by
Mykel Board
ENTRY
SIXTEEN
Nov,
2013
[Recap:
From the start, it doesn't look good for this trip. Everything goes
right... always a bad sign. Nothing portends disaster like
everything going right.
Easy
subletter in New York... smooth flight to Miami... promises of “meet
you at the airport/seaport”... $10 a night accommodations in
Guyana, the rest free.
Uh
oh! Too good. The better the news before, the bigger the fall later.
And things get worse. (Better) Miami goes so smoothly you could cry.
The only problem is a lot of rain-- heavy rain. The streets are
rivers... waves in the pool. I get wet. Very wet.
Then
on to North Trinidad, where my friends pick me up at the airport and
take me drinkin'-- and more drinking. Then, to South Trinidad... some
fun adventures... meet a Goddess... er... Empress... of a girl. It
doesn't rain so much in Trinidad.
Then
to the airport and off to Guyana.
In
Guyana, my facebook friends from KEEP
YOUR DAY JOB!
meet me at the airport. From there, we go to Jamal's. This is the
only time I have to pay for a place to sleep: 15 days for $150. Not
bad. No, it doesn't go perfectly. But it goes, and I meet some great
people in the country-- including Jamal. My trip to Kaiteur
Falls
in the jungle is-- at 741 feet-- a high point.
The
two weeks of my stay in Guyana are adventure-filled, and beer-dulled.
Most days, it rains. Sometimes for just an hour or two in the
afternoon. Sometimes all day.
“I
don't get it Mykel,” Jamal tells me. “This isn't the rainy
season.”
“Rainman,”
I say.
He
doesn't get it.
The
plan is to travel to Suriname with Keep Your Day Job! But, uh
oh... a drummer problem. Two drummers agreed to tour with us. One, a
close friend, the other, more PUNKROCK. They ditch the friend for the
punkrocker. He bails at the last minute. The now former-friend
doesn't answer emails. This cannot work out. We go to Suriname
anyway-- drummerless. It works out.
In
Suriname, I stay with a punkrock student and his super-generous
parents. They cook for me every day. I mention a local synagogue;
they arrange a tour. I mention a trip to “the interior,” bang,
we're there... surveying monkey meat. When dad can't do it, they get
the poor son, Jose, to chauffeur me; as if he doesn't have enough
with schoolwork and his own band, ADHD
He hopes for rain... It's an excuse to stay
home. Often, there's rain.
Then
it's on to French Guyana, where the brother of one of my top ten
pals, Simon,
lives with his
girlfriend Marie. His name is Florian.
I
take a small boat across the river that separates French Guiana from
Suriname. The captain lets me choose my port of entry: “legal or
backtrack?” I choose legal. At immigration, I annoy the white
immigration officers by asking for a passport stamp. They give it to
me and hustle me away. I'm hungry as shit and don't know where I am.
It's raining.
What
happens? Marie meets me on the road, helps me negotiate a ride with a
French Guianan truck driver, and gets me to her place. Smooth as a
baby's ass. The first morning is a crepe breakfast. Then a dip in the
pool. Then, I donno. Everything is spot on... except for the rain.
Well, there's the car. Florian's car breaks down just before I
arrived. Bad news?
No
problem! His friend lends him a jalopy...windows don't close...
wipers don't work... car door doesn't open from the inside.
My
first days in French Guyana are distress free... unless you count the
bottom paddling I get from my friends' spare bicycle. I have one of
the best days of the entire trip: canoeing through the Amazon with
Florian, as my French guide. Chased by dogs, paddle-blistered hands,
bitten by mosquitoes, stuck in the roots of swamp trees... it's
wonderful.
Then
an afternoon trip to a former French work camp, a type of holding
prison for workers sent to French Guiana when it was a penal colony.
I see Papillon's name scratched into the floor of a cell there.
After
that, it's meet the friends and the adventure continues.]
============
Last
month I wrote about buying a ticket for the Work Camp tour. That was
at a small tourist office by the intersection of the Marowijne River
(that separates Suriname from French Guiana)and the Caribbean Ocean.
The office serves as a kind of meeting point, and information center
for French expats and other non-natives. Tacked to the outside door
is this:
Mama
Bobi? Sounds Yiddish. Taki taki. Nenge tongo? What?
It
just so happens I know... sort of... what they're talking about. The
Guyanas (Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana) were colonies that used
African slave labor to work for their colonial overseers. Slaves were
given food and some sort of primitive housing and they had to work...
mostly long hard hours in the sugar canefields. It's like
capitalism-- with free food and housing.
A
lot of the slaves didn't like it though. In Guyana, there was a
rebellion. The rebels lost. In Suriname, the locals used the native
Indians to keep the slaves in line. In French Guyana, the French used
penal colony workers to supplement the slaves who ran into the jungle
to make their own communities.
In
the beginning of the colonial period the Guyanas weren't clearly
divided. One ran into the other. What is now Suriname used to be part
of British Guyana. Later, the British and the Dutch traded. The Dutch
got Suriname. The British got New York. I often think the Dutch got
the better deal.
