Chocolate Surrealism: Music, Movement, Memory, and History in the Circum-Caribbean

Chocolate Surrealism

Chocolate Surrealism

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

Njoroge Njoroge

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI • JACKSON

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright © 2016 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2016

∞

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Njoroge, Njoroge, author.

Title: Chocolate surrealism : music, movement, memory, and history in the circum-Caribbean / Njoroge Njoroge.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2016] | Series: Caribbean studies series | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Discography: pages

Identifiers: LCCN 2015043008 | ISBN 9781496806895 (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Folk music—Caribbean Area—History and criticism. | Blacks—Caribbean Area—Music—History and criticism. | African diaspora.

Classification: LCC ML3565.N56 2016 | DDC 780.89/960729—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043008

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

To my sister, for teaching me how to read

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

Acknowledgments

This work is dedicated first and foremost to my family: my parents, Mbugua and Josephine Njoroge, without whose loving support none of this would have been possible, and my sister, Wanjiku Njoroge, my closest friend and confidante who—both literally and figuratively—taught me how to read.

There have been many, many people who have contributed to my personal growth and intellectual development; here I can list only a few. George Yúdice was a steady source of encouragement and critical feedback, as well as a good friend and colleague. Michael Gomez’s pioneering work on the African diaspora has not only helped reconfigure the field but has also been a model for my scholarship. Adam Green consistently challenged me to deepen my analyses, and his exacting critiques helped bring this writing to fruition. The insights, knowledge, and enthusiasm of Jairo Moreno played a vital role in the project’s completion, and it was a pleasure to have his formidable academic and musical arsenal (generously) at my disposal. Christopher Winks has been a wonderful friend whose encyclopedic erudition I have had the great privilege of benefiting from through countless and ongoing conversations. Finally, Steven Feld has been a true inspiration (intellectually and musically); it is difficult to express my gratitude for the many ways in which his brilliance, guidance, kindness, and support have been crucial to this endeavor.

The ideas and themes in and around this work actually began to develop through writings and discussions with David Anthony, Angela Davis, Herman Gray, and Nathaniel Mackey. Each in their own way has contributed much to the project, and the seeds sown have been cultivating for many years. Manthia Diawara, Robin D. G. Kelley, Tricia Rose, Brent Hayes Edwards, Fred Moten, and Steven Gregory were all and always supportive. In addition, (the late) Juan Flores and Miriam Jiménez Román have been good friends and key interlocutors throughout. I must also give special thanks to Timothy Reiss and Patricia Hilden for their support, assistance, encouragement, and feedback. Inspiration and encouragement also came from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Kamau Brathwaite.

The Black Marxist Study Group in New York helped my thought immensely and the book project was refined and strengthened through hours of conversation, argument, and hilarity with Peter Hudson, Ifeona Harrison, Ted Sammons, Forrest Hylton, Seth Markle, Sobukwe Odinga, Daniel Rood, Hillina Seife, Khary Polk, Natasha Lightfoot, Rich Blint, Tanya Huelett, Chris Winks (again), Adam Waterman, Fanon Howell, Erik McDuffie, and Michaela Harrison. I also had the privilege of learning at the feet of the master, C. Daniel Dawson, who was generous to a fault in sharing his unrivalled expertise.

Here at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, I must thank a number of colleagues: Paul Lyons, Monica Ghosh, Cindy Franklin, Laura Lyons, Charles Lawrence, Mari Matsuda, Mike Shapiro, David Hanlon, David Chappell, Marcus Daniel, Vina Lazona, Matthew Romaniello, Ned Bertz, Noelani Arista, Shana Brown, Karen Jolly, Herb Ziegler, Margot Hendrickson, John Zuern, Craig Howes, Stan Schab, John Rosa, Ned Davis, Leonard, Andaya, Hokulani Aiku, Matthew Lauzon, Wengsheng Wang, Yuma Totani, Paul Holtrop, Lori Yancura, Gary Pak, (the late) Jerry Bentley, and, of course, my dear friend Giovanni Vitello. I would also like to give special thanks to Craig Gill, editor-in-chief of the University Press of Mississippi, for his patience and unflagging support in making this book possible. And thanks to the anonymous readers for their exacting and insightful commentary.

