Listening for Geographies: Music as Sonic Compass Pointing Toward African and Christian Diasporic Horizons in the Caribbean

I met my partner in Haiti while I was doing field research on Vodou and music. At the time he was a sound tech for his sister’s band, Boukman Eksperyans. We were introduced at the Rex Theater in downtown Port-au-Prince, right on the stage, a few hours before the show. The band usually set up to a soundtrack of its own music or to Bob Marley and the Wailers pumped up to a volume I found uncomfortable but that the musicians loved. Loud music made the air thicker, and it shaped the space into a pulsating, vibrating, energized place.

Hand-carved drums thundered during the sound check. The band members of Boukman Eksperyans were self-conscious researchers of the musical legacy of the African Diaspora that had brought their forebears to Haiti during colonial slavery. Taking ethnographic forays into the countryside to historic religious compounds, the band learned the rhythms, songs, and dances associated with the eighteenth-century diasporic strands: the Dahome, the Nago, the Kongo, and the Ibo. They blended these styles, along with elements of Protestant and Rastafari thought, into their own rock fusion and toured the Antilles, the United States, Canada, Europe, and Japan on Chris Blackwell’s Island record label (and its subsidiary, Mango). Traveling through the networks of the contemporary Haitian Diaspora, the band sang of the Afro-Creole history of Haiti. They crafted a religious message and a politics of a creole past even as they leaned into a globalizing future, heaving their Dahomean-derived drums through airport metal detectors together with digital music players slung from their back pockets.

Music makes a place where my husband can live in his body. Now that we have moved to a university town in Connecticut, my husband has become adept at streaming live Haitian radio broadcasts over the Internet and through the many speakers in our house. He pumps up the volume just like in the old sound check days, playing his favorite style, konpa. Our daily activities in New England are punctuated by the lively advertising jingles and the radio news in Port-au-Prince. In these moments the soundtrack of our lives echoes the soundscape of a household in Haiti (when there is electricity there, that is). Living away from his extended family and friends, outside his country and culture, my partner tells our children that he came to the U.S. too late, when he was too old to be remade here. Yet when we return to Haiti, he is clearly marked as a partial outsider, a “dyaspora,” by his clothing, his physical fitness, and an Americanness readable in other subtle ways. He has become like many transmigrants who are no longer quite fully at home anywhere. For him, I think, Haitian music and radio ads move him to a psychic space closer to home. In fact, for my husband, music itself is a kind of home and hearing it makes him feel he is “in his skin” (see Ramnarine 2007). When the devastating earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, he lived in an in-between netherworld, playing the only radio station still on the air, Signal FM. We listened to the litany of the dead, the on-air discussions and the slow dirges on Haitian radio, with the television turned soundlessly to CNN (see also McAlister 2012a).

But the konpa music changes its tune when my husband’s brother visits. Frèy Guy is konvèti (converted), an evangelical who frowns on mainstream konpa because it encourages hip rolling, couples dancing, and impure thoughts. Guy brings audiocassettes, CDs, videos, and DVDs of evangelical konpa, Haitian gospel, Haitian church services, and Haitian evangelical TV shows. The weekend after the quake, Guy and his family came from Boston to wait for news at our house. The scripture of the day on their favorite Web site was about earthquakes, all part of God’s mysterious plan. Visiting with Guy, we are invited to feel at home in a different diaspora, or more properly phrased, a global movement. Through witnessing...