This article was written and photographed by me and published in the second edition of Dominica Traveller magazine in 2016.

Refugees in their own country, I first met the members of the Dubique Cultural Group at the Grand Bay Community Centre where they had been living for almost a year since the passage of tropical storm Erika in August 2015. The village of Dubique is on the south coast of Dominica, nestled around a small river and tightly sandwiched between tall, steep volcanic cliffs that run to the sea. During the storm, the river became a torrent, tearing away the single village road, destroying property and ultimately forcing evacuation and abandonment. Though many homes remained standing, the government deemed the village too dangerous and its inhabitants were offered temporary shelter in and around the nearby community of Grand Bay.

People seemed to fill every inch of the community centre’s upper floor. Laundry hung all around, children cried, women chatted on steps, and the smell of cooking drifted across the still afternoon. An old man sat alone on a bench, staring vacantly ahead, as if he were still watching the river burst its banks and tear down utility poles and trees.

Outside the building, a tarpaulin stretched over makeshift wooden pews and a lectern. This is where the group members and I sat in the sultry heat of the afternoon, weighing each other up, talking about the group, the storm, cultural heritage, and the article I would like to write about them.

Formed in 2003, the group currently has nine members, seven of whom are women. Most are related as cousins and have common ancestral ties to a cultural icon of Grand Bay, Ma Tutu. A prominent member of the community, Ma Tutu was responsible for passing down Creole traditions of music, dance and dress. These traditions find their roots in colonial Dominica and enslavement.

Although the British and the French had agreed in 1680 to leave Dominica to the indigenous Kalinago, a trickle of migrants from the neighbouring French island of Martinique began to arrive in the early 1700s and settlements were established, gradually forcing the Kalinago into the less accessible hinterlands. They arrivals occupied the area that is now known as Grand Bay. They spread across the south west to Soufriere and up to Roseau, bringing with them enslaved Africans to work on their estates.

During this period of European colonisation, the Kalinago became ever more marginalised and French and later British estates sprang up all around the island. Although Dominica was eventually ceded to the British, it was the proximity of the French islands, mixed with surviving African tribal traditions such as dance, dress, food, belief systems and language, that came together to form French Creole. This fusion of heritage and tradition dominated the cultural landscape and remains strong in the south of Dominica and particularly in the Grand Bay area.

Commonly worn by women from as far back as the 1800s right up to the 1960s, the wob dwiyet is now only ever donned by cultural groups or during periods of Creole and Independence celebrations in October and November each year. It began life as a dress that was worn on Sundays or Feast Days when enslaved women were able to discard drab uniforms and wear something more colourful. Over the years the style of wob dwiyet has been modified and accessories have been added, but the basic combination of bright madras skirt over white chemise, often with lace adornments, coloured head scarf and kerchief, is in essence the same as the dress that was worn under enslavement. The wearer of the wob dwyet is known as the matador and for more formal occasions she may also choose to wear a headpiece, or tête en l’air, made of a square piece of madras. Central to the wob dwiyet’s colour, madras was originally Indian cotton, known as injiri, made by the Kalabari people in the vicinity of Chennai (formerly Madras). French, English and Portuguese merchants were involved in its trade and are thought to have brought it to west Africa where it became popular with Igbo tribal women.

During their performances, the members of the Dubique Cultural Group wear modern madras styles and variations of traditional wob dwiyet. Their repertoire includes a number of dance forms but it is for their interpretation and performance of the bélé that they are particularly noted.

The bélé is a dance of African origin that is accompanied by a song that is sung in Creole. The centrepiece of the dance is the drum, known as the tambou twavail or tambou bélé. It is a traditional goat skin, or la peau cabwit, drum that provides a resonating rhythm along with strong echoes of Africa. The group’s drummer, Carlton Merrifield, known by all as Abio, tells me he remembers playing the drum with Ma Tutu when he was a child.

“It’s been a passion ever since,” he smiles.

The dance moves reflect a courtship between a man and a woman as they move in turn towards the drum, responding to its rhythm. By the time the dance reaches its conclusion the drum is booming loudly and the man and the woman are dancing together with quick steps and vigorous body movements, symbolising their union.

After we have talked and relaxed into each other’s company, we arrange to meet again in a couple of weeks. I asked them how they would feel about returning to Dubique, to tell me about what happened during the storm, and to perform a bélé among the ruins of the abandoned village. I am excited when they eagerly agree to the idea.

