Читать книгу Roots in Reverse - Richard M. Shain - Страница 13
ОглавлениеTWO
Havana / Paris / Dakar
Itineraries of Afro-Cuban Music
The history of modern Cuban music in Senegal begins with the song “El manisero” (“The Peanut Vendor”). It re-creates a Havana street peddler’s chant advertising the peanuts he has for sale. While the piece’s lyrics are not particularly memorable, its melody, rhythm, and key changes have fascinated musicians and listeners from many cultures ever since its composition in the 1920s by the Cuban musician Moisés Simons. The song’s impact was especially strong in colonial Francophone Africa and continued to resonate throughout the early phases of postindependence as well. This chapter focuses on what the Senegalese have heard in Afro-Cuban music, beginning in Paris and then in Dakar, from the 1930s onward. It examines the influence of Latin music on pre– and post–World War II Senegalese debates about the fashioning of an autochthonous modernity. Afro-Cuban music, for example, played a major role in the formation of negritude in the 1930s among Senegalese intellectuals in Paris, a relationship that many of negritude’s founders, like Léopold Senghor (1906–2001), who later became the first president of an independent Senegal, either ignored or obscured once they became prominent politicians and literary figures after World War II. This chapter also reveals why the nightclub became a site where Senegalese could formulate and contest different conceptions of negritude, the black Atlantic, and cosmopolitanism. As liminal spaces free from colonial hegemony, nightclubs allowed Senegalese to combine erotic adventure and intellectual exploration in unprecedented ways. At all points in this process of developing a modern cultural identity, Afro-Cuban music had a crucial role to play.
“El manisero” first became a hit in 1929. In that year the Cuban zarzuela singer Rita Montaner (1900–1958) traveled to Paris for her second French tour.1 France during the 1920s was cosmopolitan in its musical tastes. The French discovered jazz after World War I and were enthusiastic participants in the Charleston dance fad. Argentinean tango also acquired a sizable following. However, until Rita Montaner’s tour in 1928 and her recording of “El manisero,” Cuban music was relatively unknown to French listeners. Her first appearance at the Olympia the previous season, where she was accompanied by the dancing duo of Julio Richards and Carmita Ortiz, had piqued the Parisian public’s interest.2 Her 1928 recording of the song, released after her show at the Olympia, had raised her profile in France, and she wanted to build on her triumph there.
Montaner’s second concert in Paris, in 1929, was both a critical and popular success and brought Afro-Cuban music to the fore just as she had hoped. A highpoint of her act was “El manisero.” Her performance of the song made her the talk of Paris and promoted sales of her record. There was already a sizable community of Cuban artists, intellectuals, and musicians in Paris, and it is likely that their activity laid the groundwork for an escalating French interest in Cuban culture.3 Before long the disc circulated widely throughout France and the Francophone world.4 It ignited an enthusiasm for Cuban music in Paris that resulted in the establishment of a number of nightclubs featuring Cuban bands filled with Afro-Cuban musicians.5 These clubs formed the hub of a bohemian culture in Montmartre and the Latin Quarter in the 1930s that attracted the Antillean and Francophone African students who had come to France to obtain advanced academic training unavailable in the French colonies
The popularity of “El manisero” had ramifications even further afield. On Saturday, April 26, 1930, in New York, a sellout crowd at the Palace Theatre, the premiere venue for vaudeville in the United States in the early days of the Great Depression (1929–1939), viewed a spectacle that no local audience had seen before. The Palace had transformed its stage into a fanciful Havana streetscape. As the orchestra led by the Cuban musician Don Azpiazú (1893–1943) started playing “Mamá Inez,” one of the most famous songs in the Cuban repertoire, the audience heard instruments that were still exotic to US listeners: maracas, claves, güiros, and bongos. Then a crew of Cuban dancers bounded onto the stage, in the first documented exhibition of authentic rumba dancing in the United States. Though they created a commotion with their energetic movements, it was the orchestra’s third song, “El manisero,” sung by the Afro-Cuban sonero Antonio Machín that drove the Palace crowd wild, just as it had when Montaner sang it the year before in Paris.6 Azpiazú’s arrangement of the song, which combined complicated Cuban time signatures (the clave) with sophisticated American-style big band orchestration, immediately struck a chord with the public.7 Indeed, “El manisero” became such a hit, it sparked a passion for Cuban music that swept through North America and then Europe,8 especially after Azpiazú and his ensemble recorded the song later that year for RCA.9 By 1931 the 78 rpm recording of the song reached Africa, selling extremely well throughout the continent, especially in Francophone Africa, where it reached a far wider public than just a few African intellectuals in Paris.10
LA NOCHE CHEZ CABANE CUBAINE: LÉOPOLD SENGHOR, OUSMANE SOCÉ DIOP, AND AFRO-CUBAN MUSIC, 1930S–1960S
I feel the Other, I dance the Other, therefore I am.
