Comment Share

Pierre Ledru’s 1797 Description of “Bamboula” in the Loíza/Canóvanas Area

Ledru’s original text states:

Pendant mon séjour chez don Benito, je fus témoin d’un bal que donnait l’économe de l’habitation, pour célébrer la naissance d’un premier enfant. L’assemblée était compose de 40 à 50 creoles des environs, de l’un et de l’autre sexe. Quelques-uns étaient venus de six lieues; car ces hommes, ordinairement indolents, sont passionnés pour la danse. Le mélange de blancs, de mulâtres et de nègres libres, formait un groupe assez plaisant: les hommes en pantalon et veste d’indienne, les femmes en robes blanches, avec de larges colliers d’or; tous la tète ceinte d’un mouchoir peint et couverte d’un chapeau rond galonné, exécutèrent successivement des danses nègres et créoles (1), au son de la guitar et du tambourin, nommé vulgairement ‘bamboula’.

1

Julio de Vizcarrondo Coronado translated this text in the 1860s as:

Durante mi permanencia en casa de Don Benito, fui testigo de un baile que daba el mayordomo de la hacienda para celebrar el nacimiento de su primer hijo. La reunión estaba compuesta de cuarenta a cincuenta criollos de los alrededores, de uno y otro sexo. Algunos habían venido desde seis leguas de distancia, porque estos hombres, de ordinario indolentes, son my apasionados por el baile. La mezcla de blancos, mulatos y negros libres formaba un grupo bastante original: los hombres con pantalón y camisa indiana, las mujeres con trajes blancos y largos collares de oro, todos con la cabeza cubierta con un pañuelo de color y un sombrero redondo galoneado, ejecutaron sucesivamente bailes africanos y criollos (1) al son de la guitarra y del tamboril llamado vulgarmente bomba. 2

Several things stand out from this text. First is the possibility that the “mayordomo” or steward of this Hacienda solicited this bomba dance to celebrate the birth of his firstborn. This suggests that bomba was not always performed away from the watchful eye of overseers but rather for the entertainment of the relatively more powerful members of plantation society.

3

. Secondly, the source does not specify the labor status of the 40-50 attendees. It does mention, however, that they were not only “criollos” (meaning Puerto Rican born) from the area but that some also came from great distances because they had had a great passion for dancing. This accords with a great number of bomba songs and later oral histories from the 20th century which repeatedly allude to bomba practitioners and enthusiasts traveling great distances to attend bomba events, a custom that continues today.

Returning to Ledru, in his account, he contrasts the passion that those who assisted this dance to drumming with “bamboula” drums had for the genre with their alleged “indolence” or laziness, which fits the stereotype that elite people in the island had about people from the laboring classes, but it could also suggest that they were free but landless blacks and mulatos that lived outside of towns and cities and normally subsisted on their own farming and part-time labor. At the end of the 18th century, the majority of the population in rural parts of Puerto Rico lived this way. Thirdly, the source does mention that they were black, mulato, and white, which is in itself interesting given that this is the second oldest source that we have about bomba. There is no denying that bomba has been traditionally practiced predominantly by Afro-Puerto Ricans but it is also true that it has been consumed by and in some cases executed by Puerto Ricans that would never identity or be identified as black.

Finally, there exists valid skepticism about whether Ledru witnessed a true bomba dance, in part because of his use of the word “bamboula” to denote the drums he saw, which he also refers to as “du tambourin” (a vague term in French for a kind of drum) and also guitars. The use of the word “tambourin” as opposed to “tambour” has left some wondering whether Ledru saw people playing the music for this dance with hand drums. However, one commentator has remarked that in french, the word for that would be tambourine with an “e” at the end, whereas a “tambourin” denotes a long, narrow drum with two skins held together with a rope of the kind played in the Basque region of the Spain/France border. Also, as a person who likely had little knowledge of Caribbean percussion instruments, Ledru may have used the wrong word to describe what was in fact a distinct variety of drums (i.e., similar to how in the United States, English-speaking non-connoisseurs of Latin music sometimes refer to any Latin percussion instrument as “bongos”).

The latter part about the guitar could indicate that earlier bomba was sometimes played with string instruments accompanying percussion instruments, which should not be surprising given that people two centuries ago probably did not have purist distinctions between genres and what instruments they are played with. In addition, in parts of subsaharan Africa, music instruments (e.g., the kora) have always been played alongside drums. Those string traditions were carried over to the Americas in insturements such as the banza which was played in the Antilles, including in dances in French Antillean colonies referred to as calendas or chicas, which resemble the names of bomba rhythms such as calindá and sicá.

For more information on descriptions by travelers in the late 1700s who described these French Antillean traditions that were related to bomba–including with strings being played alongside drums–see our article about bomba’s French Antillean connections HERE.

