Chocolate Surrealism

Music, Movement, Memory, and History in the Circum-Caribbean

Njoroge M. Njoroge

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781496806901
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

In Chocolate Surrealism, Njoroge M. Njoroge highlights connections among the production, performance, and reception of popular music at critical historical junctures in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The author sifts different origins and styles to place socio-musical movements into a larger historical framework.Calypso reigned during the turbulent interwar period and the ensuing crises of capitalism. The Cuban rumba/son complex enlivened the postwar era of American empire. Jazz exploded in the Bandung period and the rise of decolonization. And, lastly, Nuyorican Salsa coincided with the period of the civil rights movement and the beginnings of black/brown power. Njoroge illuminates musics of the circum-Caribbean as culturally and conceptually integrated within the larger history of the region. He pays close attention to the fractures, fragmentations, and historical particularities that both unite and divide the region's sounds. At the same time, he engages with a larger discussion of the Atlantic world.Njoroge examines the deep interrelations between music, movement, memory, and history in the African diaspora. He finds the music both a theoretical anchor and a mode of expression and representation of black identities and political cultures. Music and performance offer ways for the author to re-theorize the intersections of race, nationalism and musical practice, and geopolitical connections. Further music allows Njoroge a reassessment of the development of the modern world system in the context of local, popular responses to the global age. The book analyzes different styles, times, and politics to render a brief history of Black Atlantic sound.

1. “Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse”

The Trinidadian Calypso to 1940

Everything that happened in Trinidad with the real calypsonians, they recorded it. So the history of Trinidad can be found in the calypsos.

—Roaring Lion

Kaiso and Kalinda

By the mid-1930s what had begun as the “folk” music of the Afro-Trinidadian working and under-classes had achieved international recognition and acceptance. The music known as calypso began crossing transatlantic circuits with the first recording of the music in New York in 1912. With the growth and development of the recording industry in the 1920s, and the expanding international market for recorded music, US recording companies began searching for “new” sounds as well as catering to new tastes (outside the Euro-American classical and popular music audiences). In the United States, this was reflected in the rise of the “race” records and the first recordings of “hillbilly” music; internationally, this meant forays into the Caribbean and Latin America, as the search for new sounds followed the penetration of US financial capital and foreign investment.

Brisk sales of calypso recordings in the West Indies, the United States, and Britain led to fierce competition among recording companies. In the calypso market of the 1930s the main players were Decca and RCA Victor’s Bluebird label. The battle for the local market share of music sales in Trinidad erupted in a small “war” between the Decca distributor, a businessman of Portuguese descent named Edward Sa Gomes, and the distributor for Bluebird, a Chinese man named Akow. Perceiving Bluebird as a potential threat to his monopoly, Sa Gomes falsely reported to the colonial administrators that a recent shipment from the United States of Bluebird records contained obscene material. The British authorities, ever vigilant to protect the morals of their colonial subjects, listened to a few of the songs and ordered the entire shipment dumped into the ocean(!). Furious, Akow retaliated by reporting that the Decca shipment also contained indecencies, and, sure enough, Sa Gomes’s shipment was seized and buried at sea (Shapiro 1979).

This episode highlights the “audible entanglements” that inhere in listening to the kaiso:¹ poetics and politics; censorship and creativity; capitalism and colonial control; marginal practices and metropolitan values. Here race, class, and gender imploded in a conflict that resulted in tens of thousands of records being buried at sea. Following Guilbault (2007) we can use the analytic of “audible entanglements” to “foresound sites, moments, and modes of enunciation articulated [in and] through musical practices.… [F]ar from being ‘merely’ musical, audible entanglements … also assemble social relations, cultural expressions, and political formations” (41–42). As the epigraph that begins this chapter states, the history of Trinidad is in the calypso. Thus the story of the kaiso is also about a “history of the voice,” subterranean convergences, creolization, masking, and power. The history of calypso sounds the musical and social development of the Afro-Trinidadian community, the transition “from shared experience to conscious expression.” “[M]usic is, in fact, the surest threshold to the language that comes out of it” (Brathwaite 1993, 270).

