Fugitive Sounds: On the Politics of Listening at Argentina’s Southern Border

Abstract

In this article, I trace the resonances of the alarido in numerous nineteenth-century Argentine nation-building texts, with a specific focus on Lucio V. Mansilla’s Una excursión a los indios ranqueles. I analyze the recurrence of the racialised stereotype of the “Indigenous war cry” or “alarido”, in numerous literary and critical texts around the so-called “Conquest of the Desert”, not in order to uncover the “truth” of such voices but to instead study the dynamics underlying the gap between their inscription and audition and how they interrupt colonial logics of listening and sense-making. By situating such texts within the historical context of phono-ethnography and sound recording - inscriptive modes which presented similar anxieties around preserving disappearing voices - I argue that the alarido emerges not from a single source but instead resounds as an acousmatic, ghostly multi-vocality that these writers already locate in a melancholic past, foreclosing the futurity of the Indigenous voice in the demand for national integration. I then contend that such discordant vocalities resist gestures of inclusion into national literature and politics. I finally turn to the poet Cecilia Vicuña’s listening to Selk’nam chants recorded by the ethnologist Anne Chapman, where I advance a poetic mode of listening that resists capture.

Keywords:

• sound studies
• indigeneity
• Argentina
• voice
• nation

The Argentine intellectual David Viñas opens his seminal Indios, ejército y frontera with a number of questions regarding the erasure of the Indigenous peoples from “official” accounts of Argentina’s history and “Conquest of the Desert”. He writes:

Have historians said something about this silence or did they collaborate in erasing the traces that all of this left behind? What are these professionals of historiography: complicit or aphonic? If in other countries in Latin America, the “voice of the defeated Indians” has been brought to light, why not in Argentina? Does Argentina not have anything to do with the Indians? (…) Did they not have a voice? (…) Is this paradoxically related to a discourse of silence? Or maybe the Indians were the disappeared of 1879? (1983, 12)¹

Viñas writes in 1983, while in exile from the Argentine military dictatorship in Mexico, after witnessing the disappearance of many of his own family members and friends. He asks these questions as the government there is celebrating the centenary of the Conquest of the Desert as itself a marker of Argentine nationhood and culture, with the year 1879 referring to the army’s extermination of the last major Indigenous resistance in Patagonia. In these insistent questions, Viñas links a genealogy of silence to the question of the voice. By referring to the revealing of Indigenous voices in other regions of Latin America, or asking if these recurring silences indicate the lack of voice, Viñas suggests that there is an implicit refusal to listen in the silencing of those who were “disappeared”, whether this be the Indigenous people or the political dissidents of the military dictatorship. Viñas’s suggestions around silence and silencing, however, suppose that the uncovering of these spectral voices is itself enough, or that we might agree on how to effectively listen to them, marking listening as an ethico-political question of restitution in the present day. In this article, I depart from Viñas’s questions in order to ask how these notions of silence and sound might change our frameworks of “listening” as related to a politics of the spectral voice.

This question of “voice” functions as a recurring framework in many of the critical texts surrounding the Conquest of the Desert and the emergence of Argentine nationhood. This notion is a critical lens in many canonical texts such as Josefina Ludmer’s The Gaucho Genre and Julio Ramos’s Divergent Modernities in Latin America, where the inscription of the voice of the gaucho – the mixed-race horseman of the pampas – becomes a form of mediation between civilisation and barbarism, as well as a means to cement the gaucho’s place at the foundation of Argentine literature. But as Ludmer has pointed out (2002, 65), the national-popular genre of the gauchesca, an imitation of the gaucho voice through narrative poetry, established itself through the very silencing of the Indigenous voice. These repeated references to silencing, however, seem themselves to occult the sonic traces of Indigenous voices that remain. For despite Viñas’s interventions around the “aphonic” nature of historiographers and literary scholars, many nineteenth-century texts do exhibit numerous instances of listening not only to the gaucho voice, but to the voices of those thought to be excluded from the space of the nation: the Indigenous peoples at Argentina’s frontier meant to be eliminated by General Roca’s “final solution” to the cuestión del indio.

Many of these voices are often described precisely when the white settler and militarist loses his grasp on the visual documentation of space and such discordant vocalities ring out to destabilise colonial methods of inscribing literary, national, and geographic space for future invasion, expropriation, and extraction. From the statesman and writer Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo to the literary works of the poets Esteban Echeverría and José Hernández, no figure recurs more commonly in reference to the Indigenous voice than the alarido, a racialised stereotype of the “Indian war cry” that echoes as a silencing marker of these writers’ portrayal of unincorporated noise. Indeed, if the spectral (non)-presence of the Indian is what inaugurates the foundation of the Argentine state, following Viñas, then perhaps we can hear these spectral voices in the alarido itself as a revenant cry that cannot ever be entirely exorcised from national literary space.

In this article, I will trace the resonance of the alarido not in order to unearth the “truth” of such voices but to further examine the acoustics underlying their fraught inscription and representation as it relates to a politics of listening and vocality. For as much as the above stereotype of the Indigenous war cry recurs in these texts, there are also places where it becomes audible beyond the marker of the alarido itself. In order to further this claim, I will analyse the vocal qualities of Lucio V. Mansilla’s Una excursión a los indios ranqueles in order to show how the cry here becomes not a voice whose origin we can uncover in a single “living” body or political subject, but is instead a spectral scream that carries on through an unavoidable inheritance in Argentine and Latin American literature. Mansilla’s Una excursión… is fairly understudied compared to the texts I mention above, in part because of the difficulty of classifying it generically (Alonso 1998): it has been read as a travelogue, a proto-ethnographic study (Brown 2010; Kerr 2020), a military-political treatise (Rodríguez 2013), and an intimate epistolary exchange (Ramos 1986). Many of these readings, however, return to the figures of both Mansilla’s own wavering voice and his subsequent attempts to represent the voices of the desert: implicit in this argument is also the notion that Mansilla’s Una excursión… is an anticipation not only of ethnography but of phonography itself functioning as an instrument of documentation and preservation of disappearing voices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This connection between sound recording technology and writing reflects a melancholic desire to preserve “disappearing” cultures and sounds that always already locates them in a foregone history or past, foreclosing their futurity.² This trend recurs throughout the twentieth century, and becomes apparent in the ethnologist Anne Chapman’s recordings of the chants of Lola Kiepja, one of the last remaining speakers of the Selk’nam language in the region of Tierra Del Fuego. I will conclude by suggesting that Chapman’s recordings of Kiepja, as well as the Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña’s poetic listening of them, question the very act of listening to the spectral voice as a melancholic mode of recuperating a present-absence with a singular, legible message from the past. Thus, this article will study the inheritance of the Indigenous voice in these literary texts as the resonance of a ghostly howl or song that resists gestures of assimilation and inclusion both into national literature and politics. This is pertinent for the notion of the Indigenous voice in Argentine literature and Latin American studies, and it also begins to problematise the very notion of hearable and understandable “voice” as a marker of legible political participation and historical subjectivity. I will suggest that discordant vocalities such as the spectral scream destabilise the notion of “listening” as a possible gesture of inclusion or restitution of previously unheard voices within the liberal democratic project. To listen to these cacophonies, to these lingering dissonances, might exceed the very notion of “listening” itself as it relates to the ghosts that have yet to be mourned.

