Amid the proliferating manuals, musical transcriptions, and occasional ethnographies of Cuban batá drumming, each staking its claim to authenticity and its authoritative position on the place of Cuban batá traditions--and Santería (Regla de Ocha) more generally--in the African Diaspora, African American scholar Umi Vaughan and Cuban drummer Carlos Aldama have produced a uniquely dialogical text in the great Latin American tradition of the testimonio. Carlos Aldama is a respected ritual drummer and priest of Ocha who had a long career as a percussionist in Cuba’s premier National Folklore Ensemble, and who now lives in the U.S. Vaughan has studied batá drumming with Aldama, and the book comes out of their recorded conversations, including Vaughan’s elicitation of Aldama’s life history, which encompasses much of Cuba’s twentieth-century ferment and provides the perspective of an insider to major political events and social trends of the Cuban Revolution alongside the development of Cuban Santería.
Each chapter of this co-authored text begins with general background information provided by Vaughan, followed by first-person reminiscences and snippets of drumming lessons by Aldama. Vaughan’s introduction explains the process of “toma y dame,” or “give and take” by which “I helped generate Carlos’s narrative with my questions…. My laughter, my silence, my fascination, and my finger on the audio recorder influenced Carlos’s story” (10). Aldama’s stories and advice are presented in the first person, albeit with heavy redacting and recombining from recorded sessions over six years. The text is greatly enriched by an accompanying set of audio tracks of studio-recorded batá rhythms available for free download from the press’s website, at www.iupress.indiana.edu/f/9780253223784. Tracks are referenced in the text, and the full list appears on page 167. Not only drummers will appreciate hearing the artistry of batá as they read about it. Another important accompaniment to the text are the photographs, many from Aldama’s personal collection, especially those that show many of the illustrious religious and scholarly personalities he mentions, including the father of Cuban folklore, Fernando Ortiz himself, whose relationship with actual practitioners was…complicated.
The central chapters at the heart of the book, chapters 2-4, present Aldama’s life in three segments that neatly map onto Cuba’s mid-to-late twentieth-century historical periods. First, he recounts his early life and training, pre-1959 Revolution. Then he describes his adulthood under the Cuban Revolution: he juxtaposes his professional life in the newly-organized state-sponsored folklore production of the Ministry of Culture Cuba after the Revolution, alongside his ongoing religious participation during the decades of the 1960s-1980s, when religiosity was discouraged by official policies, and followed by the turbulent changes of Cuba’s post-Soviet “Special Period” of the 1990s, which precipitated his departure from the island. Last, in a chapter called “Diaspora,” he discusses the circumstances of his move to the San Francisco area beginning in 1997 and finalized in 2000 and his integration into a North American batá scene as a teacher and drummer.
These chapters provide a first-person perspective on historical events and cultural moments in Cuba and the U.S., alongside satisfyingly gossipy commentary on Aldama’s interactions with major personalities in Havana’s religious and folklore scene over the past seventy years. Perhaps predictably, the exile soured on the Revolution pours the golden hues of nostalgia over his youth in a vibrant pre-Revolutionary religious ambit, when the progenitors of modern Cuban batá and their first generation of students were still a living presence in Havana and Matanzas. I was particularly intrigued to read Aldama’s account of the changes in folk religious practices over time and his experiences throughout the emergence of a Cuban bureaucracy of "cultura" regulating religion as "folklore" and requiring ritual experts like Aldama, mostly black and of modest educational and class backgrounds, to navigate the opportunities and dangers of this new revolutionary terrain and the pressures of commercialization that followed during the hard times of the Special Period. And one feels the barely disguised distress in Aldama’s account of displacement and disorientation in leaving Cuba for the U.S., where he cannot but feel marginal to a very different dynamic of religious and folklore practice: his life’s trajectory seems to follow a downward curve from a lost golden era of Santería and batá in his youth through the ups and downs of professional recognition, to a more complicated immigrant status, where he can visit Havana but never “go home.”
