement going in
the latter.
Part of the literature that I encountered in my upbringing was selling
itself as erotic magazines, but actually the content was more like gossip
about celebrities. Like everything else, everywhere in the 1960s you got
this spy movie feeling, like in a James Bond movie: girls in bikinis, some
action, some scandals and some funky music to boot.
My text for Autre was all based on fiction, which suited that magazine
well. Pop culture is a key to open the door to our collective unconscious,
to what we have inherited. Everything from consumerism – meaning
consuming images and sound – and how to reflect on it. This is where
the fiction comes in. It might sound orientalist because back then,
Lebanon was producing a lot of culture. And that goes for so many other
places in the Arab world, including India, Pakistan and African countries.
There’s always a Western gaze towards the ‘other’ or the ‘exotic’; in East
Asia or South East Asia, even Hawaiians were exotic.
Advertisements were made in that kind of aesthetic. The Egyptian
guitarist Omar Khorshid was selling records that looked orientalist or
exotic, and everybody was investing in that. We were also invested in
that image and Lebanon was counting on tourists. When Egypt and Syria
became one country in the late 1950s, a lot of artists fled to Lebanon,
because it was more of a capitalist country, and not socialist. The
entertainment business of music and film grew enormously in that era,
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and I’m interested in why that happened in our part of the world at that
particular time. But there are no simple answers to this question – its
roots go in so many different directions.
Can you tell me about your new album Archeophony?
It’s an archaeology of phonics – ‘Archeophony’. I started collecting
material for this project ten years ago, when I was playing the turntables
as an instrument. I was interested in collecting recordings of solo
instruments from the Middle East, but also from places like South Asia,
South East Asia and North Africa. Most of these albums were recorded
by European scholars, while a very few were by Japanese scholars.
I believe these are colonial documents of the cultures of the world. I’m
trying to question those documents, not always in a condemnatory way.
What has happened has happened: I deal with the world as it is now. We
cannot reverse history, but we can reflect on it, and try to study it, and
prevent history from repeating itself. I found some of these recordings,
started collecting them, and tried to create these science-fiction
scenarios with the use of synthesizers, drum machines, sequencers,
turntables and other instruments. I wanted to put these recordings, which
have somehow already lived a life, into new contexts, new narratives.
The people who recorded them were mostly unknown ethnographers,
and these are field recordings that in many ways happened by chance.
I’m kind of taking them into a new time and space. A question we can
ask is: If there was no archiving in this way, would the music be lost
forever? I’m sure that in times of colonialism, the colonisers were also
responsible for the disappearance of traditions. That’s also something
that we must take into consideration.
It’s fascinating how you convert readings from the Quran into music in
Archeophony. What do you see as the relationship between music and
the Quran?
I’ve always had a fascination about the art of reciting the Quran. There
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are so many avant-garde reciters who have been neglected and pushed
outside of the Islamic clerics’ practices. People who found a way around
the Islamic rules. Arabic in particular has changed and developed, but
still has a very strong source: the Quran. Arabic is a holy language and
many read that language, but not everyone actually speaks it, because it
has so many different dialects. And the language used in the Quran is a
very old language, so many people don’t understand it.
In general Arabic is very phonetic, and sometimes the sound of things is
the same as the words. The word for the sound of a snake is so similar to
the sound itself, for instance. Arabic has a strong relationship to sound.
And it has a lot to do with music. What is the miracle of the Quran? Actually
in all the Abrahamic religions there are miraculous things happening, like
how Moses turns the staff into a snake, or Jesus walking on water and
curing the sick. But Mohammed only had language, that was his miracle,
nobody could beat that kind of logic.
The Quran was only transmitted orally and memorised in the beginning.
It took hundreds of years before it was written down. Arab poetry
is all related to music. In recitations of the Quran, there are so many
interpretations in how you can read it. They read it by using the seven
maqams – it’s seven scales actually – but it’s not purely Arab. It’s also
influenced by the Turks, Iran and South Asia. It’s extremely rare to hear a
woman reading the Quran, but I have at least one 7’ record of that.
I know of some female Sufi poets, such as Abida Parveen from Pakistan.
Why are there so few of them?
It’s different, but this is interesting: how Islam works in the Arab world is
quite different from how Islam works in the non-Arab speaking world. One
thing is the difference between Sufi poetry and recitals from the Quran.
Another thing is the difference between the Arab part of the world and
places like Indonesia and Pakistan. In Indonesia, which is around ninety
per cent Muslim, it’s not haram – forbidden – for females to recite the
Quran, like it is in the Arab world. Something is lost in translation when
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the Arabic language is not understood. The digestion of the language
is very different for those who speak Arabic and those who don’t. So
they recite the Quran, while they don’t understand the language they are
speaking.
In the first version of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s 1981 album My Life
In The Bush Of Ghosts, there’s a sample from a record named Music in
the World of Islam, Volume One: The Human Voice on the track ‘Qu’ran’.
The track was highly controversial at the time and was removed from
later reissues of the album. What’s your position in the debate around
rebranding artworks, editing or even cancelling them?
I don’t think erasing history will help. I support removing statues glorifying
colonialism, and depicting military leaders who have committed crimes.
But this is different. We should study history and prevent it from repeating
itself. You cannot use the ‘N’ word to describe someone. But neither can
you change the title of Julius Eastman’s piece Crazy Nigger. He called it
Crazy Nigger and there is a political/racial background to why he called
it that. There was a strange problem when composer and scholar Mary
Jane Leach was attacked for using the word in an article, but she was
only referring to the title of the piece itself.
The populists use the masses. When you know only half the truth,
knowledge becomes a really dangerous weapon. That’s why we really
need to know what we are talking about. Julius Eastman was speaking
about the black American experience in that piece – how it felt to him.
This is the terrible history of the United States. He wanted it to be named
Crazy Nigger. It’s American history, and that we cannot change. We cannot
erase the struggle. The full brutality of history should be documented, so
we know what happened. We display colonial objects in museums, so
why not make museums about slavery? It’s like it didn’t exist.
I need the freedom to discuss Islam. The word Islamophobia is very
elastic, and sometimes it’s used in the wrong way. It’s pretty foggy. How
can we go forward if there’s no discussion? I come from the Arab world,
23

