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Slaves to the Rhythm: theRhythmic Evolution of PlantationSocietiesMartin MunroPublished online: 06 Jan 2011.

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Contemporary French and Francophone StudiesVol. 15, No. 1, January 2011, 27–35

SLAVES TO THE RHYTHM: THE RHYTHMIC

EVOLUTION OF PLANTATION SOCIETIES

Martin Munro

The transportation of slaves from Africa to the circum-Caribbean was marked byprocesses of cultural dislocation, destruction, and renewal in which rhythmplayed a central role not only in resistance to colonial domination but also as akind of lingua franca binding together peoples of disparate origins. Rhythm wasable to transcend not only differences of origin but also geographical andlinguistic differences across the circum-Caribbean, the cultural and historicalspace that encompasses the islands of the Caribbean Sea and the countries thatborder it, or which can be said to share certain societal and cultural traits.Rhythm is one of these common features, a force that, as I will argue in thisarticle, transcends linguistic and national barriers (in this case across theFrancophone Caribbean and Anglophone North America), and is a key elementin understanding the evolution of circum-Caribbean cultures.

It may seem strange at first to say that rhythm plays a fundamental role inthe creation and establishment of stable, functioning individuals or societies.Rhythm is conventionally thought of as an element of music, or as a feature ofpoetic style, something external to the body, a supplement to experience ratherthan an essential element of it. If we think however, of where rhythm comesfrom, and notwithstanding Derrida’s idea that rhythm’s origins are ‘‘incal-culable’’ (81), we turn inevitably to the body, even to the womb, and our firstencounters with the rhythmic workings of human bodies. Rhythm as we know itseems to originate in the body, from psycho-physiological urges, from theimpulse to perform continuous, regular movements, which in turn create ‘‘theawareness of greater ease and gusto through constant evenness in motion’’ (Sachs112). The human body itself can be seen as a set of rhythms that are different,but which act in harmony with each other, particularly when the body moves in

ISSN 1740-9292 (print)/ISSN 1740-9306 (online)/11/010027–9 � 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17409292.2011.535260

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time to music (Lefebvre 31). The bodily response to rhythmic music occurs inthe sympathetic and para-sympathetic nervous systems, which govern humanemotions, and which are involved in the restoration and maintenance ofhomeostasis, that is the metabolic equilibrium operated via the autonomicnervous system to counteract disrupting changes (McNeill 6).1 The rhythmicmovements of the muscles, as they work through the nervous system, ‘‘provokeechoes of the fetal condition,’’ when the major external stimulus to thedeveloping brain was the mother’s regular heartbeat. As such, ‘‘prolonged andinsistent rhythmic stimuli may restore a simulacrum of fetal emotions toconsciousness,’’ or else return a state of consciousness left behind in infancy,when most psychologists agree little distinction is made between self andsurroundings (McNeill 7). In this sense, rhythm is part of us, an echo of ourearliest experiences in the womb and in life, a regular, regulating force that stayswith us and whose proper functioning works to ensure healthy, stable being.

Rhythm is also a crucial element in bonding societies and groups, and increating a collective experience of time. In particular all societies, developed orotherwise, seem at every stage of their evolution to have integrated theconcerted, rhythmic social movements of song and dance with other significantsocial activities, notably work (Filmer 92–93). A society’s notion of timebecomes ‘‘second nature’’ to its people through collective, rhythmicinteractions. People learn how to keep together in time through variousforms of movement socialization, and these movements are mediated byrhythm.2 This rhythmic process is moreover much older than language: asMcNeill says, prolonged and rhythmic movements throughout human historyhave created a ‘‘euphoric fellow feeling’’ that provides the basis for socialcohesion ‘‘among any and every group that stays together in time’’ (McNeill 4).Moving and singing together in time enables collective tasks to be carried out farmore efficiently. More fundamentally, keeping together in time was importantfor human evolution in that it allowed early human groups to ‘‘increase theirsize, enhance their cohesion, and assure survival by improving their success inguarding territory, securing food, and nurturing the young’’ (McNeill 93).Rhythm in this sense, and in the way it facilitated the creation of stable humancommunities, was fundamental in the emergence of human beings as thedominant species (McNeill 156–157).

