Atisole / O, Dawn
by Adolfo Alzuphar
He is a painter of beauty. He is an expert at friendship. At his table, he promised to tell me a story that would be a transcription of reality, that I’d lost my way.
First stop, a book. Daniel. Emilio, pitiful black man and failed poet. Jean. Three friends, of Jacques Roumain’s imagination in La Proie et L’ombre, who meet one night in Port au Prince, a night of cynicism, classicism, racism, and frustration. Enamored with Goethe, in search of light. They talk, and then go on their separate ways, as confused as they were when they met.
He wanted nothing of the sort, not on a late afternoon, after a crowded day. He could not remember her name, as he painted her lips yellow, and her hair green, with a brush made of bird feathers.
As he sat on his chair, he heard a knock on the door. No one ever knocked at that hour. It was a tender knock. Which he appreciated.
“Come in.”
A woman walked into the room wearing leather sandals, a linen blue dress, with yellow lips. She resembled Lina, a kind, wealthy, woman who had supported him at his worst. Before painting her, he’d painted himself as a man wearing a white dress shirt and brown paints, sitting on a drum, waiting.
He offered her a chair, a minute after she walked in. Some of his friends would have either painted her lips green, or added green to her color. Somewhere. The color of money. He didn’t think of her in such a way.
He returned to mixing his colors.
She’d spent the morning swimming in a river, in the nude. As his wife and he had once, or twice, in his native village. Such a thing had become a metaphysics to him, an ontology is how philosophers would call it. Some swim in the nude, some do not. He no longer did.
Osiris. Isis. That Osiris had learned to make wine from grapes, and that Isis would grind flour. That human beings stopped being cannibals and that a vocabulary of sacrality, that of flowers, of bees, of human life, found its way into human song. That Osiris allowed Isis to rule.
The same Isis who had offered the red flowers of salvation in The Golden Ass. Surrounded by men named Metellus, Auguste, and the like, he kept ancient Greece and ancient Rome in mind.
In the conversation that they began having, there was no pain. They did not pay attention to a man outside of the studio, as per his houngan’s instructions, breaking seven glass bottles at seven different crossroads, or with Maitre Minuit making his rounds.
Then he began to speak to me with gravity. He had a testament to tell.
I’ve named it Atisole, in honor of the morning Sun. As a story that is a dawn of my own sense of place. It came from hearing this monologue:
How humane is each and every human gaze? What is a tradition of pure solidarity, of the heart? Who of us is not free to decide if one wants to be situated within a tradition, as part of a traditional audience?
The ocean in which Haiti floats like a turtle tides anonymously because those who live on land, in port cities for that matter, are mostly unconcerned with it. Fisher-folk row through the ocean with songs and ambitions, and sometimes make off with a beautiful poisson rose, a red snapper, that will make its way through the city.
The city dances, and trances, without thinking first of the old beninese word hou in vodou, hou meaning the sea. The ocean offers its breeze and some do sit on their patios to take it in, but others sit in cement houses, thinking, feeling. The ocean knows the tap roots of this misery: it is that of those who close themselves off to the ocean, and the old Caribbean wind.
What if the mind does not want what the heart should? Does one’s criticisms of a tradition, in the name of modernity, make it any less beautiful, any less valid? How does the human gaze seek what the human heart seeks? What stops us from joining in the dance, if the dance itself is what our heart seeks, but our gaze is placed elsewhere?
Anwolèlè, Haitian kreyòl language for high up in the mountains where the sun rises, and living is bliss, surely, is where music should be experienced best. It is there, perhaps, where any dance for the spring equinox should be had, if one is open to such an ideal. She’d grown up in Anwolèlè. She only rarely left it. There, she enjoyed that others thought highly of her presence. She was a beauty. She could easily wear a crown of flowers to dance to any tragedy. Antigone in Haitian kreyòl, raging at Creon… Yet, she hardly ever did. Her skin was deep and rich, the color of land made love to by the Sun.
On a night of rain and of twisted roots, her lips the color of bougainvillea, she met the acrobat. The acrobat: an entertainer, one who is able to lead others into dance in any and every context. The acrobat entertains all social classes. The acrobat is not an intellectual. He has never admired the stars. Despite his discourse. Even has a discourse on time, and the meaning to one’s one life. At times, the acrobat seems to be the speaker, the one who speaks in common for us all, in inspirational language, until one feels skeptical about the whole thing. But no, the acrobat brings the circus, represents it, regenerates it.
