I come from a garden in Central Chile, my grandmother’s garden. A garden that hears the whispers and shouts of desertification. As activist and politician Rodrigo Mundaca clearly states: “Chile has entirely privatised water, which means that theft is institutionalised. Chile has clearly prioritised extractive industries over the rights of communities to water” (Mundaca, 2020, para. 4). This song came as a response to my love and grief for this garden in Chile that is drying up. As suggested by Robin Wall Kimmerer (2020) and Joanna Macy, “until we can grieve for our planet we cannot love it-- grieving is a sign of spiritual health” (Macy, as cited in Kimmerer, 2020, p.325). This Song tries to open up a sonic space for personal and collective grief so that we can do exactly that: love our planet. Wall Kimmerer (2020) goes further to say that “if grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again” (Wall Kimmerer, 2020, p.359). The song invites the listener to weep, recognizing that pain, grief and loss are connected with the love we feel for the Earth. The first part starts with a soothing melody in 4/4 with a very slow tempo; a lullaby that expresses the tenderness and safety of growing up in my grandmother’s garden. Right before part B, there is a dramatic silence and break. When part B starts, the tempo speeds up and the time signature changes to 5/8. The singing intensifies and becomes shouting-like. In part B I sing (see Appendix C):
“I am the solitude,
of a tree that awaits,
of the stones that await,
of my heart that awaits
while the desert opens its way.”
Here I try to give space for grief to find a home in collective sorrow. After experiencing grief, the song comes back to a soft-lullaby that opens a gateway to hope (see Appendix C):
“To the garden, I sing,
for you to come back one day,
for the clouds to come back, the rain,
where your garden used to be.”
As Teresa Shewry (2015) writes in Hope in the Seas, hope “relies on other beings, human and more-than-human. A shark, a river, a forest, a community, a memory, or an imaginary are all agents that may allow people an awareness of future openness and promise” (Shewry, 2015, p.7). In the case of this song, hope relies on the possibility of water to come back in the form of clouds, rain, and voices coming together to sing for rain.
In the following two sections, I analyze 2 out of the 7 songs that I composed as a result of my artistic research for the concert Geographies of Hope. The first one, Al jardin (To the garden) reflects on the role of grief as a requirement for restoration, then the second one, Asters and Goldenrods, highlights the importance of expanding our curiosity to more-than-human entities and entering into the grammar of animacy.
1) Al Jardín (To the garden): Grief