We make a big pretence in the Caribbean to be this sophisticated person of the world, very much at home in the metropolitan areas to which many of us migrate but in fact we’re country people. In the heart of big-city Port-of-Spain, for instance, we have a place doing a roaring business selling home-made soups from conch to channa; many of us have our wedding reception in the yard, and in Barbados, every evening, you can go to an area right in town where there are scores of vendors selling local food at a roadside place; the traffic is so heavy the police have to come out and maintain order.
We save up money to fly kites at Easter, or play mas’ during Carnival. Outside of town, it’s a common thing to see folks attacking their food with bare hands – no knife and fork, thank you. When our cricket legend Shivnarine Chanderpaul came to my house for buffet dinner in Cayman, I saw him with his plate of food, looking around, somewhat lost, so I said to him, “You okay, Shiv?” He smiled: “Yeah, I okay….but you gotta gimme a spoon.” Country man all the way; no knife and fork.
In my youth, my father had a farm in the Pomeroon, mostly coconuts and coffee, and I would go down there during August school break. He had a drying area for the coffee, which was a concrete pad at the edge of which he had two strips of railway line. On top the railway line was a wooden structure with a galvanised roof. It was on metal wheels and when rain threatened they would roll the thing out and keep the coffee dry. Down there on holidays with nothing to do (nobody lived nearby), I found my own diversions. One was to climb up to the top of the shed (I was 14 years old but in short pants) and slide down on the zinc. All by myself, no neighbours, I would make the trip several times, but I would invariably catch hell from my mother later when I returned to the house with my pants bottom black from sliding on the zinc. I remember my cousin Roy DeSouza, from Georgetown, came down there on a trip, saw me doing the zinc slide, and just folded his arms and watched me as if I was mad. He went back to town looking at me sideways. Country man.
On the old man’s farm, he had coffee on one side of the river; over on the other side he had coconuts. I remember one day (I was usually barefoot) and I was watching my father supervising the weeding in an area, not realising that I was inches away from a red ants’ nest. When the ants erupted, biting me left and right, I took off brushing and running, to the huge amusement of the workers. My father came over, took a look and said, “Oh, is just ants, man… leave that for Sunday” and walked away. As I said, countryman.
Some years later, although I was not into the booze, I remember going back to Atkinson Field where I worked and the Hillman Minx wagon, we were travelling in had a flat on the East Bank Road. It was night time, no traffic, and the drinkers tried to open a bottle of rum and broke the neck. Instead of abandoning the boozing, one of the guys pried off the Hillman hubcap, shaped like a bowl, strained the rum into it through a nylon shirt, poured it back into the empty bottle, and off they were again. Country people.
Here’s another example: In one of the Tradewinds trips to Trinidad, we ended up at Maracas Beach, having brought nothing to eat and we ended up wolfing down some strange-looking wild-meat curry from one of the vendors. I kept asking if it was beef, but all I got was “wild meat.” I later found that what we all had wolfed down so hungrily was manicou – what we call yowari. Yes, that’s country people. Barbados, too, has this atrocity called Barbecued Pigtail…something with so much salt it crunches when you eat it. Country people. City folks would just turn up their noses. “You have to be kidding; I’m not eating that.” We look at the city folks eating dry bread, and laugh. We’re country people.
We sail through situations that send town folks running. Take the famous Jamaican ackee-and-saltfish dish for instance. Country people scorn the canned ackee; we want the fresh stuff. So when I lived in Grand Cayman, I had a towering ackee tree, bearing like crazy. I know we don’t have many trees in Guyana, and perhaps one reason is the parrots love it; they fly in and eat all the opened ackees and cut down the green ones by the score. Parrots don’t joke. When I lived in Cayman, I recall being in the tree picking ackee, and parrots would just fly right in, doing their own picking, not 10 feet away from me. In Cayman, as a result, the farmers shoot them; the parrots that is. It’s a $500 fine; for the farmers, that is. After all, they’re country people, too.
So the next time you’re sitting behind a minibus in town and you see some litter come sailing through the window, just console yourself; that is town people; country people know better. My mother, for instance: time and again, coming to town, I would see her stow the Kleenex she just used in her purse. Country people. Anywhere you go in the Caribbean, don’t let them fool you with their three-piece suit and the pipe they’re smoking; we are country people.
