I have been exploring various aspects of the Plantation Machine in my music for several years now. The Plantation Machine is what Cuban writer Antonio Benítez Rojo (1931–2005) refers to as the complex, repetitious, interconnected workings of transatlantic slavery, whereby the systems created during the establishment of the plantations continue to repeat and reveal themselves as new things through time, such as colonialism, hyper-capitalism and the climate crisis.
Benítez-Rojo asserts that an aspect of its complexity comes from the smaller machines that make up the overarching one. In his book The Repeating Island, he says, ‘it was a machine made up of a naval machine, a military machine, a bureaucratic machine, a commercial machine, an extractive machine, a political machine, a legal machine, a religious machine, that is, an entire huge assemblage of machines which there is no point in continuing to name. The only thing that matters here is that it was a Caribbean machine; a machine installed in the Caribbean Sea and coupled to the Atlantic and the Pacific.’ This is why the Machine’s continuous repetition is impossible to disrupt. It is not one mechanism, but a multidimensional network of interlocking structures, repeating and operating in their own, yet relational ways.
Two other Caribbean writers were at the forefront of my mind whilst writing this piece. The first is Guyanese poet and political activist, Martin Carter (1927–1997). Indeed, the title I have discovered the secret of death comes from an untitled, uncollected 1971 poem by Carter, as do many of the words set in the piece. The manuscript is held with correspondence relating to his Poems of Succession (1977), so it is thought that it might have been considered for this collection. Poems of Succession was written in the earliest years of Guyanese independence from the UK, and themes of uncertainty, disillusionment, power, corruption and historical memory infuse these texts. For example, consider this line from his 1971 poem: ‘And so I look through the savage window of the world / sitting perilously on the sills of the shoulders of the clock.’ I interpret the latter part of Carter’s phrase as a situation that exists outside of time, rather than within it. Benítez-Rojo speaks about this too. He describes Caribbean culture as ‘a sinuous culture where time unfolds irregularly, and resists being captured by the cycles of clock and calendar.’ I think this thought is also registered when Carter writes in the same 1971 poem, ‘I have discovered the secret of death / which has nothing to do with the end of a life / or a soul or a heart or an ignorant brutal mouth, / can be revealed in a moment of supreme love and pain, the origin and birth of a face.’ In other words, endings and beginnings are blurred. Time is suspended. Going back to the imagery of Benítez-Rojo’s assemblage of machines, if they are all repeating at various rates in their own separate time zones, it makes it very difficult to have a clear sense of time as a linear notion. I often use music boxes in my music to replicate this idea. Indeed, they themselves are tiny machines that are being wound up and down at divergent speeds all at once, collectively creating a sense of ‘flexed’ time.
I have discovered the secret of death / which has nothing to do with the end of a life / or a soul or a heart or an ignorant brutal mouth, / can be revealed in a moment of supreme love and pain, the origin and birth of a face.’
Martin Carter, I have discovered the secret of death
Édouard Glissant (1928–2011), a poet and philosopher from Martinique, is the other Caribbean writer I look to. In his text Poetics of Relation, he also considers memory as part of this suspended time state, saying, ‘memory in our works is not a calendar memory; our experience of time does not keep company with the rhythms of the month and year alone; it is aggravated by the void, the final sentence of the Plantation.’ The void is the situation of the Plantation Machine, a space where time is interrupted, without centre or through-line. It is for this reason that, in the piece, I do not necessarily consider all of Carter’s words and memories as being sung, spoken, or stated in the present time of the performance itself. Instead, I aim to build sound worlds that at times give the impression that Carter’s contemplations are coming from another time, place, or space. Sometimes the words are communicated with clarity, yet other times they weave in and out of the orchestral textures, or they are spoken into a harmonica.
Photo of Hannah Kendall. Photo credit Emily Denny
The title, ‘I have discovered the secret of death,’ for example, is spoken into a harmonica by the mezzo-soprano. Whilst we can hear the chordal rhythm of the spoken text, and might even be able to catch fragments of the words themselves, the distance that is created gives the sense of this line having once been sung somewhere else. I know this idea will touch on a long-debated question in music about how important it is to hear and clearly decipher the words. In this case, however, if they might be coming from outside of the performance altogether, what does it mean to interpret them clearly? I come back to Glissant again, and specifically his thoughts on understanding, and ‘the right to opacity.’ He says, ‘opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components. For the time being, perhaps, give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures.’
I also incorporate whistling tea kettles to build additional dimensions. In John Minton’s book chapter ‘Turning the Pot Down’ from Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives, he describes how enslaved people ‘sang and prayed in pots’ on the plantations, ‘they had to take a kettle and turn it down bottom upward and then old master couldn’t hear the singing and prayin.’ Indeed, I ask the mezzo-soprano to speak to God inside a kettle, specifically reciting lines from Psalm 44, such as, ‘you gave us up to be devoured like sheep and have scattered us among the nations … Rise up and help us; rescue us because of your unfailing love.’ Again, we cannot hear the words, only the frantic rhythms created as the kettle’s whistle is engaged throughout the prayer. I imagine the rough, ragged sound as an echo of my ancestors’ kettle prayers on the British plantations in Guyana, newly realised in the present, but fractured and distorted by time.
I aim to build sound worlds that at times give the impression that Carter’s contemplations are coming from another time, place, or space.
Hannah Kendall
For the music boxes, I always use pre-programmed transcriptions of well-known classical pieces that were composed during the establishment of the plantations. It functions as a mode of engaging with Glissant’s idea of ‘non-calendar memory.’ My hope is that hearing or remembering the melody will trigger the thought: ‘What else was happening in the world when this music I know so well was being written?’ In this piece, I use J S Bach’s Minuet No 3, which many of us first learn how to play as children. Carter’s line, ‘a sweet child smiling with innocence’ is not set in the work, but it is instead encapsulated when this tune plays distantly from a music box, as well as through the sound of a toy piano. It is unlikely that the minuet will be heard with clarity, as it purposely plays along with Greensleeves, their melodies entwined just like the smaller machines that comprise the Plantation Machine. Greensleeves is thought to have been written in England only 20 years or so after the first British involvement in transatlantic slavery. This is the song that the mezzo-soprano sings into her kettle. I wonder if it ever travelled across the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean Sea, becoming part of the plantation soundscape, and if a version of it was ever sung into a kettle as a fervent act of hope and resistance against the Machine.
