Roundtable: Haitian Music. Etid ak obsèvasyon sou mizik ayisyen

Roundtable: Haitian Music

The idea for this roundtable started with Madison Smartt Bell, and a post he wrote about Haitian music for the New York Times’s Paper Cuts blog.

I knew Wyclef’s music and a few other names on Bell’s list, but I found myself feeling woefully short on context. I wanted to know what’s going on now in Haiti. What are the big struggles within and behind Haitian music? What should people be listening to? To answer these questions, and others, I enlisted the help of music scholar Garnette Cadogan and brought together Bell with:

Laurent Dubois, who is the author of “Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution,” and is working on a history of the banjo.

Elizabeth McAlister, who writes about Haitian music and religious culture. She is the author of “Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora,” and produced the Smithsonian Folkways CD “Rhythms of Rapture: Sacred Musics of Haitian Vodou.”

Ned Sublette, the author of “The World That Made New Orleans,” “Cuba and Its Music,” and the forthcoming “The Year Before the Flood.”

Edwidge Danticat, a novelist and author of the memoir “Brother, I’m Dying.”

Garnette Cadogan himself, who is at work on a book about rock-reggae superstar Bob Marley.

The conversation is theirs. I’m here only as student and moderator.

Laurent Dubois:

Last year, researching the history of music in Haiti, I came across a description of a big dinner organized on a plantation a decade before the Haitian Revolution. The M.C. was a plantation slave, the mistress of the white manager, and the invitees were slaves from neighboring plantations. The entertainment was provided by two men, described as “public singers,” playing banjos. One of them had a name I found startling: “Trois Feuilles” (“Twa Fey”), or “Three Leaves.” When I told Madison about this, he had the same sharp reaction I had—“Twa Fey” is an anthem in Haitian Vodou music, a kind of charter that describes exile, survival, and remembrance. I have no idea what to make of the fact that the singer took on this name, but I start here to suggest that part of the intensity of much Haitian music—and I share Madison’s feelings about many of the songs on his list—has to do with the way it offers up some very deep roots. Haitian music keeps reworking a long history of intense exchange even as it carries on and confronts cycles of exile.
Elizabeth McAlister:

How interesting to hear of this event at the plantation, and of the slave woman who was “Master of Ceremonies.” (Was that her title, Laurent? The word “master” is so charged under slavery).
Yes, “Twa Fey” literally means “three leaves,” which is an image of something concrete, and so may well have been the person’s non vanyan, or “honor name,” in the Afro-Creole religious world. Of course, in the Haitian religious system, leaves—as herbs and medicine—are one of the most basic and powerful tools in working with spirits. Maybe—just maybe—that person was a traditional herbal healer.

The song Twa Fey goes like this:

Twa fey, twa rasin, O Jete bliye, ramase sonje Mwen gen basin mwen Twa fey tombe ladan’n Jete bliye, ramase sonje
Three leaves, three roots, Oh
To throw down (is to) forget, to gather up (is to) remember
I have my basin
Three leaves fall in
Throw down (and) forget, gather up (and) remember


In the religion now, the song is usually sung to a hot, fast, Petwo rhythm, and can infuse additional intention when preparing an herbal bath or medicine. And, of course, as Laurent points out, these cryptic, pithy lyrics are all about losing and remembering—knowledge, stories, recipes… places, and, most sadly, people.

To hear a classic version of “Twa Fey,” check out the inimitable troubadour Ti-Coca, on the album Musique du Monde: Musique Paysannes d’Haiti. Chanteuse Emeline Michel sings a beautiful version of it as well on her 2007 album “Reine de Coeur.”

To me, it is very moving to see that people have activated and reactivated this expression, “Twa Fey,” and its deeper meanings, from before the Revolutionary War all the way to the present, through medicine and through music.

In Raoul Peck’s profound 1993 film “The Man by the Shore“—a must-see for anyone interested in Haitian history and—Haitian singer Toto Bissainthe plays a Haitian matriarch living at the height of Duvalier’s regime of terror. She sings this song plaintively in the film, as if to ruminate on the effects of trauma and its ability to obliterate, to silence, and then quickly bring back memory.


