Encounters with the Saints

I have just barely survived long and crazy weekend filled with religious festivals, music, possessions, rum, and not much of sleeping. Here it goes.

Friday night was the big concert we’d been preparing for all week. Duluc was playing the Cinema Café, a hipster-ish open air bar and essential element of music and art culture in Santo Domingo, and had invited me to play as well as a bunch of other young musicians hip to Dominican folklore and willing to not be paid well. We practiced all week, and became a pretty tight band, me on melodica and mandolin. The concert was all set up to go beautifully, a working sound system (for a change), a packed venue, and a collection of amazing invited guests. Yet, as always, some disaster lurks. After two songs, the invited Gagá de Haina (gagá are costumed troupes of drums and keyless metal trumpets, who dance and twirl sticks and basically wild out, more on this later) bumrushes the stage and starts to play along. Instead of try to control the situation, Duluc throws his guitar down, and starts leading the gaga, they proceed to leave the stage, march through the audience, past the bar, out the front door and down the street, then back again. I put away my instruments. End of show.

Duluc is an amazing all-around person, a beautiful spirit but lets just say that what he has in soul, he lacks in any type of discipline, whatsoever. Thus illegitimate children throughout the hemispheres, and frequently unpredictable behavior at shows.

A lot of people left, and the club owner was pretty furious. I was kind of disappointed, after so many hours of careful rehearsal, but am quickly learning this is how it goes sometimes. No hard feelings. Joel, the guitarist and leader of pioneering Afro-Dominican fusion band Son Abril, was not the least bit surprised. He and the folklore crazy kids of his generation are used to dealing with the inconstancies and excesses of their masters from the previous generation, if somewhat tired of it. At the very least I learned a lot from the rehearsals, and it’s an honor just to be asked to play in the first place.

Saturday night I taxied myself out to a small riverside barrio called Mazano. It was the second night of the novena for the community’s patron saint, the Virgin of Las Mercedes. For nine days before the actual saint’s day, everybody in town gets together around a wooden open-air chapel containing the altar prepared for the saint, and plays palos music. Played on three different drums, guira (the ever-present Dominican scraper), tambourines, maracas, the music is the Afro-Dominican manifestation of salves, or psalms, and are led by a singer who improvises lines inbetween the responses of the chorus. They play from about 7pm-1am each day until the last day, when they play through the night until sunrise, about 12 straight hours, and that’s apparently when the spirit of the Virgin comes to Earth to possess the worshipers and give messages, heal the sick and so forth.

If this sounds all very spiritual, it is, but it’s also a serious party. I show up with a bottle of rum to offer the queen of the fiesta, as I am told one should, which gets placed on the altar with a candle on top of it. Drinking, dancing, and having a good time is essential to these festivals. The Christian saint’s and African gods want people to enjoy life, it seems. Afro-Dominican religion is all about euphoric communal transcendence (for the funk soldiers out there, its quite a bit like the cosmology of P-Funk). Besides, these festivals are important ways of keeping the communities together in a day and age when many people are leaving their barrios for opportunities elsewhere. And besides that, drinking is considered a way to help facilitate closeness to the gods, permitting trances, and letting people let loose for a little bit of rising above temporal existance. For the musicians, frequent shots of rum keeps their hands from stinging with pain, especially the last day when they play straight through the night.

And of course, there is lots and lots of food. And this will surely be the eventual downfall of my vegetarianism. I was invited by the dueno of the festival to eat, and to refuse in this context seems outrageously rude, so I accepted and luckily the feast of the night was asopao, stewed rice and vegetables and pieces of meat big enough to take out. Surely some tiny bits that I missed contributed to the deathly-terrible-stomach pains I had the next day.

Some footage of the night can be found right here. Unfortunately my camera has a terrible microphone, so you can download some hi-fi stuff from this night HERE: 9-15Palos2.m4a




And if this wasn’t enough locura for one weekend, I had to rally Sunday morning back to aforementioned Mata Los Indios for one of the biggest parties of the year. Unlike the previous day’s festivities, this was a maní, which means “peanut” literally, but as I understand it, is just a one-day worhip/party not directed at any particular saint. This particular one is being thrown by Jesus, a venerable member of the Congos, who is famous for having particular good manís. And so it is. This community is famous countrywide for being the epicenter of Afro-Domincian spirituality, and indeed many of the salves sung throughout the country originate here. All in all this is a much bigger affair than the previous day, with multiple groups of musicians, three rooms of altars prepared inside the house, a huge pot of rice and beans cooking over a bonfire. And by the late afternoon, many hundreds of people in attendance.

But the brain-exploding, soul-rattling shock for me was witnessing the arrival of the saints, who come in droves hereabouts. Possessions, or trances, happen every couple of minutes, and it’s a seriously powerful thing to behold. Even a naturally skeptic, western-educated fellow as myself is left speechless. The spirits, or misterios as they are called here, almost exclusively possess women and gay men. Usually it starts as a woman starts screaming and writhing, having powerful convulsions. Her friends run to her to restrain her and rush her inside to the altar, or sometimes make a circle around the possessed, who after going through the initial tremors usually lies on the floor as if unconscious for a period. Then they rise up, and dance, or run around in circles, or wander aimlessly pulling at their hair. They roll on the floor, pour bottles of beer over their head, smoke cigars. Some, especially inside by the altar, act as mediums for the saints, giving advice or predictions, hugging family and strangers alike, offering healing to the sick.

Different saints are always in attendance, distinguishable by their different traits. Different misterios have distinct ways of walking, talking, behaving. For example Yemeyá is a young, beautiful, and somewhat narcisitic spirit, and will usually posess pretty girls in lavish dresses. Another, whose name I forget, is a wilder spirit with a penchant for alochol and cigarettes. People who live their lives in communities that practice this trance-religion develop relationships with certain saints, who talk to them over their years and follow up on their lives. The girls who experience poessesions, while not needing to be professional brujas or spirit-mediums, are a speicial bunch said to have cabezas de misterios (a spirit-head). They often come to the parties dressed in specific colors and adornments to faciliate the reception of particular saints, who all have their own tastes. One girl came in an extracagant wedding dress and sat by the altar all day hoping to be posessed by Yemeya, but it just diddn’t happen for her. So it goes.

From the musician's perspective, it is of course great than none of this can happen without music. Traditionally, palos drumming was the music of the fiest, but recently the Villa Mella manis have featured electrified groups who play salves on guitars, basses, and congos. The feel is almost merengue, but the lyrics are purely devotional. People will often receive the spirits right at the beginning of a song, when the beat drops. At the beginning of the party, things were mostly relaxed, with the occasional posession, mostly giving consultations. Later though, as more people showed up, a soul-train style corridor was formed, in which the posessed do the things that they do, and trances were starting left and right. When somebody first receives the spirit, everyone else screams and comes running.

The whole thing is fairly mind bending. The coming of the spirits for these people is a part of the fabric of daily life as anything else, and provides catharsis, releif of tension, resolution for local disputes, hardcore bonding, and well, a lot of fun also. As an outsider, it’s a little strange to be there, and I withold any judgements about whats really going on here. I certainly feel weird about posting a video of it, as I think you really have to be there to get a feeling for how powerful it is. Maybe sometime.

That’s all for now.