Abstract
In Weathered Men, Clif Duke, who is now thirty years old, returns to the home he left when he was sixteen. After spending more than fourteen years in the capital of San José, Costa Rica he comes back to the small Caribbean coast village of Estrada to reconcile his own sense of the belonging and to uncover the complex history of Jamaican migration to Central America through the lives of his mother, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Through this journey to rediscover his Afro-West Indian roots, Clif must answer for himself the question, “Are you Costa Rican, are you really Costa Rican?” Will Clif be able to claim both his Caribbean heritage and the nation of his birth, which marginalizes blackness?
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Notes
- 1.
SNAA—Servicio Nacional de Acueductos y Alcantarillado (National Service of Aqueducts and Drainage).
- 2.
Pocomania, also called Pukumania, is a Jamaican folk religion, characterized by rituals that include African-influenced dance and musical expressions, drumming, and spirit possession.
- 3.
Paña—a pejorative term for the white and mestizos Costa Rican nationals. It is a derivative of España, or Spanish and means “Spanish people” and their customs; cacique—chief.
- 4.
“Heart of a Woman (corazón de mujer) is the common name of a flower that grows in the Caribbean lowlands of Costa Rica.
- 5.
“Linstead Market”—a popular Jamaican folksong about a woman who goes to the market to sell her ackee (a staple fruit in the Jamaican diet). Customers look at her produce, but no one buys and she fears her children will go hungry.
- 6.
Tepezcuintle—Also called a “paca” or “agouti,” it is a large rodent found in the tropical lowlands of Central America. During the first half of the twentieth century, it was considered a prized protein source of peasant farmers. The paca is primarily nocturnal and prefers to burrow near rivers.
- 7.
Massa Keith—Reference to Minor C. Keith, the US businessman who managed the contract with the Costa Rican government to build a railroad from the Central Valley to Puerto Limón. The project heavily depended on West Indian labor.
- 8.
Mangonía—a reference to a fictional place found in one of Duncan’s earlier pieces of short fiction.
- 9.
Bammy—Jamaican flatbread made from cassava (yucca) flour. Traditionally it is eaten with a meal, sometimes soaked with coconut milk, milk, or water and fried before serving.
- 10.
These are foods found in the traditional Jamaican diet. Yam, yampi, and dasheen (taro) are tubers; coco is the meat of the coconut; breadfruit is a starchy fruit, usually roasted, boiled, or fried; ackee is a fruit, typically eaten for breakfast with prepared salted codfish; arrowroot is a starch derived from a rhizome used to make medicinal foods; bush tea is an herbal tea made from a variety of local plants and roots, typically has a medicinal purpose.
- 11.
Cholo—a pejorative term associated with the marginalized culture and customs of Costa Rican peasants.
- 12.
Pickney—Jamaican and Limonese Creole English word for “child” or “children.” May be a derivation of the Spanish word, pequeño, which means “small” or “little one.”
- 13.
Rundown, also called rundung or rondón, is a Jamaican stew typically with fish or seafood with coconut milk, tubers, aromatic vegetables, and seasonings.
- 14.
From the Jamaican folk song “Ball gawn roun’” sung to accompany a children’s circle game where children pass the ball from one to another behind their backs and one child who is “Jigga Nanny” has to find the person holding the ball. For more detail on this folk song, see Jim Morse, Folk songs of the Caribbean (Bantam Books, 1958) and Tom Murray, ed. Folk songs of Jamaica (Oxford, 1952).
- 15.
This is a reference to the agreement reached in 1934 between the Costa Rican government and the United Fruit Company that prohibited Afro-West Indian workers in Limón from seeking work in the company’s banana plantations on the Pacific coast. This was seen as a measure to protect national labor interests.
- 16.
Pinches—Reference to the mid-twentieth-century folk practice in Costa Rica of pinching something or someone new in hopes of receiving good luck. Blacks traveling from Limón to San José and other areas of the Central Valley were sometimes subjected to the pinches of strangers as they made their way around cities and towns.
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Mosby, D. (2018). Weathered Men. In: Quince Duncan's Weathered Men and The Four Mirrors. Afro-Latin@ Diasporas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97535-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97535-1_2
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