Afropop’s Sean Barlow visited Elizabeth McAlister—Liza to her friends-- at her home in Middletown Connecticut where she is a Professor in the Religion Department at Wesleyan University. Liza has focused her research and writing work on Haiti. She authored the acclaimed book, “Rara!: Vodou, Power and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora” and has compiled two beautiful albums based on her field recordings—“Angels in the Mirror—Vodou Music of Haiti” (Ellipsis Arts) and “Rhythms of Rapture:  The Sacred Musics of Haitian Vodou”(Smithsonian Folkways).   She is currently researching a book on the relationship of Vodou to evangelical Christianity in Haiti. There is more information on Rara festivals on her learning website,  http://rara.wesleyan.edu/ and on her work, on her faculty web page http://www.wesleyan.edu/religion/mcalister.htm

Liza co-produced the special Hip Deep edition of Afropop Worldwide, “The Music and Story of Haiti.”  She had help from community scholar, Holly Nicolas. You can hear a podcast of the program on Afropop.org and as of late November, the entire one hour program on-demand streaming via Afropop.org.

Sean Barlow: Describe Port-Au-Prince for, say, a first time visitor interested in music.

Liza McAlister: Well, if you’re a listening person, if you’re a hearing person, and you go to Haiti, you’re in for quite a vivid soundscape. If you get off the plane in Port-Au-Prince and make your way into the city, on just about every street corner, every street that you pass, there is going to be something happening in terms of sound, noise, or music. The tap-taps, which are the local buses—they’re like little trucks with benches built in, and famously brightly colored, are full of sound equipment and are blasting music. The buses are passing by and you get any number of powerful sonic experiences. So it’s a very fun--, sometimes even aurally overwhelming--place to be.

Each market woman has her call for what she’s selling, and there are also walking market people selling stuff. So, you have to develop your own call to advertise what you’re selling at the moment. You hear the guy walking past your house, “zoranj si, zoranj si, zoranj si,” which means ‘sour oranges’. If you want your sour oranges, you go outside, make a deal with him, and bring them back into your house. Then you might hear sounds of bottles being tapped, and each bottle has a little bit of a  different sound. And that’s the guy selling soda, and he’s tapping out a little “Dee-dee-di-doo, dee-dee-di-doo,” as he walks by. If you want to run outside and buy a Coca-cola or a 7-up, you hear his sound and you know that’s him. There’s one who walks by calling, “Chicklet, Allumette, Cigarette,” which means ‘gum, matches, and cigarettes.’ And each person has his or her own distinctive cry in each neighborhood. That tells people that they’re en route, and they’re open for business.

Then you’ve got work songs, especially in the countryside. You might walk past a garden being hoed or people grinding corn or grinding peanuts in a mortar and pestle. We’re talking waist-high mortar and pestles with enormous handles that you kind of have to put your body into to get the grinding to happen. So people will put three together and do a rhythm together to make the work more efficient and to make it more interesting. And you can sing songs to any number of work tasks, especially if it’s a rhythmic work task, like hoeing or doing the mortar and pestle. Anyone who has been through basic training in the US Army knows that music can actually make work more efficient. So, music is used as a technology in Haiti in a lot of ways. It brings people together, puts people literally on the same beat, gets work done. It also creates a mind-body connection, so that the work can flow, and so that the community can work together most efficiently.

SB: Liza, give us a sense of the big picture of Haitian history, and how music fits in.

LM: Haitians face a whole host of issues. You can see it in the history and you can see it coming out of the music. Haitians are facing the legacy of slavery and the fact that they fought a successful revolutionary war ending in 1804. They abolished slavery and emancipated the slaves. This wasn’t perfect, but you know, this is an important legacy for Haitians. So then they have issues of being in a post-colonial condition and of being a pariah in the hemisphere because there is almost a 60 year period when the US, France, and the Vatican refuse to recognize Haiti at all. They also have constant interference from the North. The U.S. is constantly interfering economically and then politically with various invasions. And race and racism become very salient here for Haitians. Because the U.S. is a majority white and Christian Anglo nation. It has operated with this kind of superiority imposing this superiority in a racist and imperialist way on Haiti, a majority African, Franco-oriented, and Black, former-French colony. All of this is addressed in music.

Haitians have also been really thoroughly militarized from the Independence War of their own, all throughout the U.S. military occupation from 1915-1934, and up to the present day where U.N. peacekeepers are still in Haiti. So we can see these themes of “What is the role of Vodou?’ “What is the role of Africa?’ “What is the role of the military?” And Haitians are also troubled by deep class divisions. This plays out through color, through language, through education and religion, and often through the music too.

The political pattern has been one where a consolidated ruling elite owns most the land. They are politically enfranchised, well-educated, and they’re dominating a majority of those who are not formally educated, who are not politically-enfranchised, and who have less and less access to land. The elite classes exploit them through taxes and unfair economic practices. This has been the pattern, and these themes all play out in Haitian music. A fair number of Konpa songs are sung from the point of the little guy, who just wants to go out and have fun, but he gets beat up by the military. Or he’s just trying to feed his kids, but he’s worried they’re going to turn into bad guys. And if you listen carefully, there’s the theme of questioning the proper place of the role of the African past. You can find that in songs from the Vodou Jazz movement through the Racine movement, where some Haitians are researching Vodou and attempting to incorporate Vodou into pop music.

S:. You talked about the tensions between Afro-Centric and Euro-centric class leagues and the issues of literacy and non-literacy. So, I guess the question is what music reflects here and now? How has music reflected all of these tensions and divides?

