The Eastern Stars Read Online Free Page A

distinctly and uniquely Dominican. But musicologists point out that a number of islands, such as Cuba and Puerto Rico, had merengues and may possibly have had them significantly earlier. Worse, from the Dominican point of view, one of the earliest merengues originated in Haiti, and the music appears to have first turned up on the Dominican side in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Haitians started coming over during the very violent Haitian revolution. Dominicans can live with the idea that their game , baseball, came from America and Cuba but not that their music came from Haiti. The Dominican Republic was invaded and occupied several times by the black nation with whom it shares its island, and anti-Haitianism, often expressed in racial terms, is a central Dominican obsession. In fact, it is popularly believed, though probably not true, that merengue was created to celebrate the end of Haitian occupation in 1844.
    The music was named after meringue, the sweet and fluffy confection that is nothing more than egg whites, air, and sugar. Both the word and confection are French, suggesting a Haitian connection.
    Merengue was always dance music. Throughout its many changes, it has remained in swiftly bouncing 2/4 time, heavy on the downbeat. It was originally played on numerous variations of guitar made of a gourd with ridges that is scraped, called a güiro —the modern metal version is called a güira —and a drum that was beaten on one end and played with sticks on the other. Dominicans have tried to attach symbolic importance to this drum because it has a male and a female side. The pounded side has a billy-goat skin and the stick side is covered with the skin of a she-goat. Dominicans commonly say that the güiro is an authentic Dominican instrument invented by the pre-Columbian Taino Indians. Anthropologists have refuted this. In fact, there is some troubling evidence that it may really have come from Puerto Rico.
    About the time the accordion was added to the merengue band, the music was denounced by prominent citizens, including former president Ulises Francisco Espaillat. Espaillat claimed that merengue was dangerous and called it “fatal” because it attacked the nervous system and caused imagination to spin out of control.
    He may have had a point. Like sex, it is a physical excitement that presents an alternative to rational thought. In the years since Espaillat, the instrumentation has gotten both more elaborate and louder with the inclusion of a brass section. The beat remains frenetic and engaging, an exhilarating and somewhat numbing expression of energy for energy’s sake. With large speakers and powerful boom boxes, merengue has ensured that Dominican towns are not quiet at night; and now, with the advent of iPods and tiny earphones, it can be blasted into the ear canal and directly patched into the brain. Things you cannot do while listening to merengue: reflect, stand still, be sad.
    Since the 1960s a newer music, bachata, has emerged from poor rural areas. This is the Dominican equivalent of country music: sad ballads of unrequited love. While it is also claimed as a distinctly Dominican form, it clearly has its roots in the Cuban bolero.
     
    T he ambiguous and confused Dominican identity, like all national identities, is rooted in history. The Dominican Republic, in a region known for harsh histories, has a particularly difficult, somewhat strange story of a land and a people struggling for centuries to find a path to nationhood. In five hundred years it was invaded twice by the Spanish, three times by the Haitians, twice by the French, and twice by the Americans—if you don’t count sugar companies or Major League Baseball. Dominicans have also on their own initiative at different times asked to be annexed to Spain, Britain, Colombia, France, and the United States.
    The one Dominican moment with an undisputed claim to world history was in 1492 when Columbus landed there, named