Rara in New York
Analysis

Rara in New York

The people who gather each week have extended Haiti's grassroots popular culture onto their local U.S. terrain. The bands created entirely new lyrics to speak of the New York experience, and these new songs were carried to families and circulated in neighborhoods after the Rara. Today, Rara in New York has come to express a point of view about the Haitian immigrant predicament.

Rara performance, with its roots firmly in Haiti, now has a role in a wider transnational Black Atlantic popular culture. Performance and attendance at Rara festivals takes place as Haitian people move back and forth between home villages in Haiti and points in the United States. A song created in Leogane could be sung in Brooklyn a week later, creating a deterritorialized popular Haitian discourse that allowed traditional knowledge rooted in peasant culture, now inflected with the diaspora experience, to circulate internationally throughout many Haitian social spheres.

A Rara band from Brooklyn plays each year for Saint Jerome's Feast at the monastery in Graymoor, New York. In New York City, Rara bands have paraded in protest demonstrations, singing songs and voicing political opinion. Rara bands gathered when Aristide was ousted in 1991, and again to sing and protest during demonstrations against the New York police's brutality in three cases involving African and Haitian men: Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, and Patrick Dorismond. There are debates in the Haitian community about whether Rara-with its boisterous, loud, sometimes joyful performance ethos-belongs in a political protest that's denouncing something horrible and tragic. Will the TV news cameras make the crowd seem like they are celebrating? Should political demonstrators instead sing Protestant hymns, as in the Civil Rights movement? These questions are still being worked out among Haitians in the various communities in the U.S.

Rara music and performance are in dialogue with the Haitian branches of dance-hall and hip-hop culture (that include Wyclef Jean, Bigga Haitian, King Posse, and Original Rap Stars). But as a particularly Haitian genre that large groups parade in public, Rara occupies a singular space that has unique possibilities for communication and performance.

(Excerpted from Elizabeth McAlister, Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance. University of California Press, 2002, Chapter Seven.)