TriumphAnt

Grenada 2006

Third and last in a series…

Them’s good eatin…

A few things we discovered on Grenada that are good to eat:

Mahi-mahi of course, described earlier. I had it on four separate occasions and enjoyed it most grilled and dressed with a generous dollop of Nantais butter (the mahi-mahi, that is, not me);

Swordfish. It’s not rare, neither is it unique to Grenada, but the onset of barbecue season is a good time to be reminded that this is a fish that cooks to the density of a pork chop and is fabulous in just about any grilled configuration you find. I had it for brunch at a lovely getaway spot on Grenada’s Atlantic side, la Sagesse, a resort that sits alone on a bay that looks like it could have served as a local stand-in for Tahiti in Marlon Brando’s or Mel Gibson’s “Mutiny on the Bounty”.

Pumpkin soup, in this case curried with coconut milk. Lush and creamy, it seemed the sort of dish that would be more at home on a table where, just outside, it is a cold winter’s night. But it was so good it sent me to Google when I got home, in search of some recipes to try. It was also a la Sagesse offering.

A couple things that were interesting but “iffy”:

It makes sense that hamburger, on an island where meat is pretty well all imported, would obviously be stretched with a seasoned cereal filler in one place where we tried it. But it rates as “interesting” because it worked. The seasonings in this case made it very flavourable.

One item we tried because it appears on many travel websites with some captioned variation of the identifier “Grenada’s tempting specialty” was something called callaloo soup. Callaloo, it turns out, is pretty close to spinach but I suspect it needed more of a search than we gave it during our short stay there to find a treatment I would call “tempting”. The soup was a green so dark it was almost black, but another of those full-bodied purées that I would classify as a winter soup. (If you’ve ever had fiddlehead soup, it’s in the family.) In another meal, callaloo was served to us as a side dish but it was well-boiled with an overpowering garlic flavouring that made any detection of the flavour of the green itself all but impossible.

Roadside roast corn. Forget what your North American mind recalls as a “corn roast”, which turns out a really tender product. On Grenada, there are lots of places along its byways where a roadside hibachi will be set up, no doubt to help supplement a meagre family income. And Grenadian corn thus grilled has been slow cooked to a consistency that is chewy to say the least. But its flavour was great and not surprisingly, considering it had been done to a toasty dryness, it echoed popcorn in taste.

Name dropping and people spotting.

Octopus: I’ll save you the trouble and point you here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacht_Octopus

It’s amazing what money will buy. In this case, $200 million up front and $20 million annually in operating costs will buy you a floating palace. The property of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Octopus was anchored just off the Grand Anse Beach for much of the time we were there. One evening, while we were at dinner at the Coconut Beach beachside restaurant, we noticed a long table with seating for 18 had been set up in the sand. A few minutes after we got there, a trio of matching Zodiacs motored right up onto the beach to disembark the dining party. The boats’ colours placed them among Octopus’ ancillary vessels and the youth of the 18-person party suggested some sort of extremely generous corporate rewards program was at work. Next day, we toyed briefly with the idea of kayaking out to Octopus and asking for the latest Windows upgrade, but decided against it. (Given that subsequent Googling has turned up the information that several of her crew are ex-US Navy SEALS, this probably was a wise decision.)

On our return flight, we changed planes in the San Juan (Puerto Rico) airport with enough time for lunch. While we were sitting in a restaurant / bar, Sir Richard Branson suddenly bustled through, obviously looking for someone who turned out not to be there, but triggering a chain reaction of recognition among all of us gawking tourists.

Music finds, courtesy of Grenada.

The Reggae bus and the spillover thumping sound of a reggae band coming from an open air club far down the beach one Saturday night sent me in search of some likable reggae when I got home. “Likable” because being a typical grey-haired older white guy, I wasn’t looking for angry cop-killer rap or rage for any reason. And I now have three new albums added to my music shelves, each representative of a different reggae style:

“The Best Reggae Album in the World… Ever” is reggae I would describe as safe, because many of its songs have made the crossover and also become rock hits in North America – UB40’s “I Got You, Babe”, Peter Tosh and Mick Jagger’s duet, “Don’t Look Back” and a disco classic, Boney M’s “(By the) Rivers of Babylon”. But even “safe”, it’s a great reggae album and will happily sustain any party – especially if you’re piping the music into a set of outdoor speakers and sitting around a campfire or just back-porching it. Rum punch would make a fabulous accessory.

