MAIN RIDGE

(In memory of my great, great, great grandfather, Congo Brown who possessed the same powers and shared the same plight as Gan-gan Sarah)

Lonely backbone
of a prehistoric, pangaeaic, fossil creature,
looking over her exiled children –
Brothers Rock, Sisters Rock, St. Giles and others,
lamenting over her adopted children,
lamenting, over her self-exiled children,
yes, she has self-exiled children too,
far from her once paradisal land,
too far away to look after.

My Main Ridge, where deer once dwelled
when the trees were not felled
and the hounds
no harlot of their bloody art were,
yes, she has history too –
the first declared
Forest Reserve of the Hemisphere,
perhaps the whole world,
by the French in seventeen sixty-five

for the protection of the rains.
My Main Ridge has watched over
colonial wars upon her shores –
French, English, Dutch and other
bloated colonial corpses floating,
colonial blood and aspirations flowing,
desecrating the sanctity of her waters –
Englishman Bay, Bloody Bay, Dead Bay and others
which by names commemorate and coronate.

Lo! In your hills, I hear faint echoes
of your distant pristine past –
an Arawak or a Carib,
fed on farine and cassava bread,
filling his peace pipe with tobacco
and your secret, sacred herbs
for his first initiate rite;
and a European named you Tobago
for the shape of his pipe.

Recently my father, my first mystic,
fed on farine and cassava bread,
corn cu-cu and plantain tum-tum too,
niam dasheen and yam
and good niniam,
my father gave me a bush bath in a boli,
from your calabash tree,
filled with your secret, sacred herbs
for my first initiate rite;

yes, you know that Gan-gan Sara
was my great, great, great grandmother.
Do you remember when,
from your highest peak,
you guided her ashore
on a trade wind, together
with the dust from the Sahara,
to join her abducted brother and sister,
Middle Passage property of Massa,

survivors of the sardine packed slaver,
those whose hopes refused to succumb
to the stench,
to sink with bloated bodies thrown
overboard to sharks?
Did you desert or embrace
her when she ate salt
meat and lost her power
to fly back home to Africa?

But there was a wind much stronger,
in nineteen sixty-three, called Flora –
traumatized your flora and your fauna
causing your land to slide
leaving bare hillside
which took many a year to repair;
and then a brutal wind even stronger,
a plague, His Imperial Venereal, AIDS,
devastated and decimated

the descendants of Gan-gan Sara,
in wasted youth they died
leaving your future, like hillside, bare;
how long will it take to repair?
My Main Ridge, protector of the rains,
I taste the salt of tears in your rainwater.
Could you not protect your peccaries
from the harlot hounds?
Could you not protect her picaninnies,

in their innocence and honesty,
from the harlot hunters
bearing tourist dollars
to turn them into beach bum gigolos
and beach bunny escort ‘ho’s?
Could you not guard and guide the guides?
Could you not protect them from the peddler
bearing blood-money US dollar
and pure-as-white death-powder

and dirty-blue camcorder?
Could you not protect them from themselves –
from incestuous shame
and political game
of land and love for sale?
Who will stand their bail
when they sentence themselves
to a new colonial jail
in a small island

of a large new plantation
tourist economy,
a large new polluted plantation,
pouring sewer into your once pristine water?
Could you not protect your pristine innocence?
Gone forever is your innocence.
Where, oh where, will her children dwell
when their terrestrial birthright they sell?
Can US dollar pay for the pain

of Gan-gan Sara’s slave labour?
Sometimes when she could not bear
the pangs of the whipping
she would use her obeah to transfer
the pain to Massa son or daughter,
yet like Christ crucified again and
again by unrepentant sinner,
each time they sell they whip her.
Where will her children,

your adopted children dwell?
Perhaps with the yatchie in the sea
or underground with bottle water in a Bloody Bay well;
perhaps with the cocrico in the air,
a national pest I do declare;
or the flying fish flying fast to nowhere,
siphoned off in stealth,
with your gas and oil and brains
and self-determination;

or extinct, a mere memory,
like the mythical mermen
who once romped with the dolphin
around Sisters Rock,
like your deer or the yeti,
mountain spirit no longer roaming free;
or swell the brain-drain ranks
of your self-exiled children;
to what and where will they return?

Leroy has his El Tucuche
and I my Main Ridge;
you are my small island,
my smaller island,
my sister island El Tucuche.
My melancholy Main Ridge,
do you have any tears to spare?
For I too am lamenting
and if I had extra tears I would lend you some.

Copyright ©2001 by G. Newton V. Chance