Garifuna 101

I realize that many of my faithful blog readers (assuming I have faithful readers, there’s no way to know really) may not have a clue what the word Garifuna means, and since this is what my stay in Honduras is all about, I thought I’d give a little crash course, and share awesome videos and music and so forth.

The Garifuna, once known as Black Caribs, are a really unique and practically unheard of ethnic group, of about 250,000 people, who live along the Caribbean coast of Central America, though mostly in Honduras. As the story goes, during the Caribbean colonial era, two slave ships got shipwrecked on St. Vincent, a little island given by the French and English to the last remaining indigenous Caribs and Arawaks in return for an end of indian raids on the colonies. The Caribs accepted the Africans into their society, whose numbers increased as escaped slaves throughout the Caribbean made their way to the island. Over time, they adopted the language and culture of the Carib, and became the Garifuna, and became fairly prosperous farming and selling goods to colonists on other islands. The ever-greedy English hungry for more cane-growing land of course broke the treaty and began to clear plantations on the free island. Just at this time, French Revolutionary ideas and the nearby Haitian Revolution sparked a war between the Garifuna and English. Eventually, the English won, but had such a hard time doing so that they decided to just deport the entire population to Central America.

Those were the early 1800s, and since the Garifuna have spread up and down the coast. They are the only black population in Americas to have never been enslaved, and the last living speakers of indigenous Caribbean languages. Up until the 1960s or so, they lived very traditionally on a subsistence basis – the women harvested yucca and coconuts and men fished the sea; houses were made of sticks, adobe or palm fronds, with thatched roofs. People were catholic but practiced elaborate ancestor-worship ceremonies called dugu. They are without doubt beach people – no Garifuna really lives more than a couple of hundred feet from the sea, and seafood (especially conch soup) makes up most of the diet.

Times have changed though, and the two big bad words “globalization” and “transculturation” have shaken things up. Little known fact is that a huge percentage of Garifuna live in the Bronx, and people from the communities go back and forth a lot legally and illegally. Being very comfortable out at sea, many Garifuna men a generation ago found work in the merchant marine or on international cruise ships, and used that mobility to find their way to New York. As a result, the reality of most Garifuna lies somewhere on the spectrum of traditional and American ways of doing things. And it’s all very hard to get a grasp on. Garifuna in Honduras tend to claim that they are extremely poor – while I am in no position to really refute that, Garifuna communities don’t look poor, not at first sight, and not at all compared to rural Honduran campesinos you see throughout the country living in collapsing wooden shacks, or the crowded squalor of the Dominican barrios I worked in. Most of the palm-and-stick homes have been replaced with comparatively spacious suburban-California-style concrete houses, most people have TVs and stereo systems, and mostly everybody is rocking some kind of designer or clever imitation ghetto-wear. Indeed, black American culture has successfully been imported to the seaside villages, and most everybody under thirty sports either fitted caps and basketball jerseys or hardcore Jamaican rasta stylings. Yet at the same time many people in the communities are going hungry. While many people still harvest their yucca or go out at night in oar-propelled canoes into the ocean depths to catch dinner for the week, many sit around and wait for remissions from relatives in the states. While the picturesque but probably not-so-much-fun-to-live-in palm and thatch houses still abound, most have been converted into tool sheds or bathrooms, or spaces to perform rituals for the ancestors. The towns are also pretty isolated – to get to one called Santa Fe, I bumped along a mud road for an hour, crossing four rivers in the back a pick-up truck, only to incongruously land in what looks like a middle-class American town dumped onto a dirt road in the jungle. Or maybe I just forgot what America looks like.

