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Diamanda Galas.
 The story of Diamanda Galas is fascinating, from her multiple degrees in immunology to living with and studying transvestite prostitutes, working with Xenakis and John Paul Jones, rubbing shoulders with Ginsberg and Burroughs and performing in no less than ten languages. Her raw talent is combined with her dedication to extend herself as an artist, historian and speaker/prophet/priestess for humanity.
Spending years performing, refining and expanding her work (including the AIDS sagas 'The Plague Mass' and the three-part 'The Masque Of The Red Death') Galas is now primarily focused on exploring the Greek, Anatolian, Hellenic and Armenian genocide in the twentieth century in her 'Defixiones: Will and Testament/Orders of the Dead' series.
Taking snippets of text from as disparate locations as the writings of Nikos Kazantzakis, Paul Celan and Henri Michaux and the Turkish propaganda newspaper 'Hurriyet', Galas unites the striking words with harrowing music from her voice, piano and scores of electronic effects. Furthermore she is reinterpreting classic songs of love and death from Johnny Cash, Edith Piaf, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, John Lee Hooker, Hank Williams and more under the title 'Guilty, Guilty, Guilty'.
Her voice can transmit deep love, abhorrence, pestilence and psychosis all within the relative confines of a 'pop' song. With a booming grand piano and her multi-octave vibrato-laden voice she transmogrifies the simplicity of words and music into a vessel for deliverance and repentance.
Hours before my scheduled interview with Galas she comes to me in a dream. As Elena Markos, the head witch in Dario Argento's 1977 film 'Suspiria', she took my hand and said to me, "I am Satan."
When she greets me from "fucking hot New York City," her raspy laugh is indeed witchy but her words and her tone, although penetrating and fierce, are comically exaggerated and often accommodating.
I share my dream with her.
"Oh my God, what was I doing to you?" There goes that wonderful laugh. "I don't know whether to take that as an insult or compliment, really!"
Interestingly, Galas is good friends with Daria Nicolodi, screenwriter of 'Suspiria'. "Was there any hanging from the ceiling?" she probes, mischievously. Italian horror movies aside we speak little about music but much about life as Orthodox-raised Greeks living on different edges of the Western world.
Galas was born in 1950s USA and raised by Greek Orthodox parents only to find her own way through the often-hypocritical narrow-minded labyrinth that is the Greek Orthodox Church.
"As I don't like the structures of any kind of monotheistic rule I think it's absurd and it just doesn't work, but for Greeks it's often quite necessary because we're such a minority group in the world. That's why I have a lot of compassion for that."
For all her devotion to documenting the destruction heaped on Greece and Greeks through genocide and military oppression Galas has been ostracized by her own people. The Greeks, at least in the United States, are unsupportive she says, because they are not interested in the past. They reside in willful ignorance and scorn people like Galas for having the gall to illustrate what she so vehemently believes should not be overlooked.
"Many of them are not [supportive] because many of them are really not interested in the issues that I am discussing with genocide. Many of them are not interested in actually being literate. I mean they're not interested in the writers that exist in Greece today, not to mention Kazantzakis, Seferis, Ritsos. They think about the classical Greece. That's it! And they don't know anything about that either! So they lay claim to this inheritance of moussaka."
Her close friend Adonis is a 75-year-old Syrian poet partially exiled to Lebanon for studying and appreciating literature outside of the Koran and the Islamic faith, as well as taking a Greek name.
"They have these ideas about their own religion. They don't read anything but one book, y'know? You know! Which is this definition of monotheism. You've read one book; you know one thing, that's it! He is just so against it and I am as well, and we have to fight primarily with our own people. With the Greeks I fight primarily. With the Arabs he fights primarily. Isn't that ridiculous?
"The best comment about my work came from an Iraqi painter and sculptor named Selim Abdullah. He came to the concert that I did with Adonis and he said 'you have no idea how beautiful it is to hear a voice of Smyrna do the work of Adonis,' and I said 'you don't even know that my father's people are from Smyrna and you say this.' How intelligent! He talked all about the tradition of the Ammanides [Ammonites] throughout the Middle East. He understands the contradiction of the stoicism and the Imerologis side and the Ammanides and what is considered the oriental feminine side: the women screaming and crying and the singing and the more poetic side of our being as opposed to the fighter side of us that keeps the stoic expression and just fights. It's very, very interesting that he would discuss this when you will see very few Greeks that will. Greeks from Greece yes, maybe Australia, but certainly never here!"
After spending 20 minutes listening intently to this fantastic dynamic encyclopedia of a woman she lets out a sigh. "I end up having to speak just to remember that I'm alive, and that's a pretty important part of our tradition isn't it? As soon as they told Socrates he couldn't speak he said, 'Alright I'll kill myself.' So, you know, there it is."
There is silence before I repeat what she said just seconds before. I can hear her smiling on the other end. Her smile becomes ecstatic laughter. She has reached me with her words. It's exactly what she has spent most of her life's work doing.
Lenin Simos
 | Diamanda Galas performs 'Guilty Guilty Guilty' at the Adelaide Town Hall on Sun 16 Oct. |
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