Hearing a world

The question of “voice”, as well as the orality/literacy binary (Acosta 2004, 10, 70), at the centre of an ongoing debate in Latin American thought and is also a lasting conceptual category for reading many of the texts surrounding the Conquest of the Desert and its implications for Argentine and Southern Cone nationhood. The term “voice” itself brings up Josefina Ludmer’s well-known argument in The Gaucho Genre, where she suggests that “[t]he enigma that interrogates Sarmiento is none other than the spoken language, the exact rhythm and tone of the voice, its intensity, its modulations and registers: the way in which a voice becomes volume and in that volume becomes a world” (2002, 12). Thus for poets such as José Hernández and others, inherent in the mediation between civilisation and barbarism that Ludmer locates in writing is not only the attempt to produce what the gaucho is saying, but precisely how he is saying it: the very sound, tone, and rhythm of his voice. This voice is not only audible, but in its very projection it inaugurates an acoustics, a hearable and knowable world. In a similar sense, Ramos (2002, 12) famously argues “Sarmiento’s writing would attempt and claim to hear the other, her confused voice, in order to weave a continuity (…) to hear, then, is the technique of historiographical practice”. Sarmiento’s “awakening” of the voice of the warlord Juan Facundo Quiroga becomes yet another instance of writing as mediating between civilisation and barbarism precisely through listening, through organising and making legible a previously unknown voice and world of sound. But if, following Ramos and Ludmer, listening becomes constitutive of nineteenth-century nation building and these attempts at “civilising” a territory; it is worth asking what voices remain forever unheard or unincorporated.

As much as the debate surrounding orality and writing has addressed the inscription of cultural difference as it relates to the Indigenous voice in Latin America,³ whether in historical writing or testimonial narrative,⁴ this dialogue rarely touches upon the Indigenous voice in many of these now canonical texts, a question already obscured by Viñas (1983). I do not mean to return to these voices from this framework of orality and writing, which has already been destabilised by many scholars such as Abraham Acosta and Ana María Ochoa Gautier;⁵ nor do I intend to answer Gayatri Spivak’s question of whether the subaltern can speak, or rehash the reading of this essay in Latin American studies (Acosta 2004, 51). It remains worth asking, however, what can be heard in Ludmer’s references to these Indigenous voices in passing, and what we might hear in their passage. This is where the question of the alarido returns, which becomes not a faithful inscription of singular hearable sound but instead its revenant erasure or absent presence: it is heard as cipher for a misheard or misplaced acoustics, a cacophony that rips through a peaceful landscape and is often read as little other than a disruption. In the poem Martín Fierro, for example, Hernández (1994, 76) writes:

¡Qué vocerío, qué barullo,

qué apurar esa carrera!

La Indiana todita entera

dando alaridos cargó.

[What whoopin’! What confusion!/How fast they got to us!/That whole horde of Indians/charged ahead screamin’. (Hernández 1974, 30)]

Sarmiento (1897, 363) similarly writes of the alarido as such: “…Profería un alarido horrible, como el de los indios, que se comunicaba a los suyos (…) que parecía contagioso” [A horrible shout resounded, like that of the Indians, that communicated with their own (…) which seemed contagious]. These writers repeat the trope of the alarido as linked to unwanted noise, to foreignness outside the realm of inscription. Another now canonical nineteenth-century poem, which rehearses this trope, is Esteban Echeverría’s La cautiva:

¿Quién es? ¿Qué insensata turba

con un alarido perturba,

las calladas soledades

de Dios, de las tempestades sólo se oyen resonar?

¿Qué humana planta orgullosa

se atreve a hallar el desierto

cuando todo en él reposa? (1974, 22)

[Who is that? What senseless mob/with a howl disturbs,/the quiet solitudes/of God, where only storms are heard?/What vain human sole/dares to be found in the desert/when everything remains at rest?]

The alarido becomes a marker of racialised sound meant to refer to the unknowable outsider. In a similar sense, these sounds of the alaridos are what take over when writing becomes halted by its incapacity to represent such an immensity of space, marking sound as a limit of colonial sense-making and visuality (Masiello 2018, 43).

The inscriptions of such cries show us how the very sound of the alarido erodes these attempts at making sense of this landscape and its acoustics, at organising its world through sound and inscribing the sound of a world. This idea becomes apparent if we pay attention to the cry not by uncovering its origin – as a single sound being emitted from a locatable body or group – but by instead considering how such (un)inscribed sounds interrupt the very attempt to separate a sonic entity from its listener, a mute and natural landscape from those populating it, and the animal cry and the human scream. Thus these alaridos here interrupt the very attempts at organising both the acoustics and the space and place of the desert’s “inmensa extension”.