My interest in this article lies in considering how rhythm functioned insocieties that were founded on an apparent counter-impulse to radicallyundermine social cohesion, and literally knock people out of their rhythm. Theplantation societies of the New World were never set up to nurture cohesivecommunities. Rather, they were money making machines that used humanbeings as combustible, disposable parts of the machine; in short these wereintended to be anti-societies that relied on the continuous supply andconsumption of bodies uprooted and thrown out of step, out of rhythm. Inthe colonial Caribbean, where the indigenous population was more or less

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wiped out by illness and warfare, the need for rhythmic socialization among thedisparate groups of African slaves must have been even greater than in the kindsof organically evolving early human communities that McNeill has in mind. Inwhat follows I will show that despite the anti-rhythmic features of plantationsocieties, rhythm survived and metamorphosed in the Americas, often taking onidiosyncratic forms that adapted to and reflected to some degree the newworking and living environment. To this end, I will address briefly threeessential related questions: What rhythms did slaves live to? How did therhythms of their African communities adapt to their New World contexts? Whatis the relation between rhythm and identity, both personal and collective? Myaim is to suggest some of the ways in which rhythm shaped the experience ofslaves individually and collectively, how it helped them survive the plantation,and how it also in other ways made the experience bearable, and thus ironicallyhelped perpetuate the plantation system. More broadly, I hope to suggest howcritical attention to rhythm can help to understand both the evolution of circum-Caribbean societies and some of the current problems of these places—peopleand groups still living out of step with each other, communities and nations stillfragmented, lacking the trust, self-awareness, and cohesion that rhythmicinteractions can bring. For, the basic configuration of the plantation, in terms ofits physical layout and the social relations it created, was essentially the same inthe Caribbean and the American South. Such are the similarities that, whenEdouard Glissant visited Mississippi and Louisiana, he found himself explainingto Americans the ways in which their world mirrored and echoed his ownhomeland of Martinique, how the families that fled the French and Haitianrevolutions brought a distinctive culture that persists still in various forms: incooking, in architecture, and in music, which are ‘‘principally the same in theculture of this whole area’’ (Faulkner, Mississippi 29). The African trace, Glissantsays, was kept alive and reconfigured according to the ‘‘inspiration’’ of particularplaces in this circum-Caribbean world, a zone shaped by a common,interconnected history that ‘‘travels with the seas’’ (Faulkner, Mississippi 29).

African Rhythms

Rhythm was one of the most effective and durable means by which this Africantrace was preserved in the New World. However much they have beencreolized, the black cultures of the circum-Caribbean region have generallyevolved from the ‘‘common trunk’’ of Africa, and in terms of rhythm haveconserved ‘‘definite filiations with the continent of origin’’ (Barthelemy 171).Rhythm is in this sense one of the most enduring cultural and existentialremnants of the Middle Passage. Rhythm continues to play a significant role bothculturally and existentially in sub-Saharan African societies, as studies by JohnMiller Chernoff, Francis Bebey, and others have shown. Rhythm permeates the

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everyday, secular life of many African societies, and is also an integral part ofreligious ritual. Indeed, it is perhaps the retention of rhythmic aspects of ritualsuch as antiphony, bodily movement, and drumming in African (and Africandiasporic) religious practice that is the single most important factor inperpetuating the rhythmic qualities of these societies. Because rhythm is notexcluded from religious ritual (as it largely is in European religious practices), itis validated as an important element of existence, and integrated into theindividual’s whole experience.

Traveling Rhythms

With the mass influx of African slaves to the circum-Caribbean, rhythm becameon the one hand a marker of racial difference and cultural inferiority, and on theother a sign of resistance and impenetrable black subjectivity. As slave ships leftthe coast of West Africa, many distressed slaves would throw themselvesoverboard, beat their heads off the walls, or else try to suffocate and starvethemselves to death. Once Africa was out of sight, however, as one slave traderreported, the slaves could be cheered up through the playing of music (Savary140, and see Miller 48–49). In this sense, music was also a source of comfort,and a means of making the experience of slavery to some extent bearable. Fornewly-arrived slaves, music and rhythm soon became some of the strongestmarkers of identity; even if the sounds of their songs initially seemed ‘‘absurdlyout of place’’ in the New World, gradually the ‘‘reassuring texture of their ownwords’’ and the ‘‘resonance of the music’s pulse,’’ in other words its rhythm,‘‘transported them to a place where something other than their appallingconditions mattered’’ (White and White Sounds of Slavery XI). If the variousEuropean colonial powers sought to institute arrhythmic anti-societies in thecircum-Caribbean, the slaves and their descendants preserved and nurtured arhythmic counter-culture that to some extent transposed some of the social andcultural models of Africa onto their New World reality. In terms of musicalmodes, the diverse African peoples brought to the New World the apart-playing, polyrhythms, cross-rhythms, time-line, elisions, hockets, ululations,tremolos, vocables, grunts, hums, shouts, and melismatic phrasings of theirhomelands (Floyd 38). In other ways too, just as drums communicatedmessages, or ‘‘talked’’ by imitating the rhythms and tonality of speech, so someof the wordless calls, howls, and hollers of slaves functioned as an ‘‘alternativecommunication system,’’ which conveyed information through sounds in waysthat whites ‘‘could neither confidently understand nor easily jam’’ (White andWhite Sounds of Slavery 20).

