Of all the physical ways that exist to support other bodies, the voice must be one of the most common. So, some bodies pull on others to help them move forward. In the face of hunger, the voices prevail. Before the passage of time, the voice prevails. Before work, injustice, love, envy, la nostalgia, the instrumentalization, the pain, death, everyday life, the humor, gender norms, violence or extinction, the voice prevails. Whales sing as much as sheep, cows as well as wolves. Birds and humans always sing.
“To those who never sang, it's hard for them to start”, we read in the dedication of a book some time ago. It was a love story, but also a story of survival. More or less. In the middle of this proverb, we find key elements of our work: disappearance, esperanza, voice, canto. It was after reflecting on the gaps between these words that, suddenly, the Galician language, the singing of birds, fascism, the totems of virility, dementia... all of this appeared intertwined in the same myth of origin, in the same lullaby. We thought imperialism and extinction were full of silence, while the resistance to them was full of song:
Mothers sing by the cradles
The workers sing in the streets and fields
The robins sing in their nests
The old sing to the young
The living sing to the dead
The lover sings to his lover
The desperate sing
The hopes sing
The angry ones sing
The twins sing
We all sing, to kill time
We sing, first of all, to fight death, to get closer to others, to survive. We sing because others have sung before and so that others may sing later., because what a song teaches is nothing other than the ability to call others, to imitate them, to entertain them and even to invoke them; the ability to find and provide comfort, plus the wonderful ability to change. Voice and language in all their forms are bridges between distant things, a place where worlds and the hybrids that inhabit them are created. May this be an invitation to tell and sing about the world in a way that makes the lives of others as important., so sacred, so complex and essential, like one's own.
Lara and Noa Castro Lema (A Coruña, 1998)