In the above texts, the alarido comes to us as acousmatic⁶ sound, and then as disembodied cry without a clear link to a single source. Thus my goal is not to uncover the origins of these voices but to instead begin to unravel the colonial and racial logics that attempt to fix the multiplicity of sound to a single voice or entity, and then inevitably fail. It is also telling that in these accounts, Argentina’s desert becomes most unclassifiable specifically when discordant sounds rip through the landscape. Hill (2013, 4) has coined the notion of the “Hearing-man” as a corollary to Mary Louise Pratt’s “seeing-man”, arguing that “[r]ecourse to sounds and soundscapes often served to grasp qualities and characteristics that proved elusive to the visual paradigms of dominant modes of inquiry, comprehension and inscription (…) techniques and practices of sound (…) supplement the imperial gaze as they represent distances and forces felt and imagined but unseen or immeasurable in the New World”. This notion of sound as immeasurable not only complicates a stable organisation of the New World through a visual register, it also demands a closer attention to axes of knowledge and power that ascribe humanity through sound and listening (McEnaney 2019), as well as what specific sounds thwart the attempts at making this distinction. I am proposing here that in an ethnographic soundscape of Argentina’s desert, the alarido is never included into a mode of legibility or intelligibility, but its complete exclusion is also never seamlessly achieved. The very undecidability underpinning the inscription of the howl thwarts the attempts at organising these sounds within a realm of belonging and exclusion as it pertains to a national language, literature, and populace.

When this alarido is heard as uncontainable, it shows us the ways in which Indigenous “orality” here cannot simply be thought of as outside of the space of the written, but instead circumscribes the conditions of possibility for inscribing sound and place. As Napolin (2020, 15) suggests, “orality” is not merely a translation of a voice emerging from a single source: instead there is an “[e]lliptical movement between inscription and sound, sound and inscription (…) the oral is not a stable referent outside of the text but caught up in transposition or sliding between text and sound”. Ochoa Gautier (2014, 42) makes similar interventions surrounding the bogas, or the Afro-Indigenous boatmen of Colombia’s Magdalena River that also confounded ethnographers; she writes that she is invested not in their “original” sound, but instead in the “interpretive gap that transpires (…) [at] the moment that ensonification is accomplished through inscription into writing”. If we become attuned to such interpretive gaps, the acousmatic alarido here is repeatedly inscribed by these writers as a revenant, spectral cry; a disembodied voice that is at once there and not there, not a mere absence or exterior but a cacophonous, overflowing presence of multiplicity that haunts the origins and borders of the nation, its language and its vox populi.

To inquire further into the resonance of the alarido is to perceive the very term’s lack of proper place. The word has cloudy etymological origins and continues to harbour the spectre of the colonial violence of the Conquest of the Americas and of the Reconquista. In the first monolingual Spanish dictionary, the Tesoro de la lengua castellana (1611), Covarrubias y Orozco locates the origins of the alarido in the Greek ololyzein [ὀλολύζειν] and the Latin ululatus, but also refers to its history within the literature and language of the Reconquista:

Finalmente, por la figura onomatopeya, le pusieron este nombre y, en particular, dieron ocasión a él los alárabes, que, cuando entran en la batalla, dan voces y repiten este término lalala para mostrar ánimo y hacerle perder a los enemigos. El llanto descompuesto y desmesurado con voces confusas y lamentables se llama alarido. (1611, 30)

[Finally, because of the onomatopoeic figure in particular, the Arabs referred to the occasion in which, when they enter into battle, they scream and repeat this term lalala in order to show excitement and make their enemies lose- The discomposed and disproportionate cry with confused and lamentable voices is called the alarido.]

Here Covarrubias already qualifies the alarido as immeasurable and unsettling, a dissonant resonance of discordant parts that cannot be united into melody and disorients the listening subject. These alaridos are associated with the Iberian conquest of Moorish territory which preceded the Conquest of the Americas and solidified the consolidation of a Spanish national territory, identity, and language (itself inaugurated by the grammarian Antonio de Nebrija’s own linguistic-imperial project, an attempt to find the Spanish language its proper place so as to defend it from the “barbarous peoples and nations of alien languages [peregrinas lenguas]” [Nebrija and Armillas-Tiseyra 2016, 204] that it brought within its empire). This wavering origin of the alarido cements Viñas’s invocation of the Conquest of the Desert as the culmination of Spanish conquest both on the Iberian Peninsula and in the Americas: and all throughout, this spectral cry rings out unfixed from a single body, crossing the limits between voice, music, and language, and undermining the listener’s ability to capture sound. As much as the use of the very word might attempt to erase such cries, they return regardless, revenant traces at the edge of empire that refuse to be banished.

Stamping sounds

Published in 1870, a mere seven years before the beginning of the Conquest of the Desert, Lucio V. Mansilla’s Una excursión a los indios ranqueles argues for the “integration” of the Ranquel tribe within the Argentine nation, and the text claims that the explicit purpose is to negotiate a peace treaty at the southern border (Alonso 1998). Mansilla questions, then, this limit between civilisation and barbarism both through responses to Sarmiento and direct experience with the members of the Ranquel tribe themselves. For in reading Mansilla’s text, we soon find that it is replete with voices – whether this be Mansilla’s voice, or digressions that allow for the presence of other voices. As Viñas and others suggest (Viñas 1983, 152; Ramos 1986, 170; Molloy 1996, 401; Ludmer 2002, 177), Mansilla prioritises the voice, but the dynamics underpinning the inscription of such voices are more complex than many have accounted for. When Mansilla transposes these voices, he not only relays their stories, he claims to be imitating their modes of speaking. When he recounts the story of Miguelito, a gaucho and outlaw, not only does this digression take over multiple chapters, but Mansilla claims that he will “hablaré como el habló” (1993, 291) [“I will speak as he did, say what he said” (1997, 143)]. Following Ludmer’s analysis of the gaucho voice, Mansilla’s text traces a border between writing and the voice, where these two poles are constantly shifting, engaged in a recursive process of inclusion and exclusion. This polyphony of voices undermines the stability of Mansilla’s own voice and subjectivity, thus suggesting that the very volatility that many identify in this text is performed through the subversion of a singular, authoritative voice (Ramos 1986; Molloy 1996). In the urge to faithfully include these voices, however, is also an anxiety around recording or preserving the voices of a fading world. Thus Mansilla’s goal here is not only to recount what he sees, but to record what he hears and to justify its preservation as a historical-cultural artefact: to “estampar sonidos” (1993, 238) [“stamp sounds”] of a complex world and its fugitive sounds.

