The singer of the unmissable Kassav band now has released an autobiographical work, “Loin de l’Amer”, Edition Le Cherche-midi, a true journey within both her life and the spectacular West Indian music band that went gold several times.
Jocelyne Béroard was born in 1954 in Martinique. She is well known as a lyricist, performer and female figure of the Kassav’ dance machine. Today, let’s discover her as an author, to experience the great Kassav’ 40 year adventure from the inside!
Her fluid and direct style first takes us back to her childhood in Martinique, surrounded by her family on the Schoelcher heights. Without artifice, her texts depict the codes of the West Indian families of the time. Rigor, firmness and respect are among the many values transmitted by a strict bourgeois education. She writes: “More than respectability, respect is an obsession for the West Indian bourgeoisie. Good manners are taught to children in the attempt to get it (…) from everyone on the street and in daily life. This can also be heard in our language that uses neologisms such as ‘dérespecter’”.
The testimony of a lifetime, this “an tan lontan” fresco makes it possible, at the beginning of the work, to fix a time when slavery was denied in order to be forgotten, when school teachers pulled children’s ears and used their heavy rulers to reprimand recalcitrant students. A time when Creole was learned in schoolyards and spoken secretly. A time when music and songwriting were unthinkable as a career.
However, over the pages, the artistic dimension sets in, especially at the time of higher education, when her anticipated future as a pharmacist was replaced by the School of Fine Arts in Paris. Big brother Michel, a recognized pianist at her side in France, would play an important role in the start of her musical career. From one encounter to another, through experience, casting day would soon come for a very young music band, strangely bearing the name of a cassava pancake…
Innovative, perfectionist, demanding… all anecdotes about Zouk creators are told with remarkable precision, a lot of humor and intact emotion.
The individuality of each one in this musical family finds their place naturally through the lines, in particular her dear, very special friend Jacob Desvarieux (who died on July 30, 2021). This over-300-page work is dedicated to him, as well as to Patrick St. Eloi, another major figure in the band who also left too soon, unfortunately.
