It's really ages since I did a songs post. Not because I've not been coming across interesting songs, but because I've just been letting them pile up in a folder.

So...

Time to address that with a quick couple of posts.

1.

It was via Darathey Din's always interesting newsletter on Cambodia (entitled Campuccino) that I came across VannDa's Time To Rise.

She was so enthusiastic that I had to check it out: "Time To Rise by VannDa featuring Master Kong Nay got Cambodia and the whole ASEAN region talking, for the right reason. This song illustrates how culture can evolve by merging tradition and modernity producing a masterpiece. It's a testament that, given the right mindset, passion to evolve, and nurtured creativity, Cambodians can create something amazing. While I lost count of how many times the song was on repeat in my house, I also noticed many positive feedbacks from across the ASEAN region in the YouTube comment section and countless reaction videos from many corners of the world. This makes me smile because for the first time, in my recent memory, we, as a region, give each other credit and encouragement for a job well done instead of tearing each other apart in debates on which culture and art form belongs to whom."

You can listen here. It's not really my kind of music, but the concept and the collaboration are nonetheless fascinating. As it says on the accompanying blurb, Master Kong Nay is a "Khmer music legend... He is one of a few great masters to have survived the Khmer Rouge era and has created a lot of memorable records for our people to enjoy and for the Cambodian’s youth generation to inherit from him."

He has an amazing story. Blind since the age of four, he fell in love very early on with the sound of the chapei (a Khmer stringed instrument). But his family for a long time was too poor to buy him one. At 13 he began to take lessons, and made rapid progress: "He then began playing professionally, improvising on traditional folk songs by spontaneously spinning stories like a hip-hopper, tailoring them to each audience."

The arrival of the Khmer Rouge, however, constituted what he euphemistically calls "a big turning-point". He was deported to a forced labour camp, but (in a case that recalls Vann Nath) his art saved him for a while, as he was ordered to entertain his fellow-prisoners with (propaganda-laden) material. After two years, though, the respite was over; the Khmer Rouge put a stop to the music, and sent him out to join the general drudgery. He was on the death list, but in the meantime, the Vietnamese army intervened, and he survived.

He and others are working to revive Cambodia's performing arts, decimated in the Khmer Rouge years. But it's far from easy: "The loss of so many artists created a cultural vacuum that has been filled by foreign music, leaving most Cambodian youth hooked on western rap and rock or Chinese pop, and scornful of their own traditions."

Which is why this collaboration with VannDa is such a big deal. In the rapper's own words, "My biggest dream is to bring Khmer music and culture to the world and show the world what we're capable of. This is what we fight for."

As a side note, one of the traditional roles of the chapei player was to disseminate news and information. Here, Master Kong Nay continues this practice by singing covid safety tips...


All pictures were taken in and around Battambang, Cambodia, 2009









2.

Sezen Aksu first crossed my consciousness in my Turkish Uncovered course, and then popped up again in A Case for Zeki Demirbilek (the eponymous detective is a fan).

Widely acclaimed in Turkey, she has a really lovely voice (check out, for example, these two melancholy expressions of the pain of broken relationships, and contrast them with the much more upbeat Manifesto).

In fact, she is known for her eclecticism and willingness to mix genres, a quality that perhaps has something to do with her mixed heritage: "Her family was originally from Thessalonica and migrated to Turkey during the migrant exchange between Turkey and Greece in 1924."

She is also, it seems, noted for her social activism.

It was depressing, therefore, to read that she's been embroiled this year in one of those awful culture-war arguments, in which a song from 2017 is suddenly being accused of insulting religious values...

She's fighting back, however, as demonstrated by the lyrics of a new song:

I’m the prey and you’re the hunter
Shoot me then
You can’t sense me
You can’t crush my tongue...

You can’t kill me
I have my voice, my instruments, my words
When I say 'me', I mean everyone







3.

And finally, for a very different kind of action...

I first heard the name Maria Uva when I read Maaza Mengiste's The Shadow King.

This is how she is introduced in the novel: "For now, it is 27 Nehas 1927, also called 2 September in the year that is both 1935, and also Anno XIII. So many ways to mark the month and year when Aster walks into Kidane’s office, sits down at his desk, and finds herself staring at a newspaper account of a woman they call Maria Uva, an Italian who lives near Port Said. While her husband draws himself into the circle of men and begins to speak to them of his father's feats, Aster is leaning to get a better look at the picture of this ferenj woman who is shouting while waving a flag like a declaration of war. Aster stares at the photo, at the arrogant woman's openmouthed glee, at that flag whipping freely in the wind, and by the time she lifts her head, Aster knows that she must make herself anew and meet this proclamation with one of her own.

"In fact, the famous Maria Uva is not shouting, but singing. And the war that will come will not be declared by her. In the instant of the photograph, published 30 August 1935, Anno XIII, she is launching into the chorus of Giovinezza while the [steamship] Cleopatra eases its way into Port Said. The tricolored Italian flag is indeed behind her. In the ship in front of her, two thousand [Italian] soldiers are screaming her name. The light in her eyes could be gleeful devotion, or more likely, a consequence of the sun’s sharp angle. But it is late afternoon and overworked journalists, frantic to fill word quotas and pass censorship before the day ends, report every movement of this ragazza del canale di Suez, la madonnina del legionario in the glorious terms of a seafaring goddess. […] [Hirut] remembers the day when Aster slipped out of Kidane’s office and brought the photo of that woman to the kitchen and said to the cook: We women won’t sit by while they march into our homes."

It's a curious narrative twist of Mengiste's that this singer -- the dual-nationality (French/Italian) "Suez nightingale", who achieved astronomic popularity by meeting troop ships full of Italian soldiers bound for the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, accompanying them on their slow procession along the Suez Canal, and singing patriotic songs all the while -- inspires Aster, the Ethiopian fighter who resisted the Italian colonizers...

Anyway, to continue the Maria Uva story... The British (who controlled Egypt and the Suez Canal at the time) were less than rapt about her activities, and made life so difficult for her trader husband that the couple moved back to Italy in 1937. There Maria received many accolades for her patriotic efforts, and that year alone saw the emergence of a biography and a song in her honour. She returned to the headlines during World War II by organizing a vast support network for Italian soldiers engaged in border defence. After the war, these activities brought her to the attention of the anti-fascism commission, and she could have been liable to the death penalty -- had it not been for her dual nationality, which meant that she had to first be tried by the French.

Who didn't see much to be bothered about: "The sworn enemies of the French court were the pro-Nazis and those who had collaborated with the Germans before and after the defeat of 1939/40. This French citizen had no connection with the Nazi occupiers: she had confined herself to singing the national anthem pertaining to the country of her husband (Italian) to Italian soldiers in transit, who were not at war with France, and all this took place not on French but on Egyptian territory, that is, that a third and neutral country insofar as it was administered by Great Britain." Their acquittal apparently saved her from the attentions of the Italian court too.

Maria Uva died in 2003 at the age of 97.

A strange story, no? But then I never really understand patriotism.