This sense of “faithfully” recording the sounds of a fading world is resonant with Erika Brady’s own work on how the phonograph changed ethnography. She suggests (1992, 2) that “Many [ethnographers] chose the phonograph, the very agent of corruption, as their tool of choice in preserving the disappearing remnants” of Indigenous cultures and communities. Brady argues that the phonograph becomes at once an instrument of preservation and a force of destruction for the very culture – specific recordings of Indigenous music and speech – that it claims to save. The phonograph is, of course, not invented until seven years after the publication if Una excursión…, though Masiello (2018) points out that increased attention to new sound devices and technologies in 1820s Argentina both shaped nation-building projects and shifted democratic practices in significant ways. Thus, Brady’s musings about the preservation of these disappearing remnants can be extended to Ludmer’s own argument that the gaucho genre amounts to the “[a] learned [letrado] use of popular culture. It concerns the use of the voice, of a voice (and with it an accumulation of meanings: a world) that’s not the voice of the one who writes” (2002, 17). The recording and imitation of the gaucho voice and its annexation into a national-literary imaginary takes place at the very moment of the gaucho’s disappearance: thus, the gauchesca here becomes proto-phonographic, an aural preservation of a fading voice that in its melancholic embalming confirms it as already disappeared. Jonathan Sterne also writes explicitly about the phonograph as a mode of preserving not only the voices of the dead but the very voices of “dying” cultures: he argues that in North America, “early ethnographic recordings of Native Americans are, thus, marked by a sense of impending loss and the imperative of preservation as well as the hope for their future use” (2003, 315). It is no coincidence that these recordings become important objects of study right at the period when the native population hits an all-time low in the 1890s, directly after the US federal government wins a centuries-long battle against the Indigenous population for control over the continent. It is also not surprising that a similar and understudied process takes places in Argentina in 1905, when the German ethnographer Robert Lehmann-Nitsche arrives in Argentina to specifically record the disappearing music and language of the Tehuelche people on phonographic cylinders. Lehmann-Nitsche also expressed anxieties about the need to preserve a rapidly disappearing world, lamenting the necessity of “[r]ushing and saving what still exists in order to be able to observe the characteristics of all [of the South American tribes] destined to disappear” (1899, 120). There is still extensive work to be done on Lehmann-Nitsche’s recordings, but what becomes important here is the lament motivating the “preservation” or “imitation” of the voices and sounds of this frontier before they change, a gesture that severs these voices from any indication of life or aliveness in anticipation of their disappearance. Thus Mansilla’s claims to “stamp sounds”, to “speak [as the gaucho] spoke”, recall the phonograph as a mournful instrument of preservation that is inherent in its invention, in Thomas Edison’s own celebration of the instrument’s ability to record the last words of dying persons (Kittler 2002, 21). If we follow Lisa Gitelman’s argument (2001, 2) that the phonograph is a mode of inscription and writing, a “reciprocal product of textual practices, rather than just a causal instrument of change”, this brings into relief that writing can function as an instrument of listening and recording that claimed to record sounds “as such”, prefiguring the phonograph’s claim to do so. Thus Mansilla’s writing here claims to record a fading acoustics through writing as recording technology, imitating these fugitive sounds. The ethnographic and ethnomusicological project thus ascribes aesthetic and historical importance to the Indigenous voice in part because of this mournful need to save these fragments or, as Brady notes, to preserve “remains”. This anxiety around saving the “living” voice becomes paradoxically an instrument of its very expiration.

Even though it could be argued that writers such as Sarmiento, Hernández and others attempt a similar gesture through their imitations of gaucho vocality, I am proposing that Mansilla’s text is unique for his inscriptions of Indigenous voices not just as inaccessible, but for the very act of inscribing their tones and rhythms as part of a fraught attempt to “integrate” them into Argentine nationhood through by both arguing for their civilised nature and advancing their legibility to the urban elite. The jubilant cry “¡Long Live the Argentine Indians!” (1997, 84) is a constant in his accounts, at once a political proposal and a performative shout. My claim is not that Mansilla records these voices “accurately”, for his phonetic transcriptions are replete with exaggerations, and many of these gestures are not selfless but instead celebrate his own unique ability to act as a first-hand witness (Brown 2010). Still, when he transcribes the Ranquel language, he claims the following: “Voy a estampar sonidos cuya eufonía remeda la de los vocales araucanos” (1993, 238) [“Here are some sounds whose euphony mimics that of Araucan words” (1997, 109)]; in another moment, he notes that he is “procurando imitar la mímica oratoria de la escuela ranquelina” (1993, 540) [“attempting to imitate Ranquel oratorical custom” (1997, 293)]. Mansilla’s text relies not only on the translation of the Ranquel language but, in its very recording, on an inscription of the Indigenous voice how and as it sounds at the moment of its projection, which depends on the illusion of the voice’s tethering to a living, present voice, as well as its foreclosure into historicity.

Una excursión… is full of such practices that quite literally claim to capture fugitive sounds. Thus as much as the idea of “estampar sonidos” or “stamping sounds” might return us to the notion of unintelligible speech, it is also worth noting that Mansilla does argue for the intelligibility of the Ranquel language in order to advance Indigenous “integration” into Argentine nationhood. In his attempts to inscribe this territory, he frequently references Ranquel place names: “Ramada Nueva [is] my own name for the new extension, and the Ranquel Indians call it Trapalcó. Trapa is cattail and co is water…” (1997, 5). He also narrates learning the Araucano numbers from Mora, his interpreter, with the result that “Tomorrow, my readers…will know how to count in a new language: One – quinyé, Two – epú, Three – clá, Four – meli, Five – quehú…” (113). In this sense, Mansilla’s inclusion of the Ranquel language is a way to integrate elements of their speech into national space. Mansilla was of course far from the first to attempt to transliterate the Mapudungun or Ranquel language – what remains unique about his work, however, is not its “accuracy”, but instead the attempts to inscribe the Indigenous voice as part of a national culture and language. Mansilla attempts to do here what his precursors have done for the gaucho voice: to legitimise it at as a part of Argentine nationhood, even as this gesture attests to its disappearance.

