Lake Nipissing’s churned up water crashes wave after wave onto a beach only meters from the rustic cabin within which I am prepping my teacher’s training summer module. Books by Betty Martin and David George Haskell bring to the surface what is shared between the acts of giving and receiving and the acoustic history of the planet. It is all about listening. My current preoccupation with “utopian moments” or “processes” also underpins my planning, in stark contrast to the past weekend’s blared news.
Reactions to the overturn of Roe v. Wade crest and surge. I think of shame. How relentlessly a woman’s sexuality is associated with shame. I think of our two mouths – the one that has been historically silenced or ignored and the one whose self-possession and authority is being robbed and bridled by the American State. This is a form of rape.
My book pairs a woman’s sexual agency with her vocal freedom. That personal reclamation is connected to the raucous, undomesticated sorority we are seeing in demonstrations across the US and Canada.
My book does not start with the thread of rape and sexual shaming but it does begin with community. Chapter 1: Hope is the thing with feathers… is set in Northern India.
It is where my “soloist” starts to slip …
Excerpt from Chapter 1: ‘Hope’ Is the Thing With Feathers
“Earlier this morning a throng of expansively winged, blue-black birds flew overhead. Reaching up from my second-floor balcony as if to touch their white tummies I hear gasps and “Oh, looks!” from Bella and her father, Dave. Along with Bella’s mum, Izzy, and Bella’s fiancé, Jono, they run the Basunti retreat center, combining intelligence, beauty, brawn, and good humor so that yoga practitioners—and occasionally, artists—can get away and, in my case, become comfortably unsettled. Bella and her dad—even Jono, when pressed—are bird fanatics; they have never seen a flock so large fly so low. I share my exhilaration with my close friend Tessa over lunch. We are both here to write, she a novel set in India and I this book on voice. Between meadow walks and simple vegetarian meals, we bow our heads to the keyboards of our respective laptops.
A few days later, I find myself tapping away against a backdrop of full-on human song. It is coming from the village. I ask Izzy what occasion is being celebrated. She tells me that Holi, the Festival of Colors, is a short festival by Indian standards, lasting only the weekend, and this is the last morning of ritual. The women have been singing and drumming for hours. I have just finished my morning’s work and need a little foot stomping before lunch to clear my mind. It is hardly three minutes to the village, and the women’s insistent voices draw me straight to the bright blue bungalow where they are assembled in song. I can’t help myself; I wave.
The women excitedly call me into the courtyard and motion me toward a brown plastic lawn chair. They remain seated on the ground around a young drummer who looks no more than ten. Her ebullient pace tethers schoolgirl to grandmother through shared rhythm. They sing hard and loud for another ten minutes, the same eight lines, an A section followed by a B section, and then the A again. The song circles incessantly, gathering energy. Their voices are fervent, nasal, strident … fantastically invigorating … full of shared intention. The potency of their singing strikes me as “real.”
They stop for a moment and one of the young women asks me if I would dance. I blush—I don’t dance. But I feel I should offer something. I tell them I sing, and would they like that? Could I sing them a song? The young woman translates and as their heads gently wobble yes, I summon up a beloved Armenian folk song “Loosin Yelav.” I ask my impromptu translator to explain that it is about the moon and that I am singing it in honor of last night’s full one. I launch in.
Seconds later several doors fling open around the courtyard and three men dash out to see what is going on. The women laugh and I want to as well, but instead force my way to the end of the chorus. My voice’s loudness stuffs my ears till I can no longer hear. My heart is pounding. Why am I so nervous? When the song ends we all grin at each other. I excuse myself and hightail it back to Basunti for lunch.
Why did I force myself to finish the song? Why did I rush home? Why didn’t I laugh or linger? Was it necessary to be so loud? Is singing solely about performance for me? I twist and turn through these thoughts while writing, while walking, while talking to Tessa over afternoon tea on the wraparound veranda.
I wanted to thank the village’s women for their voices and their lovely invitation to participate, but the dose of fight or flight I felt throughout my body while sharing my song has left me with a funny feeling about being a “singer.” The encounter revealed the artificial within my art-making, the defense within my performance. I am dis- appointed that, even without a contract in hand, my offering was about something I added on to myself. Their singing appeared to be a part of life, held within the seasonal cycle of belief, ritual, food, and play— shared vibrations, more like the birds. And it looked like so much fun.
As a teacher I believe that everyone can sing. The sounds and impulses needed to express ourselves in this way come from the human autonomic nervous system, the system that gives us butterflies or tells us when we are safe, the one that moans and groans and giggles. Here in India, far from the everyday bustle of teaching, performance, and family, I am tying word to page to describe how to reconstitute emotion through breath and sound—voice integrating flesh and spirit. The truthful fine-tuning of self leading to inner harmony—an accord between heart and mind—as well as the ability to “get onstage.” Expert and amateur alive within one body.
Late that afternoon Bella and I head up to the marble rooftop where I have been practicing yoga. Our mission is to sing like birds before the supper bell rings. From our perch we can see the Himalayas suspended above the far-off mouth of the reservoir. A pink haze accompanies the setting sun as Bella and I start to make sounds that are anything but polite, our big bodies translating the birds’ caws and shrieks into patterns we can repeat. We practice for about an hour, throats squeezing like genteel heavy metal singers, noses channeling some Janis Joplinesque screams, belly-laughing in our own wilderness.
That evening Izzy tells me that she and Dave were stopped dead in their tracks by sounds from above. She asked him about the “new birds” in the garden—had he ever heard this particular noise before?”