Dances in Cimarronaje: Sonic Errantry and the Fugitive Aesthetics of Dominican Dembow
Image of Dominican dembow artist Tokishcha. Sueños Music Festivals, Chicago, Illinois. 2022. Image by Gisabel Leonardo. Copyright Gisabel Leonardo. 2022.
The contours of Latin America and the Caribbean, the borders that define terra firma against terra infirma,¹ are inherently unstable. For those of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and its diaspora, this is known. The incertitude of belonging, the impulse to carve out entire populations on the basis of geographic, linguistic, ethnic, and/or racial difference, is further agitated by the restlessness of these bodies. Furthermore, these distinctions become ossified in the academy, where Caribbean Studies finds itself pieced up and rationed out to a multitude of disciplines and departments that rely most heavily on linguistic difference. However, this couldn’t be further removed from the realities and quotidian experiences of Caribbean life, where the vaivén of the sea destabilizes the borders of coast, island, nation-state, and region. It is in this uncertainty that the inhabitants of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and specifically the Dominican Republic, express an instinct to confound these borders, resisting capture by the confines of a Latin American identity committed to Caribbean erasure. Deep in the barrios and callejones of Santo Domingo, marginalized life² express a sonic errantry that interrogates the limits and limitations of nation and region. Dominican dembow³ collapses and confounds the multiple borders the island nation inhabits, and instead explores a shared, intuitive desire to move with the sea. Through an arrangement of move(ment)s, Dominican dembow allows deviant life in the Dominican Republic’s capital to embrace sonic errantry and maroon choreographies: the dance and aesthetics of Caribbean life that embody and transcend the borders of their illegible existence that is always on the run.
In his seminal work Poetics of Relation, Martinican poet, philosopher, and literary critic Édouard Glissant discusses errantry as a manifestation of “rhizomatic thought” (11).⁴ The rhizome, he concludes, “maintains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root” (11). Glissant explores errantry against the fixedness of the West, the emergence of nationalism, and how that very fixedness spread across the globe (14-15). Amidst this fixedness, minoritarian bodies defy conscription into nationalized imaginaries through performed and embodied expressions of errantry. Thinking in these terms, the history and performance of Dominican dembow surfaces as a practice of errantry, connectedness, and relation that contests nationalists and colonial entrapments that linger over the island-nation. Searching for “freedom within particular surroundings” (20), Dominican dembow enacts a radical will to move against the root.⁵
It is in the “particular surroundings” of the barrios of the Dominican Republic’s capital that relation is exercised through a sonic errantry that gestures beyond national and linguistic boundaries. Dominican dembow follows an international sonic tradition that some have dubbed the first transnational musical genre. Its location of origin “in this elusive, perhaps unprecedented case” sits at the very intersection of multiple and ongoing diasporic linkages (Flores x). However, one thing remains clear— reggae, dancehall, reggaetón, and dembow are celebratory affirmations of diasporic Caribbean Blackness. Dembow in its very essence is a rhizomatic, non-tethered exchange of diasporic community making. The genre’s origins cannot be understood through a linear tracing of music and bodies, but through a multitude of entry points, transnational contacts, and shared experiences and exchanges from Jamaica, Panama, New York, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. This is easily witnessed in the tracing of the dembow riddim, or beat, that dominates and is fundamental to the genre. Originally a song by Jamaican artist Shabba Ranks, Dem Bow became the definitive foundation for reggaeton and dembow, being covered, sampled, and rerecorded countless times transnationally (Marshall 141). Thematically, this song takes up an anti-colonial discourse through homophobic anecdotes of sexual performance, warning the audience against bowing down to oppression, or more appropriately, bending over and exposing oneself to it: “don’t bow to oppression, in particularly the (implicitly foreign) pressures toward such ‘deviant’ sexual practices as oral sex (both fellatio and cunnilingus) and homosexuality” (Marshall 136). However, the anti-establishment, anti-colonial cultural politics heard in Shabba Ranks’ reggae anthem continue to be relevant to Dominican dembow three decades later.