I must make mention of my extended family in New Jersey. Steve and Dequandra Fradkin, and their beautiful children Asha, Nadia, Ivan, Amanda, and Steve Jr., have always freely given much love and support (and, often, an open home and a hot meal). Jamie Wilson has been a friend, a brother, and a model of pedagogy, fortitude, and general right on-ness. Victor Viesca and Melany De la Cruz have been compañero/as, collaborators, and indispensable allies from beginning to end (en el espíritu de la resistencia). Kristy Ringor, Greg Chun, and Alice have been true forces for good in the world and our lives. The genius, wit, and friendship of my comrade, colleague, and co-conspirator Kobi Abayomi have been indispensable to my sanity and insanity. Stan Pyrzanowski has been a true friend and soul brother and I am grateful for his music and companionship. Lastly and most importantly, I must thank my partner in life and love, Suzanna Reiss.

What do I have that I have not received?

Chocolate Surrealism

Introduction

¹

In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live.

—Ralph Ellison

Black music has always been a tremendous source of information and inspiration for musicians, dancers, and music lovers. Listening to the music opens new worlds and windows onto the rich history of black music, society, and struggle in the circum-Caribbean, and provides a rich archive of the creative musical genius of the African diaspora. Music always expresses the interrelationships of movement, memory, and history, but this is preeminently true of the music of the African diaspora. This book uses music as both optic and focus, to examine and rethink both the modes of black cultural production and social formations in the African diaspora. The music has always been both an expression of black life and part of the philosophy that developed and emerged with that life, as history and as art (Baraka 2009, 9).

This book attempts to uncover the ways in which these black identities (ethnic, racial, religious, sociocultural) were constructed, transmitted, fashioned, and refashioned in and through music and music-making in order to create habitable spaces within the tumult of New World experiences. What is this black in black music, and what can the music relate about the maintenance and creation of Afro-diasporic cultural identities, memories, histories? As Marx has written, it is not the consciousness of men … that determines their existence, but instead their social existence that determines their consciousness. What can the musical forms and rhythms of the African diaspora tell us about consciousness and existence? Music offers both historiographic and musicological spaces of inquiry; but at the same time, as an aesthetic experience music is not entirely accessible through either methodology. The analysis of the development of New World black music reveals the complexity of stylistic evolution, historical change, and the interrelations between consciousness, culture, and material history.

The music of the African diaspora demonstrates coherent tendencies, a decidedly black style, and reveals dynamic, creative consciousness and meaningful responses to particular historical situations; here we can speak of traditions of mobilization and the mobilization of tradition. The music represents ways of being in and through time, and it is precisely in the polyrhythmic fabric (the weave of the flows and the breaks) of the musical traditions of the African diaspora that we can echo-locate black sensibilities in time and space: Lived history … is produced out of the clash of contending temporalities (A. Johnson 1999, 10). Using polyrhythm as structure and process, we can analyze the way the music of the African diaspora, heterogeneity and stylistic hybridity, keeps time.² The music makes an abstract world concrete (Friedmann).

The power of black music lies in its ability to re-present the significant structures toward which the thought, feelings, behavior, and values of the cultural community are oriented; the social context and performative dimensions of the groove give maximum possible coherence to the real and potential consciousness of the African diaspora. The music remembers Africa, the Middle Passage, and the history of the black Atlantic. There is a rigorous homology between cultural forms and social structures, and the depth of integration of black musical traditions in patterns of social and political life make the music a critical site of memory and imagination that opens onto a sea of meanings and experiences. Music means and makes sense at the intersection of the most abstract level of collective consciousness and the most concrete level of social practice and aesthetic sensibilities: Its [styles] and instrumentation change to reflect the level of people’s productive forces and the social, political, and economic structure of those people’s lives (Baraka 2009, 20). Through uncovering the multiple layers of clashing temporalities and crossing rhythms, the epistemological force of black music reveals a different and dialogical understanding of time, history, and the practice of diaspora.

