Music |
Umalali: The Garifuna Women’s Project
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
World
When my heart hardens and my armor needs piercing, I go to the music of women. And if they don’t sing in English, the better — it’s the sound that heals. Like the music of the Garifuna women of Belize.
I have already praised Andy Palacio and the Garifuna Collective. That effort to save a culture and language from extinction was admirable. But even more, the music was spectacular — I thought this was the most interesting World CD I heard in 2007. To buy “Umalali: The Garifuna Women’s Project” from Amazon, click here.]
And now, ten years in the making, we have a dozen songs by Garifuna women. It was recorded where Ivan Duran, the CD’s inexhaustible producer, found women singing: in kitchens, streets, temples. They sang of the life they knew. And, when asked to record, they showed up when they could make time.
One song was inspired by a conversation overhead between a grandmother and her granddaughter. “Leave behind those street-walking girlfriends of yours,” she says. “That is not glory, that is not luck. Good luck for you is obeying my words.”
Another song asks an unborn child why his birth is so difficult. Another, again sung from a mother’s point-of-view, laments rumors that she is prostituting her daughter: “All I can do is look around, I am so disappointed/ It is all over the newspapers on the streets.” Almost as an answer, another singer dismisses all gossip about her: “I only depend on one thing, and that is work/ No one will make me hang my head here.”
Another song is a wife’s lament to her traveling husband. And, perhaps the saddest, is a mother’s cry at hearing the news that her policeman son has been killed in a brawl. “What will become of me on this earth now that you’re gone?” she asks. “What shall I say to your siblings when they arrive?”
These lyrics are not exactly a pick-me-up, so the good news is that you won’t understand a word these women are singing. But the feel of the CD isn’t sad in any way. The music is pretty much pure joy.
The joy is the living, the simple fact of it. History bypassed these women long ago; theirs is the life of eternal duties, ancient rhythms and primal emotions. Photographed in cotton dresses against sand and sea, they look wise. And they look beautiful — beautiful because of what they know rather than how they look.
And so, when they sing, you feel they are singing truth. They don’t really have another reason to sing — they’ve had no show-biz careers and won’t get them now. So these songs are like field recordings, which are then layered and processed and yet somehow still sound authentic.
I’ve had “Umalali” in heavy rotation for weeks now, as an antidote to a tsunami of bad news and the prospect of more coming. I hear the strumming of guitars, the pulsing of drums, and then, like a knife, Sofia Blanco asking for a moment with her granddaughter. I don’t know how that conversation worked out in the lives of its characters. In my life, she has my fullest attention.