Ned Sublette:

Yes, Laurent, deep roots indeed, whether you look at it from the side of the profound repertoire of Vodou drumming or from the side of the creolized heritage of the contredanse that runs through the Domingan (Haitian) diaspora. Such a diversity of styles and practices, including the essential element of dance. And it’s not museum music—it’s alive. As I’ve learned to appreciate the Haitian Revolution as one of the major events of hemispheric and even of world history (though rarely mentioned as such in the history books, even those that discuss the French Revolution), I’ve come to view it as one of the generative explosions of popular music in the hemisphere. The diasporas it engendered carried a great transnational wave of music. You can hear its consequences today, too, not only in the rasin and Konpa musics of Haiti, but in music that reaches up to New Orleans in one direction and down the Antilles in the other, through the Dominican Republic, to Puerto Rico, the French Caribbean, and Trinidad.
Every time I visit any place along this musical axis—whether seeing gwo ka in Guadeloupe or Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans—I get a more complete picture of what happened up and down the hemisphere since the beginnings of revolt in 1791.


Madison Smartt Bell:

“Twa Fey” seems a great place to start on this subject, indeed. To that I want to add Vodou.
Vodou songs can be incantatory—part of a charm in the way that Liza describes—and they can also be trance-inducing when combined in call-and-response patterns with drum rhythms, which are also trance-inducing. The fusion of chant and drumming is a method for bringing our heads together (mete têt nou ansanm)—that is, creating a collective consciousness out of all the individual minds concentrating on a ceremony.

The details are particular to Haitian music and ritual, but all the religions of the world have techniques to produce the same result.

The Vodouisant essentials of rhythm and chant made their way into twentieth-century popular music through the misik rasin movement of the nineteen-eighties and nineties. Musically speaking, the rasin groups layered electric guitars and contemporary vocals over the Vodouisant rhythmic core. Thematically, Boukman Eksperyans, at least, and probably other rasin groups, too, were acutely conscious of the influence of Bob Marley, understanding that his protest music went much deeper than its topicality because of its religion base.

And, of course, another function of the Vodou song is voye pwen.


Elizabeth McAlister:

One delicious richness of Haitian music is its musicians’ “voye pwen,” or “sending a point.” As I understand it, the idea of a “point” in Haitian music is that you send a message to a listener by creating a cryptic image. Just like African-American “signifying,” you can say an awful lot through indirect speech.
“Throwing a point” becomes an act of sophisticated diplomacy, because when the singer launches the image, which is often an accusation, or criticism, the listener has to respond. Of course, directly arguing with the singer is clumsy and weakens your position. You either have to pretend you don’t hear the implied—take it at its literal meaning and refuse the implications—or you have to launch a metaphorical “point” back. In Carnival—and Carnival season just ended—the bands really get into rivalry, trading insulting “points” to the delight of their fans. Like the lyrical, aesthetic battling of the rappers in the U.S., or the Calypso Kings in Trinidad, the Haitian Carnival is full of traded put-downs, spun into evocative imagery. I remember when the Konpa band Scorpio Fever accused its rival band, D.P. Express, of “derailing” like a train. “D.P. deraye,” they sang gleefully. D.P. “threw” back this image to Scorpio: “Bet-la mouri,” or, “The insect is dead.”

The unfolding political drama in Haiti has also been full of “pwen.” Back in the days when Aristide was running for President, the U.S. ambassador tried his hand at “throwing pwen.” “Apre bal-la, tanbou lou,” he scolded: “After the dance, the drums are heavy,” implying that after they celebrated electing Aristide, they’d pay for their choice with too many problems. Aristide happily picked up the “pwen” and threw it back: “Men anpil, chay pa lou,” he said: “Many hands make the burden light.” You can imagine what a spectacle these verbal exchanges caused in the national headlines.


Edwidge Danticat:

There is also a personal use of pwen in song as well that I’ve seen. Say you’re mad at someone about something and you happen to be walking by that person’s house and she’s sitting on her porch. You can suddenly start singing a popular, Vodou, or church song that goes to the heart of your dispute. I’ve seen that done with many songs, including “Twa Fey.” “Twa Fey” is particularly poignant in cases where someone suddenly stops being your friend for some reason you don’t understand.



jete bliye
ranmase sonje.

throw down (and) forget
gather up (and) remember.


It’s a kind of warning…

To paraphrase Shakespeare, “You bite your thumb at me, sir?” Biting your thumb is a silent pwen.