L: One thing you find running through Haitian music throughout its history is a focus on Haitian identity. Haitians are really keenly aware that they are a small nation, a particular people, with a very singular identity. So you have early songs about Haitians presidents rising and falling. You have songs recently about Creole identity. You have songs that are really talking about what it means to be Haitian, from the Hip-Hop point of view, about what it means to be Haitian-American in Miami, let’s say, done in a Hip-Hop style. So, Haitians are always aware that they’re in a transnational, global order, in a hemisphere full of other nations. And what does it mean that they had a revolution? What does it mean that they became independent only second to the U.S? What does it mean that they’re still struggling for a whole series of sovereignty issues? What does it mean that they hold an Afro-Creole religious worldview, that of Vodou?  And what does it mean that they are in this particular position of long-standing independence, post-colonial, Black-majority nation? 

SB: Great. Now here’s the big obvious question. What is Vodou?

LM: Vodou refers, now, to an all-encompassing and over-arching cultural world-view in Haiti, that has a particular cosmology, a particular set of deities. It’s linked to a medical system, and a political and juridical system. And in this system there’s the world we live in, the material world, and there’s an unseen world. And the unseen world is populated by God, the creator. Also, Mary and Jesus of the Catholic world. And a series of spiritual entities, that are called ‘lwa’ or ‘zanj;’ “angels,” in English. They’re populating the unseen world, and they’re entering into relationships with humans, much like the Catholic saints. The lwa protect their human family members. They also can send obstacles, if they want to be served in a different way. So there’s a kind of discourse involved in serving the spirits. So, if you think of Vodou as a kind of religious system, the religious system is about kind of  a reciprocity between the human world and the spirit world. It’s a system of both obligation and protection.

SB: Correct me if I’m wrong, but in Haiti you have Vodou, Evangelical Protestant, and Catholic religions competing, or coexisting in peoples’ hearts, souls and ears. How does music and culture reflect this competition?

LM: Vodou is the tradition of the vast majority of people and it grows up in Haiti under an overarching scheme of Roman-Catholic domination. There is a very interesting symbiotic relationship, which some describe as a syncretic relationship or a Creole-relationship.  I like to think of this as a continuum. Vodou, and its thought, philosophy, world-view, personnel and temples are on one side of the continuum. The Roman-Catholic church with its priests, hierarchies, rites, and its thought are on the other side. They’re two ends of the scale, but the fact of the matter is that most Haitian people spend their lives somewhere in the middle. They participate in both sets of overlapping thought and practice, sometimes going back and forth on the continuum throughout their lives. So they might go to Mass every Sunday, they might be baptized and confirmed and take first communion and marry in the church. They might also participate in their obligations to family spirits. Very typically, they might go to the Vodou priests or priestesses when they are sick, or when there is a big crisis in the family. So, scholars debate whether Vodou is a form of Catholicism, whether it’s a form of Christianity, whether they’re the same religion, whether they are entirely two different religions. I like to think of it, as I say, as this sort of overlapping continuum. Protestantism sets itself apart from this continuum. It critiques Roman Catholicism for being tied with Vodou, for its relationship with Vodou over the centuries. Protestantism says that “Vodou is unacceptable, it isn’t Christian (nor is Roman Catholicism, for that matter) and that the real way is through Christ alone.” They really have, probably to a greater extent than Catholicism, set themselves apart from Vodou and, to a large extent, demonized Vodou as an outright source of evil that should be fought, resisted, and renounced. But Catholicism is not immune to this demonization; it has gone through its repression of Vodou, its periods of repression and periods of suppression.

SB: Talk about that.

LM: Well, Catholicism, over the years, has entered into periods of thought in which Vodou is perceived as impure, unorthodox, improper, sometimes even evil. And political leaders have sought to suppress Vodou. This has been really problematic because the overwhelming majority of the country is involved in the system of Vodou in one way or another. So there are these periods of attempted suppression and then failure of that suppression. And, quite frankly, a lot of evidence shows that the impulse to suppress Vodou comes from the outside. It comes as a result of wanting to show North America that “as a civilized nation, as a Western nation, Haitians are trying to suppress this African, illegitimate tradition.” So there have been discourses of Western superiority that enter into the Roman Catholic suppression of Vodou. There has been a debate among Haitian intellectuals about what the role of Vodou should be.

SB: How are the musical manifestations of the Evangelicals and Vodou, different in when they celebrate and when they have their services?

LM: Musically, the three religions have interesting features. Catholics, of course, have their own musical traditions that they practice in the Catholic Church. Occasionally they’ve experimented with bringing in elements of traditional African religions, such as bringing in the drums, especially in the 60’s and 70’s. The “Acculturated Mass” idea was that you incorporate indigenous culture music into the liturgy, but there were debates about that, such as,“What happens if you play music that people associate with the Vodou spirits? Will they be possessed in the Catholic church? Wouldn’t this be bad?” These questions were always up for debate in Haiti. The Protestants have tended to eschew Vodou drums, and certainly Vodou melodies. They really have tended to hold Vodou at arm’s length, musically and they’ve tended to use European melodic songs and European instrumentation in church. Protestant bands are much more likely to have a bass and a guitar and a trap set. Although, that said, there is a Protestant sect in Haiti called L’Arme Selest, “The Celestial Army.” Their music does borrow from Afro-Creole religious music and they’re synchronizing with Vodou in interesting ways.

SB: What is the importance of music in Vodou? 

