Edited by Azizi Powell
This pancocojams post presents an excerpt of the 2017 journal article by Monika Stern entitled "Is Music a “Safe Place”? The Creative and Reactive Construction of Urban Youth through Reggae Music (Port Vila, Vanuatu)." This excerpt is given without most of the footnotes numbers and their text.
The content of this post is presented for historical, socio-cultural, and educational purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to Monika Stern and all those who are quoted in this post.
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This is part of an ongoing post about Vanuatu. Click the links found below for previous and subsequent posts on this subject.
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From https://journals.openedition.org/jso/7852
Journal de la Société des Océanistes
[…]
144-145 | 2017 : Urbanisation en Mélanésie
[…]
Is Music a “Safe Place”? The Creative and Reactive
Construction of Urban Youth through Reggae Music (Port Vila, Vanuatu)
[…]
Monika Stern
p. 117-130
" […]
Music as a “way out”?
Today in Port Vila, music plays a crucial role for many
young men. It is one of the most readily available tools for them to cope with
the lived experience of marginalization and keep themselves “safe” (to use
their expression).
[…]
The life of young people in the settlements and their
marginalization
The population of the Melanesian archipelago of Vanuatu is
currently very young. According to the last national census of 2009, 66% of the
population was under 30 (National Census, 2009). However, as Buchlotz has
pointed out, youth is not a clear, nor a universal category. It depends not on
age criteria but on context:
“In a given culture, pre-adolescent individuals may count as youth, while those in their 30s or 40s may also be included in this category. And youth as a cultural stage often marks the beginning of a long-term, even lifelong, engagement in particular cultural practices, whether its practitioners continue to be included in the youth category or not.” (Bucholtz, 2002: 526)
Thus, today in Port Vila, “youth” cannot be defined by age or family situation (marriage, children). My observations show that if a person spends time with groups of peers who consider themselves “young people” and participates in their activities and networks, he or she is regarded as such. Thus, though musicians are often described as “young”, in fact, they may be of very different ages. As one of my friends (at the time he was around 30) told me, music is the activity of his youth, when he is older, he will have to find a different occupation because “music is for youth”. More than ten years later, in his 40s, he is still a famous musician and seems to have no desire to stop (though he is also a celebrated author, visual artist and curator). Although music is seen mainly as an activity for youth, for some people it is their main activity (even though it is not lucrative) throughout their life.
14 In 2009, according to the National Census, the capital of
Port Vila had a population of 44,039, (...)
Unlike in rural areas where life is structured around a subsistence
economy,13 the rapidly growing development of the capital Port Vila14 has given
rise to such social changes as unemployment, increases in school fees and the
cost of living, insalubrious and overcrowded housing, etc. These common
consequences of urban development have in recent decades led to the appearance
of a certain precariousness characterized by forms of poverty and social
fragility in part of the urban population (Mitchell, 2004; Kraemer, 2013).
However, unlike in more “developed” countries (according to capitalist economic norms), poverty in Vanuatu is a highly nuanced concept. Indeed, whether it be the politician Ralph Regenvanu, the writer Paul Tavo or young musicians, many ni-Vanuatu refute the label of “poor country” established by foreign criteria. They base this on an assumption of abundance, asserting that in their country there are no homeless people thanks to family support structures, no famine and constitutionally inalienable access to ancestral lands that anyone can use should their urban situation become too precarious. Kraemer (2013: 81-86) however calls into question this notion of universal rights to family land in the everyday life of second or third generations residing in town, particularly in the case of the young who express their marginalization not only with regard to the urban elites but also concerning this access to their ancestral lands.
18The young people concerned in this paper are mostly males (because the urban music scene in Port Vila is predominantly masculine) and most of them are from second and sometimes even third generations of migrants from the rural areas of Vanuatu islands. Many of them have no fixed income, although they have access to other kinds of activities paid for in various forms (cash, services, meals, cigarettes, kava, alcohol, cannabis, etc.). Most of them live off the incomes of their extended families with whom they live, often without such basic services as water, electricity, sanitation, and paved roads. However there are a very small number of musicians who are from emerging middle-class families and/or have a steady paid job.
