In When the Drummers Were Women, acclaimed drummer, teacher, and composer, Layne Redmond, relates how the frame drum, thought to have developed from the grain sieve, is the oldest known drum in history. It first appears nearly 8,000 years ago in the multi-racial, ancient Anatolian city of Çatal Hüyük, and is understood to be an instrument whose ceremonious use was part of the ritual practices of women who in leadership roles were responsible for the psychic and spiritual well-being of their communities. Of the frame drum and grain sieve (a woman's utensil), Redmond says both share the same origin and are symbolic of "feminine, fertility, grain, the moon, the sun, and the primordial first body of water,"1 and that connections between the two reach back into prehistory. Similar to the song of the Huezoztincos, a folksong of the Pardhans from the Upper Narmada Valley (India) reads:
My Singer, from that earthen drum,
What sweet music you bring
From the earthen drum of my body.2
As a poet who also trains in the polyrhythmic traditions of frame and conga drumming I couldn't help but to begin analyzing and artistically integrating such relationships as I was seeing and feeling them between the two richly rhythmic disciplines of poetry and drumming. Neither could I ignore what I was beginning to discover as the under-determined and little-disclosed ancient relationship between poetry, drumming and women.
In the 1964 book I have, in which the Aztec poem appears, the editor suggests the poet- speaker is male. Probably it's so, but what came into my mind when I saw this 16th century Mexican poem was a driving sense of confirmation of a kind of psychic transportation, whether learned or developed, of oral/aural traditions coming to us over physical land, between place, space and time. As well, I also thought of the transference of communal guardianship, now termed governmental authority, from one of female, ritualistic leadership to that which for too long has been nearly exclusively male; but even as the drumming of high priestesses was muted and the seemingly egalitarian, matriarchal and/or matrilineal cultures, whose chants were poems, whose prayers were songs to goddesses, were overrun and overturned, there remains today ceremonious and religious poetic-song and drumming traditions that echo the concepts and practices of these earlier cultures even as they have been fractured by, and assimilated over millennia into the current patriarchal paradigm.3
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The more I've begun to learn and compare drumming traditions with language and poetry against a backdrop of ancient archaeology, ancient poetry, and cuneiform translation, the more compelling the evidence becomes against an argument of strict un-consciousness in favor of one supportive of an historically directed consciousness reflective of traditions that have evolved within separate areas, states, countries, and over time, but whose origins seem clearly linked over thousands of years to those first traditions coming out of the areas we now call Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. At the heart of these traditions are the women by whose hands the first drums are thought to have come, as for example is said to have come agriculture, fire, pottery and medicine.
In an archaeological and linguistic world of overwhelming and meticulously documented evidence that continues to come to us as researchers keep digging into human past, there is a flow of artistically expressed concepts related to thinking and being that really seem less accidental than intentional. These expressions promote an interpretation of some form of sustained human memory, an ancient memory transmitted by and maintained through art, through poetry and music, through language and oral traditions. This sustained memory is part of many contemporary cultures and also lives in the practices of certain indigenous peoples world-wide.
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As part of the Library of Congress' Endangered Music Project, and in the liner notes of the Yoruba /Dahomean Collection: Orishas Across the Ocean, Morton Marks writes about several groups, including the Yorubas in Brazil. He points out that during the Atlantic slave trade many Ketus, a Yoruba sub-group from western Nigeria, were landed in Brazil and made up the majority of Yorubas in Salvador. Marks states Ketu women first created Candomblé houses in Brazil, and that, as religious practice, Ketu Candomblé has preserved Yoruba traditions with the greatest fidelity. In different areas these traditions developed regionally. In Cuba the traditions of the Yoruba (Lukumís) developed into Santería. Different Web sources credit Ferminita Gómez, a Yoruba ex- slave, as the founder of Santería, one of the most important branches in Afro-Cuban religion. At the Kabiosile Web site of Santería / Lukumí music recorded in Cuba,4 it's written that Alfred Calvo, famed batá player and master of Lukumí praise poetry, is the last surviving godchild of Gomez who was a priestess to Yemayá (Yemoja, Yemú), Mother of the Children of Fishes. Through Santería Ferminita Gómez preserved certain religious traditions that came with her from Africa, and she is credited as founder of Egwado, one of the largest branches of Lukumí /Santería religion.
