Punctuating the Architecture of Improvised Struggle: Listening to the Temporality of Violence and Resistance in the Movement for Palestinian Liberation
may 6, 2024
this is one of those practices at articulation, with attention to punctuation in its linguistic and sonic sense but also noticing the ways that death is punctuated. what i characterize as ‘resistance’ here is not the same as what i would call resistance now, knowing the necessity of the axis—it might be that some of these words slip into the rubric of liberalism. but i still resonate with this writing as a marker of my own conceptualization and my own attempts at articulation. i want to revisit that attentiveness to sound: to be continued.
The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) are invading Rafah now, scattering bombs and bodies and earth and air towards the unlivable. The land is dotted by explosions, which are also punctuating lives at their choreographed ends. And “music” continues in the core of this empire, where some sounds and gestures of the occupation reverberate the air and the ground in similar and different articulations. The violent, sharpened brutalizing of bodies at the center and margins of imperialism resonate together, but so too do the rhythmic banging on objects and incantations of un/freedom that sound together from the mouths of folks not proximal to the genocidal enactment but located in the place from which those movements are generated and funded. These soundings—this “music”—are, again, not those that are captured on the concert stage at a designated moment of shared consumption or within the soundproofed walls of recording studios, but those primordial sounds of resistance that are taking place in the streets, without spatialized acoustic resonance but in an open flow to the sky.
This is What Resistance Sounds Like
They are passing out gallon buckets from my work place now, and some folks have drumsticks to hit them with (of course, we’re gathered outside of a music school). This is the first gathering I’ve been to in protest for Palestine after months of signaling towards awareness and criticality against nationalism—after months of tens of thousands of bodies blown by the violent force of occupation. So the words are slow to come, but the rhythm hits in a way that I can access. And those hits build a new space of resistant energy that flows through my body and out of my mouth with more ease. Punctuations of sound build up the architecture of this place (a social place but also somewhere marked and contained by the sidewalk and security officers).
In drawing up a history of music’s temporalities surrounding the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, Nahid Siamdoust inserts into this archive the reflections of revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini on the intoxicating qualities of music, who says:
“One of the things that intoxicate the brains of our youth is music. Music causes the human brain, after one listens to it for some time, to become inactive and superficial and one loses seriousness…Of course music is a matter that everyone naturally likes, but it takes the human being out of the realm of seriousness and draws him toward uselessness and futility…A youth that spends most of his time on music becomes negligent of life issues and serious matters, and becomes addicted—just like someone who becomes addicted to drugs, and a drug addict can no longer be a serious human being who can think about political issues…,” (Khomeini in Siamdoust, 9).
There is a truth to this claim that music might take folks into alternative states of consciousness and being, in movement and posture and attention. (Musics necessarily contain within them a positionality of the creatives taking part, and a potentiality towards resistance of multiple forms.) And, in this truth, there is also that directionality which notices an intoxicated state as that which is generatively unproductive to imperialism. Together, disrupting the driving force of racial capitalism, demanding an end to arms manufacturing and monetary complicity in genocide, the collective song of protest is beautiful in its productive unproductivity. Beautifully articulated later in her “Soundtrack of the Revolution,” Siamdoust translates for us the importance of music as a different kind of world building—these performances take place in certain spaces, but also create spaces of their own for folks to be in. Both in live (“physical presence”) and virtual realms, music generates spaces of simultaneous experiencing and responding, drawing on (as in performativity) and also expanding “communal memory.” It seems that the location of these gatherings to listen to or perform music determines the freedom to express/converse (ie. some religious and other “private” public spaces were barred from governmental insertion, and have allowed for a freedom in the underground). And so, these rhythmic articulations on buckets and other objects, in stomping and clapping, craft a space of resistance for us to be in solidarity with one another. We are making this space for us. “We keep us safe,” we shout in unison.
