I had never been inside The Town Hall before, not until today, September 22, 1989. I was impressed by its monumental aura. Maybe not as grand and elegant as Carnegie Hall, but arguably more noble in purpose than all the world’s highbrow houses put together. The League for Political Education, a suffragette group, created The Town Hall in 1921 as a space to educate the people. Its architecture—no box seats, no obstructed views—displayed democratic values. As I crossed the balcony listening to Makandal’s soundcheck from a variety of sonic perspectives, I felt both proud and humbled that our Frisner, up from one of the world’s most oppressed communities, would play here tonight.
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Frisner’s Souvenir
N ap fè yon souvni…Menm si m ta mouri, o, m ap kanpe…kasèt la toujou la…mizik ap toujou la…l ap travay pou demen.
We’re making a memory…Even if I die, oh, I’m rising up…the cassette lives on…the music lives on…it’s working for the future.
(Story adapted from a blog entry posted to makandal.org, 26 August 2015)
New Year’s Eve 1987. We weren’t the kind of people who stressed over holiday gifts. Frisner had come up out of a struggling community—he literally slept on a dirt floor as a child. I had developed an aversion to the annual shopping mania, and, as a graduate student, my means were limited anyway. We celebrated only joudlan (New Year’s Day, also Haiti’s Independence Day). We did it the traditional Haitian way, with a ben chans (herbal luck bath) on New Year’s Eve and a nice, steaming kettle of soup joumou (squash soup) in the morning. So as we approached the finish line for 1987—counting five years almost to the day with each other—it surprised me, and touched me to the bottom of my soul, when Frisner presented me with a holiday gift, the very best he had to offer: his music.
The Frisner Augustin Memorial Archive 