She told the acrobat that times were somber and that, though they demanded of her to be sober, she permitted herself some drunkenness, a bit of friendship, a dress full of flowers but never flowers in her hair. He smiled. He told her that the answer to this country’s questions was at the bottom of a lake he used to swim in as a child but too few people in this country can swim.
She wondered if she could tell the acrobat that her son dreamed of a man in big beard and a purple jacket in this very house. She did not. She asked the acrobat where he’d learn how to pull a rabbit out of his hat, as he just had. He told her that he learned it from the orchestra, though in another form, which he interpreted of his own.
The Orchestra is Tropicana. “Adrienne”. “Defi L’humanite”. “Lanmou Bel”. “Bouske Lavi”. Cap-Haitien’s Orchestre Tropicana D’Haiti. Through well arranged instrumentation, the singular voices of its singers such as Parisien Fils Aime, and the mastery of its lyrics, Tropicana sings and arranges the lightness of being Haitian, an improbability.
“The combination of a frivolous form and a serious subject immediately unmasks the truth about our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well as those that we play out on the great stage of History) and their awful insignificance. We experience the unbearable lightness of being.” is what Milan Kundera tells us in an interview with The Paris Review. Kundera’s “lightness of being” does not begin with his own novels, and he would also agree that it finds one of its apogee in the poetry (Poetism) of Nezval, Vítězslav Nezval. Poetism was a maturing of Czech poetry, from proletariat poetry which concerned itself with writing about the proletariat, to producing a poetry that would be read by the proletariat by combining the highbrow and the lowbrow.
Yes, no orchestra is more appreciated by the Haitian masses than Orchestre Tropicana D’Haiti, exactly for this lightness of being. For Haiti’s Fete Champetre, large country festivities dedicated to vodou spirits and saints, the music of choice is Orchestre Tropicana. St. Joseph, the patron saint of desperate causes. St Jacques Majeur, god of fire, metallurgy, and battle. No one plays for the saints and audiences of Haitian campester better than Tropicana. Watteau paintings of Fete Champetre are hilariously the very opposite of the Haitian fete Champetre, though they both aim towards freedom. Haiti’s fete Champetre are popular fiestas, dangerously veering into populist fiestas. They are open to all, and carry the weight of regenerating Haitian humor and wellbeing.
Pluviose, a friend and a furniture maker in Camp Perrin, and I had a conversation about this one midafternoon. that began about Grann Saint Anne, a Haitian saint. Pluviose was the “Artisan of the Year” according to Haiti’s oldest newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, in 2021. In his native Camp Perrin, a forest community that is one of the most beautiful in Haiti, where children who’ve left to go to school or emigrate come back less and less to spend their vacations drinking Kokoye Ole (the water and meat of a young coconut), play hide and seek, tell stories in circles, and ask their grandparents what is this and what is that, no one, absolutely, can bring to life a fete champetre more than Tropicana. Near where a river irrigates fields of agriculture, Pluviose tells me, Tropicana has drawn the stars of many nights, bringing sense to the breath that makes us all human.
Perhaps there is a Haitian condition that the orchestra speaks to. My grandmother, for example, bathed my sister and I, as babies, in Armoise, known in English as Mugwort. A psychedelic childhood? Especially in its instrumentation, there is an epic, fairy tale, like character to Tropicana’s cannon, as if the songs can be put together as one long iliad of finding a self and society grounded in wellbeing. Those bathed in mugwort, in orange leaf, and other leaves, are inheritors of an iliad.
Tropicana is best when it orchestrates tragedy, that long lost, and perpetually revived, art. The contemporary Haitian novel has made tragedy a somber affair and so has Haitian media (radio in particular). Novelists such as Lyonel Trouillot, Michel Soukar, Makenzy Orcel, Edwidge Danticat, Yannick Lahens, Saika Ceus, et al, flow from the waters of Haitian marxist thought beginning with Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la Rosée, translated to Masters of the Dew by Langston Hughes. Their novels are amazing, but there is no humor to them. Reading them is like walking into a room without windows. This form of tragedy is built around a revolutionary catharsis, and seems to not exist in the text itself, but in the very fact of the novel (the pleasure of culture and lucidity).