But as much as Mansilla claims here to be defending the “Argentine Indians” as possessors of a sophisticated language, the gesture also engages in a colonial act of disciplining vocality as capture and fixity. Mansilla’s modes of phonetic translation as legibility are examples of what Ochoa call vocal immunity: she argues that the voice in many nineteenth-century accounts from anthropologists is not excluded

from written language thereby making it into its opposite (as is supposed in ideas of orality) but rather by immunizing it [Esposito], that is, acknowledging its powerful expressivity yet developing the means to protect the self from its unintended outcomes. Vocal immunity uses the fear of the voice’s intrinsic potential for manifesting an incoherent or otherwise undesirable form of the self to produce a vocally articulate one, grammaticalizes the voices through the rules of writing while purporting to speak of the name of “people’s” audible vocality, and curtails the dubious ear’s reception of the voice by training it to distinguish and parcel out uses and functions of proper and improper voices among different peoples. (2014, 171)

Ochoa refers specifically to interventions in elocution, orthography, and pronunciation that standardise the notion of a national or “correct” mode of speaking – and while Mansilla’s text is far from being an “official” attempt at standardising the Ranquel language, it remains important to ask what kinds of disruptive vocalities get silenced when certain sounds of language are made audible through colonial modes of sense-making. The German media theorist Friedrich Kittler (2002, 27) also claimed that the phonograph had a reciprocal relationship with the emerging science of phonetics as a means of fixing vocal sounds that were previously only heard as fleeting. If writing here is an inscriptive technology with a reciprocal relationship to the phonograph, these means of disciplining the voice attempt to exorcise the scream and the cry.

For, as Rancière (2010, 38) suggests, the howl has previously been figured as outside of the space of the political as linked to an intelligible voice. But as mentioned before, Mansilla frequently writes not only of these Indigenous voices as moments of ethnographic encounter, he also describes them as figures of political negotiation. He writes of the parlamentos, ceremonies of diplomacy that in their very naming refer to the oral. These acoustic events exceed the terms of aesthetic and political legibility:

Conversation in parliament follows certain rules (…) It uses a question-and-answer format, has its own tone and tempo, its own refrains and academic attitude, so to speak. One could only compare its tone and tempo to the villancicos sung at religious festivities. It is somewhat cadent, uniform, monotonous as the murmur of flowing water. (1997, 109)

Such descriptions disrupt his attempts to categorise the Ranquel tongue, locating its sounds as somewhere between song and speech, nature and culture, background and foreground, politics and aesthetics. He later writes:

The orator’s flair resides in the perfect uniformity of his intonation. And above all, in the greatest possible elongation of the final syllable of the last word (…) the final, prolonged syllable is no mere fioritura oratoria. It serves as punctuation – the period, that is – for the oration. When one orator begins it, the other ponders his own phrase, prepares, adopts the attitudes and gestures of the response, which at all times consists of lowering the head and focusing on the ground. There are orators whose chief distinction is their loquacity; for others it is the facility they have for turning a reason over. These for the chronometric evenness of their diction, those for their cadent intonation. For Indian orators in general it is the power of the lungs to sustain, as one would hold a note in music, the syllable that closes the speech. (1997, 110)

Here Mansilla elevates the phono-aesthetics of the Ranquel language – but he notes that this exceeds the circuit between the body and the voice, for Ranquel oratory requires an indescribable amount of breath to sustain the parlamento’s closing note.

Though Mansilla ascribes aesthetic and political merit to the Ranquel language, the sliding between sounding and inscription shows us how the Indigenous voice here exceeds Mansilla’s attempts at inclusion. These gaps between writing and audition thwart the annexation of the Indigenous voice as a marker of political personhood within the Argentine nation; they challenge Mansilla’s military, diplomatic and ethnographic authority in the space of the unheard and the untranslatable. Though Mansilla departs far from the alarido in opening his ear to the Indigenous voice, these instances of undecidability not only challenge the authority of “civilisation”, they complicate the very conditions of possibility for political participation and subjectivity as linked to the legible voice.

A revenant cry

To further examine these sonic traces, I will turn to a key moment that occurs where Mansilla arrives to the border town of Leubucó and meets the chief Mariano Rosas. This moment allows us not to uncover the original meaning of these voices, but instead to listen to Mansilla’s listening – as the theorist and musicologist Peter Szendy might suggest (2008, 14) – in order to point out his own engagements with the alarido as related to his politics of integration. Here Mansilla asks his interpreter: “And what the devil are they going to do with me? I assume it won’t be anything barbaric” (1997, 131). This reference situates his readers within Sarmiento’s own Facundo as well as the space of the alarido, preparing for the interruption of the mute landscape by noise.

After the interpreter tells Mansilla that the meeting ceremony involves being embraced and carried about the landscape, he recounts:

Mariano extended me his right hand, I took it.

He shook mine vigorously, I shook his as well.

He embraced me with his arms crossed behind my left shoulder, I embraced him.

He embraced me with his arms crossed behind my right shoulder, I embraced him. (1997, 131–132)