And this is also an invocation of different spatialities and temporalities, both cross-generational and international. This space of collective protest is improvised by those who begin to join and those who must leave—reading with care for the needs of this particular community of folks at this particular time, and continuing to riff on resistance as arms of the state wrap around in attempts to contain and disperse—but it is also a space built with the praxis of those who have been in the struggle for liberation. The practice of drumming/stomping/clapping is mirrored across the Atlantic, and the words which fit inside those punctuations echo at gatherings globally. We might not yet be in worlds where Palestine, Sudan, and the Congo are not occupied by genocidal forces, but the rhythmic articulation of protest crafts an architecture of bridges where resistant energy might transfer between those sites of violent occupation and those of us distanced and under the spell of imperialism’s drive.
Un/Freedom, Choreographed from Without
The shuddering of explosions unsettles me now in listening to the sonic space which Mazen Kerbaj improvises within through my headphones in a contained and quiet room of this institution. Six-and-a-half minutes over and again. This is all we are allowed entrance to of Kerbaj’s “Starry Night” 2006 improvisation/unwilling duet with the IOF whose bombs shatter through the quiescence of Beirut's nightlife. Fluttering, flickering, granular, breathing, the trumpet circulates the air of this (colonially) occupied space. And I am reminded of what Laudan Nooshin speaks to in contextualizing improvisation as a musical practice:
“[Ingrid] Monson, for example, discusses the ways in which improvisation in jazz became a metaphor for freedom both musical and social, especially in the context of the American Civil Rights movement and growing black political consciousness in the United States. At this time, ‘a broad range of social, spiritual, transnational, and political meanings became attached to the improvisational tendencies implied by the term modal jazz’, and the idea ‘that it might be possible to experience or even create freedom through improvisation…,’” (Nooshin, 250).
Improvisation as a historical practice generatively permits us access to spaces where we might find freedom from expectations of perfection and mastery, or where representations of freedom might be articulated. But what of improvisation (as in Kerbaj’s) which denotes experiences or expressions of unfreedom, occupation, brutalization? What are we as listeners to make of those six explosions which mark this six-and-a-half minute window? What are we to do with Kerbaj’s seeming lack of physical urgency here—his soft continuance, and the mundanity of it all? Is it possible to notice the violence of those detonations, the unfreedom/occupation/brutalization they send flying as shrapnel, but also to conceive of those piercing sounds as purposefully placed in time and target by the forces of imperial genocide; as a kind of score? Nooshin gives us more to think with in relation to the score in improvisational method:
“This has, in turn, highlighted particular kinds of difference between, on the one hand, creativity which generally takes place away from the performance context and whose product is usually a score requiring further creative acts to be realized as music in performance; and, on the other, that which takes place in performance and which does not result in a physical product (other than perhaps a sound recording, which differs from a score in following rather than preceding the performance),” (Nooshin, 254).
Here, improvisation tends to be placed in the second of these possibilities, as that where creativity happens in the performance without a deliberately studied set of instructions. But what seems to open up here in Kerbaj’s offering is that there is a physical product—studied before (the IOF’s mapping of this occupied territory) and after this captured recording—which is the land itself and the indentations, excavations, toppling, bones, blood, and spirits which are left in the explosions’ aftershocks.
Through this imperially choreographed punctuation of land and life by colonial powers, can we feel or hear those nuclear bombs which explode (multiple times) daily across the Atlantic, over homes in Rafah? What does the emotional potency of feeling the reverberations of those explosions say about us? And in the way that the rattling of percussive objects construct a space of vocalized resistance, is it possible for us to channel those emotionally charged explosive reverberations in such a way that this empire is utterly shaken to its rotting core?
Bibliography:
Kerbaj, Mazen. “Starry Night.” Beirut, 2006. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIo4dh884hE)
Nooshin, Laudan. “Improvisation as ‘Other’: Creativity, Knowledge and Power: The Case of Iranian Classical Music.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 128, no. 2 (2003): 242–96.
Siamdoust, Nahid. Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran. Stanford University Press, 2017
