Awakening Spaces: French Caribbean Popular Songs, Music, and Culture (review)

Awakening Spaces: French Caribbean Popular Songs, Music, and Culture, by Brenda F. Berrian. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. xvi + 287 pp. ISBN 0-226-04456-4 paper.

To the casual observer from outside the Caribbean, the region appears to have produced more than its fair share of popular music. From Cuba and Jamaica in the western end of the archipelago all the way to the southern-most island nation of Trinidad and Tobago, local songs have told the stories of a people whose sense of the oral tradition is very strong. The outsider may hear or understand only a small part of what is said in these songs, seeing mainly the danceable aspect of most compositions. But as most people in the Caribbean know, it is in the lyrics of these songs that most Caribbean people express their worldview, their grassroots philosophy, their likes and dislikes. Understand what the lyrics are saying and why, and one understands a lot about the Caribbean.

What holds true for the reggae of Jamaica, brought to international acclaim by the late Bob Marley, and for the calypso of Trinidad, also holds true for the songs of French-speaking Martinique and Guadeloupe. More correctly, one should term these islands créole-speaking, for, as Brenda Berrian's study shows so overwhelmingly, the dominant language of these songs is créole, the true language of the masses in the "French" Caribbean. Berrian does for Martinican and Guadeloupean music what has already been done in abundance for Jamaican and Trinidadian popular music. She brings to anglophone readers a detailed look at what the songs are about, what their composers set out to do, and how the various works were received by the public.

The "awakening spaces" of the study's are those of empowerment and identity in popular song lyrics of the French Caribbean from 1970 to 1996. "Martinican and Guadeloupean songwriters," Berrian writes, "clearly link performance to an emotional audience response, proving that they are repositories of cultural meaning" (9). We learn about the origins of the popular bands Malavoi and Kassav, the latter largely responsible for the crossover of French Caribbean music to the international stage with the introduction of a new breed of party music called zouk. There is abundant detail on how these musicians and their talented colleagues and countrymen set about crafting their lyrics and music to achieve maximum response, and the level of their commitment both to their art and their people becomes apparent. Most of these artists were men, but Berrian also looks at a group of women singers who "managed to overcome being silenced by male domination and a male control of language" (8). What she sees is a pan-Caribbean situation, though she does not dwell on similar situations in Jamaica and Trinidad popular music. But that was not her purpose. What Berrian does is focus our attention of the fascinating world of the French Caribbean as seen in its music. Her work is multi-faceted and interesting. Biguine and zouk will sound quite different once we understand, thanks to this study, what the lyricists are trying to say, and why. The abundant transcriptions/translations ensure that this study of popular music and culture is also a rich study of contemporary French Caribbean society as a whole.