While African music and dance were often viewed with suspicion andsuppressed by whites in the New World, slave masters soon learned that theirslaves worked more effectively when they sang, and would appoint a lead singer

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for each group of working slaves. Indeed, when slaves were auctioned, singerswith the strongest voices attracted the highest prices (Kebede 130). On theplantations slaves accompanied virtually every kind of work with songs, chants,and movements that were characterized primarily by rhythm. The French authorPierre de Vaissiere wrote in the seventeenth century of slaves engaged infieldwork, ‘‘timing their strokes in the rhythm of African songs that would delightany visitor’’ (qtd. in Desmangles 26).3 Also, in the mid-nineteenth century, theSwedish traveler Fredrika Bremer, while traveling down the Mississippi River on asteamboat, watched the black crew work and sing in time in the engine room, andwas greatly impressed by the spectacle. ‘‘It was a fantastic and grand sight,’’ shesaid, ‘‘to see these energetic black athletes lit up by the wildly flashing flames fromthe fiery throats [of the engine fires], while they, amid their equally fantastic song,keeping time most exquisitely, hurled one piece of fire-wood after another intothe yawning fiery gulf’’ (261–262). Similarly, in the 1830s, when the well-knownactress Fanny Kemble traveled down the Altamaha River, Georgia, she was struckby how the eight slave oarsmen ‘‘set up a chorus, which they continued to chant inunison with each other, and in time with their stroke,’’ and remarked that the‘‘tune and time’’ kept by the oarsmen was ‘‘something quite wonderful’’ (162–164). In work songs, pronounced, regular rhythms at once echoed the repetitivenature of much of the work, and helped slaves endure its monotony. Thus, onecontemporary observer of plantation life in pre-revolution Saint-Domingue wroteof the ‘‘abundance’’ and ‘‘peace’’ of the place, and of ‘‘[t]he dutiful Africansworking in cadence’’ (Popkin 70).4

Much later, Edouard Glissant presented and critiqued a similar function ofrhythm in his classic novel, Le Quatrieme siecle. Glissant is particularly ambivalentabout the practice of rhythmic, call-and-response chanting and the figure of thecantor, the chorus leader who has much in common with other chantwell figuresfrom across the colonial Caribbean. In Glissant’s presentation of Martinicanhistory, the cantor figure appeared not so much at a certain time, but rather in thespace, the clearing that opened up between wild humus and the domesticcompost, therefore out of decomposition and decay. The singers came out of thenothingness, ‘‘born from their own beatitude’’ to praise beauty, and in a countrywhere to sing is to ‘‘become free,’’ Glissant says, the coming of the singers wasinevitable. Glissant’s ambivalence towards the singers is suggested in the quotationof one of their songs that depicts a harmonious, rhythmic life on the plantation:‘‘How fine it was, in ordered lines, to the rhythm of the tom-tom, and in the joyfulassurance of work, to cut the cane: while far away the trade winds caressed thesoftness of the flowers, the fruits, the leaves, and the branches’’ (222).

Rhythm functions in this instance as a palliative for the alienated slave, butalso as a phenomenon that entrances, lulls, and finally deadens the senses,distorting reality. Thus in lauding the fragile beauty of the place and of plantationwork, the singers are unaware of the ‘‘robe of death’’ that envelops this beauty(222). The rhythmic singing is thus for Glissant an amnesiac act, a way of

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forgetting the everyday horrors of the plantation. The singer pretends and feignsvoluptuous pleasure, and pursues sources of joy without knowing that they willfinally fall away from his outstretched hand. But, Glissant says, the singer will notbe able to fully forget the ‘‘obscure lack’’ that will stay with him, and which will bea permanent reminder of ‘‘the man who stirs in the forgotten depths of his soul’’(222). There will remain therefore an ineradicable memory of the singer’ssituation, a core of truth that his delusive rhythms will not be able to penetrate.

Music was however only one part of the rhythmic fabric of slave life. Manyof the other sounds of the plantation, both musical and industrial, were rhythmicand repetitive, sonic accompaniments to lives that were themselves governed byrepeated routines and rhythmic patterns of work. The soundscape of theplantation included the cracking of overseers’ whips, the cries and screams ofslaves, the pealing of bells and the sounding of conch shells to mark out differentperiods of the slaves’ working day, the grating, mechanical noise of the sugarrefineries, as well as the call-and-response singing of working slaves, the genteelsounds of the masters’ dances, and the drumming, singing, and clapping thataccompanied slave dances on weekends and holidays.

In a sense, too, the slaves’ work routine was polyrhythmic, a multi-layeredconstant loop of repetitive functions (Tomich 422). The unrelenting, repetitivework of the slaves suggests something of the relation between social conventionand repetition, and the way that the former depends on the latter (in work, habits,ways of thinking) as a means of perpetuating itself.5 At the same time, this kind ofenforced, unending repetition was a sign of deep insecurity, a tacit recognition ofthe ‘‘unnatural,’’ ultimately untenable practices of plantation slavery.

