Where are we?: The singing train

Friday, January 20, 2012

The singing train

Entertained today – singing, drumming, flirting – by young men and women on the train from Kandy into the high hill country to the south-east.

They seemed to us to be travelling together: six young women, music students from Colombo with fine voices between them, off to a friend’s wedding in Bandula, along with eight or so young men with drums and tambourine and their own strong voices.

The men began first, with the women singing along. Then the women launched into their own songs, the men accompanying them with drums and tambourine. Then songs were begun together, then the men, then the women. Between them they had an immense repertory – love ballads, reggae, bouncy oompah-rhumba-sounding dance numbers – all in all six hours of music by the time we got off the bus, and their stop was two hours further on.

Only an hour or so into the journey did we discover that in fact the two groups had never met. All the more impressive, then, the pleasure with which they launched into song and the ease with which they created such pleasing music. Maybe not so remarkable is how they – mostly late teen and 20-somethings – came to hang out in small tight groups between cars, or kept shuffling seats, arms tentatively draped over shoulders, a hand gently pushed away, teasing and bravado from the men, murmurs among the women, but all with those easy, captivating, confident-seeming Sri Lankan smiles.

Popular music here, judging at least from what is played by local bus drivers, is to my ear a pleasing but incomprehensible mélange of sounds. Those oompah sounds again, but also reggae (Sri Lanka has several very popular reggae singers right now), sorrowful string interludes that might come from Rio or Lisbon and the rhythms of West African soukous, that infectiously rhythmic cat-and-mouse tight-stringed guitar work that one hears in bars across the central African plain.

I can’t make any sense of what I hear, but I do imagine I am hearing the sounds of an internetted, globalized world, now mingling with streams of earlier songs, the music of the many peoples of those vast oceans and winds that wash and blow between Sri Lanka, Africa, the Arab world, the music of invasions and invaders, of traders and missionaries, of the Sri Lankan diaspora, of travellers.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Where is here?

The title banner includes a detail from “Targets” (2000) by the U.S. artist Joyce Kozloff. “Targets” is a walk-in globe within which are painted panels of every country bombed by the U.S. since 1945. One panel on wheels acts as a door to the globe.

In the detail here, the door is ajar and we look out into the dark uncertain. I want maps (and any official representation of place), notorious for concealing their own human making and values, to have something like this doorway into their made life, an entering place where we can stand and ask questions of all those place names, images and other marks made familiar-seeming and coherent by being caught within the administrative-scientific grid-space of straight lines and co-ordinates. I recommend Kazloff’s creative wonderings about maps, places and empire, including her “Imperial Cities,” “Silk Routes” and “Voyages” projects.

Canadian painter Landon Mackenzie combines her expertise in cartography, her interest in neuroscience, and her curiosity about the experiential dimensions of place, its human ‘mapping’, and the contending personal and cultural memories and their stories (“the ghostly bits”) that inhabit places and maps. Mackenzie’s work is discussed widely but most interestingly from the perspective of this blog by Alan Morantz, Where is Here? Canada’s Maps and the Stories They Tell.

The traveller's way

The traveller’s way, as experienced here, offers up blind corners and wonders. It branches and digresses. It leads to places that excavate memories, to others that invite dialogue and questions. The traveller’s way humbles with what is not known or understood. Beyond the coordinates of empire, the traveller’s way invites the toes to stretch and curl down into those singular places where the peculiar energies of the ghosts of others’ creaturely lives seem to whisper words like ‘longing’, ‘delight’, ‘care’. The traveller’s way cheers on a more open life.