Music and Encounter at the Mediterranean Crossroads

A Sea of Voices

Ruth F. Davis, Brian Oberlander, Ruth F. Davis, Brian S. Oberlander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000467390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Music and Encounter at the Mediterranean Crossroads: A Sea of Voices explores the musical practices that circulate the Mediterranean Sea. Collectively, the authors relate this musical flow to broader transnational flows of people and power that generate complex encounters, bringing the diverse cultures of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East into new and challenging forms of contact. Individually, the chapters offer detailed ethnographic and historiographic studies of music's multifaceted roles in such interactions. From collaborations between Moroccan migrant and Spanish Muslim convert musicians in Granada, to the incorporation of West African sonorities and Hasidic melodies in the musical liturgy of Abu Ghosh Abbey, Jerusalem, these communities sing, play, dance, listen, and record their diverse experiences of encounter at the Mediterranean crossroads.

1 Voicing New Belongings

Composing Multilingual Songs in Italy’s Refugee Reception Centers

Fulvia Caruso

DOI: 10.4324/9781003008514-1

Introduction

In 2015, I initiated an action research project with my Ethnomusicology students in the Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage at the University of Pavia. My premise was that every kind of musical engagement helps people to model and reflect upon their cultural, social, and religious identifications (Stokes 1994; Turino 2008; Lewis 2015). Our aim was to understand formations of transnational cultural identity among asylum seekers in the area around Cremona, where the Department is located, while “giving something back” to the people we were engaged with.¹ Our project was concerned, in particular, with questions of cultural capital and the role that music could play in expressing belonging or even in constituting a form of political action (Baily 2015; Martiniello and La Fleur 2008). This chapter is based on a series of workshops that we conducted with asylum seekers at an overflow reception center near Vigolzone, Piacenza, from 2015 to 2017.

Being an Asylum Seeker in Italy

The flow of undocumented migrants across the Mediterranean that began at the turn of the twenty-first century, along with the European reception systems based on the Dublin Regulations that were created in response, are generating new conditions for social and cultural behavior among people in movement: In particular, new pressures in the dynamic processes of transnational identity formation, especially in countries of first arrival.² Due to its central position in the Mediterranean Sea, Italy is an important landing-point for both legal and illegal migrants. Asylum seekers³ are kept in reception centers for years, awaiting claims processing and eventual resettlement. In Italy, people from many different countries are forced to live together in overflow, or “extraordinary,” reception centers (Centri di Accoglienza Straordinari, or CAS) for periods ranging from a few months to several years, regardless of their age, ethnicity, or cultural and social background. These crowded, contested spaces hold significant potential for studies of music, language, and identity in contexts of migration.

It is important to bear in mind the special situation of asylum seekers as opposed to other types of people in movement:

Although the term “asylum seeker” is not found in the United Nations Geneva Convention of 1951 relating to the Status of Refugees (UNHCR, 2007), it generally refers to someone who is awaiting the outcome of an application for refugee status (e.g., UK Parliament 1999). Asylum seekers may be subject to a range of controls and restrictions on their rights—such as being barred from working or being detained—as well as being provided with a range of support. […] However, the more restrictive elements may be justified on the grounds that a state has the sovereign right to determine who is allowed to enter the country and the harsher aspects of such policies and practices may be founded on a model of deterrence that treats people as “objects” of policy.

(Kirkwood and McNeill 2015, 516)

Although Italy initially organized a very efficient system for processing refugees, the increasing flows of asylum seekers and the decreasing likelihood of their moving beyond Italy have overloaded the system since 2014.⁴ Adelaida Reyes Schramm has stressed that during the period of travel and application processing, asylum seekers are exposed to diverse cultural others, not just the cultures of their origin and destination, requiring a shift from a “bi-cultural perspective from which migrant musics are commonly viewed today, to a multi-cultural one” (Reyes Schramm 1990, 7).

The more recent migrations across the Mediterranean, in particular, involve the fragmentation of populations in movement: there are only a few cases of large homogeneous diasporas. These populations utilize different forms of transport, traveling in a more piecemeal way than in previous trends of migration, and the processing period impedes any re-gathering of significant groups of people from the same cultural background after arrival. We have learned not to take ethnic features for granted (Reyes Schramm 1979; Baumann 1999) and to underline transculturality (Giannattasio and Giuriati 2017). Nevertheless, the fragmentation that the reception system in Italy generates has no precedents and its musical dimensions need to be explored.

Another peculiarity of the contemporary situation in Italy is that the asylum procedure itself produces conditions of extreme precariousness. The limbo of forced migrants who are under the care of the UNHCR is not the limbo experienced by asylum seekers in Italy. Not only are the latter uncertain about where they will be resettled and when, but also about whether they will be recognized as refugees at all—whether they will ever be able to move towards a process of relocation and integration. Moreover, literature on twenty-first-century migration stresses that contemporary processes of relocation do not “follow the conventional order of uprooting-movement-regrounding. Migrants’ trajectories often involve more than two locations and in some cases the migrants’ destinations turn into transit places during the process of movement” (Stranges and Wolff 2018, 966).⁵ This complexity of trajectories is partly produced by smugglers, partly by the Dublin Regulations and the Schengen Agreement, but also by asylum systems themselves: the Italian system, in particular, moves people from one center to another very readily, further contributing to a condition of uncertainty and precariousness.