but I’m not Muslim, I am an atheist, and I need the freedom to criticise
Islam. I’m not an Islamophobe, either. If I were making hate speech, it
would be different. But still, in some countries of the Arab world I could
go to jail or even get killed for criticising Islam.
Archeophony is based on so-called ‘ethnic’ music recordings conducted
between the 1950s and 1980s by Western ethnomusicologists. This, in
turn, is related to Edward Said’s concept of orientalism. There is also an
interesting passage in Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, where
he quotes two white supremacists:
‘Gobineau said: “The only history is white.” M. Callois in turn observes:
“The only ethnography is white.” It is the West that studies the
ethnography of the others, not the others who study the ethnography
of the West.’
Césaire showed how modern social sciences were based on white
supremacy, and therefore justified colonialisation. How can we turn this
idea on its head, and show that people from the Middle East are also
capable of studying themselves, and even the West?
The West considers the others as others, while they are at the centre,
and people from the rest of the world are not part of the discussion. That
is an absolute truth that the West conveys. In all cultural production –
philosophy, music, the arts – the West doesn’t consider other ethnicities
as equals. You can see this practice all around the world. Too many
people who are interested in decolonisation come from rather white
backgrounds. In a way, they colonise you and decolonise you at the
same time.
It’s all in the vocabulary, and the way of thinking has grown out of white
institutions. Many of these discussions take place in Europe, and it’s a
good thing that more POCs – people of colour – are talking about it
now than ever before. There are many institutions trying to employ POCs,
but it feels like they are only doing it to show that they are prioritising
diversity. I feel that this is a problem: doing something when you don’t
24

