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Contemporary French and

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Slaves to the Rhythm: the

Rhythmic Evolution of Plantation
Societies
Martin Munro
Published online: 06 Jan 2011.

To cite this article: Martin Munro (2011) Slaves to the Rhythm: the Rhythmic Evolution
of Plantation Societies, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 15:1, 27-35,
DOI: 10.1080/17409292.2011.535260
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Contemporary French and Francophone Studies

Vol. 15, No. 1, January 2011, 2735

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SLAVES TO THE RHYTHM: THE RHYTHMIC

EVOLUTION OF PLANTATION SOCIETIES

Martin Munro

The transportation of slaves from Africa to the circum-Caribbean was marked by

processes of cultural dislocation, destruction, and renewal in which rhythm
played a central role not only in resistance to colonial domination but also as a
kind of lingua franca binding together peoples of disparate origins. Rhythm was
able to transcend not only differences of origin but also geographical and
linguistic differences across the circum-Caribbean, the cultural and historical
space that encompasses the islands of the Caribbean Sea and the countries that
border 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 this
article, transcends linguistic and national barriers (in this case across the
Francophone Caribbean and Anglophone North America), and is a key element
in understanding the evolution of circum-Caribbean cultures.
It may seem strange at first to say that rhythm plays a fundamental role in
the creation and establishment of stable, functioning individuals or societies.
Rhythm is conventionally thought of as an element of music, or as a feature of
poetic style, something external to the body, a supplement to experience rather
than an essential element of it. If we think however, of where rhythm comes
from, and notwithstanding Derridas idea that rhythms origins are incalculable (81), we turn inevitably to the body, even to the womb, and our first
encounters with the rhythmic workings of human bodies. Rhythm as we know it
seems to originate in the body, from psycho-physiological urges, from the
impulse to perform continuous, regular movements, which in turn create the
awareness of greater ease and gusto through constant evenness in motion (Sachs
112). 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)/11/0100279 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17409292.2011.535260

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CONTEMPORARY FRENCH AND FRANCOPHONE STUDIES

time to music (Lefebvre 31). The bodily response to rhythmic music occurs in
the sympathetic and para-sympathetic nervous systems, which govern human
emotions, and which are involved in the restoration and maintenance of
homeostasis, that is the metabolic equilibrium operated via the autonomic
nervous system to counteract disrupting changes (McNeill 6).1 The rhythmic
movements of the muscles, as they work through the nervous system, provoke
echoes of the fetal condition, when the major external stimulus to the
developing brain was the mothers regular heartbeat. As such, prolonged and
insistent rhythmic stimuli may restore a simulacrum of fetal emotions to
consciousness, or else return a state of consciousness left behind in infancy,
when most psychologists agree little distinction is made between self and
surroundings (McNeill 7). In this sense, rhythm is part of us, an echo of our
earliest experiences in the womb and in life, a regular, regulating force that stays
with us and whose proper functioning works to ensure healthy, stable being.
Rhythm is also a crucial element in bonding societies and groups, and in
creating a collective experience of time. In particular all societies, developed or
otherwise, seem at every stage of their evolution to have integrated the
concerted, rhythmic social movements of song and dance with other significant
social activities, notably work (Filmer 9293). A societys notion of time
becomes second nature to its people through collective, rhythmic
interactions. People learn how to keep together in time through various
forms of movement socialization, and these movements are mediated by
rhythm.2 This rhythmic process is moreover much older than language: as
McNeill says, prolonged and rhythmic movements throughout human history
have created a euphoric fellow feeling that provides the basis for social
cohesion 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 far
more efficiently. More fundamentally, keeping together in time was important
for human evolution in that it allowed early human groups to increase their
size, enhance their cohesion, and assure survival by improving their success in
guarding territory, securing food, and nurturing the young (McNeill 93).
Rhythm in this sense, and in the way it facilitated the creation of stable human
communities, was fundamental in the emergence of human beings as the
dominant species (McNeill 156157).
My interest in this article lies in considering how rhythm functioned in
societies that were founded on an apparent counter-impulse to radically
undermine social cohesion, and literally knock people out of their rhythm. The
plantation societies of the New World were never set up to nurture cohesive
communities. Rather, they were money making machines that used human
beings as combustible, disposable parts of the machine; in short these were
intended to be anti-societies that relied on the continuous supply and
consumption of bodies uprooted and thrown out of step, out of rhythm. In
the colonial Caribbean, where the indigenous population was more or less

