Diamanda Galás is an American avant-garde composer, vocalist, pianist, organist, performance artist and painter. Galás has been described as "capable of the most unnerving vocal terror", with her three and a half octave vocal range. Wikipedia
-----interview at HELLENISM.NET
Hailed as
one of the most important singers of our time, Diamanda Galαs has earned international acclaim
for her highly original and politically charged performance works, as well as
her memorable rendition of jazz and blues. A resident of New York City since
1989, she was born to Anatolian and Greek parents, who always encouraged her
gift for piano.
Galαs has contributed her voice and
music to Francis Ford Coppola's film, Dracula, Oliver Stones' Natural Born
Killers, Spanish/Nicaraguan filmmaker Mercedes Moncada Rodriguez's El Immortal
(The Immortal), as well as films by Wes Craven, Clive Barker, Derek Jarman, Hideo
Nakata, and many others. In 2005, Galas was awarded Italy's first Demetrio
Stratos International Career Award. Her much-anticipated CD, Guilty Guilty
Guilty, a compilation of tragic and homicidal love songs, was released by
Caroline in the U.S. and MUTE UK worldwide on April 1, 2008; You're My Thrill,
will be released in 2009.
DIAMANDA'S
INTERVIEW AT HELLENISM.NET
HELLENISM.NET:
Diamanda, hello from everyone at Hellenism.Net and thank you for taking the
time to answer to our questions.
HELLENISM.NET:
Where were you born, and is your real given name "Diamanda Galαs"?
Athamandia
is the first name, meaning adamantine. Here I use Diamanda. My father's father
was often called Philip Souli, out of respect.
HELLENISM.NET
I read in one of your interviews that your father is an Anatolian Greek and
your mother is from Mani. What part of Asia Minor is your father from?
My mother
is a Maniatissa, but born in Dover, New Hampshire, where she worked for six
dollars a week in her father's restaurant, Nicks' Lunch, for nine years, along
with eight brothers and sisters. My father is a Smyrnaic Greek with an Egyptian
grandmother from Alexandria. He was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, and worked in
the shoe factories and as a union musician for years before joining the Army. Eventually
my father went to the university and my mother as well, at his insistence, and
this changes their lives. Nevertheless, to support the family, my father had to
work as a janitor aside from his other work as a musician and a teacher, while
my mother went to school.
HELLENISM.NET
My great-grandparents came from Anatolia too (Smyrna). They had to leave their
homes and properties behind after the Greek holocaust of 1922 and move to
Greece. There, they were treated like garbage by the "mainland
Greeks". To this day I find that many Greeks all around the world often
times treat their own kin very badly while they bend over backwards for the
"xenoi". During your career, have you ever been treated badly by
fellow Greeks?
I agree
that the Greeks treat each other very poorly, with very few exceptions. It is
the self-loathing of the slave, perhaps. At least we are not a clannish people,
which I detest as an individual. However, it is necessary to support those
Greeks we respect or our culture will cease to exist since it is currently
claimed by non-Greeks "scholars" and other kleftes worldwide in
America, Britain, Turkey, FYROM, and so on. This is idiotic. Whoever thought
the Slavs and Afro-American" scholars" (who nothing about East
Africa, not to mention Egypt, and readily dismiss West Africa, where THEIR
people are from), would find an unholy bond as thieves of the Ptolemies?
I refer to
Martin Bernal's book BLACK ATHENA, which came out years ago, but is now being
used in the curriculum in Italian universities. How long will this book take to
reach Greece? As concerns "the new Macedonia," in this country
Cleopatra, for one, is rarely recognized as Greek. She is either Elizabeth
Taylor or Cleopatra Jones. It is unquestionable that she will next be featured
as a Slavic queen by the "New Macedonians," whilst already being
hailed as a Nubian Queen by Bernal. This will become a problem and will provide
endless entertainment, to be sure. Except by those who will throw hand grenades
at the screen in Thessaloniki.
I accompany
every performance worldwide with the correct information and true Greeks would
do this and DO do this, and the finest scholars from Austria, Germany and
England do this as well (see Mary R. Lefkowitz's book, Black Athena Revisited).
And yes,
the refugees from Smryna, who were living in open sewers, were treated like
garbage by the mainland Greeks, speaking only Turkish as many of them did,
having not been allowed to speak Greek in Turkey. Then only two decades later
came the Nazis, and history forgets our refugees, especially American history
which forgets them and remembers disinformationalist propaganda spread by
Bernard Lewis and Heath W. Lowry. And the rabbis who turned in their own
people, while the Greeks hid them, and some of these were Greeks who had
survived the Turkish genocides only twenty years ago, are not mentioned.
Instead Jewish tourist journals say that Thessaloniki is an anti-Semitic place.
Need I remind scholars that it was a killing ground for the Greeks as well, who
fought bravely from garrets and starved to death?
Add that
years later many Jews voted for a street to commemorate Attaturk in
Thessaloniki? Fortunately the head of the committee got mowed down by a truck.