Here Mansilla’s writing echoes his surroundings, submitting narrative authority to spectacle and repeating the cry: “He lifted me powerfully into the air and held me there, letting out a stentorian shout. I lifted him and held him and shouted equally” (132). However, the text swerves away from these tropes, when again we see Mansilla’s need to “stamp sounds” in a racialised description of the Indigenous war cry, but this time in celebratory terms. The alarido recurs, but not as occulted behind the term – instead, Mansilla transcribes its resonance: “At each of these steps, the spectators drummed their open mouths with the palm of their hands, shouting, ‘Aaaaaaaa!’” (192); he later writes: “Nos hicimos lo mismo con su hermano en medio de incesantes y atronadores ¡¡¡aaaaaaaaaaaaa!!! Luego vino Relmo; igual escena a la interior: ¡¡¡aaaaaaaaaaaaa!!! En seguida Cayupán, lo mismo: ¡¡¡aaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!” (Mansilla 1993, 271) [“We did the same thing we had with his brother, all of it amidst an incessant and thunderous Aaaaaaaa! Then came Relmo; same scene as before; Aaaaaaaa!” (Mansilla 1997, 132)]. Mansilla refers to this sound many times, emphasising the encounter’s culmination: “No se oía más que la resonación producida por la repercusión de los continuados gritos ¡¡aaaaaaaaaaa!!” (1993, 272) [All you could hear were the continuous, resonating, pounding shouts of Aaaaaaaa!” (1997, 132)]. If we listen to Mansilla’s listening here, the clashing voices take over the narrative’s unfolding and overwhelm the text itself: the screams literally populate the page, making little else visible or readable, creating a sonic skip in the movement of the voice’s capture. These “¡¡aaaaaaaaaaa!!”s overtake the aural arrangement of the landscape into background and foreground, and they exceed the very legibility of the parlamento, as well as the scream as linked to the war cry. In this scene that Mansilla can only speak of as theatrical, we cannot distinguish listening subject from sounding entity, individual from collective voice: though the source of the cry is initially apparent, by the encounter’s culmination it appears to come from everywhere at once. Thus the alarido exceeds Mansilla’s attempts at capturing vocalities and instead rings out, uncontainable and immeasurable, overflowing the body and the border’s soundscape. The revenant cry wanders about without origin or destination: if it is “all you could hear”, it arrives to us in its very spectral exteriority, as hopeful future of the past, as a celebration of Argentine-Indigenous community that would, of course, be inevitably cut short.

As I have suggested, Mansilla’s prior listening to these Ranquel voices is in part a mode of arguing for their inclusion into Argentine “civilisation”: in his epilogue, he emphasises the need to “absorb and meld them, so to speak, into the criollo mold” (384). He returns to this advancement of “peaceful” integration not only because of this paradigm of mestizaje (“all of us Americans have Indian blood in our veins”, [384]), but also speaks of the notion of “silent” land whose supposed emptiness he believes is a waste (381). Moments like these show us that despite Mansilla’s self-celebratory gesture of participating in the ceremony, which he calls “following established protocol” (132) in a foreign land, his recording of such moments is ultimately meant to advance theories of integration and what he calls “peaceful conquest”, gestures that he acknowledges will inevitably change the space and culture he describes. In this sense, Mansilla’s text attempts to include the Indigenous voice in the national archive, but in doing so, effectively silences it – not unlike what occurs with the gaucho voice. As Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra writes (2008, 74), “[i]n order to become the basis for a national nostalgia from which the nation can emerge, the indio and the gaucho must disappear. Their presence in the archive is always already spectral”. Spectrality becomes a process inherent in Mansilla’s textual and proto-phonographic “inclusions”. Thus, the dreamlike world he claims to have “faithfully” documented is on the brink of irreversible change.

With these ideas in mind, as well as the sliding between vocality and its source, the scene takes on the mournful tone of the phonograph; as Sterne (2003, 290) suggests, these voices become redolent of a “resonant tomb, offering the exteriority of the voice with none of its interior self-awareness”. Much of the discourse around Mansilla’s inscriptions has read such moments as imbued with an “immediacy” of the voice or a break with representation (Ramos 1986, 170). I depart from such readings to argue that these disembodying cries become multivocal resonances that subvert the dynamics of Mansilla’s listening.

Numerous writers have described how such modes of vocal multiplicity can be read as unsettling colonial modes of hearing and sense-making. Ochoa Gautier (2014, 11–12) has written that ethnographers’ inscriptions of bogas’ voices showed how “the voice manifested or enabled the capacity to move between states of multiplicity or unity where a single person can invoice multiple beings and where collective singing (…) can manifest a unity in which the collective is understood as expressing the singular”. Similarly, the ethnomusicologist Louise Meintjes (2019, 72) writes of ululation in the Global South as embodied practice of relationality and improvisation, where “singular voices carry within them multiple other voices, present and elsewhere”. To consider how a singular voice carries multiple voices, to disrupt the very notion of voice as linked to a unique sounding entity or identity, is to rethink dominant modes of listening as capture. Dylan Robinson (2020, 38) writes of “hungry” or “settler-colonial listening practices” that “prioritize the capture and certainty of information over the affective feel, timbre, touch and texture of sound”. This is a “colonial imposition of settling” that repeatedly means to decipher and calm the voice for the purpose extending national power and integration; this “fixed” or “settler colonial” listening quite literally puts the roaming voice to rest. If we listen to Mansilla’s listening here, the inscription of fugitive sounds exceeds his attempts at fixing and capturing Indigenous voices and directly translating their content for a porteño audience.⁷ Instead, these voices roam from body to body, from background to foreground, from page to page, refusing to remain still or to settle within the established categories of nation and its outside, of single voice and group, of landscape and inhabitant.

How, then, would we listen to these voices? Here I turn to the work of Jacques Derrida, who suggests that despite our attempts to silence them, specters can and do return: in his seminal Specters of Marx, the specter itself is always without origin, without proper place: “A specter is always a revenant (…) it begins by coming back.” (2006, 11). This discussion of the spectral as constant an-original repetition highlights the ghost’s (non)-place between presence and absence, between there and not there; the spectre arrives from elsewhere, separated from its source. For Derrida, the spectral relies on the absence or non-identity of the body, of its exterior or outside – which also means that it sounds in the voice’s echo: “We cannot identify it in all certainty, we must fall back on is voice” (7); it “resonates like an old repetition” (15). Yet this is not a single, coherent voice but one that marks the fundamental uncertainty of inheritance: “The injunction [of inheritance] itself (…) can only be one by dividing itself, tearing itself apart, differing/deferring itself, by speaking at the same time several times – and in several voices” (18; emphasis mine). While Sterne’s “resonant tomb” speaks to a historical condition of phono-ethnography, here I read this concept as spectral and hauntological. If the Indigenous voice is what arrives to us as present absence,⁸ as spectral inheritance, as severed exteriority, it recurs as multivocal and cacophonous; it resounds with the impossibility of a singular, legible message from the unresolved past. As Erin Graff Zivin (2020, 43) suggests, this spectral demand insists for an an-archeological thinking – and listening – that “would respond to a call not from an exhumed past but from the future of this and other unfixed pasts, whose spectral apparition we know not how to read, though read them we must”. As an unreadable call at once demanding to be read, the voice roams about the landscape – and Mansilla’s own text – as disparate inheritance, as undissipated sound – for these ghostly cacophonies also impede the past’s closure and time’s forward progression. The spectral scream disorganises temporality, creating discordance in time’s passage, its progression made impossible by unfinished business. It is “dis-jointed, misadjusted, disharmonic, discorded” (Derrida 2006, 25): it raises the question of what it means to listen to cacophonous inheritance and fugitive sound, and to return to these voices in the present day – not to unearth their buried truth, but to instead further consider how they stage a necessary dissonance in dominant frameworks of nationhood and politics as related to vocality, forcing us to confront the most unsound(ed) elements that disrupt the very notion of “civilisation” itself.

