Archiving collective memory: performance in the French Caribbean

Resumo

The colonial annihilation of the colonized’s histories and cultures is perhaps nowhere starker than in the Caribbean. Indigenous populations were victims to genocide owing to European invasion; Africans, brutally amputated from their languages, religious cosmologies and spiritual traditions, were trafficked across the Atlantic and enslaved; forests were destroyed on a mass scale to clear for sugar plantations, causing species depletion. Since cultures in both the Americas and Africa were predominantly oral, many were erased with their perished populations.

In this article, I examine how performance from the French-speaking Caribbean – Martinican lasotè and bèlè, and Guadeloupian gwoka – might become archives of collective memory. The musician Christian Dahomey alludes to gwoka as ‘what is left when everything is forgotten’. The gwoka musician Rozan Monza describes it as ‘memory-music’ and ‘resistance music’.

I examine how these practices become vessels not solely of trauma provoked by colonialism, but of resistance to the oppression of people, and destruction of land. I analyse this repertoire of embodied performance practices, seeking to reveal their intergenerationally embodied collective commemoration of loss, and their celebration of survival.

Significantly, I ask how they might contribute towards reconstructing decolonial notions of identity and community, as well as non-exploitative – one might say ecological – relationships with the land. I end by arguing that performance can generate knowledge that resists the fetishized materialities of the conventional archive.

The transience and absence left by the impossibility definitively to archive performance can be understood as an opening, rather than a void. Instead of congealing into grand narratives of the past, which could perpetuate exclusion through dogmatic prescription or restriction, performance’s intangibility and spontaneity, the fact that it depends on participation and presence for its production and reproduction, can become a privileged site for potential.