During National Hispanic Heritage Month and on the day when many of us now honor indigenous people instead of Christopher Columbus, too often the story of Afro-Indigenous people is forgotten or overlooked.
I’ve had several phone conversations with Janel Martinez in recent months. She is the founder and creator of “Ain’t I Latina,” a blog she describes as “an online destination created by an Afro-Latina for Afro-Latinas. Inspired by the lack of representation in mainstream media, as well as Spanish-language media.” When I met her via the phone, I remarked on that fact that she is Garifuna, She seemed very pleasantly surprised at my noticing. I went on to tell her that when teaching a course on Women of the Caribbean, I made sure my students learned about Garifuna culture and the central role played by women within it.
One thing always struck me in those classes. Though more than one-half of the students enrolled in the class were of either Caribbean birth or ancestry, none had even heard of Garifuna. Many of those students at SUNY New Paltz grew up in the Bronx, yet they were completely unaware of the sizeable Garifuna community there.
The history of resistance known as the Black Carib Wars may be one of the reasons we find the Kalinago/Garinagu people missing from our textbooks. I can’t remember a mention of maroons here or in the Caribbean fighting back during my high school days, and it wasn’t brought up in college, either. It wasn’t until I was in graduate school, focusing on the anthropology of the Caribbean, that my eyes were opened.
In The Black Carib Wars, author Christopher Taylor offers the fullest, most thoroughly researched history of the Garifuna people of St. Vincent, and their uneasy conflicts and alliances with Great Britain and France. The Garifuna--whose descendants were native Carib Indians, Arawaks and West African slaves brought to the Caribbean--were free citizens of St. Vincent. Beginning in the mid-1700s, they clashed with a number of colonial powers who claimed ownership of the island and its people. Upon the Garifuna's eventual defeat by the British in 1796, the people were dispersed to Central America. Today, roughly 600,000 descendants of the Garifuna live in Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, Nicaragua, the United States, and Canada.
The Garifuna--called "Black Caribs" by the British to distinguish them from other groups of unintegrated Caribs--speak a language and live a culture that directly descends from natives of the Caribbean at the time of Columbus. Thus, the Garifuna heritage is one of the oldest and strongest links historians have to the region before European colonialism.
The French, the first white people to live on St Vincent, attempted to subdue the Black Caribs but eventually developed an alliance with them. When the Treaty of Paris ostensibly handed St. Vincent to the British crown in 1763, the British clashed with the Black Caribs but, like the French, eventually formed another treaty. This cycle of attempted colonialism of St. Vincent by France and England alternately would continue for three decades. After repeated conflict and desperate measures by the European powers, the Garifuna were forced to surrender.
In March 1797 the last survivors were loaded on to British ships and deported to the island of Roatán hundreds of miles away in the bay of Honduras. A little over 2,000 men, women and children were all that were left--perhaps a fifth of the Black Carib population of just two years earlier. It was a cataclysm. But the Black Caribs--the Garifuna in their own language--survived and their descendants number in the hundreds of thousands.
Taylor is not an anthropologist. He’s a journalist for The Guardian, and he recounts how he happened to write the book in this interview with Garifuna filmmaker Teofilo Colon Jr.:
1) You explain in your book, that your interest in the the story of the Garifuna people began about 20 years ago in Nicaragua, while watching a baseball match. Is that where you first heard of the Garifuna people? If so, what were your initial impressions or thoughts upon hearing about the Garifuna people?
Yes, I first heard about the Garifuna in the context of Nicaragua. TheAtlantic Coast of Nicaragua is a fascinating place, home to a variety of ethnic groups but the Garifuna people seemed to have the most unusual story, although I picked up only the barest outline. As I heard it back then, the Garifuna were Africans who had been shipwrecked on the island of St Vincent, had some time later been on the wrong side in a war between the British and the French and had as a result been exiled to Central America. I think what struck me most about the story was the apparent possibility of being able to trace an unbroken history back to the moment of arrival in the Americas – something that the nature of slavery makes very difficult for most people of African descent. Naturally,when I finally got around to researching the subject the story got a lot more complicated.
2) You also explain that upon listening to an Andy Palacio album many years later after your Nicaragua visit, you began to wonder about the real history behind the music. What compelled you to make the decision to actually proceed and write a book about the history of the Garifuna in St.Vincent?
I was on holiday with my wife and she played me the Andy Palacio & The Garifuna Collective record (Wátina) which we both thought was wonderful. Listening to the songs and hearing the language we got to wondering about the Garifuna story.
