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  • El Sur ProfundoAlternative Soundings of the South
  • The Dolores Flores-Silva Deep Listening Trio (bio), Dolores Flores-Silva (bio), Keith Cartwright (bio), and Rosemary Mulligan (bio)

South is the direction of release. Birds migrate south for winter. It is flowers and food growing. It is fire and creativity. It is the tails of two snakes making a spiral, looping over and over, an eternal transformation.

—Joy Harjo, Crazy Brave (2012)

TRACK ONE: BETWEEN HISTORY AND ETERNITY (15:42)

Our response to the word deep in southern studies draws resonance from the SLJ “Gulf” special issue from Spring 2014 in which the call appeared. Incoming editor Sharon Holland launched us into these spiraling loops of southern exposure via a short statement titled “Going South” and an epigraph sending us “Home” into “a world . . . endlessly deep” (iii). The special issue editors opened their introduction with invocations of Veracruz coupled with Edna Pontellier’s final engulfing swim in “deepwater horizons” (Cartwright and Salvaggio 9), interspersed with riverside wailings (spirituals and la Llorona) converging in “Creole’s” bass line from James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”: “He was Sonny’s witness that deep water and drowning were not the same thing” (14). We follow this pulse of necessary witness here—a soul music of audible release and transformation. It’s a directional muse and music, a southward-faced awakening to deeper temporal and spatial consciousness of buried voices and sounds. [End Page 92] We listen to Richard Campanella’s “Geographer’s Take” on the issue and hear that the term “Gulf South” is replacing “‘Deep South’” because Deep South “carries certain baggage” (18), is “disturbing,” and “loaded in the worst way” (19). No wonder then that Sharon Holland calls us back to the deep to account for what we might jettison, the baggage we would disavow when confronted with endless depths of home and homelessness.

Respect for what Wai Chee Dimock has called “deep time,” the long duration, is necessary for healthier reconfiguration of literary studies in the U.S. South. This nation, as well as the nation’s southern region, carries such a young (or “naïve”) historical consciousness that much of its citizenry can hardly think, vote, or read from perspectives of deep time crisscrossed by migrations and exchanges across space. Following Dimock’s lead, southern studies scholars can reach further into “rememory” by drawing from Pauline Oliveros, the Houston-born avant-garde composer and accordian player whose practices of “deep listening” may help us respond to patterns and sounds poorly recorded in our literary-cultural histories. Our trio’s practice of deep listening seeks out spaces and texts resonant with sounds and languages other (or older) than the presence of English. We listen for Spanish, African, and Indigenous voices, instrumental and text messagings that relay drum sounds, storm winds over cornfields, the trill of cicadas in the oaks. We listen in the manner of Langston Hughes riding southward across the Mississippi on his way to spending his nineteenth year with his father in Mexico, his soul “grown deep like the rivers,” “older than the flow of human blood in human veins” (4). Or perhaps with Joy Harjo in “New Orleans,” as memory of DeSoto’s trek “swims deep in blood” (How We Became 43), and we hear Muscogee “voices buried in the Mississippi mud,” voices of

  . . . ancestors and future children buried beneath the currents stirred up by pleasure boats going up and down.

(44)

Deep listening calls for holistic attentiveness and brings a vibrational depth to deep time and space. We can listen to Cabeza de Vaca’s La relación (1542), for example, as it takes us into a south resonant with more than we may be accustomed to hearing. A hurricane’s sonic force summons wild reverberations from a Cuban harbor in chapter 1: “we heard all night long, and especially after midnight, a tremendous clamor, and shouting voices, and many bells and flutes and tambourines and other instruments playing loudly, which lasted until morning, when [End Page 93] the storm ceased” (6–7). Cabeza de Vaca’s representations (here either of Taíno ritual response to the storm or hallucinatory prefiguration of Ariel’s Tempest) often shipwreck...

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