Kumina and Glistening Waters

A Night of Kumina

One of the very interesting things about Jamaica is that many distinct traditions live on, often parish by parish. The scrubby, windward parish of St. Thomas, is known for kumina, a culture of spirits and ancestors as brought over 150 years ago by indentured workers from the Congo region.  I felt lucky that a Peace Corps volunteer invited me up for a night of kumina, all to honor the passing of a founder of a local organic cooperative. Under a canopy of stars, with flashes of lightning off in the hills, the drumming and dancing lasted all night. Or so they tell me. It's not like I can stay up all night any more. 

As with much of Jamaica, once you turn off the coast road, things quickly get rural as you climb up the winding, single-lane roads. This time I was doing it in the dark, my headlights illuminating the foliage around the road like I was in a tunnel. When I parked, I could only hear a faint murmur of drums and walked in inky darkness until I emerged into a clearing strung with blue and white ribbon (considered positive kumina colors) and lit by several candles on the ground, as well as a bright floodlight that one man held, it seemed, for most of the night.

Looking for Julia, the PC volunteer, I greeted some of the 20 or 30 people there in the shadows. This cooperative is no stranger to gringos, so I only felt somewhat the outsider. When I found Julia, I was introduced to the man who had made the drums. Kumina rituals like this are long nights of drumming and dancing and rum-drinking in order to channel the spirit world. The drums are very specific, played with the hands and adjusted by the feet, with a low-pitched drum considered the male (kbandu) and a higher-pitched drum considered female (kyas). A player also sits behind and uses sticks (katta tick) to beat a clicking rhythm on the wooden back-end of the drum. People lean in around the drummers, singing and chanting in a call-and-response style, sometimes in a kumina language, sometimes in English. The group seems to decide what to sing on the fly, and I saw them argue a couple times about it during the interludes. Dancers turn circles around the drumming group, shuffling their bare feet because contact with the earth is crucial.

Rum is a large part of the ritual, ceremonial and celebrational, with the drummers calling out for more in between sets. At one point, people began setting rum afire and dancing through it (which is much less dangerous than it sounds). I shared some of my Dominican mamajuana rum, sipping and standing to the outside with the other watchers or people taking a rest. Every now and then we would have to dodge a wild dancer, though I did not escape getting doused by flying rum shaken out over our heads. We were joined in the outer ring by a handful of local teenage girls, indulgent of the proceedings, but not above a wry comment or two, or even, it seems, a game of Clash Of Clans on her phone.

In kumina, the spirits are always close and, on nights like this, they will possess people (myal). Sure enough, we had some folks go into myal, toppling onto the drums, spinning violently, rolling in the brush. When this happened, there was always someone who acted as minder, keeping the possessed from hurting themselves, even tying a sash around them to hold on to. One lady began rubbing peoples arms with some liquid. At another point, the drum circle called out for a sacrifice, specifically wanting the sacrifice of a troublesome rooster I am here calling Frank. He escaped 2 weeks prior, had been molesting the hens, and seemed uncatchable. Being uncatchable spared him, of course, and no other candidates were volunteered for sacrifice.

In all honesty, this was probably kumina-light. The myal possessions could just as easily been a kind of personal rapture. But out there under the stars, with the rum and candle light, even a cynic like me figures it's all as real as anything else in this world. The drum-maker told me that there are dark kumina ceremonies ("...if you see them wearing red and black, walk away, walk away..."), and I don't doubt that farther back in the bush, the possessions take on more and more powerful qualities. At one point, a lady in myal danced for over 15 minutes with a bottle balanced on her head. That may or may not be possession, but it's certainly a level of focus that's pretty strong.

I was done by 1am, pitiful considering that when I returned at 8am, there were some who had not yet been to sleep. In daylight, I could see that the cooperative is a friendly cluster of buildings on a ridge with views to the ocean in the distance, with a little school room and composting. They fed me a breakfast of salted sprats and plantain, supplemented by a local farmer who came by with a bucket of fresh breadfruit.

A Night at Glistening Waters

You may already know about the nighttime phenomenon in which ocean plankton will sometimes, when jostled, light up like stars. Twice, as a California teen, I had a chance to enjoy the effect. One time it was the glittering wake behind a sailboat I was on, and another time it was during a dive, during which every wave of my neoprene hand was glittery magic.

It is notoriously hard to photgraph the effect,
I had to copy this photo from Google.

But neither compare to the show put on by a mangrove cove off of Falmouth, Jamaica. We went out on to the dark bay in a 20-seater wooden boat. Almost immediately we were in it, our wake didn't simply sparkle, it lit up as if by floodlight. The glow is produced by dinoflagellates, a neon green like fireflies make, and you see it wherever the water is disturbed. Each time our boat spooked a fish, a bright green slash would would streak away. Jennifer, Carter, and I slipped into the black water along with several others, splashing, laughing, and experimenting with our own luminescence. We felt like aqua sorcerers, summoning light at will, floating on our backs and waving our limbs to create illuminated snow-angels. Carter and the kids were giddy, hollering, panicking, happy. The water in the bay is shallow, with several feet of gelatinous silt. I decided to stand in it and it was so fine that I sank almost to my knees. There, weirdly planted in the muck like a mangrove, I lifted Carter up out of the water and I swear it was like my boy was made entirely out of stars. I know how dopey that sounds, but that's what it was like.