Initially I just wanted to be able to buy a book that would tell me the history. I started off by borrowing a copy of Sir William Young’s book (An Account of the Black Charaibs of St Vincent’s) which was written in 1795. From there I sought out any books I could find but none seemed to me to tell the whole story. As I read more I became more fascinated with the subject and after a while I realised that I had discovered details that had never been published before. By the time I went to St Vincent in 2009 I had decided I would write a book. The main motivation was that I wanted to read the story and no one else had written the book I wanted to read. I only set about finding a publisher after I had written it.
Here is a song called “Watina” by Andy Palacio & The Garifuna Collective:
Music video for Andy Palacio and the Garifuna Collective. Directed by Brent Toombs. Belize 2007. Sadly, Andy passed away on January 19, 2008. I am honoured to have had Andy as my friend. He was an amazing artist and a great person. For more on Andy's life and music please visit www.stonetreerecords.com
Members of Bodoma, a Honduran Garifuna group, discuss their music and their culture. The Garifuna are African and Arawak Indian descendants.
I was introduced to Garifuna music via teaching women’s studies, and learning about the work of The Garifuna Women's Project:
Blending the rich vocal textures of Garifuna women with echoes of rock, blues, funk, African, Latin and Caribbean music, Umalali is an entrancing journey into the heart and soul of women whose strength, hard work and perseverance provide the bedrock of their community. Descendents of shipwrecked African slaves who intermarried with the Carib and Arawak Indians of the Caribbean, the Garifuna people live primarily in small towns and villages on the Caribbean coasts of Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua.
Umalali: The Garifuna Women's Project expands on the story of this fascinating community, which is struggling to retain its unique language, music and traditions in the face of globalization. Umalali (which means "voice" in the Garifuna language) began in 1997, when a young Belizean musician and producer named Ivan Duran began traveling to Garifuna villages in search of exceptional female voices. The founder of the Belize-based label Stonetree Records, Duran had noticed that while men were usually in the spotlight, it was the women that were the true caretakers of Garifuna songs, and were often responsible for new compositions that dealt with issues of day-to-day life. "With women, music is more part of their daily lives," explains Duran. "They are the bearers of most of the traditions, they are the ones who teach the Garifuna language to the children while the men are either out to sea all day on their fishing boats or working abroad to earn money to send home to the family."
Duran began by recording women in natural settings: kitchens, living rooms, in the streets or in the Garifuna temples, often putting on tape voices that had never been recorded before. But while Ivan recognized the importance of documenting these songs, his intention was always to create something more. He had in mind a musical journey, one that blended Garifuna traditions with contemporary flavors to capture the soul and spirit of Garifuna women in a way that would translate to the wider world. Says Duran, "The project was always about the stories, about the lives of these women, about capturing the essence of their voices and putting them in a modern context. I was looking for songs that people everywhere could enjoy for their musicality and melodies, not just on a purely intellectual level."
This is a visual preview of a CD of the Umalali project, which will be released soon on the new record label Cumbancha. It focuses on the amazing music of the women of the Garifuna community of Central America.
Switching gears from music to poetry, far too often those of us who are monolingual are locked out of reading, hearing, and appreciating poetry and literature from another culture, unless a good translation is available. With the work of Wingston González there are more obstacles, since he writes in Spanish peppered with Garifuna and Guatemalan slang.
Wingston González (Livingston, Guatemala, 1986) is a textual producer. In addition to poetry, he has worked in the fields of dance, visual arts, music, and artistic action. His published work includes Los magos del crepúsculo [y blues otra vez] (Cultura), CafeínaMC: segunda parte, la fiesta y sus habitantes (Catafixia), CafeínaMC: primera parte, la anunciación de la fiesta (Folia), san juan - la esperanza (Literal; Germinal), Miss muñecas vudu (Germinal), Espuma sobre las piedras (Catafixia; in collaboration with choreography by Alejandra Garavito), traslaciones (Cultura; winner of the 2015 Luis Cardoza y Aragón Mesoamerican poetry prize), ¡Hola Gravedad! (hochroth; tr. by Timo Berger into German), and Nuevo Manual de Procedimientos para una Educación Sentimental 1 (YAXS; with illustrations by Bernabé Arévalo).
No Budu Please by Wingston González:
NO BUDU PLEASE emerges in the voice of "an artificial boy in some sort of plastic prairie," as he zeroes in on desire, spirit, and diversion. A diversion for all those forgotten and on the outskirts, impenetrable. Wingston González has carved out a distinctive way of creating beats with words, a spiritual questioning of godliness, and a space of immersion in a Garifuna history marked by the 1797 expulsion from St. Vincent and subsequent exile to the coast of Central America. One of the most prolific Garifuna writers today, González has built a window into contemporary Black indigeneity in Mesoamerica, but also closed that same window in a sidelong attack on colonialist language and syntax, rewriting Spanish as he goes. Urayoán Noel's translation moves the ludic experimentation with Spanish into an English that also tears at the colonial heart of Occidental imaginings. Both books insist that colonial fantasies are not to be stomached, that there is no easy way in or out of reality or dream, rather a series of glacial contradictions and bloody yearnings.
