Spatial Memory

Spatial Memory, Music, and the Sound of War

Music facilitates the convergence of space, place, and memory in composition and performance. As a cultural artefact, music preserves, and so performing music is an act of conservation. Music belongs to a larger soundscape, which encompasses the nuances of sound in space. Yet, music and soundscapes are often ignored in the criticism of wartime literature. Carolyn Birdsal maintains that an inquiry into the soundscape “can be studied to gain insights into social organisation, power relations and interactions with urban space” (12). The role of sound and sound’s relation to spatial memory is essential in Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan, and The Cellist of Sarajevo by Stephen Galloway. In both texts,

music is a focal point of cultural resistance. However, the sound of music is polluted by the sound of war. Not only are the lives of the Hot-Time Swingers and the Sarajevans threatened, but their way of life is altered by the oppressive hierarchies projected onto the soundscapes of the cities they inhabit. Whether it be via policing or bombing, the characters in both novels face cultural erasure in enforced silence. Yet, both Hieronymous Falk and the cellist subvert the cycle of destruction by preserving their spatial memories with music, and in doing so they reimagine the soundscape of war. These new soundscapes facilitate ideals of hope and forgiveness, even in the midst of genocide.
In Half-Blood Blues, jazz creates a safe space for the Hot-Time Swingers within Nazi Germany.

The band finds shelter and camaraderie in The Hound Club, which provides Hieronymus Falk in particular with a sense of racial and geographical belonging. His own identity is questioned because he is a Rhineland bastard; he identifies as German, and yet Germany denounces him as a cultural stain. Andy Bennett posits that music can facilitate a “collective sense of identity and feeling of community” in giving displaced peoples a spiritual homeland (4). Hiero is “lost as a cat” (Edugyan 271) when he isn’t playing music, but the Hot-Time Swingers and the Jazz community give him a space to exist. The other characters of Half-Blood Blues are also similarly displaced. Sid and Chip are American expatriates who came to Germany’s Jazz scene to evade the Jim Crow laws. Paul is a Jewish man in the Third Reich, while Ernst and Fritz identify with Jazz as a counter-culture movement to oppose German authoritarianism. As Moly McKibbin states, Jazz becomes the way these characters engage in discourses with each other and with politics, despite the language barriers between them. Jazz facilitates the band’s authorship of space, leading to their definition of Germany’s

soundscape.
Andy Bennett identifies the conflicts inherent in authoring music. He describes “a series of competing local narratives” (4) which lead to the contested nature of space and place. Not only did ‘the Housepainter’, as Sid describes him, physically mark the territory of undesirables, he also controlled the soundscape. Edugyan often represents Nazi oppression with yelling, drawing a sharp contrast to Sid’s rhythmic speech. “Jewkikes!” is what a Boot screams during an alleyway fight (Edugyan 98). This scene relies on sounds of struggle, of wheezing and scuffling. Hiero screams over and over throughout the scene. The term Boot itself is a reference to the constant marching of SA troops. Birdsal explains that the Boots “provided a palpable symbol for soldierly discipline and rhythmic order” (40), something to which Jazz, as an improvisational art, is opposed. The alleyway scene is sonically doubled in Delilah’s account of Paul’s arrest. It begins with Paul’s name being shouted, and then Boots hollering “Jude” at him (Edugyan 250). Birdsal terms similar acts of violence as “acoustic conflicts”, which eventually result in the landscape of fear (40) which the characters of Half-Blood Blues seek to escape.
In The Cellist of Sarajevo, the concept of the homeland is physical as well as spiritual. However, when the novel opens, that innate community is already in flux. The levelling of the Sarajevo Opera Hall has disconnected the cellist from his music. The loss of his safe space has “[shredded] him beyond recognition” (Galloway 12), and so it is music which correlates identity with physical space. Similarly, the other characters in Sarajevo have difficulty reconciling their intense feelings of home with the destruction of the city. The geography of Sarajevo has been destroyed to such an extent that “you can’t even walk from one end of the city to the other” (Galloway 46). Yet, when another mortar levels the marketplace outside his home, the cellist is compelled to act. He reclaims the mortar crater to perform Albiononi’s Adagio in remembrance of those who died (14). By doing this, he begins the process of reclaiming Sarajevo’s cultural soundscape.
Andrew Herscher defines urbicide as an act of erasure against memory, history, and cultural identity (4). As in Half-Blood Blues, the soundscape of Sarajevo is also inundated by acoustic conflicts. Urbacide is not simply the destruction of physical place, but a complete seizure of space. The men on the hills accomplish this by replacing the sounds of life with death. When Emina is shot, Dragan describes the noise as “[punching] through silence” (Galloway 175). Immediately, the street descends into a frenzy of movement and yelling. After Emina is taken away by an ambulance, all Dragan can hear is automatic gunfire and shells falling. He describes it as “a language, a conversation of violence” (Galloway 241), something which he now associates with Sarajevo. Yet, even though the city has mutated into a theatre of war and will never be the same, Dragan cannot imagine leaving through the tunnel the way his family did. In a moment of doubling, Arrow hears the same sounds of bombardment, automatic gunfire, and sirens (Galloway 251). Nermin’s assassination has made her question her own place in the city, but like Dragan she decides that she cannot go through the tunnel. Despite her circumstances, she believes “it’s possible that someday [that girl] might return” (Galloway 252), referring to who she was before the war. She will not forsake the memory she has of herself in Sarajevo.
While the characters in Half-Blood Blues try to escape Nazi Germany, the characters in The Cellist of Sarajevo refuse to abandon the city. Escape is difficult in both situations, but Ernst is willing to trade his freedom in order to get the remaining Hot-Time Swingers out of the country. Characters who could escape Sarajevo choose not to. Shifting notions of space and place are the reason for the difference. The communal space of Jazz is mutable and mobile to an extent. At the beginning of Half-Blood Blues, Jazz has already migrated from America to Germany. The Swingers can carry their music elsewhere, and so they bring it to Paris. The tie of place is stronger in Sarajevo because the characters within it are naturalized citizens. Sarajevo is an inalienable home to them. Music in The Cellist of Sarajevo is not treated the same way it is in Half-Blood Blues; rather, it is the rebuilding of community in a soundscape void of everything but violence. The music of Sarajevo is an anchor, rather than a transporter, of meaning.
Although Jazz can move, mobility alone cannot protect it.

