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

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 region and department respectively, the Lesser Antilles islands of Martinique and Cuadeloupe 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 negritude cofounder Amie Cesaire--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 bele 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 grayscale 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) ...