really mean it is a disaster. Some people will feel used. Human rights is
not fashion. But now it is fashionable, somehow. Do you see what I’m
saying?
Yes, it’s like something Tom Wolfe writes about in his book Radical
Chic. Western institutions are currently trying to follow the times,
while in reality they are mostly dealing in tokenism. But people are not
tokens, like replaceable parts. Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o says
that the decolonising of the mind starts with language: Cultivate your
own language, your mother tongue. How does this apply to you and the
Arabic language?
There’s tons of knowledge in Arabic, and knowledge is power. There was
a Lebanese painter who went to Andalusia, and he commented that ‘it’s
so sad to see that the glory days are behind you’. So the glory days of
the Arab world are gone. The power dynamics in the world also play a
big role. Many Western regimes do empower dictators in the Arab world.
These regimes in turn use the ignorance of the people against them.
Because if you’re ignorant, you can’t really revolt. It’s not only poverty, it’s
also the thinking – if you’re educated or not. If they oppress you enough,
you don’t have time to think. If you have to wait five hours to get bread,
you don’t have time to think. You can’t be creative or think critically.
What’s happening in many Arab countries is too bad. The regimes don’t
invest in the infrastructure of humans.
Earlier in 2021, the Iraqi founder of Nawa Recordings, Khyam Allami,
unveiled two music production tools in order to decolonise electronic
music, as reported in an article in Pitchfork. Tunisian musicians Deena
Abdelwahed and Kenyan Slikback were among those who acknowledged
the usefulness of the software. What’s the hype all about, and have you
tried this or any other software that aims to escape from Western bias?
What Khyam Allami is doing is epic. I haven’t tried the said software,
but I know that it’s called Leimma and Apotome. It’s an essential and
25

necessary piece of research: to have the different options. Decolonisation
needs to appear in the new recording tools; it’s as if the twelve-note
tuning system is the only one that exists. Everything is actually related
to this bias, and the internet and social media needs to be decolonised
as well. You can see it in the censorship that occurs on Facebook or
Instagram when Arabs post about the Palestinian cause. Social media
is being manipulated. It’s important to have options. Many people don’t
even know that music production software has any bias.
So many people in the West don’t think it’s necessary to make software
like Apotome and Leimma, or to decolonise the internet. What do you
think about that?
I feel pity for them. It means that they are very narrow-minded. To be
against this approach is pretty weird – it is to believe that you are the
centre of the world; that there’s an absolute truth. While in reality there
are so many other possibilities. Every person of every colour, of every
nation, needs to be open-minded, especially within the arts and cultural
fields, where a really big scope of what’s going on in the world is needed.
You can’t always be the centre of the universe. Whatever you need isn’t
necessarily in the market.
You run the record label Annihaya Records, organise the Irtijal Festival
for Experimental Music, are a member of the band Praed and work as an
interdisciplinary artist. Which of these do you most enjoy doing?
I’m doing what I’m doing, and life guides you. If you study the biographies
of so many artists, you find that they usually have huge interests in so
many things. I try to broaden my scope as an artist. While I don’t have to
be successful at everything I do, I do know that no matter what I do, it will
enrich my role and understanding of life.
I have an interest in everything from the arts to music, even cooking
and travelling. For me, it’s also important to release other artists’ music,
organise festivals where other artists can shine: platforms where ideas
26

and other points of view can grow. Involving others in what I do is
important. It’s important to throw your idea into a pool of thinking and
see how the idea develops, because if it’s only developed in your head,
it’s not as sustainable.
27

‘NOT YET UHURU’:
DECOLONISING OUR
IMAGINATIONS, PUSHING
BACK THE FRONTIERS
BY ARETHA PHIRI
28

Frontier: noun.
1. the part of a country that borders another country; boundary; border.
2. the land or territory that forms the furthest extent of a country’s
settled or inhabited regions.
3. Often frontiers.
• the limit of knowledge or the most advanced achievement in a
particular field: the frontiers of physics.
• an outer limit in a field of endeavour, especially one in which
the opportunities for research and development have not been
exploited.
Dictionary.com
In the month of June 2021, South Africa formally entered a third, more
aggressive wave of the Coronavirus pandemic. When the first instance of
Covid-19 in the country was officially reported on 5 March 2020 followed
by the declaration of a national state of disaster on 15 March, initial,
detached cynicism at news of the existence of a new and potentially deadly
virus emanating from Wuhan, China was replaced by palpable angst and
resentment at the deleterious effects of cosmopolitan globalisation.
What is frequently experienced and described in South Africa as
‘Afrophobia’ – a (violent) prejudice against the presence of ‘foreign’
African nationals – quickly translated into a more generic xenophobic
sentiment that included foreign nationals from across the globe. In line
29

