SUN, SEA AND BLOOD: A CARIBBEAN ODYSSEY
Chalice-lighting: ‘Dawn and Sunset’ by CMR
Opening Words: from, ‘For Christopher Columbus’ (5), by A.J. Seymour (‘Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse’, p. 169)
Introduction: In today’s service I am offering you my reflections on the Caribbean. Why? Because for me personally, that region has been a part of my life for fifty-five years. Not a big part, you might say, in that I haven’t really spent much time there, only a few months in total, but a surprisingly significant part in terms of its influence on my life – not least, of course, my family life. And from first going there in September 1969 to my most recent visit in February this year, the Caribbean has never been far from my thoughts. I want to share with you something of my experiences there, and some music, poems and other material which channel the history, culture and spirit of the Caribbean. I suppose that most people in this country see the region as a holiday destination, and so it is. Tourism is, for good or ill, a major part of its economy. But there is so much more. It is, in many ways one of the most complex parts of the world in terms of history, demography and religion, It is possessed of remarkable natural beauty, but behind the beauty lies a terrible history of human suffering – genocide and slavery, racism and injustice, exploitation and poverty. And this is a continuing legacy which demands more understanding than you’re likely to get from a week or two at a beach resort.
Hymn: 120 (green) ‘Life of ages, richly poured’
Reading: ‘The Caribbean Sea’, by CMR (‘Beyond Darkness’, pp. 93-94)
In September 1969, aged twenty-two, I flew to Georgetown, Guyana, on the north coast of South America. When I say that this marked my arrival in the Caribbean, geographical purists will object that Guyana is not really in the Caribbean. True, it is not an island. It is physically and biologically part of South America. But as far as population, politics, language, culture and cricket are concerned it is very much closer to the English-speaking West Indies than it is to its immediate neighbours – Brazil, Venezuela and Surinam. Its population is very diverse. There are people of African origin, the descendants of slaves, who form one of the two dominant ethnic groups. The other is of South Asian origin, the descendants of the indentured labourers brought in after the abolition of slavery. Confusingly, they are known as East Indians. Other groups contribute to the diversity, the descendants of English, Scottish, Irish, Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish labourers and settlers – a reflection of Guyana’s often troubled political past – and present. As far as religion is concerned, they include Christians, Muslims and Hindus amongst others – and happily recognise and celebrate each others’ festivals. One group, though were never settlers and have their own distinctive traditions. These indigenous people, known in Guyana as Amerindians, live mainly in the interior, much of it thickly-forested, whereas most of the population live on the coastal strip, which is where I lived, in a place called Kitty. I went there with Voluntary Service Overseas, to work as a librarian at the Government Technical Institute in the capital, Georgetown. I should have been there for two years, but my time was cut to a mere seven weeks as the result of a near-fatal motor-cycle accident in which I suffered a fractured skull.
Reading: ‘Odyssey: Guyana and Trinidad 1969’, by CMR
That fractured skull necessitated my removal, in a state of unconsciousness, to a hospital in San Fernando, Trinidad. This turned out rather better than might have been expected. As I wrote later,
“Those were days I never should have had,
in a country I never should have been in…
but I did have those days,
on that beautiful island,
having times that changed my life…
until my Odyssey brought me back to Ithaca.”
The kindness and the welcome I met with in Trinidad, were remarkable and made the weeks I spent there truly memorable for a variety of reasons. In hospital I acquired friends, who afterwards introduced me to the island and turned convalescence into a rewarding and enriching experience. Musically, of course Trinidad is the home of the Steel Drum, or Pan, and of Calypso. And the Greek myth of Odysseus’s encounter with the nymph, Calypso, on her enchanted Isle, also had its resonances in that enjoyable interlude. One other episode in Trinidad involved an English Unitarian who heard that I was in Trinidad and took me out for a drive that included stopping at a mosque, because Trinidad, like Guyana, is ethnically and religiously very diverse. This was my first ever visit to a mosque, and it happened to coincide with the end of Ramadan. The sun was setting, so we were invited to join in the feast that was set out on the verandah and to stay for prayers. For me, that was an important and memorable experience. But my stay in Trinidad was all too brief. A few days later I flew, reluctantly and against my will, back to a cold wet Manchester! But my thoughts were still in the Caribbean. “I’ll be back if I can”, I wrote in my diary. It was fifteen years before I saw that blue, blue sea again – but this time it was in Jamaica, by which time my life was much changed. Going to Jamaica was now a family affair, and one in which I have been involved five times.