Being(s) voiced

As a mode of conclusion, I turn to another instance of a writer’s listening to Indigenous voices in the Southern Cone, specifically in the region of Tierra del Fuego. My intention here is not to sacrifice the specificity of Mansilla’s text through easy comparison, but to instead suggest another mode of poetic listening to spectral phonographic sounds that might resist, or contest, their capture. Here I move further south from Mansilla’s account: in the 1960s, the Franco-American ethnologist Anne Chapman travelled to Patagonia and recorded Lola Kiepja and Ángela Loji, at the time two of the last few living Selk’nam (Ona) people of Tierra del Fuego. The Selk’nam were one of the last Indigenous groups encountered by settlers in the 1890s; the later gold rush and introduction of estancias in the region led to their genocide, an outcome of the logic of the settler colonial project in Argentina and Chile (Gigoux 2022). The Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña, inspired by many of Chapman’s recordings of Kiepja, repeats Viñas’s familiar trope of disappearance regarding the Selk’nam genocide:

and the Selk’nam

were the first

disappeared

in Chile, that is to say,

they were a whole people

made to disappear. (2012, 129)

For Vicuña, as for Viñas, the spectral absent-presence of the Indian is what prefigures and enables the disappearance of so-called “political dissidents” by the military dictatorships in the Southern Cone. The Indigenous theorist Jodi Byrd (2001, xxiii) writes of “American Indian” in a different context of US empire and settler colonialism: “As the ghost in the constituting machine of empire, the paradigmatic ‘Indian tribe’ that exists as a parallel to ‘foreign nation’ is not an absence, but rather a sui generis presence that enables the founding of US empire by creating a within that facilitates the colonialist administrations of foreign nations and Indian tribes alike”. These ideas speak to the Indigenous (non)-presence as a cipher for a political enemy figured within the nation’s internal outside – evoked as paradoxically empty presences who cannot ever be completely cast away. Vicuña, however, does not silence the Selk’nam but instead engages with Chapman’s recording through a poetic mode of listening that resists fixing or “uncovering” Kiepja’s voice.

Perhaps Vicuña hears how Kiepja’s own recordings and statements already resist such colonial modes of capture implicit in Chapman’s repetitions of similar tropes to those of Mansilla and Lehmann-Nitlsche. She references the melancholic need to preserve the voice of Kiepja, the last remaining Selk’nam shaman of xo’on, in the face of her language’s vanishing: “With Kiepja all direct testimony of the Selk’nam culture disappeared (…). She would ask me excitedly to hurry and get the machine ready lest the chant disappear from her memory before we could record it. Once recorded and we heard it played back, we were relieved. The chant had been saved from oblivion” (Chapman 1988). Chapman’s words reflect the same compulsion to untether Kiepja’s voice from living presence in order to assure its preservation in the future.

The songs Chapman recorded, which later became part of the compilation Selk’nam Chants of Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, were called “chants” in part because of their incantatory significance: Chapman claimed that Kiepja understood many of these chants as allowing the shaman to cross between the realms of the living and the dead. In these recordings, Kiepja mourns the deaths of her family members, and Chapman (1972, 10) claims that while watching her, she “had the impression she would sing this chant to evoke the presence of her sons and husband by means of a trance in which she felt that she transcended her living condition and that her spirit partook of their company”. The content of some of Kiepja’s chants, translated by her friend Ángela Loli, reveal a voice that carries with(in) it other voices, including the voices of those no longer alive. In the film The Ona People: Life and Death in Tierra del Fuego, one of Kiepja’s chants is translated:

Here I am singing,

the wind is carrying me.

I am following the footsteps of those departed.

I am allowed to come to the Mountain of Power. I have arrived at the Great Mountain range of the Sky.

The power of those who departed turns to me.

Those of infinity have spoken to me. (Chapman and de Gonzáles 1977, 00:2:08)

This lyrical translation portrays a seamlessness in representing Kiepja’s laments for a Western audience – however, the descriptive notes that accompany Chapman’s recordings tell a different story: “Although [the translator] speaks Spanish and her native tongue, she is not a shaman, and therefore has considerable difficulty in understanding the texts of the songs, mainly because of the vocal distortions, the style and the esoteric words” (1972, 8). These “vocal distortions” enter into Chapman’s liner notes (Chapman 1972, 6):

 

The ellipses and strange translations, as well as revenant phrases “vocalisation” and “repetition”, speak to the untranslatability and opacity at the heart of Kiepja’s laments. It is interesting that Chapman herself would view these “vocalisations” as impediments to understanding these songs rather than constitutive elements of their ritual force. Another discrepancy arises in Kiepja’s own relationship with the tape recorder. While Chapman saves these chants as cultural artefacts Kiepja has a different relationship with the medium:

Lola delighted to sing for the tape recorder, “la maquina” [sic] as she called it. Invariably she would insist that I play back immediately when she had stopped singing (…) she sang some of the chants again and again, mainly two of the laments (number 3 and 38) for her last two sons and her mother. She sang these so frequently that often I would not record them (…) But she wanted to be recorded every time she sang and when I did not do so she became visibly irritated. In vain I tried to explain that I could not record the same chant indefinitely. (1972, 3)

To record the same chant indefinitely, without end: Kiepja’s engagement here with the recordings – and as a listener of her own recorded voice, mourning through and with song – resists Chapman’s attempts to uncover these laments and fix them into a foreclosed past, but instead repeats them endlessly as returning, revenant songs that are always already unfixed, untranslatable, unsettling and unsettled, fugitive and escaping. Each song is another song, each cry another cry, each voice another voice: far from being linked to Kiepja herself, or from being captured by the tape recorder as ethnographic object, Kiepja’s engagements with la máquina attest to the poetic and performative force of these songs, questioning the very closure of “past” itself, of a completed process of mourning that allows for the movement toward the future. Chapman recounts that Kiepja did not view herself as the owner of these chants: “Quite often when I greeted [Kiepja] in the morning, she would smile widely saying: ‘I found another’, meaning that during the night she had recalled a chant she had heard many years earlier and she always remembered the name of the owner of the chant” (1972, 3). Chapman’s liner notes speak to Kiepja’s performances as not emerging from a singular voice, but as “found”, inherited, sung not as concretised memory but as the unfinished past in the present, as a voice that is always and necessarily more than itself.