with the resultant lockdowns – characterised by restricted movement
and limited activity – South Africa, as with other nations worldwide,
closed its borders to the outside(rs). Although the pandemic’s impact was
and continues to be felt globally, this survivalist impulse – a sovereign
imperative to protect its citizens and save lives – was underwritten
by a particular nationalist discourse highlighted in the president, Cyril
Ramaphosa’s, national Covid addresses, which invariably commenced
with the (deadpan) greeting: ‘My fellow South Africans.’
These discursive and institutionalised frontiers, which see the country
prioritising the vaccination of its citizens ahead of foreign nationals and
migrants living (legally and illegally) in its borders, replicates an ensuing
global vaccine nationalism in which more advanced economies the likes
of Europe and the UK prioritize – through blatant vaccine hoarding and
disproportionate vaccine pricing – the wellbeing of their own citizens.
South Africa’s sense of its own exceptionalism – its distinctly advanced
sociopolitical and socioeconomic standing on the African continent –
is contrary to its rhetorical intimations of promoting, European Unionlike,
developmental African Unity. But not unlike the (implicit) ethnicised
anti-immigrant sentiment that characterises more advanced Western
economies, South Africa’s localised iterations of global apartheid –
the closing of its borders and subsequent ‘lockdown’ of its citizens –
echoed its colonial-apartheid past and exposed further the inequality
and violence that is entrenched in and has come to undermine its
democratic mandate, post-apartheid. Alongside reports of increased
unemployment, poverty and crime levels, government statistics revealed
increased reports of violent policing and violations of the civil rights and
liberties of its (primarily poorer) citizens during the initial lockdown. In
particular and also declared a national pandemic, gender-based violence
reportedly increased exponentially, cementing the ugly truth and sad
reality of a society permeated and ravaged by heteropatriarchal norms
and a manifest toxic masculinity.
30

Not quite the apocalyptic, extinction-level event divined in spiritual and
atheist circles alike, Covid-19 did lay bare the embedded toxicity of our
human relations. Upending global mainstream militarist mantras that we
‘wage war’ against the lamentably disruptive and fatal virus, the pandemic
highlighted our own socially engineered pandemics – economic poverty,
social inequality, structural and physical violence, racism, sexism
and the endless ‘ism’s’ that obtain – now typical of a sanctioned neoliberal
capitalist world. Where poorer, global South countries naively
predicted and championed the worldwide democratising potential of
the transnational virus, financial representatives of richer global North
nations, touting Churchilian hearsay of never wasting a ‘good’ crisis,
opportunistically harnessed the moment to profit further from global
inequalities. This apparent entrenchment of global apartheid sentiment
and practice is seemingly endorsed by the World Trade Organization
(WTO) and its donors’ reticence to consider the prospect of a vaccine
patent waiver for poorer, Third World nations. The muscular display of
global North neo-imperialist dominance, then, evidences how the race
for and subsequent nationalisation of vaccines is premised not just on
survivalist instincts, but on enduringly racialised, ‘anti-black’ colonial
hierarchies and prejudices, occasions of which triggered a second wave
of the global Black Lives Matter movement.
But while the unprecedented number of Covid-related deaths that were
also disproportionately black in the US, UK and Europe might be read in the
global South as a macabre simulation and realignment of the accepted
fate of ‘Third World’ countries, such biases are also translated at the level
of (political) class. South Africa’s own embarrassing mismanagement and
noxious exploitation of the pandemic – including the Personal Protective
Equipment (PPEs) corruption scandal – were overseen by a ruling-party
political elite whose claims of entitlement to official Broad-based Black
Economic Empowerment (BBBEE) programmes have, contrary to the
government’s post-apartheid electoral promises of racial integration and
31

