Beken - Imilyasyon (Haitian Classic Music - Nostalgia Pou Moun Nan Diaspora a)

Beken - Imilyasyon (Haitian Classic Music - Nostalgia Pou Moun Nan Diaspora a).

Le « John Lee Hooker » haïtien, a écrit, d’enthousiasme, le critique du NewYork Times, le 5 mars dernier, quand il l’a découvert chantant les souffrances de son peuple dans les rues de Port-au-Prince. Avec le groupe Barikad Crew et Manno Charlemagne une des « stars » de la chanson haïtienne d’aujourd’hui, celui dans lequel les Haïtiens se reconnaissent.

Après avoir perdu une jambe à l’âge de 12 ans dans un accident de voiture, il a grandi dans la tradition des troubadours des rues. Sa maison détruite dans le tremblement de terre, il vit aujourd’hui sous une tente sur les hauteurs de Pétionville, près du Kinam Hotel, et c’est dans le Break-Time, un café en plein air de Pétionville, où l’on servait un bouillon de tête de chèvre, que le journaliste du NY Times, bouleversé, l’a découvert, et les habitués reprenaient en cœur ses chansons. Et en elles passaient la désespérance et l’humour, la révolte et l’énergie d’un pays d’une prodigieuse créativité au plus noir du malheur…

Beken est l’invité d’Etonnants Voyageurs, où il viendra chanter, aux cotés de Marlène Dorcéna, lors de la grande soirée Haïti de France Culture, au th^éâtre Chateaubriand de Saint-Malo, samedi 22 mai à 20h00.

Beken Biography

The Haitian singer Beken, whose government name is Jean Prosper Dauphin, was born in Port-au-Prince in 1956. When he was twelve, he lost a leg in a car accident. In Haiti, a cripple without means is condemned to the life of a malere-one of the permanently wretched of the earth. Luckier than many, Beken attended Sainte Eternité School, which serves disabled children, and managed to complete high school by the age of nineteen-more education than most Haitians can win. lf the sang "Bakaloreya" has the facts straight, he might have gone on to university, if not for the death of his mother.

Beken's father used to sing regularly for a peasant organization. Soon after the loss of his leg, Beken picked up a guitar and began to get into Haitian music. "l've had this wooden guitar a long time", Beken sings in "Kote'w Te Ye". At some point, the instrument became his mealticket. His music falls in Haiti's troubadour tradition; like most European cultural phenomena, the model of the troubadour has not passed through Haiti without transformation. Some troubadour recycles international pop music into a Haitian idiom, others become such stinging political gadflies that they risk assassination; one of the latter, Manno Charlemagne, became mayor of Port-au-Prince on the strength of the acerbic political commentary presented in his songs.

Beken was discovered (though not for the first time) in 2010, on the streets of earthquake-wracked Port-au-Prince. Photographer Simon Romero caught a snatch of one his songs through the window and (without understanding the Kreyol in which Beken sings) thought its artful melancholy captured the post-catastrophe mood. Eventually, Romero found the singer himself in a camp for displaced persons on the Place Saint-Pierre in Petionville - suffering, llike most the capital’s population, from grief, shock, and dire deprivation. Still, Beken's spirit was strong, and so was his voice. When Thirty Tigers producers Chris Donohue and David Macias heard the short clips of his singing in a slideshow Romero had produced for the New York Times website, they were inspired to find a way to make the album "Troubadour". Beken's political material is less controversial, and his lyrics tend tobe far less personal than those of a First World singer­-songwriter. Another role of the troubadour is to reflect the listeners' own feeling back, and Beken really excels at that. Everything in Haiti is shared, and for all Beken's lifetime, there has been plenty of suffering to go round. My suffering is also yours, his songs propose, and my dream of a better·life is yours as much as mine.

This message, in Beken's gently mournful phrasing, has won the singer a few cycles of success, especially in the 1980s when he was able tour the United States.

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