By: Ruby Wells

Ruby Wells — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 19:38:16 +0000

I’ve always longed to have a cd, because I’m in love with this voice. Today I was just browsing through, and came across the queen of culture. I believe she was recognize too late, but as the saying goes (better late than never). Sweet St.Lucia the island that’s adored by many worldwide. Let’s keep up with the tradition, and most of all have dame Sessene Descatres songs on cd. I’d buy @ least a hundred, and distribute just to invite people to visit our island. There’s so much to offer, and so much to see. Rip chantwelle Sessene!

By: Shantel Jn Baptiste

Shantel Jn Baptiste — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 14:14:54 +0000

i believe that she had and still has a great impact on most of us and has inspired us in many different ways.she was a great leader ad singer.she will forever leave in all of our hearts.though for me her time here on earth with us was not suffice it is alife that will be remembered for many to come. R.I.P. We love and we miss u!!!!!…..

By: John Robert Lee

John Robert Lee — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 20:56:35 +0000

I think we are moved by the rootedness, earthiness, Saint Lucianness of Sesenne’s lyrics, the music and that coming-at-you- from-far voice. Like a band coming up the road in the early jouvert morning. Casual like a jazz singer, all hoarse intonation and inflection, lines cut, just so, the language singing, a conversation between familiars. A life, many lives, in the voice accompanied by the other voices. Community of song.
All the voices of Walcott’s folk plays, the verse of them and the voice he is always searching for in his St. Lucian poems, he must have heard in Sesenne’s guttural, mountain-and-valley chantwelle wail. “A voice with woodsmoke and ground-doves in it.”
There is something about St. Lucian folk music that moves all its writers in ways we can’t explain easily. For me the violon (violin) wailing, the la commette and other dance and music forms, supported by the dancers in wob dwiyet, curtseying, flirting smiles, toe to heel..; the chantwel and chantwelle chanters (Sesenne was a chantwelle, a leader of her group of singers), who turn rumshops into La Rose halls as August, their festival month, approaches; the folk musicians of the anban goj bands with their violons, banjos, cuatros, shac shacs, bones and drums. The anban goj, describing the violins tucked under the goj, the throat; and the lyrics, with their tinge of sadness, broken hearts, unrequited love, not only of the folk singers, but of more classical, urban composers like Charles Cadet – all that moves me deeply, to glimpse my own creole (kweyol) soul inside. Another place. Another life.
I think Saint Lucia is at heart a Creole/Kweyol society, neither English nor French. And the music of Sesenne, her folk singers and musicians, call to that. Call from that. Are that! And yes, the heartstrings tighten, deep under the sound, the dancers’ skirts, the insistent shac shac. God, the swing! The hips of the women, just so, just right! Creole notations of composition and choreography.
Anyway, I think it is some of those things that our great poet also yearns after and hears and sees. And heard in Sesenne. And took with him to Stockholm in 1992.

Comments on: R.I.P. Sesenne Descartes, 1914–2010

By: Ruby Wells

By: Shantel Jn Baptiste

By: John Robert Lee