“A dangerous balance between silence and art”

Nicholas Laughlin — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 17:17:24 +0000

Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin (at left), moments before their execution; Port-au-Prince, November 1964

. . . on November 12, 1964, two pine poles are erected outside the national cemetery. A captive audience is gathered.

Radio, print, and television journalists are summoned. Numa and Drouin are dressed in what on old black-and-white film seem to be the clothes in which they’d been captured — khakis for Drouin and a modest white shirt and denim-looking pants for Numa. They are both marched from the edge of the crowd towards the poles. Their hands are tied behind their backs by two of Duvalier’s private henchmen, Tonton Macoutes in dark glasses and civilian dress. The Tonton Macoutes then tie the ropes around the men’s biceps to bind them to the poles and keep them upright.

This week, the CRB is very pleased to publish an essay by the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, excerpted from her new book. She begins by telling the story of the execution of two young Haitian activists, Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, at the order of the dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier. This event, Danticat explains, is one of her personal “creation myths.” The story of these brave young men is her starting-point for a bracing consideration of the importance of literature, of the act of writing and the act of reading, in dangerous times:

When it was a crime to pick up a bloodied body on the street, Haitian writers introduced Haitian readers to Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Antigone, which had been rewritten in Creole and placed in Haitian settings by the playwright Franck Fouché and the poet Felix Morisseau Leroy. This is where these writers placed their bets, striking a dangerous balance between silence and art.

How do writers and readers find each other under such dangerous circumstances? Reading, like writing, under these conditions is disobedience to a directive in which the reader, our Eve, already knows the possible consequences of eating that apple but takes a bold bite anyway.

How does that reader find the courage to take this bite, open that book? After an arrest, an execution? Of course he or she may find it in the power of the hushed chorus of other readers, but she can also find it in the writer’s courage in having stepped forward, in having written, or rewritten, in the first place.

Also published in the CRB this week: the latest in our special series of film reviews, supported by the trinidad+tobago film festival. Ian Craig looks at Los Viajes del Viento (The Wind Journeys), a “road movie” set along Colombia’s Caribbean coast, directed by Ciro Guerra.

Finally, this week we launch our new music column, which focuses on new releases from underexposed Caribbean genres as well as classic recordings and performances of the past. It begins with B.C. Pires’s review of The Longest Kiss Goodnight, the latest album from the Trinidadian rock band jointpop (your Antilles blogger is a fan), and John Robert Lee’s essay on the late St Lucian folk singer Sesenne Descartes and her classic 1991 album, now scheduled for re-release.

R.I.P. Sesenne Descartes, 1914–2010

Nicholas Laughlin — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:28:59 +0000

Sesenne Descartes. Photograph courtesy the St Lucia Folk Research Centre

My country heart, I am not home till Sesenne sings,
a voice with woodsmoke and ground-doves in it, that cracks
like clay on a road whose tints are the dry season’s,
whose cuatros tighten my heartstrings. The shac-shacs
rattle like cicadas under the fur-leaved nettles
of childhood, an old fence at noon, bel-air, quadrille,
la comette, gracious turns, until delight settles.
A voice like rain on a hot road, a smell of cut grass,
its language as small as the cedar’s and sweeter than any
wherever I have gone, that makes my right hand Ishmael,
my guide the star-fingered frangipani.

— Derek Walcott, from “Homecoming”, in The Bounty

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“Manmay la dit wai!”, from Sesenne: St Lucia’s First Lady of Folk (1991), produced by Ronald “Boo” Hinkson. Audio recording courtesy the St Lucia Folk Research Centre:

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Marie Selipha “Sesenne” Descartes, St Lucian folk singer and “queen of folk culture,” died on Wednesday 11 August in Mon Repos.

The poet John Robert Lee has written an obituary of Sesenne published by the St Lucia Folk Research Centre. He describes her public debut in the early 1920s:

Sony [Sesenne’s father] had plans to start a La Rose group in the Micoud area and he needed a lead singer. Sesenne was then posed with the challenge of being lead singer/chantwelle of that new La Rose group. Sesenne was about eight years old at the time. Her father first informed her mother of his decision to place her in the group because he believed she was the best individual to become the chantwelle. Sesenne accepted and she took her first bold steps into folk culture history. Sesenne said of her distinct and pristine voice, “Everyone was envious of my voice” and “when I sang I could be heard in Magretout.”

At the peak of the La Rose celebrations in Mon Repos, a huge crowd of La Rose fans awaited the commencement of the séance. Sesenne realised that the crowd was growing impatient, so she requested that coffee be served to the people in an effort to curb their increasing frustration. The ushers at the séance organised many teacups to be filled with coffee for whoever wanted a drink. And as if that was not enough, Sesenne asked the ushers to cut the two cakes that were gifted to the La Rose group into small pieces so that everyone could get a taste. The people were all appreciative of that gesture of genuine hospitality. When all of that was done, Sesenne stepped onto the stage and sang these words — “ah ya yai mamai La Rose, pa plé wé!” — the crowd went into an uproar.

The Caribbean Review of Books » john robert lee

“A dangerous balance between silence and art”

R.I.P. Sesenne Descartes, 1914–2010