If you respond to a point in song or word, you’re saying, It hit home. You’re acknowledging guilt on some level. So the voye pwen worked.

I also want to add that when I was growing up in Haiti my uncle ran a Baptist church, in a popular neighborhood named Bel Air, which was next to a peristil—a Vodou temple—and we, the children, often found ourselves between competing modes of music. When there was a ceremony next door, our house would be sealed super-tight to keep the trance-effect of the music from affecting us. I never really heard the lyrics of “Twa Fey” sung at those ceremonies, but, rather, more so in the popular culture—so it was considered less trance-inducing and more pwen-throwing. Wyclef, I think, is a result of that tension between protestant and Vodou music, with Bob Marley mixed in, too. It’s interesting now to see how the Carnival songs use church rhythms and how much protestant churches use Konpa and even roots music rhythms. And, by the way, the Carnival period just passed. For a good primer on Carnival music, in general, and current Haitian music in particular, try the Haitian websites kompatv and sakapfet, which post Carnival songs for the current year.


Madison Smartt Bell:

My understanding of pwen is that it is a spiritual power contained in an object. Sometimes the power is bound in the object by force, like a genie in a bottle. Pwens like these can be bought and sold and constrained to do magical work against their will—there is a clear analogy to slavery.
But the power in a pwen can also come to the user more freely, by a process one might call inspiration. The object in question can be a packet or a jar and can also be a text, such as a proverb or a song lyric. So when people are throwing pwen, as Liza describes it, it is also understood that they are slinging little grenades of spiritual energy.


Garnette Cadogan:

“Twa Fey”; Vodou; voye pwen: all part of the bloodline of Haitian music. And all crucial to understanding its distinctive character. I’d like to look, however, at a more basic trait that animates Haitian music. Well, Haitian music’s border-crossing penchant does seem to be embedded in its DNA, doesn’t it? In its fundamental elements, from language (Kreyòl, which derives from 18th Century French and various other tongues: African languages, Portuguese, Spanish, and, less so, English) to religion (Vodou, which fuses West African religious practices with those of Roman Catholicism) to genre (mizik rasin, which combines American rock with Vodou music with reggae)—Haitian music is a deft mix in form and content. This blending, in no small way, accounts for the tension Edwidge mentions between protestant and Vodou music, between the sacred and secular.
Listen to any type of Haitian music—the buoyant Carnival music rara, the funky, jovial American big band- and merengue-tinged Konpa, the rapturous rock-reggae-Vodou mizik rasin—and you’re struck with how well the musicians amalgamate local and distant sounds and styles. This holds true, too, when they’re working from within musical traditions not their own—jazz, especially, which inherited what Jelly Roll Morton called “the Spanish Tinge” in part from Haiti. Given all this mixing and genre-busting, I’m surprised that Haitian musicians do not enjoy a wider hearing in our divides-are-disappearing musical era.

Playing trance-inducing music may not be the best way to pack a dance floor—don’t tell that to techno fans—but, as Ned said, the African rhythms propelling Vodou music have been rocking bodies all over the Caribbean and, perhaps most notably, in New Orleans for around two centuries now. And why? The border-crossing—literal and metaphorical—that drive Haitian musicians to weave the old and the new, the sacred and the secular, pop and the political; the musical wiles that employs an infectious groove to hold it all together; and the playfulness—pwen, anyone?—wed to historical consciousness that insures the music comes with coiled meanings. No wonder Bob Marley played such a crucial role in the development of mizik rasin—talk about exile, survival, and remembrance with a beat.

July 13, 2009
Roundtable: Haitian Music, Part 2: “What Does Revolution Sound Like?”

Three months ago, I posted a roundtable discussion of Haitian music among several remarkable scholars and writers. Happily, they have returned to discuss revolution, “rara,” and other intersections of Haitian politics, daily life, and music.

Laurent Dubois:

I often think of Haitian music as a kind of remarkable archive, one that keeps traces of the process of deportation, slavery, and revolution that created the nation.
The slave trade to the colony of Saint-Domingue in the late eighteenth century brought forty thousand people a year from different parts of Africa, and these different groups met up on plantations and in towns, exchanging ideas, confronting their new situation, and creating new music, religion, and language.

