ABSTRACT
The world of Caribbean percussion is, in many ways, a magic-realist one. It was forged through the traumatizing and profoundly alienating processes foundational to global modernity-the movement of peoples across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans to the Americas. Like the mysterious amassing of butterflies in an episode in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Caribbean percussive traditions and instruments are manifestations of proliferation, mutation, bringing into the world of pleasurable sound unexpected source materials. These materials include not just skin and wooden frame to create myriad variations on the drum, but also crates and storage boxes, seeds, gourds, and tree trunks, wooden sticks used in shipbuilding, and a range of metallic objects purloined from everyday use, from oil drums to ablution vessels to spoons. These converted objects sound out of resistance and pleasure to the punishing rhythms of plantation life through an equally bewildering profusion of modes. They are not just slapping with hand or stick, but scraping, shaking, and bringing together two metallic surfaces to resonate against each other. To the latter category of Caribbean percussive instruments, technically called 'struck idiophones', belongs the subject of my essay, the dhantal. 1
2 Two iconic examples are Antonio Benitez-Rojo, 1996, and Edouard Glissant, 1997.
