NOTE: I have been known to bore my audience, compulsive, too deep into a subject. Here, I've shunted some of this detail into footnotes at the end, there for those intrepid enough to want to read them, but not necessary.
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Colonel Frank Lumsden, head of the Charles Town Maroons,
playing the abeng in an old photo from Google. The abeng
is the cow horn that helped confound the British,
communicating across the dense mountainous foliage
using a secret code, like Morse code. |
Sometimes, the search for something will fail to discover its goal, yet still deliver up a different, unforeseen prize. In my case, I wanted to visit a Jamaican Maroon community (see below*), hoping for insight into the history of their music and possible retentions of the island's indigenous culture. Instead, I stumbled upon a formal discussion, a reasoning, between them and a no-less independent contingent of Rastas.
In a narrow canyon of Portland parish, up the kind of road where I had to back up to allow an oncoming car to pass, lies one of the few extant Maroon communities in Jamaica. The Charles Town Maroons, who, for the last 7 years, have hosted a Maroon conference: a gathering to discuss, celebrate and share their culture. Without knowing exactly what to expect, I came alone from Kingston, my wife and son recognizing this outing as one of my Quixotic exercises, not willing to endure the 2hr drive there and back based only on the hope of experiencing the music and dance of Maroon gatherings. In this respect, their doubt was proven wise.
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| Mutabaruka, the barefoot poet |
I arrived much too early at the Charles Town yard (community space), an open-air grassy enclosure with a small stage and a smattering of vendors outside. It was hot, even in the shade, and I waited 90minutes before they kicked off 3 hours of scholarly, mostly boring presentations to the 20-30 of us wilting in the audience. Some little girls climbed around me, grabbing at my sunglasses, before a stern auntie sent them off with stern admonishments about bathing and returning presentable for the event. I cooled off: first with a fiery, natural ginger-beer, then with a fresh and refreshing coconut (though I did commit the faux pas of not opening the coconut and using its shell to scrape out the meat inside...I gotta learn the trick to that). In one corner, a large, 60-ish, barefoot man sat draped in African robes, earthy rings and bracelets, and a frown. Elsewhere, a spry grandmother type wore hemp clothing and seed-pod rattles as anklets. But then, too, there was a small group with iPads and smart phones, there to promote their Maroon comic book for children, based on the various spirits and myths that inhabit Jamaica's natural world (see below**).
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Mau Mau G
(from Google, I couldn't get a photo) |
Finally, blessedly, the sun went down, and Colonel Frank Lumsden used the abeng to call the village elders back to the yard as a panel took the stage for the reasoning. It turns out that the shoeless man was the famous, barefoot dub poet Mutabaruka, there to represent the rastafarian point of view. The grandma was Mau Mau G, a Maroon matriarchal figure. As far as I can tell, there are some frictions between Rasta and Maroon (e.g. a 1740 treaty guaranteeing independence for the Maroons from the British also stipulated that they become trackers of newly escaped slaves). But they find common ground in their rejection of colonial oppression and the sins of modernity, and this reasoning was a forum for that. Muta spoke powerfully, his oration delivered with barely contained fury, pointing out today's moral bankruptcy and advocating for self-reliance and African identity (see below ***). Mau Mau G also spoke of self-reliance, she lives without electricity, using the natural world around her for food, clothing and medicine, living like a Maroon matriarch would have long ago. A jumpy Rasta posed a question: how to reconcile the Maroon pantheon of nature spirits with the rastafarian deification of the onetime emperor of Ethiopia, "the one true Jah, the Lion, Heile Selassie"? But the panel refused to be drawn into a theological argument, turning the focus back to the practical need for a strong, proud self-identity, skeptical of the white man.
Seems reasonable.
* 'Maroon' is a general term, referring to any number of communities (mostly in the Caribbean, I believe) that trace their heritage to enslaved African peoples who escaped into the bush and banded together with indigenous peoples and other escapees. Shortly after Columbus, Jamaican Maroons confounded the Spanish, then the British, successfully creating a fiercely independent culture that has survived for centuries. The way Jamaicans think about the their Maroon history is nuanced, not immediately graspable by an outsider. I've only begun to read, both about Jamaican Maroons and various others (Belize, Trinidad, Cuba, Haiti, 60,000 in Suriname and French Guiana, the kings of the "Mosquito Coast", Black Seminoles in Florida, etc. etc.). It is seriously interesting.
** http://www.leagueofthemaroons.com/ A large host of West African nature spirits came over with the slave trade and, like the Maroons, found a way to survive in the Jamaican wilds. But it was a new land and the African spirits could not represent it all, so new spirits were invented/discovered, creating a new, Africa-Jamaica hybrid mythology unique to the island. The kids in the comic book deal with the spirits using iconic Maroon objects (like the abeng/cow horn). Not all Jamaicans are as enamored of this cultural history, disliking its paganism, some even disliking its Africanism, and the idea of getting the book in front of children is complicated.
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Rasta calabash bag a carver sold
to us along with a bone pendant
for Carter. |
*** It is probably not necessary to point out that true Rastas are serious about their beliefs and African identity...very different from the hippy fashion version in the U.S. that's preoccupied with dreadlocks, reggae and ganga. In Jamaica, there are various rastafarian groups, from orthodox to almost secular, it seems. The common themes are the evils of Babylon (Euro-American imperial culture) and the spiritual (or literal) return to the Africa they were ripped from centuries ago. Like the Maroons, Rastas have not always been accepted by Jamaicans. Until the 1970s, they were viewed by most as druggie malcontents and it was reggae and black pride that began to turn that perception around. Some Rasta are vegan, some wear only natural fiber, their men recognizable with dreads often piled high into cantilevered hats. But they remain a minority in Jamaica; on weekends they are far outnumbered on the roads by church ladies wearing prim hats. Jamaica has, per capita, more churches than any other country. So here, a Rasta continues to be somewhat a revolutionary.
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