Another Dispatch from Miami: Manno Charlemagne

Tonight, Manno Charlemagne played another show in Miami at the Tap Tap.  Charlemagne is a Haitian singer who made his name creating oppositional music in the vein of Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, and Bob Dylan (if you can imagine Dylan getting shot at whilst playing Kent State).  He did a brief stint as mayor of Port-au-Prince; lived as a “caged bird” in the Argentine embassy to escape the military junta; moved to Miami after being forced into exile. But in the last couple months, Charlemagne, whose life has been so extraordinary, has been living through an ordeal shared by countless other members of the Haitian diaspora:

The agony of waiting to hear from loved ones who may or may not have survived the earthquake; the pain of feeling one’s roots severed.  Charlemagne’s sons went missing in the aftermath; his Port au Prince apartment was destroyed.  “We don’t have a country,” he says. “I was planning to go back to Haiti — definitely, that was my plan. I don’t have any plan now. I don’t want to stay here in Miami.”

Charlemagne’s music draws from the the twoubadou tradition, a “guitar-based music that can trace its roots back both to the rural songs of the Haitian peasantry and to the Cuban influences brought back to Haiti by returning migrant sugar cane cutters in the early decades of the twentieth century.” In the 1970s, he participated in the kilti libete (“freedom culture”) movement — a group of artists that believed in battling the Duvalier dictatorship through cultural creativity.

NPR has an excellent article on the inspiring & melancholy life of Manno Charlemagne.