After the Dance, the Drums Are Heavy: Carnival, Politics, and Musical Engagement in Haiti
There is a saying in Haitian Kreyòl that one must “voye wòch, kache men,” or “throw the rock [but] hide the hand.” Naturally, the art of throwing and catching hidden meanings through metaphors in Haitian song involves both the skillful toss of the artists (i.e., “sounding”) and the conscious grasping by the audience (i.e., “listening”). From foreign occupation to military regimes to life in a foreign land, and even to just surviving the everyday, the vast use of creative word play in song is a significant source of power and justice for the Haitian people. At the same time, Haitian politicians and commercial artists have coopted these tactics to achieve their own agendas. Nowhere is sounding and listening as a politically and socially engaged act more contentious than during the carnival season, exactly where Rebecca Dirksen sets the stage for her deep dive into musical engagement in Haiti.In fact, the Haitian language is so rife with such sleight-of-hand metaphors that even the title of the book seemingly sets up the reader's expectations before skillfully sending them in another direction. As a direct translation of the well-known Haitian proverb “Apre dans, tanbou lou” (After the dance, the drums are heavy) and accompanied by a cover image of a tanbou drummer painted by artist Garry Chanel, one could be forgiven for thinking that the book focuses primarily on the intense, percussion-driven rhythms of carnival street musicians. Unexpectedly, Dirksen devotes only part of her book to the sonic environment of Haitian carnival before zooming out to reveal the setting of the book to be equal parts carnival stage and political arena. This is one of many instances in which Dirksen subverts reader expectations, alerting us that there is more going on here beneath the surface.Dirksen's deep commitment to understanding Haitian frames of experience—a result of several years of field research and over a decade of research on the subject—reveals itself throughout the book in other ways as well. Rather than a strict chronology of Haitian musical evolution, Dirksen presents an ethnographic reading of different performance modes/codes that bridge the world of politics and carnival in Haiti between 2010 and 2018. Her rich ethnographic accounts are the biggest strength of the work; they are made even more compelling by the fact that her interviews are not anonymized, allowing for local perspectives and experiences to serve as the source of her theoretical considerations. These welcome methods for grounding this book's framework, positing them as “acts of decolonization,” work to decrease the distance between reader and the source material at the same time that they privilege the many Haitians present throughout the text as equal contributors to the scholarly discourse. This is similar to methods used recently by other white, cis-gendered female scholars from the United States writing about the subject of Caribbean music.1 Dirksen's approach also sets this work apart from other essential texts on Haitian music and politics, continuing the discourse while adding more representative voices to the conversation.2Notably, this book was originally intended as an essay response to Gage Averill's seminal article on musical engagement and Haitian carnival music.3 For this reassessment, Dirksen focuses on the years of the Martelly presidency (2011–2016) and the signifying melodies of carnival songs by Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly himself (a successful konpa commercial artist before his presidency), Wyclef Jean, Matyas (Jean Toussaint Frantz), Boukmann Eksperyans, RAM, and Brothers Posse. Her original essay, “Mixed Modes and Performance Codes of Political Demonstration and Carnival in Haiti” (2017), has been adapted and included as chapter 2.4As a conceptual frame, Dirksen judiciously applies the technique of “Spiralism,” a Caribbean literary movement of the 1960s spearheaded by Haitian authors such as Franck Étienne, aka Frankétienne. At the heart of Dirksen's spiral is Haitian carnival (as both carnivalesque and protest), and throughout the work, the author returns to several important moments to re-examine the same events from an increasingly nuanced perspective. This spiral is driven by two overarching avenues of inquiry into musical performance, one more globally applicable and the other more particular to the Haitian case study. The first is carnival as “sounding” or, more precisely, “how musically constructed narratives, logics, behaviors, and performances can be carried across political divides and across generations, even as grammars and specific