Text by Moosje M Goosen
Writer and reader Moosje M Goosen follows the beat — and the off-beat — in a variety of ways. Listen to the pulse, the drums and the break as the seasons change.
A Different Drum (Spring)
The high pitched ‘petit’ drum supplies the energy and holds down an unvaried rhythm. The ‘seconde’ drum supports the movements of the dancers. The ‘mamman’ drum with its complex and varied rhythms occasionally contributes a ‘break’ (cassé) in the beat. This temporary departure sometimes instills a loa in the head of the worshipped (possession). The musical statements are made by the drum and not by the drummer.
— Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen. The Voodoo Gods of Haiti, Lyrichord, Stereo LLST 7341, 1980, album liner notes
Spring is here and inside my living room in Rotterdam I am listening to the drum beats of Voudoun ceremonies, recorded in Haiti by experimental filmmaker Maya Deren. Sparked by the research of dancer Katherine Dunham, whose thesis on Haitian ritual dance she had edited, Deren visited Haiti between 1947 and 1951. There she first attended, then was given permission to record a number of Voudoun ceremonies near Croix des Missions and Petionville. She goes in without reservations: she’s an artist studying form, she writes in the preface to her book Divine Horsemen. The Living Gods of Haiti (McPherson & Co Publishers, 1953). It turns out that the dance cannot be extracted from the drums, the drums cannot be extracted from the loa spirits, and the loa cannot be extracted from the human being once it has ‘mounted’ the body. Voudoun is the form. And art is always about the form in full. Deren’s study, part anthropologic, part artistic research, ends with an all-night ceremony where she becomes one with the form: while dancing, ‘a white darkness’ overcomes her and her body is taken over by a loa spirit. Listening to the field recordings I think about this powerful, ongoing beat as a flow with ruptures, having traveled across space, across an ocean — but also crossing time and history. A soundtrack of survival. I try to make sense of what I am hearing but more than sense I get sensations; something I welcome at this moment in time, when I feel the need to put up my defenses, to protect myself from the rage and hate on global scale. The beat of the drum breaks through this guard. We need a break, we really do. The world is inflamed. It needs to hear itself in order to be able to heal — or maybe to survive, at all. Considering that enslaved Africans were not allowed to speak their own language; that people from the same region were separated from one another, and had but limited means to congregate, it is a miracle that West-African mythology continued to exist in the West-Indies. Not only did it persist; a whole new kingdom of spirits, known as the Petro loa, emerged from these precise conditions. Deren writes: ‘Petro was born out of rage. It is not evil; it is the rage against the evil fate which the African suffered, the brutality of his displacement and his enslavement. It is the violence that rose out of that rage, to protest against it. […] For it was the Petro cult, born in the hills, nurtured in secret, which gave both moral force and the actual organization to the escaped slaves who plotted and trained, swooped down upon the plantations and led the rest of the slaves in the revolt that, by 1804, had made of Haiti the second free colony in the western hemisphere, following the United States’ (62). The Haitian Revolution was empowered by Voudoun practice and the rituals of the collective turning into a single body of resistance, led by the pulse of the drum beat. A possessed body does not only host the spirit, it also temporarily abandons the self, and self-interest. This is reflected in the role of the ceremonial drummer, who ‘knows no individual virtuosity’; the drummer serves the loa and the body of the Voudoun practitioners who, ‘as if amplified by the entire resonance of the drums […], dancing, live by that pulse’ (238). The polyrhythmic drums recorded by Maya Deren sound graceful, at times gentle, then rumbling. Breaking. I listen for the break to happen. The mamman stirs my body. I am sick of the sound of bombs and gunshots fired by military and police forces. I am sick of the idiotic sound bites by Trump and the like. I am sick to my stomach, which waits for what is to come; anticipates the call of the drum.