The oldest generation, especially women, is wearing traditional patterned dresses and head wraps and gabber unintelligibly (to me) in Garifuna, while the youngest kids run around in the ocean all day signing Panamanian reggae songs and don’t speak a work of the language. Most people in-between these extremes can speak Garifuna, but mostly speak Spanish, switching over for the occasional anecdote, or sentence (or I suspect, to make fun of the weird gringo hanging around and asking where to find musicians.) It seems to me that there is a pretty obvious divide between Garifuna with family in the states and those without. One of my teachers in Trujillo, named Pancho, had no family abroad, and was very poor as a result. He lived with his seemingly endless children in a tiny dwelling and was definitely hustling to get by. Yet at the same time, he was the most impressive person that I’ve met, living and breathing the traditions. While others sat on their asses drinking moonshine, he would wake up and make a drum, then go fix a boat, and then spend all night fishing, and then play a concert the next day.

While Garifuna towns still alternatingly laze in the midday Caribbean sun and bustle with Caribbean exuberance, they are communities in crisis. Among people old enough to care, there is a lot of talk about culture – people understand that that Garifuna beat is unico-en-el-mundo and incredibly important to hold on to, and they are losing it before there eyes. Garifuna struggle to hold on to their communal land rights in the face of encroaching land-starved mestizos and strong-arm developers who want to sea the beautiful Honduran coast dressed in high-rises. They struggle to modernize and keep their traditions at the same time; they struggle to get their kids to learn to speak their language, just a little too little too late. They struggle, first and foremost, to find opportunities – there is just no work, anywhere, at least not without going to larger Honduran cities, and so people leave, because it’s the only way to make anything change. And due to immigration, Garifuna really has improved their material conditions incredibly. But nobody knows exactly how to go forward and keep proudly living Garifuna style at the same time.

One interesting twist is that practically nobody in the villages still host dugu, an elaborate ritual that takes a year to fully complete. Its just too godamn expensive. Yet relatives in the states who feel the need to placate the ancestors (“forgive me grandma for choosing the Bronx?”), host several in every town every year. It’s that the going rate for the ceremony is about $13K, only affordable on an American salary and even then not so much. Yet this has created a way for, spirit mediums, drum-makers, musicians, and dancers to eek out a living.

Anyway what I’m really here for is the music, and there is plenty of it. There are many traditional styles, played on drums of various sizes sporting jury-rigged snares out of guitar strings, sea turtle shells, and maracas. They range from a Christmas mask dance called jancuru, to ritual music played on giant versions of the drums, to social commentary dance songs called hungunhugun. These styles are mostly played at traditional or folkloric events, at specific times during the year. My favorite stuff though, is parranda. It’s the Garifuna blues – tragic minor key soul jams played on guitar, played with a strum that is really hard to understand. Sadly, very few young people play guitar, and the music is fading. My senator-pop-star host is among the only young people driving the music forward. Parranderros, as the bluesmen are called, are universally awesome tired-eyed and sun-scarred badasses. This video is of a parranda played by Pancho, who I mentioned earlier. His hands are kinda messed up and had trouble playing, but you can get a glimpse of the awesome.



Better known though is punta, a modern adaptation of, bizarrely enough, funeral music, which is played by modern-style electric bands and has come to be the national music of
Honduras. The basis for this, as Aurelio tells it, that Garifuna believe that when a man dies, another man must replace him. Velorios, or wakes, are thus festive events celebrating human fertility, and women dance around a beach bonfire doing a provocative dance in order to symbolically fulfill the creation of a new person, aka, sex.

Somehow or another this turned into pan-Caribbean party music that took off in the late 80s and 90s known as punta rock. Despite the penchant of some musicians for synthesized horns and drum machines, its really cool stuff, combining elements from merengue and soca with the off-kilter 6/8 Garifuna groove that’s hard to get a grasp on. The dance involves incredibly high speed booty shaking, that I am either not doing right or is just really exhausting. Punta was the most popular music in Central America for a while, though just now it’s being supplanted by the cancer that is reggaeton. One common Garifuna complaint many ladinos, as mestizos are called here, used the image of Garifuna culture to sell punta on the international scale – the first band to take off in the style, to give you an idea, was called the Banda Blanca (uhh, White Band). Indeed there’s a difference between Garifuna punta bands and those that just threw in one drummer for good measure. But business-savvy ladinos get the lion’s share of the pie, and just aren’t quite as good.