These life history chapters are bracketed by the first, fifth, and sixth chapters, entitled “Fundamento,” “Drum Lesson,” and “The Future: What Comes Next?” which introduce batá as an African Diasporic tradition and detail its practice. The notion of fundamento is a central one in Cuban folk religion, referring to both consecrated ritual objects and to the essential, deep, and often secret knowledge necessary to work with them. The orichas or deities of Santería are embodied in objects referred to as the fundamento: the ritually prepared stones, implements, and cowries initiates manipulate to work with the orichas, for example, are referred to collectively as the fundamento. Batá drums that undergo consecration through an initiation not unlike what people undergo to become Santería priests are said to be de fundamento, and are called Añá in reference to the oricha of the drum. Drummers initiated to such drums are known as children of Añá or omo añá, in Santería’s ritual lexicon. This sort of basic information is covered in Vaughan’s introductory comments to these chapters.
An orientation to batá as a site of cultural production of the African Diaspora, and not just in Cuba, is provided in the first and sixth chapters and brief conclusion as well. Of note are the acknowledgments of tensions between Vaughan’s position as an African American scholar staking a claim for the broader cultural continuities of the African Diaspora and Aldama’s rather different centering on a Cuban tradition that recognizes but does not own the North American identity politics around African diasporic cultural forms, despite his poignant earlier descriptions of tensions between white Cuban folklore intellectuals and black Cuban “carriers of tradition.”
The chapter, “Drum Lesson,” knits together fascinating practical details and tips about how to play batá, covering everything from advice about hand techniques, to descriptions of the meanings and uses of various rhythms in ceremonies, to nuanced suggestions about achieving a balance between replicating tradition and innovating, to exhortations to practice, practice, practice. Here, in particular, I got a sense of Vaughan’s and Aldama’s relationship, a fascinating intergenerational, intercultural, bilingual teacher-student relationship producing a doubly diasporic dialogue in words and music.
For all my appreciation of the value of Aldama’s and Vaughan’s “testimony” about batá, I will admit that it took me a while to warm up to the book as I read. As I proceeded, I tried to imagine the possible audiences for and uses of this book, especially beyond specialists already knowledgeable about Cuban folk religion and musical genres. Vaughan certainly works to provide the basic contextual information about Santería, Cuba, and batá to orient novices, but it is all too easy for such descriptions to sound prescriptive, and I was turned off by the sometimes uncritical repetition of what are, in my ethnographic experience, seldom such straightforward historical “facts” about origins and norms of ritual practice. I would only assign this book whole or in part in classes if accompanied by other readings to balance it out with a deeper ethnographic and ethnohistorical grounding than Vaughan provides.
I also never quite got over the awkwardness of Vaughan’s approach to translating and transcribing Aldama’s voice--an admittedly difficult process of trans-substantiation from the cadences of colloquial speech (in Cuban Spanish) to the frozen phrases of the written word. Vaughan of course keeps the specialized vocabulary of ritual, providing in-text glosses and a glossary. But he never quite achieves a consistent stride in whether to keep the colloquialisms and sometimes crude idiomatic expressions Aldama used or smooth them into a blander standard English, nor whether or when to put the original phrase in parentheses or leave it in the text with a gloss in parentheses. And at times I wondered why Vaughan had not put in the original phrase, when I could not imagine what it could be, based on the translation. Unlike in more literary testimonios, I could “hear” Aldama’s voice only for brief moments before being distracted by such questions. This is a shame, because the essence of the book is Aldama’s story in his own words. Then again, perhaps such awkwardness serves a purpose in reminding us that the voice of a subject is always mediated, always a product of dialogue with the scholarly co-author.
All said, this book makes a compelling contribution to scholarship on batá as religious practice, folklore, and diasporic symbol, through the dialogue between a Cuban master drummer and his ethnographer-student.
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[Review length: 1451 words • Review posted on August 30, 2012]