Calinda

For the ancient city in Asia Minor, see Calynda.

Calinda, dance of the Negroes in America, watercolour by François Aimé Louis Dumoulin.

Calinda (Kalinda) is a martial art, as well as kind of folk music and dance in the Caribbean which arose in the 1720s. Calinda is the French spelling, and the Spanish equivalent is calenda; it is a kind of stick-fighting commonly seen practiced during Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago.^[1] There, Carnival songs are considered to be derived from calinda chants and "lavways".

Though it is more commonly practiced as a dance because of the violent outcome of stick fighting, its roots are still that of a martial art originating from Africa, and stick fights still occur in Trinidad. They also have been formalised into annual Carnival competitions.^[2]

Kalenda is one name assigned to an Afro-Caribbean form of stick fighting as practiced in Haiti and entering the United States through the port city of New Orleans.^[3] It is also practiced in other parts of the Caribbean, such as Martinique.^[4]

The well-known Cajun song "Allons dancer Colinda" is about a Cajun boy asking a girl named Colinda to do a risqué dance with him; probably derived from the Calinda dance which was reported to have been performed in New Orleans by Afro-Caribbean slaves brought to Louisiana.

Similar forms of this martial art exist elsewhere in the Caribbean. For example, in Barbados it is commonly referred to as stick-licking or stick science. (See Bajan stick licking)

Sources

1. ^ Shane K. Bernard and Julia Girouard, "'Colinda': Mysterious Origins of a Cajun Folksong," Journal of Folklore Research 29 (January–April 1992: 37-52.
2. ^ Trinidad Sweet - The People, Their Culture, Their Island - Bird, Adrian Curtis (1992) Inprint Publications LTD, Port of Spain, Trinidad, W.I.
3. ^ Kalenda by Dennis Newsome at http://malandros-touro.com/kalenda.html
4. ^ "Tangled Roots: Kalenda and Other Neo-African Dances in the Circum-Caribbean" by Julian Gerstin, New West Indies Guide 78 (1&2): 5-41 (2004)

External links

• Streetswing
• Calinda Software: The martial art of making enterprise collaboration more productive