redress, adversely affected the (economic) wellbeing of its majority black,
poor citizens. Along with decreased household income levels and record
high overall and youth unemployment figures of 42.3 and 74.7 per cent
respectively, the unnecessarily high number of infections and death rates
– the result of stalled vaccination programmes and concomitant vaccine
hesitancy – exposed South Africa’s infrastructural unpreparedness for
and lacklustre management of the virus. The malaise of post-colonial
governance and the disaffection of its citizens witnessed country-wide
in typically explosive service-delivery protests, is aptly prophesied in
Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and astutely reiterated in Achille
Mbembe’s On the Postcolony, revealing a post-apartheid nation that is
embedded in and reproduces the (structural) violence of its colonial and
apartheid history.
As a phenomenon witnessed worldwide, however, the largely inadequate
and tardy reaction to the pandemic points to what World Health
Organization (WHO) head, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has described
as a global ‘catastrophic moral failure’, a moral deficiency that, if global
warming and environmental degradation have shown us anything, has
become endemic to our species. With this is mind, while we pontificate
about how best to manage and defeat the virus, perhaps we should be
questioning the extent to which we are or have become a pandemic.
Complacent and complicit in the continuing global asymmetries of
power and access that have so characterised our planet and our
relations, we do not appear to have used the ravages of Covid-19 as an
occasion to properly reflect upon and re-think our lived realities. Viruslike,
we ourselves have simply mutated and shape-shifted to – become
adaptable and adaptive variants of – our (newly) sanitised, socialdistanced
lives.
Within the profession to which I belong, Higher Education’s move to (a)
synchronous, hybrid-model remote learning/teaching is a case in point.
32

At the height of the first wave of the pandemic, the unprecedented and
swift embrace of digital technologies hastened, catapulted us into, the
much prophesied, futuristic Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). This helped
to continue the academic project. But it also came at an expense. Where
global tech giants – none of whom are women – witnessed increased
profit margins, Higher Education experienced deficit learning outcomes as
the demands for digital technologies exceeded institutional operational
capacities. In South Africa, pandemic-induced reliance on digital
technologies did not just undermine current imperatives to decolonise
the curriculum through a process of ‘Africanisation’ that includes the
advocacy and deployment of non-Western ‘indigenous knowledge
systems’; digital technologies unveiled institutional discrepancies and
students’ disproportionate, asymmetrical access to digital technologies,
despite the reported gains of social media interconnectivity. More
worrying, global and national research reported increased mental and
emotional unwellness/stress 1 among staff and students unable to adjust
to and cope with the pressure of being always ‘on[the]line’. And equally
disturbing, women scholars reportedly experienced lower research
productivity levels 2 compared to their male counterparts as increased
institutional demands of teaching and administration competed with
the exigencies of home and family life. Reiterating the gender divide
in this way, epistemic injustice translates into representational, even
ontological, injustice. So, while further revealing and facilitating our
inexorable worldwide interconnectedness in potentially democratising
and transformative ways, our uncritical embrace of digital technologies
during this pandemic has at the same time shown how our race to/
for the future falls short of twenty-first century decolonial imperatives
of inclusivity and diversity; it has exposed an embeddedness in and
accentuation of global inequalities which translate into and operate on
1 Or https://mg.co.za/coronavirus-essentials/2020-06-05-academics-health-suffersunder-covid-19/
2 Or https://www.sun.ac.za/english/Lists/news/DispForm.aspx?ID=7711
33