Léopold Senghor 11
By the late 1920s Paris had become one of the international centers of Latin music. The vast Colonial Exposition in Paris in 1930–1931 contributed to the music’s burgeoning popularity by further whetting the French appetite for “exotic” foreign cultures like Cuba’s. This Afro-Cuban boom in Paris occurred during a period of decline on the island. The end of prohibition in the United States in 1933 resulted in a precipitous drop in US tourists traveling to Havana right at the time that the global Depression began to devastate the island nation. As the Cuban economy contracted, opportunities for Afro-Cuban musicians dried up.12 Faced with grim professional prospects, some Afro-Cuban musicians migrated to Paris, where a network of Latin music clubs had opened up to capitalize on the craze for Cuban music.13 There the musicians found the work and respect that had eluded them at home.14
This influx of Caribbean musicians coincided with the rapid expansion of the population of Antillean and African students in Paris. The 1930s saw a gradual opening up of the French higher education system to the most gifted students from throughout the French empire. The French motives in providing university education for their colonial and “overseas” subjects and citizens were complicated, a mixture of the pragmatic and the idealistic.15 There was a need for middle echelon manpower in many colonial bureaucracies, and local personnel often were cheaper to employ. In addition, both French assimilationist policy and republican ideals called for at least some non-European French speakers with university training and respectable positions in colonial governments. Financial aid for these students in France was insufficient, and their level of academic preparation was often inadequate. Furthermore, they had to contend with the racism of the French academic establishment and the “glass ceiling” that limited their advancement after they obtained their degrees. For many of these students, their experiences in the French educational system were stressful and alienating. For support, they turned to one another and the few places in Paris where they were welcomed with no ambivalence. Latin music clubs provided one such refuge for them.
The most famous and influential of these clubs was La Cabane Cubaine in the Place Blanche in Pigalle. The Cuban musician and entrepreneur Eduardo Castellano opened the club at 42 Rue Fontaine in 1930. The club featured cabaret shows with both large Cuban orquestas and small son and rumba ensembles.16 Its success appears to have been instantaneous. Probably because the poet and surrealist theorist André Breton lived upstairs, the club soon became a surrealist haunt. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were also habitués. Bohemians and intellectuals of all sorts flocked to the club to hear “authentic” Cuban music and see professional Cuban rumba dancers. The club was simultaneously seedy and stylish, a mix many Parisians found exhilarating.
For somewhat different reasons, African and Antillean students frequently visited the club as well. The club was a place where individuals from the black Atlantic could meet one another, recognize their cultural diversity, and find common ground in Afro-Cuban music. The Senegalese writer Ousmane Socé Diop (1911–1973), in his novel Mirages de Paris, described it as an “ethnographic museum”: “In the throng of blacks gathered at the Cabane Cubaine so similar in appearance, Fara introduced Jacqueline to Africans, Haitians, and Mauriciens. People said this nightspot was an ethnographic museum of the black world, to which each nation had sent a specimen.”17
The club was a cultural contact zone, one of the few places in the world at that time where blacks and whites could socialize on a basis of relative social equality. An image by the photographer Brassaï, “En La Cabane Cubaine,” shot around 1932, captures the special ambience of the club. The photo immediately draws the viewer’s eye to how racially integrated La Cabane Cubaine was in its heyday. There are racially mixed couples as well as all-black and all-white couples, everyone obviously at ease at the club. In the photo’s foreground is a table at which are seated a white couple deep in conversation with one another and a nattily dressed black man lost in thought, smoking a cigarette. Movement is an important visual component of the image. At the center of the image a laughing black man dances with a smiling white woman. The delight they take in each other’s company is palpable. Other dancing couples surround them, equally enjoying themselves. Indeed, pleasure and desire, rather than racial diversity, is the image’s dominant feature. Brassaï’s photo references Paris as a city of erotic adventure where taboos that impede sexual intimacy elsewhere evaporate.18 During the Harlem Renaissance, European American men went to Harlem to hear Duke Ellington and court black mistresses in segregated nightclubs like The Cotton Club. La Cabane Cubaine offered an altogether different experience. It was a combination of a nodal point for people of color in Paris, a space where whites and blacks could freely interact, and a space where desire from all its patrons could be displayed publicly. Most of all, it was a site where young Africans connected Afro-Cuban music, movement, and blackness with modernity.
A La Cabane Cubaine, Montmartre, ca. 1932 Brassaï (Gyula Halasz, called, 1899–1984) © Estate Brassaï-RMN. Photograph PL.473. Photo: Michèle Bellot. Private Collection. © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY
One of the patrons of La Cabane Cubaine in the early 1930s was a young Senegalese student in Paris, Léopold Sédar Senghor, a major figure in the cultural and political history of Senegal. Senghor was born in 1906 in Joal, a coastal maritime village in a region where Kru and Cape Verdean sailors had been exposing the Senegalese inhabitants to Caribbean music for centuries. After spending his early years in an agricultural village with his mother, Senghor began attending a Catholic mission school as a boarder when he was eight years old. He proved an extraordinary student, and when he was seventeen he entered a newly established Catholic seminary in Dakar. Disenchanted by the racist condescension he encountered there, he withdrew and enrolled in a new lycée in Dakar in 1926. He excelled in his studies and in 1928 received a half scholarship from the colonial regime to study literature in Paris.