Further, Trinidad provides a unique location from which to explore and interrogate the socio-historical dynamics of the circum-Caribbean as a cultural area writ large. As Peter Wilson has said: “the island’s singular status gives it the peculiar distinction of being an amalgamation of much that is typical in the Caribbean” (1973, 188). Having been subject/prey at various points to all three major Caribbean imperial powers (Spain, France, and England), Trinidad offers us a microcosm of the region as a whole and a site to theorize the complexities of creolization and the “fragmented whole” that is the circum-Caribbean. Kaiso emerged out of this transcultural complex of music-dance-language and religious beliefs, in the context of social conflict, repression, and resistance that characterized black colonial life in Trinidad. The music developed in the late nineteenth century, through the intermingling of the once largely rural proletariat: unemployed and underemployed ex-slaves, formerly indentured Africans, and other creoles (and some Asians), mainly (though not exclusively) in the urban context of Port-of-Spain. The calypso tells the history of migration and immigration, urbanization, proletarianization, underdevelopment, and black reconstruction in the post-Emancipation period. The kaiso emerged in and developed from the barrack yards, stick-fights, road marches, carnival tents, rumshops, and city streets and became a national popular music and symbol.

Using humor, hyperbole, narrative detail, deft allusion, satire, wit, suggestive imagery, and verbal violence, the kaiso narrates the story of the Trinidadian social system, black life beneath colonial rule, the nature of male/female conflict and gender roles, the interpenetrations and clashes of classes and ethnicities; it tells of immigration, censorship, industrialization, and Carnival. It is about language and power, pun and proverb, survivalism and surrealism, and the endurance and aspirations of the dispossessed. The calypso is related to all Afro-diasporic musics and shares traditional African traits—songs of praise, blame, derision, protest, satire, celebration, affirmation, and contestation; dense rhythmic structures, dramatic syncopation, and improvisation; the interweaving and intereffectivity of speech and song, dramaturgy, drive, and eloquence. The calypso is oral history as well as “auriture,” a repository of living folklore and political commentary chronicling historical transformations, collective aspirations, and social tensions; it has faced similar strictures, censorship, and repression as have all black musics in this hemisphere.

The Cedula of Population of 1783 encouraged and attracted labor and capital to Trinidad from other West Indian islands, like Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Vincent, St. Kitts, and Grenada. Before the cedula, two-and-a-half centuries of Spanish colonial neglect had left the island largely uncultivated and underpopulated. The cedula changed the composition and complexion of the colony as the influx of planters and slaves from the French colonies overtook the Indian and Spanish settlements. After 1789, in response to the fluctuations of French Revolution, French planters and free people of color (of diverse political leanings) and their slaves left the French islands for Trinidad. The cultural dominant of this new society was essentially “Afro-French.” The arrival of French planters and enslaved Africans began the complex creolization process that would stamp the island with its uniquely Caribbean and cosmopolitan character.

Prior to the cedula, slavery was inconsequential to Trinidad’s development; however, by linking land grants with slave ownership, the cedula ensured the massive influx of slaves and the creation of a slave-based economy. Particularly after 1795, there was a dramatic increase in migration and population, as French planters fled with their slaves Saint Domingue and the advancing armies of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Andre Rigaud, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The arrival of the Haitians, enslaved peoples from other French colonies and Africa, along with their (fearful) masters was to place a lasting and distinctive imprint on the emerging national culture of Trinidad. With the arrival of the French, the plantation-complex that syncopates the Caribbean meta-archipelago was introduced to the island. Between 1783 and 1797, French immigrants established 468 plantations, with 159 sugar mills and hundreds of smaller holdings processing coffee, cotton, and tobacco (Pearse 1956, 176).

As early as 1784, the British had begun their economic penetration into Trinidad. While the French planters concentrated on agriculture, the British established a strong hold on the island’s trade, disproportionate to their actual numbers. Thus, despite Spanish capitulation to the British in 1797, the “open door” policy would continue to provide a steady influx of French speakers and slaves, and the French/Afro-Creole cultural matrix would remain at the center of black cultural life throughout the nineteenth century (Wood 1986, 32).² The British takeover of the island added new layers of cultural complexity and contradictory pressures to an already diverse colonial scene. The underdeveloped state of the island and abundant land proved attractive to a number of English planters, who came with their patois-speaking slaves. The coming of the British also meant the ascendancy of “King Sugar,” and the rationalization of the plantation regime that was to rule imperiously throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. British capital made the rapid rise of the sugar industry possible; large amounts of arable land and fertile soil (in comparison with the older colonies) made the island attractive to merchants and planters alike.