And they did so in the midst of a thriving cultural life in the towns of Saint-Domingue (and later—after the revolution—in Haiti). All the significant port towns had theatres with several performances every week, and in the largest, Le Cap, a theatre performed the works of Moliÿre and Voltaire, and several plays written locally in the Creole language, which brought together African and French grammar and vocabulary.

Some of the revolutionaries who won independence for Haiti in 1804 were big fans of this eighteenth-century music and theatre—the music for Emperor Dessalines’s coronation was drawn from Rousseau’s blockbuster opera, “Le Devin du Village”—and they reopened the theatres after the revolution, performing the old plays with all-black casts. This was a swirling and complicated cultural world, and it produced a remarkable musical tradition.

But part of what also comes through in much Haitian music is a kind of response to the question “What does revolution sound like?”


Elizabeth McAlister:

Laurent, what a great question; it lets us imagine the political soundscape of public spaces. We may have a clue about the soundtrack for some moments of the Haitian revolution: the French army marched to battle with bands—corps de musiques—featuring snare drums and trumpets, which would follow the commands of the drum major to communicate through the chaos of the battlefield. So this is the music of warfare. Even more interesting, though, as you say, is the music of revolution: maroon armies were also said to move through space while surrounding themselves with big musical sound. A maroon leader in the Port-au-Prince region named Halou, headed an army of two thousand maroons, whose leader “marched preceded by the music of drums, lambis [conch shells], trumpets and sorcerers…”

That seems very possibly a historical source for the parading festival called “rara” (which happens to be the subject of my first book). Rara still lends itself to the feeling of rebellion. During rara season, which is during Lent, musicians and followers sort themselves into what they consider small “battalions” out on musical maneuvers. Nowadays they move about neighborhoods and villages, “taking territories” by dominating musically, competing in aesthetic battles to see which bands can attract the most fans. It feels exhilarating to go out with them and dance for miles through public space in the relative cool of the Haitian night, dancing behind waves of drummers, horn players, percussionists, and singers, with children and market women trailing behind, selling sweets from baskets on their heads.

They usually sing religious songs to the spirits in the morning, and stop to pay their respects to their people in the cemeteries. Then, by late afternoon, they’ll “call out” local corruption, singing what little they can about politics in cryptic, poetic songs, often recycled for generations to fit the present crisis (and unfortunately there’s usually a crisis).

Hearing a rara band as it approaches for miles through the mountains is quite thrilling—it must have been electrifying to hear the rebel-army bands during the Haitian revolution. Rara creates a sonic signifier of Haitianness like no other, because of the distinctive bamboo horns that are played by hocketing (one player on one note, with everyone playing on rhythm to get a melody going). You can get a feel for parading rara music on this Web site. The track called “Instrumental Isolations” gives the feeling of a rara band passing by, and the video “Musicians in an Artibonite Rara Walking” presents something similar.

Rara parades are catching on in the Haitian diaspora, too; they’ve been used in celebrations as well as protests in Miami, New York, and Boston. Recently, a rara band from Brooklyn called DjaRara played on the Mall after Obama’s inauguration.

Rara is so unbelievably rich that I could go on forever, so I’d better sign off.


Laurent Dubois:

I spent an afternoon at Duke University participating in a symposium on the work of the Miami-based Haitian artist Edouard Duval-Carrié, whose work represents a world in which past and present collide and collude, with the Middle Passage and the journeys of Haitian boat-people happening all at once in a kind of eternal repetition.

In his paintings, the boats are full of Vodou lwa (gods). The boats are populated by people whose heads are Kongo crosses, and one contains the goddess Ezili captured by American Coast Guard officers who look at once stern and a little fragile. His paintings and your comments make me think of the way that spiritual combat has often accompanied, indeed preceded, political and military combat in Haitian history.

The launching of the Haitian revolution, after all, was a Vodou ceremony, so music quite literally opened the way. And the archive of Vodou songs today still hops with many songs that evoke the various stages of the battle, from survival in the Middle Passage to building community on the plantations to rising up against slavery and winning the war against the French. But the exhilarating battlefield of rara is also a reminder that, in a sense, the war is unending, or at least not yet finished.

