Date
of Entry: 3/28/2001
Name: The Garifuna 
The
Garifuna people are a sort of lost world, unique even among
the crazy patchwork of Caribbean cultures and races. At first
glance, they might be confused with the other main Black strain
in Belize, the Creoles...but there are actually major differences.
In fact, of all the ethnic groups in Belize--the Hispanics,
Mayans, British, the Creoles and Garifunas--it is the two
Black groups that are least likely to get along. There differences
are not just racial, and they go all the way back to the slavery
days.
Creoles, the main population in Belize City and Belmopan,
are essentially mulattos--slave blood direct out of Africa
then mixed with the seed of white owners. They speak a colorful
argot based on English, but barely recognizable. Signs advertised
"Dis da fu we chicken", for instance. "Fu we"
corrupted from "for we" and so meaning, "our".
A bar has a sign saying, "Watcha Ya! You no got 18 yeas,
you kaan drink lica ya." A political candidate riled
a local press photographer by saying, "You tek my pictah,
I'm gon come down deah, bax you head." Most foreigners
would think of the Creoles as being like Blacks in Jamaica
in many respects.
The
Garifuna also represent very pure African blood strains, immediately
obvious in their dark, almost purplish skin, and their gleaming
complexions. They also mixed with another race upon arrival
in the New World, but in this case with indigenous peoples,
particularly the fierce, warlike, canoe cannibals called Caribs,
the Indians for which the whole area is named. This group,
which populates much of the southern coast of Belize, including
towns like Dangriga, Placencia, and Hopkins, traces back to
a single arrival, a sort of "Mayflower meets Amistad".
A slave ship was wrecked on the Island of St. Vincent, freeing
its cargo to begin wandering the islands looking for a place
they could eat and live. Predictably, they were not welcomed
with great hospitality in slavery areas, nor in Spanish areas
where the huge, black people--their African wildness sharpened
by years of struggle to survive in the Caribbean--were extremely
threatening. They managed to interbreed with Caribs without
either side getting eaten, and eventually, after a saga that
makes "Exodus" look like a Sunday picnic, ended
up settling in to the area they now live.
The
Garifuna are Coasters, resolutely bound to the sea. They preserve
an African cultural mode that might be the purest in the Americas.
Their language is so obviously African that hearing even one
short phrase spoken is enough to convince a listener that
he is not hearing anything that was ever English, although
you might hear smatterings of Spanish, English or even Maya
dropped into it. Written Garifuna has words like "jrumu".
Their
drumming is very stylized, based around two drums, the treble
"Primero" and bass "Segundo". The drums
are turned from mahogany logs and covered with hide that they
call "reindeer" (or possibly "rain deer",
it's hard to imagine reindeer of the Lapp or Rudolph variety
down here in the jungle) and fishline traps strung across
them give a hint of that buzz that native Africans love to
hear from their instruments. They can be accompanied by maracas
and vocalizing. The beats and vocals are about what you would
expect--complex polyrythms, a driving joyous rhythm, vowel-heavy
warblings that have East Africa written all over them.
The
dancing is extremely simple, mostly consisting of shuffling
in a circle or just bopping around in general. There is a
sort of draggy two-step involved, and improvised arm motion,
but generally it's a dance form that would not be noticed
at a rave, Dead concert, or cumbia salon. Of course, the garifunas
tend to do it a lot better than the foreigners they invite
to dance with them. The hit dance of the evening is the "Mata
Muerte", which acts out a vignette, presumably originating
in satiric acting-out of an actual incident. A girl is walking
on the beach with her fresh-cut fruit on her head and machete
in hand when she sees a corpse washed up on the beach. Or
is it a corpse? She pokes it with her machete to make sure,
but the results are inconclusive. So she bops the dead man
with the machete a little harder, then gives him a major whack.
This is where the "Kill the Dead" name comes from.
Convinced the body is a dead one, she sets down her machete,
wipes her brow, and fans herself with her skirt. That's it.
The
drums race as the band leader enacts the dance, followed by
other Garifunas who have attended. They use a stick instead
of a machete to whack a small stump representing the dead
beachcomber, and their styles range from aggressively masculine
to very coquettish (why is the skirt-fanning always done straddling
the dead man?) to broad comedy. Now the stick is passed to
one of the white tourists watching the show. It's been explained
before that nobody present can refuse to take the stick without
grave insult to the dance, the culture, and everybody else
present. It's probably not a good idea to insult people who
kill the dead. The foreigners rise, one by one, and dance
through the little story, some stiffly, the younger ones getting
daring in their interpretations. Everybody loving it. It's
a dance hit at once, the Locomotion with sex, violence, and
death involved.
After
the Mata Muerte, the floor is opened up and everybody is now
primed to boogie. The drums pour it on, the maraca shaker
is all over the floor, an immensely fat woman warbles vocals
in a complex counterpoint to the musicians. And everybody--black,
white, young, old--gets out there and shakes that thing.
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