![]()
"I will show you what a woman can do."
Part One: a clear, subtle voice
Whether through brawny assertiveness or by embellishing happenstance, we are now being gifted by more and first-rate access to what women have to say and how they choose to say it in music. While working recently on a review of Sofia Rei’s bedazzling Umbral, I had a mini-revelation: I had inadvertently (or maybe not) filed my last ten or so articles for RootsWorld top-loaded with the efforts of women from around the world who have been pivotal in elbowing men from their ages-old monopoly over the artistry, center stage, and business of music, arguably the most influential of all of the arts. These women boast supreme and engaging musicianship, as well as growing savvy independent of and with equal agency as men.
In Umbral, Rei channels Chilean Nobel poet laureate, Gabriela Mistral, adopting Mistral’s admonishment that women swell with self-blame and need to be rid of it. Rei has used her lyrics, which can sound haughty and humble at the same time, to prickle and even embarrass men about their cluelessness and silly behaviors. And her experiments with electronics, if not making the grand statements that men have been trumpeting throughout their reign over the idiom, brim with conviction and taste. Her statement is one of a woman who has expanded her musical horizons with aplomb, unbeholden to men’s entitlement. And Rei’s star is rising, beyond the Latin world now, as a consummate creator.
“Kijiti” is the most captivatingly interpreted song in Siti Muharam’s homage to her great grandmother. In it, the younger Siti relates and laments the true story of a young pregnant woman abducted from the Tanganyikan mainland and brought to Zanzibar, where she is raped and then murdered. It’s a story the telling of which most certainly was prohibited in turn-of-the-century East Africa, and one would thus have to marvel at Siti Binti’s temerity to share it with her vast public. Siti Muharam, along with her arranger, Mohamed Issa Matona, has taken taarab into the present with electronic enhancement and tasteful riffs on traditional lines, yet taarab still reigns: haunting, bygone, melancholic and, if one must, exotic. The album reveals Muharam’s deep commitment to her heritage and to the breakout woman who questioned injustice within it. They make an august team, great granddaughter and her antecedent using their music to do justice to the women of East Africa.
Ghali said after their success last year at the Pioneer Works club in Brooklyn, from whence their acclaimed album, At Pioneer Works, comes, “When we started to play the music, we just liked hanging out with our friends, playing one guitar and singing.” It’s this sense of earnestness and artlessness that is at the core of their appeal, in sharp distinction to the commanding metal of their male counterparts, many of whom bear the battle scars of ongoing wars for a homeland for their semi-nomadic people. For the women, they are not iconoclasts, but are consciously taking rightful possession of their part of a tradition that, in this changing world, is integral to the fragile cohesion of a bedouin culture. What seems like a small step is really a giant one, not only for les Filles de Illighadad, but for all the women celebrated here. In their way, they are changing whom we listen to and what women have to say in music today, finally opening avenues leading towards artistic equality. Their achievement reminds me of the comment by the brilliant Baroque painter, Artemisia Gentileschi, who, after nearly 500 years of oblivion is finally getting her due: “I will show your Lordship what a woman can do.”
Part Two: enough-is-enough
It’s taken multiple decades for the latter day women’s movement to peer out from its bourgeois bastion and consider the urgency of change, and that the burning issues at the fore worldwide go beyond who does the dishes or who takes a seat in the boardroom (although these are critical concerns), but they beg being able to survive as a single mother; to fight, not merely for equal pay, but for the right even to be accepted into the work force; to appropriate the dignity to own one’s body free of the fear of assault, rape or trafficking; and to attend school as a portal towards empowerment and self fulfillment. Black Lives Matter has been able to reach disenfranchised women the world over alerting them to the achievements of activism, as have young victims turned sheroes, like Malala Yousafzai, Karla Jacinto (a Mexican woman fighting to end sexual abuse and trafficking, once trafficked herself), and Ifrah Ahmed (a high profile campaigner against female genital mutilation in Africa). Music, always a vital avenue of communication among women in the so-called developing countries, had, until now, afforded women little agency since they have traditionally been heard publicly backing up men or singing only of love and praise. But early pioneers like Chavela Vargas, Oumou Sangaré and Abida Parveen laid the groundwork for today’s voices that are clamoring to be heeded; since the turn of the century or so, women have used music cogently and ardently, clamoring for basic human rights and equality. Women such as Amparo Sanchez (Spain), Ladama (a collective from throughout the Latin world), and Luedji Luna (Brazil), are in-your-face women; they form, along with others, a “basta brigade” of enough-is-enough sisterhood.
Sanchez's songs have purpose. They reflect her values, which translate to action; she champions causes such as indigenous rights (she’s spent time in Chiapas in the Lacandón forest with the Zapatistas), refugee and immigrant rights, and, most earnestly, the empowerment of women, which she’s achieved conspicuously by launching her own record label, Mamita. The label produces Sanchez’s own and other women’s music, while advocating for women to be counted in all aspects of music, on, off, and behind the stage. Her lyrics are characteristically honest. In the Amparanoia and Himnopsis Collective CD of 2021, Mi Génetica , she sings of getting out into the streets to march for women’s rights and of her conviction that she was sent down from the heavens to make a better future for us all. On the more personal side, Sanchez confesses that leaving her lover has freed her of his foolishness and expresses gratitude that, now liberated, she can luxuriate in cumbia! Bringing it way back home, fiercely and eloquently, Sanchez has sung and spoken openly about her experience with abusive men. She is, indeed, a lodestar.
Love is the brightest star in Luna’s cosmos, yet she reveals how she struggles with how to love fiercely and physically while maintaining a relationship in which her integrity, independence and self-respect are honored. Her songs of heightened sex, while they may not burn in all women, are thorny and very difficult to navigate. Luedji Luna is giving women of pronounced physicality much to think about as well as her empathy. Amparo Sanchez, Ladama, and Luedji Luna contrast with more demure women like Sofia Rei, Siti Muharam and Les Filles de Illighadad, but the ultimate affect is equally far-reaching. Both sets of inspired artists add much to advancing women’s empowerment, while taking different routes through the highways of their art. They represent a new era of advocacy through music.
You can find longer reviews of all of these artists, with songs, by clicking on the album covers above.
More artists to explore:
Search RootsWorld
|
|