Editorial Page Continued
Continued from Editorial Page.
Dangriga, Belize.- 1983
There was a cold east wind last night. The surf roared. In the moonlight iridescent green waves held and broke, then swept off to the south in furious white lines of foam. But now it is late morning. The sun is shining. Children in blue uniforms amble lazily in two’s and threes down the dusty potholed street. The tiny houses are painted in garish yellows and greens. Two boys lead small bay horses back from a swim in the ocean.
The giant California nurse I had met up north off the coast on that little island had made mention of this place. We had been in her room. We were listening to a locally made tape she had bought off of some Rasta guy in Belize City while she nursed me back from some undone Cerviche’. I was mostly cured by then, but she wanted to make sure. She sat up on her side of the bed causing it to contemplate collapse and me to gravitate in her direction. She frowned and massaged my neck.
“Think healthy thoughts,” she said.
We had already thought healthy thoughts.
She seemed annoyed. She punched a button on the player and another song thumped out of it. Nice.
“I think I’ll go down and find that place,” I said.
I go in search of breakfast. I see a small crowd. A man has caught a large fish. Blood leaks from the fish onto the short pier that sticks out into the river. Flies buzz. Some black ladies in bright dresses haggle and laugh and point at the fish. They finally nod. He chops the fish into pieces with his machete, wraps the pieces in old newspaper and collects some crumpled bills and a little change. He grins at me, showing the teeth he has left. He tosses the fish offal into the river and washes down the pier with a bucket of water. He rolls and lights a cigarette and we talk of the fishing. His cousin has a café’. We walk there. After a while his cousin serves me a huge mug of delicious coffee, fry bread, with Mennonite preserves made just down the road, some sausages of an unknown provenance, but nice and hot, and some scrambled eggs. The sun is warm.
Evening. No fishing today. Families gather on porches of the faded little houses. I fall asleep and am awakened later by the thumping of a drum. It’s not hard to hear. The whole town can hear it. It’s an irritating sound.
“It’s a wedding,” the proprietor says. “Or something,” he adds, as if to imply that it doesn’t take much for the band to play here.
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In a while I head there. A mélange of black people has gathered in a building and in the street. There is a bandstand. I’m the only white person. People ignore me. No one is on the stage when I get there. In a while a young man picks up an electric guitar and begins playing a riff of some sort. He plays the same notes, varying the tempo and emphasis. A few people dance. In a while another band member ambles slowly up, picks up some other electric instrument and starts playing…Some drums kick in. This continues, with the others joining. In a while they seem to agree on what song they are playing and one of them begins singing. The music is easy to dance to, long guitar riffs, plenty of drums. I have no idea what the songs are. I recognize some words. Not that many. It doesn’t seem to matter. Syncopated rhythms. The air heats up. People hoot and holler. It is loud… On the street two woman sell plates of the staple of central America, chicken and rice. The food is dipped out of two huge pots. It’s two dollars a plate. It’s good. I scarf the food and listen. The paper plates are tossed in a large bucket. A scrawny yellowish dog lurks. The smell of marijuana wafts. The band plays on for twenty minutes. Same tune.
Years later. I am twenty miles off of the coast on another Island where for a few hundred you can go and live in a palm frond hut for a week. The fishing and diving are pretty good there and if you don’t mind a few sand flies the housing is cheap. A drunken Englishman and I get into a argument about Hemingway. He had just gotten there so he could be excused for being drunk. Actually you don’t need an excuse to be drunk there.
“Hemingway didn’t know about bull fighting,” he said, trying hard to focus on the pretty blue green sea in front of us. “You have to be Spanish to really understand bull fighting. You have to be from there to write about it.
“You mean that one has to be British to write about say…. British cuisine?” I asked.
He stared at me… “I go bed now…,” he mumbled.