In a similar spirit is the grossly misnamed “MADNESS” by a group called The Dangermen. Actually, its full title is “MADNESS: The Dangermen Sessions Volume 1” but these guys are anything but mad and dangerous. The album style is ska, which is frequently described as “reggae’s precursor”. And it, too, is a lot of fun. The Dangermen cover several rock tunes in a light reggae style, including José Feliciano’s “Rain”, The Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” and The Kinks’ “Lola” . (On a digressionary note, have you ever listened to the lyrics to “Lola”? I hadn’t, not really, until I Googled them while playing the album recently. In a nutshell, it’s about a guy who gets picked up by a transvestite. The last line is the kicker:

“Well I'm not the world's most masculine man,
But I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a man.
And so is Lola. (L-O-L-A, Lola… etc)”

Finally, because I had to get hold of at least one of the harder pounding collections that would forever recall the reggae bus, I bought a great album by an artist named Super Cat entitled “The Struggle Continues”. Oddly enough, its message is one of peace, despite the much sharper aural edges that seem to drive the music.

Check out this poetry in Super Cat’s “Every Nigger is a Star”, whose root message (from the very first wordplay that makes “Dedicated” into “Livicated”) is that war and killing won’t solve anything (It’s included here in its entirety hopefully to impart a sense of amazement that all of what follows, with four repetitions of the chorus, is staccatoed out in a little over three minutes of playing time. Perry Como this guy ain’t.):

Every Nigger Is A Star

(Livicated to Mr. Nelson Mandela And The People's Fight For Freedom... The Struggle Continues...)

Jah Rastafari
Well me look an' me tell dem seh Rude Boy
And me look an' me tell dem
I and I seh a kingdom that is divided by itself must fall
All for one and one for all
I and I shall be like a green tree that's planted by the river bank of Dunns River Falls
A weh me tell dem Rude Boy
African People come follow me

Hear this

(Chorus)
Well Every Nigger is an African and also a star
And We know where We coming from and know who We are
Every Nigger is an African and also a star
A no brag We a brag and a no blar We a blar
Teeth white like a snow skin black like a tar
And anytime dem see We a de show We a Star
Africans oonu better cut out de war !
United We stand and divided We fall
Oonu hear me Africans oonu better cut out che war
United We stand and divided We fall

Because !

Deep down in a Africa We fore parents roam
When We never did have no need fe no scissors nor comb
When de animals Were tamed and We shared de same home
We use to walk up on silver and cook up on gold
Drink de cow's milk and den we suck de honey comb
But that was in the days of beginning and old
When exploiter they came with religion unknown
They robbed Us our culture an' our kings they dethrone
And they carry Us in a Babylon true We strong bone
But no matter what they do Jah Jah guiding Us home
We a go chase dem crazy bald head out of We town
A We plant de corn and build de cabin alone

(Chorus)

Oonu see the coming of Jah Jah it is not very far
Him nah go drop out a sky like a falling star
Nor appear like a soldier from 1JR
Him nah go come in a no jet nor na big fast car
Him a go come like a thief in a de night from a far
Wid de fire in a Him eye like a burning cigar
Hair white like a snow - feet like a brass bar
Nah go come with no 'matic and a no SLR
Hear me now super - you haf fe hear me now star
When Jah Jah come a brimstone fire war
Him nah contribute to no skin color bar
Neither take no side with no guy weh preach war

(Chorus)

Because !

This is not He Man and this is not Thundar
Neither Superman nor the one Skeletar
This is not Tarzan make believe jungle star
These are the African children wearing the African scar
Ancient motherland and she so pretty and far
Millions of children were stolen from her
Bought into slavery and sold like a car
Fe cut sugar cane, cotton and quail cigar
Under Jah moon and Jah sun and Jah star
Hear me now super you haf fe hear me now star
A no brag me a brag no blar me a blar
Them never make no weapon fe go fight no war

(Chorus)

- 0 -

And a non-Grenada closing note, but one coincidentally à propos, given the “Tarzan” reference ten lines or so above…

Call me startled. A chimpanzee dubbed “the world’s oldest” was the subject of a CBC-TV news item on April 10. “Cheeta” turned 74 and celebrated with sugar-free cake and diet soda at a party in Palm Springs, California.

What surprised me about this story was the added fact that this particular chimpanzee starred under his own name in a dozen Tarzan films in the 1930s and 1940s before he headed into retirement. The best-known ones featured Johnny Weissmuller as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ ape-man, movies I figure I’ve seen about four times each on countless Saturday morning black-and-white movie times while growing up. (Tarzan and Cheeta take on Nazis, for example, in 1943’s “Tarzan Triumphs”, and tackle New York City in the previous year’s “Tarzan’s New York Adventure”.)

Here’s a family photo (I’m pretty sure Cheeta’s the one on the left.): http://www.meredy.com/tarzan4.jpg

Not one to just fade away, Cheeta returned for another kick at celluloid fame in 1967 to play opposite Rex Harrison in Dr Doolittle, and is also considered an accomplished artist in the world of simian painters, with two of his works hanging for a time in the National Museum in London. (Although one suspects there is not a huge pool of competing talent against which to measure the performance that earned him the adjective “accomplished”.)

Cheeta has also received a special comedy award from the International Comedy Film Festival of (wait for it)

Peniscola, Spain.

There’s no follow-up possible to that, so until next time…