Tambu: Multiple Languages

I love this sign.  Heehee!  "Stop here and wait for the bell!"  It's at a (smaller) post office in Curacao.  It also illustrates how the island is a multicultural, multilingual environment.  Papiamento, Dutch, English, and Spanish are the main ones.  

One of my interviewees explained that there are novelty tambu songs in English and Dutch.  Tambu is also present in Venezuela, among other places.  It has a different name and there are some other differences I won't get into.  My point is that there is tambu in Spanish, too.

Tambu Info: Transcription

Transcription took a long time.  The interviewees spoke in Papiamento, which was harder for me to listen to and type verbatim than English would've been.  There are accents, for example, which I left out, choosing to capitalize the accented letter for the sake of speed. Also, I'm more familiar with English spelling rules than Papiamento ones---schools in Curacao started teaching Papiamento just after I left the island to go off to college.

So this is how I did it: two windows, one the video, one a word processor, and I just toggled back and forth between the two.  I think it took me about 1 hour to transcribe 10 minutes of speech, but I wasn't very precise about keeping track.

Tambu: So Many Tapes!

I haven't posted in a while since returning to California.  I had to get over the jet lag and then deal with the reality of being back in Monterey---reverse culture shock, if you will---and get caught up after a 3-week absence.

And there was a bit of procrastination.  You see, each of these tapes is 60 minutes long.  Not all of them are full of footage, but there's also all the footage on my back-up camera, which has a hard drive and doesn't use tape.  I don't know how many hours are on that.  Eek!

Tambu with Vocal Percussion

The idea is that tambu parties were against all morality and decency and were frowned upon by the elite and the Catholic church.  So you had these parties in secret, of course.  One way to keep them hidden was to use vocal percussion---imitate the drumming with non-sense words and the like.  In one of Rene Rosalia's books I read that the Jewish community held such a cappella tambu dances fairly regularly at one point.  And they would invite beautiful black women to such dances . . .

One place were wealthy Jews lived was Scharloo, and they had these parties, called "bokan"---"boka" means "mouth" in Papiamento---in the woods behind Scharloo.  The Scharloo houses were enormous and gorgeous, like this one.

Dutch Apartheid?

I haven't researched this, but right now it looks to me like the Dutch have bought lots of property and converted it into bed-and-breakfasts, and other tourism-related businesses.  Then they bring in Dutch employees and interns, so much of the money generated by those tourism businesses doesn't circulate in the local economy.

Mind you, I look like a local.  I went to a beach the other day and the parking lady spoke Dutch to me and didn't speak the local language.  A Dutch family saw me and thought I was the taxidriver they had called. 

I can see how some speak of neo-colonialism.  I confess, though, that I haven't sought out "the other side" to get a different perspective.

And what I'm saying may be unrelated to the sticker, but it's just interesting to note.


The traffic sign means something along the lines of, "Watch for pedestrians."

Tambu: Music and Dance of Curacao

Editing isn't quite where I'd like it to be, but right now I don't have access to my preferred software.

Would you prefer subtitles, or voice-over?

Making Tambu: Music and Dance of Curacao

Cables:
- to charge my video camera
- to charge my back-up video camera
- to charge the laptop (a rental)
- to connect my video camera to the laptop
- to connect my back-up video camera to the laptop

Each one gets it's own baggie.

Pretty crazy, eh?