On the
other hand, Greeks who worry about Jews have better things to do like help
their OWN PEOPLE rather than envying the supposed success of other ethnic
groups. We are wealthier than the Jews in America but we do not invest in our
great scholars, like Speros Vryonis or Stavros Stavrides, but promote
Constantine Maroulis and John Stamos in silly magazines. What can I possibly
say.
Yes the
Greeks love the xenoi while hating them at the same time, but not as much as
they hate each other. Ask Patrick Leigh Fermor, who, if he is still alive, can
still not understand this, and he fought with the Cretan fighters, as you well
know. Greeks should not be speaking out of the sides of their mouths but
directly to the press and the people, and stop taking money from German
tourists since they don't like them. Yes, it IS easy for me to say because I do
NOT do anything I do not want to do and I have a very hard life supporting
myself as an artist in this country.
And let us
also discuss the refusal by the mainland of Greece to recognize the genius of
Cavafy and Kazantzakis until they were long dead. The Greeks of the Diaspora
have long been treated with contempt.
HELLENISM.NET
It's obvious from your shows and interviews that you speak at least some Greek.
Are you fluent in Greek?
I do speak
Greek but it is lacking. I work very hard on my conversational Greek and it is
my duty as a Greek to learn the language. It is the songs that teach me the
most. The paradox is that my accent is excellent and that I was born singing
Amanethes with ease and, as Maria Farandouri told me many years ago, my voice
has a Smrynaic sound. Many of us have origins in the Black Sea, as well, and my
father has always said many of his relatives were also from Colchis, the Pontic
area, and were Psaltis.
It is
paradoxical that my Spanish is far better than my Greek, but then I was born
only ten minutes from Tijuana, and, in any case, California is considered by
most of us as Mexico, so you might say I am a Mexican Greek.
On a
different note, music claimed by Uzbekistan is also Pontic Greek musics. As
usual, revisionists leave out the fact that there IS no "Muslim" or
"Christian" music, only the music that was created by the inhabitants
of particular areas of the world who collaborated as musicians and artists to
create something new. Only later, with ethnic cleansing, are imbecilic comments
like " the Sufi music of the Muslims," or "Turkish" music
used. Anatolian music was actually a collaboration of Greeks, Assyrians,
Armenians, Gypsies, Jews, Arabs and Turks, and the idea that there is a
definitive Turkish music is absurd, as is the MUSLIM MUSIC FESTIVAL at Brooklyn
Academy of Music curated by the cowardly and obsequious liberal Joe Melillo.
To say
there is a MUSLIM music is to say that all MUSLIM music has the same makams,
scales, melodies, and so on, is ridiculous. Does Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sound
like West African "Muslim" music? I think not.
HELLENISM.NET
Do you visit Greece often? Have you done any shows in Greece?
At the
Lycabettus Theatre I did Plague Mass in 1991, produced by Nikos Valkanos, Linda
Greenberg, and Jed Wheeler. Valkanos also included my version of ANOIXE
(recorded previously by Sotira Bellou) in one of his Greek Diaspora recordings,
whose label I do not have with me.
Also the
Pallas Theatre, twice. In 1992 and 2007.
Defixiones
at the Athens Opera in 1996.
In
Thessaloniki twice, and once in Haldidiki.
HELLENISM.NET
What's your relationship with your family? What was like growing up in the
Galas household?
Extremely
intense. A great deal of love and creativity.
HELLENISM.NET
Who - or what - would you say has had the biggest influence on deciding to
become a singer/songwriter? Were your parents supportive of your decision? (I
read somewhere that your father discouraged you from singing - but encouraged
you to play music).
My mother,
who believes in me completely, although the artistic and temperament comes from
my father, who is a phenomenal musician. He discouraged my singing possibly
from his memories of the way singers were treated by fellow musicians and
because many of them had no knowledge of music, other than microphone
technique.
My mother
however is extremely powerful and a fighter, a true feminist and believes I can
do anything and has insisted upon it.
HELLENISM.NET
Do you feel that your Greek heritage has shaped your character and influenced your
music?
Utterly,
absolutely, incontrovertibly. To be a completely unknown minority group in
America, unquestionably the greatest and most prolific (did I say profligate?)
creative culture that ever existed, but unknown in this country, except on
dinner mats, is a blessing that will find me fighting to the gruesome finish
with the gratuitous xenoi-loving Onassis Foundation, who would not even make an
appt. to see me, but heralds ancient female warriors and Germans taking
pictures of octopodi fisherman, to keep up their financial relationships with
more important persons - tourist organizations who have sold our culture as a
pastiche of ruins. Pastitsio is the worst food the Greeks ever thought of.
Kiki
Dimoula, who is that? A living phenomenon, the most prolific and esteemed poet
of Greece - who is that? And Sofia Leonardou, do Greek here know that she
co-wrote the script to REMBETIKO? A visionary.
HELLENISM.NET
Why did you choose to concentrate so heavily on "dark" music?