With the coming of the British also came the beginnings of the crown colony system and a more rigid racial stratification. The installation of crown colony status was used principally to deny the right to vote to the free people of color who numbered more than double the whites at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Under Spanish law the free coloreds enjoyed almost equal status to that of the whites; however, the succession of British governors sharply and systematically curtailed those rights. “The taint of republicanism associated with many of the Colored immigrants from the French islands, and the shades of Haiti which they evoked, were enough to compel competing groups in the white upper class to momentarily sink their differences in their universal apprehension for the security of the stratified social order, the maintenance of which they regarded as fundamental” (Singh 1994, 3; emphasis added). With the coming of the “age of revolutions” to the Caribbean, the specter of Haiti, the independent black republic, loomed large in the planter imaginary, and the colonial elite—formerly divided by nationality, religion, and language—forged an uneasy peace in order to maintain social control. As carnival developed, it would play an important role in consolidating the ruling classes.

Trinidad’s development as a slave society began late. In 1813 the majority of the slaves were African born, and slaves were still concentrated in relatively small holdings. Bridget Brereton writes: “As late as 1834, the average owner had only seven slaves; 80% owned less than 10, while only 1% held over 100 slaves. An unusually high proportion of Trinidad slaves were urban: about 25% lived in Port of Spain in 1813, and this pronounced urban orientation was to be important for the development of post-emancipation society” (1981, 55). The late development, erratic growth and the competition from larger sugar-producing islands ensured that the Trinidadian economy would never be wholly dominated by the plantation. In 1810 “only” two-thirds of the population was enslaved, a much smaller proportion than the territories boasting “monster” plantations: Jamaica, Barbados, Brazil, and later Cuba. Slave mortality generally exceeded fertility and the population had to be regularly replenished.

Oral and recorded evidence reveals that diverse groups of Africans were brought to Trinidad. Higman (1984) has shown that the majority of the Africans imported were Mandika, Fulbe, KwaKwa, Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, and Kongo.³ A complex pan-African cultural base was forged from the diverse ethnic groupings of slaves, and while many maintained their “national” affiliations, internal and external forces in the context of plantation production necessitated the creation of a common community. This transformation from “ethnicity” to “race” was paralleled in the development of the creole language or “nation language” (Brathwaite 1993).

African slaves, like those born in the Americas, tended to marry endogamously, thus facilitating the transmission and retention of core cultural and linguistic codes, values, and practices beneath the oppressive weight of the slave system. Since few of the African-born slaves could speak French or English, or had mastered the Afro-French creole, they had no other recourse but to their mother tongues, which in turn continually transformed and “Africanized” the already multi-inflected creole. The linguistic history of Trinidad reveals the significance of social context, the period and provenance of African migration, and the varying levels of accommodation, adaptation, and transculturation between ethnic and racial groups. Rex Nettleford explains: “For not only does Africa ride the sense and sensibility—and bodies—of her offspring in the diaspora, she fertilizes the [Caribbean’s] Creole languages in dynamic interaction with the masters’ tongues as part of the all-pervasive process of cross-fertilization. Syntax and structure, idiom and lexicon are transformed to create ‘third tongues’” (1978, 31).

In addition to and inseparable from language, slave song, dance, and religious ritual were vital nodes of resistance to the brutal dehumanization of enslaved life and served as crucial sites of opposition and affirmation, creating the “living room” necessary for the slaves to preserve and express a sense of humanity not constructed by the plantation, a humanness that resisted reduction to their legal status as property and their economic status as units of production. Music, dance and aesthetic production and celebration were critical to the survival and maintenance of slave culture. Slave dances had been tolerated and accepted in varying degrees at varying historical points throughout the circum-Caribbean. They were generally allowed in the French and Spanish colonies as a safety valve and a means of control; however, in the British colonies slave activities tended to be more circumscribed.

Like the carnival traditions (as we will see below), black musicking and celebrations in the early colonial period provided not only a means of social control for the planters, but more importantly, these practices also provided a means of social cohesion for the diverse population of enslaved Africans. And while the dances served to reinforce the common stereotypes that underwrote many of the moral justifications for slavery and reassured the planters of their (tenuous) hegemony, lurking behind the wavering tolerance and racist stereotypes lay the genuine and well-justified fear of the numerically superior slave caste. The planter class realized early on that black music and performance often masked potential subversion.⁴ This dialectic of repression and tolerance by the elite dependent upon social conditions would continue to characterize ruling-class attitudes and actions regarding the expressive cultures of the slaves and their descendants.

