"So what?" my wife retorted. "It's a lovely melody and it complements the words beautifully."
There are many songs in the Greek repertoire that have found there way into the Assyrian musical canon. This is primarily because as refugees, a good many Assyrians sojourned in Greece before obtaining visas to emigrate to other countries and they were exposed to Greece's musical culture. Some of the songs however, are contested. I would always argue with my father in law as to the provenance of the Assyrian song Asmar Asmar, which is identical to Giota Lydia's «Γύρνα Πάλι Γύρνα». I've since come to find the same song in the Turkish and Arabic musical canons and cannot conclusively prove its origins. It is easier to point out the Greek influences in the songs of Affifa Iskandar Estefan, nicknamed the "Iraqi Blackbird," and considered one of the best female singers in Iraqi history. She was after all, half Greek, as is Iranian-born George Chaharbakhshi, whose mother was Greek.
"Why is it important that you establish ownership of any particular song?" my wife laughs whenever I try to prove that the latest Assyrian hit is actually a rip off of one of Notis Sfakianakis hits from the nineties. "For the same reason that you have to prove that Assyrians invented the baklava, that you insist that your people worked out Pythagoras' theorem a thousand years before the great sage did..." I begin.
And this of course is true. The Assyrians are a very old people, much older than the Greeks. Until the excavations of Nineveh, one hundred and fifty or so years ago, the only notion of their own history that they had came from the Bible. Having had their history interpreted for them and reconstructed by the West, this for them is a lifeline. Since the dawning of their national consciousness around the same time that national consciousnesses were being formed in the Balkans, the Assyrian people have sought ways to link themselves to the West, and consequently possible acquire statehood.
They firstly did this by emphasising their Christianity. Half of them broke off from their traditional Nestorian church and embraced union with Rome, in the hope that this would cause the West to intervene and intercede on their behalf. Instead of statehood and protection, genocide is what followed however. They then sought to capitalise upon Western interest in the archaeology of their land, actively assisting archaeologists such as Layard unearth and transport wholesale to Britain, their national heritage. Unlike the Greeks, Assyrians are grateful to the British for removing the remnants of their ancient past to the British Museum for they feel that it would have been destroyed by their oppressors otherwise.
The ensuing pride in their unearthed past, also creates a sense of grievance. One of the major ways in which Assyrian ideologues ideologise the necessity of the existence of an Assyrian state, is by emphasising that Assyria is the mother culture, whence all other cultures come. In order to do this, they must explode the "myth" that it is the Greek culture that gave rise to Western Civilisation. In their opinion, Greek culture could not have arisen if it not were for the Assyrians and they produce evidence, much of it from ancient Greek historians to reinforce their arguments. When I hear the odd aggrieved Assyrian proclaim: "We gave the world the light of our civilisation," I shudder. They shudder in turn when I respond: "At yet you remain in the dark." Now how to prove that the Greeks invented this stock and oft-used phrase first.
Indigeneity is thus important. It is the reason why Australian Aborigines emphasise that they are the world's oldest continuous culture, that they take pains to point out that they have farming and bread-making techniques. Indigeneity provides status, secures a position and is an instrument of ownership. The problem arises, however, when the lore of other nations exists in and contests the same space. I remember my Assyrian family's outrage in watching a Kurdish folk group dressed in traditional Assyrian clothes sing a war song extolling the exploits of legendary Assyrian fighter Mam Odisho. "They have no right to do that. It's appropriation," they grumbled. Borrowing Greek music however, is not. It is a sentiment I felt for the first time when hearing members of the Skopjan community play their version of «Μακεδονία Ξακουστή» to accompany their float in a Moomba procession years ago. These things are complicated.
"Whose is this Song?" a collection of fascinating essays about Balkan Nationalism, Greece and Shared Culture, edited by Eleni Eleftherias-Kostakidis deals precisely with these points. Taking as its thematic starting point a documentary film "Whose is this Song?" by Adera Peeva, through various essays, reflections and travel narratives, the book discusses the manner in which songs and other cultural items far from being shared, are claimed, rendered divisive and ultimately are utilised as tools in a broader quest to claim contested spaces. As Mary Kostakidis observes in her forward to the book: "The Balkan region, with its fascinating historical and geopolitical intricacies and shifting borders, is a cauldron of contested ownership of culture."