Two weeks later we head up the narrow village road as far as we can before it ends; severed in two by the power of water, mud and rocks. Houses still stand around us and I meet a woman carrying a container of water on her head that she has fetched from a spring higher up the valley. She stops to say hello and I learn that she comes back here to live from time to time.

“Until it rains,” she says. “Then I go back to the community centre. But I don’t like it there. This is my home.”

While changing into their traditional costumes, some members of the group tell me that they too have returned to Dubique on occasion since the storm, to collect belongings or to harvest produce from their yards.  A couple of them have spent the night, but they tell me it had been a strange, rather unnerving experience. Looking around, it is very easy to understand why. The vertiginous cliffs and narrow river valley mean there is no easy escape. During the storm, some of the group managed to get to higher ground, away from the torrent. Some stood on flat rooftops or verandas out of reach of the water, others scrambled down the valley to the coast. All agree it was terrifying.

Despite this, there is a sense of shoulder-shrugging and just getting on with life; something I have often seen in Dominica by a people who seem determined not to let an event like this bother them too much; or at least, if it does, not to show it outwardly. I ask them if returning to Dubique makes them emotional in any way.

‘For sure, a little,” says Nadia, the group’s lead dancer. “But I suppose we are accustomed by now.”

I remind myself that almost a year has passed and that the events of that night would surely have faded by now, but I can see on their faces as they look around and explain to me what happened, that there is still a sense of loss and bewilderment. They have homes here, many still standing, but they cannot return to them on a permanent basis.

“It’s too dangerous,” some of them say in unison.

The group members receive no financial assistance to do what they do and the money for the madras and the seamstress work comes out of their own pockets. When I think about this and look at these nine people before me, I realise how fragile the continuation of cultural tradition really is. Despite everything that has happened to them, and how difficult it is to make ends meet, they choose to go on dancing.

Fully attired in bright madras and wob dwyet, the group assembles near the wide break in the village road. Abio positions himself on an old chair he has borrowed from a nearby building and starts to beat his drum. Miriam, Julia, Juline, Esther and Corinthia begin to sing, and a shiver runs down my spine. The song that accompanies bélé is in Creole, often a conversation between a man and a woman, either portraying the despair of enslavement, or of the joy of liberation. For enslaved workers on estates Creole became a way of communicating in a language that their masters may not have easily been able to understand and the lyric describing a simple conversation disguised a deeper meaning yet further. They perform such a song now; about a woman lending a man a shirt, but instead of wearing it, he uses it to collect wawa, a type of wild yam that was commonly eaten and traded at the time.

Barefooted, Nadia and Leon dance on the road in front of the drum, moving away from and then closer to each other, Nadia spreading her madras skirt and Leon raising his arms like wings. Colourful, beautiful and against an enchanting accompaniment of song, it is like watching a courtship ritual. The beat grows quicker, the voices and the drum louder, the dancers ever closer to each other, eventually almost entwined. A more incongruous scene there could never be; this display of love, music, sexuality and life against a backdrop of silence, abandonment and decay.

When the dance is over, we decide to take a walk, crossing the river and broken road towards the top of the village. A half-finished church stands empty, and Leon takes me to a tumble-down shack where a faded image of Ma Tutu still hangs. She is wearing madras.

Homes give way to bush, rocks and boulders. A utility pole sags, holding on but perilously close to giving up the ghost. Nadia sits on a large rock in contemplation, her wob dwyet contrasting starkly with the bleakness. Fruit is ripening on a pommerac tree in the yard of Corinthia Defoe who recalls the night of the storm.

“I had nowhere to go so I just stayed in my home and watched the water rising all about,” she says. “It was big and brown, covering the road.”

“Were you afraid ?”

“Yes, oui. But I survive, thank God. ”

On the walk back down through the village the group tells me how draining it has been living in the community centre for so long.

“We’re on top of each other all the time,” says Julia, the group’s leader. “There’s no privacy at all. We are all looking forward to getting out of there.”

They hope and expect to be moving out of the community centre soon. Their new homes will be in an area of Grand Bay where mass produced, low cost housing from Venezuela, known as ‘petro casas’,  or ‘oil houses’, are being constructed in a purpose-built community.

I ask what will happen to their homes and yards in Dubique once they have moved out of the community centre and resettled in new houses in Grand Bay. But no-one really knows, nor has a plan. In fact there’s a sense of embarrassment at not really having an answer. They speculate that perhaps they will come and grow vegetables in their yard but I sense that memories of the storm will always be in their minds and that they are eager for the chance to move on and make a clean and fresh start.

“But we will always be from Dubique,” says Nadia resolutely. “It is our home, our heritage, and always in our hearts.”