4

Thus, the use of the word “bamboula” and its mistranslation into Spanish as ‘bomba’ has led to some confusion about what Ledru actually saw. It is certainly not something that ought to be directly translated as a “bomba drum,” but without a doubt, bamboula is a complex term that appears widely in the bomba tradition. It has multiple meanings, among which are a type of drum and dance used and executed in Saint Dominingue (modern-day Haiti), in New Orleans, and in some of the neighboring Virgin Islands (e.g., Saint Thomas and Saint Croix) that Ledru visited before arriving in Puerto Rico. It could be then that he observed that type of drum and dance in some of the islands directly to the east of (which at that time were Danish slave colonies), learned the use of the term there, and then applied it to what he saw in that Puerto Rican hacienda. If so, it is likely that what Ledru witnessed was related to what we now recognize as bomba, if not a kind of “proto-bomba” itself, since we know that there are many correspondences between bomba and its “sister-genres” from Haiti and Antilles to the east of Puerto Rico. We also know that these traditions from French, Dutch, and Danish Caribbean colonies significantly influenced what we know as bomba today.

One part that sometimes goes unmentioned about Ledrú’s original text that is even more significant to answering the riddle about whether or not Ledru saw bomba in Puerto Rico are two footnotes that accompany this section of his travel narratives:

(1) The ‘chicca’ and the ‘calenda,’ voluptuous and slightly lascivious dances. See the scene described by Pernetty in The History of a Voyage to the Malouine (or Falkland) Islands, Vol. 1, pg. 279 (*).

(*) Since the journey of Pernetty is already old and has been little read, it ought not matter to find here the description that this Benedictine father makes of the ‘ Calenda ‘. “There is however a lively and very lewd dance that is sometimes danced in Montevideo;” They call it the ‘ Calenda ‘ and both blacks and Mulattos, who have the burning temperament, like it madly. This dance was taken to America by the blacks of the Kingdom of Arrdt on the coast of Guinea. The Spaniards also dance it, in all its establishments of America, without the slightest scruple. It is however of an indecency that confounds those who do not see it habitually danced. It is so popular that even children practice it since they are old enough to stand. The Calenda is danced to the sound of instruments and voices. The actors are placed in two lines, one in front of the other, and the men in front of the women. Spectators form a circle around the dancers and instrumentalists. One of the actors sings a song whose chorus is repeated by the spectators clapping. All the dancers then raise their arms at half-height, they jump, they twist, they make contortions with the behind, they approach at two feet from each other, and recede in rhythm until the sound of the instrument or the tone of the voice warns them to approach again. Then they, their stomachs against each others’, two or three times in a row and move away after doing pirouettes to return the same movement, with very lewd gestures, as many times as the instrument or the voice tells them. Occasionally, they interlace their arms and do two or three laps as they continue to beat their bellies and kisses, but without losing the cadence [translation into English by the contributor of this wiki article].

5

We should note that in the first footnote, “chicca” and “calenda” correspond to sicá and calindá, two rhythms commonly played in bomba today. This is not surprising since many if not most of the names of bomba “seises” and their sub-rhythms come originally from either French or Kreyol words, or from words derived from west African languages, many of which re-appear in analogous traditions in other parts of the Caribbean. The second footnote is significant since it indirectly gives us a clearer description of the dance that Ledrú observed in Puerto. In other words, what he witnessed reminded him of this account of a different Afro-Uruguayan drum dance in Montevideo characterized by what the observer interpreted as a dance full of “lasciviousness” and lacking “scruples,” but also noteworthy because of the presence of Spaniards.

Notes:

  1. Ledru, André-Pierre (1810). Voyage aux îles de Ténériffe, la Trinité, Saint-Thomas, Sainte-Croix et Porto Ricco (T.2). Paris, pp. 73-74. Available online at: https://issuu.com/scduag/docs/sch13216/81
  2. Ledru, André-Pierre (1971). Viaje a la isla de Puerto Rico en el año 1797. Vizcarrondo, Julio L. [trad.], 5a ed., San Juan: Editorial Coquí, p. 54.
  3. Note: mayordomos or “foremen” were not always white. Sometimes they were mulatos, and in some cases, were illegitimate children of the plantation owner
  4. Also, some music scholars and practitioners have noted the high degree of syncopation that exists in Puerto Rican string (i.e., guitar and cuatro) music traditionally associated with mountainous areas. Some of the seises and aguinaldos jíbaros (e.g, aguinaldo cagueño, seis fajardeño) use rhythmic patterns that correspond with some of the seises de bombs (e.g., sicá) played in bomba with drums. Quintero Rivera, Ángel G (2001). “Bambulaé sea allá: la bomba y la plena Compendio histórico-social.” Fundación del Banco Popular de Puerto Rico. Available online at: http://docplayer.es/36206872-Bambulae-sea-alla-la-bomba-y-la-plena-compendio-historico-social.html
  5. Ledru, André-Pierre (1810). Voyage aux îles de Ténériffe, la Trinité, Saint-Thomas, Sainte-Croix et Porto Ricco (T.2). Paris, pp. 75-76. Available online at: https://issuu.com/scduag/docs/sch13216/81

There's no comments

Leave a Reply