Awakening Spaces: French Caribbean Popular Songs, Music, and Culture.
CORNELIUS, STEVEN
By Brenda F. Berrian. (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology.)
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. [xiv, 287 p.ISBN
0-226-04455-6 (cloth); 0-226-04456-4 (pbk.). $40 (cloth); $16 (pbk.).]
Culturally distinct, but politically tied to France as overseas
region and department respectively, the Lesser Antilles islands of
Martinique and Cuadeloupe find themselves squeezed between conflicting
French and Caribbean ideologies and economies. Historically dominated by
French interests, the islands' peoples have long struggled to
maintain their African legacy. If, in the past, the unrelenting
skirmishes for cultural heritage could be said to have taken place
within the shadows of daily life, during the previous half
century--dating back at least to the post-World War II rise to power of
Martinique politician and negritude cofounder Amie Cesaire--the
resistance to French hegemony, along with the concurrent redefinition of
island cultural values, has been fought in the open spaces. Particularly
so, argues Brenda F. Berrian, in the musical soundscapes of island life.
It is this struggle, taking place over the airwaves and in the
islands' many performance spaces, that Berrian seeks to explicate.
This is important work. Little documented, but central to island
identity, are the genres of popular music (as typified in the sounds of
the beguine, jazz, and zouk) and traditional music (as typified in the
sound of carnival in general and the gwo ka and bele drums in
particular). Berrian's focus is on musicians' manipulation and
politicization of these forms from 1970 to 1996.
Berrian is interested in how lyricists use song texts to promote
their political or social agendas, and this becomes one of the
book's central focuses--an emphasis amplified, no doubt, by the
fact that the author is not an ethnomusicologist. This, of course, is
perfectly fine, but readers interested in the more complex whole might
find themselves discouraged by the author's grayscale descriptions
of musical style and form.
Following a useful prologue and introduction, Berrian divides her
book into seven chapters, each, she says, representing a space for
social "awakening" in which there is a "piggyback effect
of domains wherein the journey into one of them naturally leads into
others within a circuitous route" (p. 233). In order, these areas
are: (1) songs referencing childhood, (2) songs of optimism, (3)
subversive songs sting by women, (4) black resistance, (5) performance
and marketing, (6) recontextualization of urban music, and (7)
reinvigoration and reconstitution of traditional drum culture.
Throughout the book, Berrian convincingly argues for the central
importance of Creole lyrics as a device to define and promote a
Caribbean heritage that is both culturally vital in its own right and
politically unfettered by France. Berrian begins in the first chapter by
focusing on the Martinique band Malavoi and what she describes as the
group's interest in defining, through the use of metaphors from
childhood, a culturally "safe space." This chapter, like those
that follow, attempts to accomplish three goals: to give a biographical
account of the musicians involved, to analyze lyrics, and to explicate
the social, financial, and political milieu in which events take place.
It is a logical, and generally successful, approach to the
problem--but not in all cases. Chapter 4, titled "More Than a
Doudou: Women's Subversive Songs," seeks to make the point
that women are not just doudous (that is, powerless, just a man's
plaything) but are actively claiming their own space and lives from a
world once dominated by men. Yet, because the reader is forced to rely
too heavily on Berrian's voice and her interpretation of the facts
rather than those of her informants, the thesis is sometimes hard to
accept. At the very least, the facts require deeper exegesis. How, for
example, is Edith Lefel's song "Marie" consistent with
any sensible person's notion of liberation? Berrian states that
Marie's "decision to die is the ultimate appropriation of
power, for she controls how long she wants to live. Marie's death
becomes the mirror through which her grief-stricken husband recognizes
his victimization of her" (p. 85). Perhaps Berrian is correct that
islanders (men and women?) really do read this t ext as she suggests.
But if so, we need to be given more information from the players
themselves, and in their own voices.
So too, Berrian's broad generalizations about the nature of
African religion, music, and culture demand greater context and a firmer
native voice. Undoubtedly, Berrian is accurate in her thesis that music
is a central platform for the airing of emerging social values and
political positions. Had her argument been more contextually detailed,
however, it would have been more powerful.