Though I was having trouble finding a live music scene, ironically, in the country’s party capital of La Ceiba, it is alive and well in Trujillo. I already wrote in my last post about the dance parties I went to, but not enough can be said. It makes any other party you ever go to forever after comparatively lame. Despite modernization and what not, people still really get down in an old-school way. The hot band in town is Renovacion Lunu, a bunch of young guys who play punta rock and parrandas at high speeds, only with percussion and voice, so its modern Garifuna stylings that sound like traditional music. On my trip to Santa Fe, I recorded a demo for them, which you can here a little of (unprocessed), right here: Lunu2ndSong.m4a

I passed my week in Trujillo meeting a million people and taking lessons and just being in the awesomest place ever, and I kinda regret not choosing to be there the whole time. I had not one but two Thanksgivings, one with Lillian’s awesome family, and one with Naomi and the 5 million American volunteers in her little town of Cofradia. Much more to be said, but this post is already very long, and you have things to do.

Rain Rain Go Away

Its been raining. For a long time. In fact, its been raining pretty much without stop since I arrived in La Ceiba. Apparently they don´t mess around when they speak of the "rainy season." Living in a coastal city during hurricane season means that there is pretty much water everywhere at all times. And this a sort of rain that only can happen in the tropics - thundering down with terrifying force, unrelenting. Now, my first reaction to the rain was stay inside and get some quality reading/lazing time, waiting for the rains to end. Then I realized that I was bored, and that Ceibenos seem entirely unfazed, going about their business. Bycycling with an umbrella is a popular move. So I eventually got used to riding on streets with water up to my bike pedals, and accepted that I would spend most of my time in Honduras kind of damply. Wet becomes state of being, state of mind.



Where we last left off, I didn´t have malaria, which is awesome. However, a couple of days later I was back in the hospital, and it turned out I had BOTH ameobic and bacterial dysentery. You know, that thing the kids died of in Orgegon Trail in your 3rd grade computer class. After halucinatorily panicking with fever for a few days, I got better.



So between sickness and rain, I lossed a lot of time, but then finally the sun came out, and I started going to the villages and creepily asking around for musicians, and doing interviews and being a the busy little "musicologist" that I apparently am being paid to be. As it turns out La Ceiba is surrounded all around by beautiful jungle waterfalls, and I´m determined to find them all.



I´ve spent most of my time chilling with the surprisingly large Ceiba expat crew (if theres one thing I´m learning, its that theres Americans, Danes, and Australians living in every forgotten corner of the Earth. You are never really more than a stone´s throw away from a Peace Corp member, Bilingual School volunteer, or some weird overwieght and hawaiian-shirted propreitor of something.) Though I do miss being really part of a local community, they are great, and I´ve gotten to feel settled. Its a different kind of thing. On Wednesdays me and some buddies play a gig doing drunken acoustic covers of American pop songs, with repetoire ranging from Bright Eyes to Gorillaz. It´s really fun wilding out on the melodica to Kanye´s "Goldigger", but I think the irony/hilarity is maybe lossed on our largely middle-aged Honduran audience.



I´m now spending the week in Trujillo, an isolated and sleepy town built on a hill overlooking the most beautiful godamn stretch of Carribean beach, in the shadow of emerald towering mountains from storybook chilhood imaginings, and I´m getting some serious grandma treatment from Lillian´s abuela, and its awesome. That means delicious things to eat at all times of day, and an insistance that I not lift a finger to do anything. We watch soccer all day long and indulge in family gossip. Something great about being here in, well, the middle of basically nowhere and seing a Wesleyan flag on the wall.