Eleni Eleftherias-Kostakidis in her essay "Whose is this Song," quotes Adera Peeva as observing: "When I first started searching for the song, I thought it would unite us... I never believed the sparks of hatred can be lit so easily." Helen Vatsikopoulos readily acknowledges the corrosive effect that constructed cultural memories can have in her essay: "The Balkans In Europe: And the Curse of Too Much History." The "curse" of invented traditions as underlying a sense of cultural ownership and just how dangerous and divisive cultural customs that are portrayed or understood as being longstanding, rooted in the distant past, when in reality they are relatively modern and often deliberately created by individuals or groups has been identified and explored in the 1983 book "The Invention of Tradition", edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. As is the case with "Whose is this Song?" which in many respects is in dialogue with that book, quite often it is the case that many so-called "old" traditions are actually of recent origin and have been consciously invented. This differs from simply creating a new tradition without claiming it has historical depth. The concept is especially evident in the rise of modern nations and nationalism, where such traditions help foster national identity, unity, and lend legitimacy to institutions or cultural practices.
George Mihelakakis, in his absorbing essay: "Patriarchy and Nationalism in Adela Peeva's: Whose is this Song?" invites us to consider exactly that question. While determining the cultural provenance of a given song may be fruitless task, it is important to analyse whose interests the appropriation of that song serve. His view, that there is an overarching class-based patriarchy that transcends borders, delineations, languages and ethnic categorisations, is a poignant one and there are dangers in being so immersed within it, that is proves an impossible task to deconstruct it. As he points out this form of analytical amnesia has implication for the Diaspora communities that transplant and replicate those cultural tropes in their new places of settlement: "In the Greek communities of the diaspora no discussion has ever taken place about the so-called "tradition." Discussion is always characterised by idealised generalisations without reference to any concrete analysis of reality. Multiculturalism is perceived as the promotion of tradition, even in entertainment, without any connection to the changed social realities in which the migrants now live. Consequently, tradition becomes an ideology which preserves nationalism and as such takes over everyday life by being lived without awareness and self-criticism."
Vrasidas Karalis, in his "Greek Music and its Formal Complexities," refutes the concept of ownership by placing Greek music within a cultural continuum where it is constantly replenished by other influences and influences other traditions it turn: "Greek music was always an amalgam of both, having liminality of compositional patterns as the most permanent element of its morphoplastic potentialities. Greek music continues the challenging task of being renewed from elsewhere by absorbing new elements and by establishing novel melodic attractions through instrumental experimentation. It's multimodality remains the foundational grammar of external repertory. It bridges cultural configurations and oral experiences and at the same time repositions itself within its geographical context by incorporating new patterns through the composers of the diaspora and the new voices emerging after the demographic change of the nineties...Music is never owned; it is always reimagined by various people under different conditions of performance and reception."
Rather than argue, as many of my tribe tend to do, that Ennio Moricone's iconic theme to 1966 film "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" is a rip off of the Epirot Folk Song «Εγώ για σένα τραγουδώ,» perhaps it is better to adopt the stance of Levitros, the stage name of Levi Mu'alem an Israeli of Iraqi origin who achieved popularity in Israel for his interpretation of Greek songs. "Hellenising" his name by adding the -tros suffix, he states that even though he "was not born Greek," he became Greek through Greek music which "penetrates to every place and every person."
At the end of the day, perhaps the answer to the question "Whose is this Song" belongs to Spotify and Varoufakis' Technofeudalists, proving analyses such as those of Eleni Eleftherias-Kostakidis prescient and more timely than ever before.
*"Whose is this Song" will be launched by Con Pakavakis and Dean Kalimniou, on 27 April 2025 at the Greek Centre at 3pm, under the auspices of the Greek Australian Cultural League in collaboration with the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne and Victoria and Hellenic Theorem Publishing.
or register to post a comment.