CALL & RESPONSE
Text published in 2HB volume 10 (eds. Francis McKee & Louise Shelley. Glasgow: CCA), 2010
When two women play kattajaq, they face each other, sometimes holding onto one another, and make sounds. The sounds are voiced and unvoiced, guttural, rasping or breathless. It is not exactly singing. It is sometimes called throat singing. They mimic each other and build heady rhythms, asynchronous with the slight lag of the second voice. They compete to see who lasts the longest before laughing, or gasping for breath. Traditionally, the women sing into the mouth of their partner, using it as a resonating chamber. Sometimes, kitchen utensils are used instead, or hands are cupped conspiratorially between the two mouths.I am looking at a picture of two women playing kattajaq.
One thought in particular nags at me:
to use someone’s mouth as an resonating chamber for your own voice
like she is doing.
It is to use another as the instrument of your own amplification,
to rebound against another in order to verify your own existence.
Is it parasitic?
Or is it an act of generosity on the part of the open mouth
to confirm that they themselves do indeed exist
and moreover are the landmark by which you orientate yourself?
Sometimes, when I am walking, I take a very minor sense of comfort when people step aside to let me pass or walk around me, as it confirms that I am indeed visible and solid, mass and volume displacing air. They may not know me but they are obliged to recognise the fact that I am there, intruding upon their material existence.
Which is not to say that I suffer from a debilitating inability to believe in my own, but just to acknowledge that at some very fundamental level it induces wonder to see your own perceptions mirrored and bolstered in another person. Comforting in the same way is the thought, when sat in a group, that if you stood up and started singing show tunes or undressing it would disturb proceedings, irrevocable proof that you do indeed impinge upon other people.
Which brings me back to the picture of the Inuit women, clasping the arms of their partner at the elbow although it is hard to clasp tight in mittens.
And perhaps we are missing the point here
because really it is not instrumentalisation imposed on one by the other but entered into voluntarily by two.
Because the mouth is not a resonating chamber but rather two mouths become an echo chamber.
It is a question of call and response.
It is dizzying, an act of vertiginous concentration and so they lock arms,
or at least that’s what it looks like there where it is dark and the trees behind them are bare.
I imagine that the air is cold and clear and the sound resonates
and their breath clouds around them and perhaps their heads are sometimes lost in the mist, like mountaintops.
And there where they are singing against a purple sky she looks overwhelmed with emotion, about to collapse
like Cheryl Cole in the headline from this morning which had a familiar ring to it,
CHERYL COLE HAS COLLAPSED!
I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed.
Steadied by the arms of her partner,
really it acknowledges that the most two people can do is to become for a moment reciprocal mechanisms
and once again I have stumbled upon a banality.
And the mechanics of aurality allow for a more perfect reciprocity than those of the flesh, in patterns of reflections and echoes.
It was the women who discovered it in cold climates
facing each other warmly wrapped up and mouths slightly open