The Song of Freedom: Vodou, Conscientization, and Popular Culture in Haiti

Abstract

The themes of justice, liberation, peace, progress, and unity dominate the music of the popular culture today in Haiti and its Diaspora, now renamed the Tenth Department. While the people of Haiti have been in the forefront of the world resistance movement against colonialism and political oppression for the last two centuries, and Haitians are known throughout the world as a fighting people (Charlie Mingus, the great African-American jazz musician recorded in 1957 a composition titled “Haitian Fight Song”), it is only in the past ten years that its popular music has explicitly articulated the themes that in the 1970s were referred to as “Kilti libète” or Freedom Culture. This movement that is not limited to music, for one finds its counterparts in the dance, drama, literature, and the plastic arts, results in part from a long accumulation and internalization of resistance patterns, and the world progressive movement that came of age in the wake of the 1960s social consciousness revolution spearheaded by the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. This chapter, an exploration into the Haitian song of freedom from its roots in Bwa Kayiman to Boukman Eksperyans and beyond, will focus on the role of music in African and African-derived cultures, with specific emphasis on the Vodun. It will further highlight the centrality of Haiti, its Vodun and music, in the contemporary world movement of oppressed people’s cultural affirmation. Finally, the dialectical relation between the various elements of the world movement of Conscientization (Freire 1972; Nkrumah 1970; Fanon 1959; John XXIII, 1958–1963; and U.S. Civil Rights) will be elucidated to explain the role of the arts, music in particular, in the future democratization of our planet’s socioeconomic/political structures, a movement I call “Humanocentrism.” These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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