A Day for the Hunter, a Day for the Prey: Popular Music and Power in Haiti (review)

A Day for the Hunter, a Day for the Prey: Popular Music and Power in Haiti, by Gage Averill. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. xxviii + 276 pp. ISBN 0-226-03292-2 paper.

Gage Averill is a well-known authority on Haitian music, and A Day for the Hunter, a Day for the Prey will only enhance his reputation. Indeed, his knowledge of Haitian music history is amazing. The book, however, is not simply a history of twentieth-century Haitian music: it is really a political history of Haiti as portrayed in music. Averill's exegesis is an all the more impressive achievement because of the extent to which he is able to ground the politics in the music. There are a number of excellent studies that present musical and social developments in more or less parallel narratives, a strategy most ethnomusicologists and many anthropologists find tenable for implying correlations. For Averill, grounding the politics means not merely referring his discussion to the lower classes but rather searching for actual determinative dynamics in the music. There will always be some people for whom such an objective is unachievable, but Averill certainly pushes the envelope as far as anyone I have seen. The introduction provides his justification for his approach. A tour de force, the introduction would well serve any student or scholar in ethnomusicology or any cognate field as a statement about the way contemporary ethnomusicologists try to discuss musical meaning.

By the same token, what is possible in a discussion of Haiti might not be as convincing in other places. The Haiti we visit is this book is a country of such cultural riches that incredible complexes of meaning can coalesce around numerous musical styles, extensive folkloric and proverbial erudition, Catholic and Vodou religious liturgy and symbolic imagery, ambiguities and puns in the use of French and Creole, and a heritage of coded class and racial distinctions. Within the context of this book, Averill portrays this cultural legacy as a record of intellectual and creative responses to issues of power, and Haitians come across as people deeply conscious of the intertextual possibilities within this legacy of kaleidoscopic signification. As such, it makes sense that artists and intellectuals could play the part Averill assigns them as "conscience of the people," and the broad need for a response makes sense as well. Unless one has actual experience, one would find it difficult to imagine how frustrating and annoying it is to live under oppression and stupidity. This abundant arena of metaphoric engagement is testimony to many Haitians' disgust and to their need to come to terms with their difficult history. Although latent and applied violence remain as ever the foundation of power, even the ruling elites felt the need to participate deeply in this cultural complex--more deeply than we see in many other comparable situations--in order to support their authority.

Averill discusses four periods of twentieth-century Haitian history with reference to the ways music served as an important medium for the characterization of social and political groups. These periods are the American occupation (1915-34) and its aftermath, the regime of François "Papa Doc" Duvalier (1957-71), the regime of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier (1971-86), and the period of various military rules up to the brokered return to Haiti of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1993. The four major chapters on these periods are framed by the noteworthy theoretical introduction and by an epilogue. The epilogue reaffirms Averill's purpose of portraying music as "a medium of the communication and negotiation of power," through which class relations can be seen in dynamic and complex patterns of influence, even when the relations seem at first glance to be those of domination and resistance. The chronicle is propelled by Averill's ironic narrative of musical production as a...