Resistance of the Black Carib

POETRY is an earthshaking tool used to convey love and hope. It bemoans injustice and rallies for change. But seldom is it used as a medium for a historicity that is profound, instructive and arguably prophetic.

Reverend Canon Horatio Nelson Huggins has accomplished this rare feat with Hiroona a narrative that details the epic struggle between the Black Caribs (also known as Garifuna) of St Vincent and the British.

In this fictionalised but ironically accurate account of the Second Carib War of 1795- 97 we are teleported to the birth of the so-called New World where Social Darwinism lay waste to many an innocent people.

It is revelatory work of qualitative existential value, a work that mirrors some of the lethal confrontations between expeditionary forces and indigenes throughout the world.

Hiroona proves that warfare is but a matrix of multiple forces jockeying for mastery of people and resources. What defines this literary monument is the medium it uses to tell this tragic tale, a medium characterised by a rich poetic style that is colourful, nuanced and equally bold.

Equally impressive is the editor’s ability to recapture the originality of the manuscript.

We are enraptured by the subtly of expressions and the varied play on words. While contemporary, standard literature may advocate different constructs we cannot help but be mesmerised by Huggins’ linguistic adaptations.

His is an offering that explores just about every human experience - romance, politics, enculturation, and miscegenation (between black Africans and Caribs that changed the phenotypic characteristics of the later).

The author who died in 1895 relies on oral tradition that is hardly remote and uncorroborated.

He injects tales told by those who were directly involved in the deadly fray, a fray that saw the Black Caribs expelled and culturally gutted. We end up with an incisive look at their culture – social and political hierarchy, rituals, and the intriguing role of the Carib woman.

And there is romance, passion and sensibility.

But it is the insurgency that excites the imagination.

We relive the ferocious resistance of the indigenous people.

Huggins writes of one raid in this vividly captivating verse, “Around and scattered abroad, The Homestead’s desecrated sward, The charred and littered fragments lay of household furniture and store; And grimmed with smoke and smeared with gore, The severed limb and mangled corpse, Of negro slave, and mule and horse. And yonder, midst the fire and smoke, Whose volume for a moment broke; The hideous forms of Carib glide, Ghoullike, and hugely magnified!” Later, he gets more impressively graphic, “Secure; the prowling Caribs crept, with neither moon to guide nor star, The bloody foot-steps of their war - So settlers old traditions say, they crept like midnight beasts of prey, And sprang, as savage and as wild, on helpless woman, maid, and child; they sprang ferocious in attack. Alike in white man and in black; they spared no life that night, but gave to death the master and the slave.” Indeed, the Black Caribs fought back valiantly but succumbed and were expelled; many were sent to Honduras under insufferable conditions.

Decades later others moved to Trinidad, Guatemala and New York.

Today, Black Caribs are seeking redress for past wrongs. And we are ever moved by Dr Ralph Gonsalves, the Prime Minister of St Vincent, who, oftentimes addresses this tragedy. In 2015 at the annual Wreath-Laying ceremony in Dorsetshire to commemorate national hero Joseph Chatoyer, he expressed his outrage at the demise of the island’s indigenous people.

“If the International Criminal Court existed back then”, he averred, “the British would have been “hauled” before it for genocide.” He detailed the whole scale massacre of men, women and children.

“Many rather than being killed jumped off from cliffs and went to their watery graves; even to the last that was their resistance.” He then asked rhetorically, “They took all the lands and you tell me I must not get reparations?” As the legal battle continues unabated Hiroona assumes new importance.

Without question, Huggins’ signature work is must read for anyone roused by injustice of any kind.

Book: Hiroona: An Historical Romance in Poetic Form by Reverend Reverend Canon Horatio Nelson Huggins Publisher: The University of the West Indies Press, Jamaica ISBN: 978-976-640- 553-3 Available at Amazon Ratings: Recommended