Oye Mi Canto

I had wanted to go to Andalusia for years. My love affair with Spain commenced with Barcelona when I was a child, but I have always been drawn to the concentrated range of religious and artistic emotion expressed to so much excess in the South. I am a passionate person and passion is an expansive and dangerous state. It encompasses heights of ecstasy or depths of despair, anger, pain, lust, and little in between. There are no shades of grey in passion, only the ochres and yellows of buildings, landscapes and fruits, underscored by a violet sky.

Having finally achieved my dream of visiting the land of Flamenco, I hoped to encounter this particular condensed elixir of passion – the music of the soul. I know very little about the intricacies of its form, the compás, malagueñas and sevillanas, nor can I recognise the difference between a seguiriya and a bulería. But I do know that the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I hear it and that its heartbeat is embedded into the geographical and social fabric of the area.

Its shadows are as sharp as its salt plains are flat. In the towns, enticing vestibules of ornate mosaics and tiles, as forbidden as a harem, emphasise the reverberation of children’s voices. The crescendo and finale slam of solid wooden doors delineate the firm boundary between the inner sanctum of family life and the outer bustle of the streets. Its capriccio roads resound with staccato carhorns, segueing into the pulsating of the cicadas at every dusk.

It is insuppressible. Old men sit on doorsteps, clapping their veined hands in the afternoon siesta sun. A drowsy melody drifts down from a balcony, a private tutorial is given in a cool, shadowed corner of a palace courtyard, and long-haired youths pluck their guitars on a promenade while lovers sing to each other on the beach. If you are lucky, you may find a bar where the great, the good and the pedestrian hone their skills amid clouds of hashish and glassfuls of cold, crisp Fina.

One hot afternoon, just before siesta, I drifted into the Convento de Jesús Nazareno in Chiclana, just in time to hear the enclosed Augustinian nuns, hidden behind a grille, commence their service with a Gregorian chant. I have heard such chants before, in Northern and Central Europe, where the voices were stripped down to an asexual tonal purity, regular as a species of angel.

Here, though, there was no doubt that the sensual love offered to deity belonged to earthbound women. Smokey, husky bass notes rose to an illicit vibrato, its sonorous timbre as honey sweet as the taste of Moscatel. It seduced. It celebrated. It had its feet in the dust and its hands clutching its own breasts. Its art of relating to the Divine required no fundamental transformation, no destruction of native talents or memory and its cadence was served up raw, ill-disciplined and true.

I would like to go back to this land to live for while. Its irregular, passionate music teaches that you should never debase your own voice, for the song that flows through your nervous system is the authentic sound of your spirit. Its measure is love and its vibration is the gift of life itself.

Photos galore