Musical meanings

 I’ve always loved musical sound tracks in novels. Knowing the music they listen to is another way to get to know the characters.  Music, rhythm and even silence can define their identities.

Whale Rock has its own sound track from salsa to rock ‘n’ roll. Most of the characters are misfits and damaged people. In a sense, they have lost their rhythm. In particular Rafael, a Nicaraguan immigrant, is out of tune with life in a new country where he doesn’t feel he’s accepted. The way the characters’ alienation in this world intersects with music, however, also gives their stories meaning.

In one of the units I studied as part of my Masters, we looked at The Time of our Singing by Richard Powers (2003) where the music, while carrying identity, is a metaphor for a wider look at racial tension, brutal societies and personal trauma. It can also be a metaphor for divisions between people in an uncaring society.

This dense and poetic novel is set during the tumultuous civil rights period in the United States. Rebellion was in the air and was reflected in the music. Rock’n’roll was crossing over from only being performed by Blacks to a wider audience as it paid homage to its roots - the slave songs and chants of the cotton fields that became the blues and the gospel that became soul.

In Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (1986), Peter Guralnick describes soul music as: “the far less controlled, gospel-based, emotion-baring kind of music that grew up in the wake of the success of Ray Charles from about 1954 on and came to its full flowering, along with motown, in the early 1960s”. He says, it was “an expression of rebellion, or at least of discontent” and “accompanied the Civil Rights Movement almost step by step, its success directly reflecting the giant strides that integration was making”.

Music in itself can be political, not just the words of the songs but the sheer act of listening to it in defiance of the authorities. Music during the civil rights period strove to break down barriers between the races, but in Cuba and Latin America it was a sign of class differences, and to a certain extent, ethnic differences between the Blacks, Indians and the Spanish descendants.  Like blues and soul, much of Latin music would not exist without the African slave trade.

In Cuba, the rumba is a dance of the common people, in particular Black Cubans, and it is the racial tension exemplified through music and the influence of Santeria  (or Cuban voodoo) in the  revolution that informs the narrative of my play, Havana, Harlem. 

In 1960, around the same time as much of the setting of The Time of our Singing Cuban leader Fidel Casto visited New York to speak at the United Nations. Banned from every hotel in Manhattan he and his entourage were offered accommodation at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem by local Blacks. My character, Celia Sanchez, (Castro’s right hand woman and the white daughter of a sugar plantation doctor) learnt rumba from Jose, her former Black lover and guerrilla fighter, who just happens to be a waiter at this hotel.

The “revolutionary baby” of Cuba was Nicaragua in Central America where the Sandinistas, a group of left wing revolutionaries, toppled the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. Among the leaders of the new government were novelists and poets such as Sergio Ramirez, Giaconda Belli and Tomás Borge, who wrote about social issues and patriotism and the actual experience of being guerrilla fighters, as well as the revolution’s aftermath.

While revolutionary music took the form more prominently of folksongs in Nicaragua, it would be hard to find a Nicaraguan who couldn’t salsa, a musical form also formed by the merging of African and Caribbean musical traditions. Other popular music there with even stronger indigenous roots is the Palo de Mayo from the Atlantic Coast.

Belli fictionalizes her experience in The Inhabited Woman where Lavinia, a middle class architect, is introduced to radical politics by her enigmatic boss, Felipe, and finally joins the revolutionary Movement. Like many Latin writers post-1970s Belli has found politics can be felt most keenly in the ordinary, when people are prepared to continue with everyday life in the face of war and economic embargoes, and that includes dancing.

Belli also seems to be saying that in times of change and war,  music as well as being escapism from the drudgery of everyday life, may be the only way such men, who have been ruled by machismo, can finally express themselves.

In Whale Rock, an accident on a building site triggers traumatic flashbacks to Rafael’s own experiences of torture in Nicaragua in the 1980s, a time when he was a street fighter in the revolution and later a cameraman working with an American journalist, Lana. He has Post Traumatic Stress 

Disorder but has managed to keep it at bay, until this accident “returns” him to the original trauma.

Music in Rafael’s home country is strongly linked to race and identity. He feels that in Australia his music has been appropriated by people who do not share this background and have no understanding of its roots and meaning. In Australia where so many people either feel they can’t dance or really can’t dance, the latest fashion is more recognised than deeply-held beliefs, or so Rafael believes. The music scene here only reinforces his alienation.

The other main character, Shannon, is an Australian former dancer in her thirties of Irish descent, who runs a café in Sydney’s eastern beaches. She has suffered a stillbirth and her marriage has broken up; her five-year-old son lives with his father. She too feels as if she’s lost her rhythm, her reason for being. She no longer wants to dance or even enjoy music.

Sensory triggers of sight, smell, sound, taste and touch force characters back into their involuntary memories or as in the case of Rafael flashbacks that as his PTSD progresses become more and more terrifying.

The experiences recalled are traumatic in different ways. But a stubbornly recurring memory in fiction as in life doesn’t have to be of something horrific but one that provokes strong emotion. Incidents that cause shame, humiliation and embarrassment can give rise to flashbacks even if they don’t involve violence. Those suffering trauma in Nicaragua particularly from the effects of the war against the US-backed Contras in the 1980s have said that “certain songs” have had the power to trigger painful memories.

A flashback is used in novels as a device for time travel and also dramatic tension. But music can also, in fiction as in real life, suspend time.

Music can also be used to express the talents but also the cultural gaps, dilemmas, frustrations and eventually tragic emotions of the main characters.