Beat of the Boroughs: Öneza Lafontant

December 21, 2020 Öneza Lafontant, As told to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Öneza Lafontant. Photos courtesy of the artist

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Öneza Lafontant is the founder and lead singer of KONGO, a Haitian roots music group of Brooklyn. The Flatbush resident is featured in the Center for Traditional Music and Dance’s Beat of the Boroughs: NYC Online series, which is showcasing the artistry of 54 of the city’s leading immigrant performers and diverse cultural traditions from around the world.

When did your musical journey begin?

In 1993, I started volunteering to work with refugees detained in a U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after they were interdicted by the U.S. Coast Guard after fleeing persecution in Haiti to seek asylum. The following year, I returned to Guantanamo to work as a Family Health Counselor with World Relief. During that time, I began to sing with the refugees as a means of coping and developed musical healing activities to counter these difficult times. We would beat on buckets for drums and sing to make Haitian roots music. In 1995, I founded the Haitian roots music group Kongo, and some original members of the group were Haitian refugees who I met in Guantanamo.

What drew you to Brooklyn?

I moved to Brooklyn to join my two sisters who were living here, and I was enrolled to attend Wingate High School. Prior to that, I had left Haiti to live for a year in Belgium, where my other sister was living at the time. Although Brooklyn is home to one of the largest Haitian communities out of Haiti, I struggled with integration because of the prejudice and discrimination that Haitians faced in this country. There was a history of stereotypes about Haitian people that had been adapted in the mainstream media, and people believed these negative anti-Haitian narratives. Haitian youth were constantly bullied and under attack in school settings. The first week that I attended school at Wingate, I was mugged in front of the school. Later that year, my close friend Alphonse Rempell was shot to death in front of the school. He was like a brother to me.

What makes your music distinctive?

Kongo’s music is a raw blend of a cappella interspersed with percussion and acoustic accents, which remains true to its African roots. You can use instruments in varying the ways you accentuate or create “your own sound”. The drum was the first instrument; its sound is connatural with that of the human heartbeat. It allows us to stay connected to our ancestors, who influence our daily lives by sending messages of wisdom, love, truth and justice, through the lwa spirits. Haiti’s own independence relied on the drum as a communication device, which made our revolution possible… It’s very powerful.

What inspires your musical repertoire?

Our songs are songs of struggle. Through Haitian song and drums, we own our struggle, and our struggle inspires our music. Our songs rally resistance around the various struggles that our people face in Haiti and people facing social injustice around the world.

Who are your favorite artists from Brooklyn?

My favorite artists in Brooklyn are actually both Haitian visual artists. Jean Patrick Icart-Pierre is known for his revolutionary style of Haitian paintings and ghetto landscapes, which much like my music, also responds to social injustices that our people face.

And Deenps Bazile is known in the Haitian community as Granbwa, meaning spirit of the woods. He is a multi-disciplinary artist known for his spiritual sculptures carved of dead wood stumps in Prospect Park. He also organizes the annual Haitian cultural gathering Bwa Kayiman at Prospect Park to commemorate the Bwa Kayiman ceremony that gathered maroons that escaped slavery in 1791 to organize and launch the successful Haitian Revolution.

How has the pandemic affected you and your group?

This pandemic has interrupted life as we know it, and things may never be the same. I typically work as a Teaching Artist in the public school system, and there are little to no opportunities to continue to teach musical enrichment activities on a virtual platform, that would allow most artists to support themselves and their families. Haitian people are known for our resilience; it goes far back into our history, and we have inherited it. We continue to face many struggles over time. Whether it’s natural disasters, manmade disasters, or climate change, which all make an economic situation more difficult.

Living as a teaching artist in New York, I have learned to make ends meet. Thankfully, I was able to have some savings put away for a rainy day. I learned that this is important as an artist because work is not always steady.

How are you reaching audience now?

I continue to participate in social justice movements by lending my voice as a singer and participating with our drums to fuel rallies and other actions, both in person and virtually.

Over the summer of this year, we participated in social actions and demonstrations to protest the detention of Haitian families in Berks County Pennsylvania with the Shut Down Berks Coalition. This cause is dear to me because I used to provide family drumming circles in that detention center 15 years ago, as a healing music activity for the detained youth and families.

Last month we participated in the National TPS Alliance Justice for Journey action. As they stopped in Brooklyn, we provided drumming for a rally in Flatbush (and we will participate in a virtual cultural music encuentro with them in January 2021). On December 5, we participated in the Stolen Lives Induction Ceremony, and event that we usually play in every year, that brings together parents of people that have been killed by the police. This year the event was done online, and our group Kongo closed the presentation.

What do you think the future holds for your arts sector in New York as a result of the pandemic?

At some point the school system will eventually reach a new point of normality that is a healthy learning environment for the students. I only hope that the administrators can realize the importance of teaching music, dance and other arts activities, especially as a tool for healing, which is especially important now and going forward.

What types of support do you most need now?

It is important for artists to have access to virtual platforms, and perhaps receive technical assistance training of how we can best share our music widely on digital platforms. This would allow people from all over the world to hear our music and see our videos. We have great material to share, but we just need to know how best to do it.

What is next for you?

As our struggle continues, so does our fight for justice. I will continue to find ways to use my art form to gather people and fuel social justice actions. Meanwhile I am trying to familiarize myself with ways to present my music remotely, on virtual platforms.

What are your hopes for 2021?

I hope that we can truly realize some racial reckoning that has been talked about throughout this year in a symbolic way. Our population has been affected by racist policies that started long before the Trump administration but have certainly gotten worse during 2020. I hope that different sectors of our society will continue to work together to fix over 500 years of damage caused by colonization. I will continue to work to decolonize the wrongs of the history through my music. In the meantime, I hope for this pandemic to end so that we can all live safer and be healthier.

What does it mean to you to be part of Beat of the Boroughs?

During this time that people cannot gather during the pandemic, this program provides a safe platform for artists to share their music and dance with communities, not just locally but around the world since it’s online. I can even share it with people in Haiti.

You can view Öneza Lafontant’s presentation on Monday, December 21 at 5:00 PM on CTMD’s YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/user/CTMDProgramsConcerts or Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/CTMDnyc. And learn more about him at kongoroots.com.