Reading: “Early Morning, Runaway Bay, Jamaica.” By CMR (‘Beyond Darkness’, pp.94-95)
There have been too many memorable experiences during those visits for me to catalogue here. I will mention one or two. One was on Christmas Day 1984. I wrote in my diary: “Get up soon after 4-30 a.m. and drive down to the local Baptist church with Paulette’s mum, [her sister] Sadie, and the woman from across the road. The service is a combined Baptist and Anglican one. It is pitch dark when the service begins… Out in the darkness, throbbing bass rhythms speak of other, more secular celebrations… The service is one of lessons and carols, with a short sermon on the text, ‘The people who lived in darkness have seen a great light, by the young Baptist pastor. He speaks well and with great vigour, illustrating his message with homely references to duppies and obeah-men! …The service ends with greetings all round. Outside it is now light, and from the church porch there is a stunning view of dawn over the Blue Mountains.
Music: ‘Cooling Down’, from, ‘Another Phase’ by Phase II Pan Groove, track 9
You don’t go anywhere in Jamaica without encountering Rastafarians – one of my brothers-in-law is a Rasta and we have had deep discussions on the subject. And wherever you go in Jamaica you will see images – and hear the music – of that most famous of Rastafarians, Bob Marley, who – with his band, The Wailers – I heard play twice in Manchester in the 1970s. In 1984, we went to his birthplace and his tomb in the village of Nine Mile. I noted that we saw “the little wooden house where he was born”, “the little chapel…where he is buried” and where “Red, Green and Gold Ethiopian flags flutter overhead.” It was quiet. No-one else was there other than a few Rastafarian attendants, with whom we talked about “Bob Marley’s message of ‘One Love’.” In 2017 we went there again and it was very different – “highly commercialised”. I noted, “full of shops and tourists.”
Reading: Psalm 137: 1-4
Music: ‘By the Rivers of Babylon’ by The Melodians (‘The Harder They Come’, track 3).
For Rastafarians, as for many other Jamaicans, the consciousness of slavery’s baleful legacy is strong. They equate the cruel and murderous removal of their ancestors from Africa with the forced exile of the Israelites to Babylon – as powerfully remembered in Psalm 137. The history of slavery in Jamaica is evident in the landscape, much of which was once slave-worked sugar plantations, and in historic buildings once owned by slave-owners, most of them from Britain. In Jamaica’s capital, Kingston in 2016, we visited a fine 18th century town house now known as Headquarters House but originally called Hibbert House after the family who built it. The Hibberts owned some of those slave-worked sugar plantations and Hibbert House was the hub of their empire, complete with slave-quarters. It later became the seat of Jamaica’s colonial legislature and government but today it houses the offices of the Jamaica National Heritage Trust – an altogether more wholesome use than its original one. Our particular reason for visiting it was that it was the birthplace of a man named Robert Hibbert. He was sent to be educated in England where he met Unitarians, under whose influence he became a Unitarian. But he was a slave-owner with a sugar estate in Jamaica called ‘Georgia’. His English Unitarian friends were abolitionists, but they were unable to make him one too. However, to do him justice, he did take some steps intended to improve the lot of his slaves – although they were limited in scope and pretty much ineffective in practice. We know this because one of Hibbert’s measures was the appointment of a young Unitarian minister, a Suffolk man, named Thomas Cooper to be pastor to the four-hundred slaves on the Georgia plantation. With his wife, Ann, Cooper spent over three years doing what they could for the slaves, but they found the slave system to be irredeemably evil, both on Georgia and in Jamaica generally. They concluded that it had to be abolished. On returning to England he wrote a graphic expose called ‘The Condition of the Negro Slaves in Jamaica’, which played its part in bringing about the abolition of slavery in 1834. It also earned Thomas and Ann the bitter and undying enmity of the Hibbert family. In 2017, we found our way to the Georgia estate.
