Hard Workin’ Woman is first of all a song; it’s inspired by other two songs and it’s dedicated to three women. The first one is a woman from Cameroon of Tikar ethnicity; we don’t know her name, but a recording from 1964 has allowed us to hear her voice as she sings to the rhythm of grinding corn on a stone. This chant is connected to another: Hard working woman, a blues song by Mississippi Matilda, an African American singer who passed away in 1978. The similar melodic contour, the theme of hard work and despair for the future, and the timbre of the two singers create a parallel connection between the two chants. Another Afro-American woman’s story overlaps with this process of rediscovery: her name is Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951), and she is the subject of the text of my piece. Henrietta was suffering from a serious form of cancer, and at the hospital where she died, her cells were taken – without her knowledge – for research and study purposes. The HeLa cells (derived from He(nrietta) La(cks)) turned out to be very special because they can reproduce indefinitely. They are still sold for billions of dollars for the benefit of medical and scientific research, but not for the benefit of her family, who didn’t learn of her ‘immortality’ until more than twenty years after her death. I was fascinated by these two chants and the idea of an original lost but not forgotten, much like the continuous duplication of the HeLa cells where the original no longer exists but survives in its copies. (And meanwhile, the doublebass grinds…)

The text of the piece is based on a few lines (repeated/multiplied) extracted from a letter* written by Deborah Lacks (daughter of Henrietta Lacks) about her mother and the HeLa cells.

*featured in Rebecca Skloot’s book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” (2010).

I tell you her name. HeLa.
She is everywhere.
Her cells are still livin’ today, still multiplyin’, still growin’ and spreadin’
if you don’t keep em frozen.
Now, I tell you her name. Henrietta Lacks.