Senghor found academic success difficult to achieve in France in the 1920s. His colonial education had not adequately prepared him to excel at the university level. Moreover, many of his Parisian professors were not receptive to teaching African students, no matter how outstanding. One of his biographers, Janet G. Vaillant, also suggests that he found much of the teaching about literature at the Sorbonne hidebound and out of date.19 To make himself better able to withstand the rigors of the French university system, Senghor withdrew from the Sorbonne and became a student at a famous lycée, Louis-le-Grand, where he formed a close lifelong friendship with fellow student Georges Pompidou, later president of France. By the early 1930s Senghor had reenrolled at the Sorbonne, this time as a student of grammar. During this period he took up residence at the Cité Universitaire, a dormitory for French-speaking students from around the world. It was there that he met Antillean students like Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) and began to get a sense of the global dimensions of African civilization. Despite his plaintive letters to colonial administrators complaining about his life of unrelieved drudgery in Paris,20 it was during this period that he first started visiting La Cabane Cubaine, sometimes in the company of Césaire. A New World opened up to the previously reticent and withdrawn student as he began to socialize with intellectually gifted youths from the Caribbean and elsewhere in Africa at Paris’s Afro-Cuban music nightclubs. Though an awkward dancer, by the late 1930s he was teaching newly arrived Senegalese students in Paris the latest steps.21
Out of this sustained intellectual and social interaction between African and Antillean students and the explosively creative climate in Montmartre/Pigalle and the Rive Gauche emerged the famous cultural movement negritude. Pioneered by Senghor, Césaire, and the Guyanese Léon-Gontram Damas (1912–1978), “négritude was a rejection of assimilation, an identification with blackness, and a celebration of African Civilization.”22 The movement advocated a reverse racialization of colonial knowledge, privileging an African “emotional” way of knowing over an arid European “rationalism.” According to negritude theorists like Senghor, Africans and people of African descent, through intuition and sensory perception, could see through surfaces to the essence of an object or behavior. This ability to get to the heart of the matter was something invaluable that African culture could bring to world civilization. At its inception, negritude tried to strike a balance between cosmopolitanism (universal ways of knowing) and cultural authenticity (validating particular African methods of producing knowledge). In so doing, it addressed philosophically many of the same challenges of being modern and African that Afro-Cuban music did on a more everyday level.23
At least in their early phases, the histories of negritude and the Senegalese embrace of Afro-Cuban music were intertwined, involving some of the same individuals. The initiators of negritude and those who saw the path to African modernity illuminated by Afro-Cuban music believed that African modernity must have a prominent aesthetic dimension. The two groups equally underscored the significance of rhythm and movement in defining blackness. The theorists of negritude and the aficionados of Afro-Cuban music also argued that any modern black identity had to be transnational, “not simply constructed in opposition to Europe but in relation to it.”24 Both argued that these identities had to be performed publicly to counter dominant European cultural models. Each saw cafés and nightclubs as important laboratories for incubating ideas and developing modern forms of sociality.
By the late 1930s, however, the trajectories of negritude and the linking of Afro-Cuban music with Senegalese modernity began to diverge. This fissure grew out of a number of debates that began in Paris in the 1930s during the formative period of negritude and still resound in Senegalese academic and artistic circles. Senghor and his allies saw negritude as a “high-culture,” modernist project in dialogue with important contemporary trends in French literary and philosophical thought, like surrealism and phenomenology. He recognized that for his generation Paris was the world capital of modernity and cultural prestige.25 It was also, despite its imperial ambitions, a global repository of republican values and political liberalism.26 Taking these facts into account, Senghor’s strategy for the political and cultural liberation of his nation was to simultaneously pursue full citizenship in the French Republic and “the world republic of letters” centered in France.27
The realization of Senghor’s vision of cultural citizenship entailed the creation of a mandarin literary class, similar to France’s. By definition, such a group would dominate the imagining of modernity in Senegal and, as a result, would benefit the most from it. While this position was intellectually coherent and politically viable, it had ramifications that some Senegalese found disturbing. Their reservations revolved around the elitist assumptions of Senghor’s position. In addition, Senghor’s variety of negritude, despite its efforts to strike a balance between universalism and cultural nationalism, still seemed to favor cosmopolitanism over cultural authenticity, thus potentially limiting the scope and significance of intellectual decolonization. Some Senegalese felt it was too accommodating of French intellectual hegemony. Moreover, Senghor’s model left little room for serious consideration of the role of popular culture in creating Senegalese modernity. That meant a dismissal of the cultural importance of Afro-Cuban music (and even of African music) and, with it, an implicit repudiation of an embodied modernity.
