Diamanda Galas

October 10, 2005
The Age
By John Slavin

PHILOSOPHER Theodor Adorno once wrote: "After Auschwitz, poetry is no longer possible." It is a contentious statement for a number of reasons. Poetry is the paramedic of culture: without poetry, what will cleanse language through which history, politics and media is polluted?

The other contention is that there were other genocides before the Holocaust. Greek-American artist Diamanda Galas confronts these issues head-on. Hers is a poetic chronicle and angry protest of man's inhumanity to man pushed up hard against the glass of memory.

The horrors that her extraordinary, over-the-top performance commemorates are the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the Anatolian catastrophe of 1923 in which an estimated half a million Greeks lost their lives and another 1½ million were displaced. "The Defixiones" of her title are the lead beads left on graves in the Middle East to warn against the desecration of graves. Her hour-and-a-half sustained chant for the dead based on poems by the Greeks Ritsos and Seferis and eyewitnesses to the murders in Armenia and the writings of the novelist Dido Soteriou, among others, are the chain of a rosary told for the victims upon which she hangs her performance.
[...]
Although a minute printout of the poems is provided, the audience seated in the dark can't possibly understand the details of a recital delivered in a smattering of Greek, Armenian and Turkish.
[...]
Diving into Galas' performance is like entering someone else's nightmare. It is intense, incomprehensible and finally tedious. It did, however, arouse an enthusiastic response from an audience of ululating Goths who might have identified with Galas' romantic despair.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.