Trujillo is the site of the first Garifuna mainland settlement, and is unique in being the only really urban Garifuna community. And I´m realizing I should have been here all along. While everywhere I´ve been I´m found people lamenting the shriveling up and dying of hundreds of years of tradition, here culture runs deep. Last night I went to a "disco" in which a group of 8 traditional punta drummers was leading a ridiculous dance party that mixed the traditional music and dance, normally played for wakes, with a modern context of Saturday night wilding. People make a circle, which a girl enters rocking out with rules-of-physics-defying hip swinging, and eventually a guy comes in following her aroun, but never touching. Its straight up traditional, but all young kids dressed in shirt-dresses and yankees fitteds, and in the set breaks All around town people are playing this game that i think is called Santo Malo, in which a dude in a mask and full body paint runs around town chasing kids and blowing a whistle, who have to give him some money if they get caught. This results in hordes of children running around and screaming, and while maybe bizarre, looks like everybody is having fun. Meanwhile I´ve been invited to a nearby village to record yesterday´s drumming group, so you know, moving on up.



Its still raining, but I guess I don´t care.

Sickly in Ceiba

This blog post will probably be short/nonsensical because I have malarial dizzyness and can´t quite think straight.

Well actually, as it turns out, I don´t have malaria, but I´ve spent the last few days violently shaking in Central American hospitals, interspersed with gems of American cinema such as Harold and Kumar goes to White Castle. Hopefully this sickness leaves soon.

Where we last left off, I was dancing punta on national Honduran television. I had really hoped that nobody in Ceiba saw that, but alas, I go to get my bicycle fixed (oh yeah! I have a bicycle, its great), the next day, and the guy behind the counter start laughing and says "I saw you dancing on TV with that leeeetle guitar." Sigh.

That Saturday, I went to an backyard expat Holoween party, shocked and amazed to find large quantites of Americans and Europeans living here in little La Ceiba, dressed as wizards and geishas, dancing to classic rock covers played by a Honduran cover band. This was very exciting, as I hadn´t really talked to a single human being minus my hosts since getting into town. The completely open bar led to too much Gifiti, a lethal Garifuna concoction of moonshine and various herbs and grasses, which in turn led to me vomiting on the side of the highway the next morning after approximately 2 hours of sleep. I was going with Aurelio to a Garifuna catholic youth meeting with lots of music in a dope thatched-cabins-on-the-beach town, but more on all that later.

Some absurdities about life in Honduras so far:

- public transportation is all in tricked-out American yellow school busses that got handed down at some point - little seats for little legs and all.

- Though Spanish is indeed the language here, people for some reason say the phrase "rice and beans" exclusively in English.

- Before I got here, I would have to introduce myself like this: ¨My name is Marlon¨¨ ¨WHAT?" "Marlon like Marlon Brando" "Ohhhh". Well... it just so happens that there is a large fried-chicken chain here in La Ceiba called ¨Pollos Marlon," so I get to say "Marlon, you know, like Marlon Chicken"

- My host Aurelio, ridiculous in many ways, among them his extremely tacky and ostentatious mansion (well, a normal house on American standards I guess, but really out of place luxurious here) and his favorite activity of choosing where to hang his countless awards. Which is not to say anything bad against him - he´s a really incredible guy, a brilliant musician, and a person who really works tirelessly for his people. BUT I was shocked that on the 2 hour drive to the Garifuna village he actually listened to the same song on repeat the entire time. Actually. Its his favorite song, an incredibly tacky country song called "Put Your Troubles On My Shoulder"

OK feeling weak, gotta roll.

Nuevas Tierras

A new place, new things.

Been in Honduras little over a week, and suddenly I am surrounded with new people, new cusines, new language, new reality, and its time to readjust. I spent my first bunch of days in a dusty little cowboy town called Cofradía, where Naomi and 9 other Americans live cramped together in an awesome little compound, where they teach large numbers of rowdy little people how to speak Enlgish, and other life skills. Though I was in an abusrd forgotten corner of the Earth, it was pleasantly college-like living there, spending the night cooking communal meals, drinking beer in hammocks, and making fun of the fat and/or stupid kids in their classes. I guess starred in Miss Naomi´s class as a visiting music teacher, and instructed the 4th grade on the art of beatboxing. Really fun, and hilarious, hopefully I will put a video of the spectacle up here.

