All That Magic. All that Magic: Teresa Lanceta Through the Radical Sonic Prism of Lester Bowie’s All the Magic.

It’s a familiar scene, one in which we have all played a role at some point; but it’s also a scene that reflects a larger history of things, spaces and people. Taken from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, the passage recounts the visit by Miss Mitten, Baby Kochamma’s Australian born-again missionary friend, to Ayemenem, during which Miss Mitten ‘generously’ gifts Estha and Rahel a baby book – The Adventures of Susie Squirrel – which unfortunately rather offends the twins. To show their offence, and to Miss Mitten’s dissatisfaction and displeasure, the twins read the book forwards and then backwards: ‘ehT serutnevdA fo eisuS lerriuqS. enO gnirps gninrom eisuS lerriuqS ekow pu.’ When Miss Mitten complains to Baby Kochamma about the twins reading backwards, saying she has seen Satan in their eyes, the twins are punished with writing a hundred times: ‘In future we will not read backwards.’ So, when Miss Mitten is killed in a milk van accident some months later, the twins are convinced of the poetic justice of the accident, as the milk van was reversing when it knocked Miss Mitten down.

As children, if we spoke backwards, it was because we wanted to create a world that was inaccessible to the adults around us – a world only the initiated could enter; a world that chose language as a means not only of escape but also of rebellion against the too-often violent and oppressive world of adults. Beyond its role as a medium of communication, language is a space of belonging. We inhabit our languages as they inhabit us. When we are deprived of language, we create other-, sub-, proto-, subaltern-, pseudo-languages to exist in. The phenomenon of speaking backwards can be seen as a codified way of speaking back: speaking back to authority, back to the oppressor. And, paradoxically, this speaking back is all the more valuable because it is unintelligible to the majority society or the oppressors.

In France, for example, children living in the banlieue – the children and grand- and great grandchildren of migrants – whose parents were met with violence upon immigration, and who themselves were born into oppression, have found escape, resistance, and resilience in verlan, a kind of reverse language (a ‘vers langue’ or more literally l’envers – the inverse) which has strength, aesthetics and form. It has been noted that already in the nineteenth century, certain citizens considered criminals, social misfits, pariah, the subaltern, had adopted a kind of verlan to wrong-foot the authorities. But it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that these children of the banlieue really institutionalised verlan for their own purposes. With some gymnastics of the brain and tongue, they could, in real time, twist and reverse syllables of words and add extra letters. Verlan is not just great art, it’s also a marronage of sorts: an escape from the banality of normativity; an escape from the normativity of violence; an escape from the violence of the quotidian. And as soon as the majority society, the oppressor, learns verlan, i.e., as soon as the plantation owner finds the hide-out, it is time to escape again. Which is an inversion of an inversion. Verlan as a form of break-out. Speaking backwards as a multiple coding. This is how ‘femme’ became meuf in verlan and later, in a double cascade, feumeu – the verlan of the verlan, a re-vernalisation, or second reversal.

It is this space of coding and even double coding that interests me when I look at, or rather, listen to Teresa Lanceta’s work. Much has been written about the various types of weaving and about tapestry as a language. There is surely truth in that. But what interests me particularly is the space that the reversal of language, coding, double coding, weaving, and tapestry can be – literally and metaphorically. Weaving as verlan, as speaking backwards, and speaking back. But more on that in a moment.

When studying Teresa Lanceta’s work, I felt as if Lester Bowie’s sound had been invoked. Constantly. In particular, the album All the Magic. But it was not a sonic invocation like a soundtrack (Lester Bowie’s sonic sphere didn’t seem like a soundscape for Teresa Lanceta’s tapestry), but of something weirder: it seemed as if some of Lanceta’s works were notations or scores for All the Magic. Not just because of the magic in Lanceta’s work, but because of certain phrases, idioms, narrations, mind spaces and landscapes that both the sound and the tapestry evoked, in sync, as if interwoven. It seemed as if Lanceta were writing the score of Bowie’s music after the music had been made, or writing a musical notation that already existed in the noosphere. A kind of writing backwards. A kind of writing back.

One could even go so far as to say that besides weaving, many other art forms, like the blues and jazz are a kind of verlan too. As Amiri Baraka points out in Blues, Poetry, and the New Music, blues is ‘the basic national voice of the African American people. It is the fundamental verse form of the African/American slave going through successive transformations. Blues is African-American. The verse form of African American culture and language’. It follows, therefore, that the blues and its radical and more cryptic offspring jazz are spaces in which history is coded. Spaces where the word is more than the word, where every word potentially carries a world, and where every tone and every note is either a doorway to the vastness of the sea or a key that unlocks the immensely layered depths of African history – provided one finds the right lock. So, if blues is the first grade of reversal that makes the coding of the verlan possible, then jazz must be the secondary reversal that makes the further coding of the coded possible.