Two literary texts dealing with this era—Senghor’s famous poem “Comme Je Passais” and a much less known novel by Socé Diop, Mirages de Paris, articulate these differing early visions of negritude. Afro-Cuban music plays a crucial role in both texts. However, in Senghor’s poem, references to Afro-Cuban music are so oblique that many distinguished literary scholars have completely overlooked them. By contrast, Socé Diop’s novel gives pride of place to Afro-Cuban musical expression and shows how it served as one of the foundations of an African modernity. Senghor’s poem hints at his future distancing from Latin music, while Socé Diop’s novel suggests why this music would have such a powerful attraction for postwar Senegalese youth. Not surprisingly, Senghor was critical of the novel when it was published in Paris in 1937.28 His disapproval, however, could not prevent the ideas expressed in the novel from having a long life in Senegalese discussions of what sort of modernity would best suit the Senegalese.
It is possible to generate many readings of the extraordinary “Comme Je Passais,” but the analysis here focuses exclusively on how the poem illuminates Senegalese debates about music, cultural identity, and modernity.29 The poetic voice recounts the thoughts and sensory sensations he experiences as he walks past La Cabane Cubaine on the Rue Fontaine in Paris:
Comme je passais rue Fontaine,
Un plaintif air de jazz
Est sorti en titubant,
Ébloui par le jour,
Et m’a chuchoté sa confidence
Discrètement
Comme je passais tout devant
La Cabane cubaine.
Un parfum pénétrant de Négresse
L’accompagnait.
Voilà des nuits,
Voilà bien des jours au sommeil absent.
Réveillés en moi les horizons que je croyais défunts.
Et je saute de mon lit tout à coup, comme un buffle
Mufle haut levé, jambes écartées,
Comme un buffle humant, dans le vent
Et la douceur modulée de la flûte polie,
La bonne odeur de l’eau sous les dakhars
Et celle, plus riche de promesses, des moissons mûres
Par les rizières.
As I was walking by Fontaine Street,
I heard a jazz song stagger about,
Dazzled by the day,
And it whispered its secrets to me
Discreetly.
And just as I walked in front of
The Cuban Cabana
The penetrating scent of a black woman
Became its accompaniment.
Here come the nights,
Here come the days without sleep.
Horizons I thought had gone
Have reawakened in me.
And suddenly I bound from my bed
Like a buffalo with its muzzle raised high,
Legs spread, like a buffalo
Sniffing the wind
And the modulated sweetness of the polished flute,
The good smell of water under the dakar trees
And the aroma, richer in promise,
Of ripe harvests from the rice fields.30
In a number of respects, this poem constitutes a daring sequence of appropriations by Senghor. Most saliently, Senghor creates a new African subject. In the poem he veers away from representing Africans as the exoticized objects of the European gaze, positioning Paris as the object of desire and fantasy. The poet’s tool for fashioning this new subject is French, the language of the imperial dominator. He uses this language to assert his cultural “citizenship” in the “lettered” imperial city. Senghor’s adroit use of French literary style, infused with his knowledge of French literary history, further supports his case for cultural citizenship.31 His poem pays homage to Baudelaire through oblique references to such poems as “À une passante.”32 A key element in the poem is the textualization of urban space. Though a colonial subject, the speaker moves comfortably around the capital of the country that has conquered his nation, proclaiming his freedom of movement. The speaker in this poem is an African flaneur marveling at but not being intimidated by the semiotic spectacle of Paris. This poem demonstrates that the speaker is at home abroad, cosmopolitan without being French.
Senghor explicitly links the poem to negritude through his emphasis on sensory perception. The poem engages the body and many of the senses: seeing, smelling, and hearing. Senghor’s flaneur uses his head (eyes, nose, and ears) to know the world. The poem also references negritude through its identification with black music and rhythm. Here Senghor introduces music stripped of its specificity. There is only a vague association in calling it “jazz.” When the speaker passes by La Cabane Cubaine, he detects “Un parfum pénétrant de Négresse” (the penetrating perfume of a black woman). Similarly, later in the poem, when he encounters “la douceur modulée de la flûte polie” (the soft and refined modulations of a flute), it awakens his sense of smell: “La bonne odeur de l’eau” (the beautiful smell of water). The music as a symbol of blackness induces nostalgia. He keeps on walking and resists responding to the music physically. However, it continues to resonate for him. Later that night he is finally affected by it, perhaps involuntarily and subconsciously, in the privacy of his room.
The poem reveals more of Senghor’s complicated feelings about Afro-Cuban music than he perhaps intended. His African flaneur is not sauntering down the Champs Élysées or wandering through the arcades. He is strolling around Pigalle, a district famed in the first part of the twentieth century for its bohemianism and artistic modernity. The sonic environment of this area, so associated with advanced artistic production, was saturated with Afro-Cuban music during this period. Senghor thus, consciously or not, links Afro-Cuban music with African modernity by locating the poem in this quartier. This link, however, is fraught with ambivalence. The speaker passes by La Cabane Cubaine but does not go in. Moreover, he misrepresents the type of music that was played there in the 1930s, calling it “jazz.” While it is true that there are numerous instances of African musicians and listeners referring to Afro-Cuban music as jazz, especially in the Congo, it is much more unusual for an African resident in Europe to conflate the two musical traditions.33 Senghor listened to Duke Ellington in Paris and undoubtedly heard other US jazzmen. As an urbane sophisticate, there is little chance that the speaker would have incorrectly identified the music that was wafting out of the club. Senghor’s veiling of his experience with Afro-Cuban music demonstrates that he already considered it as lacking in cultural prestige. In his view, it was not a suitable sound track to accompany the Senegalese quest for modernity and potentially could undermine his yearning for full cultural citizenship.