Alfred Calvo is said to be one of the most knowledgeable Afro-Cuban folkloric singers alive today. His knowledge represents one example of the kind of living memory that harkens back to some other place and time, sustained by generational memory, full of musically-related information, and maintained through oral practices that have survived throughout the world and by varying adaptations and evolution. In Cuba, Brazil, and throughout the Caribbean Islands, information has been preserved through the practices honoring the Orisas (Orishas Orixas), African gods and goddesses, often disguised as Catholic saints, whose traditions present themselves comparatively, offering glimpses into an ancient history that begs serious interdisciplinary study as traditions whose similarities to Neolithic and Paleolithic concepts and rituals should not be entirely overlooked or discredited. Such living memory and its relationship to an ancient past may prove to be a new frontier by which humanitarian restoration within the egalitarian paradigm might be actualized.
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An inscription on a wall of the Temple of Hathor at Dendera, Egypt reads: The sky and its stars make music to you. The sun and the moon praise you. The gods exalt you. The goddesses sing to you.5
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I remember the very first time I heard frame drums played ceremoniously. I'd never heard them before, and certainly not as tambourines whose skinned heads players drummed upon with their fingers. When the procession started a slight gasp nearly escaped from me, and I was for just the slightest instant overcome with a simultaneous feeling of overwhelming joy and grief. This left a deep and lasting impression on me and I have since determined that what I was experiencing was some reconnection to my own ancient memory, wherever it lay in my mind, silenced, dormant, having suddenly been called out from its centuries of imposed unconsciousness.
This was the beginning of my journey into hand-drum apprenticeship, a journey I started six years ago, and whose path has clearly enabled me to give further language to a philosophical, cultural, poetic and musical perspective that relates to and recalls a non-patriarchal condition under which many more cultures seem to have existed and whose dismissed historical relevance remains today at the heart of patriarchal maintenance or things as they are, not as they might be (and by that I mean they might be fair, life-sustaining, and egalitarian for all peoples on this planet).
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Nubian (Sudanese) master frame-drummer Hamza el Din teaches the names of the frame drum strokes as Kah, Daum, Tak, and Cha which relate, respectively, the elements earth, water, fire and air. It's worth noting the closeness between the word "kah" (earth) and the Sumerian word for earth "ki." Personified, Ki is (earth) mother of Enlil (air).6 Both appear in the Epic of Gilgamesh, whose ancient tablets were written during the first half of the second millennium BCE. Imagine how ancient the concept must be to invoke the elements and praise the gods and goddesses by playing upon the frame drum! Add chant to this and what you have is a view of the very earliest form of ritualistic poetry and drumming.
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There is so much to be said about the ancient archaeological evidence that supports an interpretation of peaceful, earth-centered cultures whose art, music, and poetry relate a divinity manifest in female form, where woman was viewed as analogous to nature itself, resulting in symbols and motifs taken from the natural world as a means of drawing her relationship to that world. In his forward to archaeologist Marija Gimbutas' book, The Language of the Goddess, Joseph Campbell writes:
One cannot but feel that in the appearance of this volume at just this turn of the century there is an evident relevance to the universally recognized need in our time for a general transformation of consciousness. The message here is of an actual age of harmony and peace in accord with the creative energies of nature which for a spell of some four thousand prehistoric years anteceded the five thousand…from which it is now certainly time for this planet to wake.7
Again, what strikes me as remarkable is this fluidity of consciousness crossing time and land, a consciousness from which sprang not only the sweet-voiced drums of women, but also her ritualistic practices, also her lyric poetry, all preceding this current history we now find ourselves in; a history of consciousness transformed, a consciousness still largely defined under patriarchal constriction, by which many continue to suffer, with many grievances against conditions of inhumanity, not the least of which is war.
For quite some time the text and subtext of much of my own writing has been informed by this understanding, and attempts to deal with the human toll of such conditions and the paradigmatic thinking that promotes them instead of challenging them.
Notes:
1 Layne Redmond, When the Drummers Were Women: A Spiritual History of Rhythm (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997), 19.
2 Redmond, When the Drummers Were Women, 57.
3 For clarification and in this discussion I must say I view patriarchy as a state of conditioned consciousness, exercised by both men and women, with discriminating exploitation and assimilation processes along the lines of gender, class, race, religion, ethnicity and nationality. I view egalitarianism as that which does not accept hierarchical processes of division and exclusion as part of its paradigm for humane living.
4 http://www.kabiosile.org
5 Redmond, When the Drummers Were Women, 5.
6 Michael Jordan, Encyclopedia of Gods: Over 2,500 deities of the world (New York: Facts On File, Inc., 1993), "Ki."
7 Joseph Campbell, forward to The Language of the Goddess, by Marija Gimbutas (New York: First Harper-Collins Paperback Edition, 1991), xiv.
Image:
1. Ferminita Gómez, http://kabiosile.org/english/photos.html?s=ancestors&p=1 Photo © 2003 Kabiosile.
