Garifuna love poem

I present here my little love poem translated into the Garifuna language (Cariff, Karif, Island Carib, Kalipona, Central American Carib, Moreno, Eastern Garifuna, Caribe, Western Garifuna, Black Carib).

Black Carib is spoken on the coasts of Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, Salvador and Nicaragua by the Garifuna populations. This Maipuran language of the Arawakian family (based on Iñeri), marked by European and Caribbean influences, count less than 200,000 speakers.

It should be noted that the Garifuna language uses masculine and feminine words. The masculine words are inherited from the Caribbean language and the feminine one are inherited from the Arawak language.

Cariff is not taught at school and remains primarily the oral language spoken by the Garifuna community at home and among themselves. However, if Garifuna is the mother tongue of adults, for the youngest, it is clear that it is Spanish which is becoming so.

For a bit of history: There was first a group of warriors speaking Karìna (Caribbean language) who arrived in the Lesser Antilles, they killed the Arawaks (very peaceful) who were there, and took their wives.

Among themselves, if they continue to speak their Caribe language, their women speak Arawak, and step by step it is the language spoken by women which crossbreeds and become their language.

Around 1635, Africans survivors of shipwrecks or fleeing from the Caribbean islands where they were reduced to slavery joined Saint-Vincent, and from this interbreeding emerges an Afro-indigenous people and culture called Black Carib or Garifuna.

The Garifunas (Garínagu) are therefore the fruit of a mixture of Africans and Arawak and Caribbean Indians who populated the Antilles.

If their birthplace is first the island of Saint-Vincent (Yurumein island) between Saint Lucia and the island of Grenada, because of the conflicts with the Europeans who deported them, they began by settling on the island of Baliceaux then on that of Roatán. From there, many of them settled on the coast of Honduras, then on those of Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador.