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COPYRIGHT 2002 Center For Black Music Research
I traveled to Carriacou, Grenada, immediately after reading Paule Marshall's novel, Praisesong for the Widow (1983). The novel introduced me to an island I had never heard of and to a society mysteriously unified in memorializing its past. After a first trip, I came to solidify my graduate school project of comparing stylistic musical types and eras of the various musics (1) on Carriacou. But when I realized the depth and historicity flowing from the Big Drum (with about 150 extant French Patois songs), I was enticed to study and collect the songs.
Carriacou is a simple, small island with about seven thousand people living on its arid soil and, some say, with the majority of its population living in London and Brooklyn (Hill 2003). It is situated in the southern Caribbean, near Grenada, its governing island, and near Trinidad and Tobago.
The first major study of Carriacou was written by Jamaican sociologist M. G. Smith, who revealed an island with unusual patterns of lineage drawn by people with long memories of ethnic inheritance kept intact by a ritual dance, the Big Drum:
Carriacou is an island almost completely unknown to the outside world, and even to its neighbors in the northern Caribbean. Its political and economic insignificance, coupled with its minute population and area, guarantee it a marginal position, even in the British West Indies to which it belongs. In no sense therefore is it representative of Caribbean societies; yet a knowledge of life in Carriacou is important for the light it sheds on the larger Creole units nearby. (Smith 1962, 1)
No longer unknown nor a British colony, current investigation of Carriacou and its ritual dance continues to define the formation of slave societies and Caribbean religion. In this article, I will present some new assumptions on Carriacou's religious past.
Perhaps by now overstudied, with four books (Smith 1962; Hill 1977; David 1985; McDaniel 1998) and six recordings (see Discography), interest in Carriacou seems to grow. Since the island gained some notoriety during the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada, this minute island continues to attract a growing number of researchers in the social sciences, history, anthropology, dance ethnology, ethnomusicology, linguistics, art, and cultural studies.
Long before the modern interest in Carriacou, the legendary Trinidadian dancer/anthropologist Pearl Primus, infused with the understanding of African dance, wrote a paper on the oldest dances--the Nation dances--of the Big Drum and performed them as early as 1950 at the New York YMCA (Wenig 1983, 50). Primus's paper is lost, but hopefully other dance ethnologists will revive her performance study in the near future.
The Carriacou case reviewed here, although researched from the living ritual, is in actuality a historical examination focused on ancient traditions. In this article, I hope to use the spiritual contexts of the old society in formulating a pantheon of ancestors that has been forgotten by the people but survives in the texts of the ancient Big Drum ritual. The perpetuation of dances, structures, symbols, melodies, and texts allows a perusal of the discrete African ethnic origins and original formations in the early society.
Dance
I continue to encounter validation of the cultural depth and power of the dance circle in its projection as institution and canon in diasporan culture. The cultural infusion of the ring resonates as a history-keeping practice in original, revitalized, and syncretized forms, danced in countless configurations, movements, and reasoning. The order of the dance gives us a clue to ritual structure. Being aware of the distinctive low stance...
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