What does it mean to listen to Kiepja’s spectral voice now, as it resounds from la máquina, conjuring the past in its presence, the presence of the past? How do we listen to her “trance-like” vocalisations that ceaselessly repeat? In a poem inspired by Kiepja, Vicuña (2021, 203) attempts to answer this question:

No es un canto

es un ser de voces

la nadadora.

(It [she] is not a song/it [she] is a being of voices/the swimmer.)

If we listen to Vicuña’s listening, what do we make of the first two lines? What does the “es” refer to – to Kiepja herself, to the songs, to the voice? Vicuña says that Kiepja’s song is not a song, that it is a being of voices, that it emerges from beings voiced: that each song is already more than one, not a single chant but a chorus ringing out in infinite voices. To be of many voices appears an odd paradox when each of us is meant to have our own “voice”, and when we intend to listen for the singularity of each and every voice’s individual experience. But perhaps Vicuña listens otherwise; perhaps she hears not (only) a living voice, but tells us something about listening to the voices of the dead – or to the dead being voiced, to their voices being, to their voices undoing whatever it is to “be” a voice. Perhaps to listen to these voices is an indefinite task, engaged in repetitions and re-apparitions, in endless replay: not a voice annexed into a distant past, made into a “faithful” remainder of a culture’s disappearance, but a fugitive and wandering sound that tells us something different, hearable and unhearable, every time it plays.

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Jane Kassavin

Jane Kassavin is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation centers on the poetics and politics of the voice in modern and contemporary Southern Cone and Brazilian literature with a specific focus on questions of performance, translation, and transmediality.

Notes

1 All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.

2 Robinson (2020, 153) points to the “salvage paradigm” as indicative of this, where “a false ascription of the inevitable extinction of Indigenous cultural practices and the resultant desire to save them – was at the time motivated by a sense of ethnographic responsibility”.

3 Ángel Rama’s The Lettered City remains a key reference regarding the significance of writing as an index of power in Latin America. In this seminal text, he writes: “To the degree that this dying cultural universe depended on unwritten traditions and oral communications, one might say that urban letters came to its rescue, but only to hold its funeral services in writing” (1996, 62). In certain ways the above quote’s reference to “dying” cultures and “funeral services” may rehearse the same phonographic tropes I outline here.

4 Though this article does not engage with the role of testimonial literature in the orality/writing and orality/literacy debate at length, there is no doubt that it bears importance for destabilising notions of “orality” as linked to pure truth and authenticity. For an overview of these categories, see Sommer (1999); Moreiras (2001); Beverley (2004) and McEnaney (2019).

5 Acosta (2004, 10) develops the concept of “illiteracy” in order to complicate the notion of “orality” as an access to unmediated authenticity; he writes that: “Illiteracy reveals the gap that exists between orality and writing, a condition of excess and subordination that cannot be understood adequately within the framework of writing (…) versus orality, or modernity versus tradition (…) Illiteracy is what emerges when a regime of sensibility encounters ‘zones of indistinguishability’ between identity and difference, inside and outside, proper and improper, truth and error, and so on”. Ochoa Gautier (2014, 20), meanwhile, views orality as a “historical mode of audibility that emerges in divesting the voice of unwanted features while pretending to be speaking about it”. I join these arguments by proposing a different mode of hearing what was seen as Indigenous “orality” in these texts, reading it not as immediacy or inaccessible alterity but instead proposing that “orality” itself becomes read and represented as a spectral condition that forecloses Indigenous futurity.

6 My discussion of the acousmatic here is grounded in the film theorist Michel Chion’s use of the term, itself in dialogue with the French composer Pierre Schaeffer’s coining of it: “In film, the acousmatic zone is defined as fluctuating, constantly subject to challenge by what we might see (…) the principle of cinema is that at any moment these faces and bodies might appear, and thereby de-acousmatize the voices” (Chion 1999, 22). I am interested in the acousmatic here at this moment of fluctuation between a sound source’s appearance and disappearance: Hernández’s first question “¿Quién es?” or “Who is that?” firmly locates the alarido in the territory of acousmatic vocality, where it is heard as intrusive and eerie mystery before its source is fully revealed.

7 The notion of “fugitive sound” here speaks to Mansilla’s proto-phonographic recording of these voices in line with Brady (1999) reading of Thomas Edison’s famous claims surrounding the phonograph, as well as the ways in which it changed the ethnographic project. However, the analysis of the relationship between listening and capture in service of the national-popular project here bears affinity with Alexandra T. Vazquez’s notion of “listening in detail”, where she writes: “I challenge the usage of details as things to be excavated and made epistemologically useful to instead allow for their retreat back into whatever productive bunker they’ve been hiding. They effect in flashes and refuse analytical capture. The fugitivity of details allows us to honor their effects in the here-and-now and to imagine how they will perform in some future assembly” (2013, 21). In dialogue with Fred Moten’s own formulations on fugitivity and Blackness (2003), Vazquez’s methodological project also resounds here in order to consider how disruptions and details unravel Mansilla’s and Chapman’s own ethnographic projects.

8 This framework of spectrality here is also grounded in the work of the theorist Jodi Byrd, who writes of Indigenous presences within US imperial expansion: “American Indians and other Indigenous peoples have often been evoked in such theorizations as past tense presences. Indians are typically spectral, implied and felt, but remain as lamentable casualties of national progress who haunt the United States on the cusp of empire and are destined to disappear with the frontier itself” (2001, xx).