Ned Sublette:

In trying to understand the music of Haiti, I find myself taking a transnational approach, because, as I keep arguing, the Haitian revolution was a generative explosion for the popular music of the hemisphere. It sent populations up and down the Atlantic coast and the Antilles—and ultimately to New Orleans, where many families from Saint-Domingue were reunited. There are places today where you can connect the dots by listening. Let me, then, make some connections.

To Elizabeth’s evocation of the trumpet and snare drum of the colonial military bands (which ultimately became the basis of the jazz instrumentation in New Orleans), I would add the vocal legacy of the military drill, which evolved into the gruff vocal style of dancehall reggae. The adoption of this vocal style throughout the Antilles echoes the universality of the quadrille in the same territories two centuries ago, when a commandeur barked out the dance steps.

The sound of revolution could easily have the same rhythm it had two centuries ago; it could be heard as recently as January in the street music from the underreported general strike that began in Guadeloupe and spread to Martinique.

The rhythm that the L.K.P. (Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon, or Collective Against Exploitation) demonstrators are parading to is what was known in different times and places as the habanera, tango, and bamboula. In musical terms, dotted quarter, eighth, quarter, quarter: BOOMP, da DOM DOM. It’s a versatile but very specific rhythm, diffused across a wide geographic area.

The scholar Robert Farris Thompson identifies it as the Kongo mbila a makinu, “the call to the dance,” and it was known in Arabic music. It’s the Antillean beat, bouncing around for three hundred years or more.

It was the right-hand rhythm of Dominguan-descended Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “Bamboula” in 1848; it’s the invariable underlying rhythm of reggaetón; and it’s the rhythm underpinning the Guadeloupean demonstrators.

Another version of the same L.K.P. anthem, “Gwadloup sé tan nou” (“Guadeloupe is ours”) demonstrates a politicized use of the dancehall/reggaetón style, by now firmly entrenched as the timbre and rhythm of a pan-Antillean sensibility.

There’s also a lexical component to the sound of revolution. There have to be ways to transmit secrets in order to accomplish a revolution, no?

The chronicler M.L.E. Moreau de St. Méry gives in a footnote (!) the untranslated text of an anthem from Saint-Domingue—a text corroborated elsewhere, and, more remarkably, which Moreau was able to transcribe without knowing the language (not French, and, very interestingly, not Creole either, but Kikongo), possibly from having heard it repeated many times:

Eh! eh! Bomba, hen! hen! Canga bafio té Canga moune dé lé Canga do ki la Canga li
The anthem translates roughly as:

Eh! eh! Secret, hen! hen! Tie up the abusers Tie up the whites Tie (them) up (with) the action spirit Tie them up
When I think of revolution and music, my first thought is this text.

They had a secret, all right. They were singing out loud what they were going to do. Hey, hey, secret! It was no secret if you understood the song: Bomba! (“Bomba” is a word with a complex of meanings; the art historian and linguist Bárbaro Martínez Ruiz tells me it means “secret.”) Had Moreau de St. Méry known the meaning of the lyrics he transcribed, he could perhaps have seen better the revolution that was coming in 1791.

It’s not a coincidence that bomba is the name of the folkloric Afro-Puerto Rican musical form. I was unaware until recently that this song, which we find in Moreau de St. Méry’s eighteenth-century book, continues to be sung. It has been collected in present-day Puerto Rico by the musicologist Alex Lasalle, leader of the New York-based bomba group Alma Moyó.

It’s a bámbula (which in New Orleans was known as bamboula). I would not be surprised to find it somewhere in Cuba. One thing’s for sure: this song was almost certainly sung at Congo Square in New Orleans in the eighteen-teens. This in turn cracks open a mystery: what one component—and not an unimportant one—of Congo Square sounded like. The fabled bamboula is still alive, in the Dominguan diaspora.

Sometimes, as in Haiti, revolution entails dancing. Makandal was recognized and apprehended at a dance. In various parts of the Antilles there are choreographic societies that go to great lengths to perform a memory of the moment of truth of more than two hundred years ago: the last days of plantation slavery in the French Caribbean.

