What happens when we attempt to hearܫ war, become aural witnesses rather than engage, again and again, in the act of seeing wide-scale devastation? Following a catastrophic event, powerful images and visuals from war-torn regions often become our primary means of constructing a lexicon of war. Most of us are attuned to prioritising our faculty of sight over others, but a shift towards sonic territories allows us a different register to make sense of the happenings of war. Is not the aural landscape merely noise, one might enquire? Loud, chaotic, ambiguous, and indecipherable. It is, still it is more. The pandemonium of war remains heavy with the silence of suffering and pain, and when its end is nowhere in sight—the murmurs of everyday chores, giggles of children, whispers of prayers and cries, the clanking of ladles against vessels, and the artist’s splashing of paint on the canvas become part of war’s monotony. By shifting our perspective to the living, we bear witness to the ghosts of voices surviving amidst unfathomable grief.
What Happens When We Listen To The Soundscape Of War?
ꦚThe pandemonium of war remains heavy with the silence of suffering and pain, and when its end is nowhere in sight—the murmurs of everyday chores, giggles of children, whispers of prayers and cries, the clanking of ladles against vessels, and the artist’s splashing of paint on the canvas become part of war’s monotony.
Liturgy of Anti-Tank Obstacles (Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk, 2022), a short film documenting the lives of a group of sculptors in Ukraine after the Russian invasion▨, begins with a hymn sung by a church choir as the camera pans across the ruins near Lviv. While the operatic psalm continues, the soundscape materialises intricately—we hear the footsteps of a soldier patrolling and alongside him, the rapacious breathing of a military dog, the siren of an ambulance nearby, the tyres of a few cars speedily hum on the road, and finally, inside the artists’s workshop, a radio informs of the lack of resources for those defending Mariupol. The radio never stops talking, and the sculptors themselves utter no words, but sounds made by their tools and machines — drills, brushes, scalpels, chisels, knives, concrete mixer—pervade the screen. These piercing, squalling, caterwauling mechanical sounds slither down our skin, and our hearts palpitate uncontrollably. One thinks if collective pain could be vocalised, this is how it would feel. And it would be so damaging to our world that it would destroy hearing altogether. Just then, the prayer song resurfaces in the film.
We discern that the sculptors are constructing and renewing religious statues of different Angels and Apostles, Mary and Christ like a terracotta army to stand against the Russian military apparatus and its synecdoche ‘tank’ in Liturgy of Anti-Tank Obstacles. Sparks fly as angle grinders cut steel, possibly making the uncountable crosses that surface throughout the film. The intense sounds emanating from cranes and trucks carrying humongous statues return to the screen. People place these sculptures all around their neighbourhood. The film ends with a pair of children praying under the guidance of perhaps their mother and beseeching God for help before rolling over the grass in a chortle. Concurrently, we hear a man stuck in a relief camp, singing in Manipuri, melodiously appealing to Christ for peace and protection in Bharat Ek Khoj: Manipur (Samdish Bhatia, 2024).
In the wake of continuous havoc caused by Manipur’s warring tribesꩲ and the apathy of the State to put resources towards a resolution, prayer seems to be one of the only few recourses for surviving the everyday reality of a relief camp. In the ephemeral moment of a song, whether he submits to hope or not, the man’s melancholy rips the fabric of war open—the memory of a burnt home, we observe, leaves indelible crevices in the voices of those who have been displaced. A young girl who graduated last year struggles to string sentences together; there is nothing she can say, no rage now, no tears. In another sequence, as the host of the documentary (Samdish) engages with children in a Meitei camp, we catch them giggling, and the camera promptly cuts to an old man striking a token towards a pocket of a carrom board. The intermittent laughter is juxtaposed with the snapping shot of the striker, and from the Meitei camp, we are transported to a Kuki relief camp where we see old men playing a game of carrom.
ꩵWe can hardly point out any difference between the two camps: cramped spaces, a fog engulfing people’s vision of the future, people in mourning and waiting—waiting for a sense of quiet, waiting to rebuild what has been lost—people suspended in time. With no possibility of return in sight, the sounds of the everyday infiltrate the space of the camps—volleyballs jostle around making thuds, and in a corner, steam sighs from a pot on the stove. In this documentary, a background score is occasionally used instead of relying on diegetic sound, but it is evident that war—apart from being a traumatic experience in its own right—places a burden on the survivors to chronicle it, to constantly speak. In the end, the raging disembodied voice of a chemistry professor reminds the documentarian and the spectator alike how articulation is nothing but an excruciating liability in the face of their experience that lies beyond the scope of language.
In one recording of It’s Bisan From Gaza, And I’m Still Alive🅰, from late October 2023, a shocked Bisan cries as she informs of Israel’s bombing of the entrance of Al-Shifa hospital. She recounts having been there a few minutes ago. As she wrestles with language, tears roll down her face, evoking both the terror of witnessing a massacre as well as the pain of reporting and living in a war zone. Over the span of last year, Bisan made hundreds of videos as she got displaced from the north, first to Khan Younis and then to Rafah in the south of the Gaza Strip. In one, Bisan declares she now possesses no individual dream except a collective hope for peace, freedom and justice, signifying that the unique voices of an entire people have been violently rendered mute. What sound does a lost dream make? Are we capable of hearing it? No matter how incomprehensible, it is a sound that splits the world into those who suffer and those who inflict suffering.
No Other Land (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, et al. 2024) begins with Basel recalling his father’s encounters with the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) in Masafer Yatta, the West Bank♓, in the early 2000s. His narratorial voice seems to carry the ghost of his community’s past, dense and eerie. From 2019 up until October 2023, the most dominant sound recorded in the region is that of cranes and bulldozers demolishing Palestinian houses, forcing part of the population to retreat into caves. An operation that has been in progress since his father’s time. The men and women of Masafer Yatta shout and rage against the IDF soldiers as they flatten their homes into debris to make space for military training grounds and build settlements on Palestinian land. Asymmetrical power relation is blatantly palpable when the sound of a person’s cry is drowned by a towering bulldozer razing a house or a school.
When two little girls are asked if they miss their school in BBC’s Life and Death in Gaza (2024) by Aya, one of the four Palestinians who takes it upon herself to record the war, they reply in affirmative. Aya jokingly retorts, “You’re already [sheltered] in a school?” They burst out laughing. At that moment, a bomb explodes nearby. Their laughter stops abruptly; the blast obviously scares them. Do you remember a video from Syria that went viral on social media a couple of years ago, featuring a toddler being pacified by her father? There, a series of bombs explode with disturbing loudness. However, the girl is invited to laugh at each of them. Like the ‘Riddikulus’ spell in Harry Potter🥂, she is encouraged by her father to expel seriousness from the sound of horror. Certainly, he knows it will not annihilate her fear, but in helping her change its form to a ridiculous one, he helps her manage panic. The aim, then, is not to conquer fear but to survive.
(Views expressed are personal)
Srishti Walia is a doctoral student of Cinema Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi