Ramgoat Dashalong

RAMGOAT DASHALONG is the name of a ‘bush’ used to make tea in Jamaica. In the title story Errol’s grandmother, Ganje, makes tea with seven kinds of bushes to help them through their early morning dangerous journey in one of Kingston’s inner city areas. Every morning they drink this tea with surprising results. Things go well for a time, but one morning Ganje doesn’t have one of the recommended ‘bushes’ and makes the tea with only six of them. The result is both terrifying and amusing. The stories in this collection deal with the special divide between what we call reality and the surreal. The dividing line is sometimes obscure and so we talk of magic. Magic means different things to different people. Many traditional Caribbean stories deal with ‘bad’ magic- obeah and so on, and some have really devilish and frightening characters. I was interested in bringing magic into the world of the modern child who perhaps has a different definiton (or no definition ) of magic. The children in these stories are ordinary, everyday children caught up in expereinces which beg the question – what really happened?