By Lionel Gayle
“This time I’m coming like Hurricane Hatty.”
That’s a catchy line from teenager Jimmy Cliff’s song, “Hurricane Hatty,” a mere reference to the Category 5 Hurricane Hattie that crashed into British Honduras (now Belize) on Halloween 1961.
Besides claiming over 300 lives, the powerful hurricane forced the Central American British colony to relocate its capital from Belize City to present-day Belmopan.
Whenever I hum Cliff’s melodious ska tune, I’m not in the least mocking the inhabitants of the Caribbean region, especially when they are in the throes of another perilous period. For the next five months, a lot of West Indians will only be able to watch and pray as some weird and dangerous climatic conditions batter the region as the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season takes its toll.
The National Hurricane Centre has predicted 12-18 named storms and hurricanes for the season that began, officially, on June 1.
To many others the stormy weather is hardly a deterrent to their accustomed lifestyles as they stage lavish pageants, regattas and carnivals. Add to those, a series popular music fetes featuring jazz, gospel, soca, calypso, hip hop, reggae, or a multi-genre showcase like the St. Kitts Music Festival (SKMF), scheduled for June 23-25, 2011 at Warner Park Stadium, in Basseterre. (http://www.stkittsmusicfestival.com/).
If at first you chose Ocho Rios for the 21st annual Jamaica International Jazz Festival, June 11-20, you must visit St. Kitts-Nevis on your island-hopping. At this time Basseterre should be teeming with excitement as the first concert of the festival kicks off on Thursday, June 23. This year marks the 15th annual renewal of the event which has been downsized to a three-night musical extravaganza.
If you’ve abandoned your staycation and heading south for a vacation, don’t worry about hurricanes. Use this 1898 memory poem as a maxim: “June too soon/July stand by/August look out you must/September remember/October all over.”
Despite all the odds against them, Caribbean people are a resourceful and fearless lot and even with the inherent danger, it would take more than the baddest storm to scare them. Presently – based on a 2010 estimate – there are more than 36 million people occupying over 92,000 aggregate square miles of land space in the Caribbean region.
Since its inception in 1996 as the Shak Shak Festival, no hurricane has ever blotted out the SKMF. However, the event was dropped in 2000, the same year St. Kitts-Nevis presented the 7th Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta).
When I first visited St. Kitts in 1999, one of the organizers explained that the festival had no set formula. “It varies from year to year,” but they were aiming for 80 per cent Caribbean content, he added.
I did not scrutinize the formula on my last attendance in 2002, but something seems to be working right – or almost right. The show has been moved from the historic Fort Thomas Hotel to a larger venue, Warner Park Stadium, and the SKMF is now a fixture on calendars of events throughout the Caribbean, and probably right across the “global village.”
Three cheers for the SKMF management committee and all the 35,000 souls on the 64.9 square miles of volcanic rock that looks like a chicken drumstick, with sister island Nevis sitting off the southeast tip like an over-sized McDonald’s nugget.
For more information contact St. Kitts Tourism toll free: US 1-800-582-6208 and Canada 1-888-395-4887.
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