Last night I saw Diamanda Galás perform Defixiones: Orders from the Dead, about the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides carried out by the Ottoman Empire 1914-1923.

The music was in vintage Galás style: her voice (three and a half octaves and very dark), undulating drones, hints of jazz piano. Most of the words were not English, which is a good thing — one could focus on the music rather than reel in horror. Most of the time images from the genocides were projected on a backdrop, and matching the sound, were usually mercifully undulating and distorted.

A brilliant success.

Included in the program is this atavistic screed, “published by the large circulation Turkish newspaper Hürriyet on 18 July 1974, just 48 hours before the Turkish invastion of Cyprus by order of the Bulent Ecevit government”, titled HATRED:

As long as the vulgar Greek exists in this world
By Allah, my hatred won’t leave me
As long as I see him there like a dog
By Allah, this hatred won’t leave me
A thousand heads of infidel Giaours cannot wash away this hatred.

My only aim is revenge
When my turn comes to go to battle
In one day I’ll butcher a thousand Giours
By Allah, this hatred won’t leave me
A thousand heads of Giaours cannot wash away this hatred.

Even if I crush thirty thousand of their heads with a stone
Even if I wrench out the teeth of ten thousand
And throw a hundred thousand of their corpses into the river
By Allah, this hatred won’t leave me

A thousand heads of Giaours cannot wash away this hatred.
The whole world knows how superior the Turk is
Who crashed the Greek’s fucked world over his head
Even if I burn in stokeholes the heads of five thousand of them
By Allah, this hatred won’t leave me

A thousand heads of Giaours cannot wash away this hatred
Even if I slash forty thousand of them with my bayonet
And send eighty thousand of them to the devil
And hang a hundred thousand of them
By Allah, this hatred won’t leave me

A thousand heads of Giaours cannot wash away this hatred.

…

A one minute excerpt of The Desert Part I from Defixiones, a list of recordings by Galás with audio excerpts. I especially recommend Let’s Not Chat About Despair and Wild Women With Steak Knives, but you really have to listen to the entire tracks, especially the latter.