The Cuban Cabana
The penetrating scent of a black woman
Became its accompaniment.
Here come the nights,
Here come the days without sleep.
Horizons I thought had gone
Have reawakened in me.
And suddenly I bound from my bed
Like a buffalo with its muzzle raised high,
Legs spread, like a buffalo
Sniffing the wind
And the modulated sweetness of the polished flute,
The good smell of water under the dakar trees
And the aroma, richer in promise,
Of ripe harvests from the rice fields.30
In a number of respects, this poem constitutes a daring sequence of appropriations by Senghor. Most saliently, Senghor creates a new African subject. In the poem he veers away from representing Africans as the exoticized objects of the European gaze, positioning Paris as the object of desire and fantasy. The poet’s tool for fashioning this new subject is French, the language of the imperial dominator. He uses this language to assert his cultural “citizenship” in the “lettered” imperial city. Senghor’s adroit use of French literary style, infused with his knowledge of French literary history, further supports his case for cultural citizenship.31 His poem pays homage to Baudelaire through oblique references to such poems as “À une passante.”32 A key element in the poem is the textualization of urban space. Though a colonial subject, the speaker moves comfortably around the capital of the country that has conquered his nation, proclaiming his freedom of movement. The speaker in this poem is an African flaneur marveling at but not being intimidated by the semiotic spectacle of Paris. This poem demonstrates that the speaker is at home abroad, cosmopolitan without being French.
Senghor explicitly links the poem to negritude through his emphasis on sensory perception. The poem engages the body and many of the senses: seeing, smelling, and hearing. Senghor’s flaneur uses his head (eyes, nose, and ears) to know the world. The poem also references negritude through its identification with black music and rhythm. Here Senghor introduces music stripped of its specificity. There is only a vague association in calling it “jazz.” When the speaker passes by La Cabane Cubaine, he detects “Un parfum pénétrant de Négresse” (the penetrating perfume of a black woman). Similarly, later in the poem, when he encounters “la douceur modulée de la flûte polie” (the soft and refined modulations of a flute), it awakens his sense of smell: “La bonne odeur de l’eau” (the beautiful smell of water). The music as a symbol of blackness induces nostalgia. He keeps on walking and resists responding to the music physically. However, it continues to resonate for him. Later that night he is finally affected by it, perhaps involuntarily and subconsciously, in the privacy of his room.
The poem reveals more of Senghor’s complicated feelings about Afro-Cuban music than he perhaps intended. His African flaneur is not sauntering down the Champs Élysées or wandering through the arcades. He is strolling around Pigalle, a district famed in the first part of the twentieth century for its bohemianism and artistic modernity. The sonic environment of this area, so associated with advanced artistic production, was saturated with Afro-Cuban music during this period. Senghor thus, consciously or not, links Afro-Cuban music with African modernity by locating the poem in this quartier. This link, however, is fraught with ambivalence. The speaker passes by La Cabane Cubaine but does not go in. Moreover, he misrepresents the type of music that was played there in the 1930s, calling it “jazz.” While it is true that there are numerous instances of African musicians and listeners referring to Afro-Cuban music as jazz, especially in the Congo, it is much more unusual for an African resident in Europe to conflate the two musical traditions.33 Senghor listened to Duke Ellington in Paris and undoubtedly heard other US jazzmen. As an urbane sophisticate, there is little chance that the speaker would have incorrectly identified the music that was wafting out of the club. Senghor’s veiling of his experience with Afro-Cuban music demonstrates that he already considered it as lacking in cultural prestige. In his view, it was not a suitable sound track to accompany the Senegalese quest for modernity and potentially could undermine his yearning for full cultural citizenship.
In Senghor’s later years this belief grew even stronger, especially after the launching of his political career in the 1940s. As he enjoyed increasing political success, his version of negritude shifted from being primarily a literary movement with political ramifications to a political philosophy with a cultural dimension. Shaped by the exigencies of becoming a state ideology, Senghor’s negritude became intertwined with his doctrine of “African socialism.” It now had to coexist with cultural nationalism in Senegal and humanism and neocolonialism in France. It also had to compete in West Africa with the conscientism of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and the African Stalinism of Guinea’s Sékou Touré. Under pressure from these two new political philosophies, Senghor shifted his position and began to propagate Africanité instead of blackness. Simultaneously, his negritude evolved from a tool for achieving cultural and political citizenship into an instrument for garnering international cultural prestige, especially important for newly independent African states struggling to become full-fledged members of the international community. Promoting Afro-Cuban music had no place in this new orientation, which relied on African culture to gain global recognition. In fact, in his “state of the arts,” in which up to 30 percent of the national budget in the early 1960s went to the Ministry of Culture, Senghor relegated any type of musical expression to the background.34 Literature and “high art” painting fit much more securely into his cultural program. As new artistic forms for Senegal, they were much easier to control through state patronage and drew much more serious international attention than did African or Cuban music at the time.
In the 1960s Senghor’s hostility toward the Cuban Revolution also had an impact on his attitude toward Afro-Cuban music. Although he was an admirer of Hispanic civilization and mandated the teaching of Spanish in Senegalese schools through the university level, Senghor abhorred Fidel Castro.35 His promotion of latinité stopped short of embracing the Cuban Revolution. His antipathy toward Castro had several roots. Senegal’s neocolonial ties with France in the period after independence made establishing diplomatic ties with Castro’s communist Cuba an impossibility. Furthermore, Castro’s alliance with Sékou Touré of neighboring Guinea complicated matters. As previously mentioned, Senghor and Touré were fierce rivals for regional influence, and Senghor resented Cuba’s military support of his enemy. Though the Senegalese public’s love of Cuban music almost entirely lacked any “revolutionary” political content, Senghor largely prohibited Afro-Cuban music from being performed at the premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (FESMAN) in 1966 on political grounds. Sizable demonstrations occurred in Dakar over Senghor’s musical policy, but the president stood firm.
Senghor’s public retreat from Afro-Cuban music (which according to his son he continued to listen to privately) meant that the development of Afro-Cuban music in Senegal had to proceed without state sponsorship, in marked contrast to neighboring Guinea and Mali.36 Whatever interest Senghor had in music during this period he devoted to jazz, which had a significant following in the Western European and North American art and literature worlds.37 During this same era the prestige of Latin music declined in Western intellectual and artistic circles outside of Africa as well, despite its continuing artistic excellence. With the possible exception of Tito Puente’s band in the 1950s, Afro-Cuban music lost whatever cultural cachet it had once had outside the Latin community in Paris and New York.
Observing Afro-Cuban music’s diminished status