Music is not only assailed upon by acoustic conflicts, but by censorship. In Berlin, the Hot-Time Swingers can no longer perform live due to the new laws (Edugyan 93). Even in Paris, Sid knows that “the music’s just dying” (Edugyan 260) as a result of Nazism’s spread through Europe. Rather than participating in everyday life, Parisian citizens were “hunched up on over some radio somewhere” (Edugyan 244), waiting for the war to begin. Hiero has to stop speaking so he can ‘pass’ as Senegalese, hiding his German heritage. Without the universal discourse of Jazz, Sid finds that language proves to be “a constant door in [his] face” (Edugyan 274). When the French accidentally shell a borough of Paris, Sid doesn’t hear the cacophony of war that exists in The Cellist of Sarajevo. Instead, it’s the absolute silence of death which frightens him. In trying to escape the violence in Berlin, the Hot-Time Swingers encounter resounding muteness in

Paris.
Birdsal explains that all the manifestations of sound – “whether music, voice, silence or noise” (178) – can be appropriated for political causes. Silence is used by the Third Reich in an attempt to erase Jazz culture, but Hiero is able to use Jazz to resist Nazism. Hiero appropriates the “Horst Wessel”, a Nazi anthem, to create “Half-Blood Blues”. Louis Armstrong insists that the track will say something to the world and the Nazis, something that “only [Jazz] cats can say” (Edugyan 263). McKibbin notes that Aryan Germanhood is subverted by the ‘degenerating’ threat of American jazz, which supports Bennett’s reading of music as a contested space. As a record, this piece of music could only have been created at this specific time, by these specific people. It creates a sharp imprint of the state of Jazz during the war. Not only that, “Half-Blood Blues” enables the Hot-Time Swingers to remember the joy of creating music, something they have been unable to do freely since the rise of Hitler’s Germany. The record eventually becomes a cultural relic of resistance during WW2. Ironically, the history behind its making becomes misappropriated by Caspar’s documentary.
Silence in The Cellist of Sarajevo is less noticeable. Moments of true silence are rare during the war. Rather, a silence exists between people due to the destruction of places of community and culture. Atrocities become unspeakable. Kenan experiences the self-censorship of experience when he meets Ismet on the street. He thinks “there is much to talk about, but none of it can be said, none of it is worth saying” (Galloway 68). Silence is an oppressive force in Sarajevo, but it is not the primary goal of the men on the hills. It’s merely a symptom geographical loss and the victimisation of the city. While war is loud and impossible to ignore, the death it causes is rendered as temporary muteness. When the shell lands on the market, the cellist simply stands and stares (Galloway 13) at the destruction. When the brewery is shelled, Kenan has the thought that “you never hear the shell that kills you” (Galloway 209). After the detonation, he experiences total silence before the screaming starts again. Before Arrow defies the orders she is given, she walks up fourteen flights of stairs in silence (Galloway 283), foreshadowing her own death. Sound and silence coexist in Sarajevo’s soundscape, whereas the two are clearly demarcated by movement in Half-Blood Blues.