2. Learning a Dead Birdsong
Remembered songs of extinct wattlebirds, endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand, catalyze Julianne Warren's storytelling. In Chapter 2, she spins a path from first listening to a Pākehā-narrated recording of an elder Māori performing traditional mimicry of Huia. Replaying these dead bird-human voices...
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| Format: | Book Part |
| Language: | unknown |
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Open Book Publishers
2020
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| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/obp.0186.02 https://www.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0186.02.pdf |
| Summary: | Remembered songs of extinct wattlebirds, endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand, catalyze Julianne Warren's storytelling. In Chapter 2, she spins a path from first listening to a Pākehā-narrated recording of an elder Māori performing traditional mimicry of Huia. Replaying these dead bird-human voices interacting with sounds in the near-Arctic helps her begin learning, in poet W.S. Merwin’s words, to 'hear what never/Has fallen silent.' Between antipodes, ancestral echoes escape from machines, and sleeping languages live on—in loss—uncanny companionships of hope's sound. |
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