Rara and Politics
Analysis

Rara bands are thought of, in a way, as the military branch of a particular Vodou society or Sanpwel secret society. So besides being carnival bands, they are also armies out on manoevers, and they are competing with other Rara bands that might be in the area. The Rara bands are very hierarchical, and have Presidents, Colonels, Majors, Capitans, and other military ranks. Rara bands probably harken back to eighteenth-century peasant armies, which had marching bands accompany them.

So within and between bands, there are lots of levels of power politics. Then there are also the politics created by insecurity. The conditions in Haiti during the twentieth century have occasioned multiple insecurities resulting from many causes: land erosion, massive migration, unemployment, poverty, famine, dictatorships, coups d'etat, and foreign invasions. It is on a shifting and violent stage that Rara bands leave their home compounds and enter public space.

The political economy of violence in Haiti has been devastating to that country. As an anthropologist, I was in a position to write about everyday life under the repression of the coup, and the cultural changes that accompanied it. Looking at Rara was a way to see beyond the strict politics of coups, sanctions, and troops and considers the religion and expressive politics of the poor: what it was possible to say in public, and how it was possible to say it.

Through their song lyrics, Rara bands make musical points about sexual mores, politics within the local community, and about the national situation. Rara bands operate primarily within local power networks, performing religious work, yet there are times when the Rara festival intersects with state power in the arena of national politics. Rara members can become overtly political actors on the national stage and use their strength in numbers to minimize the risk of broadcasting political opinions they cannot otherwise voice. As stylized performances of the peasant armies of previous eras, Rara both creates popular solidarity and conveys cognitive messages to the dominant classes of the strength and power of the disenfranchised.

Within this expressive politics, the significance and connotations of words and phrases are manipulated in a constant process of change. Meanings and their referents can and do shift quickly and unpredictably. When Rara bands move in large numbers through public thoroughfares singing about current events, they open up a social space for popular expression.

I argue that Rara creates a semiautonomous stage for discourse under conditions of insecurity. Insecurity applies to a range of social relations, from terror to other less dramatic factors such as political coercion, discrimination, or unemployment. In New York, Rara bands speak about the politics of racism, of inter-Caribbean relations, and of the experience of migration. Often enough, in Haiti and New York, Rara bands take to the streets in explicit protests. Their massive numbers of people singing their opinions really do form a powerful force. But until those numbers of people can mobilize on the political stage for an agenda of full political rights, the politics of Rara will remain more in the realm of the expressive, performative, and theatrical.

(Excerpted from Elizabeth McAlister, Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti. University of California Press, 2002, Chapters 5 and 6.)