LM: Music, for Vodou, can be thought of as a form of technology. It’s a technology for doing spiritual work. To be precise, it’s considered a form of sacrifice, in a way. Like, in Roman Catholicism, sacrifice includes praying, it includes lighting a candle, it would include doing the novenas, and all sorts of other devotions to our Lord and to the saints. Likewise, in Vodou, music is a form of sacrifice. It’s a form of spiritual work that you do on behalf of the spirits, in order to serve them. Each spirit has its own repertoire of songs, and each spirit is associated with a particular rhythm in the tradition. Because of this, musicians in the tradition are responsible for knowing enormous numbers of very complicated rhythms and for knowing exactly what rhythm to play in exactly what time in the ceremony, or in a prayer. So music is a form of sacrifice and it’s a medium through which people can communicate with the spirit world. If you’re singing a song for a spirit and playing that spirit’s rhythm, the idea, or the goal, in a service, is for the spirit to come down and possess the human or humans that are praying and singing. And, in fact, the drummers don’t attribute talent to themselves, if there’s a particularly talented master drummer. He would usually say that it’s the spirit that makes him a good drummer. Drummers can also “lie down with the drum” in initiation. That’s a phrase that refers to the process of initiation when people are classically dead to the world and are reborn as a new person in the spiritual world of Vodou. People can be initiated to the drum, in which case they are said to be master drummers. They then hold a special relationship to the spirit of the drum, because even the drum has a spirit.

SB: Tell us about the basic setup of drums and how they’re used.

LM: Port-au-Prince Vodou music is one of my favorite styles of music in the world. It’s very complicated, very sophisticated. I find it very beautiful. It consists, essentially, of three drums. A maman drum, a segón drum (a second drum), and a boula, or baby drum, which can also be called kata. There are at least two sets of these drums because there are various branches or rites that own their own sets of drums. The maman drum is generally talking to the second drum; they have a conversation back and forth, throughout the rhythms. The baby drum is holding down the back-bone of the beat, while the segón and the maman are talking back and forth in this beautiful conversation, which will ultimately serve to communicate to the spirit world.

SB: Can you pick a song a from your “Angels in the Mirror” compilation album to tell us about?

LM: “Nago Pa Piti,” which means “Nago is not small.” ‘Nago Pa Piti,’ says “Nago is not small. You cannot talk badly about the Nago you can’t denigrate the Nago.” It’s using indirect language to respond to a threat.  It refers to a theme that you can find commonly in Vodou songs and throughout Haitian music: a mistrust of the stranger or a mistrust of people who might betray you. I always think this can be traced to the days of slavery, to the days of extreme brutality and extreme violence. The idea is that you cannot trust people you don’t know and that people are always coming by to look at you, to take you away, to surveil you, and you have to be on guard at all times. So “Nago pa piti pinga’w pale nago mal,” means “Nago is not small. Do not speak badly about Nago.” This is set to the Nago rhythm, which is the particular Nago rhythm of a compound called the Lakou Badjo, in Central Haiti. (Nago refers to a sub-group of Yoruba people.)

SB: What is another song you especially like?

LM: “Ogou O, Wa de Zanj.”  This is the name of a song, which literally means, “Ogou, king of the angels.” Ogou is the spirit of warrior discipline. He’s the iron-worker, the metal-worker, the blacksmith. Ogou is one of the Nago spirits. “Ogou O, Wa de Zanj,” is a song that came into the head of a woman one day while she was possessed by Ogou so, really, Ogou wrote the song. It’s sung here by her granddaughter, Mimerose Beaubrun, one of the lead singers in the group Boukman Eksperyans (a leading force in the racine roots music movent in the late ‘80’s and 90’s). The grandmother was possessed by Ogou in the market. The story goes that Mimrose’s grandmother was a market woman who had other rivals in the market. She was in a little bit of a turf war with some other women over who would sell what in what location. Ogou came into her head and started singing this song which says “Ogou O, wa de zanj. . . “  The song is sung in two voices. One voice says “Ogou, the spirit says it will eat me. Is this true?” And then the voice of Ogou comes in to respond and Ogou says, “This is not true. This is a lie. I’m the king, I will protect you. You’re my child. No one can do you any harm.” So, in this song, Ogou is assuring his child that, since he’s there, the problem can be resolved. She shouldn’t worry. This song was passed down in Mimerose Beaubrun’s family and stands in their prayer services as a praise song for Ogou and as a reminder that he’s protecting their extended family.

SB: I really like “Legba Plante Poto.”

LM: I love this song, “Legba Plante Poto.” It means “Legba is planting his post, his center post,” and it refers to Legba, who is the first spirit who should be saluted in any ceremony, because he is the guard of the crossroads. He is the guardian of the doorway. He is like Hermes, the messenger between the human world and the spirit world, so he has to be saluted first. This song features the famous drummer Coyote, and was recorded by the famous Maya Deren, the filmmaker, who went to Haiti in the 40’s because she was interested in dance. She filmed and recorded all sorts of Vodou dances and music. In fact, she recorded one song in a country setting, where there was no electricity, and she had to run her reel-to-reel tape recorder off her car battery as a form of electricity. I love the story about that one.

SB: Is there any kind of attempt to record Vodou and pass it on? Any kind of recorded forum, either informally or commercially?