From a Columbia Journal review by Juliana Clark:
A seminal Guatemalan poet and musician known for his fractured poetic aesthetics, González utilizes the musicality and rhythm of his compositions to bewitch his readers into following him on journeys to examine the immaterial, the spiritual, the periphery. The collection opens with a poem titled “myth of myself,” which begins with a quote from Walt Whitman as its prelude (which is surprising given Whitman’s race politics). The quote states: “And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.” Which coupled with lines describing “an artificial boy” in a “plastic prairie,” lends itself to the construction of this great myth where the external world has the power to transmute the internal selves into destructive forces. This notion is pushed even farther as the landscape of this external world further reveals itself throughout the course of these six poems.
Translator Urayoán Noel reveals himself to be an exemplary translator for this particular text on a personal level, thanks to his Puerto Rican cultural identity, which carries a similar transnational, colonial history and is also characterized by a fraught relationship to the “homeland.” Puerto Ricans, like Garifungu, do not have a true, singular homeland. They are both the products of indigenous, European, and African peoples, which each contain singular cultural traditions and histories. González’s searching for the self and for home is complicated by this racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic mélange, which “more dan bringing me closer to things dribes dem away,” as he writes in the last lines of the final poem “St. Vincent.”
Here is a photo via Twitter:
The video below delves into the Garifuna diaspora:
You can hear a sample of Garifuna spoken language in this this clip:
But this isn’t simply a story of history, music, arts, and culture. The Garifuna are under attack as they try to maintain their communities and heritage. It isn’t easy to find video in English on the grave situation faced by Garifuna. FYI: The following video is from Chinese television.
You may not have heard of the Garifuna people. They’re people with a unique culture who live mostly in coastal Central America. Descendants of runaway African slaves and local indigenous groups, they have their own language, religion and lands. But the Garifuna in Honduras say their land is under siege. Several of their leaders have been killed as they fight to defend it. Private investors and even Honduras' government are now after their land. Correspondent Gerry Hadden has our story.
From a Reuters article titled “Honduran minority fights for a threatened way of life”:
Activist Miriam Miranda said the Vallecito community had become the “heartland of Garifuna resistance” in Honduras, which Global Witness has called the world’s deadliest country for environmental activists.
Miranda, general coordinator of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), said there were persistent threats to the community’s existence. In April, a suspected arson attack almost razed the settlement to the ground.
Vallecito falls within a tract of land earmarked as a Employment and Economic Development Zone, or ZEDE, a state initiative to attract foreign investors to Honduras through the creation of autonomous economic enclaves.
These are predominantly premised on large-scale energy, mining and tourism projects and OFRANEH says they will encompass more than 20 of the 47 Garifuna communities dotted along Honduras’s Caribbean coast.
“Never before have there been so many threats to the cultural subsistence of the Garifuna,” said Miranda.
The Honduran government, in bed with narcos and corporate raiders, has a deep apathy and antipathy towards the Garifuna. “Repeatedly the police have told us that they know these people and they are ‘friends with them,’” Miriam Miranda, a leader in OFRANEH, said of the response to the recent assaults. “Unfortunately, what we see is that there is no political will on the part of the State to protect our projects and our lives. The truth is that they want us to leave.”
Besides the narcos’ illicit trade, the Garifuna’s coastal lands have also been targeted for tourism, a naval base, palm oil plantations and oil and gas extraction — all with government approval. Miriam herself has been detained twice in the last six months by the Honduran National Police, treated like a criminal merely for traveling around her own community’s land. This harassment clearly violates Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’ orders for the government to protect Miriam and allow her to continue her work.
Violent land grabs like these drive migration: cause and effect, push and pull. Back in 2014, Humberto Castillo estimated half the Garifuna population between 12 and 30 years old had left Honduras. As Miriam said, Garifuna “are going to the United States, leaving our land, because they are attacking us here.”
And so the oppression in Honduras and other Garifuna areas causes our Garifuna communities to grow, often completely overlooked in our national discourse around immigration.
I’d like to write more, but will stop here and close with some music from Aurelio Martinez (here’s a link to some excellent background on Garifuna music), and a question: How many of you were taught anything in school about Garifuna?