The prism through which I like to read, ehem, listen to the work of Teresa Lanceta in proximity to, and in juxtaposition with Lester Bowie, is one that considers the verlanisation in textiles and music in general, and in jazz in particular, via atonality and pluriversality, as stretched harmonies, as polyrhythmic and even arrhythmic, polysyllabic and melismatic structures – that is, tools through which histories have been written and coded, and devices that allow the decoding and articulation of these histories. This is a call to see and listen to music in the lines, curves, waves, dots, stars, crosses, arrows and many other signs and symbols that figure in Lanceta’s tapestries. This is a call to hear the rumours, gossip, stories, kongossa, plots, joys and furies that manifest themselves as colour patches and spectra in Lanceta’s tapestries. This is a call to eavesdrop on the pluriversal epistemologies that Berber women have woven into their creations since time immemorial, and that Lanceta has, through her own practice of listening over the decades, adopted and further incorporated into her own tapestries. This is a call to listen in to the voices of generations, absorb the manifestations of civilisations, the embodiment of sciences and technologies, and the politics of societies and their cosmogonies in music and in tapestry. Every thread interlaced with another is a fibre of history woven into another; and this connection produces a sonic spark.

Act I: ‘For Louie’. La red de San Luis

Louis Armstrong’s 1956 visit to Ghana on American journalist Edward R. Murrow’s instigation can be considered as one of the most spectacular visits to Ghana anyone has ever made. If the term homecoming ever signified anything, then that visit surely epitomized the term. When Satchmo landed, he was greeted by the sound of legendary Highlife musician E.T. Mensah’s All for You, and women, men, children and people of all walks of life flocked to see their long-lost cousin return home. From the airport to Accra city centre, crowds jam-packed the streets, singing and escorting the great and charismatic Satchmo & His All-Stars and his wife Lucille on their very first visit to Africa. Louis Armstrong played to a crowd of more than 100,000 people, among whom was the Ghanaian Prime Minister and independence leader Kwame Nkrumah, and to him he dedicated the Fats Waller classic Black and Blue: ‘Cold empty bed, springs hard as lead / Feel like old Ned, wished I was dead / What did I do to be so black and blue? / Even the mouse ran from my house / They laugh at you, and scorn you too / What did I do to be so black and blue?’ The history of the world of the past 500 years compressed into a song only a few minutes long. And in tones of black and blue it criss-crosses through Lanceta’s La red de San Luis (1991, p. 140).

Some memories cannot be locked up within the space of the intangible. Some memories must take the form of landscapes, rivers, hills and mountain ranges, especially if they are of larger-than-life figures, of gigantic beings like Satchmo, St. Louis, Louie, Louis Armstrong, or if they are of distinctive places like Plaza Red de San Luis.

Lanceta’s La red de San Luis could be the sound waves coming out of Bowie’s or even Satchmo’s horn. But if we stay true to the notion of reversal, to the notation that is written independently of and subsequently to the music, then La red de San Luis could be the score from which Bowie had unconsciously played the tribute to Louie. The gentle and subtle blowing at the beginning of For Louie announces the coming and being of majesty. Sometimes rusty and cautious like some of the sky blue waves flowing longitudinally in La red de San Luis, the guiding waves of the horn, in contrast, are the oxblood red undulations that boldly carve their way through the landscape, only interjected by the beats of the drum, and the keys must also find their way latitudinally across that same landscape. But it is this crossing that informs and marks this portrait. The magic is in Lanceta’s disruption of the sinuous wave patterns and in Bowie doing gymnastics with his breath. In the regulation of air, but also in the tapping of air from deep within the bowels only to press it out through the funnel of his horn. In the middle of this sonic journey, this praise song, this sonic weaving of memories, Fontella Bass and David Peaston sing out loud as if to remind us ‘there was a man. Great man from New Orleans. Some call him Satchmo. Or just plain Louie. Maaaaaan could he blow some horn. I still feel it, feel it, feel it all around. I say Louie you lay deep in our heart. And this song is for you. When he played his music, you could hear it all over town, in smoke filled places, his sound is still right there.’ And it is this ‘still thereness,’ this ability of people, their energies and their sounds, to occupy and mark spaces that makes major crossroads – smoked filled spaces or otherwise – what they are.