LM: Definitely. Vodou services that are done in someone’s house or in someone’s compound are recorded, typically by folks in the family. They might record it on cassette and send it to someone in Miami who is their extended family member. They might say “Look at the service that we held where the spirit came and gave us a message,” and people in Miami might listen to them around the house as a way to be connected to back home. Additionally, people might record them and just listen to them as you would listen to an event that you think is important. People also might record ceremonies to sell, hand-to-hand, in the market to Vodouists that are interested in Vodou music. Also, priests and priestesses with particularly strong voices have gone into the studio to record Vodou songs with studio quality and those are very popular in Haitian communities, in Haiti and in the diaspora as a form of music that is nice to listen to around the house. There’s a Manbo Henriette who’s very popular. There’s Wawa and Azor; they’re very popular. Before that there was Ti Roro. Frizner Augustin has recorded music that has been put on LP, cassette and CD. Studio Vodou recording is a subgenre of Haitian music that does get produced in the studio and enjoyed and consumed by Haitians all over Haitian social space.

SB: As you know, there are a lot of stereotypes about Vodou, in films, and so on.  A lot of it revolves around this idea of possession. Can you tell us just what is possession in the religion? What happens? What does it mean?

LM: Every society, almost every society, at some point in its history, featured spirit possession. It’s not unusual in human culture. In Haitian Vodou, spirit possession is a prized form of spiritual work. Only some people can be possessed by spirits, and the people who are spirit mediums can usually be possessed by different spirits, not just one. It’s thought to be a kind-of privileged role where the person has access to the spirit world. In this experience, the sense is that people’s personalities are temporarily displaced, and the spirit personality enters. In Haiti spirits enter from the soil, from the ground, up through the feet, into the head. These are particular spirits with particular names and personalities and features.

SB: Can you give us an example of the various ones?

LM: Some of the most popular, or important spirits, these days, for example, would be Legba, who stands between the human and spirit world. Another would be Marasa, who are the sacred twins. Another is Ogou, who is the spirit of metal working and military discipline. Then you have Ezili Dantò, who’s a spirit of hardworking, serious, feminine strength. You also have Ezili Freda, who’s the coquette, the flirtatious, she is sexualized. She’s thought to be wealthy, and interested in sort of bourgeois pursuits-- powdering her face and perfuming herself. You have a spirit called Kouzen, who’s a farmer. And you have Agwe, who lives at the bottom of the sea, who’s something like Neptune in the Greek system.

There’s also, very importantly, a whole series of spirits of the dead. They’re headed by Bawon, or “the Baron.” He is the sort of governor of the spirits of the dead which are called Gede. They’re actually between the recently dead and the older spirits. The Gede are working class, roll up their sleeves, roll up their pants legs, sit-on-the-floor beings. They’re known as great healers. A lot of manbo and oungan, or priestesses and priests, work side-by-side routinely with a particular Gede spirit that they’ve inherited. Thus, if clients come to them with a sickness, a psychological problem, or a social problem, Gede might posses the manbo or the oungan and work out the solution for the client. Gede comes on an everyday basis, but he is not fancy. Gede is down-to-earth. He likes to roll up his sleeves and get to work. He likes to drink liquor. He likes to laugh at people. He’s a social satirist and the ultimate comedian.

SB: Is it expensive to do a consultation with a priest or priestess?  Is it something that you have to save up money for, or is it easy to do?

LM: Once people develop a relationship with a priest or a priestess, they can go anytime and consult with them. If they don’t have any money, which is usually the case for anyone in Haiti who is in a disenfranchised class, then the priest or priestess can work out a payment system for them, or they might charge them a particular fee. The fees aren’t going to be very high in Haiti for routine matters, but, times are hard. Priests and priestesses have to make a living, too. They may charge substantial amounts of money if something complicated has to be done. Still priests and priestess really run the gamut in Haiti as a social welfare system.  A lot of the mambos are like daycare centers. They take in people’s children. They take in destitute people.

S: That’s fascinating. Okay, you wrote a book about Rara. First, what is Rara, and give us a picture of a typical Rara at carnival time in Haiti.

LM: Rara is a parading, musical festival that is both political and religious. It typically happens right after Carnival ends continuing for all the six weeks of Lent, and climaxing on Easter week, and especially on Easter Sunday and Easter Monday.

There’s some evidence in the historical record that in slavery times, a kind of predecessor of Rara was practiced. This may have been practiced by enslaved Africans during Easter week which they were supposedly given off under the Code Noir, under the rule of French king Louis XIV. It also may have been practiced on Sundays, which they were also given off. So, it could be a very, very old form that’s evolved through time and is now very prevalent in Haiti. I really do think it’s probably the largest and most popular form of grassroots music in Haiti because it’s done all over the country and it’s done by musical communities of extended families in small villages, by Vodou societies. It’s something that everybody can participate in, from small children to older folks. During Rara, often a Vodou society will form a kind of subgroup within it sending out musicians, drummers, and a chorus of women called queens. It will have a very distinctive instrument, which you can almost not find anywhere else. This consists of bamboo that is cut to particular lengths in order to achieve particular tones. A short bamboo produces a very high tone and a long bamboo produces a very low tone. Each instrument player plays one note. So, if I’m playing “higher note” and you’re playing “lower note,” we get in a circle with a bunch of other musicians and we figure out a particular rhythm to a melody.  Then we start walking through the countryside, collecting money from people that we entertain, and it’s wonderful fun. Now, I say that it’s political. This is because it’s also possible to compose songs and the Rara will typically have a song-maker called a samba. He or she (usually it’s a he), will compose songs, which could be praise songs for the spirits or they could be “singing the point”-- singing a political message to a local person, or to a national figure, or even an international figure.  For a local example, if one year, over the course of the year, a neighbor stole my chicken, that year in the Rara, I could write a song that says, “When chickens are stolen, people get upset.” Now, I haven’t named you, and I haven’t said “You stole my chicken,” but if I walk by your house and I sing that song, you’re going to know that I know that you stole my chicken. So Rara can be a very pointed way to get a political message across without directly naming what the situation is. This allows people to side-step out-and-out conflict.

