f32 Magic By Moonlight
Moonlight Benjamin has astonished everybody who has heard her new album Siltane, and took this year’s WOMAD apart. All in a day’s work for this electrifying Haitian Voodoo priestess. Elizabeth Kinder invites her home for tea…
F
or possibly the most brilliantly focused four minutes and seven seconds of private exhilaration to be had in public, Moonlight Benjamin has released Siltane (Ma Case). This blues-infused title track on her latest album opens with a cool, sultry swagger. Spangly guitar riffs and driving
rhythms drop into the groove. Her voice, which feels like a force of nature she’s somehow managing to control, is at first smooth and reined in, but you can sense the containment of power and coiled anger. As the riffs build she lets rip and that anger, like water through a dam, finally bursts. The vocals end in a rising note that’s picked up by the guitarist who unleashes a solo to bring the song skidding to an end in a whorl of feedback. Benjamin calls it a “mix- ture of Voodoo and rock’n’roll.” I call it electrifying.
Born and brought up in Haiti, Siltane is her “questioning of the silence about the injustices endured by the Haitian people.” Her anger, so effectively conveyed, is “at the forces that flout the values set out in this young republic’s constitution.” As she’s singing in Cre- ole this is not immediately apparent to me. It’s only when we meet that I discover that through her music Benjamin wants to “Show the world the real Haiti,” an aim in part inspired by her move in 2002 to France, where “Haiti is often confused with Tahiti.”
Whilst Benjamin also sings in French it’s Haitian Creole that’s the first language of Haiti and the island’s history is reflected in its roots. A mixture of French, Portuguese, Spanish, English and West African languages, it also contains elements of Taino, the lan- guage of its original indigenous peoples who were decimated by European diseases.
The songs on this album (which inspire attempts at singing along, I’ve found) are totally intertwined with the history and cul- ture of the island, not just through the language but from the lyrics which draw on texts from Haitian writers, poets and philoso- phers. She composes her own too, relating the natural world of her homeland and the interconnection with both seen and unseen that underpins life on the tropical island. When she mentions Voodoo, it’s not a marketing ploy. She is not teasing with tired shorthand for exoticism or magic.
Her music combines the rhythms and melodies of Voodoo cer- emonies that originated in Nigeria, with elements of the kompa (or compas) with its roots in merengue, as well as her love of ’30s jazz that she heard as a child. Into this perfect bubbling pot are thrown French chanson, rock and the blues. And so implicit – not just in the language but in her sound – is the history of Haiti: the French and Spanish colonisation, the slave trade, the rebellions and the American occupation. Like Devotchka’s Nick Urata she evokes landscape and mood in a filmic way and Ennio Morricone sometimes flows into your mind through the guitar sound.
As well as her career as a musician and singer, Benjamin is a wife, mother and a Voodoo priestess. She stands in counterpoint to ideas of what this last part of her job description might entail in the popular imagination, or in mine at least.
It was during the American occupation of Haiti in the 1930s that Hollywood’s ongoing sensationalised (and demonising) ver- sion of Voodoo first caught the public imagination. Films such as White Zombie and The Devil’s Daughter fed on lurid accounts of frenzied drumming and orgiastic ceremonies that leapt from the pages of travellers’ tales. Enjoying titles such as Voodoo Fire In Haiti, these were infused with a sense of the madness induced by the heat and the lush vegetation of the tropics, and introduced the power of nature itself as a dominant character, shaping events.
And into these events was woven fear of the power of the
Voodoo practitioners. Since the claim that Voodoo fuelled the suc- cessful slave rebellion in 1791 that gave birth to Haiti as a republic in 1804, it’s been implicated in every revolt, violent organisation and natural disaster ever since.
The menace of Voodoo and violence interwoven with politi-
cal power, heat and madness inspired Graham Greene, whose stays at the iconic Oloffson Hotel in the island’s capital, Port-au-Prince, resulted in The Comedians. And this book, satirising the Duvalier Regime and the Tonton Macoute (the paramilitary death squads that supported it), was banned by Francois ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier.
The Oloffson attracted celebrities like Jackie Onassis, Brando and Mick Jagger, heightening a sense of Haiti’s glamorous appeal despite the violence, the poverty and recurring cat- aclysmic natural events. Islanders often rely on subsistence farming and it and the export trade of cocoa, coffee, sugar cane, bitter oranges and vetiver are – with awful regulari- ty – devastated by hurricanes, mudslides and earthquakes.
With each new intima- tion of disaster and/or the bloody upheaval of politi- cal revolt, foreign reporters hole up in the hotel’s bar filing reports and drinking rum with politicians and local press. Its current owner Richard Morse told The Economist, “When there is political trouble and someone shows up sweating with no luggage, I say the hotel is full.”
Photo: © Judith Burrows
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