Rara!: Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora (review)

During the six weeks between the eve of Lent and Easter Week, Haitian Rara bands take to the streets, offering the urban and rural poor of Haiti an opportunity to negotiate power under conditions of political and economic insecurity as well as publicly celebrate Vodoun religious culture. Through the performance of music, song, and dance during long parades of many miles, Rara bands serve participants and audiences by recalling to memory an oppressed and brutal past. Perhaps more crucially, these bands express much about the current realities of Haitian social, spiritual, and political life as they perform religious work for Voudoun spirits, solidify the notion of community through the patronage of local "big men," and contest political oppression. Elizabeth McAlister's book, Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora, exemplifies a well-written, multidisciplinary approach to this understudied genre. Through solid ethnography and analysis, she shows how Rara serves its practitioners as a strategy of social protest as well as a celebration of religious and expressive culture for lower-class, disenfranchised Haitians.

To the untrained eye, Rara bands might appear to be chaotic groups of revelers, but they are actually highly organized, mixed-gender ensembles of twenty or more performers, each of whom has a specific role as a musician, singer, or dancer. Rara bands create their distinctive music through performance on the banbou or vaksin, hollowed bamboo tubes of varying lengths that produce a single tone or a tone and its higher octave. A group of vaksin players improvise hocketed patterns until an interesting ostinato is produced and then repeated to become the basis of a song. Other participants include a variety of drummers and various percussion instrumentalists, singers, and finally, dancers who also solicit contributions. Some bands are simple affairs whereby performers simply stomp their feet in a marching rhythm as they perform songs; others are more elaborate and may feature other instrumentation, such as brass sections.

Dancing is integral to Rara processions and, like many Afro-Caribbean dance traditions, each Rara dance is based on a specific rhythm. While some dances are more closely related to Afro-Haitian traditions, others reflect styles derived from European social dances. The vocal repertoire of Rara bands is similarly broad and ranges from Voudou prayer songs and rituals to betiz songs, the latter of which are often overtly sexual and absurd. Perhaps most important in terms of contesting power are pwen songs, which use indirect signification and metaphor to convey political critique.

Rara! is organized into chapters which draw variously from the fields of ethnomusicology, performance studies, and religious studies. The first chapter, "Work and Play, Pleasure and Performance," presents an ethnography of Rara performance organized along the lines of a work-play continuum, in which Rara is a "time of all-night play during which short periods of work occur" (p. 57). Chapter 2 examines betiz songs as a popular form of Haitian communication that reveals truths about gender, machismo, vulgarity, and sexuality as well as class inequalities, power dynamics, and dictatorial politics. Through betiz songs, Rara processions offer the often silenced masses a powerful vehicle of cultural critique and protest. But, as McAlister points out, Rara serves other needs as well, namely the work of Haitian Vodoun religious ritual, which is the topic of chapter 3. Here she argues that Rara festivals serve the spirit world in ways crucial to the community through public performance and, by extension, its valorization to the greater community.

Chapter 4, "Rara and 'the Jew:' Premodern Anti-Judaism in Postmodern Haiti," is provocative in its analysis of the figures of Jesus, Judas, and "the Jews" during Rara. Rara developed as an Afro-Creole cultural expression in the context of a community dominated by Catholicism, and each year its...