https://goddard-edu.zoom.us/my/haybarn
Everything I made after becoming a caretaker was about or blocking out my mother. About or blocking out the distress of living and dying, of remembering and forgetting, of ancestors and descendants, wrecking and reckoning, birth and decay, pissing and shitting and laughing and loving. Everything I made was a way of not seeing the hunched shoulders, the gaping mouth, the deflated teats, the wisps of hair on the pubis. The hag. The crone. The Cailleach. Everything was a denial of the truth of never not seeing it. A forgetting of the forgetting.
After my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s -- when she could no longer manage her money or safely drive a car, but still knew the difference between a dog and a child, between a person on the television screen and a person sitting beside her -- my mother said she would like to go back to Scotland, where her mother was born.
I planned the trip. Me, who had never had the slightest interest in my own heritage. Who dedicated decades to studying orisha dances from Cuba and kongo songs from Haiti; who walked junkanoo in the Bahamas, played mas in Trinidad, and belted cumbia behind a carnival float in Barranquilla; who recited Kikuyu in Nairobi and chanted in protest marches in Buenos Aires; who danced in Saint’s Day festivals on village squares in Venezuela and Guatemala, and beneath the moon on beaches in Martinique and Senegal. I did not know a single Irish dance step or Scottish song. My whole life, I danced, sang, and drummed in the company of my friends’ ancestors. As my mother slipped away, the time came for me to summon my own.
At my mother’s behest, I traced our family’s genealogy and plotted ancestral sites across Scotland and Ireland. I reserved cottages, rented castles, hired caterers, a piper, a ceilidh band, and organized a private concert in a castle with a recent Scottish Traditional Singer of the Year, Iona Fyfe. More than 30 family members signed up for Frances Jean Fraser Family Heritage trip in July 2020.
The pandemic scrambled our plans. We postponed the trip until 2021, and then 2022. In the meantime, I hired Iona Fyfe to teach me how to sing Scottish traditional songs. We met once a week over Zoom, my mother sometimes sitting in and singing along. Iona helped me match songs to my ancestors, making a musical map of our family history. For my Goddard practicum, I shared my ancestral repertoire with my long-time musical collaborators in Miami and together we made a series of music videos of Scottish and Irish traditional songs set to African, Caribbean, and African rhythms.
Locked at home with my mother, we re-made her memories in music. Then a few weeks before the start of my thesis semester, my mother’s heart began to fail faster than her mind. As my mother lay dying, her songs were all I could sing or hear. When she left her body, I followed her, on a pilgrimage to her mother’s homeland. My thesis is a testament to the role of music in memory and the relationship of performance to death, mourning, and ancestry. This is a record of my mother’s last songs.
"My Mother's Last Songs: Memory, Mourning, and an Ancestral Pilgrimage" shares and reflects on performances I created for, with, and about my mother during her decline and after her death, on a pilgrimage to Ireland and Scotland. I examine these songs in relationship to my mother’s memory loss and to the social forgetting of the violence of the creation of whiteness and modernity through the Black Atlantic slave trade and the genocide of native Americans. I hear in these songs the echoes of the fraught relationship of my ancestors, the Gaels, to that violence, first as colonized people in Ireland and Scotland, and later as enforcers of racist terror and beneficiaries of white privilege after settling in the United States.
