Reviewed by Greg Dening | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.4

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Reviewed by Greg Dening | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

How Early America Sounded. By Richard Cullen Rath. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xi, 227. $32.50.)

Reviewed by Greg Dening , Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University, Canberra

It is 1974. We are seated in the back pew of a white wooden chapel on the Marquesan island of Tahuata in the center of the vast Pacific Ocean. It is Sunday morning. My wife and I are participant observers in a priestless prayer service. The prayers and readings are in a drone of French, Marquesan, and Latin. At this moment, it is in Latin, the slow mantra of a Litany of the Saints—Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis; Sancte Petre, ora pro nobis.... Suddenly we feel as much as hear the speeding rhythm and growing loudness. The congregation now is one body and ends the litany in a climactic, almost orgasmic, gasp. Gregorian chant was never like this, at least in my experience. But I knew what I had heard. I had heard a sound line into a native past. I had caught the onomatopoeia of passions long forgotten, never dead.

It is 2004. We are in a darkened cinema. We had watched for seven long minutes—agonized or angered according to our prejudices—the blank face of George W. Bush as he sat before a class of children, a story about a goat in his hand, the knowledge of the unbelievable in his head. Then the screen was black and silent. The terrible was coming. We had seen it so many times. But we really had not heard it. That is what came, the awful, rushing, deadly whoosh! The sound hit us in our seats. Sightless we had experienced the inexperienceable in a new and terrible way. Then when the first bombs hit Baghdad, the very theater shook. The winds of death hit us hard. Do the blind hear more? Do the deaf see more? With one sense gone, could I write the history of the others?

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