Online Exclusive: Manze Dayila
By Lissette Corsa

Every November 1^st for the last several years Haitian immigrant Dayila dresses up in a black suit, dons dark sunglasses, and paints her face half white-half black with crosses on each cheek. Performing Haitian dances and traditional songs in Kreyól in the New York City subway, she pays tribute to Gede, the impish god of the underworld whose affinity with children and the dead demonstrates the contrasting capriciousness often displayed by Haitian vodou’s complex pantheon of spirits (lwa).

At first unsure of how people, particularly fellow Haitians, would react to seeing a woman embodying Gede, Dayila ultimately chose to defy convention with a striking combination of performance-art devotion that drew the subterranean crowds. It wasn’t the first or last time she broke with convention, but certainly one of the most striking examples of this indomitable woman’s personality.

“I am the first Haitian woman who decided to go out there and expose the culture, singing in my language, without thinking about how people were going to react,” she says of her subway station forays. “When I started singing, people would thank me for having the courage to stand up and for lifting their spirit, for sharing my dances with them. I’m the type of artist that, if I’m performing, I want the audience to be a part of my performance.”

As luck would have it, or maybe by the grace of Gede, the city’s labyrinthine underbelly served as a gateway for the aspiring singer. Dayila eventually landed a record deal thanks to the exposure she received from the Metropolitan Transit Authority just recently she dropped her debut Solé. The culmination of years of soul-searching followed by years of getting to the heart of the album, Solé’s overlapping currents reflect the unlikely, if increasingly common marriage, between sacred and secular music. Dayila pays homage to her ancestors and the vodou deities that guide her. At the same time, in a nod to the city that’s taken her in, she embraces the world village eclecticism filtered through the prism of contemporary life in the Big Apple.

For years Dayila juggled odd jobs to make ends meet. She hadn’t really realized she could sing until she became involved in NYC’s Haitian arts community. Then, at the urging of friends, she began to foster her natural abilities, eventually becoming a mainstay in Haitian roots music circles, gaining a reputation as the go-to singer with the kind of soul-stirring, visceral voice favored by dancers of traditional trance-driven rhythms. She’s now been baptized as the Empress of Haitian roots music.

Her big break came in 2001 when she was selected to be a part of the MTA’s Music Under New York program. “I just got up there, closed my eyes and did my thing,” Dayila says of the audition. Her a capella performance of “Solé,” which later became the title track of her album, floored the judges. Best described as an existential cry, it earned Dayila a spot on a compilation CD featuring New York’s best subway buskers. Several weeks later producer Jamie Propp, one of the judges at the audition, called Dayila and offered to produce an album for her. “When I met him he said to me he had never heard anyone sing like I did and that. For those five minutes I sang, he really traveled,” Dayila says. “I took him somewhere, through every range of emotion.”

It took Dayila three and a half years to record Solé. “It was tough,” she admits. But up until then her life had been a series of traumatic events, so the process was nothing new. Not surprisingly, the album conveys the full spectrum of feelings that Dayila had been accumulating for so many years, projected through the vitality of vodou music as a living 21st-century tradition. Boldly, she breathes new life into ancient ritual songs within arrangements that incorporate breakbeats and electronic remixes of roots music.

But Dayila does more than update long-standing folklore. Backed by her band, the Nago Nation, she bridges disparate musical ideas from a very personal perspective. Together they venture into urban-infused pop territory on groove-oriented tracks like “That Feeling” and “I Want To Be Free,” both sung in English and featuring rapper Bennchoumy Elian. She also expands her Haitian worldview by integrating bits of Afrobeat and reggae, and by using instruments that aren’t indigenous to Haitian music.

As is so often the case with artists, distance and the exposure to an amalgamation of diverse cultures have made Dayila feel even closer to her roots. “The more I live, the more things change, the more I think of where I come from and how I got here,” she points out. It’s a philosophy made all the more poignant on the cover of Solé, with Dayila dressed in a red dress covered in vévés (drawings that represent and beckon the lwa), facing a semi-circle of matriarchal vodou priestesses all in white.

Manze Dayila traveled a long, rocky road before she discovered she could sing. Growing up in Saint-Marc, on Haiti’s western coast, she was influenced by French music on the radio and the traditional songs and percussive beats of vodou – integral parts of the syncretistic West African derived religion. As a child she often sang for her family during gatherings and celebrations. But those formative years soon took a backseat to life’s daily struggles: One apocryphal moment in 1988 found her 19 years old and eight months pregnant as she left Haiti boarded a rickety raft along with dozens of others who dreamed of a better life in America. “I felt like I should go somewhere, somewhere that I can have the opportunity to be better,” she says of her choice.

In the end it all worked out for the best – Dayila arrived safely in Miami after five harrowing days at sea and gave birth to a baby girl. There were other obstacles as well - just as she settled in Miami, the Haitian man who had taken her in threatened to kill her when she declined his romantic advances. “He said ‘If you leave I’m going to finish with you,’” she recounts. “’Nobody will know because you have nobody to pursue any justice for you.’”

After the incident Dayila had a dream that made her change course. “It was a very dark-skinned woman, she had a big bag on her shoulder and told me I needed to leave right away,” Dayila says. “She said to me ‘If you stay you’re going to die. Go to New York.” She didn’t know anybody in New York, and didn’t even know which way to go, but she heeded the warning, embarking upon another odyssey with her baby in tow. It would be the final leg of journey that led her to Gede, underneath a city that helped her find her calling in life.