Jamaica, in 3 fires.
By M. Shane Aquârt. Shane is an artist, and sometimes writer who is from, and lives in the Caribbean. This is a letter from the road.
The Nyabinghi drummers were in a semi circle around the fire.
A Palladian house on a hill, in the hills; the night was cool: a goodbye dinner was happening on the front lawn by the sundial, next to a bed that was on a swing, and between two sculpted Indian Almond trees.
The baandu, the bass drum, with its deep voice, like a pulse, played as the other drums filled the middle silence - the funde and the kete were beating out an adulterated syncopation, eh, that is the 3rd beat was very evident on the the bass, but pronounced softly instead of hard: and Chinna danced.
The drums tell stories, as do the chants …
Nearest us, on the left, 2 grey-haired rastas - his locks were salt and little pepper, hers more grey – it was hard to tell in the dark how old they were, but I imagined well up in their 70’s - sat, part of the clan, but not of the band. Next to them, on their left, a Japanese son and his father, who were visiting musicians; rastas or dreads I wasn’t sure, because I never asked if they were religious or just musicians; the son was stoned till he could barely function; the father hit the chalice regularly, like an old hand and seemed unfazed by all the ritual weed he was consuming; beyond them in the circle, the band, 6 players.
There were 17 of us on the other side of the fire in other semi circles, some close in, some of us on the wall above, looking down at the fire and the drummers in the natural amphitheatre made by a notch in the hillside.
The firmament above was a well lit deep cobalt, full, full of stars; and low in the sky, a penumbra of soft light - it was as if, although the sun had long set, it was still refracting its light, through some mystery unknown to me, around the sphere of night and just barely still illuminating the dark.
I spoke to R, in a whisper, about things other than the drums.
The fire kicked off sparks to join the stars filling the sky.
“and the flame of the fire, rising so straight into the quiet sky, made one think of earlier worshippers … when the [wood] was but red embers, Najla took my hand and made me leap thrice across them, wishing a wish, as, no doubt, Babylonian maidens had done to the honour of their gods.” Freya Stark Baghdad sketches
Fire enthralls, eh, it is visceral, mesmerizing, sensual, it calls to you in the same way as does its opposite, the void.
Out there, to the north and east, a little to my left, I think - while I’m sitting on that old, cut stone wall, listening to the drummers - there’s a thing called the Duanvale fault zone; it runs, in an almost straight line, across the top of Jamaica, and I guess the center of it runs through a village called Duanvale: we were literally on it; a geological, tectonic, fault line: it is one of those things that shift and move and crash together to create earthquakes – seismic shifts.
The faultline creates an escarpment between the coast and the cockpit country which is to the south.
The cockpit country is a vast (222 sq kilometers) and unique white limestone plateau with a ‘typical karst topography with innumerable conical and hemispherical hills covered with dense scrubby trees, rising hundreds of feet above depressions and sinkholes with sharp, precipitous sides—the cockpits…’ [britannia]. Time and water have worn heavily wooded hillocks into the landscape, between which are ‘cockpits’ of arable soil.
It is difficult terrain to traverse and it was here that the first ‘Maroons’ retreated from the British when they took the island from the Spanish, in 1640 odd and from where the Maroons, added to over the years by escaped slaves, were never defeated … it is called ‘the land of look behind’ - There are a few ways through, a couple of old, historical trails cross further west; the Troy Trail, and the Quick Step Trail and I know a little-travelled rough road that goes through farm land and on out to Maroon Town and from there to the plains of St Elizabeth.
Sitting where we were, at the top of the escarpment, at the very beginnings of the cockpit country, listening to the drums, there on that tectonic faultline between the Enrique and the Walton zones, we were literally in as likely a place as any for our earth to move, to change its and our trajectory into something completely different.