Crossroads are where spirits intersect and interact with each other, and it’s no wonder that in Yoruba cosmogony, the trickster god Eshu (Elegba) is not only the mediator of life’s transitions, the messenger between humans and orishas, but also the guardian of crossroads. This is no different from the Plaza Red de San Luis in Madrid, for example, or any other red (literally translated from Spanish as ‘network’ or, in this case, confluence of many streets). In Lanceta’s La red de San Luis the streets fluctuate across each other to create a mesh of networks, like a fishing net, a captor of spirits afloat.

Act II: ‘Spacehead’. Jacob soñó. ‘Down Home’

‘And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran.

And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep.

And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.

And, behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed;

And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.

And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.

And he was afraid, and said, how dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.

And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it.

And he called the name of that place Bethel: but the name of that city was called Luz at the first.’³

The questions of why we dream, why we dream what we dream, and what our dreams mean have intrigued humankind since the beginning. Dreams are the stuff of some of the greatest mysteries on which religions and societies have been built, and the grounds on which wars and peace treaties have germinated. Dreams have also provided some of the most important raw material for scientists of all disciplines and artists of all generations and times, mediums and denominations. In the Abrahamic religions, one of the most widely known dreams is the dream of Jacob, dating from the genesis of time. For almost 3,000 years, philosophers and theologians have tried to unpack, signify, interpret, and create associations between the dream of Jacob and the ladder at the centre of the narrative. If one believes Philo of Alexandria’s (c. 20 BCE – c. 50 CE) deliberations and varying interpretations in De somniis, the ladder in the dream is the human soul, the souls ascending from and descending into bodies, and the dream might reveal virtues/ups and sins/downs in life; or the angels might signify human beings’ changing relations.⁴ But this is just one of countless other readings. The history of art is awash with paintings of Jacob, his dream, the ladder, the angels and stone, with each generation projecting its notions of love, place, spirituality and even anxiety into them. From Giorgio Vasari’s Jacob’s Dream for the Florentine Marsilio degli Albizi in 1558, to Domenico

Feti’s Jacob’s Dream (1613), Jusepe de Ribera’s Jacob’s Dream (1639), Ary de Vois’ Jacob’s Dream (1660‒1680) and William Blake’s Jacob’s Ladder (1799‒1806), it is as if to qualify as an artist one had to re-imagine Jacob’s dream, and even dream it again with Jacob!

Teresa Lanceta’s own interpretation of Jacob’s dream is the piece Jacob soñó (1984, p. 106). If ever a tapestry was a painting, then it is this – and it is an abstract painting too. But there is a twist in the tale in Lanceta’s Jacob soñó in the use of the tenses: Jacob doesn’t dream, he dreamt. What seems to be a relegation to the past is more an arching of the bow of time to make the past continuous. In the symbol-laden tapestry, the ladder is in the centre and stretches up from the earth into a place unknown, and we see universal symbols, like the key and the triangle (which, depending on its shape and direction in alchemy could be a signifier for air, water or fire); and Amazigh Berber symbols, like the eye and the various stars, the meanings of which lie deep in the ‘archives’ of Berber women, the bearers and transmitters of knowledge. As with verlan, if you are not initiated, the words you hear might lead you down false paths. So a symbol that looks like a house in Lanceta’s Jacob soñó could actually represent the house of God and the gateway to heaven as dreamt by Jacob in the sense of the Abrahamic religions; or it could represent any other spiritual or occultist understanding held by any of the world’s peoples.

But what if one could translate Lanceta’s interpretation of Jacob’s dream into the sonic? Wouldn’t it sound like Lester Bowie’s Spacehead? The flashes of the keys and steel at the beginning could be the readings of the stars, and the horn and organ could be the slow then hectic ascension of the stairs. The percussive interjections might be the angels’ doubts as they make their way up and down the ladder, wondering where it is taking them. But Space- head is also as magnificent an exposé of the mind in a state of wild dreaming as that dream of Jacob’s in Genesis. It is topsy-turvy. There are moments of despair, with Jacob wondering why he and the angels are endlessly climbing this ladder. The piano conveys the repetitiveness of this ceaseless climb, and Bowie on his horn lays bare the exhaustion, the desire to quit, the fear of giving up, the long- ing to see the light at the end of the tunnel or the top of the ladder. Then with much gentility he brings us down at the end to the moment of awakening in which we realise it was all just a dream. But one with a longlasting impact.