In the Caribbean, the slaves’ monotonous, rhythmic experience of time wascompounded by the largely constant year-round duration of the day in theTropics; the very slight variations in daylight from one month to the nextcreated a temporal continuity that reinforced the unending repetitions thatstructured work. In the American South, from the 1830s onward slaveholdersadopted a mechanical ‘‘clock-dependent time consciousness’’ that wascommunicated to slaves through the regular, rhythmic soundings of bells andhorns. While they or their forebears had come from societies in which clockswere virtually absent, where the sense of time was ‘‘task-oriented’’ and‘‘natural,’’ slaves had to adjust themselves to the strictures and demands of theclock-regulated world, to the plantation’s ‘‘mechanical regulation of life andthought’’ (Smith, ‘‘Time, Slavery, and Plantation Capitalism’’ 143, 152, 157,158. See also Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in theAmerican South).6 It is significant in this regard that a contemporary observer incolonial Saint-Domingue remarked how two slave foremen wore pocket watches‘‘to distinguish themselves’’ from the field workers; it was as if the mastery anddomination of people went hand in hand with the control of time (Popkin 41).Time and culture in the plantation world were structurally interrelated andinterdependent, and were always ‘‘mediated by rhythm’’ (Filmer 91).

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Rhythm, as an ancient and yet modern force that structures time, work, andsocial interaction, is an essential element in creating cohesive communities. Theplantation societies of the circum-Caribbean were unique in modern worldhistory in that they were set up as (though never quite became) arrhythmic,deadening sites of unfettered human exploitation. Into these anti-societiesflowed the rhythms of diverse African peoples, radically displaced and knockedout of step by their brutal uprooting and new situation as parts of the plantationmachine. Rhythms evolved and survived and became some of the mostimportant elements in the nascent societies that evolved on the plantations of theNew World. It was through rhythm that the various African groups bonded witheach other and, in more attenuated ways, with the European groups inplantation societies. Within the broader, macro rhythms of the plantation(governed by clocks, work regulations, and agricultural and industrial cycles)the micro rhythms of slave lives (the call and response singing and the rhythmicbodily movements of field work, the sacred and secular rhythms of dance anddrumming, the rhythms and repetitions of oral culture in general) graduallyfashioned a new rhythmic ontology that was to some extent adjusted to theimposed rhythms of work, but which also constituted an alternative system, aconception of the world and social relations that was starkly different to that ofthe colonial order. If we still think of Caribbean societies as being fundamentallyalike, and if we can yet see similarities between these societies and those of theAmerican South, it is because in the darkest days of slavery African peoples cametogether in rhythm as a means of survival, and rhythm itself became closelyassociated with a nascent New World subjectivity that would evolve and assertitself in different ways as time passed, moving to its own beat and remaining asymbol of resistance and cultural identity. More than a crude avatar ofessentialized racial identity, rhythm is a very real element in circum-Caribbeancultures, one that is crucial to understanding the history and evolution of thesesocieties, and to their effective functioning, now and in the future.

Notes

1 Rhythm is being increasingly used in the treatment of a variety of disorderssuch as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Rhythm-based musictherapy is also being used to treat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, andvarious psychological conditions. See, for example, Michael Thaut, Rhythm,Music, and the Brain and Robert Lawrence Friedman, The Healing Power ofthe Drum.

2 See Layne Redmond’s idea that ‘‘Through rhythmic repetition of ritualsounds, the body, brain, and the nervous system are energized andtransformed. When a group of people play a rhythm for an extended periodof time, their brain waves become entrained to the rhythm and they have a

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shared brain wave state. The longer the drumming goes on, the morepowerful the entrainment becomes. It’s really the oldest holy communion’’(qtd. in Friedman 44).

3 Similar instances of the repetitive sounds of plantation work in the UnitedStates are discussed in White and White, The Sounds of Slavery 2.

4 See also Tolstoy’s remark to Gorki that ‘‘Where you want to have slaves,there you should have as much music as possible’’ (qtd. in Schafer, ‘‘OpenEars’’ 30). Game and social songs were also marked by regular meter, andconsisted of simple additive rhythms and repetitive pentatonic melodicconstructions, with accents on the off beat (Floyd 51).

5 See Fred Moten, In the Break, 69. See also Lefebvre on the differences betweencyclical (cosmic) repetitions and linear (mechanical) repetitions (90).

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Martin Munro is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Florida State

University. He previously worked in Trinidad, Ireland, and Scotland and is the author,

most recently, of Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas (2010). His

latest edited works are Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide (2010) and Haiti Rising:

Haitian History, Culture and the Earthquake of 2010. He is a member of the Small Axe

editorial collective.

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