Affective temporalities of presence and absence: musical haunting and embodied political histories in an Algerian religious community

Tamara Dee Turner

doi:10.1080/14735784.2020.1856700

Abstract

ABSTRACT What does it mean to be musically haunted? In the Algerian popular Islamic ritual called dīwān, one can be haunted by the deep, bass-register melodies of spirits, saints and historical figures of the trans-Saharan slave trade. Musical haunting is affective haunting. Melodies are not only felt emotionally as recurrent fear, dread and ambiguous loss (Boss 1999. Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.) but they are also simultaneously physically arresting for the body and senses, erupting into uncomfortable sensations like prickling skin and knots in the stomach, eventually precipitating into registers of trance. Here, musical affects manifest spectrally – both directly as non-human entities or spirits and indirectly through strong emotions that tend to ‘take over’. The haunted are never eventually ‘healed’ in ritual, in the sense of completion; suffering always comes back in some form. Rather, dīwān is a modality of continually inhabiting and embodying various tumultuous, political histories perpetually resounding through the daily lives and physical bodies of the dīwān community. By way of non-Western understandings of affect, music, and ritualised temporality, this essay illustrates an intertwined, spectral interdependency of music, affect and politics.

Highlights

What does it mean to be musically haunted? In the Algerian popular Islamic ritual called dīwān, one can be haunted by the deep, bassregister melodies of spirits, saints and historical figures of the transSaharan slave trade
It is probably for this reason that, in ritual, he is depicted as a hunter: his adepts take up spears and move them in stabbing motions
Most dīwān trance varieties are understood as precipitating from the musical ignition of pain and suffering (‘ghabina’), the way song vibrates and brings into the moment memories and affects, sensations and emotions associated with painful feelings

Summary

Introduction

Most dīwān trance varieties are understood as precipitating from the musical ignition of pain and suffering (‘ghabina’), the way song vibrates and brings into the moment memories and affects, sensations and emotions associated with painful feelings. In other words, this is not ecstasy or rapture but the musical ignition of burdensome affects. When Hasna falls over, begins to moan, or even reaches up to cover her face or bury her head, she is losing agency to some other presence, some kind of spectre, whether it be a jinn or a painful memory-feeling This means that, first, she is haunted by the spectre through affective-bodily reactions in response to the song. That is, when musical hauntings grip bodies with trance – itself a barzakh between cognitive presence and absence that obscures the thresholds of memory and amnesia – feelings are meaningful in and of themselves, whether or not they follow temporal ‘logic’ or can be ‘cognitively’ understood

Concluding thoughts

Notes on contributor