In eastern Cuba, a zone with a deep revolutionary culture that derives in no small part from nearby Saint-Domingue/Haiti, I have seen performances by three of these societies, called in Cuba tumba francesa—one in Santiago de Cuba, one in Guantánamo, and a rural one in the foothills of the Sierra Cristal (whose existence was only discovered by anthropologists in 1976). These are formally constituted clubs of older people who dance in costumes that reference eighteenth-century ball attire, the women’s heads wrapped in the tignons that women of color were required by law to wear. This is something that came from Saint-Domingue, apparently with the 1803 exodus to eastern Cuba, and it is believed to have come down to Santiago de Cuba from the coffee plantations the exiled Domingans built in the hills of Oriente. The tumba francesa performs African-derived dances, and they also dance contredanse and wind a maypole, all of it to a music entirely African in origin, consisting only of drums.

Moreau de St. Méry describes something similar to the tumba francesa in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue, though he saw it as the comically inept imitation of the master’s dances by domestic servants. Folklorist Alan Lomax shot silent film footage in 1930s Haiti that depicts almost the exact same scene. (Exciting news: Lomax’s recordings and films from his 1936-37 trip to Haiti—the first extensive field recordings there—are about to come out in a big set to be called “The Haiti Box.”)

In Guadeloupe today, there are antiquarian kadwi (quadrille) societies that do very much the same thing as the tumba francesa (though the music is not a set of African drums, but dance tunes with accordion and scraper), in which the costumes are as important as everything else. There are similar groups in St. Lucia, which has an English-language government but a Creole-speaking peasantry, and in Dominica, and probably in other places.

The bomba group Alma Moyó has in its repertoire a dance—a duet between a drummer sitting on top of his turned-over drum and the steps of a male solo dancer festooned with kerchiefs—that is almost identical to a tumba francesa dance called frenté.

The unintelligibility of much of hip-hop and reggaetón to outsiders, as well as its relentless code-switching, is another way of getting at that bomba, in the sense of a sung-out secret. One of the remarkable things about the dancehall/reggaetón sound becoming a pan-Antillean and Caribbean style is that through timbre and rhythm it crosses the language divide that keeps adjacent territories from talking to each other now that their African languages have largely, though by no means entirely, vanished.

A suivre.

Edwidge Danticat:

I was in Haiti with my family for Easter, in the middle of rara season, and we spent a week in Jacmel with friends. A few observations, then, that might echo some of what’s already been said:

It seems there is a lot more effort being made now to “organize” the rara in some way. For example, in Leogane, a rara stronghold, there were banners for a rara competition/parade—a defile (as in “narrow passage requiring a single-file march”) of rara, as it was advertised. This seemed like an attempt to bring the rara a bit more prestige, as some locals said, like the carnival. Rara, like revolution, can be so deceiving, in that it might sometimes seem rather disorganized, but is highly organized—rara mimicking, as some have said, a military structure that might have served quite well in revolutionary battles.

When I was a kid, it struck me that the rara was always demanding respect, both with its loudness and active recruitment as it went along. Sometimes the rara would stop in front of churches and try to drown out the sounds of the church service, leading many churches to organize retreats out of large cities during that time. Driving through raras, you realize that there is some teasing.

You often pay, or at least play nice, to get through. A friend who was traveling through Leogane with her daughter was finally allowed to go through the rara when she rolled down the window and said hello to the head of the rara and allowed him to stroke her hair. (This does seriously frighten some people, I must admit.)

In Jacmel, we were always hearing friends say, I have to go home because I received word that such and such a rara is coming by. Having the rara stop by is an honor, and to turn it away is an insult.

On Good Friday, one friend received two raras with rum and a little money. He brought out two chairs for the drummers, and the core of the raras both performed a dans baton—a dance with sticks that you often see performed more elaborately in the Artibonite Valley. The rara’s visit bestows respect on the person visited—who it is assumed is an important person—and the way it is received brings honor to the rara. Most striking was how old some of the dancers were. One rara had four generations of women from the same lakou, the oldest a very lithe ninety-plus-year-old woman. A lot of this can be found in Liza’s book, but it was wonderful to be reminded that while Haitian music, including rara, can be used in revolution and protest, it can also be used in community building.



Ned Sublette:

“When I was a kid, it struck me that the rara was always demanding respect, both with its loudness and active recruitment as it went along.”
Edwidge, you could be describing a second line in New Orleans, which I am convinced owes much to the rara. Last year around Easter I had the remarkable experience of going on a gagá (the Dominican equivalent of rara) out in the country in the Dominican Republic on Jueves Santo (Holy Thursday) and then going on a second line in New Orleans the following Sunday. Despite all the differences of specifics and style, it felt so similar.