In Senghor’s later years this belief grew even stronger, especially after the launching of his political career in the 1940s. As he enjoyed increasing political success, his version of negritude shifted from being primarily a literary movement with political ramifications to a political philosophy with a cultural dimension. Shaped by the exigencies of becoming a state ideology, Senghor’s negritude became intertwined with his doctrine of “African socialism.” It now had to coexist with cultural nationalism in Senegal and humanism and neocolonialism in France. It also had to compete in West Africa with the conscientism of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and the African Stalinism of Guinea’s Sékou Touré. Under pressure from these two new political philosophies, Senghor shifted his position and began to propagate Africanité instead of blackness. Simultaneously, his negritude evolved from a tool for achieving cultural and political citizenship into an instrument for garnering international cultural prestige, especially important for newly independent African states struggling to become full-fledged members of the international community. Promoting Afro-Cuban music had no place in this new orientation, which relied on African culture to gain global recognition. In fact, in his “state of the arts,” in which up to 30 percent of the national budget in the early 1960s went to the Ministry of Culture, Senghor relegated any type of musical expression to the background.34 Literature and “high art” painting fit much more securely into his cultural program. As new artistic forms for Senegal, they were much easier to control through state patronage and drew much more serious international attention than did African or Cuban music at the time.
In the 1960s Senghor’s hostility toward the Cuban Revolution also had an impact on his attitude toward Afro-Cuban music. Although he was an admirer of Hispanic civilization and mandated the teaching of Spanish in Senegalese schools through the university level, Senghor abhorred Fidel Castro.35 His promotion of latinité stopped short of embracing the Cuban Revolution. His antipathy toward Castro had several roots. Senegal’s neocolonial ties with France in the period after independence made establishing diplomatic ties with Castro’s communist Cuba an impossibility. Furthermore, Castro’s alliance with Sékou Touré of neighboring Guinea complicated matters. As previously mentioned, Senghor and Touré were fierce rivals for regional influence, and Senghor resented Cuba’s military support of his enemy. Though the Senegalese public’s love of Cuban music almost entirely lacked any “revolutionary” political content, Senghor largely prohibited Afro-Cuban music from being performed at the premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (FESMAN) in 1966 on political grounds. Sizable demonstrations occurred in Dakar over Senghor’s musical policy, but the president stood firm.
Senghor’s public retreat from Afro-Cuban music (which according to his son he continued to listen to privately) meant that the development of Afro-Cuban music in Senegal had to proceed without state sponsorship, in marked contrast to neighboring Guinea and Mali.36 Whatever interest Senghor had in music during this period he devoted to jazz, which had a significant following in the Western European and North American art and literature worlds.37 During this same era the prestige of Latin music declined in Western intellectual and artistic circles outside of Africa as well, despite its continuing artistic excellence. With the possible exception of Tito Puente’s band in the 1950s, Afro-Cuban music lost whatever cultural cachet it had once had outside the Latin community in Paris and New York.
Observing Afro-Cuban music’s diminished status and its potentially controversial association with the Cuban Revolution, Senghor shifted from his previously ambivalent attitude toward the music to a more actively censorious stance once he became head of state. He sought to erase from his personal history his early involvement with Afro-Cuban culture. Where once he was at least willing to write about his bohemian past, with its wild nights at La Cabane Cubaine, he increasingly appeared embarrassed by it. From the postwar period onward, in his essays and poetry, Senghor replaced the few references to Afro-Cuban music with abstract paeans to rhythm and dance and passing nods to jazz. In his autobiographical musings and the reminiscences of his friends and allies during this era, Afro-Cuban music receives scarcely a nod. Senghor’s close associate Birago Diop’s four-volume autobiography, which documents both their sojourns in Paris, contains few mentions of Afro-Cuban music.38 A pervasive silence has come to envelop the important role of Afro-Cuban music in Senghor’s cultural and political development.
However, many of his countrymen did not share his increasingly negative attitude about the cultural significance of Latin music. For them, Cuban music was far from disreputable. On the contrary, they saw it as integral to the embodiment of modernity that was culturally suitable for their society. Ousmane Socé Diop’s Mirages de Paris, for example, looks at the relationship between Afro-Cuban music and modernity from a much different vantage point than Senghor’s.39 In Socé Diop’s work, Afro-Cuban music awakens the protagonist Fara to the beauty and power of his African roots and alerts him to the cultural richness and significance of the black diaspora. It accompanies him as he courts a white French woman, Jacqueline, and it underlies many of his philosophical reflections. His life in Paris would be unthinkable without it.
