What compels someone to begin singing late in life? In Kurdish condolence practices, women collectively sing to commemorate their deceased relatives, reconstituting the dead as an active presence among the living. Yet in cases of death related to the Kurdish resistance, mourning was often obstructed by the colonial violence of the Turkish state through the withholding of bodies or restrictions on public commemoration. For most of her life, E., a Kurdish woman from Mardin on the Syrian-Turkish border, did not sing. In the early 1990s, when she was in her sixties, her son left to join the resistance and was never heard from again. From within this silence and uncertainty, E. began to narrate and sing, improvising words and melody simultaneously—sometimes alone, with no one present, and sometimes in the presence of listeners, but often while performing everyday tasks. Although E. also circulated collective stories as a storyteller, her singing was not organized as linear narratives with clear beginnings and endings but consisted of fragments, repetitions, and scenes from her own life. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2018, shortly before her death, and drawing on psychoanalytic and critical theory, I argue that E.’s vocal practice unfolds in a temporality in which death cannot be settled and loss cannot be fixed in the past, thereby rethinking singing less as an expression of completed grief than as a way of inhabiting indeterminacy and living within unsettled time.

Released in 2019, Zana (dir. Antoneta Kastrati) is set in the aftermath of the 1998-99 Kosovar war. Following Lume, an Albanian woman grieving the wartime killing of her daughter, the film stages psychiatric, spiritual, and political grammars as attempts to render her suffering legible that ultimately do not forestall her own death. While often framed as narrating “post-war trauma” in a patriarchal landscape, Zana’s acousmatic and diegetic renderings of voice shift attention from representation of trauma to the conditions of listening in the afterlives of irreparable violence. In this presentation, I argue that Zana stages voice as the site through which a history of wounds becomes audible and pain is sustained as ethical relation outside humanitarian teleologies of violence (Asad 2000). I examine three voiced moments suspended between dreaming and waking—the opening hum, the wailed lament, and the closing lullaby—as sonic enactments of pain that sustain an ongoing moral relationship between voice and listener beyond grammars of repair and redemption. What modes of listening are beckoned when voice does not speak for suffering, but instead sits at the threshold of life and death in irresolvable vulnerability? Drawing on Stefania Pandolfo’s (2018) work on voice and agony in Islamic healing, alongside scholarship on the relationality of voice (Hirschkind 2021; Abels 2022; Weidman 2014, 2015), this paper proposes an ethical-historical listening attuned to voicings of the “unspeakable” in the afterlives of war. Zana, I argue, compels viewer-listeners to inhabit pain as an ongoing condition of relation in the wake of genocidal violence.

In Ukrainian folklore, rusalki are the restless souls of women who have experienced a violent, premature, or unjust death. An amalgamation between nature spirit, ancestral being, and the anonymous dead, rusalki exist across multiple social and ecological landscapes. Their plurality is a key feature—reflecting how the dead become materially subsumed within soils and other-than-human bodies and their socialities. Reappearing annually in June, rusalki exact violence (usually towards men) or bestow blessings. I suggest their seemingly capricious natures hold in check excesses of gendered/ecological violence. “Farewell ritual” (provody rusalok) polyphonic songs are performed by women at the end of “Rusalka Week” while processing through various landscapes, culminating at burial grounds where the rusalki are then laid to rest. This paper will explore voice as a “transcorporeal” medium used to communicate with (and contain) the restless dead. Examining the aural and “intermaterial” (Eidsheim 2015) features of polyphonic “farewell ritual” songs from the Kyïvan Polissia—an area located within what is now the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone following the 1986 nuclear disaster—I explore the entangled ecological and social relations negotiated through singing. Through the concept of “transcorporeality”—that interrogates assumed boundaries between social and ecological worlds (Alaimo 2010)—I will analyze how “efficacious” vocal timbres/textures, resonance, and structured speech/lament produce material/cosmological transformations. My aim is to critically examine the ways vocality, the body, and ecological-social relations (recognizing the dead as situated within/across both) are co-constructed, unmade, and re-constituted through voice.

For the better part of a decade I have been researching, listening, thinking, and writing about Ecuadorian singer Julio Jaramillo (1935-1978). A truly transnational star, Jaramillo performed and recorded across the American continent for over twenty years. His voice stands at the crux of his Pan-American intimacy, sonically bounding a heterogeneous region. How to make sense of Jaramillo’s vocality? As I enter the latter stages of this project, I have returned to my fieldsite, now a telematic forum, to listen to Jaramillo along with some of his most avid contemporary listeners. Inspired by de la Cadena’s (2021) concept of “co-laboring,” this presentation reflects upon the listening sessions I have conducted with a number of jaramillistas (Jaramillo buffs) located throughout the American continent. Through these sessions, I have sought to query how the inexhaustibility of music and sound (Cimini and Moreno, 2016) manifest itself in the polyvalent aurality Jaramillo fosters. Ethnomusicology has been key in positioning the act of listening in the so-called auditory turn. Concomitantly, ethnomusicologists have advocated for collaborative models of academic knowledge-production (Guilbault and Cape 2014, Díaz and Feliciano Pecanha 2024). I seize on this juncture, centering communal listening and conceiving it as theory proper. The analytical insights emerging from these listening sessions expand and complicate many of the insights of my ongoing work on Jaramillo.