Of all the physical ways of supporting another body, the voice is surely one of the most common. In doing so, some bodies pull others along, helping them to move forward. When faced with hunger, voices persevere. When faced with the passing of time, the voice prevails. When faced with work, injustice, love, envy, nostalgia, instrumentalisation, suffering, death, everyday life, humour, gender norms, violence or extinction, the voice prevails. Whales sing as much as sheep, cows as much as wolves. Birds and humans always sing.
A while ago we came across the following in a book dedication: “Those who have never sung don’t know where to begin”. It was a love story, but also a story of survival. More or less. We found key elements of our own work in this popular saying: disappearance, hope, voice, song. It was only after reflecting on the gaps between these words that, all of a sudden, the Galician language, birdsong, fascism, totems of virility, dementia… seemed to be woven together within the same origin myth, within the same lullaby. We thought that imperialism and extinction were filled with silence, while resistance to them was filled with song:
Mothers sing next to cradles
Workers sing in the streets and in the fields
Robins sing in their nests
The old sing to the young
The living sing to the dead
The lover sings to their beloved
The desperate sing
The hopeful sing
The enraged sing
Twins sing
We all sing, to pass the time
We sing, above all, to fight against death, to become closer to others, to survive. We sing because others have sung before us and so that others may sing after us, because what a song teaches us is nothing other than the ability to call out to others, to imitate them, to entertain them and even to invoke them; the ability to find and to offer comfort, as well as the wonderful ability to change. The voice and language in all their forms are bridges between distant things, a place where worlds and the hybrids that inhabit them are created. Let this be an invitation to recount and to sing the world in such a way that the lives of others are as important, as sacred, as complex and as essential as our own.
Lara and Noa Castro Lema (A Coruña, 1998)