SB: Tell us more about that.

LM: In a lot of different genres of Haitian music there’s a way to launch indirect political critique. This is a technique called “voye pwen,” which literally means “sending the point.” It’s kind of like the form in African American music and speech called signifying. I might signify on you, but I haven’t really named you and I haven’t really named the situation. So if you claim I’m talking about you, I can just say “I’m not talking about you.” It’s a way to protect the speaker, and yet still engage in a critique. So in “voye pwen” you speak cryptically, or you beat around the bush, to name a situation without being precise. “Pwen” means point, and it’s like reducing the essence of a situation into one image. So, for example, there was as song when I was in Haiti in the early ‘90’s in a countryside Rara. The song talked about “Asefi jete yon pitit set mwa.”  “Asefi threw out a baby of 7 months.”   It seemed to say that Asefi--which is the name of a woman--managed to abort a baby at seven months. Now, Aristide had also just been in power for seven months when he was overthrown by a coup d’etat. So that song could have easily been criticizing someone in the town named Asefi. Or it could have referred to the fact that Aristide was overthrown in a coup. So it had a double message, on both the local political level and the national political level of critique. There’s also a very sophisticated way to send a point musically, where you’re only using the musical, sonic sound as your reference.  Haitians send the point in musical form; they will compose a riff and a song with a slogan that goes with the riff. Then they’ll play the riff around town without singing the words. But everybody knows the words and fills them in in their heads.

For example, in 1992, one Rara band downtown in Port-au-Prince developed a song called “Pa Vle Zinglindo.” Zinglindo, at that time, were kind of like left-over macoutes, members of Duvalier’s  secret service who were then called “Atache,” or “Zinglindo,” which means “piece of broken glass,” or “shard of broken glass.” The Zinglindo were mercenaries, thugs, working for political leaders. They would terrorize neighborhoods and rob people. So the band was saying, “We don’t want Zinglindo coming into our neighborhoods to terrorize us and rob us,” and the song, which was very explicit, said “We don’t want Zinglindo.” When Aristide was overthrown, and the military leaders were using the Zinglindo as sort of foot soldiers of their regime, the Rara went out, but it didn’t sing the song. It just played the melody. They couldn’t be accused of singing against anybody because they weren’t saying anything. But if you were a resident of that neighborhood, you knew exactly what that song was saying. It sent a point without even using lyrics, just using melody to deliver a political message.

SB: Any other Rara songs come to mind?

LM: One band, Sanba Yo, a pioneer in the Racine (roots pop music) movement made a very interesting recording of Rara in the studio. It’s called “Vaksine!” It was actually part of a public service announcement to vaccinate children. It says, “Mothers stand up, fathers stand up, vaccinate your children so they don’t get sick. Lawyers stand up, farmers stand up.” It called out all members of society. It was sort of interesting because it mixed high-status jobs with low-status jobs. You know, “Nurses stand up, Vodou priests stand up. Everyone, no matter who you are, you should vaccinate your kids.”  It used the Rara bamboo sound as a sort of sonic tag. It became extremely popular, played on all the radio stations and all the little kids of Port-au-Prince could sing you that song that year.

SB: You mentioned Racine. What is the Racine movement and who are some of the primary artists?

LM: Well, throughout the late, late 70’s, 80’s, and then full-blown in the 90’s, the Racine movement rises in Haiti. Racine means roots. It takes an idea that Haitians have used before, which is to say, “What is Afro-Creole traditional music and culture?” Even though we’re intellectuals, even though we’re middle class, let’s go back to the roots and learn the culture and cultivate it and learn from it and see what it’s got, and let’s valorize it. This is sort of a political statement because Afro-Creole culture has often been the source of great debate in Haiti. The question is “What should be the role of our relationship to African culture? Are we going to follow the West and denigrate it, or are we going to valorize it?” This is the essence of the debate. So the Racine movement, or the roots movement, comes down on the side of valorizing it. They go out into the countryside and they sit with the old folks in the traditional Vodou compounds. They learn the rhythms, they learn the songs, and they hang out with the priests and priestesses bringing that idea back into the city. In a lot of cases, they start mixing that with the codes of rock and roll. They’re also listening to Santana, Jimmy Hendrix, to Earth, Wind and Fire. You’ve got rock, you’ve got the British invasion, and you’ve got funk. All this gets mixed together into a delicious blend that’s heavy on the Vodou drumming and heavy on the electric guitar.

Boukman Experyans is one of the bands that is going into the countryside and reemerging, bringing their experience into the roots movement. They produce a number of albums. The first one, “Vodou Adjae”  has a great track on it called “Se Kreyòl Nou Ye.” This means, “We are Creole.” Now, this shouldn’t strike us now as being particularly controversial but their message was controversial. They were saying, “Look, we are a mixture of African, European, and Native American, and we are therefore Creole, and we should all embrace the Creole.” Along with that, they said, “We should all be speaking Kreyòl.” There’s also a whole verse in the song that says, “Why do Haitians prefer to speak Spanish? Why do Haitians prefer to speak French or English? We’re Creole, we should speak Kreyòl.” And it was doing a particular political maneuver about embracing multiple identities. Sort of a multiculturalism, if you will.

SB: Why don’t you tell us about another Boukman Eksperyans songs? 

