Tambú represents a ritual from Curaçao, largest of the Netherlands Antilles, employed by the island’s African peoples as a religio-spiritual vehicle. In Dutch mainland cities, however, the Tambú has developed into a type of party music, with Curaçaoan immigrants joining other African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants to explore and express complex collective identities. These reinvented tambú parties constitute new sites of cultural reproduction as well as contestation, of solidarity as well as difference, providing the rare occasion to observe diasporic belonging among Afro-Caribbean communities in the Netherlands. These contemporary tambú parties provide a needed space to negotiate competing and overlapping identities, enabling both a specific Antillean identity as well as a more inclusive diasporic identity.
Examines the role of successive intraregional migrations on the construction of cultural identity in Curaçao, Netherlands Antilles. The author analyzes the Afro-Dutch experience within the broader canvas of Caribbean migration studies, and thus brings a broader diasporic perspective to current research of identity and culture, with particular reference to Curaçao. Through migrations, the island has incorporated different kinds of musical expressions of the region. Of all cultural forms, music provides an ideal opportunity to explore cultural exchanges within and beyond diasporas. Curaçao therefore offers a rare window for viewing the role of intraregional migrations in the formation of discourses on diaspora and cultural identity. Migration studies that look only at the modern transnationalistic diapora obscure the deeply rooted significance of migration on Afro-diasporic identity within the Caribbean and the cultural identity of specific island societies. Intraregional migration movements both past and present profoundly influenced the cultural identity of Curaçao and its diasporic historical vision. Curaçaoan cultural identity has not been solely shaped by the internal dynamics of a merging of African and European cultures, but also intraCaribbean interactions of the descendants of enslaved Africans.
There are many parallels between the music and worship of the African American Pentecostalism of the author’s upbringing and that of Afro-Caribbean religious groups, including Trinidadian Spiritual Baptists, the Haitian Heavenly Army, and Jamaican Revival Zionists. This can partly be attributed to their shared West African roots. Many features of West African worship have survived among these two geographically separate groups, including a heavy use of rhythm and percussion instruments, a call and response vocal form, and a climax of spirit possession, when congregants reach a state of rhythmically induced ecstasy in which they feel fully possessed by the divine. Both groups have also independently adopted white Christian hymnody, in which they stay true to the text but often change the music in an improvisatory style.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
As contemporary tambú music and dance evolved on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, it intertwined sacred and secular, private and public cultural practices, and many traditions from Africa and the New World. As she explores the formal contours of tambú, the author discovers its variegated history and uncovers its multiple and even contradictory origins. She recounts the personal stories and experiences of Afro-Curaçaoans as they perform tambú–some who complain of its violence and low-class attraction and others who champion tambú as a powerful tool of collective memory as well as a way to imagine the future.