motivations change” (5). To this, Dirksen adds a dimension of musical cartographies that asks how musical sound produces space (not to be confused with musical geography, which asks how space produces musical sound). The second is carnival as “creative vagabondaj,” where she considers the act of Haitian vagabondage to be an extension of both the carnivalesque (kanaval) and political engagement (manifestasyon).The book explores these themes in nine chapters, accompanied by an array of frontmatter and two short epilogues. The first three chapters serve as an introduction to Haitian carnival history and politics. Chapter 1 outlines the context and conceptual framework for the book as a whole. Chapter 2, “Mixed Modes and Performance Codes of Political Demonstrations and Carnival,” focuses on a series of political events and carnival songs released during two contentious election cycles. This chapter highlights Dirksen's grounded approach, as her ethnographic voice bring manifestasyon and kanaval into dialogue with each other. Chapter 3, “Wyclef's Score,” is the first chapter to take full advantage of Dirksen's Spiralist approach, re-examining the election cycle of 2010–2011 from the vantage point of Haitian-American artist Wyclef Jean's career leading up to his long-shot presidential campaign. At the same time, Dirksen traces the evolution of a melodic political slogan, showing how the meanings of Haitians’ grassroots engagement (angaje) and emotion (anraje) are repeated, recycled, and resignified over time.The next three chapters shift focus to the gravitational center of this book's spiral galaxy—former president and konpa artist Michel Martelly—and show his prolific career as an example of creative vagabondaj. In chapter 4, “Sweet Micky's Allure,” Dirksen draws connections between Martelly's song “Prezidan” (President) from 1993 with the art of betiz (both expressions of silliness and vulgarities) found in the music of his musical predecessors and the appearance of Gede (the Vodou spirit of fertility and death) at carnival. Chapter 5, “The Konpa President's Government on Parade,” looks at President Martelly's restructuring of the national carnival celebration in 2010 (post-earthquake) as another layered meaning of his betiz as a showman. Chapter 6, “Ti Lil and Nèg Bannann nan (The Banana Man),” returns to 2016 to examine Martelly's carnival anthem “Bal Bannann nan” (Give her the banana), which he composed and performed during his tenure as president. As a strong continuation of the themes that she established in the previous chapter, Dirksen details how the carnivalesque betiz of Martelly's musical career eventually seeped into his political career.The remaining three chapters spiral out yet again, examining the case studies of various politically engaged Haitian musical groups and focusing on how these commercial artists forged paths that connected them to other fellow musicians, everyday Haitian citizens, and elected politicians after the failed election cycle of 2015–2016. Chapter 7, “The Population's Bacchanalia,” looks at the resonance of carnival song lyrics and contemporaneous political events through the case study of musician-comedian Matyas. Chapter 8, “Response from the Roots,” profiles the carnival anthems of famed Haitian raisin (roots) music groups Boukman Eksperyans and RAM over the span of thirty years. Finally, chapter 9, “Re-sounding Mizik Angaje,” revisits the materials of the preceding chapters to reveal the meaning of the book's title beyond its metaphysical implications: after the fun of carnival is over—where songs both point attacks and raise consciousness—comes the real hard work of transforming that energy into radical activism.Overall, the comprehensive breadth of After the Dance makes it an important contribution to the discourse on Caribbean carnival and the politics of music. Educators looking to incorporate this work into their classroom readings will find plenty of worthy material to select from, as this book's ambitiousness gives it the feeling of an edited volume more than a monograph. In the words of Matyas, “Nan kanaval tout ti pawòl gen eko. . . . Lè w ekri tèks lan pou kanaval, w ap tounen sou refren an de twa fwa” (In carnival, every single word has an echo. . . . When you write a text for carnival, you're going to return to the refrain several times) (270–71). In this way, Dirksen's work will successfully engage a wide range of readers through its well-crafted ethnographic narrative, which brings together a chorus of Haitian voices sounding their own stories, along with her voice to provide the historical and cultural context so that we can truly listen.
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