At 7:30 p.m. on August 6, we took flight. The Falcon was our vehicle. We would be arriving in Belize in no time.
The Falcon is a restaurant next to the Lattintown Creek in Marlboro. A large wooden structure, its inside resembles a refurbished honky-tonk joint turned artist’s delight, with portraits of famous musicians hanging around the bar. In the great hall, large beams support the peaked roof. For-sale paintings made by local artists adorn the side walls. Suspended from the center is a disco ball.
That was how I got to Belize. That place, The Falcon, was to become a teleportation device that one night. The rest of the audience and I left the Hudson Valley and landed in Belize.
The lights dimmed, and the host introduced the Garifuna Collective, a band that has been touring for some 20 years. This was to be my first time seeing them and hearing them.
The group began its first song with an a cappella. Then the electric guitars began to strum. Next was a woman playing the claves, a two-stick instrument that makes a distinct ting-ting sound. A man wearing a dashiki shook two handheld gourds that made a rustling shhh shhh-shhh-shhh noise. Finally, two drummers began to slap their hand drums.
“Welcome to Belize,” one of the drummers said. And like that, the audience was no longer in the northeastern United States, but on a beach in Central America.
The band welcomed us with their songs of sadness, joy, family and love. Songs called “Watina,” “Ayo” and “Mongulu.” They shared their stories about the boy who wished to see his father and was visited by a pelican. They paid tribute to the late Aurelio Martinez and Andy Palacio – Garifuna musical icons. They sang about the bad woman who asked if there was a place in heaven for her, and a song written for a band member’s sick relative.
As the Collective played, the woman in pink danced the punta – an Afro-Indigenous dance called the punta. Dancing the punta involves energetic hips, fast feet and joyous smiles. My spouse, a Garifuna woman, and a few other audience members joined in on the dancing.
Whether joining or just watching, we in the audience could not but feel the historic pride of these people. And why wouldn’t they be proud? Their roots run deep in the Caribbean. Various sources cite several different beginnings of the Garifuna people, such as the conflict between two Native tribes, the Caribs and Arawaks.
I favor the oral tradition that I’ve heard my wife tell from time to time. It traces the beginnings of the Garifuna people to a time when a slave ship had been wrecked on St. Vincent Island. The slaves intermingled with the Indigenous people, creating a new group called Garinagu – the Black Caribs, or the Garifuna people.
The history of the Garifuna people was not peaceful. Outsiders, first the French and then the British, attempted to push the Garinagu out of the land they called Yurumein. A Garifuna native hero, chief Joseph Chatoyer, or Satuye, led the revolt against the British. In 1795, the British killed Satuye. According to the African American Registry, a nonprofit that hosts a database, the Garifuna people were exiled to Roatan, Honduras, where they still endured.
As I heard the voices of the Garifuna Collective, a tear came to my eye. While I don’t speak the Garifuna language, there was something in the words, the tones and the drums that gave me a sense of understanding. I heard the heartache and the loss, as well as the happiness and the hope. Sentiments that need no translation.
The band ended its last song. The melody lifted me and the rest of the audience from our Belizean dream. We were back in Marlboro, back at the Falcon.
During the car ride home, my wife shuffled through the Collective’s album, and I couldn’t help but feel a part of me was still in Belize, in Honduras, in Yurumein.
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