Hugh Martin
TODAY IS Grand Market Day. Those of us who hail from the rural areas can remember the importance this day had for the small farmer and the rural communities. It was the day when the best of the year's produce was taken or sent to the local market located in the major villages and towns. Housewives and other homemakers would relish the prospect of choosing from among the choicest of vegetables, fruits and ground provisions to prepare the special Christmas dinner the next day. It was the big pay day for the farmer and the higgler. And for those who were not cultivators it was the day to secure their sorrel and their gungo peas.
I don't hear much mention of this special market these days. Perhaps the steady march of progress, bringing with it rural electrification, supermarkets, green groceries and a refrigerator in every home has trampled in its path yet another of our traditions. Or perhaps migration is to be blamed; rural to urban migration and emigration. These two have reduced many of the once reasonably well-populated deep rural communities to deserted stretches of farmland and ruinate.
There are, to be fair though, several other such communities that have grown into prosperous townships. The bauxite industry has contributed immensely to this but a lot is also due to the growing of another kind of vegetable that won't be seen for sale at the Grand Market. Still, it may be that as we get older we become susceptible to the seductive power of nostalgia that allows us to romanticise
the hardships of yesteryear into something worthier than it was. The good old days are nothing more than difficult times remembered without the pain.
PREPARING FOR MARKET DAY
As I write, a memory that has stayed with me from I was about eight or nine years old comes back. It is a scene of a big cousin of mine walking behind a mule laden with yam heading for Brown's Town market 15 miles away. It is Friday about six in the evening. He has already covered five miles from Grants Mountain and expects to reach Brown's Town by midnight to select a good spot to sleep and be ready for business at daybreak. At the end of the day he will hopefully have sold all his yams, have bought whatever supplies his father requires and will be able to ride the mule back home. Norbert, one of the brightest and wittiest persons I knew, left for England a year after that, joining the first wave of emigrants in the early 1950s.
Over the next 10 years, a flood of young people from his and similar deep rural communities followed in the search for a better and easier life. Very few will tell you that it was easier. All will affirm that in the end it was better. Many of them have returned to enjoy their retirement but few to their original communities. So those districts remain
deserted and undeveloped and that is one of the ways that emigration impacted on the Grand Market tradition.
'JAMAICANNESS' IN THE WIDER SOCIETY
Another and most interesting way relates to the way in which Jamaicans remain attached to their 'Jamaicanness' no matter where they find themselves. We love our culture; our food, our music, our dance. So the hundreds of thousands of us who left for England, Canada and the United States of America, craved for the food left behind and a great demand was generated. A colleague of mine once explained the phenomenal growth of yam exports with the crude expression "Wherever Jamaicans go they carry their yam belly with them." Well, it wasn't just yam. It was also pumpkin, dasheen, breadfruit, papaya, ackee, scotch bonnet pepper and jerk sauce.
Even more interesting is the way in which the Jamaican cuisine began to, like reggae music, find acceptance in the wider society. That has helped to increase demand for our produce and products to the point where our non-traditional export crops have begun to challenge some of the traditional crops in terms of export earnings. As a consequence of the opening up of the market the exporters now travel to the communities to purchase at the farm gate thus rendering it unnecessary for the farmer to go to the village market. Grand Market therefore is now just a fading memory. Do have a holy and peaceful Christmas.
Hugh Martin is a communication
specialist and farm broadcaster.