While the difficult living conditions of these young people have already been noted (Mitchell, 2004; Lindstrom, 2011; Kraemer, 2013; Wittersheim and Dussy, 2013), in recent years an important new factor has appeared: a particular kind of hunger influenced by contemporary perspectives of masculinity. This hunger is closely connected to urbanization, its monetary system, social organization and marginalization of youth - particularly young boys because of the public nature of their everyday lives. Urban girls and children are not affected by this phenomenon to the same extent, as their lives are structured more domestically, in and around the home and the preparation of food. For young urban boys, finding food is difficult.
[…]
More and more, increasingly younger boys are taking daily
refuge in the streets, among their peers and in the “ghetto”, often returning
home very late at night. Thus, young boys in different areas of the town are
building special places for themselves where they can gather together, storian
(talk), eat and find refuge if they encounter problems. They call these
makeshift shelters (an abandoned house, a shed built from local natural
materials or sheets of corrugated iron), “ghettos”, a name probably taken from
reggae songs even if its meaning is totally different from that of the Jamaican
ghettos called shanty towns or those of big American cities like New York:
“ahhh, ghetto is, today in Vanuatu…for me, ghetto is a little house or a place where boys, boys and girls get together, everyday to smoke or chat (stori). To enjoy their day in the ghetto.” (Interview with Tio Masing, Koncerners Band, 1 November 2012)
Young boys have thus created their own spaces. Though Tio speaks about ghettos as mixed spaces, for boys and girls, in reality, they are mostly used by young boys. According to testimonies gathered, many districts have their own ghettos visited by the local young. Though some of them have names like Ohlen Hole, 95 Colombia, Dark Kona (“Dark Corner”), Waet Kona (“White Corner”), 74 Dark Street, Cornwall Street, or Grass House, most of them are just called the “ghetto”. Although they are not frequented only by “artists”, these are privileged places to meet, talk, and exchange. They are sites of mutual inspiration and influences, places in which to create something together. It is also here that they often articulate their experience of marginalization.
[…]
Creating musicians’ networks
[…]
The young people of Port Vila, particularly those born in
the city, are becoming increasingly detached from their parents’ island of
origin, customary life and sometimes even family networks (Kraemer, 2013).
Young boys are building their own exchange networks around cigarettes, alcohol,
cannabis, but also for some of them church activities, internet or associative
activities and musical practices.
Today in Port Vila there are many different kinds of music: Christian choirs, string bands with falsetto male voices accompanied by string instruments, “traditional” dance and music,20 and pop music dominated by the reggae style. Each of these genres creates its own networks, as evidenced, for example, by the organization of Fest’Napuan in which separate days managed by different people from the festival committee are devoted to string band, pop and religious music respectively. Even if there may sometimes be bridges formed between different musical styles, music practices, like other leisure activities (Wittersheim, 2014: 140), have the power to generate a sense of belonging and differentiation.
I suggest that music is one of the ways through which young people in Vanuatu imagine their own new networks and communities. How important is this “reggae community” myth in Port Vila? If young people believe that reggae culture connects them to Jamaica and African reggae communities, does this help them to construct a local reggae community across or beyond those more familiar Melanesian social norms such as family and island of origin?21
22 People in Vanuatu are used to speaking about people from outside cities as « islanders » as opposed (...)
When islanders22 first started migrating to Port Vila they
chose to settle according to their island of origin. As the city expanded and
after years of migrations, intermarriages took place and some settlements
became increasingly mixed with people originating from different islands
(Lindstrom, 2011: 257; Kraemer, 2013).
Today urban identifications appear to have altered. While
Wittersheim (2006: 68) described a transfer of identification from island of
origin to province23 of origin, it would seem now that island or province of
origin is not always a crucial factor. It can be replaced or enriched with that
of the city area of residence (Kraemer, 2013) or, as we will see, regardless of
origin or living place, by leisure or artistic practices. As Lind (2012: 23)
states when analysing the case of the Veanu string band, this urban social mix
is reflected by music in which can be read not only kinship relations, but also
social relationships based on a sharing of the same musical taste. Thus, for
instance, the most famous reggae band of the early 2000s, Naio, brought
together young boys from the same island in the south of the archipelago,
Tanna. By contrast, many members of today's reggae groups come from different
islands of origin and, though they may sometimes be from the same city areas,
this is not always the case.
In addition, Vanuatu is a Christian country and for a long time the church has also been a factor in community building. It is in the new churches that some people find answers, fill gaps or appease their dissatisfaction with how the country is governed by politicians (Eriksen, 2009: 78, 79). However, some young boys are very critical of the church... Some of these young people are therefore looking for new opportunities to develop networks outside their family and church membership, and music offers them this possibility.
