Linguistic and Material Intimacies of Cell Phones by Joshua A. Bell Joel C. Kuipers

Author:Joshua A. Bell, Joel C. Kuipers [Joshua A. Bell, Joel C. Kuipers]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781315388366
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 39819209
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

This example is by no means unique. Photographs of the dead are amongst the most valued images that people collect, decorate, and share via their phones. Such images are intended to generate a highly affective and ontologically charged field of absent presence through which relationships with the dead (and by extension their sacred sites) are maintained (Deger 2008).

The wallpaper on Gurrumuruwuy’s phone features his late wife, Yangathu, a woman of great integrity and dry humour who dropped dead out of the blue, two years ago, aged only 48. I took that photo on my own phone a couple of weeks before she died. Gurrumuruwuy, an internationally travelled performer and director, now lives rough, camping in the long grass in Darwin, assuaging his sorrow and fury with too much grog and not enough food. His phone is new, a replacement phone bought with his fortnightly welfare payment (his last one ruined by an enthusiastic leap into the ocean on a hot day). When he got it, Gurrumuruwuy asked his relatives to retrieve his contacts and his ringtone: a particular track recorded by mobile during a recent ceremony. In this song, a mokuy (trickster figure) cries as he searches for lost loved ones in the Dhalwangu homeland of Balambala. “Are you alive? Or are you gone” the mokuy calls to the land and the spirits that live there. For Gurrumuruwuy, it doesn’t matter that he’s never physically visited Balambala. He knows it from singing it, dancing it, imagining it – going there with his mind and heart. In this song, the land cries for Yolngu, as in his mind Gurrumuruwuy cries for Yangathu; they become bound in shared sorrow and loss in the act of calling out and in the confronting truths delivered by the fact of no reply.

A few months later, we’re in Paris together for a film festival, all credit for international calls spent. It’s late and I fall asleep to the sound of that same song playing through the tinny speakers of Gurrumuruwuy’s phone. He blows cigarette smoke out the window into the freezing French night as the song takes him home. “It’s just like being there,” he says. “Like sitting on the ground.”

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