In conjunction with the polyrhythm, the concept of rootwork is used here both as an historical methodology to re-present subaltern strategies and as an expression of cultural practice. Refracted through the lenses of the African diaspora, this notion alludes to conjurational practices (e.g. Hoodoo, Vodûn, Obeah, Palo Mayombe, Candomble), as well as the material operations, philosophical transformations, historical meditations, aesthetic mediations, and spiritual invocations that shape and embody the tradition: a complete and conscious return to which assimilates all the wealth of previous development (Marx 1970, 87). Highlighting what Gilroy has called the antiphony of roots and routes, thinking of black musicking³ and musical traditions as rootwork enables a move from the general ontological categories to epistemology and specific socio-historical context, a move from folk hermeneutics to historical praxis, to uncover the continual reciprocity between culture, ideology, and consciousness developing under definite conditions. Rootwork expresses the dialectics of production and reproduction, transit and transition, in the invention of tradition. We can think of root-work as a theory of practice, a black unconscious and system of dispositions reflecting an internal coherence of dynamic structures whose efficacy and vitality, "as with all symbolic reduplication lies in the extent to which it brings to consciousness all that is implicitly assumed in the unconscious mode of the [Afro-diasporic] habitus" (Bourdieu 1977, 216).

Here we can think about the work of art. Examining the music of the African diaspora helps reframe the interrelation of popular cultural expressions and social formations, and allows us to rethink the relationship of Afro-diasporic culture to the making of the modern world. By centering music as method and subject, its explanatory and elocutionary force provides a view into the critical work of cultural creation, the politics of time and temporality, and a different and perhaps deeper way of rendering New World black experiences. Placing music at the center, as both the subject of historical analysis and mode of examination, and using rootwork and polyrhythm as theoretical and structural anchors, we can develop and elaborate a methodology for Afro-diasporic historiography and the study of expressive culture more generally.

The more we attend to the uniqueness of music as a social and cultural phenomenon, the more the concepts we have inherited from the social sciences are challenged. As a medium, method, and expression of social organization of sound in motion, music transcends such classical antinomies as form and content, emotion and meaning, signifier and signified; form and content are expressions of each other (Baraka 1968). Listening to music can tell us not only about political, ideological, and cultural logics but also about the practice of everyday life. Looked upon from different vantage points, music can be conceived as at once an activity and an artifact, as process and product. Taking the music seriously demands that we attend not only to its production and reception, but also, critically, to how music continually makes meanings and feelings available to its creators and participants—audiences, musicians, dancers, and singers.

John Shepherd has written: Music seems to most faithfully reflect the intangible, fluid, and dynamic characteristics of social relationships (1991, 81). We can push this further. Music not only reflects social relations but, in many ways, is constitutive of social relations and socialization. Humanly organized sound expresses humanly organized behavior.⁴ The interrelationship of music and sociality illuminates historically and culturally specific politics of time and temporality—in a word, style. The power of music lies in its ability to at once communicate the incommunicable and to keep time, to narrate and describe the experiences of collectivity. Movement, affect, memory, and history are all united in the innate mythopoeia of music (Soyinka 1976). The dialectics of music and history shape the production, reception, and interpretation of symbolic forms, affecting presences.⁵ The music can shed much light upon the history of historical consciousness.