Act III: ‘Ghosts’. Magdalena. Magdalena (multiplicada). Domingo. Última copa

In 2004, Teresa Lanceta embarks on a series of coloured pencil drawings on paper that capture the ghostly beauty of the apparitional experience. In Vodou cosmogony, the ghost is often likened to a lwa, a spirit that serves as an intermediary between humans and the Bondyé. It is said that there are more than a thousand different apparitions or manifestations of the lwa, each of them with their own personality and purpose. It is when humans are dreaming or participating in rituals and divinations that the lwa work their magic, healing, alleviating worries and offering advice. Vodou, practised in Haiti and beyond, is a weave of spiritual practices that originated under Spanish enslavement when people and their religions were brought to the so-called New World from the west coast of Central Africa and the Bight of Benin, and ethnic groups such as the Yoruba, Fon and Ewe were forcibly baptised into the Christian faith by Roman Catholic missionaries.⁵

In this series of drawings by Lanceta – which in- cludes Magdalena (2004, p. 232), Magdalena (multiplicada) (2004, p. 230), Domingo (2004, p. 234), and Última copa (2004, p. 235), among many others – one is tempted to ask which of the lwa has possessed the people portrayed? What is the lwa channelling into these people and through Teresa Lanceta? And what about these ritual spaces they occupy, with their signs and symbols that only the initi- ated can comprehend?

‘A Vodou ceremony involves song and dance for hours and is used to serve and offer the lwa food and drink, receive council from them and keep the social fab- ric functional. It may take hours for an initiate to dance him- or herself into trance,⁶ a prerequisite for a lwa to appear in the head of a serviteur by possession. Whenever a lwa rises up through the feet of a serviteur, the person being ridden by the lwa will change cadence and speech pattern, the style of dance, gestures and countenance to the appearance linked to the lwa. The serviteur will also ask for clothes, food, drink and luxuries ascribed to the lwa according to its ascribed nationality.’⁷⁸

Lester Bowie’s Ghosts could just be one of those songs that accompany this ritual; that invite the lwa to take possession of the body. Bowie begins with something like a summoning of the spirits with his horn. It is an alluring, seductive and captivating displacement of air from the player’s body through the lwa into the ears and body of the listener. It is a familiar sound, for it is a sound of the wind and the birds. It is a familiar sound, for it is the sound of the jinn leaving the bottle. Then, Bowie guides you with his horn into the dancing as the prerequisite of the transition. It is here that all the valves open up to let the lwa in.

The spaces that Lanceta has created in this series of drawings are reminiscent of Mudejar carpets and floor, wall and ceiling gardens; and of silos in which not grains, but symbols, are stored along with the secrets of the world. It is in such spaces that the lwa gain access and that Magdalena and Domingo have been ideally placed to have a last drink before the transition.

Act IV: ‘Trans Traditional Suite’. Navajo I

The spiritual wellbeing of the Navajo people is said to be informed by practices that offer vitality and healing. Examples of this are the Night ceremony, the Blessing Way ceremony, the Enemy Way Ceremony, the Girl’s Dance (the Squaw Dance), the Navajo House Blessing Ceremony and the First Laugh Ceremony, amongst others.⁹ A core element of many of these ceremonies is the notion of transformation: the possibility of migrating spiritually, physically, emotionally, psychologically from one state to another. In the Night Chant (Yeibitchai Dance), for example, as Washington Matthews describes in his 1902 book The Night Chant,¹⁰ a ritual lasting nine nights is performed to cure the community of its ills and restore balance among the people and among humans and the universe. Over the course of the nine nights, four rites are performed – In the Rocks (Tseh’nn-jihHatal’), from the Timber (Tsin-tzahn’jihHatal’), Danced Across the River (Klay-chah’jihHatal’), Big God Chant (Hash’jaytso’hihHatal’) – and by implementing shock and arousal techniques, through sand painting, singing and praying, diseases are eliminated, transformation takes place, and balance within and without is restored.

There are many transformations in Teresa Lanceta’s Navajo I (1990, p. 142). Small waves become large waves, then small squares making chequered patterns (this chessboard-like Amazigh symbol is associated with celestial experiences and religious trances) become larger, then become hills and mountains, a cross, and ultimately straight lines to infinity. There is also a transition in terms of density, with the left half of the fabric dense, frenzied and with a ‘thinking’ rhythm, while the right is spacious, quieter, pensive and less intense.