It is
considered dark by those who do not understand a death-obsessed culture. Or
perhaps the Mikrasian and Maniate sides conspired. But my father survived
during the Depression, has a horrific past with great suffering in his family,
here and in Turkey, and I seem to have inherited that darkness, that constant
skepticism, "skeptiko," I think, which is knowledge about what is to
come, where we shall remain for longer than we have been present here. The
Great Fear.
HELLENISM.NET
Which artists do you like to listen to?
Kazantzanidis,
Xyrsanthos, Vitale, Avvelopolous, Bougas (yes Bougas!, who takes me out of my
sadness and when I am not sad, I laugh loudly, the Greek laugh, that sarcastic
laugh that invites the Devil for tea-- because we have seen worse than he has
to offer), singers from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tunisia, Anatolia (known as
"Turkey" by the victims of Turkish propaganda), who are better
recorded and have better distribution than our Pontic singers, who are masters
of the Amanethes, past and present. I am concentrated on this singing, which,
after all is the last cry of the soldier on the battlefield as he is dying.
"Mana. Mana."
HELLENISM.NET
I have to admit that (being a huge Led Zeppelin fan) I listened to your work
for the first time when you collaborated with John Paul Jones in "Sporting
Life" (which was an amazing album). I know that you also toured with him
that year to promote the album. How was working with him, and would you
consider working with John Paul Jones again in the future?
Possibly.
We both have so many different things we want to do in our lives that, although
it is possible, life is not that long. He was a big fan of my Smyrnaic signing
and worked with it. I composed the melodies and chord changes to most of our
work together and he composed the bass lines and worked with the drummer, Pete
Thomas. Of course I wrote Hex during this time, in Greek, which is very
entertaining. It concerns my desire to kill a German lover but my disinterest
in sitting in a German prison afterwards for years. And the decision to wait
until he becomes old, loses his teeth his hair and his virility. This happily
occurred and I was quite pleased. And it happened in only four years!!! He now
lives in Shanghai!
HELLENISM.NET
You have a very devoted following but your music is mostly not understood by
most people. How do you feel about this? Would you ever consider
"commercializing" your sound so that you'll get your message out to
more people?
No. Life is
too short. I once thought it was a question of legacy, but it is not. It is a
question of boredom. I cannot create anything that bores me. I have had endless
offers to collaborate with famous musician whose work is dull, and when the
time comes I always have to say "no,' which has made me very unpopular
amongst other musicians. It is only because I suddenly find no inspiration to
even get started and I stop as if at a red light that says, "No, you don't
cross here."
HELLENISM.NET
I'm a huge blues fan and your renditions of old blues classics are amazing.
However, I found even more amazing your renditions of some old
"Rembetika" songs, like "Kegome, kegome". What made you
choose to play this specific song, and would you ever consider making a full
Greek album?
I have
indeed planned on doing a Greek album and will do so soon, probably under my own
label in the US, Mute in the UK, and worldwide under my own distribution.
Perhaps the title will be KLEOPATRA IS WAS AND WILL ALWAYS BE GREEK. It will
focus on much of my Amanethes singing as well as other works.
HELLENISM.NET
You're only one of a handful of singers that has the guts to sing about
genocide. Genocide is obviously an uncomfortable and not "politically
correct" subject to discuss or sing about. How do people react to these
songs?
In general
they have no idea what I am talking about. The Greeks do, the Armenians do the
Mexicans do, the South Americans so, but most Americans are lost. They still
celebrate Thanksgiving, so how can we expect them to understand what WE are
talking about.
HELLENISM.NET
Was writing about genocide a personal experience because of your father's
background and experiences? Did he ever talk to you about life in Asia Minor?
Yes. Every
day since I was 12 years old or younger and for many hours. Like a person who
has survived or heard warnings of a horrific trauma and was told to remain
invisible regardless of the cost. This has clashed with my mother, who, as a
Maniatissa, was told to FIGHT regardless of the cost and has, each time
endangering her health greatly.
HELLENISM.NET
You were one of the first artists to sing and talk about HIV/Aids (since the
early ‘80s). At the time all moralistic and homophobic
societies (Eastern and Western) were seeing Aids as the disease sent by
"God" to punish the homosexuals. After all these years do you think
that anything has changed?
Yes,
although let's discuss the Greeks RIGHT NOW. How long are Greeks going to
continue this RIDCULOUS sham of homophobia when homosexuality was part and
parcel of our own culture, not to mention our military culture? I always enjoy
baiting a Greek homophobic journalist with this when they begin to discuss our
great innovations, whilst smiling agreeably, and then say roundly, "and
let's not forgot our most stunning innovation," at which point the tape
recorder is shut off.
You may
refer to my essay on my home page, which is important to me emotionally and
politically. http://diamandagalas.com/home.htm
HELLENISM.NET
What are your views on politics and religion (feel free to vent out; we are not
going to censor this interview!)
Refer to my
paper, GODHEAD AND ANAL GLUE and the paper which expresses
my solidarity with the Greek "anarchists" (on the News page of
Diamanda's official website).
HELLENISM.NET:
Diamanda, it was a great honour to have the chance to ask you all these
questions. We wish you every success in the future. Yiasou!