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SLAVES TO THE RHYTHM

wiped out by illness and warfare, the need for rhythmic socialization among the
disparate groups of African slaves must have been even greater than in the kinds
of organically evolving early human communities that McNeill has in mind. In
what follows I will show that despite the anti-rhythmic features of plantation
societies, rhythm survived and metamorphosed in the Americas, often taking on
idiosyncratic forms that adapted to and reflected to some degree the new
working and living environment. To this end, I will address briefly three
essential related questions: What rhythms did slaves live to? How did the
rhythms of their African communities adapt to their New World contexts? What
is the relation between rhythm and identity, both personal and collective? My
aim is to suggest some of the ways in which rhythm shaped the experience of
slaves individually and collectively, how it helped them survive the plantation,
and how it also in other ways made the experience bearable, and thus ironically
helped perpetuate the plantation system. More broadly, I hope to suggest how
critical attention to rhythm can help to understand both the evolution of circumCaribbean societies and some of the current problems of these placespeople
and groups still living out of step with each other, communities and nations still
fragmented, lacking the trust, self-awareness, and cohesion that rhythmic
interactions can bring. For, the basic configuration of the plantation, in terms of
its physical layout and the social relations it created, was essentially the same in
the Caribbean and the American South. Such are the similarities that, when
Edouard Glissant visited Mississippi and Louisiana, he found himself explaining
to Americans the ways in which their world mirrored and echoed his own
homeland of Martinique, how the families that fled the French and Haitian
revolutions brought a distinctive culture that persists still in various forms: in
cooking, in architecture, and in music, which are principally the same in the
culture of this whole area (Faulkner, Mississippi 29). The African trace, Glissant
says, was kept alive and reconfigured according to the inspiration of particular
places 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 African
trace was preserved in the New World. However much they have been
creolized, the black cultures of the circum-Caribbean region have generally
evolved from the common trunk of Africa, and in terms of rhythm have
conserved definite filiations with the continent of origin (Barthelemy 171).
Rhythm is in this sense one of the most enduring cultural and existential
remnants of the Middle Passage. Rhythm continues to play a significant role both
culturally and existentially in sub-Saharan African societies, as studies by John
Miller 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 of
religious ritual. Indeed, it is perhaps the retention of rhythmic aspects of ritual
such as antiphony, bodily movement, and drumming in African (and African
diasporic) religious practice that is the single most important factor in
perpetuating the rhythmic qualities of these societies. Because rhythm is not
excluded from religious ritual (as it largely is in European religious practices), it
is validated as an important element of existence, and integrated into the
individuals whole experience.

Traveling Rhythms
With the mass influx of African slaves to the circum-Caribbean, rhythm became
on the one hand a marker of racial difference and cultural inferiority, and on the
other a sign of resistance and impenetrable black subjectivity. As slave ships left
the coast of West Africa, many distressed slaves would throw themselves
overboard, beat their heads off the walls, or else try to suffocate and starve
themselves to death. Once Africa was out of sight, however, as one slave trader
reported, the slaves could be cheered up through the playing of music (Savary
140, and see Miller 4849). In this sense, music was also a source of comfort,
and a means of making the experience of slavery to some extent bearable. For
newly-arrived slaves, music and rhythm soon became some of the strongest
markers of identity; even if the sounds of their songs initially seemed absurdly
out of place in the New World, gradually the reassuring texture of their own
words and the resonance of the musics pulse, in other words its rhythm,
transported them to a place where something other than their appalling
conditions mattered (White and White Sounds of Slavery XI). If the various
European colonial powers sought to institute arrhythmic anti-societies in the
circum-Caribbean, the slaves and their descendants preserved and nurtured a
rhythmic counter-culture that to some extent transposed some of the social and
cultural models of Africa onto their New World reality. In terms of musical
modes, the diverse African peoples brought to the New World the apartplaying, polyrhythms, cross-rhythms, time-line, elisions, hockets, ululations,
tremolos, vocables, grunts, hums, shouts, and melismatic phrasings of their
homelands (Floyd 38). In other ways too, just as drums communicated
messages, or talked by imitating the rhythms and tonality of speech, so some
of the wordless calls, howls, and hollers of slaves functioned as an alternative
communication system, which conveyed information through sounds in ways
that whites could neither confidently understand nor easily jam (White and
White Sounds of Slavery 20).
While African music and dance were often viewed with suspicion and
suppressed by whites in the New World, slave masters soon learned that their
slaves worked more effectively when they sang, and would appoint a lead singer