I don’t know if that happened, the earth did not move in that kind of way, but how am I to know if, in that moment, the drums, the fire, the night, the people, didn’t alter some course of life whose outcome will be felt eventually …
“I also know that a butterfly can flutter its wings over China and cause a hurricane in the Caribbean. I believe it. They can calculate the odds.” Jack Weil, played by Robert Redford, in the movie Havana
And I would take those old trails through the cockpit country in my dreams that night.
I must trod home to that land
I must trod home to that land
For there is love in that land
Joy and happiness in that land
I must trod home to that land where I am from [Nyabinghi chant]
And wake to INXS playing ‘Don’t Change’.
We had been on that hilltop, staying, scattered between three Georgian-old, cut stone houses on a farm which I had visited often: I would write the following poem in another stone house, just down the bottom of the hill, but above the river, on this same farm, a few months earlier.
“There is, at this very moment,
as I sit in the shade of a mango tree watching dogs snooze,
both the cacophany of beauty and the noise of haste …
the din of progress, interpolated
between the whisper and the hush of
a visible, but silent, history ...”
The emotions had started a few days before, in a place just off at the western edge of the cockpits: P and I had gone up into the hills of eastern Westmoreland for dinner, skirting the edge of that fortress of rough hillock and impregnable bush, to another house; a house that I have loved for a long time, and in which I had spent a lot of time, on a farm near a village, with its police station sitting on the hill, so you know it's time to turn left.
I had, as we hung out before dinner, imagined two other friends, whom I knew would enjoy the space, there; I imagined them sitting in the red sofa reading books from the bookcase, perhaps the one about climbing Everest, and listening to music.
When I was in my late-late teens C, 6 years older than me, and close, had married a girl from this farm, and they used to live in the 'cottage', which is what is best described as a 19th century, English cut stone colonial bungalow, sandwiched between two cater-corner spanish era towers, from the late 1500’s, that had used to make up part of an old fort.
And it is sandwiched, eh, because the roof lines peter out into the stone work of the the two square towers as if it were jammed in there instead of built in – the lines are not uniform.
According to a map from the National Library of Jamaica, the original house had been burnt in the Christmas slave rebellion, the Sam Sharpe rebellion, before the current family ever owned the land – along with more than 100 other houses, and ‘works’ across the West of the island - for 5 weeks at the end of 1831, the old world order was burnt, fires and people raged; at the end the rebellion was quelled, with help from Maroon regiments, but the world had changed; imperfectly, eh, incompletely, yes, and out of fear, and not out of honour, but it had changed.
That ‘girl’s’ brother was the current occupant of the house.
We ate chicken for dinner.
They drank some wine, and I had an Appleton rum on ice: the rum factory was about 20 miles, as the crow flies, out the window, to my right, past the massey-fergueson outside the stone wall, on the south-western edge of the cockpit country in:
“a Terroir like nowhere else on earth, where the limestone karst gives birth to springs so blue; a place where the morning sunshine and the afternoon rain bless the rich red dirt so that it gives rise to endless fields of sugar cane …” [Appleton ‘from cane to cup’ advert].
A spider, with its long legs, high-stepped across the side-board, as if its wood were burning coals.
The ‘cottage’ sits in the middle of a bucolic fortress of 1000 acres, and so when the lights are out the night is truly dark, yeah - the land is only moderately and ethically farmed, and fairly 'unmanicured', and as such it is really alive; under an umbrella of stars the whistling frogs and the crickets were trying to converse in different tongues, fireflies were pulsing to send little signals of light telling of kinship, and love to one another.
As we drove away from the house after dinner, between a wood on one side, and a pond on the other, on the road between two pastures, away from it all, we stopped and turned off the lights and the engine, and sat, music playing on the radio; I held her hand, and we watched the fireflies
... Light pollution and agricultural chemicals have done for fireflies all around the world and so seeing them is more rare these days, and lovely.