Oracabessa; Hawksbill Turtles on Gibraltar Beach

Carter and a hatchling from the nest.

We took it as a good sign that within minutes of arriving and checking out the balcony view, a ray jumped 4ft into the air to impress a potential mate. Gibraltar Beach is a stretch of relatively secluded beach, on the shore of the Oracabessa Fish Sanctuary. Most significantly, the beach is one of the few nesting spots for the critically endangered hawksbill sea turtle. Our host, a "retired" British expat named Mel Tennant, has become locally famous as the turtle man. He lives on the beach in a house that looks from the outside like a construction ruin, but actually has a couple of small units that he rents out to visitors like us.
Over the last 12 years, Mel has become the hawksbill advocate, guard and nanny. He points proudly to the ever-increasing success rate (measured by percentage of eggs that hatch and return to the sea successfully, and the increasing numbers of mothers coming in to lay a nest). This improvement is very hands-on; while we were there, Mel literally dug up a nest from a site where the cliff drainage kills the eggs and reburied it elsewhere. The hawksbill, it seems, is so critically endangered that we do not have the luxury of "letting nature be nature".

The first hatchlings out of the nest.

A certain amount of this success is by way of good PR. First and foremost, the Fish Sanctuary and the local fisherman's cooperative have achieved the kind of understanding so rare in these kind of environmental negotiations. The fishing yields get better every year just outside the Sanctuary buoys, and word is spreading along the coast. Now, the locals are also guardians of the turtles, and "there hasn't been a turtle-kill in 5 years".  Mel takes mixed groups like ours on the beach all the time, letting them experience the magic of a hatched nest making its way to the sea. We're mostly spectators, but the group helps by quickly taking the unearthed hatchlings and rinsing them in the sea, returning them to the top of the beach (because the journey to the water is critical, it's when they "set their internal GPS" so they can return in 3-5 years to mate and lay), and then guarding them on their strenuous trek to the water, watching out for non-native mongoose and local herons.

The strenuous trek to the sea.

Rinsed & ready!

Leaders of the pack.

After we had rinsed a couple of baby turtles, marveling at their strong little flippers, we put them back in a clean bucket where they promptly began to scrabble towards the sea. Jennifer was given the honor of tipping the bucket; once out, the hatchlings wriggle energetically, using their strong little flippers to propel themselves seaward. We stepped carefully, laughing because sometimes a turtle would crawl right over our foot. We were absolutely prohibited from helping them in any way, which gets difficult to stomach as the the stragglers seem to tire and get hung up along the way. But they all made it, the last one was cheered just as the first one had been. Now, 36 hours later, the current has taken them to the western tip of Jamaica on their way to Cuba before they will swing around into the Atlantic for a multi-year tour of Spain then Africa and back.

Late that night, Mel woke us to see a mother hawksbill laying her nest. We had missed her arrival and 90 minutes of digging and laying, but did get to see her finish up and head back to the water. She was a tagged returnee, Mel had her on record from a few years prior, and about the size of a large steamer trunk. Photos are not allowed (other than when they are actually laying because, Mel says, they go into a kind of non-responsive trance; which is why that is also the moment to staple the tag onto mothers not yet tagged).

 

The Oracabessa Foundation and Fish Sanctuary

Gibraltar Beach (from the balcony of Mel's place)

The Fish Sanctuary was started by a couple of Peace Corps volunteers, with funding by Chris Blackwell of Island Records fame and owner of the Golden Eye hotel out on the point. In addition to enforcing a no-fishing zone, the Foundation plants coral. We met with the administrator (also a former Peace Corps volunteer that's stayed on in Jamaica) while the fisherman on the little dock were cleaning their catch and building large chicken-wire traps. Then Sanctuary wardens took us out to the reef where we snorkeled, watched their two divers tending to the coral, and enjoyed sightings of a very large snapper, a great school of blue tang, parrot fish, and many others of the usual reef suspects. Diving in Jamaica is not the same quality as some other spots in the Caribbean, but the Foundation hopes that with improved coral reefs will come more eco-tourism. And they are not the only ones, along the coast many fishing cooperatives and hotels are asking for the same to be done in their waters. With luck, the Oracabessa model will be expandable. Their people certainly are working towards that. (Here's their website with a video about the Sanctuary: http://www.oracabessafishsanctuary.org/)

Oh, and if you want to watch  our family video of the turtle release:

Rastas and Maroons, a Reasoning in Charles Town

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.

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.

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**).

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.

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.