Reading: ‘On My Mind: The Georgia Estate, Hanover Parish, Jamaica’, by CMR (‘Beyond Darkness’, pp. 95-96)
Hymn: 122 (green) ‘One holy Church’
Thomas Cooper was not the only Unitarian minister to have worked in Jamaica. In the early 20th century a Jamaican called Egbert Ethelred Brown attempted to establish a Unitarian presence on the island, initially in Montego Bay and then in Kingston. He trained for the ministry in Chicago and got some rather half-hearted support from the American and British Unitarian Associations for his Jamaican ‘mission’. In the end, lack of funds – exacerbated by the effects of the First World War – brought the project to a sad end and Brown himself went on to minister in New York, in Harlem. This is why, for all the bewildering variety of churches to be found in Jamaica, not a single one is Unitarian. Indeed, in the entire Caribbean region our presence is restricted to two small Unitarian Universalist fellowships, one in Puerto Rico and the other in the US Virgin Islands. I can’t help wondering what Jamaican Unitarianism might have been like if Brown had succeeded, if the support he got from America and Britain had been more enthusiastic and less inhibited by racial prejudice – which I’m afraid it was. We have a record of Brown’s ideas about worship which also give us an idea of the kind of faith that Jamaican Unitarianism would have expressed.
Reading: ‘Cold Services’, by Egbert Ethelred Brown (Been in the Storm So Long’, p.33).
Prayer: ‘Without Love’, by Egbert Ethelred Brown (‘Been in the Storm So Long’, p. 36 )
Music: ‘Three Little Birds’, by Bob Marley & The Wailers (‘Legend’, track 4)
The Caribbean has a rich natural heritage, despite the destructive pressures to which it has been – and still is – subjected, both unnatural and natural, such as hurricanes. The Jamaican poet, Andrew Salkey, describes one of these in his poem, ‘Hurricane 1951’.
Reading: ‘Hurricane 1951’, from, ‘Jamaica’ by Andrew Salkey (Hutchinson, 1973), pp. 86-88).
And yet, despite hurricanes and humans, the Caribbean’s surviving forests, wetlands and coral reefs sustain some wonderful wildlife. For me, the birdlife in particular is a major attraction. This was also true for a priest and ornithologist named Raymund Devas who lived and worked in the Caribbean in the 20th century. In his little book about the birds of Trinidad and Tobago, he makes a charming connection between his love of birds and his work as a priest.
Reading: ‘The Carib Grassquit’, from, ‘Visitors Book of Birds, Trinidad and Tobago’, by Fr. Raymund Devas OP MC (Muir Marshall & Co., Port of Spain, 1950).
“The Carib Grassquit [is] very well known in the islands further north. The cock is not beautiful, but you get to be fond of him and his, for once, more comely spouse, and these little creatures are so trustful and tame. These Carib Grassquits are not afraid of nesting in churches. Even less so than some other finches, as also hummingbirds, house wrens and Scaly-breasted Ground Doves. Naturally, I am partial to birds that ‘go to church’; and I should like to draw attention to how clean they are. Never a speck of dirt falls from their nests or near them, and rarely enough some tiny fragment of grass or a little cotton. Until the young are ready to take to the wing, the parent birds scour the nest removing what they collect in a manner that should delight the heart of any sanitary inspector. The little birds behave so well in church. I did once meet a wren who seemed to resent the presence of a Red-throated Bullfinch, but he only showed his disapproval by (presumably) preaching to the other bird and singing vociferously. In a country church in Grenada, one of these jolly little wrens used sometimes to compete with me, when I was actually in the pulpit; but no doubt he was really only backing me up in what I was trying to say.”
Earlier this year, in search of birds, we took a walk along a peaceful forest road in the beautiful foothills of the John Crow Mountains.
Reading: ‘Rainforest Road, Jamaica, February 2024’, by CMR
Hymn: 155 (purple) ‘The day will come, must come, and soon’
Closing Words: ‘Caribbea’ (extract), from ‘Jamaica’ by Andrew Salkey (p.106)
Blessing: ‘Teach us true respect…’, an adaptation of verse 2 of the Jamaican National Anthem (‘We Are Here’, p. 58) .
Music: ‘Redemption Song’ by Bob Marley & The Wailers (‘Legend’, track 12)
-Cliff Reed, 1st September 2024
Ipswich Unitarian Meeting House 