For a different stab at Laurent’s question that involves a uniquely Haitian style of music, I think immediately of the first two albums by Boukman Eksperyans—who Madison brought up in our first discussion—which come out of a tradition of direct political engagement in music (mizik angaje): “Vodou Adjaye” (released in the bicentennial year of the religious leader Boukman’s uprising at Bwa Kayiman, generally considered the start of the Haitian revolution) and “Kalfou Danjere” (Dangerous Crossroads, released after General Raoul Cedras’s September 30, 1991 coup against Aristide; the title song was the subversive hit of Haitian carnival in 1992).

These albums came out on Chris Blackwell’s Mango label in the heyday of “world music” and received international attention; they’re classics, as I’m sure everyone on this panel can attest. Listening to them is like jamming your finger into a wall socket. Drawing on the energy of rara, this style of music called mizik rasin (roots) was built on culturally oriented, politically charged lyrics, choral chants, trance-inducing vodou drumming over a drum-machine pulse, and psychedelic lead guitar. (Those who want to explore further should pick up Gage Averill’s essential “A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey: Popular Music and Power in Haiti.”) There’s still nothing like the music generated by the rasin bands in that early-nineties moment of dangerous crossroads in Haiti—Boukan Ginen, RAM, Zobop, Kanpech, to name some that I recall from that time.

If I want to forgo the pop-music instrumentation and just go into the drum, which is where I most like to be, I go to Azor. Mizik rasin continues today, of course, and now has to confront a vision of Haiti’s future of sweatshop labor and importation of food.



Laurent Dubois:

I’m glad Ned brought us to Guadeloupe, and to the ongoing link between song and revolution, since it’s on that island that I’ve most often had the pleasure of participating in the pan-Caribbean tradition of street music we’ve been talking about.

In Guadeloupe the two most famous groups, representing the two sides of the island, are Akiyo and Voukoum, each of them linked in important ways to the politics of protest and cultural revival. Their processions are led by a line of marchers striking long whips against the streets, which sends out a sharp, stunning crack (as you can see Voukoum doing here). Like the whips that are part of many Vodou ceremonies in Haiti, they are both a potent reminder of slavery and also a curious appropriation of slavery’s ultimate symbol for a radically different purpose, that of calling down the lwa or of opening the way for the music.

Their costumes, which parallel those found in New Orleans, Haiti, and Trinidad, tell the story of slavery: participants are sometimes dressed as “Congos” just arrived from Africa, covered in dark black grease, or else dressed as maroons, runaway slaves, as Akiyo is in a January 2009 procession. Akiyo’s anthem retells the history of abolition, declaring that it was not truly the French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher who freed the slaves, but rather the maroons who fought for liberty for generations. (One of the sponsors of the group over the past years has been the now-retired soccer star Lilian Thuram, long a pillar of the French national football team, who was born and grew up in Anse-Bertrand, Guadeloupe.)

They evoke these histories in order to call for new kinds of marronage—running away from the plantations—in the present.

What is powerful about these groups is that they really highlight the complicated politics of culture, and culture of politics, in the French Antilles. The nationalist movements that developed there starting in the nineteen-sixties never rallied large majorities in favor of independence from France. But if political nationalism never really took hold, a kind of cultural nationalism that came out of the independence movements most definitely did, changing the way many Martinicans and Guadeloupeans think of themselves, and propelling the creation of groups like Akiyo and Voukoum.

This movement, in turn, surrounded and in some ways sustained union activism and other political protest on the island, helping to lay the foundation for the strike that took place in Guadeloupe earlier this year.

As was the case two hundred years ago in Haiti, music and revolution are tightly intertwined, which makes sense, since one of the main tasks of Caribbean music has always been imagining the unimaginable.

I was in Haiti and then in Guadeloupe in late May and saw much of what we have been discussing in motion. In Haiti, on May 18th, Flag Day, there were many people out doing rara, bringing that tradition further into the national celebration. I saw one group led by a man with a large Bob Marley flag. And in Guadeloupe I was able to attend several events organized by the L.K.P., the coalition of groups that organized the strikes earlier this year.