Kalinda⁵ emerged as a general term for an entire complex of slave song/dance and ritual activity, and was observed and documented throughout the circum-Caribbean, from Louisiana to British Guiana. According to J. D. Elder: “The term … seems to be well known in other islands of the Caribbean, e.g. Haiti, Carriacou, and in Bequia, the form the institution takes in Trinidad is unique in respect to the music and dance and the ‘stick-fight’ which is its most important feature” (1966, 192). The ubiquity of the term in various accounts of slave culture can be explained by several factors: in the ongoing internal and inter-island creolization processes, song and dance complexes were simplifying and merging throughout the nineteenth century, while others died out altogether. Songs/dances like the Jhouba (juba), Bel-Air (bele), and bomba were transforming, adding and subtracting elements and developing through pan-Caribbean exchanges. Another factor that may explain the term’s wide usage is that most white traveler-reporters had neither the inclination nor the ability to distinguish one dancing style from another. Pierre Labat, one of the most perceptive early commentators, wrote of kalinda in 1724: “The dance which pleases them [the slaves] greatly, and which is their most customary is the kalinda. It comes from the coast of Guinea, and according to all appearances from the Kingdom of Arada [the present-day Benin Republic, formerly Dahomey]. The Spanish learned it from the Negroes and dance it all over America in the same way as the Negroes” (quoted in Emery 1988, 25). The kalinda in Trinidad was an articulation of diverse modes of African-rooted ritual, which included song, dance, and stickfighting—a body of practices brought from the shores of Africa and syncopated to and transformed across the region by the rhythms of the plantation. From the eighteenth century on, kalinda (the dance), stickfighting, and their musical accompaniments were to play a decisive role in slave culture celebrations and the development of the kaiso.

There are conflicting legends as to the origins of the kaiso; Mitto Sampson gives two versions. In the first tale, a French planter known as “Lawa” (“King”) Begorrat, who came to Trinidad from Martinique in the late eighteenth century,

used to hold court in his cave to which he would adjourn with his favorite slaves and guests on occasions to indulge in a variety of entertainments. The court was attended by African slave singers of “Cariso” or “Caiso,” which were usually sung extempore and were of a flattering nature, or satirical and directed against unpopular neighbors or members of the plantation community, or else they were “Mépris,” a term given to a war of insults between two or more expert singers … Gros Jean [a slave] was said to have been the first of these bards of “chantwells”⁶ to be appointed Master of Caiso, or Mâit Caiso. (Sampson in Pearse 1956, 253)

Many of these early “chantwells” were reputedly obeahmen, and, assumedly equally respected and feared for their musical and magical prowess. They were larger than life figures with names like Papa Cochon and Hannibal the Mulatto.

The second myth of origin recounted by Sampson comes from legends passed on by Surisima the Carib, one of the few Amerindian kaisonians that has come down through history. According to Surisima, the word cariso is descended from the Carib word carieto (see fn. 3), which were traditional indigenous songs used to “heal the sick, embolden the warrior, and seduce the fair” (Sampson in Pearse, 296). Atilla⁷ traces the roots of the modern kaiso back to the gayap,⁸ or communal work effort and the musical accompaniment that both rhythmatized the labor and eased the strain of the work load, as slaves would prepare (their) ground for planting and divide themselves into gangs, each vying to outwork the other. As Atilla relates:

Each gang had a leader whose main duty it was to set a rhythm by improvising and chanting a song, the refrain of which was taken up and maintained in unison by the whole gang as they worked their implements in time with the rhythm. The leader always chose a sonorous and important sounding name like Elephant, Thunderer, Trumpeter.… At the end of the day as they gathered around the cooking pot and made preparations for the evening meal, the gang that had done the most work would extol their prowess in the field and the leader would improvise ribald ditties making fun of the other gangs and their inability to do as much work as the victors. Thus, no doubt originated the “picong” which distinguishes the earliest forms of kaiso. (Quevedo 1983, 5–6)

Finally, Liverpool (2001) traces the origins of kaiso to praise-singing traditions and griottage of West African derivation. What these diverse explanations have in common is the affecting power (natural and supernatural) of word and sound, the presence of the musical form, and its functional and symbolic efficacy.

Carnival and Canboulay

After the abolition of the slave trade by the British in 1807, an inter-colonial trade developed in the region. Slaves from less profitable and productive islands were transported to the more fertile soils of places like Trinidad and British Guiana. The higher value of slaves and the newer, virgin soils inaugurated and sustained the inter-colonial trade. Between 1813 and 1821 Trinidad received over 3,800 slaves from neighboring islands, of whom nearly 1,100 came from Dominica and nearly 1,200 came from Grenada (E. Williams 1964, 76). The inter-island trade would complic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse” The Trinidadian Calypso to 1940
• 2. “Cuba Libre” Clave Consciousness and Montuno Aesthetics 1945–1955
• 3. Dedicated to the Struggle The Aural Making and Unmaking of the Third World 1955–1965
• 4. “Cosa Nuestra” Salsa “Folklórico y Experimental” 1965–1975
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Select Discography
• Index