It is said that the Garifuna people originated from West African slaves who were shipwrecked off of the Island of St. Vincent in about 1635 and later in 1675. They intermarried and became what is known as “black Caribs”. Others came from slave islands like Jamaica. Somewhere around 1800 the British shipped some of these people to Belize. In 1802 the city of Barranco was established, probably the first Garifuna community in Belize. In about 1823, several hundred Garifuna settled in what is now Dangriga. These people were the remnants of thousands. They weren’t the wheat separated from the chaff. They were what was left of the wheat. They are a very black, very tough and very smart people. As opposed to American slaves, who were beaten out of their origins, these people brought their African culture along mostly intact. In some respects it was the perfect place for them. They intermarried. They danced their dances and told the old stories, their history being been, until modern times, largely oral.
Garifuna culture and their West African music have spread literally around the Caribbean. In sound it ranges from strictly folk African call-and-response tunes (think of the families with their colorful costumes), to beautiful syncopated jazz-like electric music with west African singing - sounding like world music. Punta rock, a relatively recent derivative, began with some impatient and raucous young people, in Dangriga in the late 70’s.
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Many of the Garifunas had traveled to the States. They had listened to all kinds of music. Looking for a music more tuned to their energies they formed a band. In Dangriga at that time there was little or no television or internet. They began playing street dances; locally called roadblocks. Gradually the local bands found their way to the clubs of Belize City. In the 80’s Tourism increased and the internet came. Someone noticed. A lot of people noticed. World music noticed.
Truth be told, I never did find Punta Rock music. Oh I have known the place for sure. I have met some of the people, and heard the music too. But that Britt on the Island was right, one can’t really know it. I’m not a Belizean and you really have to be one to understand it all.
But of course that isn’t really the point. When I think of Belize I always see myself there for the first time. It is afternoon. I am wading the flats, standing in the middle of a great blue-green ocean. It is hot and it is the first time I’ve been here. The horizon traces a huge circle enclosing only me, our little boat and my guide off in the distance. I can’t believe it. I am really here. I’d dreamed of this, of getting to places like this.
Mike..on the beach.
In the eighties the tourists came. That’s a good thing. Belize is a poor country and needs a healthy tourism business. First it was a trickle. Then a flood. People with money. “Hungry eyed” people I called them. I was there too, off and on. The locals I knew are mostly still there. But the expats who used to meet at the Lagoon Saloon every afternoon down at Placencia are gone. California Mike has gone west. I talked to his wife. The heart thing.
I still go back . The last time I was there I was in a beat-up cab in Dangriga heading for the airport. The cabbie is short, very black and enterprising. The cab stereo was blaring.
I point at it.
“Nice,” I say.
“My cousin,” the cabbie says. “They’ve got a band. Punta? You like Punta?” He examines me out of the corner of his eye.
I mention I was here in the eighties.
“You were?” He seems impressed and turns to look at me. It’s an act. His taxi zooms straight toward a tiny girl in a blue uniform straggling reluctantly toward school. He honks. The tiny girl lazily pirouettes to see who it is, one hand held straight up, the other arm hooking a little pack. Save that, she doesn’t move at all. He misses her by a couple of feet.
“I love tourists! Man we party at the clubs! You want land? I can get it. Here take my email address.”
I take it. You can never tell.
At the airport at Belize City I’m sitting across from a young bedraggled backpacker. The tourist patina has worn off of him. He feels himself a local. We are waiting for a flight to Houston. We visit a little and I lament paying a hundred a night US for a hotel room in the casino.
“That place isn’t Belize,” he scoffs. “That isn’t the real Belize.”
I think of things to say, but then I don’t. “It isn’t?”
He shakes his head emphatically. “No, no, the real Belize is out there.” He waves vaguely toward the highlands or perhaps the rest of the country. “That’s the real Belize. You have to go there to find it.”
I nod. “You’re right… Maybe I will sometime,” I say.
Our flight number is called.
Mike Felix's book The Weather Witch is available at the Book Exchange in Grand Rapids and is also available on Amazon. He has two more books coming out, hopefully in the next year .. or two.
2005, Hollywood & Norm Inc.