Jamaica Nice

"So why do they call it the Cunha Cunha Pass?", H asked. We were sitting around a fire with Peter, president of the Bowden Pen Farmer's Collective. The mosquitoes had ebbed, the night was quiet, stars sharp against a cooling sky. The lurks and murmurs, insects and frogs and birds calling through the tropical forest, leaves and trees in the breeze, had faded to background, an aural patina.

"Because de Brits cunha find it!" Peter answered proudly. "De maroons would use de trees, so dat de soldiers couldna find de trail.". The path was clear now, we'd hiked in two days before, walked up from the town of Hayfield . Peter's collective had cleared the trail a few years back, cut back the bamboo and the brush, built bridges over the streams and small waterfalls that slid down the slopes, put up "rest-up" shelters, so that it was now an easy path, broad enough to be a road in most parts.

After a few days of "bushing" in Jamaica's highlands, we were very appreciative of good paths. But the Brits hadn't had this convenience, during their war with the rebel maroons. This area had been an insurgent stronghold


From the pass, we could see the John Crow mountains to our right, and the Blue Mountains to our left - both ranges were national parks. The slopes dropped into the valley of the Rio Grande, curving a few hundred* feet below us through green hills, lush jungle. Another easy hour or two's walk had brought us down to Bowden Pen

"Dis is de oldest trail in Jamaica", Peter claimed. H and I looked skeptically at each other. The Arawaks had been here first, before the Spanish, before the Brits, before the Africans that both had brought over to work the plantations as slaves. "Actually, we don't call them Arawaks anymore. They're Taino", I'd been informed a week earlier, by a sculpture artist from a university in Massachusetts - we'd been chatting over Red Stripes in the genteel lobby of the Terra Nova Hotel, in Kingston about plasma cutters and revivalism*- he was part of a study tour on Caribbean post-colonial identity and culture. "It's like calling an inuit person an eskimo.", he announced.

Well possibly, but all the Arawaks were dead, quickly wiped out by disease, after the Europeans arrived. So there isn't anyone left to feel culturally slighted. To my knowledge, the Taino had arisen much more recently, and spread across the Caribbean in the form of an appealling theme for tourists - day trips to see their cave art and rock paintings, archaeological shards, dioramas and bones in museums, and terra cotta simulacra available at gift shops.

I thought there might have been some cultural/genetic mingling between the Arawaks and the Maroons, but according to Peter, the Maroons had fought and killed any they came across. Which pretty much adheres to standard cross-cultural interaction - If a new tribe successfully wins a foothold on the coast, the prior inhabitants will move inland, occupying less desirable/accessible areas. Which is what happened when the Spanish settled in Jamaica - the surviving Arawaks moved inland. Which in Jamaica's case, is also upland - dominating the island is the Blue Mountain ridge, steep slopes of dense forest, tight valleys curled through the butressing hills.

Sensing our skepticism, Peter elaborated - "When de British come, de Maroons run away. Dey try to find a way tru de mountains. Dey try all de passes, but can't come tru..." He's gesturing with his hands, the flight out of Kingston, north into the hills, and then deflecting eastwards. We'd been hiking that general area, and it was true, there hadn't been any easy paths across the Grand Ridge, between here and Kingston. "When dey find the Cunha Cunha Pass, dey cross over, and live here." He concluded, smiling, and I understood his pride - this valley, this area, was where the Maroons, his ancestors, had first settled - the pass was the Maroon's Plymouth Rock, and Peter lived in sight of it.

There are moments of insight, when a landscape meshes with an understanding of how the land, the environment has shaped the culture, the history of a place, how it's shaped and affected the people. I haven't come up with a good pithy term for that yet, but as Peter lights up a cigarette, I can suddenly imagine what it must have been like for the Maroons, when the Spanish suddenly fled - they were free of their masters, and rather than stay and wait for the English and more tyranny, likely worse, since the Brits had pushed their current overlords into panicked flight, they headed for the interior, away from Kingston's harbour, North into the highlands, and when the mountains got too steep, the strongest, the most determined, kept pushing, scrambling and hacking their way up likely valleys until they dead-ended again, at a waterfall, a cliff face, a steep tangled morass of jungle.

And what must it have been like, to finally break through, across the Grand Ridge, and find an empty valley, shelter, refuge, freedom? The slaves became Maroons, warriors that decimated every military expedition that the Brits sent at them, swooped and raided the plantations along the coast, and then pulled back into their Zion. And Peter's smile still echos the pride, the determination of his ancestors, who made of this valley a new homeland, outlasted the British Empire, farming and hunting where his people had for centuries.