localised, domestic existential frontiers.
One such example is Makhanda, the monikered ‘City of Saints’ formerly
known as Grahamstown and home to the famed second largest
international National Arts Festival. ‘Founded’ in the Eastern Cape
province in 1812 as a military outpost in order to further secure British
influence in the Cape colonies – a colonial feat achieved through the
violent forced removal of the indigenous amaXhosa and culminating in
the fourth ‘Frontier War’ or eGazini, the 1819 battle of Grahamstown –
Grahamstown/Makhanda became the second largest town after Cape
Town to develop into a Settler colony, thereby marking the passage of
British colonial influence that permeates the city today.
Home to the renowned Rhodes University and some of the most
prestigious (and expensive) private and public schools in the country,
Anglo-Saxon legacies endure, and not just in the memorialising and
commemorative colonial place-names and rituals. Mirroring colonialapartheid
South Africa’s structural race-relations, predominantly white
suburban (intellectual and economic) opulence lives un/comfortably
alongside majority black township (intellectual and economic)
deprivation. Simulating the city’s racialised frontier cartographies, Eurocentric
ideological roots (and ideals) are transplanted onto African soil
and become routed through our everyday relations and interactions, a
perpetual reminder, twenty-seven years post-apartheid and despite
changing racial demographics and black, middle class upward mobility
that history – that Orwellian palimpsest – repeats its nightmarish self,
repeatedly; that is, history is never erased, we are compelled to ‘live’ with
or through it.
Covid put paid to and tested the limits of our bounded existences and
mentalities. As more people became locked down and out of employment
and levels of hunger and desperation grew as a result, petty and violent
34

crime – already at pandemic levels in South Africa – rapidly increased in
the city. Tellingly, in attitudes famously satirised in the fiction of renowned
anti- and post-apartheid authors, Nadine Gordimer and Ivan Vladislavic,
suburbia’s penchant for securing itself firmly behind high, electricfenced/razor-wired
security walls, was reinforced during the pandemic
by increased surveillance and policing in affluent neighbourhoods that
outsource security companies to maintain suburban civilization by
keeping out the (black, township) ‘natives’. Annoyed at the proliferation
of (young) black men crossing into his suburban borders, a male
member of one such affluent neighbourhood’s WhatsApp ‘security’ group
explained that these ‘unkempt’, ‘suspicious looking individuals’ have ‘no
place nor purpose lingering around our neighbourhood or engaging in
idle vagrancy. I must commend our small community for their active
vigilance … I will not support or tolerate desperate and vulnerable people
engaging in unilateral and non-consensual asset accumulation.’
While the words ‘unkempt,’ ‘suspicious’, ‘idle vagrancy’ and ‘lingering’
indicate and appear to acknowledge socio-economic vulnerability and
deprivation, if you live (long enough) in South Africa, you know that this
descriptive, adjectival lexicon – frontier ‘cannon fodder’ – also translates
into broadly anti-black and anti-poor racial euphemisms. Underlined here
is a repeated we/they dichotomy which, reiterating Apartheid’s separatist
spatial aesthetic and practice, advances a ‘dompas’ – literally ‘passlaws’
– attitude that does not just emphasise the notion of black alterity;
its criminalizing tenor which ignores the indignity and violence of poverty
finally poisons, in a post-apartheid, twenty-first century, the potential for
decolonised and equitable, fully (inclusive) human relations.
Declaring South Africa a ‘strange and morally tangled place to live in’,
Wits University philosopher, Sam Vice’s 2010 article entitled, ‘How do
I live in this strange place’, considers appropriate reparative responses
by white people to Apartheid’s lingering racial injustices and to their
35

continued situational privilege. Her ethical quandary is echoed in another
controversial text, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace which, set predominantly in
the Eastern Cape and in the fictional town of Grahamstown/Makhanda,
confronts historical frontier sites of (violent) race relations through the
intimate prism of (violent) sex. Published in 1999 and causing national
outrage and condemnation of Coetzee, the novel appeared to deride
post-apartheid’s unifying, discursive ‘rainbow nation’ euphoria. In its
ambiguous conclusion, Disgrace, as with Vice’s article, would have
us consider that the only moral solution to the question of how to live
morally ‘in this place’ involves a silent exercise in humility – a humbling
‘before history’.
But stepping away from and expanding the obviously racialised
paradigms employed by both writers, their controversial works advance
even more provocative inquiries that resonate on broadly existential
levels. The question of how to live morally in such a landscape, of how
to navigate our global apartheid legacies is a profoundly global human
question. What do we do and how do we live both responsibly and
responsively in the world? How do we decolonise our mindsets from
a world which, as we (currently) know it, is simply not enough? Where
South African songstress, Letha Mbulu’s, post-apartheid anthem, ‘Not Yet
Uhuru’, filled our ears with the cautionary sounds of the ongoing struggle
for structural freedom not-yet-realised, the critically acclaimed Indian
author, Arundhati Roy’s, reflection on the workings of the Covid-19 in a
country whose recent disastrous experience of a second wave revealed
public health underfunding and negligence comparable to that witnessed
in South Africa would seem to provide a more aspirational response.
Stating that historically, ‘pandemics have forced humans to break with
the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a
portal, a gateway between one world and the next’, she suggests that we
‘can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice
and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers
36

