The Calm Before the Storm

With summer camps and professional development cancelled, many of us didn't know what to do with our free time.  We expected to be busy planning, teaching, crafting, exchanging, blogging.  We didn't plan on flooding, packing, waiting for Hurricane Earl.

Our last big event before the hurricane was at the cultural center.  From the street, the center looks like one of those barbecue places you see driving down a road your GPS insisted was faster.  At dusk we entered, the sweltering heat suffocating any doubt we may have had about eating here.

I am a reformed picky eater.  It was not a point of contention with my husband when we got married, but he simply saw it as a challenge.  He was very much a foodie who had grown tired of his small town food; I grew up on a farm eating the exact same Southern recipes and was tired of them.  We spent the first 7 years of our marriage with me insisting I didn't like something, and him insisting on cooking it.  It wasn't until I hit middle age that I knew I needed to eat less potato, more tomato.  I began to experiment and find things I like; I quickly turned into an even more picky eater because instead of only liking a few foods one way, I liked lots of different foods in VERY specific ways.  I wasn't afraid to try the traditional Garifuna food, but I wasn't hopeful that I would enjoy it.

We were welcomed into a bar area with an old tube television in the corner.  The wicker furniture was unstable, worn from the various groups who had come to experience the story of a triumphant culture celebrating their ability to preserve history.  The docent began the video, and through that old vacuum tube we were transported through the story before the story.  We were reminded of the Middle Passage, bodies tossed overboard like banana peels out a car window, and European insistence that Africans were meant to be enslaved.  Although these stories are not new to those of us in education, the storytellers were new. Garifuna telling the story of the Garifuna; all people should get to tell their own story.

After the video we were served buffet style; I asked the attendant what each dish was, not to in any way dismiss it, but to simply know what I was trying.  I dipped the serving spoon intimately into a piece of their history; fish that sustained them on the coast, and cassava root that leads to the matriarchal branch of each family tree. Their story begged to be consumed.

Paulo Friere, in his essay "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," posits that "human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which men transform the world" (p. 157).  The Garifuna continue to be nourished by the words of their people -- written, spoken, and sung.  Friere urges that educators transform the world through awareness of the essentials of another's reality; the reality is that the Garifuna know they are only one voice among many.  In fact, they embrace the country they share with the Chinese, Lebanese, Mayan, Creole and European populations.

They share their voice with anyone who will listen.  As the hurricane approached our tiny island, I could hear settlement day songs from each cloud.  As the leaves bent toward the ground I could see the young dancer bending over to wash her clothes, as the drums memorialized those before her.  The trembling coconuts resembled the hips of the Punta dance, if I just squinted a little.  It's easy to let a storm brew inside you, to be disappointed and frustrated at history; what's harder is to let the storm pass over you and realize that history is constantly happening, and you are a part of it, just like everyone else before you.

References:
Freire, P.  (2013). Pedagogy of the oppressed. In D. Flinders & S. Thornton (Eds.), The Curriculum Studies Reader (pp. 157 - 166). New York, NY: Routledge.