Leaving the woods, on the rough rock worn road out of the farm, we locked the gate behind us - earlier, when we had been driving up through the Town to the farm, which comes right to the edge of the village, there'd been a big football match on, lots of spectators; and now leaving, as we neared the cross roads – left to the village centre and the main road - the verges, rough and undulating, like little miniature hills, cleaned and cleared, were lined, on both sides of the road, in all three directions from the cross-roads, for 100 feet, with candles, all flickering … all this flavescence converging to a cathedral like aggregation, just below the cross roads near the football pitch, in a glorious-lovely ‘concupiscent’ fulgence of perhaps 300 or more candles in various clumps on both sides of the road, accompanied by the bass pump of music, marking the after-party ... it was beautiful.
We rolled through and as we did, 4 men, using an overturned old oil drum as a high-top table, watched us, drinks half-way to their mouths; and it all seemed to slow down, as if it were a poignant moment in a film.
And so sitting on the picnic table, drinking a coffee, beneath the shade of that mango tree, watching ‘Mr Brown’ and the other dogs sleep, a few days later, the emotion of that night, and the days that followed, had led me to write to the friends whom I had imagined on the red sofa at the cottage, and included in the message to them was that poem, and the story of the firelight of a gazillion candles, lit to the saints of football and dancehall, at a cathedral of a cross-roads in the hills, somewhere between heaven and earth – wish you were here etc etc.
The lakes used to come up in the empty green fields when it rained, and the fireflies would come out en-masse; they seemed to light our way through the very dark – but I haven't taken that road in over 30 years; it had gotten so broken, and then finally I no longer had a reason to go … my grandmother had left the house, and the farm, and it fell into decay, was sold, and then the house itself, finally fell down.
But on chill winter evenings we would arrive from Kingston, up the smooth washed stone drive, under the great poincianas, and there would be a fire in the hearth and the two old people would be sitting - in matching chairs, either side of the fire, at one end of the long, long living room, in that old, old, robin’s egg blue house, on the top of the hill, overlooking the pastures of dairy cows - drinking gins.
And it always felt good to arrive there.
Identity-knowledge; all of what’s rolling around in language and memory, and language’s ability to express emotion almost visually — You know, I could show you photographs of what that first turn off from the Mount Zion cross road, just past the big Silk Cottonwood tree, that must have been as old as the dirt, it’s canopy spreading out over 100 feet in any direction, looked like … and others of the views along the slow decent into the valley; first through the then hamlet of Clapham, where village children used to like to play with my hair, if we stopped at the shop, and along past the gateposts to an old house that had still been there when my mother was young, and where W’s grandparents had lived; past where the mad man, with his dreadlocked hair, and the bent fingers of his deformed hand, lived in the cave by the side of the road; of the roughness of the road, on the last steep hill, down, with uncle T’s house on the hill on the left – it’s still there, but a relic for duppies - and how that last hill looked to me from the back seat of a Morris Marina.
And those photographs might show you an interpretation of the light and colour of an instance, but they wouldn’t be emotive descriptions of how my excitement would build, they would contain none of the perspicacity of my history with that road, no emotional context.
But, if I tell you the story with my own particular phonology and my peculiar syntax, with my distinct vocabulary, and the waving and weaving of my hands; if I show you my teeth, and if I move, and sway, look to the sky, if I dance, then, then I can let you in on the true truth of things.
How bright the green leeks become when you cook them, eh; the smell of the butter and the onion, the garlic, as you stir – alchemy - how the deep yellow of a scotch bonnet pepper, cut up into big chunks, leaps out in a contrast with their green. How the pepper smells; fruity but sharp, smokey, distinct and warm, redolent, underlying vibe of bath soap, so floral; your eyes tang a bit, your mouth waters … and how the sound of Sunday Morning Coming Down, sung by Ernie Smith, playing while I cook, reminds me of both my mother and grandmother … and of how that house used to feel on a cool December night with the fire lit in the hearth.
“What is the story that rain tells of it falling on rock” Buddhist Koan
Peace and Love
Talking about our problems is one of our [society’s] greatest addictions. Break the habit. Talk about your joys. Rita Schiano (quoted by Nicki DeLisser, Jamaican)