and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little
luggage, ready to imagine another world.’
The occasion to ‘walk through lightly’ belies the mundanity of our
everyday existences. Life as we ‘know it’ is here transformed from
conventional abstraction into an ethical act of and exercise in alterity,
what philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in Otherwise than Being describes
as a ‘susceptibility to being affected’ by otherness. As a creative Art form,
literature in particular affords just such imaginative scope to disrupt
positivist history and historiographies. If, as Canadian Poet, Dionne
Brand, suggests, ‘Writing is an act of desire … To write is to be involved
in the act of translation, of succumbing or leaning into another body’s
idiom’, then to read is a similarly transformative exercise of imaginative
migration. In going beyond the strictures of space and time – the ways
in which it invites us to journey across and move outside the nation’s
prescripts – literature impresses upon us/the reader the itinerancy of
our realities. It affords us the opportunity to travel lightly, without the
‘carcasses of our prejudice and hatred’ and to imagine other possible
ways to be.
Literature’s diasporic paradigm is evidenced in contemporary African
diaspora fiction, a generational genre of African literature composed by
authors typically not living on the continent and frequently described,
rather disparagingly, as Afropolitan. Censured in some critical quarters
for offering both ‘lite’ and dark – that is, sanitised and/or ostensibly
self-hating – versions of Africa that are tailor-made for a global North
readership, this literature is said to lack an authentically African texture
which, in failing to depict African ‘everyday realities’, perpetuates a
neo-colonisation of the continent. The inversely prescriptive tenor of
such criticism, however, is not just about the seemingly extroverted,
‘Western-oriented’ character of African diasporic literature. The need to
impose upon African literature in particular ‘pass laws’ that delimit the
way in which the continent can be imagined points to the pervasive
37

embeddedness – the haunting spectre – of the colonial power matrix.
And while the (popular) demands for an Afrocentric, pan-African
counternarrative is revealing of Africa’s discontents with the continued
(representational) marginalisation of the continent, despite the
democratising aspirations of cosmopolitan globalisation, the problem
of the colonial invention of Africa morphing into the overdetermined
postcolonial idea of Africa precipitates. This does not just reiterate and
reinforce the limited, and exclusionary, ways in which Africa has signified
in the global imagination. It typically results, as global history continues
to demonstrate, in violent essentialised and territorialised, boundaryreinforcing
identity politics and mass atrocities.
Herein is what African diaspora writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie,
delineates in her 2009 Ted Talk as the danger of single (meta-)narratives.
Underwriting Chris Abani’s professed conviction that ‘story is fluid and
belongs to nobody’, contemporary African diasporic literature’s aesthetic
advancement of less explicitly politicised, idiosyncratic versions of
African diasporic cultures, is an attempt, despite recurrent global
asymmetries, to decolonise – to go beyond ethnonationalist imperatives
– in order to facilitate more embodied and material considerations of
our universal interconnectedness. In her own efforts to ‘forge a sense
of self from wildly disparate routes’, Taiye Selasi’s sensitive portrayal
of intergenerational, transnational and cross-cultural African-American
familial relations in her novel, Ghana Must Go, domesticates politicised
imperatives to accentuate ‘the notoriously and gloriously disorderly
affair’ that is human life. As with the peripatetic characters in NoViolet
Bulawayo’s We Need New Names, this compels moving ‘across borders
and difference’ in ways that ‘speak and have always spoken to the very
core of our humanity’. Literature in particular, and the Arts in general,
encourage us to decolonise our imaginations – to push back (at)
established frontiers. As Toni Morrison has elsewhere so eloquently
observed, in this is the necessary reminder and a firm assurance in these
38