Socé Diop was a close associate of Senghor’s in Paris and was present at the creation of negritude. He received a scholarship to study veterinary medicine in Paris around the same time that Senghor obtained his scholarship to study literature. They studied together at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand and worked together in forming the Association of West African Students (both were among the original ten members). In 1934 Socé Diop helped Senghor and Césaire publish the shortlived journal L’Étudiant Noir. Later in his career, he was a politician and diplomat. In the 1950s he was the publisher of the important Senegalese magazine Bingo.
Mirages de Paris appeared in 1937 and is one of the earliest African novels. It is a foundational text in Senegalese literature, exploring issues such as cultural hybridity and the quest for a tropical cosmopolitanism. The book is especially significant for its explicit linkage between nightclubs, Afro-Cuban music, and Senegalese modernity. The text is a mélange of descriptions of the 1931 Colonial Exposition, philosophical discussions between Fara and his African friends, and a recounting of the troubled relationship between him and Jacqueline. It is both an African appreciation of Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale and a novel of ideas, establishing a novelistic template that has been used by many other African writers, most strikingly by the Senegalese Cheikh Hamidou Kane in his L’aventure ambiguë.40 Socé Diop’s plot revolves around the experiences of Fara, a Senegalese who travels to Paris in the early 1930s. He gets a job at the Colonial Exposition and one day meets Jacqueline, a white French woman. They start dating and frequent Afro-Cuban nightclubs. Ultimately, they move in together despite her parents’ opposition to the relationship. She becomes pregnant, and problems ensue. A despondent Fara ultimately commits suicide by jumping off a bridge into the Seine.
The novel is perhaps most notable for depicting a typical evening’s entertainment at La Cabane Cubaine and for containing one of the first detailed descriptions of modern Afro-Cuban music and dance in any language (over ten pages long). Just as important, it documents the emotional response of a young Senegalese student to hearing the music, providing a unique glimpse into what the music meant for Senegalese in the 1930s. The first thing that Fara and his French girlfriend notice upon entering La Cabane Cubaine is its remarkable (for the time and place) ethnic diversity. There is an orchestra playing Latin dance music, and the dance floor is filled with couples. When the orchestra takes a break, a small Cuban combo takes the stage, performing a son number. A rumba dance display that thrills Fara completes the evening. Later, Fara holds forth on why he prefers Afro-Cuban music to jazz. His discourse establishes a framework for the Senegalese appreciation of Afro-Cuban music that remains relevant to the present day: “Rumba was softer than jazz. The latter has a charm and fascination that was measured in kilowatts. Dizzying contagious, jazz had a direct effect on the nerves like an electric current while rumba echoed with the heart. When jazz is unleashed it evoked planes taking off, the frenetic turning of a transatlantic propeller. Rumba evoked a black girl swinging in her hammock at nightfall, rocked by the plaintive sounds of a guitar.”41
Fara makes it clear that he considers both jazz and Afro-Cuban music emblematic of modernity. However, for him jazz is cerebral, almost neurological. It is the music of a frenetic industrial society, powered by the most advanced technology. In contrast, Afro-Cuban music fits a developing tropical world: soft, soulful, and evocative but still modern. It appeals to the heart as well as the head and culturally straddles continents. Revealingly, jazz doesn’t strike him as particularly “black music,” while Afro-Cuban music does. Jazz may be the product of the black diaspora, but Fara implies that it has only limited “pull” outside of Europe and North America. Afro-Cuban music, he thinks, could gain popularity with a potentially much wider public in the black world. The image of a black woman in a hammock resonates in many more African cultures than the metaphor of airplanes taking off. As the subsequent history of Afro-Cuban music in Senegal and Africa demonstrates, Fara’s words were prophetic. Outside of South Africa, jazz has been a cult music appreciated by small coteries in Africa’s capital cities, while Afro-Cuban music has gone on to be the foundation of many African nations’ popular music.42
In other respects as well, Socé Diop’s novel foretells the future significance of Afro-Cuban music in Senegal. The explanation the book offers for the allure of Afro-Cuban music for Senegalese abroad in the 1930s still holds true for many Senegalese at home today. Socé Diop’s protagonist in the 1930s and the salsa musicians in 2003 express their fascination with Afro-Cuban music in much the same terms. For both groups, Afro-Cuban music, the product of méttisage, bridges the diaspora, bringing Africa and the Caribbean closer together culturally.43 Both groups also share an intense emotional connection to Afro-Cuban music. Perhaps most strikingly, both groups agree that the emphasis on dance and movement inherent in Afro-Cuban music promotes a type of modernity appropriate for Senegal.
A DISTANT MIRROR: LISTENING TO SENEGALESE LISTENING TO AFRO-CUBAN MUSIC
Cuban Music truly belongs to us.
