3 - Chanted Defiance: Singing a Culture of Resistance

Summary

You can't have a revolution without songs.

(banner at President-Elect Salvador Allende rally, 1970)

The last young man arrived too

and the first young man addressed him:

repeat thirteen times

that you’re awake,

so that I tell you

yes, grab your knapsack

and write on the petals of a poppy

thirteen times anew

one can always arrive

right at the time of harvest.

…

Repeat thirteen times

there's no blood of Judas in my body

so that I tell you, it's enough

just to grab your knapsack

and your walking stick too

and brother

rise up!

Shahyar Ghanbari (2012)

If poetry was the prophetic voice that artistically anticipated and valorised militant resistance more than a decade before Siahkal, it was the protest songs that, in the 1970s, popularised poetic depictions of the existential dilemma of living under dictatorship. Unlike poetry's anticipative tone, ‘protest songs’ represent the ‘delayed effect’ of the guerrilla movement. Aside from passionate lovers yearning to express themselves through poems, poetry is, stricto sensu, typically and historically the art of literati, students and the educated classes, the art of seekers who are able to get away from the mundane and delve instead into poetic imagination and its envisioned world. Clearly, there is an organic relationship between poetry and music: both entail rhythms and are as ancient as human collectives; even today's freeverse poetry often contains a certain (internal) rhythm that threads the words in ideational harmony. In songs, the music enhances – in a way, appropriates, accentuates and externalises – the internal, phonological rhythms of the verse. Aided by the soul-grabbing power of music, songs take poetic words to the public, often in the course of the mundane lives of people, reaching deep inside their feelings and lifting them to the musically sung ideas. Moreover, music is so innate to the human mind that anyone without (or with) musical knowledge can hum or whistle a tune upon hearing it, often only right after the first time of hearing. Braided with the tune, lyrics become musically invigorated and thus remembered. Songs are the greatest mnemonic arts.