For music enables the creation of new networks. A band is often experienced as a second family, with new networks of close or more distant friends: sound engineers, members of other bands and music associations. In my own experience of playing in the local band, we all became a family and were connected not only by the pleasure of playing music together, by obligations linked to our music activities (rehearsals, performances, organisation, etc.) but also by our presence and support in each other’s important life events outside music: the birth of a baby, marriage and death ceremonies, illness, etc. While our band formed something like a close family, our own networks, friends and families, along with other musicians or local music activists became an extended family for all of us. Thus, family, island or even city district of origin and relations with neighbours can be replaced or enriched by social networks and friendships created through music activities.
In Port Vila, music is what connects musicians and the different actors of the music world and enables the exchange of various services. Musicians exchange performances and musical entertainment at fund-raising events, borrow each other’s sound equipment and musical instruments, circulate digital recordings or share the stage at public shows. Musicians and music lovers form an active and reactive community with influence on the city. I have developed elsewhere the idea that, via digital technologies, music in Port Vila circulates through its own networks outside the official music industry market (Stern, 2014). Because most young people have no leisure budget, they acquire their music (in the form of MP3 or MP4 files, mostly on their mobile phones) for free, through their networks, unaware of any copyright system.
Technologies such as mobile phones or Internet facilitate the creation and communication of these new networks. Mobile phones enable easy communication for gatherings (for example, rehearsals or meetings). The Internet is itself a space for exchanges and the creation of networks via different discussion groups or forums, which can then be extended even beyond the country. Thereby the “myth” of a musical community is continuously reactualized and is omnipresent in the construction and transformation of new forms of sociability in Port Vila. Other kinds of events allow the creation of more structured networks: music festivals, associations and youth centres.
Institutionalizations: music festivals, studios, associations
[…]
In the 90s, two major events were created: la Fête de la
Musique introduced in Vanuatu by the Alliance Française and Fest’Napuan, an
annual national music festival (which also made a public access rehearsal
studio available). The same period saw the emergence of ngos like Wan Smolbag
Theatre (http://visit.wansmolbag.org/) and Further Arts
(http://www.furtherarts.org/) that were closely involved in the development of
musical practices. These associations provided musical instruments, classes and
rehearsal studios, thus making music more accessible to young people. The
number of local bands increased significantly during the 2000s, as did the
development of digital technologies, recordings and home studios.
The Fest’Napuan festival, which is generally a great
success and has a very good public image, nevertheless at times provokes
accusations of causing problems and violence. The association’s work is then
to neutralize those aspects considered negative and to nurture those seen as
positive. Fest’Napuan thus has its own rules. For example, the association has
forbidden the sale of alcohol on the festival site and provides its own
security service.25 This desire of associations to neutralize the “bad” sides
of youth through art is also reflected in the development of a discourse about
musicians, or more generally artists, having a duty to set a good example.
For musicians, playing in big festivals like Fest’Napuan or the Fête de la Musique, releasing an album or having the opportunity to go on an international tour affords them a certain power of expression and also enhances their image in the eyes of their community. Appearing in public gives musicians a sense of responsibility. A lot of musicians told me that they have to set an example because they appear in public and then everyone watches them in their everyday life. The creation of associations which support musical activities provides informal musicians’ networks with a space and the possibility to be more organized and structured and offers musicians the opportunity for their voices to be heard more widely.
Music as the political voice of youth
26 Even if today we hear a few committed songs in string
band music too, they remain a minority.
According to several Port Vila reggae musicians, they see
themselves as strongly committed to creating the country's future, unlike
string band musicians whom they consider less committed because of their songs’
lyrics which are mostly about love and women.26 For many of these musicians,
music is the only form of expression for conveying messages.
“Music is a part of life […] it’s a kind of civil resistance,
you play music to get a message over. […] When you preach by talking, it’s
difficult to get people to listen to you, so it’s better to use music. And
civil resistance comes mainly from young people who find it difficult to get
into the official system. Our economic system excludes many young people
because they don’t have sufficient school education, so when they need to
assert themselves the only way to be heard by those inside the system is
through music. So the young from outside the system, if they know how to play
music, can make themselves heard by those inside the system.” (Interview with
Lopez Adams, Ants in Tokyo band, 6 November 2012)”…
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