Saint Mary Culture & Language

Saint Mary’s culture is rural Jamaican with a curious literary overlay.

Mento

The parish is part of the country belt where mento survived — Jamaica’s original rural popular music, played on banjo, guitar, hand drum and the rhumba box, a large thumb piano that the player sits on to provide the bass. It is bawdy, topical and older than ska, and it fed directly into everything that came after. Bands still play at hotels and community events.

The Bond books

Ian Fleming wrote all fourteen at Oracabessa, in the mornings, between January and March each year from 1952 until his death in 1964. The Jamaican landscape is all over the novels, and several were set here outright; he named his hero after the author of a book on Caribbean birds that was on his shelf.

Noel Coward

He wrote, painted badly and entertained at Firefly for two decades, and chose to be buried on the lawn looking north along the coast.

Church and revival

Rural Jamaican religious life is strong here, including Revival and Kumina, Afro-Jamaican traditions with drumming and possession.

Jonkanoo

Masked Christmas processions with drum, fife and characters including Horsehead, Pitchy Patchy and Devil, danced through the villages. Suppressed at various points and now much reduced, the tradition survives better in the country parishes than in the towns, and Saint Mary is one of the places you may still come across it.

Craft

Basketry in jippi-jappa and thatch palm, wood carving in lignum vitae and mahoe, and straw work, sold in the country markets and at the roadside rather than in craft villages. The makers are usually the sellers, and prices are a fraction of what the same object costs on the resort coast.

English is the official language and is used for all business, signage and formal exchange.

Jamaican Patois is what is spoken between people, and in a rural parish like this it is spoken more thickly and more consistently than in the city. Expect to understand less than you thought you would, and to be met halfway if you ask.

Useful expressions: wah gwaan as a greeting, answered everything criss or mi deh yah; likkle more for see you later; walk good as a farewell that means travel safely; soon come, which does not mean soon; and respect, which works in almost any situation.

A greeting before a question is expected everywhere.