Vocalizations of Suffering

Abstract

In this chapter I examine rituals that involve “chants of suffering,” which not only hone singers’ voices within genre-specific forms of expression, but which also require them to modulate their breathing and respiratory rhythm to produce what I conceptualize as “throaty sounds.” In my work I was particularly struck by the formal similarity between human expressions of suffering at the end of two long field studies among the Andalusian Gypsy singers and the Cuban possessed. In Andalusia, I was working on the flamenco repertory that includes songs with particularly sad content dealing with imprisonment, famine, or unrequited love. In this cultural context, suffering is associated with those painful words; the Gypsies make their voices hoarse on purpose and in doing so approach an infrasound level (Pasqualino 1998). That type of phonation nearing aphonia can be found in Cuba too, in the Afro-Cuban rituals of Palo Monte,¹ in which the possessed, beset by internal suffering, articulate suffering through quasi-animalistic guttural sounds, in the form of barking, for example.²