Raymond Gama, a historian who is a spokesman for the L.K.P., explained to me that though it was unclear what the next steps of the movement should be, or even what the specific goals should be for Guadeloupe, they felt that their victory was in mobilizing people, in showing them what might be possible in the future if they continue. We were at a nighttime dance driven by gwo-ka drumming, and with an illuminated grin he announced: “Nous sommes déjà demain!”—“We are already tomorrow!”



Garnette Cadogan:

What does revolution sound like? This begs for a long answer, but consider this shortcut: Bob Marley and, with apologies to Carl Wilson, not Celine Dion. (Some people may smack the wag in me and suggest, with good reason, that the sound of revolution is Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, the Beatles—to name a few. True enough, but Laurent, if I haven’t misunderstood you, you are not so much asking about revolution—dramatic, wide-reaching change—as you are reaching back to Revolution—political revolt that ushers in a new social order.) What, then, does that signal moment in the past—the Haitian revolution—sound like in the funky potpourri of rhythms that is contemporary Haitian music?

Thankfully, Haitian musicians possess a canny pop sensibility: they see no trade-off between being political heralds and pleasing a crowd. They tie their messages of resistance to catchy riffs and vibrant rhythms, producing ambidextrous music that presses the consciousness while shaking the hips and feet. Their songs may be infused with the memory of the revolution, they may make renewed challenges to power, they may weigh in on the heavy matters of the moment—but Haitian musicians never forget that they are entertainers. (This, in part, explains why some rara songs and parades are so ribald.) The music is infectious not merely because of catchy rhythms but also because satire (“pwen,” anyone?) does the heavy lifting, saving musicians—more often than not—from the snare of preachiness. (This is not only good musical sense—it’s common sense: explicit criticism of corrupt powers in Haiti has often invited a beating or worse.) With word, movement, and—uh-huh—sound all in coördinated service, the sound of revolution turns out to be as playful as it is weighty.

Boukman Eksperyans, whose very name advertises their aesthetic—Boukman was a Vodou priest and slave who helped incite the 1791 rebellion that started the Haitian revolution; eskperyans (“experience”) is a nod to Jimi Hendrix —is an excellent example of pop wed to protest. On Vodou Adjeye, one of the albums Ned praises, traditional Haitian music (Vodou drums) and modern rock (guitar riffs) interweave beneath protest. (On “Wet Chenn” (“Remove the Chains”) they insist, “Get angry, break the chains”; “Ke’-m Pa Sote,” a song credited with precipitating the military junta’s downfall in 1990, wears its resistance in its title: “I Am Not Afraid.”) But the sound of revolution is much more than the sum of Afro-Caribbean rhythms and political criticism. In Haiti, it also involves coming to terms with Countee Cullen’s question, “What is Africa to me?” In Haitian music, one’s relationship to Africa is central to the “sound of revolution,” and so the celebration of the Afro-Haitian vernacular—language (Creole), tradition (Vodou; kombit dance), religion (Vodou)—is paramount. It’s no surprise, then, that Vodou Adjeye opens with “Se Kreyol Nou Ye” (“We’re Creole”), which criticizes Haitians who “would rather speak French, English, or Spanish rather than Creole.”

The musicians declare “We’re Creole—we’ll never be ashamed of it” … “we’re people of the Kongo, let’s not be ashamed of it” and the galloping Vodou rhythms convince you they mean it. And in “Nou Pap Sa Bliye” (“We Won’t Forget This”) they come to the defense of Vodou: “They’re saying that it’s werewolf music/But we know that it’s a lie.” But so what if you don’t understand Creole? The warm voices, bright guitar riffs, jittery synthesizer lines, and propulsive drumming will dissolve your regret. (I’m reminded of the many people who happily dance to Bob Marley’s lament “No Woman No Cry” and his protest “Get Up, Stand Up.” A welcome incongruity, if ever there was one. Music scholar Lynn Abbott once made an observation about Marley’s music that aptly applies to much Haitian music: “It reminds me of the Cajun Two-Step [dance style] that chugs merrily along while the guy is singing, ‘I’m condemned to walk down the big lonesome road for the rest of my days.’ ”) Yes, perhaps the revolution—or should I say Revolution?—will get lost in translation, but the sound of joyful defiance, that open secret, will prance right through

Such a great post...keep up Sasaye!