Black Soundscapes White Stages: The Meaning of Francophone Sound in the Black Atlantic

2 “To Begin the Biguine” Re-membering Antillean Musical Time

How it was beautiful . . . my Martinique! —Léona Gabriel While twentieth-century Antillean regionalist poet Emmanuel Flavia-Léopold affectionately names his nostalgic collection of poems after the folkloric song “Adieu madras, Adieu foulard,” negritude poet Guy Tirolien’s “Adieu ‘Adieu Foulards,’” in Balles d’or aligns himself with the poetic camp of a certain Antillean black radical musical refusal: We will no longer sing the defunct romances that the honey sweet hearts used to sing long ago unfurling handkerchiefs on beaches of sugar waving goodbye to the setting sails of winged ships. We will no longer pluck on our plaintive guitars, to celebrate Ninon or pretty Amélie the pure crystal of laughs, the kisses full of spice nor the moons reflection on the golden brown skin [ . . . ] We will raise our voices in a bouquet of screams to rupture the eardrums of our sleeping brothers and on the ardent bow of our island the fires of our anger in the night will rage our raucous bonfires of hope.1 Tirolien’spoeticscreambreaksupthecolonialromancebetweenthedoudouand departing French sailor so fondly represented in French colonial and Antillean folkloric song and poetry. Le cri nègre drowns out the doudou’s romantic sweet talk and her somnolent lullabies; but at the same time, it ignores the plight of the women of color inscribed in the imperial poetic economies it mockingly disparages . Instead the black scream intends to awaken “sleeping brothers” and to rally them for the coming revolution, and a coming new black fraternité. two “To Begin the Biguine” Re-membering Antillean Musical Time 48 black soundscapes white stages In a similar vein, Guyanese poet Léon-Gontran Damas, like other negritude poets, expresses frustration with black Atlantic popular musical culture in the imperial metropolis during the interwar years. In his poem “Nuit Blanche” (Sleepless Night) from the collection Pigments—Névralages (1937), Damas alludes to the imperial violence haunting the depths of contemporary black Atlantic musical practices. He darkly writes, I’ve waltzed my friends madly waltzed to such a point that often I thought I had an arm about the waist of Uncle Gobineau or cousin Hitler or that good Aryan gumming out his years on some park bench2 Damas represents popular dance culture as a site of historic complicity and of (homosexual-incestuous) colonial family romance. His double play on the French expression nuit blanche—“sleepless night,” literally “white night”— poetically relates a late-night musical culture to the loss of black time and the whitewashing of black cultural authenticity. In “Trêve” (Enough), Damas calls for a break in this musical beating, evoking the violent historic depth fueling the popularity of black New World and colonial musical performances in France. Enough with blues with hammering pianos with muted trumpets with tapping feet crazy with rhythmic satisfaction Enough with swing sessions around rings excited from wild screams Damas’s description of the hammering of the piano, the clacking of the feet, and the wild cries of the crowd invert the scene of pleasure into one of violence, suggesting a deep complicity between the beating of black Atlantic musical culture “to begin the biguine” 49 and the beating of black bodies and subjectivities in the imperial metropolis. (Chapter 4 takes up this question more thoroughly in a critical reading of the figure of the tam-tam and Damas’s modernist epic poem Black-Label.) It should come as no surprise that women Antillean thinkers listened more carefully to the Antillean folkloric and popular musical culture that negritude ’s male poets wanted to drown out. Much like “Adieu” constitutes an origin myth of French Antillean relations, so too the origins, authorship, and cultural authenticity of the hybrid folkloric dance and musical genre the biguine is a source of contentious debate turning on questions of gender and belonging.3 While dominant and male-centered negritude discourse operated in the “major mode,” creating heroic poetic figures who engage in epic struggles with History and make absolute choices, what the analysis below will call “negritude in the minor” expresses the negotiations of the everyday that take place across colonial and racial lines. Eschewing the mythical return to African roots, “negritude in the minor” instead involves expressing transnational relations of continuity. Traditionally dismissed as “middle ground” or “less radical” within negritude circles and histories, writers Jane and Paulette Nardal along with Andrée Nardal excel in this minor mode. They pinpoint the gendered...