Let me tell you about Honduras, or least the part of it I started ot in - think Texas 200 years ago. Really, though, its the wild wild west. Firstly, there is a conspicious lack of people, and endless, gorgeous emerald jungle covered mountains everywhere. The towns are dusty dirt road kind of places where women stay indoors, and cowboy-hated and mustachioed men in sober serious faces play pool in hard-drinking saloons. And when they go out, all cary an old-school revolver in their back pocket. Insanity. The only vehicles are pickup trucks, who will seemingly always stop for you to hitch a ride, and riding in the back of some farmer´s truck through the moutains is an excellent way to fulfill any romantic travelling fantasies.

The food is Mexican-ish, but a little blander, with beans, tortillas, and salty chunks of cheese seeming to make up a large part of the diet. Many restaurants serve three things: Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. However, breakfast and dinner are identical, and pretty similar to lunch. I can´t say I yet understand anything.

Took a weekend trip with Naomi to Copan, famous for crazy Mayan ruins, but I was more impressed by the bizarreness of the town. Due to the backpacker nature of tourists that come to Copan, the place is the Burlington of Central America, the sort of place where Honduran cowboys and curried thai tofu live peacfully side by side. Its absolutely bizarre, though, as the town is filled with sleek cafes and bars owned by painfully-cool-blonde-belgian-expats, fairtrade art stores AND even a higher cowboy hats per capita rate than in Cofradia. The other thing, is that there were no actual tourists there. It was as if they are all waiting for the tourists to come.

All thats past now, and after 6 hours of winding through beautiful jungle mountains, I arrived in my new home, La Ceiba, where I am currently living in the half-built mansion of senator and pop-star Aurelio Martinez. La Ceiba is like a whole other country. It sits sweating on the Carribean Coast, filled with a diverse group of hispanic Hondurans, afro-indigenous Garifuna (more on them later), English-speaking decendents of imigrants from Grand Cayman, and decendents of Americans and Europeans that came to administer or work on the banana plantaions. Built entirely by Chiquita banana, the town looks more like a Southern American city, maybe New Orleans, and has a sort of pan-Carribean culture, where you never know what language to address anybody in. And the only nightlife in Honduras to speak of, with a bustling beachside club strip. No cowboy hats, lots of doo-rags. Every other person is selling lychee nuts on the street, I don´t know why. Most insanely, American country music is one of the most popular music styles here, with thugged out types dancing the latest Nashville two-steps.

Aurelio invited me to play with him headlining a benefit concert for disabled children on national TV. Crilaton 2007, as the event was named, went down last night in a school gym, and had a sort of high-school-talent-show thing going on. Once again, sound failure in the last moment prevented me from being able to play, yet somebody Aurelio tricked me me into dance on stage with him, feebily shaking my hips on national Honduran television. Hopefully nobody in town will remember this.

I did meet some cool musical expats there however who invited me to play a weekly gig with them, and to go to a Haloween party tonight at the subtly-named "Expatriate´s Bar." I am excited for this, but somewat feverish (malaria? dengue? dysentary?), and need to find a costume.

Till the next update, all my love.

Bored in a Miami Airport, Goodbyes, and Maybe Americans Really Do Suck

I’m in Miami, well, in the airport. Its funny, to me, to reflect that this is the most time I’m going to spend in America for the next year. I was excited for the prospect of a 3 hour layover with wireless internet connections to lose myself in the sweet surrender of email. But actually, I really was looking forward to joys of internet, a lot, and this disturbs me. Alas, no wireless in the Miami airport. Other than that I’ve gorged myself on American things, National Geographics, Starbucks Coffee, Kettle Chips. Strangely… unsatisfying. But how lovely to be able to throw toilet paper in the toilet. It’s the little things.

