Revolution, Embodiment, and the Black Feminist Sound: a Sound-Text Analysis
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Revolution, Embodiment, and the Black Feminist Sound: A Sound-Text Analysis of Lillian Allen’s “Revolutionary Tea Party” by Maria Caridad Casas Department of English University of Toronto In my forthcoming book on the transcription of creole in Afro-Caribbean Canadian feminist poetry (Casas) I examine the connections between meaning and materiality through the social semiotic category of mode. Mode is the socially- recognizable style of a medium, a type of style which carries social and therefore crucial meanings in any text. Mode tends to get short shrift in literary text analyses for reasons I will shortly suggest. The main purpose of this essay, however, is to extend my analysis of mode in Caribbean Canadian feminist poetry by taking up the sound aspects of a dub poem -- that is, analysing a dub poem as a sound-text. The specific text is the title track from the contemporary dub poet Lillian Allen’s album Revolutionary Tea Party, which was recorded with the Toronto band The Parachute Club in 1986 and released under Allen’s own label, Verse to Vinyl. I will analyse this text on its own terms. What those terms are, of course, is open to discussion, and it is this discussion I turn to next. Dub poetry is a genre that developed under the inspiration of reggae -- socially, politically and aesthetically. In written versions, its combination of syncopated rhythms, 2 attention to the beat, and emancipatory activist content is what makes it characteristic. Originating in the 1970’s, it quickly became part of the inventory of Jamaican verbal art forms of London, Toronto, and New York. Today, written and performed dub flourishes through the work of numerous poets in North America, Europe and the Caribbean, co- existing alongside its super-commercialized descendant, hip hop. Although dub has a double platform in sound and writing, academic critics of dub have not kept up with this dual activity,1 because literary studies as a discipline has always been concerned with written literary texts -- that is, written verbal art. This, in turn, is because literature has been considered written only. Thus, in close readings, only the written aspects of texts that are also meant to be performed are examined; the discipline does not look at performance as text, nor at the sound aspects as text of performed texts. Examining dub poetry as sound-text thus achieves two things: it emphasizes the ‘literary’ aspect of dub poetry (and therefore declares its cultural value); and it develops a reading methodology or approach to the sound-texts of verbal art. Though it may be argued that this sound-text analysis is something better left to musicologists, dub poets themselves consider their art form literature -- poetry -- rather than song. Yet, the sound of a dub is as much its meaning as is its written words; and to ignore the sound in a literary analysis for too long risks seriously misrepresenting this poetry. I interpret the famous dub and reggae slogan “word sound power” as word-sound and power, an emphasis on the power of word-sounds. This power operates in several 1 See however Eldridge and Carr for readings of Allen’s dubs that make references to their sound. 3 quite specific ways: the physical properties of a word-in-sound; the impact of those properties on the physical world; and the power the sound has in its referencing capabilities. It is something akin to naming in primary oral societies or those social contexts in which oral verbal art remains an important form of self-expression. In these contexts, naming is not taken lightly; naming physically conjures the thing named. Naming is something Allen is very aware of. According to Allen, to perform is to give power to words; to name is to access the power of what the name represents. Naming cancer, for example, is to “spell” 2 cancer in order to disempower it (Personal interview). Allen also taps visceral responses to sound by imitating in her performances the wail of a siren, or the lick of a whip, or the spasms of birthing labour. She has also used chants and political slogans to create cohesion in a crowd and thus to focus community protest. For Allen, as for all dub poets, sound as power is a concrete social as well as physical force. The title “Revolutionary Tea Party” contains two entities that are usually seen as contradictory: revolution and tea party. They are contradictory along several vectors. A revolution is a burst of energy in the public domain, changing history. A tea party is a restful activity in the domestic sphere; it connotes tradition and hence stability. The name is also an allusion to the Boston Tea Party and thus evokes a historical cultural context in which the terms ‘revolution’ and ‘tea party’ are heavily gendered: revolutions in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were the concern of men; tea parties in the same 2 “Spell” is defined by Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary as “a spoken word or form of words held to have magic power.” This reflection of an old Anglo Saxon reality reinforces my point. 