(pandemic) times that we as humankind have ‘always been imagining
ourselves … subjects of our own narrative, witnesses to and participants
in our own experience … We are not, in fact, ‘other’. We are choices.’
39

ELAINE MITCHENER is a contemporary vocalist, movement artist and
composer, whose practice encompasses improvisation, contemporary/
experimental music and dance. She has worked and collaborated
with numerous artists including Camae Ayewa (Moor Mother), Tansy
Davies, George E. Lewis, Christian Marclay, Apartment House, London
Sinfonietta, David Toop and Hannah Kendall. She is the founder of
collective electroacoustic trio The Rolling Calf with saxophonist Jason
Yarde and bassist Neil Charles.
RAED YASSIN is an artist and musician. He developed his conceptual
practice through multiple mediums such as video, sound, photography,
text, sculpture and performance. Yassin’s work often originates from an
examination of his personal narratives and their position within a collective
history through the lens of consumer culture and mass production. He
was a resident artist at De Ateliers, Amsterdam, the Delfina Foundation,
London, Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne and is a recipient of the
Abraaj Group Art Prize (2012). As a musician, he is one of the organisers
of the Irtijal Festival for Experimental Music (Beirut), and has released
several music albums with bands such as ‘A’ Trio and PRAED. In 2009,
he founded his independent music label Annihaya. Raed currently lives
between Berlin and Beirut.
ARETHA PHIRI is an associate professor in literature at Rhodes
University in Makhanda (Grahamstown), Eastern Cape in South Africa.
Her research broadly interrogates the intersectional interactions of race,
ethnicity, culture, gender and sexuality/ies in comparative, transatlantic
and transnational considerations of identity and subjectivity, with a
particular focus on American, African-American and contemporary
Afrodiasporic literature, as well as South African (post)-apartheid and
transnational literature, realist and modernist fiction and poetry.
40

Sounds Now: The Project
Sounds Now is a 4-year project presented by a consortium of 9 European
music festivals and cultural institutions that disseminate contemporary
music, experimental music and sound art.
In this project, we are concerned with the way in which the contemporary
music and sound art worlds reproduce the same patterns of power and
exclusion that are dominant at all levels of our societies, all the more
so because these sectors are committed to promoting progressive
agendas.
Sounds Now consequently aims to stimulate diversity within this
professional field by reflecting and challenging current curatorial
practices. Activities are directed at bringing new voices, perspectives
and backgrounds into contemporary music festivals. Centering on three
pillars of diversity — gender/gender identity, ethnic and socio-economic
background — the project includes a range of actions such as labs for
curators, mentorship programmes, artistic productions, symposia and
research. In this way, Sounds Now seeks to open up the possibility for
different experiences, conditions and perspectives to be defining forces
in shaping the sonic art that reaches audiences today.
www.sounds-now.eu
41

Sounds Now Partners
42

Creative Europe
Creative Europe is the European Commission’s framework programme
for support to the cultural and audiovisual sectors. It aims to improve
access to European culture and creative works and to promote innovation
and creativity.
The Culture Strand of Creative Europe helps cultural and creative
organisations such as those involved in the Sounds Now project to
operate transnationally. It provides financial support to activities with a
European dimension that aim to strengthen the transnational creation
and circulation of European works, promoting transnational mobility,
audience development (accessible and inclusive culture), innovation and
capacity building in digitisation, new business models, education and
training.
Sounds Now gratefully acknowledges the support provided by Creative
Europe in bringing artists and cultural operators the opportunity to foster
artistic works and improve practices, thereby contributing to a strong
and vibrant European music sector.
43

© 2021, Sounds Now
All rights reserved
Published by Musica, Impulse Centre for Music
Editor: Rob Young
Interview: Endre Dalen
Design: Patty Kaes
Print: Haletra, Houthalen-Helchteren, Belgium
Distribution: Musica, Impulse Centre for Music, Pelt, Belgium
ISBN 9789464335989
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication
reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for
any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and essayists.
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ISBN 9789464335989