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Thursday, January 14, 2010
LENBA, LENBA SOU LEMO
Unknown artist
1937
Available on : Alan Lomax in Haiti
Harte Recordings : 2009
[Buy It]
[Donate to Earthquake Relief]
I was thinking about Haiti fairly regularly even before the earthquake this week. I have a friend who is working there, living and writing, and it hasn't always been easy for her, and sometimes this has resulted in frustration, and other times in measured analysis, and other times in resignation.
Earlier this week she wrote me to say that she was working on an article about the Haitian lottery, a surreal enterprise in which the numbers played are extracted, through a mix of soothsaying and self-deception, from dreams. (If you dream of a fire, you are encouraged by a sort of dream consultant to play the number 11, say; a cow may translate to the number 20.) The draft she sent me focused, correctly, on the strangeness of the lottery process as a vehicle of hope: it took people's dreams, turned them into numbers, then tried to turn those numbers into a different kind of number, money, that could satisfy dreams.
About a day later, the earthquakes snuffed out a great deal of hope. I wrote a bunch of emails to make sure she was okay, all the while thinking how strange it was to be distilling a nation's suffering into my concern for an individual. She eventually replied, and then went off to do her job, which is to try to explain (or at least present) the unfathomable to the rest of the world. I haven't talked to her about her experience during the earthquake, or the ways in which she believes (or knows) that this will change everything around her. And I'm left in a strange position for a writer: I'm not sure what to say, or what can be said, in the face of how much there is to be done. Another friend of mine said she can't wrap her head around it, and she's exactly right.
Since the earthquake, my friend in Haiti has been posting updates, and in one of them she mentioned that as night falls in Port-au-Prince, she can hear praying and singing. I don't believe in prayer, but I believe in music, and today is one of the days I'm happy I don't know the difference.
Over the last few months, I've been sending her excerpts from the recent box set "Alan Lomax in Haiti," which collects hundreds of field recordings that the pioneering ethnomusicologist made on the island in the late nineteen-thirties. I have been listening to the box set often, realizing that I understand almost nothing about the island, but still interested to hear the Haitian versions of blues songs, or children's rhymes, or booty calls.
When I heard about the earthquake, I thought I'd go listen to the box set, but I found that I couldn't. It was too much and not enough, all at once. No song seemed right. Then this morning I listened to "Lenba, Lenba sou lemo." This song is about Lenba, which is (according to the liner notes) a healing movement that "contributed to the growth of the Petwo movement in Haiti that helped to develop a revolutionary consciousness among Haiti's slaves." Petwo, which refers to a family of Vodou spirits, can also refer to a drum, or to a rapid style of drumming. This all goes deeper than what I know, and what I can understand. But I do know, and can understand to some degree, the lyrics, which talk about overtopping, if not exactly overcoming, death:Lenba, I am shouting out
Lenba on top of Lenba
Lenba, Lenba triumps over death
Ay, Lenba rises over Lenba One of the Petwo spirits is Bosou, who is represented by a bull and is in charge of fertility and protection. The spirits teach, among other things, that the power to heal and protect is closely allied with the power to kill. I'm not sure that this is a lesson I can absorb, though I am sure that it is a valuable one.
The Lomax set has ten discs. "Lenba, Lenba sou lemo" comes from the tenth and final disc, "Worship in Carrefour Dufort," in which Lomax went to the south of Haiti to record religious rites. It is not the last song on the last disc. It's the next to last. The simple act of picking something that wasn't quite the end seemed, for a moment, significant, and maybe even hopeful.Labels: ben, haiti
posted by Ben
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