Camou Yandè, sonero and conguero 44
When asked to describe their relationship with Afro-Cuban music, Senegalese Latin music connoisseurs and musicians respond by declaring that Cuban music is deeply pleasurable, emotionally direct, and aesthetically powerful. It is important both as a source of enjoyment and for what it signifies and symbolizes. Afro-Cuban music for them has been representative of a cosmopolitanism that is rooted in the black internationalism of the diaspora without undermining “local” norms and aspirations. It also has inculcated “correcte” modern social behaviors such as self-control and a ritualized respect for women. As a consequence, in addition to constituting a highly satisfying form of leisure, the music has been a guide to how an urbane citoyen should behave in public in a modern African state in terms of etiquette and personal style. This section explores what Senegalese have heard in Cuban music beneath its evocative melodies and compelling rhythms. Though its focus is on musicians, broadcasters, and Latin music connoisseurs, the sentiments expressed are shared by nearly anyone in Senegal who listens and dances to Afro-Cuban music.45
For many individuals in preindependence Senegal, listening and dancing to Afro-Cuban music anchored them more securely in the cultural universe of the black Atlantic. When asked why Afro-Cuban music appealed to them, Senegalese repeatedly stressed its diasporic dimension. By linking Senegal with distinguished artistic expression in the Caribbean, the music first served as a bulwark against the racial arrogance of colonial French society. Later, during the Cold War era of the 1960s, when cultural nationalism was rife, the diasporic connection with Afro-Cuban music demonstrated the global reach and prestige of African civilization, especially in the Atlantic tropical world, while circumventing dominance by US popular culture. In Senegal, consumers always have viewed Afro-Cuban music as black music, originating in Africa. Balla Sidibè, a leading sonero and timbale player, stated: “Everything that comes from there [Cuba] comes from Africa. It’s the slaves. The great Cuban musicians—they’re black or mulattos.”46
Djibril Gaby Gaye, a radio and television broadcaster, made much the same point: “Black people are the foundation of Latin American music and we feel that.”47 Mbaye Seck, a guitarist who played with celebrated saxophonist and bandleader Dexter Johnson in the 1960s, like many Senegalese asserted that he finds himself reflected in the music in a diasporic mirror: “Even though it’s not sung in any [Senegalese] national language, it’s the melody that people like. In my opinion, I find there’re African roots in salsa. Africans feel salsa like they feel African music. It interests everybody.”48
Antoine Dos Reis, a retired journalist and radio personality, further developed this diasporic line of thinking: “This is not a music that came out of nothing. It was transplanted to Cuba, Brazil and other places from its native land. So this music came back to us. When you hear this music, you really feel something, the Africanness. This music is not foreign to us.”49
Pierre Gomis, a Latin music radio announcer, perhaps put it most succinctly: “In Afro-Cuban music, I find my roots.”50
For a portion of the Senegalese Afro-Cuban music public, the music has linked Senegal with other tropical societies like Cuba that face somewhat similar challenges of cultural and social development. This group views both Senegal and Cuba as products of cultural méttisage: a mixing of European and African cultural materials. For these listeners, Afro-Cuban music exemplifies a cultural “counterpoint” that illuminates a path to modernity. It enables its Senegalese audience to celebrate African civilization’s contributions to world history without lapsing into cultural chauvinism. This group regards cultural “purity” as an illusion. Instead, they believe a “modern” society selectively blends elements from a number of global “traditions.” By orienting themselves toward black Atlantic nations such as Cuba (and to a lesser extent Brazil), they have been able to practice their own form of cultural nationalism, simultaneously rooted in the African diaspora and in an expansive cosmopolitanism. Pierre Gomis, for example, declared: “In Afro-Cuban music … there’s the rhythmic inspiration of Africa, French dancing and the Spanish language. There’s nothing that can rival it. You rediscover yourself in this music—whether you’re in Havana, New York or here [Dakar].”51
Orchestre Baobab’s Rudy Gomis said to the researcher Aleysia Whitmore: “We needed something that wasn’t our folklore but that was close to our folklore. That’s why cha-cha-chá came here to Africa.… Before you could go to a bar and you danced tango, waltz, pasa doble. It was too white, too toubab.”52
Pascal Dieng, who was a singer with the group Super Cayor for many years and now leads his own ensemble, articulated why the cultural mélange of Afro-Cuban music is so important for many Senegalese: “Afro-Cuban music is a music of blacks and whites. It’s a music of méttisage. With salsa, there’s no apartheid. It’s for whites and blacks. Our grandparents who left Africa for slavery in the Americas—they sang in the sugar cane field. They mixed with white people so salsa is a music that mixes and joins white skin and black skin.”53
For the generation that came of age in the 1950s and 1960s, those who could dance well to Afro-Cuban music gained a reputation for cultural refinement. Dance for this group has been more than just social leisure. Along with expertise in Latin music, it has been a means for achieving social distinction, accumulating social capital, and embodying modernity. For this generation of Senegalese, Afro-Cuban dancing is modernity in motion. The late El Hadj Amadou Ndoye, a professor of Hispanic literature at Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, recalls: “Dancing and Cuban music go together.… Ibrahima Fall—he became Minister of Foreign Affairs—we were students then—he was a great dancer. There was a contest to see who was the best dancer. He was Dean of the Law School, a great intellectual—and he won a bunch of those dance contests. It [Afro-Cuban music] is, in fact, associated with modernity, class, education. It’s urban, modern and it goes with what’s chic and the latest style.”54
