CARRIACOu MAROOn And STRIng BAnd FESTIVAL

FE ST I VA L
P R O F I L E
f
FESTIVAL PROFILE
Carriacou
Maroon and
String Band
Festival
Grenada
Simon Broughton samples the African
delights of a Caribbean festival on
Grenada’s sister island, Carriacou
M
ention the Caribbean island
of Grenada and do you
get a signature sound in
your head? Probably not.
With just 110,000 people,
it’s impossible to compete with Cuba, Haiti,
Jamaica and Trinidad who all pack a powerful
musical punch. But there’s a festival that
might help raise Grenada’s musical profile.
I’m setting out from St George’s, the
island’s capital, to visit the Carriacou Maroon
and String Band festival. Grenada may be
small, but its sister island of Carriacou is even
smaller – it’s little more than 10km from top
to bottom and home to just 7,000 people. I’m
taking the Osprey, a catamaran that
speeds north up the coast of
Grenada and across to
Carriacou in
90 minutes.
Once you leave the fly and flop tourist
concentration around Grand Anse beach,
Grenada’s landscape gets noticeably lusher and
more dramatic. From the sea, the island’s
profile, with a humpback of mountains at its
centre, is spectacular. There are precipitous
drops, impenetrable forests and it’s worth
spending a few days exploring the island. There
are peaks, waterfalls, and gorgeous little plots
on the slopes growing banana, cocoa, mango,
and nutmeg – the national crop. Grenada is
the second largest nutmeg producer in the
world after Indonesia, from where it originally
came. The old nutmeg processing plant at
Gouyave is an extraordinary place with its
drying, shelling, sorting and sacking amidst an
intoxicating odour.
The Osprey arrives at Hillsborough,
Carriacou’s main town, just two or three
streets wide along a sandy bay. The
From top to bottom:
drumming and dancing at
the Maroon in Bogles; Mamai
Kweyol from St Lucia on the
veranda; maypole dance on
Paradise Beach; ‘Meet the
ancestors’ – festival banner
Right: dance group from
Tobago performing at Belair
54 Songlines
January/February 2011
Maroon and String Band Music Festival
begins in Bogles, a couple of houses at a
crossroads a few kilometres away. Derived
from ‘cimarrón’ (Spanish for fugitive), the
word Maroon refers to escaped slaves and
there were communities of them in various
parts of the Caribbean – notably Haiti and
Jamaica. Groups of Maroons came to
Carriacou and established small communities
like Bogles. “The word maroon also means a
gathering of the community – for cooking,
dancing and singing,” explains Winston
Fleury, the island’s fount of cultural wisdom.
Maroons take place during the dry season
from February to April. The first is in Mt
Pleasant to welcome the first harvest, the last
is in Bogles at the end of April and is
supposed to induce the rain for the next
planting. 2010 was the first time the string
band festival was timed to coincide with the
maroon in Bogles so visitors could attend
both events.
Smoked food is being prepared in huge
cauldrons over a fire in an open space off the
risqué, with grinding and groin-thrusting
leading to peals of laughter. “The dances are
ritual, recreational and frivolous,” says Fleury.
I wake to the sound of a lovely string band.
Sharing my B&B is Mamai Kweyol (Creole
Children) from St Lucia who are rehearsing
on the veranda. They have the feel of an old
mento band with banjos, drums, shakers
and, most charmingly, a veteran violinist
called Placid who makes swoopy slides
between the notes of his tunes. Guitar bands,
needless to say, are popular throughout the
Caribbean with different regional styles. In
Carriacou (and Trinidad) there is a
ST VINCENT &
THE GRENADINES
GRENADA
Caribbean Sea
Carriacou
St. George's
Port-of-Spain
TRINIDAD &
TOBAGO
HOW TO GET THERE
VENEZUELA
Everyone is insistent that
you eat, because if you
don’t, the spirits of the
ancestors will bother you
road. There’s meat (pork and chicken), rice,
cucu (cornmeal) and large bean-like peas. The
food and drink is free and each village saves
up to host their maroon feast. Everyone is
insistent that you eat, because if you don’t, the
spirits of the ancestors will bother you.
When it’s dark the ‘Big Drums’ are set out
beside the crossroads and people settle on
benches in a large circle. There are three Big
Drums, although they’re not in fact that big –
“it’s the crowd around them that’s big,” says
Fleury (see Postcard from Carriacou in #71).
At first people dance to lay scarves like
offerings in front of the drummers and then
the women get up to dance in turn. Each
dancer flamboyantly flicks her flowery apron
or dress and each new dancer will twirl a
couple of times with the previous one before
taking over. The drums give a powerful
backing to the call-and-response vocals. The
languages are originally African and there are
specific songs and dances for each ethnic
group – there are said to be nine West
African tribes in Carriacou. What’s
remarkable about the event is how African it
feels, how the drum culture continued here
when it was outlawed in other places, and
how much of a real community event it feels
– made accessible to visiting guests without
spoiling the atmosphere in any way. As the
evening goes on, the dancing gets more
www.songlines.co.uk
● Golden Caribbean (www.goldencaribbean.co.uk
/0845 085 8080) offers return flights from London
Gatwick to Grenada from £448 including taxes. On
Carriacou, stay in the garden cottage at The Green
Roof Inn (www.greenroofinn.com ) from £45; on
Grenada recommended hotels are True Blue Bay
Resort (www.truebluebay.com) near St Georges and
Petite Anse (www.petiteanse.com) in the north of
the island. Accommodation is per person per night,
including breakfast
● Ferry from Grenada to Carriacou
(www.ospreylines.com) costs £38 return
● Visit www.grenadagrenadines.com for more
information on the islands and see
www.carriacoumaroon.com for details of Carriacou
Maroon and String Band Festival 2011
Christmas parang tradition of serenading
around Christmas and there used to be oldtime quadrille bands. Now the bands at the
String Band Festival are playing in a more
contemporary idiom.
The second evening – the official opening
of the Festival proper – takes place at Belair
Heritage Village around the remains of an
old colonial house. Your reporter diligently
attended the whole thing and had to sit
through too many speeches. The locals
knew better and came later once the
formalities were over and the music really
got under way. Proceedings also got
interrupted from time to time by rain, but I
guess that was inevitable after the libations
and music of the night before.
Sunday was a real treat as events moved
down to Paradise Beach, a few kilometres
south of Hillsborough. Unlike the Big
Drums, Paradise Beach is aptly named – an
arc of silver white sand lapped by a warm,
inviting sea. On stage from 1pm till sunset,
there were about ten string bands playing 45
minute sets, as well as a spectacular maypole
dance, performed to soca music. The bands
include my friends Mamai Kweyol from St
Lucia, the Old Time Jammers from Tobago,
the Country Boys from Carriacou, Men
from the Main Land from Grenada and,
finally, the Lashing Dogs from the British
Virgin Islands, one of the favourite bands in
the region. ‘The party starts now,’ they sing,
‘winding on de rum.’ There’s shade from
trees, a nice beer bar and terrace with a good
view of the stage and as the sun gets lower
and the shadows get longer, the dancing
really gets going. l
DATES The next edition runs from
April 29-May 1 2011
online www.carriacoumaroon.com
A Feast of
Music
Songlines Music Travel
has a wide range of
festival trips for 2011 on
offer, including the
Festival on the Niger in
Mali and the Shetland
Folk Festival. See p26 or
www.songlines.co.uk/
music-travel
Below: Carriacou – the
town of Hillsborough
with Paradise Beach in
the distance
Songlines 55