Socrates destroyed Greek tragedy, through Euripides, claims Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. What he means by this is that when Euripides pushed aside the chorus for explanation by characters, which will, by the way, later balloon into the European psychological novel, Greek tragedy died and with it its promise of vitality. After the collapse of ancient Greece, Nietzche writes, wild Dyonisius was replaced by the much more sober Apollo as the god of music.
Tropicana’s tragedies, neither Greek nor Nietzche’s (that require a class of slaves that are not optimistic about emancipation) are fusions and epic in character. “Ti Dady” is Tropicana’s first great tragedy. It begins as a love song to Ti Dady, who the narrator loves. She is a “malerez”, which means that she is poor, and because of this a social outcast in Cap-Haitien. It was written before the advent of the Yamaha DX-7 in Haitian music, and synthmania that it has since induced. It is instead mostly led by wind instruments. The narrator speaks directly to TiDady, who has “chosen because it is who he loves”. However “blacks marry blacks, mulattoes marry mulattoes” in Haiti, the narrator sings. The tragedy is first that this narrator has to sing this song, and has to examine this. The narrator begins to sing that “we are all flesh” and that we should marry who we want. The narrator has become Antigone, and the society a Creon whose acts have created the sort of situation that merits this sort of song. We are the chorus in this tragedy, all making a complete work of art, a tragic Gesamtkunstwerk.
Demographically, Tropicana was born in 1963 to a city of around 30,000 souls. It is now a city of half a million, nearing a million quickly. Demography is critical to understanding popular melody and harmony. There is a certain quiet to a city of 30,000, and a sense of the permanence of tradition and one’s presence. The melodic ideal in creole societies such as Haiti at the time of 30,000 person cities was folk melody. They were cities of trees, birds, and of urban forests. The musicians who founded Tropicana were and still are trained and informed by classical music melody, and utilized this in arranging folk melody in music for modernity. This is apparent in how indecipherable the harmonies can be, a mark of great music.
The orchestra was founded on August 15th, an important day to both Benin (where the term vodou that Haiti is famous for originates) and Haiti. In Benin, it is the Festival de L’igname, or the festival of yams. The festival of yams is a day to celebrate Mahi culture, a culture that is very present in Haiti. On that day, that tradition is that community members meet to celebrate themselves, their deities, and receive blessings to consume the harvest. In Haiti, August 15th is the day of the Bwa Kayiman ceremony, that brought a group of slaves, and some non-slaves, together in Saint Domingue, as Haiti was named when it was colonized by the French, who decided to come together and revolt. Bwa Kayiman is the official beginning of Haiti. Finally, it is the day that a great saint is celebrated in Haiti, Notre Dame.
Haitian cities could be kreyòl ladogwesan, a creole necklace of many beads, each bead representing a deity. Mixed and proud of it. Haitian cities, however, were and are places of both political and social prejudice. Of jaundiced dreams. The modern city that is the most loyal customer of Tropicana is a city of sorrow and pain, of violence. Its dreams, that of a traditional square where folks meet, boulevards where stores, nightclubs, and street vendors co-exist, and neighborhoods where an ethical hedonism, friends discussing on a patio over whisky or rum nightly, young men singing songs for young women, young men playing cards at a table on the street, the acceptable mistress of two, is lived, are under siege. Even the ideal that undergirds it all, the old consolation, that of a woman in traditional garment, a carabella dress, picking noni leaves while being on her cell phone, as the Sun sets, is becoming rarer. For this city, a city where harmony and melody is the subject of less thought than it once was, Tropicana orchestrates wind instruments tonalities popular in the Jazz age, and the age of Havana, Cuba, nightclubs (the orchestra is named Tropicana) to audiences that seem to find themselves in Hip Hop, pop music, and electric Raboday music. The ephemeral dominates the permanent in the new city, and even voices suffer. The softness of the voices of past generations, cultivated while singing at the river, singing while working, singing at rituals, has been replaced with coarseness of voices perpetually protesting and negotiating a frustrating existence, for all social classes.
Some fans would disagree that Tropicana’s best music is its orchestration of tragedy. They would point to “Adrienne” and would argue that Tropicana’s best songs are celebrations of Haitian female beauty in the grand tradition begun by Emile Nau in 1836, in a newspaper article asking Haitians to celebrate the natural beauty in poetry. This tradition found its great poet in Oswald Durand, whose poem “Choucoune” is a Haitian classic. “Choucoune” is a poem about a black woman with long hair, a marabou, whose beauty inspires passion. Passion let’s not forget is as Catholic as it gets. Catholicism in Haiti has always had a say in the education of Haitians. Subverting Catholic passion with a post-colonial passion may be the purpose of this tradition.
