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Beken


The Haitian singer Beken, whose government name is Jean Prosper Dauphin, was born in Port-au-Prince in 1956. When he was twelve he lost a leg in a car accident. In Haiti, a cripple without means is condemned to the life of a malere-one of the permanently wretched of the earth. Luckier than many, Beken attended Sainte Eternité School, which serves disabled children, and managed to complete high school by the age of nineteen-more education than most Haitians can win. lf the sang Bakaloreya has the facts straight, he might have gone on to university, if not for the death of his mother. Beken's father used to sing regularly for a peasant organization. Soon after the loss of his leg, Beken picked up a guitar and began to get into Haitian music. l've had this wooden guitar a long time, Beken sings in Kote'w Te Ye. At some point, the instrument became his mealticket. His music falls in Haiti's troubadour tradition; like most European cultural phenomena, the model of the troubadour has not passed through Haiti without transformation. Some troubadour recycles international pop music into a Haitian idiom, others become such stinging political gadflies that they risk assassination; one of the latter, Manno Charlemagne, became mayor of Port-au-Prince on the strength of the acerbic political commentary presented in his songs. Beken was discovered (though not for the first time) in 2010, on the streets of earthquake-wracked Port-au-Prince. Photographer Simon Romero caught a snatch of on...

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