The stirring presentation of the Tallawah Mento Band on the coded communication messaging of folk and mento music struck a key note at the recent Marcus Garvey Symposium in Limon, Costa Rica.

The venerable Colin Smith, a founding member of the South Florida band, highlighted in his half hour presentation of interactive audience engagement and performance, how the infectious rhythms of both music forms often masked and shielded pointed critique of plantation life. Lyrics, in our own dialect, that an increasing number of cultural custodians and educators insist on being classified as a national language and not broken English, readily mocked the ‘owner class’, Smith acknowledged.

“These musical artforms,” said Smith, “simultaneously lightened the challenges of slavery and harnessed resilience. It was storybook of our very survival spreading news of plantation activities and developments that was entertainment and information network to avoid detection and comprehension by the planter class.”

The presentation, enhanced by the performance of acclaimed dub poet Malachi Smith, took the aroused audience through the Transatlantic passage and voyage, marked by chorus wails of endurance and resistance, to shackling sugarcane plantation labour shaping an ever evolving dynamic Jamaica – and the performance repertoire ranged from folk and mento to ska and nyabinghi. Pieces included Ribba to De Bank, Sweet Jamaica (original Tallawah composition), Dis Long Time Gal, Rum and Coconut Water and poems by Marcus Garvey put to music – Keep Cool and Africa for the Africans — that was sung for the very first time at the Symposium.

The presentation also highlighted folk and mento as call and response field songs – music that was a method to ensure rest time especially during long and arduous days, with other songs adopted for various endeavours like the pulling of houses from one destination to another as was often done in Westmoreland.

The concert performance at Wallaba, Puerto Viejo (called Old Harbour by the many Jamaicans living there) was to prove particularly interesting as well, according to Smith.

“It was quite festive,” said Smith, “and the audience took to the floor. There was a connection – and a member of the band even discovered family members. It was as if we were in Jamaica in the 1920s – 30s with the cuisine being what you could only describe as your grandmother’s cooking. It was a good old Jamaican get-together, and they yearn to come back to Jamaica the way we speak of going back to Africa.”

National hero Garvey, says Smith, is revered in Costa Rica, having been a central figure in unionizing workers there. Expelled from the country because of developing trade union unrest, there was a general strike in protest that resulted. A holiday was declared in Wallaba when the government recanted and invited him to return.

“The tour, the symposium,” said Smith, “was simply about us all being home.”