Many Senegalese of this generation that straddles the colonial and postcolonial eras associate the fluid steps and swaying motion of Afro-Cuban dance styles with a modernity that they have found culturally comfortable. The cabaret singer Aminata Laye remarked: “I started dancing to salsa music. That was the beginning of my loving the music—the rhythm. Whether it’s two-step, three step, four step—you feel at ease. There’s less noise in the music.”55
Mas Diallo, a radio announcer of Afro-Cuban music, has had a similar response to the music: “I love salsa and I find it’s one of the best musics. For the very simple reason, I choose salsa because it’s accessible and flexible (souple). As a music, it has no equal.”56
Senegalese from this generation of the 1950s and 1960s have viewed Afro-Cuban dancing as dignified and respectable as well as modern. Indeed, because it emphasizes proper comportment and courtesy toward women, many see it as having a moral dimension. The guitarist Mbaye Seck observed: “Everyone dances not only because of the rhythms—it’s the morals. It’s their [Afro-Cuban music] calm morals. They’re sensible morals. It’s a music of deep feeling and everyone loves it.”57
Seck’s observations about why so many Senegalese have loved Afro-Cuban music points to another reason for its enduring popularity: its role as a catalyst for creating a “community of sentiment” for Senegalese “entering modernity” in the last half of the twentieth century. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai argued in Modernity at Large that mass media have been especially effective in fostering the formation of such communities. Through film, sports, or, in the case of many nations in Africa, music, “a group … begins to imagine and feel things together.”58 In Senegal, a shared enthusiasm for Afro-Cuban music has allowed the generation that came into its own after independence to coalesce and create its own cultural identity. The singer and bandleader Pape Fall commented, “when I listen to Cuban music, I feel there is a part of me in that music,”59 an experience shared by many others in the Senegalese Afro-Cuban music public. The guitarist Baye Sy talked of his engagement with Afro-Cuban music in similar terms: “To love something is a sensation. You listen to something and it touches you and you don’t even know why. As soon as I heard this music, right away I loved it.”60
Nicolas Menheim, a sonero and bandleader, has an equally emotionally charged relationship with Afro-Cuban music: “We identify with this music. It’s almost as if it was in the water.”61 Cheikh “Charles” Sow, the late writer and librarian, also pointed to the emotional immediacy of Afro-Cuban music and its ability to create “communities of sentiment”: “It’s something that people sense right away. People feel it spontaneously regardless of the fact that it comes from far away. It’s not the same thing with jazz. People love it but it’s, let’s say, something intellectual or for people who have lived a long time in France. It’s not a music that is as instantly appreciated … I don’t even understand why people love it so much. Old people love Cuban music and so do young people.”62
Sow’s statement demonstrates that for the Senegalese of his generation (those who reached adulthood in the 1950s), involvement with Afro-Cuban music was not primarily cerebral. It was not just an exercise in salon cultural politics or an intellectual gesture. Instead, it entailed a profound emotional and, through dance, physical connection with the Hispanic cultures of the African diaspora, the méttisage/mestizaje of the Caribbean and a modernity as much based in the Atlantic tropical world as in the cooler climate of Western Europe. It engendered a community of sentiment based on lived experience that has lasted for three generations and shows few signs of disintegrating.
Communities of sentiment, though, as Appadurai has observed “are capable of moving from shared imagination to collective action.”63 This potential capacity is in part responsible for this group of music lovers’ often tense and complex relationship with the Senegalese state, even though the music has never been associated in Senegal with a political position. When Senghor became head of state, negritude became the semiofficial cultural policy of Senegal until the 1980s, a period coinciding with government neglect of Afro-Cuban music. Those in power during this era regarded the Afro-Cuban music community as being potentially at odds with negritude. By depriving it of state patronage and recognition, the Senegalese government inhibited the community of Afro-Cuban listeners from developing their aesthetic preferences into a political ideology.
This official disregard did little to quiet debates about what type of modernity was best suited for Senegalese society. In new contexts with new participants, discussions continued, informed by Senghor and Socé Diop’s differing models of negritude. Afro-Cuban music lay at the core of both these models; conspicuous in one case for its absence and in the other for its animating presence. In the 1950s Senegalese urban youth took up as their generation’s bandera both Afro-Cuban music and a form of negritude closer to Socé Diop’s version. This mixture made Senghor uncomfortable, but he was powerless to prevent it. For him, the path to full cultural citizenship, both domestically and internationally, involved securing an esteemed position in the global “republic of letters,” requiring that he mask his interest in Afro-Cuban music. In the 1950s and 1960s, however, for many youthful Senegalese the struggle for full cultural citizenship entailed engaging in new patterns of consumption and mastering new forms of sociability. For this generation, Afro-Cuban music continues to embody modern sociability in a unique and powerful way.