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

Awakening Spaces: French Caribbean Popular Songs, Music, and Culture. By Brenda F. Berrian. (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. [xiv, 287 p. ISBN 0-226-04455-6 (cloth); 0-226-04456-4 (pbk.). $40 (cloth); $16 (pbk.).]

Culturally distinct, but politically tied to France as overseas région and département respectively, the Lesser Antilles islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe find themselves squeezed between conflicting French and Caribbean ideologies and economies. Historically dominated by French interests, the islands' peoples have long struggled to maintain their African legacy. If, in the past, the unrelenting skirmishes for cultural heritage could be said to have taken place within the shadows of daily life, during the previous half century--dating back at least to the post-World War II rise to power of Martinique politician and négritude cofounder Amié Césaire--the resistance to French hegemony, along with the concurrent redefinition of island cultural values, has been fought in the open spaces. Particularly so, argues Brenda F. Berrian, in the musical soundscapes of island life.

It is this struggle, taking place over the airwaves and in the islands' many performance spaces, that Berrian seeks to explicate. This is important work. Little documented, but central to island identity, are the genres of popular music (as typified in the sounds of the beguine, jazz, and zouk) and traditional music (as typified in the sound of carnival in general and the gwo ka and bèlè drums in particular). Berrian's focus is on musicians' manipulation and politicization of these forms from 1970 to 1996.

Berrian is interested in how lyricists use song texts to promote their political or social agendas, and this becomes one of the book's central focuses--an emphasis amplified, no doubt, by the fact that the author is not an ethnomusicologist. This, of course, is perfectly fine, but readers interested in the more complex whole might find themselves discouraged by the author's gray-scale descriptions of musical style and form.

Following a useful prologue and introduction, Berrian divides her book into seven chapters, each, she says, representing a space for social "awakening" in which there is a "piggyback effect of domains wherein the journey into one of them naturally leads into others within a circuitous route" (p. 233). In order, these areas are: (1) songs referencing childhood, (2) songs of optimism, (3) subversive songs sung by women, (4) black resistance, (5) performance and marketing, (6) recontextualization of urban music, and (7) reinvigoration and reconstitution of traditional drum culture.

Throughout the book, Berrian convincingly argues for the central importance of Creole lyrics as a device to define and promote a Caribbean heritage that is both culturally vital in its own right and politically unfettered by France. Berrian begins in the first chapter by focusing on the Martinique band Malavoi and what she describes as the group's interest in defining, through the use of metaphors from childhood, a culturally "safe space." This chapter, like those that follow, attempts to accomplish three goals: to give a biographical account of the musicians involved, to analyze lyrics, and to explicate the social, financial, and political milieu in which events take place.

It is a logical, and generally successful, approach to the problem--but not in all cases. Chapter 4, titled "More Than a Doudou: Women's Subversive Songs," seeks to make the point that women are not just doudous (that is, powerless, just a man's plaything) but are actively claiming their own space and lives from a world once dominated by men. Yet, because the reader is forced to rely too heavily on Berrian's voice and her interpretation of the facts rather than those of her informants, the thesis is sometimes hard to accept. At the very least, the facts require deeper exegesis. How, for example, is Edith Lefel's song "Marie" consistent with any sensible person's notion of liberation? Berrian states that Marie's "decision to die...