Laurent Dubois featured in NEW YORKER ROUNDTABLE

March 24, 2009; The New Yorker

Roundtable: Haitian Music

The idea for this roundtable started with Madison Smartt Bell, and a post he wrote about Haitian music for the New York Times’s Paper Cuts blog.

I knew Wyclef’s music and a few other names on Bell’s list, but I found myself feeling woefully short on context. I wanted to know what’s going on now in Haiti. What are the big struggles within and behind Haitian music? What should people be listening to? To answer these questions, and others, I enlisted the help of music scholar Garnette Cadogan and brought together Bell with:

Laurent Dubois, who is the author of “Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution,” and is working on a history of the banjo.

Elizabeth McAlister, who writes about Haitian music and religious culture. She is the author of “Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora,” and produced the Smithsonian Folkways CD “Rhythms of Rapture: Sacred Musics of Haitian Vodou.”

Ned Sublette, the author of “The World That Made New Orleans,” “Cuba and Its Music,” and the forthcoming “The Year Before the Flood.”

Edwidge Danticat, a novelist and author of the memoir “Brother, I’m Dying.”

Garnette Cadogan himself, who is at work on a book about rock-reggae superstar Bob Marley.

The conversation is theirs. I’m here only as student and moderator.

Laurent Dubois:

Last year, researching the history of music in Haiti, I came across a description of a big dinner organized on a plantation a decade before the Haitian Revolution. The M.C. was a plantation slave, the mistress of the white manager, and the invitees were slaves from neighboring plantations. The entertainment was provided by two men, described as “public singers,” playing banjos. One of them had a name I found startling: “Trois Feuilles” (“Twa Fey”), or “Three Leaves.” When I told Madison about this, he had the same sharp reaction I had—“Twa Fey” is an anthem in Haitian Vodou music, a kind of charter that describes exile, survival, and remembrance. I have no idea what to make of the fact that the singer took on this name, but I start here to suggest that part of the intensity of much Haitian music—and I share Madison’s feelings about many of the songs on his list—has to do with the way it offers up some very deep roots. Haitian music keeps reworking a long history of intense exchange even as it carries on and confronts cycles of exile.

To read the full article, click here.