The instincts of Caribbean fugitivity can be wholly witnessed and experienced in the tight, raucous spaces (Hartman 4) of barrial life. The angst, agitation, and shakiness of the borders that seek to capture and define Dominican existence are on full display in sound, dance, and aesthetic. In the dusty dead-ends of the capital’s ghettos, dembow transports dancers elsewhere in search of Caribbeanness, “an affirmation of place” that reaches across and beyond linguistic difference (Glissant xxi). Dominican dembow rejects the compulsory Hispanicity its Latin Americanness relies on and compels the body to move otherwise. Over the bombastic dembow beat, performers expose and explore luxurious and sexual fantasies in the face of their violent reality. They move their bodies in undefined ways, creating angular shapes with their arms and legs at incalculable speeds. Their frantic movement, as if preparing for takeoff, displays an instinct of fugitivity, or marronage, that resists Latin American cultural hegemony. As their bodies open and contract, rise and fall, their faces are unsettled. Haciendo muecas con el gilet en la boca,⁶ dancers contort their faces, tongues adorned with razor blades hanging out of dissident mouths, into expressions that are otherwise unknowable. This popular dance trend serves as a critical intervention that, despite its increasing global commercial success, reterritorializes a genre that brings together a medley Caribbean subjects. With danger on their tongues, they display expert footwork, flexibility, and agility in choreographies of fugitivity that express an intuitive togetherness that defy the confines of their marginalization. However, the urgency and restlessness expressed through their movement is evidence of the many quotidian ways the Caribbean subject, through “canny detours, diversions, and ruses,” resists capture by hegemonic forces (Glissant xxii-xxiii).
As dembow dancers and performers gather in the narrow, forgotten streets of the Dominican capital, they move together in difference. The claustrophobic environment inspires their creative movements in “an urban commons where the poor assemble, improvise forms of life, experiment with freedom, and refuse the menial existence scripted for them” (Hartman 4). As spaces of encounter (Harman 4), the barrios and the sonic errantry produced from the streets exercise a relation that resists “the totalitarianism of monolingual intent” (Glissant 19), for dembow has transcended language, and reinforces a sense of identity (Glissant 20). Marginalized life in the Dominican Republic— the poor, the criminal, the deviant— defy the logic of borders and demand we look elsewhere: to the sea and sky that brings the Caribbean together. Through music, dance, and aesthetic, dembow artists challenge Dominican and Latin American Hispanicity and firmly reject any attempt at being known as such. With their agitated, contorted movements, dancers shake the earth beneath them, and through a collective “choreographed flight” (Hartman 108), bring the islands together in a total refusal of the borders that define them.
Notes
¹ Terra firma as solid ground, distinct from air and sea; The Caribbean rejects these distinctions and is defined by the “shakiness” of terra infirma that knows no distinctions between land, air, and sea.
² The ghettos, riddled with poverty, crime, and illegitimate life. Predominantly Black and Afro-descendant.
³ A musical subgenre following in the tradition of dancehall and reggaetón.
⁴ See Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.
⁵ Glissant later adds that the root is monolingual.
⁶ “Making faces with razor blades in the mouth”
About the Author
Gisabel Leonardo is a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her work focuses on expressions of gender, race, and sexuality through performance in contemporary Dominican and diasporic literary, artistic, and musical cultures. Her current work Melenas Malcriadas: The Black Aesthetics of Hair and Dominicanidad examines the conflicting affects of the Dominican hair salon and how Dominican hair culture is reproduced and reimagined in diasporic music, literature, and art.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Translated by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
Flores, Juan. “Foreword: What’s all the noise about?” Reggaeton, edited by Raquel Z. Rivera,
Wayne Marshall, and Deborah Pacini Hernandez, Duke University Press, 2009, pp. ix-xi.
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing, University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.
Marshall, Wayne. “Dem Bow, Dembow, Dembo: Translation and Transnation in Reggaeton.” Song and Popular Culture, vol. 53, 2008, pp. 131-151.