But really on my mind are the goodbyes, there were many, and how sad to leave a place that really became home. My last week in DR was spent getting ready for the next leg of the journey, doing little things, having fun with Dominican crew. Since my eviction I crashed on the couches (metaphorically) of various members of Santo Domingo’s artist community, eventually ending up renting a spare room in the colonial house of an impoverished gay writer. The kicker – a pool and a roof terrace. Went to the beach in the hippie-mobile of my friend Guillermo, passed up an opportunity to jumpstart my acting career as a French soldier in a History Channel rendition of the Haitian Revolution. Had a goodbye party in which we played music all night in the park, gave hugs and said “nos vemos” and ya, me fui ya.

Amazing though – my recorder that was stolen in the robbery got back to me. How this happened is a long and convoluted story, but basically I went back to Villa Mella a couple of times to talk to community members, tell them about the assault, and ask for them to do their best to help find my stuff, above all my recorder. A drummer fiend Giovanni, who happens to be a brujo or witch, told me it was going to turn up, though I was pessimistic. He spent three whole days entirely investigating my situation, found the thieves through their mothers and girlfriends, found the corner store they traded it to for a night of free beer, bought it back from grocer, and got it to me hours before my flight, all without asking for a penny. This is true kindness. I gave him a bottle of vitamins in return (he said he always wanted vitamins…) a bizarre trade in the last moments of Dominican life in a Santo Domingo pizzeria.

But really, truly sad to leave, but this is the nature of my life now. Get there, get comfortable, get going. I sometimes think I know more people in Santo Domingo than in New York. I can’t help but think that I worked so hard to make a life that worked, and its gone like the dust with a snap of the fingers. But this blog wasn’t supposed to be about feelings.

Being an American living and traveling in the Dominican Republic is met with about three basic responses. One is “I’ll give you 8 thousand dollars to marry me for papers.” Another is, “Oh I have a tio in Washington Heights, I’m waiting for a visa to go myself.” The third is, “Yuck, Americans suck,” translated into the appropriate Dominican slang. To the first two, I sometimes will just smile blankly or will try to explain that although I understand the economic impetus to want to bounce out of the DR, that America’s streets aren’t actually paved in gold and there are certain things about the quality of life that really are better on the island. To the third, I try to convince people otherwise, that the bullshit on American television and in American government doesn’t represent the real people, that we have a rich artistic aesthetic of jazz, diners and beatniks, that we aren’t really that bad. I try to be an embassador of American chillness.

However, on being back in America for three hours, I have to say, maybe Americans really do suck. At least ruddy-faced, frumpy, screechy voiced and unfriendly Floridians. I can already tell it’s going to be rough to be back.

Which is not to say I don’t miss you New York, and all of you beautiful people in it.

Next time in Honduras!

The Colorful Characters of Parque Duarte

This is an old blog article I wrote and never put up. Why not, I figure?

I have the great fortune to live one block from Parque Duarte, a little plaza that has been at the very center of my social life here in Santo Domingo, and the spot where I got connected to virtually everybody in the folklore/Afro-Dominican scene. Think, perhaps, a Union Square, minus hipsters, plus the ability to legally drink in the park, plus a colmado (Dominican for bodega) that sells jumbo sized Presidente beer for a mere $2.50. The park, though packed to the brim on weekends with all sorts of people, is consistently stocked with regulars who seemingly never leave. It is certainly the center of alternative culture in the city, filled with brilliant and mostly broke artists of all generations, drinking and… well, drinking, day by day.

Each crew has a part of the park where they traditionally congregate – the gay community is over by the statue of the horse, then the black-clad heavy metal kids, the domino-toting dykes, and the main part inhabited by my friends, who for lack of a better word, are the hippies of the Dominican Republic. My best buddies are Pipin, a writer and self-proclaimed leader of the "Movimiento Erranticista" who carries himself with constant rock star swagger, Jean Jean, a Haitian actor who has no money but 50 pairs of shoes, and Renato, an artist who almost exclusively paints cats.

When there is nothing to do, I just go down to the park, and am sure to find friends drinking on the benches, a jam session, a man who sells delicious cheese on sticks, some strange performance art, a magic show, at least one crazy person yelling nonsense, and always, good times.

But what I want to write about are some of the more colorful personalities who frequent the park.

