Lumane Casimir
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Lumane Casimir
An artist with the expression more authentically haïtienne, member of the Astoria Trio which Jacques Nelson directed, starts to wake up the interest. Sometimes to Mrs. Ludovic Boucard, street Lafleur Ducheine, it comes to sing and to grip the guitar for the pleasure of the mistress of céans and the passers by, intrigued by its bright stamp, group in front of the house to hear it... It is the dawn of a celebrity who soon will confer to the singer Lumane Casimir, first Haïtienne guitarist, the title enviable of first high-speed motorboat of the song in Haiti. With the festivities which mark the inauguration of the new frontier city of Belladère in 1948, the singer moves her audience by her upsetting voice. Success, during the Exposure, of the folksongs Panama m tonbe, Dad Gede bèl gason, and Caroline Acaau, harmonized and orchestrated by Antalcidas Murat of the Jazz of the Young people, and that the singer Oporto-yankee Daniel Santos will reveal with the four corners of the continent, bring the dedication to him ".
The reports/ratios on its life so often confine with the legend and if little chatter appear to us, in addition, traces of its authentic existence that, had not been the implicit credit granted to certain forms of testimony, one would have the right to see in Lumane only one piles and pure produced of a collective mirage. Very few things indeed remain today of it, apart from what it was a "country-woman with the gold voice" whose songs will remain " in the memories like the most evocative airs of the hours of enchantement of the Exposure of the Bicentenary " . And in spite of our meeting of certain people having known it a little, and more often seen on scene, to outline a linear course of Lumane can hold only of one real gageure that after many unfruitful attempts we humbly renonçons to raise.
Its guitar under the arms, it would be seen with Port-with-Prince around his 14 years, coldly unloaded of Gonaïves. Carrying out the typical existence of the mown artists, it is with the Field of Mars, the one of these attroupements that did not fail to cause its improvised concerts of street, that it would have been made locate by the painter Alix Roy who hastens to introduce it near his aunt Lina Mathon Blanchet. The diagnosis of the Master is immediate: its talent is undeniable and it is not necessary more so that Lumane is at once counted Troop of Lina. "Semi-officially", one of our sources entrusts to us because, so in addition Lumane holds without question the scene with famous Jazz of the Young people, Lina, playing without any doubt of this art, if useful for successes of time and so private individual with it, to make étonnament profitable côtoiement of worlds of various nature and a priori antagonistic, will especially produce it in his concerts in interlude, accompanied by untameable and imprésivible Ti Roro. Because finally which is it? Diffuse stammerings and memories, it arises about this: apparently of fuzzy and modest stock thus consequently not very interesting for a certain medium, the perception of it oscillates between that of a girl of street and that, not more advisable, of a girl with emotional and sentimental life unstable -- it is reported, incidentally, that around 1949, it would have married one named Sailor-hat but of a dash and weddings altogether of short duration. There is the certainty which she wrote itself numbers of her songs, which she was always with money court and which she never stopped drinking... One particularly remembers his maintenance and his air a little revêches, the promptness of his remarks towards which ventured to approach it with grain-hair, all that raised of the eccentricity of shoes of white tennis to man and this wide hat flowered of which on scene, and even in the representations of the troop abroad, it agreed only with difficulty, not to never say, with déprendre.
If one sticks to the year 1953, advanced like year of its death, the passage of Lumane in the song haïtienne seems, in the final analysis, to have been only of very short duration. One wants that she knew towards the end of her life the abandonment and greatest misery and that she died tubercular patient, in a shack with "Fò Senklè". Other voices insist that Lina -- or another helping hand -- would have assisted in its last moments and that she would have died in the hospital. A last version, that one quite as plausible, supports that she would have died very young person -- approximately 35 years -- of improper use of alcohol and the little arranged life and definitively exhausting that she carried out.
The life of Lumane, just like its death, was that of large, an impregnable density. Of it remain most significant, these songs so marvelously tough, of the bits that obviously we did not take time yet to restick and carried by the voice of epigone of Carole Démesmin at its top, this homage of the Koralen writer-storyteller
RLORI
nulook@mail.com
