Among the diverse theories that can be elaborated on the long-lasting curative powers of music, there is one that has consistently been eschewed: the idea that traumatic heritage appeals for a particular type of prognosis involving transgenerational artistic/psycholinguistic healing. This academic blindness is furthermore evidenced by the scarcity of ethnomusicological studies devoted to the genesis of specific black music in Western societies (Nettl 1990) and their role in the communities that created them. The present paper aims, therefore, to show that a collective transgenerational trauma like transatlantic slavery has had a long- standing impact on the “prolonged disorders of consciousness” (Magee 2018) affecting Afro-diasporic populations, but that it has also generated a ‘chorus of common memory’ (Phillips 1995) suffusing Caribbean and Transamerican poetics. In this respect, Zouk events, dances and concerts (since Zouk is an Afro- diasporic heritage) have counteractively played a major role in healing the psyche of Afrodescendants. Our thesis is consistent with the idea that trauma is not exclusively synonymous with loss or suffering, as Patrick Chamoiseau deftly remarks when he associates it with birth and creation: “[if] life is otherwise a long succession of happy times, this means, too, that trauma would not only be, as we too quickly imagine, the privileged locus of pain, but also one instance of the formidable joy and exaltation procured by the epiphany of beauty” (P. Chamoiseau, “L’esclavage : quelle influence sur notre poétique ?”, in Bowser & Charles-Nicolas, eds., L’esclavage : quel impact sur la psychologie des populations ? 2018: 446-447 – personal translation). While sublimating the horrors of the past, Zouk artists have inherited and capitalized over an archive of communal experiences binding Afrodescendants scattered all over the Americas with the aim of combining the diagnosis of the trauma with its corresponding cure. In the process, they have developed a complex aesthetics based on the dichotomy between the rhythms of diurnal epics (fighting, marooning and survival) and those of nocturnal aegis (remembrance and healing, wakes, and musical composition). These, and other aspects, will enable us to probe the depths of Zouk in the forty years of its evolution since Kassav’ made it known to the world