Pocomania 
Long Mountain rise,
Lift you’ shoulder, blot the moon,
Black the stars, hide the skies,
Long Mountain, rise, lift you’ shoulder high.
Black of skin and white of gown,
Black of night and candle light
White against the black of trees,
And altar white against the gloom,
Black of mountain high up there,
Long Mountain rise,
Lift you’ shoulder, blot the moon,
Black the stars, black the sky.
Africa among the trees,
Asia with her mysteries,
Weaving white in flowing gown
Black long mountain looking down
Sees the shepherd and his flock
Dance and sing and wisdom mock
Dance and sing and falls away
All the civilized today
Dance and sing and fears let loose
Here the ancient gods that choose
Man for victim, man for hate,
Man for sacrifice to fate.
Hate and fear and madness black
Dance before the altar white.
Comes the circle closer still,
Shepherd weave your pattern old.
Africa among the trees
Asia with her mysteries.
Black of night and white of gown,
White of altar, black of trees,
Swing de circle wide again,
Fall and cry, me sister now.
Let de spirit come again,
Fling away de flesh and bone,
Let the spirit have a home.
Grunting low and in the dark
White of gown and circling dance
Gone today and all control,
Power of the past returns,
Africa among the trees,
Asia with her mysteries.
Black the stars, hide the sky,
Lift you’ shoulders, blot the moon
Long Mountain rise.
Philip Sherlock
Long Mountain is an elongated, oblong-shaped landform that looms over the landscape of Kingston in Jamaica. It borders the capital city on the north-eastern side, but the urban development curves around it at both its ends, as it hovers there always visible from anywhere in the sprawling city as a dark, brooding boundary to the north while the cultural, urban life illuminates the stretch from the foot of the mountain to the sea.
Long Mountain plays a part in the geographical as well as the cultural and demographic landscape of Kingston. It angles itself, slanting from the city’s eastern edge where it bears down, leaving a narrow passageway between itself and Kingston Harbour. At that end it partakes busily in urban economic development while harbouring a garrison community in the downscale, down-market East Kingston. At its other end in the north-east, the city curves around it with a series of upscale upmarket residential areas – Liguanea, Beverley Hills and Mona Heights. Continuing around it there is its most ironic, geographic, demographic and economic paradox. The Hope River, over time, has cut a large valley which actually separates Long Mountain from the massive St Andrew mountains to the north. The river ends up at the extreme end of East Kingston where the mountain stops. Its opposite end where the city curves around it is occupied by the fairly affluent Mona Heights, the intellectual community of the University of the West Indies (UWI), and in the deepest reaches of the Hope River Valley – August Town.
This not so august town shares a border fence with the university. So, in a single step, one can move from a middleclass environment and the hallowed halls of academia straight into a community which is part working class, part garrison, and part agricultural with quite rural credentials. August Town is a community rocked by reggae and dance hall, occasionally by gun shots, where the people once rose up to drive a murderous gangland don out of the area. It is the home of urban proletariat, and deeper in the valley, of villagers eking out an agricultural existence.
August Town is also the former home of the legendary Alexander Bedward. It is here that the greatest link exists between the title of the poem by Sir Philip Sherlock – “Pocomania”, and its main subject, Long Mountain.
“Pocomania” was written circa the early 1960s or late 1950s. The poet, Sir Philip, was the Vice-Chancellor of the UWI at the zenith of his long and distinguished career at the Mona Campus. He served as Director of Extra Mural Studies in the 1950s and as editor of the journal Caribbean Quarterly. He was a folklorist and edited a collection of Jamaican folk tales – Anansi the Spiderman and was also a historian. Born in Jamaica, he was very well known for his keen interest and contribution to the arts. He was appropriately immortalised at UWI when the Creative Arts Centre was named after him. It is now the Philip Sherlock Centre for the Creative Arts.
Given the poet’s cultural grounding it is not surprising that he should write on pocomania. As a university man living at the foot of the mountain he would have been conscious of its dominant presence on the landscape and the cultural factors with which it was associated from the Warika Hills in the East with the proletarian settlements nestled in its lower reaches to the agricultural peasants to the north with their spiritual preoccupations hidden deep in a valley blocked and protected by the dark mountain mass from the malevolent city.
Looming black against the sky on a moonlit night, Long Mountain influenced the imagination to recall images of the August Town peasants virtually next door and their practice of pocomania. This is one of Jamaica’s spiritualist/revivalist religions of the folk – driven by African survivals of spirit possession and influenced by the Christian Baptist faith. The rhythm of the poem is informed by the drum language of a possession dance.
The imagery of black and white resound Africa and the white robes worn by the spiritualists. The poem’s link to Rev Bedward lies in the fact that he was a pocomania leader called the Shepherd who led his flock in August Town early in the twentieth century. A mixture of history, legend and myth told a story of how he had a vision and promised on an appointed day to lead his followers on a literal flight up to heaven.
This recalls the belief held by Africans through and after slavery that they could discover the power to fly back to Africa. Here the mountain is personified as if it takes on a spiritual life of its own as Sherlock stresses the white robed dancers with the overwhelming land form as one of them and as the shepherd at the same time, given its power to control the sky, the stars, the elements.
The poem tends to be repetitive without too many startling elements of poetic versification, but its sustaining qualities are the overpowering presence of the black mountain mass at night and its coming to life to imitate the heave and fall of a dance to the life-giving rhythm of pocomania.