LM: The song that gets Boukman Eksperyans international attention was their 1990 Carnival song, “Ke’m Pa Sote” which means “My heart is not afraid.” This song came out during the Avril regime. Avril is the military leader at that time, who has not been elected, but who is ruling Haiti. Boukman is speaking out against Avril, and, as it turns out, the song is thought to be one of the straws that breaks the back of the Avril regime. He has to step down shortly thereafter finally giving power to Ertha Pascale Trouillot who is an interim president of Haiti and the first woman to hold that position.

SB: Talk about who Boukman Eksperyans was. Where did they come from?

LM: Boukman Eksperyans is headed by a husband and wife team, Mimerose and Lolo Beaubrun--he is the son of the famous comedian Languichatte.  Languichatte himself had a theatre troupe of comedy players and later a really successful TV sitcom in Haiti, which was just hilariously funny. It was sort of slap-stick Haitian comedy. Lolo himself played Languichatte’s son, Barnaby. So Lolo already had a national platform and was a kind of national celebrity. So, when he starts researching Vodou music and coming out with his band, he has an audience who’s already interested in him.  His wife, Mimerose Beaubrun, is from the north of Haiti. She’s an ethnologist, herself, and educated in the ethnographic question of traditional culture, how is traditional culture working? She is a beautiful vocalist in her own right and together they attract some of the best musicians, young musicians, in Port-au-Prince at the time. This includes Eddie Francois, who’s just a beautiful vocalist, who goes out later to form his own band, Boukan Ginen.  Also Olicha de Lynch, a fanastic drummer who later passed away and a series of other drummers and vocalists who were really excellent.

SB: What’s the state of the Racine music movement today in Haiti?

LM: You know, it’s interesting, because nowadays, Racine has been somewhat eclipsed by the international Hip Hop movement, which has arrived in Haiti.  Now there are Haitians who go back and forth in a kind of transnational existence, with one foot in Haiti and one foot in the US. They are converting to Hip Hop and they’re bringing it home to Haiti. Shabba Ranks from Jamaica is huge in Haiti.  So you have really interesting mixes now of Dancehall, Reggae, and Ragga (Raggamuffin) from Jamaica with Kreyòl lyrics. You’ve got Hip Hop with Kreyòl lyrics. In general, people are mixing all the genres together. These songs are usually expressing urban young people and their concerns.

SB: Can you give us some examples of these?

LM:  One of the earliest examples of Raga Hip Hop is King Posse. They’re a band of young guys in the early 90’s. They come out with a song called “Lokal.”  It says “We all need a home base. King Posse should be your home base,” which means “King Posse is where you go for pleasure.” It’s got a very Jamaican influence music with some rap, and it’s got a nice tag, a nice refrain.  Black Alex is the lead singer of King Posse. He’s now working a lot with Wyclef Jean. He’s got a very distinctive, interesting voice. He’s an interesting artist someone to watch out for.

SB: Wyclef Jean. What does he mean for Haitians?  

LM: Wyclef Jean is an extraordinary figure. He changed the entire sense of Haitian youth self-identity. He won the first Grammy for “The Score,” (1997) and he went up on the Grammy award show wrapped in a huge Haitian flag.  There he was representing Haiti as the most successful Hip Hop artist of that year. Now, mind you, this is a setting, a context in which Haitian youth were at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of status, especially in Miami. To be Haitian was to be associated with boat people. It was to be stigmatized as being poor, Kreyòl-speaking, illiterate, Voudou-practicing, HIV-carrying, you name it, Haitians were in a bad position. There was even a case in a Miami high school of a guy who was passing for Jamaican to impress a girl that he wanted to be his girlfriend. When his girlfriend found out that he was really Haitian and not Jamaican, this poor young guy commited suicide. So that’s the picture into which Wyclef stepped with his incredible success. He manifested Haitian pride and, almost overnight, it became okay to be Haitian. The youth now are just incredibly proud of Wyclef. Wyclef has gone on to make multi-platinum albums, many different albums. At this point, he’s just completely out of control, working with everyone from Celia Cruz and Paul Simon, to Carlos Santana, to T.I., to Shakira, to the Ying-Yang twins. He works with all kinds of people.

It’s interesting to watch Wyclef because he keeps one foot in Haiti. Back in the day, he used to release tracks in Kreyòl into the Haitian radio market, and not release them in the U.S. He always maintained a Haiti connection while he was working on his success in the United States. After he got to a certain level, with his album “Wyclef Presents the Carnival,” he started releasing tracks in the U.S. in the Kreyòl language. Now Americans are used to hearing him speak Kreyòl. But he was always connected to Haiti and he’s recorded a lot of Konpa songs too. He’s recorded with Sweet Micky and a bunch of other Konpa musicians. He crosses over a whole lot of styles, musically. Politically, Wyclef is interesting because he’s developed a foundation called the Yele Foundation that aims to work on a lot of initiatives in Haiti for education, for feeding children, orphanages, and social progress. He works on a number of levels. He’s now an official U.N. Goodwill Ambassador, with diplomatic status. The other night he was with Bill Clinton at the Apollo, urging the youth to become more politically active. Wyclef Jean is the first Hip Hop artist to perform at Carnegie Hall, I think, and he’s really proud of that. So he’s an interesting figure.

SB: Could you just name one or two of Wyclef songs that really got Haitians?

LM: A lot of Wyclef’s songs are about the Hip Hop life of living large and embodying a sort of masculinist prowess, but he also does wax political. He has a bittersweet and heartbreaking song about the town of Gonaives, which was flooded, and huge mudslides ensued. Hundereds of people lost their lives and thousands of people were displaced. Wyclef recorded a Konpa song saying, “I am heartbroken over Gonaives. What can we do to help our brothers and sisters there?”