In theory, migrants are first sent to Hospitality Centers (Centri di Accoglienza, or CdA) where, regardless of their legal status, they receive first aid and are registered. If they are undocumented or refuse to undergo border controls, they are sent to Reception Centers for Asylum Seekers (Centri di Accoglienza per richiedenti asilo, or CARA) in order to be identified and to apply for recognition of their refugee status. In practice, however, there is not enough capacity in the CdA and CARA to process all of the arrivals. In 2015, therefore, the Ministry of Internal Affairs created the Extraordinary Reception Centers, or CAS, to deal with the overflow. The CAS system is managed by the Prefectures, or provincial administrative centers,⁶ which have to provide facilities within their respective areas capable of accommodating asylum seekers while their claims are being processed. In 2017, the CAS housed 90% of pending asylum seekers and that percentage had not changed at the time of writing. In most cases, the Prefectures are not able to regulate these institutions as they are all managed by private entities (cooperatives, associations, religious organizations, private citizens, etc.) with no universally applicable rules.

As regards the situation that we encountered in Cremona and Piacenza, one of the conditions that most intensely affects the cultural and social behaviors of the asylum seekers is their forced cohabitation in small living spaces, where they spend most of their time. Even if, officially, they are free to move, in practice conditions are often similar to those of a detention camp: Migrants housed in a CAS are free to leave during the day but obliged to return every evening; those who do not return for several days are considered to have “escaped” and are recorded as having left voluntarily. They could, theoretically, work while their applications are processed, but circumstances mostly prevent this. The Italian system is also becoming more and more restrictive about conditions for granting refugee status, which gives asylum seekers a growing mistrust in their chances of obtaining asylum. Thus, a sense of being out of place and out of time pervades the everyday life of these irregular migrants during the entire waiting period for regularization or expulsion.

In this kaleidoscopic scenario, it is difficult to anticipate the musical styles, genres, or practices that people in movement will engage with as they express, reflect on, and reshape their belongings and entanglements—or to predict exactly how and why. It is also impossible to conceive of these fluid musical formations of identity in terms of any one particular ethnicity or culture. The study of music in this context must, therefore, move beyond static conceptions of genre and identity, taking flux as a theoretical and methodological starting point. As Reyes Schramm observes:

In a situation where the common aspiration is to move on to resettlement, where the temporary character of camp existence is what sustains refugees, flux is the norm and the possibility of permanence is corrosive. These extreme conditions of uprootedness and dislocation are central to the context within which musical life is shaped and reshaped.

(Reyes Schramm 1999, 208)

Musical interaction with asylum seekers can provide us with a deeper understanding of how they express their sense of belonging through music, create models of musical sociability, and formulate their own musical citizenship in the conditions of limbo in which they are forced to live. In this context, music can also represent an occasion for refugees to escape the monotony of their everyday lives while giving them an opportunity to reflect critically on their situation and to express their feelings about it—including anger. Our workshops, moreover, proved to be an effective means for asylum seekers to foster better relationships with each other, whereas their living conditions tended to obstruct productive social interactions.

In the following section, I will concentrate on the project that we carried out in a CAS near Vigolzone, Piacenza from October 2015 to July 2017, when the center closed. My analysis cannot present definitive conclusions, given the intrinsically kaleidoscopic situations that Extraordinary Reception Centers create. My aim here is to offer insights, based on an analysis of the material gathered, into one of the main features of the asylum seekers’ musical identity formation that emerged: Multilingualism. Reflecting on multilingualism through the lens of participatory listening and collaborative composition contributes to our understanding of the fundamental roles that both music and language can play in processes of identity formation among people in movement.

Musical Workshops in a CAS

Over the duration of our project, the center hosted from 15 to 20 men, aged between 18 and 31, coming from francophone West Africa: Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Mali, Senegal, and Togo. The several workshops that we conducted centered on musicking (Small 1998): From listening to music and sharing music in participatory settings to improvising, learning to play percussion instruments, and composing new songs. Realizing that none of the participants had any prior training or experience in musical performance, we decided to start the musical training portion of the workshops with improvisations and percussion classes on self-made musical instruments. We introduced each activity with short sentences, normally in both Italian and French, then communicated through imitation or simply by playing. During the participatory listening and sharing of songs and, later on, the collaborative composition of new songs, we dealt with any kind of music that the participants wished to share and with any language(s) featured in those musics; this involved learning from the asylum seekers some songs in their local languages. In that sense, everyone was contributing to a mutual understanding through music. I will begin with a workshop on the theme of “adventur...