PARIS, France — After about three months of planning and a flurry of typically Jamaican banter through our mailing list, a time, date and venue were finally agreed upon. No mean feat for a mailing list peopled with 50 opinionated countrymen!

The result was more than 90 Jamaicans, their offsprings, spouses, associates and assorted hangers-on, enamoured with any and everything Jamaican converging recently on the Nanterre Parc on the outskirts of Paris for their Fourth Annual Jamaica Day picnic. The park was alive with red, green and gold. The sun magically appeared for us in what up to that point, had been a lacklustre, anaemic month.

We came to meet, to greet but mostly to eat! Once the meeting was taken care of we got down to business. Everybody had to contribute a dish, but it was the chief instigator of this get-together, Latoya Clarke-Nivore, who, with the help of her mom visiting from Jamaica, cooked up a storm. Mainly, there was curried goat, rice and peas, stewed peas with rice all washed down with ginger beer.

It was a taste of nirvana, as the park resonated with our trilingual banter. Some English mixed with a generous helping of French and topped off with some colourful Jamaican Creole. All this accompanied by Jamaican music, from old-school roots rock reggae to the new St Thomas sensation Clifton “Nobody canna cross it” Brown.

But we were raised right, so before touching the feast, we duly blessed the food with an impromptu rendition of the national anthem. Oh and a rousing performance it was too! There was Tessa’s and Deirdre’s soprano, Yannique’s contralto, Alton’s, George’s and Eddie’s deep bass. Who said one can’t perform on hungry bellies? True, there were some grating tone-deaf voices, the owners shall remain nameless, however, but that wasn’t enough to throw off our groove.

Dandy Shandy with the Farmer in the Dell

After duly scraping the pots and pans clean, the appreciative group of yardies in exile decided to play. We looked around for some raw material and indeed, there was a group of about 20 ‘Framaican’ children running around with bellies full of Jamaican fare. The time was indeed right to attempt some ring games! Luckily, Sandria excels at the daunting task of explaining how to play “bluebird in and out the window”, “Punchinello little fellow” and “Dandy Shandy” to uninterested, perplexed children.

She enthusiastically rounded up a crew of the restless tots and a few intrigued adults and tried to get the farmer to leave his dell and take a wife. She walked them though reproduction, had them procure a pet and set them up in dairy production. Unfortunately, when the farmer and his family abandoned the cheesemanufacturing process, no doubt it was too labour-intensive, the cheese was left standing alone. So the group launched into countless other school-yard classics to the bemusement of the French onlookers in the park, before alas, collective amnesia struck. Nobody seemed to recall how to play Dandy Shandy!

We chalked it up to that very common postmeal malady which seems to disproportionately and viciously strike our countrymen. Indeed, as the blood flowed southward from our brains and our hearts to our bellies in order to facilitate digestion, we were forced to take it easy as the resulting sluggishness set in.

Networking

This made it as good a time as any for networking. And surprise, surprise, what a motley crew of Jamaicans it was! We had two lawyers in our midst, two PhD candidates, two journalists, one expatriated young man posted in Paris and accompanied by his lovely wife. There was one fashionista blogger, a professional photographer, the personal secretary to the dean of France’s number one business school, a budding musician, several Jamaicans in Paris by way of London and numerous other people, all with interesting stories to tell.

When the laughter and the wonderment petered out though, six hours had already gone by. By then, I had amassed dozens of telephone numbers, business cards, Facebook identities and it was time to sing the Jamaica farewell.

So we did the now ritualistically engrained French cheek kissing, said our au revoirs, all the while promising to carve out some time in our busy schedules to link up once again before next summer. Strange though, I thought that the symptoms of ‘niggeritis’ dicated that my heart was running on low, crippled by survival-mode level blood flow. But instead, my heart flushed, alive with pride, satisfaction and emotion as I parted ways with this diasporic group from Jamrock. So I told them all, “Walk good and à l’année prochaine!”