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SLAVES TO THE RHYTHM

for each group of working slaves. Indeed, when slaves were auctioned, singers
with the strongest voices attracted the highest prices (Kebede 130). On the
plantations slaves accompanied virtually every kind of work with songs, chants,
and movements that were characterized primarily by rhythm. The French author
Pierre de Vaissie`re wrote in the seventeenth century of slaves engaged in
fieldwork, timing their strokes in the rhythm of African songs that would delight
any visitor (qtd. in Desmangles 26).3 Also, in the mid-nineteenth century, the
Swedish traveler Fredrika Bremer, while traveling down the Mississippi River on a
steamboat, watched the black crew work and sing in time in the engine room, and
was greatly impressed by the spectacle. It was a fantastic and grand sight, she
said, to see these energetic black athletes lit up by the wildly flashing flames from
the 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 into
the yawning fiery gulf (261262). Similarly, in the 1830s, when the well-known
actress Fanny Kemble traveled down the Altamaha River, Georgia, she was struck
by how the eight slave oarsmen set up a chorus, which they continued to chant in
unison 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 repetitive
nature of much of the work, and helped slaves endure its monotony. Thus, one
contemporary observer of plantation life in pre-revolution Saint-Domingue wrote
of the abundance and peace of the place, and of [t]he dutiful Africans
working in cadence (Popkin 70).4
Much later, Edouard Glissant presented and critiqued a similar function of
rhythm in his classic novel, Le Quatrie`me sie`cle. Glissant is particularly ambivalent
about the practice of rhythmic, call-and-response chanting and the figure of the
cantor, the chorus leader who has much in common with other chantwell figures
from across the colonial Caribbean. In Glissants presentation of Martinican
history, the cantor figure appeared not so much at a certain time, but rather in the
space, the clearing that opened up between wild humus and the domestic
compost, therefore out of decomposition and decay. The singers came out of the
nothingness, born from their own beatitude to praise beauty, and in a country
where to sing is to become free, Glissant says, the coming of the singers was
inevitable. Glissants ambivalence towards the singers is suggested in the quotation
of 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 joyful
assurance of work, to cut the cane: while far away the trade winds caressed the
softness of the flowers, the fruits, the leaves, and the branches (222).
Rhythm functions in this instance as a palliative for the alienated slave, but
also as a phenomenon that entrances, lulls, and finally deadens the senses,
distorting reality. Thus in lauding the fragile beauty of the place and of plantation
work, 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 feigns
voluptuous pleasure, and pursues sources of joy without knowing that they will
finally fall away from his outstretched hand. But, Glissant says, the singer will not
be able to fully forget the obscure lack that will stay with him, and which will be
a permanent reminder of the man who stirs in the forgotten depths of his soul
(222). There will remain therefore an ineradicable memory of the singers
situation, 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. Many
of the other sounds of the plantation, both musical and industrial, were rhythmic
and repetitive, sonic accompaniments to lives that were themselves governed by
repeated routines and rhythmic patterns of work. The soundscape of the
plantation included the cracking of overseers whips, the cries and screams of
slaves, the pealing of bells and the sounding of conch shells to mark out different
periods of the slaves working day, the grating, mechanical noise of the sugar
refineries, as well as the call-and-response singing of working slaves, the genteel
sounds of the masters dances, and the drumming, singing, and clapping that
accompanied slave dances on weekends and holidays.
In a sense, too, the slaves work routine was polyrhythmic, a multi-layered
constant loop of repetitive functions (Tomich 422). The unrelenting, repetitive
work of the slaves suggests something of the relation between social convention
and 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 of
enforced, unending repetition was a sign of deep insecurity, a tacit recognition of
the unnatural, ultimately untenable practices of plantation slavery.
In the Caribbean, the slaves monotonous, rhythmic experience of time was
compounded by the largely constant year-round duration of the day in the
Tropics; the very slight variations in daylight from one month to the next
created a temporal continuity that reinforced the unending repetitions that
structured work. In the American South, from the 1830s onward slaveholders
adopted a mechanical clock-dependent time consciousness that was
communicated to slaves through the regular, rhythmic soundings of bells and
horns. While they or their forebears had come from societies in which clocks
were virtually absent, where the sense of time was task-oriented and
natural, slaves had to adjust themselves to the strictures and demands of the
clock-regulated world, to the plantations mechanical regulation of life and
thought (Smith, Time, Slavery, and Plantation Capitalism 143, 152, 157,
158. See also Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the
American South).6 It is significant in this regard that a contemporary observer in
colonial Saint-Domingue remarked how two slave foremen wore pocket watches
to distinguish themselves from the field workers; it was as if the mastery and
domination of people went hand in hand with the control of time (Popkin 41).
Time and culture in the plantation world were structurally interrelated and
interdependent, and were always mediated by rhythm (Filmer 91).