The peculiar phenomenology of music as sound, sign, and symbol lies in its ability to simultaneously present and represent, to historicize and poeticize existence. Music expresses cultural patterns (structures of feeling) and at the same time, articulates a relationship between communication and social structure.⁶ Music is both media and mediation: society is as much ‘in’ music as music is ‘in’ society (J. Shepherd 1991, 190). Modes of musical and cultural expression exhibit an extreme sensitivity to their historical contexts and conditions. Music means and is made meaningful in the context of social interaction, of its communal creation and reception in time and space. Thus music gives us unique insight into the nature of cultural production in general.⁷ Ellison has said, "one of the chief values of living with music lies in its power to give us an orientation in time. In doing so, it gives significance to all those indefinable aspects of experience, which nevertheless make us what we are. In the swift whirl of time music is a constant, reminding us of what we were and of that to which we aspire" (1964, 197; emphasis added).

Black Marxism and the Philosophy of Music

The history of the expressive cultures of the African diaspora provides a locus for exploration of many of the issues of music, memory, movement and history. Interrogating the black aesthetic provides both a multiperspectival historiography and sonic holography. In black music, black culture is politicized and poeticized in such a way as to make it a rich analytic.⁸ As Marx and Engels have said: History is nothing but the succession of separate generations each of which exploits the materials, capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with completely changed activity (1972, 57).

The histories of Africans in the Americas are histories of enslavement, resistance, downpression, displacement, encounter, and survival. From the middle passage to the slave cabin, from plantation to ghetto, the music of the African diaspora has nourished, sustained, and preserved Africans and their descendants in the so-called New World. The histories of the musics of the black Atlantic reveal the dialectic between the succession of modes of cultural production and the revitalization of traditional activity: the expression of discontinuous continuity (Bastide 1978), coherent deformation (Mackey 1993), and consistent modes, attitudes and approaches within changing contexts (Baraka 1963, 153).⁹ Further, these cultural practices and processes eloquently express the Caribbean counterpoint that underpins the shaping of the modern world system. The Caribbean region as locus, Africans in the Americas as actors were central to the construction of modernity, and these expressive cultures provide an alternate archive in which the histories of these countercultures of modernity are inscribed (Gilroy 1993).

The semantics and semiotics of musical communication reveal the dense interrelations of experience and expression. The complex interplay of music and sociality and its affecting presence in Afro-diaspora also enables us to glimpse some of the modalities of insurrection, accommodation, and resistance embedded in black cultural practices and politics played out on a lower register (bass culture). Historically, we can think of the popular musics of the African diaspora as a form of low-intensity peasant and proletarian warfare (Wolf 1969; James 1995). Not only do the musical conversations of the African diaspora enable and embody ways of retheorizing and remapping the geographical, cultural, and imaginative bounds of the Caribbean region; examining these expressive cultures and their production as popular styles (grooves) also enables us to read social history of the region from below and explore a different level of productive activity and cultural creation, beneath the ground of political economy.¹⁰ Through tracing some of these musical styles from slavery to freedom and through the first half of the twentieth century, we get a sense of a different level of productive activity and cultural creation; we can begin to echo-locate an Atlantic Sound. In addition, we can examine some of the sociological, philosophical, and feelingful dimensions and functions of the music: the politics of music and the pleasure of meaning.¹¹

The complexities of transculturation, ethnic differentiation, gendered identification, class, status, and state formation in the Caribbean over time are such that we can speak of Creole identities (Brathwaite), plural societies (Smith), proto-proletarians (Craton), reconstituted peasantries (Mintz), and lumpen and comprador bourgeoisies (Rodney; Frank). New social and cultural forms emerged in the Caribbean that were neither determined by the African past nor reducible to the idealized structures of political economy.

