Children and mothers the world over have been rhythmically chanting nursery rhymes since time immemorial, accompanying the words with often elaborate rituals of hand-clapping and body movements that seem to tap in to the collective unconscious.
Children’s nursery rhymes often also preserve group memory in a highly condensed and eloquent form when the young singers themselves have no inkling of the events that gave rise to them. As ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’ in England echoes years of plague, in Grenada, as you might expect, there are reverberations of colonialism. This and the island’s close association with nutmeg are reflected in one popular nursery rhyme entitled ‘I had a little nut tree’:
I had a little nut tree Nothing would it bear But a silver nutmeg and a golden pear The King of Spain’s daughter Came to visit me And all for the sake of my little nut tree.
This haunting rhyme surely harks back to Grenada’s discovery by Columbus and the start of centuries of exploitation by Western powers. Like lots of other children’s nursery rhymes, it expresses a truth and a pathos that elude many learned histories.
The topology of the island with its scythes of white sand slicing gently into clear, blue water, palm trees bending under tropical storms, and the upbeat approach to life of the inhabitants, are neatly encapsulated in ‘Four White Horses’. This is a more light-hearted rhyme, accompanied by rhythmic hand clapping by small children standing in a circle or by a mother crooning over the cot:
Four white horses, on the river, Hey, hey, hey, up tomorrow, Up tomorrow is a rainy day. Come on up to the shallow bay, Shallow bay is a ripe banana, Up tomorrow is a rainy day.
Many nursery rhymes have also been adopted from French, English and Spanish sources, as Grenada came under the successive influence of these empires and their territorial conflicts, and through interaction with other islands in the Caribbean.
‘Brown Girl in the Ring’, which originated in Jamaica, is a ring game of the sort played by children across the world before they enter their teens, but also continues to hold its own as a popular nursery rhyme. In the group version, children hold hands in a ring and one of them jumps into the middle and starts skipping to the song, and when told ‘Show me your motion’ performs their favourite dance. ‘Show me your partner’ elicits the response of them choosing a friend to join them in the circle, and the whole performance is perhaps a precursor to courtship and marriage:
Dere is a brown girl in the ring tra la la la la A brown girl in the ring tra la la la la la Dere is a brown girl in the ring tra la la la la She look like a sugar and a plum.
These nursery rhymes have a power or magic that defies analysis, because they have little to do with reason and everything to do with sounds, gestures and symbols that belong to an instinctive, primitive state of bonding.
Grenada’s children, like children everywhere, represent a culture within a culture, and their spontaneity and unique ability to respond joyfully, because unselfconsciously, to their island and its age-old traditions and history is perhaps its greatest treasure.
A stay at the Hotel Laurena on Carriacou will be an opportunity not just to relax, but also to meet the island people.
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