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SLAVES TO THE RHYTHM

Rhythm, as an ancient and yet modern force that structures time, work, and
social interaction, is an essential element in creating cohesive communities. The
plantation societies of the circum-Caribbean were unique in modern world
history in that they were set up as (though never quite became) arrhythmic,
deadening sites of unfettered human exploitation. Into these anti-societies
flowed the rhythms of diverse African peoples, radically displaced and knocked
out of step by their brutal uprooting and new situation as parts of the plantation
machine. Rhythms evolved and survived and became some of the most
important elements in the nascent societies that evolved on the plantations of the
New World. It was through rhythm that the various African groups bonded with
each other and, in more attenuated ways, with the European groups in
plantation 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 rhythmic
bodily movements of field work, the sacred and secular rhythms of dance and
drumming, the rhythms and repetitions of oral culture in general) gradually
fashioned a new rhythmic ontology that was to some extent adjusted to the
imposed rhythms of work, but which also constituted an alternative system, a
conception of the world and social relations that was starkly different to that of
the colonial order. If we still think of Caribbean societies as being fundamentally
alike, and if we can yet see similarities between these societies and those of the
American South, it is because in the darkest days of slavery African peoples came
together in rhythm as a means of survival, and rhythm itself became closely
associated with a nascent New World subjectivity that would evolve and assert
itself in different ways as time passed, moving to its own beat and remaining a
symbol of resistance and cultural identity. More than a crude avatar of
essentialized racial identity, rhythm is a very real element in circum-Caribbean
cultures, one that is crucial to understanding the history and evolution of these
societies, and to their effective functioning, now and in the future.

Notes
1

Rhythm is being increasingly used in the treatment of a variety of disorders

such as Parkinsons disease and Alzheimers disease. Rhythm-based music
therapy is also being used to treat Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and
various psychological conditions. See, for example, Michael Thaut, Rhythm,
Music, and the Brain and Robert Lawrence Friedman, The Healing Power of
the Drum.
See Layne Redmonds idea that Through rhythmic repetition of ritual
sounds, the body, brain, and the nervous system are energized and
transformed. When a group of people play a rhythm for an extended period
of 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 more
powerful the entrainment becomes. Its really the oldest holy communion
(qtd. in Friedman 44).
Similar instances of the repetitive sounds of plantation work in the United
States are discussed in White and White, The Sounds of Slavery 2.
See also Tolstoys remark to Gorki that Where you want to have slaves,
there you should have as much music as possible (qtd. in Schafer, Open
Ears 30). Game and social songs were also marked by regular meter, and
consisted of simple additive rhythms and repetitive pentatonic melodic
constructions, with accents on the off beat (Floyd 51).
See Fred Moten, In the Break, 69. See also Lefebvre on the differences between
cyclical (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 Readers 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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