Escaped
slaves had little regard for borders. They settled anywhere they
could, trying to maintain their distance from their white slave
masters, and the Native Indian bounty hunters.
To
communicate with each others, the runaway slaves developed a language
using what they knew. Mainly a mixture of English and Dutch, the new
language, Tongue of the Negroes, (Nenge Tongo, get it?)
developed its own vocabulary and grammar.
Is
it just a jumble of Dutch and English? It doesn't look like that.Asaw
is the word for elephant in
Nenge Tongo. It clearly isn't from either of those Germanic
languages. How did that word get into the language? There are no
elephants in South America. Looks African to the experts... and so
there's more to the language than meets the ear.
The
language also uses a process called reduplication
common to some languages like Japanese (guro
guro, a growling
stomach or tokidoki
occasionally). Moshi moshi... which is what the Japanese use when
they answer the phone-- means MOUSE in Nenge Tongo. Dutch and English
rarely use this kind of word structure.
 |
| Some Nenge Tongo |
Carlos,
one of Florian's fellow teachers is tri-lingual: English, French,
Nenge Tongo. He teaches Nenge Tongo in his spare time and this
afternoon I sit in on a lesson.
At
Carlos' house, he brings out the local booze. It's my kind of
language lesson that begins with a drink! The bottle's label says
Rhum Supreme. On it is a drawing of a somewhat frightened
slave, and some squiggles that look like a combination of a swastika
and a penis.
Mighty
tasty stuff-- the rum, that is.
I
think I'll have another, a third please! Even though it's Caribbean,
I can feel AFRICA course through my veins with every sip. Ever since
the canoe trip, there's been JUNGLE in my blood. Now it's AFRICAN
JUNGLE, transplanted, but still African....
“Another
rum tangitangi!” Somehow I don't remember much more of the lesson.
After
the lesson, we're off to an outdoor restaurant by the beach. I buy
Parbo for the crew... it's the least I can do for my free lesson.
Suddenly
there comes the sound of drums. Not South American... not Calypso...
not socca, not something from Parbo nights.
“What's
that?” I ask.
“Drums,”
says Florian.
Wiseguy.
“It's
African,” I tell him, “I can feel the rhythms. I can tell the
players... Slave blood runs through their veins. The agony of chains,
the ecstasy of chains removed. The original weltshmertz, expressed
the only way possible, through beating... harsh... beautiful. The
sound of AFRICA!”
“Huh?”
he says.
“I've
got to find it,” I tell him, “I need to experience this...
this... this... essence. Real African blood, translated into the
sound of hands and sticks against animal skin.”
I
stand up and follow the sound... into the building next to our
outdoor table... around the corner. It's getting louder... calling to
me in it's most primitive agony. Ahead... an open door...
FUCK!
I can't believe it. A bunch of white people. One colored guy, at the
end, barely in the group... a token... that's it. The leader is a
white woman in her late thirties who wouldn't look out of place at a
feminist anti-porn rally. That's it! My uncle Bernie in Forest Hills
has more African soul than these guys.
 |
| From French Guyana |
Crestfallen,
I slink back to the table where my friends are enjoying the beer.
“Did
you feel the essence?” Florian asks.
I
change the subject.
“Carlos,”
I say. “Could you do me a favor?”
“Sure
Mykel, as long as it won't humiliate (he pronounces it like a
Frenchman: oomeeleeAht)
me.”
Wiseguy.
“Would
you say something in Nenge Tongo to all the reader who is reading
about this adventure?”
“Are
you sure your grammar is right, Mykel?”
“I
know my audience,” I tell him.
And
here it is: Carlos speaks to my reader. Sorry about the heavy
background noise. Kids are annoying all over the world.
 |
| From French Guyana |
During
my trip, we go to visit Carlos' sister in a Nenge Tongo village. The
escaped slave descendents have not only made their own language,
they've designed their own buildings... a kind of suburban house, on
low stilts to keep it off the often wet, sometimes completely liquid,
land.
Here
is an eerie picture of one of the houses. Check out how it's raised
off the ground.
 |
| A Nenge Tongo House-- in the rain |
They've
also developed their own fabric designs. Earthy colors and intricate
patterns.
.JPG) |
| Marie checks out the Nenge Tongo goods |
The
next day is my penultimate one in French Guyana. We're gonna start
with a trip to a Hmong village, then end with the super carnival. A
festival planned for months... like a carnival... The teachers have
worked on this... trained... found talent... worked with it...
make tents... booths... got sponsors. It's the super big deal of
the year.
“Mykel,”
Florian tells me, “it's got everything you want: a trapeze, clowns,
bands, sexy girls on stilts, movies. It will be the best thing you've
ever seen in South America... maybe in your life.”
“Is
it better than sex?” I ask.
He
turns to me, stares hard at my crotch, then snickers.
“It
depends,” he says.
-end-
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