She, “Adrienne”, told the acrobat that Tropicana was too much an idyll, an idyllic music. She did not want to pretend to want to live in admiration of old traditional churches at the heart of a city, like in the song “Veye Priye”. She did not want to wear a dress with high heels and participate in creole politesse. She wanted to dance. She wanted freedom. She did not feel that her freedom was less important than participating in some kind of collective ceremony of light tragedy. So, she did not love Orchestre Tropicana. She loved the idea of red lips, of expensive sandals and of nights out in a bar. She dreamed of wearing acid washed jeans to a cafe in a public square in Haiti, for the first time, her hair dyed. She wanted jazz, but did not want to say it.
She was a contradiction. She preferred to spend her money on the ecstasy of konpa bands, such as Carimi, T-Vice, Kreyol la, whose musical climaxes and melodies were so obviously simulations of orgasms. This despite the sense that she got from contemplating a green lizard on a light green wall, of her true appreciation for the texture of a banana peel or of an orange, as sold at an open air market. She loved the organic and how it juxtaposed itself in the city of 3 million that she grew up in. She grew up to the beat of such orgasm, and could simulate her own excitement for it if need be. She had never eaten sugarcane in front of the national university, that bastion of freedom and protest, with radical pairs. Plus, she believed that both were kitsch. They were songs of falsified love, and a derivative of the Haitian romantic movement in poetry. Massillon Coicou. Etzer Vilaire. Beloved French romantic poets such as Alfred de Musset studied in middle and high schools. The universities that she had attended outside of Haiti made her adverse to inherited values, a difficult position to be in in Haiti. Instead, she dreamed of ontological freedom, conversation and legislation that led to new values. Values that were currently written in the wind, and would be interpreted by our bodies.
“Humor is the great invention of the modern spirit” Octavio Paz tells us, especially about Cervantes founding the modern novel. This was her position. Not inherited humor, though. The sort of humor that she herself created and shared with others. She was open to the humor of others, even to Rabelais’s humor. However, she could only value his humor if he would have been open to her humor. She liked Van Blanrenberghe’s painting of Cap-Francais in 1788, which later became the Cap Haitien that gave birth to Orchestre Tropicana. She loved how Blanrenberghe painted his skies and orange clouds.
She dreamed of detachment, the Upanishads. The Upanishads? She felt that detachment was what was missing from the culture she lived in, a sort of mindfulness of what festers inside. She, weirdly enough, also dreamed of, and valued, vodou, attachment. Mimerose Beaubrun’s words marked her, that “vodou is a dance of the spirit .. It is being able to establish a balance between the elements that surround us, it’s being in harmony with nature and vibrating with the universal soul… that vodou never ceases to dance with us, its creation.. These spiritual powers dance all the time, they make us dance and they dance within us.”
The acrobat wanted to ask her how self-created values, however beautiful they were, could fight with imposed values, and an imposed reality. A manufactured consent. He did not however. He didn’t see why she couldn’t find all of what she wanted in Tropicana. Why she did not want to dance to tragedy. Kitsch? He didn’t agree that Tropicana was. Yes, they had produced kitsch in the past, but times had changed, and she was a product of her times was she not? How about “Oka Oka”? Was that not a song that embodied the city that she dreamed of? Perhaps the issue was that she did not have “the arteries for this age” to paraphrase the poet Adonis. He could hear the tourterelles, the turtle doves, that she kept. TU-tu-tuTU.
She changed the subject with a laugh. She asked the acrobat if he’d like some basil. She had started farming it, in a garden under her bedroom window. Basil for cleaning the inside of her house, and for making tea. She had so much to say about basil. The ancient Egyptians and basil. The Greeks and how they did not embrace it like the Egyptians and the Chinese did. He felt much obliged.
The acrobat could not believe his eyes as he meditated on this paradox. Of her freedom, learned in the west, and how she could not find this freedom in this culture. The acrobat wanted her to change. She wanted Haiti to be France, Miami, Spain.
He, being me.
Adolfo Alzuphar has contributed to Entropy, The Brooklyn Rail, and the LA Review of Books. He is currently writing a memoir.