The massive demographic displacement of the African slave trade, and the socio-political derangement and dis-integration that ensued on the African continent ensured that a wide spectrum of diverse peoples with varying cultural competencies and social statuses were recruited into the New World labor regime. This had profound effects on the making of black culture in diaspora. Differences in age and sex as well as regions of provenance and time of arrival are also important variables that further complicate theories of cultural transmission and contact. Processes of transculturation among African groups in the circum-Caribbean region reveal that these intricate sociocultural interchanges had more to do with the historical patterns of interaction on various local levels than simply ethnic origins, class formations, or demographics.¹² Shared experiences, cultural sensibilities, economic conditions, and New World labor discipline enabled and fostered the formation of coherent, if contradictory, panethnic African-based worldviews and cultural networks. But this process was by no means automatic; the question is how these black identities were constructed, refashioned, and expressed in and through music and music-making. As James Snead observed: Black culture highlights the observance of […] repetition, often in homage to an original generative instance or act. Cosmogony, the origins and stability of things, hence prevails because it recurs.… Periodic ceremonies are ways in which black culture comes to terms with its perception of repetition, precisely by highlighting that perception (1981, 149).

The central role of music and dance in black cultural life survived the middle passage. Music has always been a crucial part of a wider African and Afro-diasporic cosmology and worldview, inseparable from a variety of related media and relations. There is a deep structural integration between music and virtually all other aspects Afro-diasporic performance. Music and dance are so closely bound together in the thinking of many West Africans that it is difficult to separate song from movement or playing the drum from speech. The various media blend into one another as when the drummer might say of a dancer, ‘The dance she spoke’. It is in fact, difficult to find a word in any of the West African languages that is equivalent to the Western idea of ‘music’ (Stone, 15). The continued implication and imbrication of music and performance in the social lives, cultural productions and political articulations of the African diaspora are testimonies to the profound resourcefulness of the enslaved, the deep necessity of innovation and adaptation, and the critical role of song and dance in cultural and communal preservation. Culture is not a fixed condition but a process: the product of interaction between past and present … it is not one of survivals but of transformations (Levine 1978, 5). In West and West Central Africa, the main areas of catchment and embarkation for enslaved Africans can (roughly) be divided into six overlapping cultural zones (clusters) that shared numerous underlying cultural similarities (as well as marked differences).¹³ Similarly, the New World context of the Caribbean provided common conditions and experiences as well as a host of new differentiations and stratifications. The power of black music lies in its feelingful representation of these transformations of African peoples into black folks.

Black Science

The concept of rootwork is more than just metaphorically suggestive, but also is historically and empirically verifiable when we turn to the diaspora as a whole and maintain a focus on cultural production as process. Polyrhythm provides an analytical and methodological tool to examine the multiplicities of time and space, musically and historically in the Caribbean region as a whole. There is an unmistakable family resemblance between the musics of the African diaspora, a kinship based upon lineage and history and shaped in and by the Caribbean crucible, while still enabling these various local traditions to maintain their subtle individuality. This work uses four musical genres to outline a general historiography of the African diaspora and its musical and aesthetic expression. Since black labor was critical to the creation of white capital, and given the centrality and ubiquity of music in the cultures of the African diaspora, these musical traditions have much to tell us about the lives and histories of people of African descent. By placing music and cultural production at the center of historical analysis, we can create a more (w)holistic historiography of the circum-Caribbean region, theorizing the area as integrated culturally and conceptually while paying close attention to the fractures, fragmentations, and historical particularities of development and, at the same time, holding the region as both crucially constitutive of wider Atlantic history. Black music provides the back beat to the making of the modern world.

Utilizing archival sources and research, oral interviews, secondary historical works, musicology, ethnographic and linguistic literature, and drawing from a broad framework of cultural studies and critical theory, I investigate the musical cultures of the African diaspora, both in their relations to the African origins of the enslaved, the New World context, and their ongoing transformations in relation to political economic change and social flux. The techniques, content, and structure of these musical modes reflect and engender shared conceptual frameworks, cultural strategies, and creative approaches that give meaning and coherence to the idea of a black aesthetic, understanding blackness as processual and contingent, imagined but no less real. Afro-diasporic musical traditions reveal deep structural forms and aesthetic grammars of the historical imagination,¹⁴ at the same time they encode and embody an alternative archive of the processes