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  • The Other Side of the Water: The Journey of a Haitian Rara Band in Brooklyn
  • Erin Durban-Albrecht
The Other Side of the Water: The Journey of a Haitian Rara Band in Brooklyn. Third World Newsreel, 2010. By Jeremy Robins (Director, Co-Producer) and Magali Damas (Co-Producer).

The Third World Newsreel documentary by Jeremy Robins and Magali Damas insightfully blends together archival footage, vérité interviews, and other documentary materials highlighting Haitian cityscapes in Brooklyn to enliven discussions about Caribbean diasporic cultural production in the United States. The film focuses on Haitian Rara music performed by walking bands during the Lenten season that feature percussion and wind instruments and its transnational circulations. The Other Side of the Water follows the twenty-year history of a band [End Page 206] in New York, DJA-RARA, but contextualizes its performances within the history of Rara as Haitian resistance in musical registers as well as within broader socio-cultural, political and economic shifts such as racist United States domestic policies and foreign interventions, immigration, and social movements.

The opening montage of men constructing tanbou (drums) juxtaposes archival film from Haiti and contemporary shots from Brooklyn; even before viewers are introduced to DJARARA, the filmmakers place the band in a genealogy of Haitian music rooted in Afro-diasporic cultural forms, resistance to European hegemony, and vodou and Christian ceremony. Although the filmmakers draw our attention to the continuities of Rara in the diaspora with the music’s provenance in the Haiti mountainside, the documentary also directs us to understanding how Rara changes in the context of weekly gatherings in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and demonstrations in New York against police brutality and AIDS stigmatization. Pè Yves, the centrally featured DJA-RARA band member in the documentary, describes that re-working the tradition of Rara in the United States is a way of “putting Haiti forward” in a place where Haiti and Haitians are violently denigrated. Yves continues, Rara is about the “survival of Haitians in New York.” This profound statement underwrites the film as the transmigrants in DJA-RARA are shown in protest against egregious American laws and military interventions in addition to surviving the everyday conditions of immigrant life in the United States—work in the service economy, cramped living spaces, and endurance in order to shape some kind of continuous engagement with life in Haiti.

Rara transformations lòt bo dlo (on the other side of the water, or in the diaspora) are important to two related debates highlighted in the film: Where does Rara come from? What is the role of vodou in Rara? The contested origins of Rara emerge in interviews. Various theories set forth by the interviewees are that Rara developed out of the hours set aside for amusement under Napoleonic Code, of Rada vodou ceremonies honoring old world spirits, of harvest celebrations (konbit), and/or of walking funeral processions. Rara scholar and author of Rara! Vodou, Power and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora (2002), Elizabeth McAlister, notes in her interview that Rara is related to carnival Carnival in the Americas as well as Jazz processions. She calls Rara the “mouthpiece of the poor,” a way to perform politics and speak public opinion in Haiti and its diaspora. Pè Yves, whose interviews narrate the documentary, follows with the instruction that even though no one knows where Rara comes from exactly, it is a big part of Haitian culture in the way that McAlister describes. Yet, as the documentary shows, many Haitians express aversion to the vodou aspects of Rara. The Other Side of the Water traces a generational divide in DJA-RARA that has several fault lines, such as the amount of discipline the band needs, but that in large part appears to be about the degree of vodou’s centrality to Rara. As the last half of the film wends through the lives of the new generation DJA-RARA band members, Rara is articulated more frequently as something that, at least in its diasporic manifestations, transcends vodou. As the film successfully argues, Rara becomes important in the diaspora as a Haitian mode of belonging, resistance, hope, and cultural connection that de-centers the frame...

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