Victor Camilo

The unico-en-el-mundo Victor Camilo, now at the ripe age of sixty-something, studied sociology in the states for 19 years (claiming to have all that time never gone to a class without being stoned), and knows seemingly everything. He is usually raving drunk, and never stops talking, using the word "discourse" every seven words. He used to be the official photographer of the Fania All-Stars, and finds himself in every possible situation. He has pictures of himself with Pele, with the Queen of Spain, with everybody imaginable. His friends all think he's over-educated, so he has taken to me because I have a degree from an American college and put up with his verbosity more than most. In the words of Jane's mama, Carol Charles, who shared schooling with him, "He's really crazy."

Yeyo

Yeyo is the black Dominican Elvis. He is obsessed with American blues, country, and rockabilly and consistently talks about how Elvis was the true messiah. He speaks in a low, incomprehensible growl, constantly laughing and hugging people he doesn't know. The man exclusively dresses in black pants, black shirt, black leather vest, and black cowboy hat, and though it may seem that he only owns one outfit, his friends assure me he just has a closet filled with 10 versions of the same clothes. He sings in a poorly-rehearsed but high-spirited psychedelic blues band.

El Rey de Los Perros

The best-known beggar in the Zona Colonial is the King of the Dogs, and lanky fellow who travels with a pack of 30 dogs of all shapes and sizes. Like clockwork, every night he comes over with the same speech. "Please, 5 pesos for the Rey de Los Perros, so he can feed his wolves, etc etc." He speaks to his dogs in a language of whistles, which they seemingly understand perfectly. In one recent park drama, the police beat him up (the police beat people up pretty regularly) for some disrespectful comment, with the whole park protesting and the dogs yelling. What the police didn't know is that the Rey de Los Perros was once a well-regarded amateur boxer. When one argument with the acid-head bum who lives on my corner turned violent, he knocked the guy out with one punch. Don't mess with the Rey de Los Perros.

Robberies, Jail Breaks, Evictions or Trouble in Paradise

Things have gotten a whole lot crazier since last posting. Best buddies Laura and Vlad were in for the weekend and I was determined to show them a good time. Saturday, the third day they were here, was the fiesta of San Miguel, one of the biggest Saint’s Days of the year, so it was a perfect excuse to bring them along to the parties to see what it is exactly I do here. The whole weekend had a strange energy in the air in general; the day before the lights went out in the entire Zona Colonial, and the torrential tropical rains came down heavier than normal. We checked out one fairly uneventful celebration in the neighborhood and then caught a guagua to Mata Los Indios, Villa Mella, the distant shack-and-mango-tree filled barrio where I do most of my work.

There was, as always, a wonderful huge celebration going on there, with communal food, kids playing, a beautiful altar inside the house, and a live electric band leading the festivities. We got our plate of rice and beans and settled under a tree. San Miguel is syncretized to Belie Belcan, a god of storms, of warriors, and of many other things. The participants were doing a dance that involved circling a machete around people’s heads. We ate delicious passion fruit icees and dug the glory that is a Saturday in Mata Los Indios.

My little buddy Elan, the 8 year old heir to the Cofradia de los Congos, a terrific drummer, and all-around coolest kid in the neighborhood took us down to the river past the town. Along the way we got together a gang of little dudes to guide us, running around and freestyling reggaeton and generally being free-spirited village children. The path went past town, through pastures dotted with soaring palms and jungle, across streams. We chilled out bathing in the river, took pictures of our crew doing flips off an overhanging branch, smoked cigarettes in the shade. We all agreed it was one of the nicest days we ever had.

We returned to town and started heading out on the road that leads to the highway back to the city. Walking along happy-as-can-be, the sun setting past the point that I like to be walking by myself in Villa Mella, a guy in front of us motioned for us to stop, and wham, my first-ever-in-life mugging. Six guys, two of them with guns aimed at us appeared out of seemingly-nowhere, took everything we had, and were gone. And I mean everything – recording equipment, camera, licenses, credit cards, keys, sunglasses, my notebook with my music transcriptions. Everything. Except for Vlad’s coca-cola he was holding, he got to keep that, as one onlooker duly noted.

