“The existence of this woman, whose life remained undefended since the day of her birth to the day of her death – as a street prostitute, a middle-aged woman, a lesbian, and a child raped continuously by her father, was comprised of the four strikes that finally put her into critical mass. In 2002, after living on Death Row for ten years, Wuornos finally become worn down and asked to die by lethal injection. At her execution she said, ‘I’d just like to say I’m sailing with the Rock and I'll be back like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mother ship and all. I'll be back.’”

The present writer interviewed Diamanda Galás in late January, primarily about the simultaneous release of her albums ‘La Serpenta Canta’ and ‘Defixiones: Will And Testament’ just before Christmas. At that point I was unaware of the singer’s position regarding the Hollywood-isation of Wuornos. On learning of it, I sent an e-mail requesting an additional quote on the subject. The following is Galás’ response, reproduced here with her permission.

"Hi Peter!

Let me just say briefly that the Doppelgangster Hollywood Kill/Reincarnate Syndrome especially with Aileen, is as evil as they come. The ads for this film came out the day after Aileen’s execution. This summer the articles on Charlize Theron in various designer clothes announced that this role will break “the toughest woman in Hollywood,” the way ‘Boys Don’t Cry,’ or whatever, broke that hag somebody’s seedy gash, what’s-’er-name.

These people never gave one bloody cent to trying to help this poor woman, about whom they “cared so much”; they disingenuously used double-entendre or incontinent sardonicism in their creation of the title, ‘MONSTER’. They played her for all it was worth, and threw her body in the garbage dump. For them she never really existed anyway, she didn’t have a life, a frightening history to detail or discuss compassionately; she was just a photo-op for the new post-post-Stanislavski method (accent on the second syllable) of faking a part in the Gortex room.

Remember when Laurence Olivier asked Dustin Hoffman, who was no doubt sucking off the waste products of some autistic child somewhere, “Why don't you just ACT?” In the future Hollywood will be able to afford the sabbaticals of their leading men and ladies so that they can commit the actual crimes themselves, with the appropriate Hollywood lawyers standing by. So they won’t have to passively kill-off their real-life protagonists for threat of lawsuits.

More later,

affectionately yours,

Diamanda"

Galás’ outspokenness on this matter is entirely in character. Denounced by the Christian right in America and the Catholic Church in Italy, beloved of Marilyn Manson (who used her music as an intro tape on tour), she’s not your average three-and-a half octave singer, virtuoso pianist and composer of hardcore avant-garde liturgies. Equal parts Medea, Medusa and Mahalia, Galás renders terms like ‘diva’ and ‘cutting edge’ entirely meaningless.

The singer’s stance regarding Wuornos’ case is informed by her own case history. In previous interviews, she has spoken about her past as a prostitute in California and the clientele that comes with the job, and has been an aggressive supporter of draconian retribution towards rapists and perpetrators of sexual assaults. She’s also been a long standing champion of the rights of prostitutes who, in order to make a complaint against a rapist, attacker, or an overly aggressive client, must first confess to solicitation.

Brought up in San Diego by Greek Orthodox parents, Galás made her performing debut in 1979 at the Festival d’Avignon in France, taking the lead in the opera ‘Un Jour Comme un Autre’ by composer Vinko Globokar, based upon the Amnesty International documentation of the arrest and torture of a Turkish woman for alleged treason. It would set the template for much of her later work. On her 1984 self-titled album she explored the mindset of the incarcerated, the isolated and the cast-out on ‘Panoptikon’ and commemorated the Greek women killed by the Junta between 1967 and 1974 on ‘Song From The Blood Of Those Murdered.’

Throughout the mid to late 80s, much of her energy went towards highlighting the social pariah status of AIDS sufferers, a pandemic whose growth she saw as an act of genocide on the part of a government that treated HIV as divine retribution upon homosexuals and drug addicts (her own brother, Philip Dimitri Galás, a playwright, died of the disease in 1986). Her ‘Plague Mass’ ‘Masque Of The Red Death,’ incorporating a triptych of albums The Divine Punishment (1986), Saint Of The Pit and ‘You Must Be Certain Of The Devil’ (1987), constituted a hellish and hallucinogenic exploration into the mind of a dying AIDS victim, incorporating the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, German expressionist Schrei opera, electronic voice manipulation, performance art, the Psalms, excerpts from Leviticus and the Lamentations, parodies of fundamentalist evangelists, and traditional blues and gospel songs.