Deep within Lester Bowie’s Trans Traditional Suite, a voice emerges, chanting ‘everything must change, nothing stays the same, everything must change, nothing stays the same [...], mysteries do unfold, never much too soon, nothing stays the same, there are not many things in life you can be sure of, except rainfall from the sky, the sunlight of the sky, and hummingbirds just fly, everything must change, nothing, no one remains the same, everyone must change, nothing stays the same, there are not many things in life you can be sure of, except rainfall from the sky, the sunlight of the skies and hummingbirds just fly.’ The transformation in Bowie’s piece is spiritual but essentially political too. Every note, every sound made, every drop of air squeezed through the horn, every drum beat, and piano key hit is political. And like Lanceta’s Navajo I, Bowie’s Trans Traditional Suite exudes the spirit of change. No one will oppress or be oppressed ever again. Change is imminent. Change is constant. Change is the only religion. And as Octavia Butler writes through Lauren Oya Olamina’s religion Earthseed in her novel Parable of the Sower:

Consider: Whether you’re a human being, an insect, a microbe, or a stone, this verse is true.
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.¹¹

Act V: ‘Organic Echo 1, 2’. Subían y bajaban

Subían y bajaban (1987, p. 110) is another of those wellcomposed confluences of Amazigh symbols. Before digging deep into a reading of this particular verlan, one can immediately see hints of the most organic elements around us: water, sky, sunlight and, in the middle, the human being, almost suppliant, with so many other organic forces around. The fabric is a narrational piece told in the language of abstraction, and while we can understand some of the signs and symbols, the general narrative stays within that space of double coding.

The title of the fabric, Subían y bajaban, literally translates as ‘They went up and down’, which invites speculation as to who ‘they’ are here and what the context is. With the reappearance of the ladder, one is tempted to think again of Jacob’s dream. Is ‘they’ in ‘They went up and down’ a metaphor for the rise and fall of Christianity? Or is it a metaphor for the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula – Hispania – by the Umayyad in 711 and the Reconquista of Granada by the Christians in 1492? Or is it a metaphor for Spanish colonisation and the active expansion of the Spanish empire between 1493 and 1898 and the loss, much later, of the Spanish Sahara in 1976? Or is it a metaphor for the rise and fall of the dictator Francisco Franco, between 1939 and 1975? Indeed, the ‘they’ could be a metaphor for everything and nothing.

On the other hand, the Amazigh symbols in this abstract-narrative composition speak loud and clear. Obviously, there is more than meets the eye, but one can see the Finger, which is said to be a symbol of protection; the Scissors, a symbol of ghost-fearing metalworkers; the Chessboard, symbol of celestial experiences; the Snake, symbol of holiness as well as healing, and the Lozenge, which symbolises womanhood and fertility. With these pillars, the reader of the work can construct a universe.

The universe that Lester Bowie conjures for us is the universe of the Organic Echo. As they say, ‘As you make your bed, so shall you lie in it.’ That might be the organic echo. The karma. What goes up must come down. Bowie’s Organic Echo is a kind of a dirge. A solemn and beautiful, hearty and at the same time vast – vast like the Sahara – companionate exposé. It is deeply melancholic but also celebratory: it celebrates life beyond human life and the profundity of the lives that enable our own – the many other beings in this universe whose presence and activity allow humans to live on, despite all odds. The sounds of Bowie’s horn are as capacious as the spaces they accommodate and the emotions they evoke. Towards the end of Organic Echo 1 the temperament changes to a warning, a caution, as if to say: They went up and down. Organic Echo 2 is a continuation of the voluminousness of Subían y bajaban. Bowie’s trumpet seems to caress the surfaces and curves of each wave in Lanceta’s work. The sound seems to produce even more ripples and suddenly the blue bubbles in the fabric acquire new meanings. At intervals, Organic Echo 2 is punctuated with despair and struggles to find faith and solace, as the burden of history is sometimes too much even for the piano keys to carry.

For more than four decades, Lanceta has used the medium of weaving to pack histories into symbols and unpack histories from crevices and vaults of the past. For history is not of the past but of the present. If history is like an old house at night, with all the lamps lit and the ancestors whispering inside, as Arundhati Roy reveals to us via Chacko; and if to understand history we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying and look at the books and the pictures on the wall, and smell the smells, then Teresa Lanceta’s work has shown us the way into that old house, given us the tools and sensibilities to see, smell, listen to the props of history. And even more especially, Lanceta’s work has given us the means, like the many Berber women weavers before her, to encode histories, so that those who have historically banalised and perverted histories will have difficulty accessing this knowledge, as they can only understand forward language, while we have learned to communicate backwards through the process of verlanisation and double verlanisation.