Wyclef also did the soundtrack for the Jonathan Demme film, The Agronomist. This is a film that focused on the life and times of Jean Dominique, who was a very prominent and outspoken journalist, all throughout the Duvalier regime and beyond. Jean-do, as people called him affectionately, was assassinated during a period of struggle between Aristide’s military and Aristide’s enemies. So Jonathan Demme released this film chronicling Jean Dominique, and Wyclef did the soundtrack. It includes a wonderful kind of musical pastiche of Jean Dominique talking about Haitian national pride, with Wyclef singing over that.   

KONPA

SB: Let’s turn our attention to Konpa.

LM: In the 1920’s, we have advances in technology in the phonograph. Recording of music is possible and radio starts improving. So Haitians are now exposed to Cuban Son, and Dominican Meringue.  (There’s a raging debate over whether Merengue is really Haitian Meréng, exported to the Dominican Republic and then re-imported back as Merengue). You have Dominican Merengue, you have Cuban Son, and you have American Jazz, and that reaches Haitians. They take all of that and they mix it together and come out with a thing called Konpa Direct. Konpa is the term coined by the famous band leader Nemours Jean-Baptiste, who comes out with a recording in 1955 that sets the tone for the evolution of this movement. Interestingly, Septentrional is a band started in the North of Haiti in something like 1948, so they’re actually older than Jean-Baptise. They originally played a slightly different form of music, but these bands evolved together and are the beginning of Konpa Direct, which is all the rage in Haiti from then until now.

SB: Give us a picture of a Konpa band.

LM: Okay. In Konpa, the smaller Konpa bands are usually sort of medium to fast tempo beats. There’s an emphasis on electric guitars. There’s usually a solo alto sax, a horn section and, unlike Dominican Merengue (which is in Spanish) the lyrics are all in Haitian Kreyòl.

SB: Why don’t you introduce these guys?

LM:  Part of what propels this style to national attention in Haiti was the fact that Nemours Jean-Baptiste’s first recoding is immediately answered by Weber Sicot, who developed an alternate style, Kadans Konpa. This develops into an intense rivalry, in which they shoot songs, critiquing one another. One comes out with one song and the other comes out with another. The song “Rit Comercial,” or “Commecial Rhythm,” is a classic Nemours Jean-Baptise song. It talks about a mango tree bearing a lot of fruit and how people want to throw stones at the fruit and knock it down all the time. This is Nemours Jean-Baptise saying to Weber Sicot, “Hey! You’re always trying to throw stones at me, but you’re never going to really knock me down. Plus I have plenty of fruit.” It’s an example of rivalry politics. It’s found in a lot of other Black Atlantic forums, from Calypso to Hip Hop. It’s a masculinist style of men making reputations for themselves by knocking down the other guy. 

On one hand, Konpa and all music in Haiti typically gets used by political aspirants, by political big-men. So I could gather up a whole bunch of people and pay to sing praise songs around the village for me. Those are called “koudjay,” kind of political gatherings, where music is launched in favor of a political candidate or a military leader. But by the same token, as a samba, or song-writer, I could develop a song that speaks out against a military or political leader. As I’ve said before, I could do that in shrouded messages, or I could just do that outright, and name names.  Music ends up being sort of a double-edged sword, politically. It can be used to promote candidates who may not have the backing on the people but who may be military leaders, or it can be used to critique them. An interesting example of this is the classic band Septentrional. They’re the longest standing band in Haiti. They start in 1948 and they’re still at it. They start out as a sort of “misik tipik,”  as a kind of country music, and they quickly join the ground swell of the Konpa style. Their song, “President a Vie” literally means, “President for life.” Now, you’ve got to realize, this was practically Duvalier’s  last name. After a while it was Francois Duvalier, President for Life. Now, why would Septentrional write a song praising Duvalier, Duvalier for life? The story I’ve heard behind this song is that the band was being harassed, and even threatened, by Macoutes in the north. There was some incident at the Rumba night club, where there was a shooting and somebody got killed. So, somebody came to Ulrick, the maestro, and said, “You really should write a song for Duvalier, and that will protect you. Once you get on his good side, and are known to be linked to Duvalier you won’t have Macoutes harassing you anymore.” Ulrick couldn’t bring himself to do it, but the other composer for the band, Moise, said he would, so the song came out. There’s a little bit of question in my mind whether the song ever got released on an album. I’m not sure it got released. I think they might have just released it out to the radio because the band was very ambivalent about this song. It was like a song they felt they had to write. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting piece of music.

SB: Papa Doc Duvalier, who is he? How did he affect music?

LM: Duvalier is a nice country doctor and an ethnologist, or a culture student. He comes into elected office as President of Haiti in 1959 and everybody thinks he’s great. He’s got an agenda, he’s a Noiriste. He believes that the Black majority and Black culture should be valorized. That’s fine, until the mid-60’s, when he becomes a ruthless dictator. He consolidates a secret police, separate from the army, called the Tonton Macoutes, which famously means, “boogeymen.” They are his secret death squad; not-so-secret death squad, really. They dress in blue denim with a red kerchief around their throat and a particular kind of cap. They’re given power as sort of regional sheriffs all over the country. So by the mid-60’s to late-60’s, the game in Haiti is to establish some sort of credible claim to association with Duvalier. That is where power flows from and that’s what protects you. What happens musically during this time is that Duvalier develops a preference for Konpa. He likes Konpa. He even has a favorite group.