Galás continues to interrogate history on her new works. ‘La Serpenta Canta’ is a live album on which she strips bare and breathes fire into standards by Blind Lemon Jefferson, Hank Williams, John Lee Hooker and Ornette Coleman. ‘Defixiones, Will And Testament’ is an ambitious studio work concerning “the forgotten and erased” of the Armenian, Assyrian, Anatolian and Pontic Greek genocides that occurred between 1914 and 1923.

This writer became aware of Galás work tangentially, from a variety of sources. Trent Reznor spliced her hackle-raising version of ‘I Put A Spell On You’ into Jane’s Addiction’s ‘Nothing’s Shocking’ on the ‘Natural Born Killers’ soundtrack after that film’s co-producer Jane Hamsher championed her music to Oliver Stone. Then there was her reading of ‘Masque Of The Red Death’ on Hal Willner’s 1997 Poe tribute ‘Closed On Account Of Rabies.’ And interviewing John Paul Jones a couple of years ago, I asked the bassist if there was anyone he’d worked with who exhibited the same chemistry as Led Zeppelin. Without hesitation he name-checked Galás, with whom he collaborated on ‘The Sporting Life’ in 1994.

“She’s actually stunning,” he said, “the voice and the musicality. I love her piano playing, and just the sheer, ‘Fuck you, I’m going for it!’ Somebody suggested we work together, and I’d heard the ‘Wild Women With Steak Knives’ single, which is pretty much as it sounds from the title. One thing Diamanda told me, which I took to heart because she’d done the same thing with collaborations, was that if she was going to put that much effort into music, it might as well be her own.”

Galás, for her part, says, “John is one of the classiest men I have ever met. Of course, for a gentleman he plays the bass like a 400-pound spree-killer.”

In Diamanda Galás’ universe, the primary role of the artist is to bear witness. The word ‘Defixiones’, meaning hex, refers to the warnings engraved in lead plaques and placed by relatives on the graves of their deceased in Greece and Asia Minor, serving as deterrents against moving or desecrating the corpses. ‘Will and Testament’ indicates the last wishes of the dead taken from their graves under unnatural circumstances.

Here, the voices of the murdered acquire a power denied them in life. And as Galás concedes, rock ‘n’ roll’s appropriation of folk and ballad idioms have rendered the general listener accustomed to murder ballads or songs of mourning, but not as curses issued from the grave.

“That’s a very Greek tradition,” she says. “I think we see this in all of Greek tragedy, all you need is to spend one week with a Greek family and you’ll understand all of the above. But with Defixiones, because you’d be living as a minority group as a Greek in Turkey, the idea was that you’d have to protect yourself by these things because the law would allow the Turks to dig up your grave and pull your body apart and steal your jewels, and they would make sure that nobody knew how many people they had killed, and so there would be these lead plaques put on the dead, and these ornately written curses that would function as a warning that if a person would dig up the grave their daughter would be deformed and her daughter and her daughter. I think I’ve always been interested in these kinds of subjects obviously, but I think a lot of the murder things in rock n’ roll seem very sentimental to me, and I have no problem with sentiment, but Greek tragedy and ‘Defixiones’ are not sentimental at all.

“In a way we could relate it to many of the understandings that you would have in Ireland: when death is that present all around you, you tend to get a little bit less sentimental about it. Obviously I know about the drug statistics there, as a person with Hepatitis C, I’ve been on treatment for it for two or three years and temporarily got rid of it, and I know a lot about the IV drug users thing in Ireland and the AIDS statistics. People have often talked to me about doing the Plague Mass there, but for financial and publicity reasons it didn’t happen.”

With ‘Defixiones,’ Galás intention is to exhume the buried truth of the “minor holocaust” of Asia Minor, atrocities committed by the Ottoman Turks, condoned by Allied nations to protect economic and strategic interests. This genocide, she maintains, deserves its place in the annals of human shame alongside The Middle Passage, the Nazi Holocaust, the decimation of the Incas, Aztecs, and the North American Tribes, Rwanda, Kosovo and East Timor. The album is a bloody trawl through history’s charnel house, describing death marches through the desert, the torching of an Armenian church with its congregation trapped inside, and the drowning of the Anatolian Greeks of Smyrna, pushed into the Aegean while Allied warships moored at the furthest edges of the harbour. It fuses Armenian liturgical music with texts from dissident poets condemned to live in physical or spiritual exile, among them Siamanto, Adonis, Cesar Vallejo, the Assyrian poet-martyr Dr. Freidoun Bet-Oraham, Henri Michaux, Paul Celan’s haunted masterpiece ‘Death Fugue’ and also Blind Lemon Jefferson’s entirely apposite ‘See That My Grave Is Kept Clean’. Given the geographical and psychic location, this writer thinks of Saint John the Divine, writing his Revelation while living out his exile from the Romans in a cave on Patmos.