No time for panic as night sets in the hood and three gringos without even one peso and stranded far far from the safety of home, I panic somewhat anyway and we hurry into the barrio to find someone I know. Luckily, and I repeat, so luckily we run into Giovanni, a friend of mine, drummer, and brujo. He gives us all the money he has, the 5 dollars we need to make it back, and takes us up the back road to the highway. Due to festivities all over Villa Mella, the world’s worst traffic jam awaits us, and the busses leading back to town don’t appear. We get into a public taxi, who doesn’t charge us after hearing our story, and start on our long journey home. On the last leg of the trip in carro publico, a woman in front of us turns around, and with great concern, says “You guys are tourists? You should be really careful, you could get robbed” We smiled amongst ourselves. We didn’t have the heart to tell her.

Miraculously, I somehow left the door of my apartment unlocked. This is really miraculous, because I’ve never done this before, and there would have been no way to get to the last of our money, or even their passports to go home the next morning. Strange happenings.

We head down to Parque Duarte, where a big festival that me and Vlad were supposed to play in is happening, tell our story to my friends. As it turns out, my friend Renato was picked up by the police that morning for no reason, and he’s stuck in a 12 meter cell with 37 murderous thieves. Off to the rescue.

We get to the jail, where various sinister, pot-belied, gray-uniformed policemen are sitting around and laughing as horrible screams of pain are coming from the cell. I tell them I am a respected anthropologist and they have arrested my associate, a vital contributor to Dominican culture. For the first time, my official letter of introduction from the Watson Foundation comes in handy. When four white people show up to the jail at 1am to get a guy out, the police respond. They let him out, and Renato comes out of that stinking cell the happiest man in the world. He was going to be sleeping on the floor in his own urine until Wednesday. As the cops even admitted themselves, he was picked up for having suspicious looking hair, little pointy dreads. Que pais. I earned myself a free Renato original (my boy is a badass painter), and its time for celebration. Our spirits, pretty fucking low, have been lifted.

The night continues and we go to a crowded palos drumming-house-party with a huge altar covered with millions of kinds of fruit, and we dance till the early morning singing ancient songs to San Miguel. Life is absurd, sometimes. More often than not these days.

Well my friends have left, and here I am with no money, my contacts lost with my cellphone, my transcriptions gone, my equipment gone, seemingly starting from scratch after months of work. But I’m alive, and all things considered, feeling allright. After getting robbed like that, there is this feeling of violation I’ve never known, of helplessness. Its going to be a while before I start to live without an ugly tasting ball of fearfulness lodged somewhere in my throat. Traveller’s innocence robbed, in a way, and after months of happily roaming where I please and having marvelous adventures, its time to step back and remember after all that I am a conspicuous gringo in an impoverished land. Piece my piece I’m putting my life back together.

Its rained all week since, and there is a certain gloom in the air. I’ve been slacking on doing my investigation and spending lots of time cooking dinner parties with my friends and digging the last moments of my glorious Santo Domingo life. My buddy Jean Jean and his Spanish girlfriend Cristina have been crashing on my floor, and it’s nice to have housemates again. Thursday was my third show with Duluc, this one also fraught with sound failure, but an amazing, drunk, and enthusiastic crowd. As he went around the corner after the show to get cigarettes, he too was arrested for suspicious hair, until the police realized he was a famous musician.

The bad news, though, is that I just got kicked out of my apartment today by my landlord, under accusations of “haciendo coro con tigueres y enanos,” or “having parties with swindlers and dwarves.” While my friends do have suspicious hair, mostly, they are certainly not tigueres (the word basically meaning delinquent/ rapscallion). As for the dwarf… I have to admit I didn’t invite him over and somehow new having a dwarf over would mess my shit up. So shitily, I have to find a new place to stay in three days. I will really miss my apartment, it’s become home, and symbolic of the settled-ness I feel in this country. Oh well, time to ramble.