4 period were the preserve of women. These two strands of connotations of course overlap: the domestic sphere in the European tradition is female, public life is the domain of men. Political philosophy, including those philosophies advocating revolution out of a pressing need for social reform in the long eighteenth century, were written by and addressed to men. Both tea party and revolution, however, are collective activities. The juxtaposition of the terms suggests a specific, utopian social vision, perhaps following disillusionment with current and past revolutions; it states that the rituals of domestic life are neither ‘just’ domestic nor just shoring up tradition: it blends the two concepts and their surrounding worlds. The title of the dub is radically inclusive, re-visioning the nature of revolution. The words of the dub are an invitation to the listener to join a grass-roots, activist left-wing political movement (see Appendix 1). It addresses “you who know what the past has been” and invites you to “come sit here with we… a mek we talk / analyse / strategize.” The dub is, loosely, a performative speech act of interpellation and invitation. As such, it is more than a simply-worded, inclusive invitation. The poet characterises the movement, the collective “we” to which she refers, through the ways in which she presents herself and the group -- in the way that any speaker does. Thus the address “You who have been burned by vanguardism / … / You who believe in the future / in transforming by your labour / … / You who see for peace a future / … / you who create with yu sweat from yu heart” is a direct characterisation of the group reaching out to the listener (or at least of the poet herself, because she is implying a relationship of similarity 5 in her address to like-minded people). The invitation is to “come sit here with we / a mek we drink tea / …talk / …analyse / … / come mek we give yu little nurturing / come sit awhile”. This offers a vision of co-operation and stability as political relationship. But is the group represented by the different voices in the text itself in such a relationship? Do the represented participants (‘characters’ within the sound-text) work together in the way the human chanter invites “you” to? Or is the verbal advice of the chanter -- to work together -- qualified by the sound of the dub as represented by the activities of her group? The following analysis will initially focus on the relations of power between the represented participants3 in the sound-text in order to answer this question. It draws on ideas and categories in van Leeuwen’s Speech, Music, and Sound. but will also consider the implied references of sounds as social symbols and on the more symbolic, dub-specific aspects of revolution and riddim. Each participant is represented by a ‘voice’ or instrument. The sound-text as a whole uses vocal polyrhythms,4 background noises, and an appeal to electronic effects such as echoes, fade-aways, and other recording dynamics against a tight structure of repeating bass rhythms. These latter are produced by three instruments: a set of bongo drums, a bass guitar, and a brush. The polyrhythmic voices, on the other hand, are: a human voice (“the chanter” from now on); a lead guitar; and several types of chimes. The six represented participants, then, are: brush, bongo drum, lead guitar, bass guitar, human chanter, and chimes. 3 This useful category is found in Kress and van Leeuwen’s Reading Images. 4 Polyrhythms are conflicting rhythms or accents produced simultaneously. 6 As a first step in describing the relationships of the participants, I will focus on time. According to van Leeuwen, time in dominant Euro-Canadian culture is conceived of as a progression from past to future; it flows in one direction only, at an even pace, and hence it can be segmented, or measured (x). I would add that this is closely entwined with pastoralism (in its aspect as nostalgia for a simpler, purer past) as well as progressivism as structuring mythologies. The temporal or rhythmic nature of “Revolutionary Tea Party” is partly within this Western tradition of measured time, because the most basic, simple sound is a brush that establishes a very, very regular beat, with no stresses. It simply brushes back and forth throughout the song like a metronome, with a soft onset (beginning of each beat) and a relatively sibilant, soft timbre (quality of sound).5 However, the timbre of the metronymic brush and its unassuming character suggest that the dominant context for this song is not classical European measured time.