“The work I have been doing for a long, long time, ‘Insekta,’ it begins with Apokalypsos by John of Patmos,” Galás points out. “It’s in Greek and Latin and English, it begins with him, and I’ve told many of my Greek friends, some of whom have property on Patmos, that I wanted to go there because I wanted to work on it there. Some friends of a friend went there and saw that someone had carved my initials into the cave!

“It’s quite incredible that you should bring that up now, because ‘Insekta’ has to do with a person who’s been confined in one of these institutions where they put people with diseases or impossible illnesses or people in old folks’ homes with Alzheimer’s, and also the isolation of people who’ve been put in institutions for political reasons and have been researched upon. And for some reason I was using always this Apokalypsos at the beginning, and I kept thinking to myself, ‘Why am I doing this? I don’t even know what the relationship is. Why is this the beginning when the rest of it is a cacophony of sounds of animals being slaughtered and someone being fucked like a pig and all this insane shit going on?’ I’m always wondering why I do it, and then when you talk about this, this man in a hole being exiled from the Romans, it makes perfect sense to me.”

Galás work also locates similarities between the work of European decadents, such as Genet’s ‘Our Lady Of The Flowers,’ Baudelaire’s ‘Les Fleurs Du Mal’ and Rimbaud’s ‘Season In Hell’ and the sense of abandonment and anguish in the Psalms.

“I think I’m more or less driven, if you think about it, by the liturgical rhythm of all of the above,” she says. “Perhaps they are different liturgical rhythms, but we’re definitely talking about the rhythm of speech. With Baudelaire it really has this kind of swing to it that makes perfect sense, it has this kind of incantational drive, very musical. And the Psalms of David are very connected with a person trying to survive in the face of certain despair for as many moments as he can eke out.”

Another example of the Euro-American gospel convergence: on ‘The Dance’ from ‘Defixiones,’ Galás sets to music a fragment of one of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last poems before his murder in 1975, the same Pasolini who made the inspired move of scoring parts of his stunning ‘Gospel According To St. Matthew’ with Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark Was The Night.’

“It’s so profound, it’s so beautiful. I had forgotten that I had seen that, but when I went to Rome I was performing the Pasolini (piece) and then I was performing Roy Acuff’s ‘Were You There When They Crucified My Lord’ and a piece that was made famous by Mahalia Jackson which had to do with, “When I go I’ll go peacefully because . . .” And they were very struck by the repertoire that I used and I didn’t know why, because for me they seemed very dissimilar, but for them they seemed completely eerie. It’s strange, I don’t understand these connections, but on the other hand I do obviously. I think human beings are conditioned now by society to really underestimate our intuition.”

One of Ireland’s foremost music and pop culture writers, Peter Murphy (b. 1968, Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford) got a taste for journalism at the age of 17 when he won first place in an EU sponsored competition for young essayists. After ten days of being wined, dined and chauffeured around Europe on someone else’s tab, the only proviso being that he file a report at the end of it, he figured this was the way to live. But first, he had to get the rock ‘n’ roll bug out of his system, and spent most of the next decade playing drums with a succession of bands. He quit music to become a journalist in 1996, quickly establishing himself as a senior contributor to Hot Press. Since then he has written over 30 cover stories for the magazine, accumulating a portfolio of interviews that includes Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Willie Nelson, Radiohead, Public Enemy, Shane MacGowan, George Clinton, Sonic Youth, Television, Henry Rollins, PJ Harvey, Richard Hell, David Johansen, Warren Zevon, Wim Wenders, Iain Banks, Will Self, William Gibson, Billy Bob Thornton, FW De Klerk and many others. His work has also appeared in the Bloodaxe Books anthology Dublines, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) plus international publications such as Rolling Stone (Australia) and Request (US). Miscellaneous assignments include writing the programme notes for jazz legend Miles Davis’ art exhibition hosted by the Davis Gallery in Dublin (2000), collaborations with cult author JT LeRoy for the American magazine Razor (2002), and co-producing Revelations, a two-hour radio documentary about The Frames (2003). He is frequently employed as a rent-a-mouth by the BBC and Irish national radio and television, is a contributor to the online archive Rocksbackpages.com and more recently gave a talk entitled Nocturnal Emissions at the ReJoyce symposium in the National College of Ireland, tracing the influence of James Joyce’s writings on Irish music. He has also been invited to contribute an essay to the liner notes of the 2004 remastered edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music, and is currently writing his first novel.

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.