Benna (genre)
music genre
Benna (alternatively spelled bennah, or called ditti) is a genre of Antiguan and Barbudan music.
Benna is a calypso-like genre, characterized by scandalous gossip and a call-and-response format. It first appeared during slavery, and became a form of folk communication in the early 20th century, and it spread local news across the islands. John Quarkoo was a singer who used the genre to criticize oppressors of black people. It was the main genre of non-religious music in the region until the 1950s, after which was replaced by the popularity of Trinidad calypso.
Singing Benna is referenced three times in the short story Girl by Jamaica Kincaid published in the New Yorker Magazine June 19, 1978.
The public source identifies “Benna (genre)” as music genre. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Benna, genre and music.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4889602. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1978.
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This entry incorporates text from “Benna (genre)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.