What also happens musically during this time is that Haitians leave Haiti, going to Montreal, New York, Boston. There, musicians write critical songs about Duvalier, naturally, from outside the country. From inside the country, it’s trickier business. A lot of musicians just sort of go in for the pleasure of women and rum and music. So Konpa rides along a lot on benign lyrics, lyrics that are not “angaje,” or politically engaged. But you do have interesting tracks, like the famous song by Tropicana, a famous band from the north. This tells the song of a guy who wants to go to a ball, or a dance, but he loses his wallet, so he has no money for the entry fee. He climbs over the wall and crashes the party (a party-crasher is called a “dasomann”). Some Macoutes are inside the party. They see him scaling the fence, they grab him, and they beat him up. So the song is the story of this guy’s plight. All he wanted was to dance with a nice girl, have fun, and drink a little rum, and what he got was his body completely torn in half by the Tonton Macoutes. I look at that song, and I say, “Well, on one hand, that’s a critique of the Macoutes and the Macoute system. For entering illegally into a nightclub you’re going to get beaten up?” But, on the other hand, that’s what really happened. So it wasn’t a controversial song. It was a song that, in some ways, spoke to the power of the Macoutes. The Macoutes probably kind of liked it! So this is the kind of song that can happen during the Duvalier era.

Sweet Micky is one of the most popular contemporary Konpa artists even though he’s just retired, but you can still see him popping up and playing certain shows, here and there. Mickey develops a particular style where he’s got just three musicians on stage, so he’s not a big band type of guy. He’s a guy with a synthesizer, a guitar and a bass. He makes it really simple, and his songs are really catchy. His music is very popular. One of the reasons, I think, that he got this abbreviated band together was that he was known in his heyday for having multiple gigs in a single night. He would have a gig at seven, a gig at nine, a gig at one in the morning. He would go out to an after party at four and then pack up his guys and his sound equipment and roll to the next show.

SB: Great, great. I forgot one question. Just give me a minute on what Aristide means for Haiti, especially in terms of culture and music.

LM: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is a very tricky figure at this point. He was this first democratically elected President of Haiti, in 1990. Then he’s ousted, comes back, has a second coup, comes back again, and is ousted again in an even more nebulous coup/kidnapping. There’s a huge debate about what happened there. In the meantime, the incredible hope that gets pinned to Aristide dwindles and his promise is not realized. So he’s a very tricky figure. He’s sort of a heartbreaking and painful figure, whose legacy is still being debated by books that are still coming out, arguing everything from, “He’s a mentally-ill, sort of demonic military dictator,” to “He was a promising, egalitarian, charismatic leader who was done in by the US and by the Haitian business elite.” Everything in the middle gets argued about him, too. He’s very tricky.  

One thing you can find throughout Haitian music, in all of its history, are these tensions about power. One of the earliest recordings we have is a praise song for Nord Alexis, who’s a president in 1905. It basically says, “Alexis is the big man. He’ll leave power when he feels like it.” Then, just recently, when Aristide was president, they recycled a song from Duvalier.

SB: He promoted Kreyòl culture and the use of the language and music even, didn’t he?

LM: Aristide delivered many of his speeches in Kreyòl, rather than French. He was very aware that the vast majority of disenfranchised Haitians spoke Kreyòl, were affiliated with Vodou, and were disenfranchised politically. So he spoke to them in their language, which is one of the reasons why he was so enormously popular among the majority and so feared and despised by the business classes and the enfranchised political classes. But, he’s tricky. People are still fighting over what he meant.

SB: Thanks so much, Liza, for a fantastic contribution to Afropop’s Hip Deep!

LM: Thanks for having me.



ADDITIONAL SOURCES

About our contributor

Elizabeth McAlister holds a BA in Anthropology from Vassar College; an MA in African American Studies and an MA in History from Yale University; and a PhD in American Studies from Yale. She is Associate Professor of Religion and Associate Prof in African American Studies and American Studies at Wesleyan University. Her area of expertise is Afro-Caribbean religious traditions, particularly Haitian Vodou. She is also interested in issues of transnationalism, religion and the social construction of race and ethnicity, as well as religion and gender and sexuality. At Wesleyan she teaches on these themes, as well as a course on "the millennium and end of times thought." She has also produced three albums of Afro-Caribbean sacred music. She loves music--playing it, hearing it, producing it and dancing to it.

Featured Artists

Erol Josue
http://www.eroljosue.net/

Read Banning Eyre’s CD review of Régléman
http://www.afropop.org/explore/album_review/ID/3316/Régléman

Wyclef Jean
http://www.wyclef.com/

Boukman Experyans

Sweet Micky
http://www.afiwi.com/sweet_micky.asp

Black Alex
http://www.myspace.com/blackalex1

Other Links

Rara: Vodou, Power and Performance
http://rara.wesleyan.edu/photographs/index.php

http://rara.wesleyan.edu/

http://www.wesleyan.edu/religion/mcalister.htm

Photo credits

Three lengths of bamboo walking. (Elizabeth McAlister)

Rara Djakout plays in Prospect Park, Brooklyn (Elizabeth McAlister)

Rara Painting (Elizabeth McAlister)
”This painting depicts the collaboration between the government, via the military, and the Catholic Church, in targeting Afro-Haitian traditional religion for suppression. These efforts were called the Anti-Superstition Campaigns.

Rara Kings and Queen (Elizabeth McAlister)
Two young Rara kings and a Queen behind them.

Wyclef Jean
http://www.potomitan.info/bibliographie/images/wyclef.jpg

Sweet Micky
http://media.giantstep.net/assets/events/detail/788.jpg

Haiti Map
http://www.medsandfoodforkids.org/ha_map.jpg

Haiti flag
http://www-scf.usc.edu/~usccsa/images/flags/haiti.gif

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