Hopes Unrealized In Independent Jamaica
Laura Fleminger
Ian Thomson won the prestigious Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize in 2010 for The Dead Yard. He is also the author of Primo Levi: A Life.
April 16, 2011
At midnight on Aug. 5, 1962, Jamaicans hauled down the Union Jack for the last time, and raised the new colors — black, gold and green — of independent Jamaica.
In the capital, Kingston, 20,000 people gathered in the newly opened National Stadium to bid farewell to British rule. It was a grand and hopeful time. Britain's Princess Margaret attended the festivities, along with Lyndon B. Johnson, then the vice president of the United States.
But almost 50 years later, "a lot of Jamaicans feel that since the Union Jack came down, there has been largely disappointment," writer Ian Thomson tells Weekend All Things Considered guest host Noah Adams. Parts of Jamaica are a vacation paradise, but much of the country is crippled by violence and corruption.
The Dead Yard
By Ian Thomson
Paperback, 392 pages
Nation Books
List price: $16.99
Thomson traveled all over the island, and everywhere he went, people asked the same question: What has Jamaica done with its independence? Thomson chronicled his search for the answer in his new book, The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica.
It's a difficult question for an outsider to answer. One woman challenged Thomson directly at a meeting of the Jamaican Historical Society. "You visitors are always getting it wrong," she told him. "Either it's golden beaches or it's guns, guns, guns. Is there nothing in between?"
Thomson says that despite the grim picture he paints of conditions on the island, he also did his best to depict the good alongside the bad.
"One of the things that I set out to do in writing this book is to look at the fabulous variety of this country," Thomson says. "It's a whole kind of bewildering melting pot of different skin colors, different peoples, different religions, different creeds ... so I was looking at that aspect of Jamaica in particular and celebrating it as much as I could."
The Dead Yard
By Ian Thomson
Paperback, 392 pages
Nation Books
List price: $16.99
I began my journey in south London, where James Fairweather had lived since 1947 after serving in the RAF. His Peckham house stood in a Victorian terrace which had been occupied once by horse omnibus inspectors and bank clerks; now, increasingly, by refugees from Africa. On greeting me, Fairweather led the way down a dimly lit corridor to the kitchen. Above the fridge hung an oilskin map of pre-independence Jamaica and, next to it, an out-of-date Page Three girl calendar. In his pinstriped waistcoat, Fairweather was prepared for the interview.
Another man was seated at the table, drinking white rum ('the whites', he called it). He introduced himself as George Walters, a building contractor. Walters had left Jamaica in 1966. Like Fairweather, he was natty, dressed in a pork-pie hat and a tie with a Top Cat motif. 'So when are you off to Jamaica?' Walters asked me, interested. 'Next week,' I said. He winced slightly. 'Mind how you go out there,' he said.
Fairweather's Jamaican childhood, as he described it to me, seemed very remote, a golden age when Jamaica had been an outpost of Britain's sovereignty. He loved Britain, he said, and the British royal cult with its fripperies and rituals (increasingly meaning less to young Jamaicans). On display in the kitchen were a Union Jack sweet tin and a 1952 coronation mug, as well as souvenir shire horses. Fairweather's wartime service was prompted by the anti-Nazi film In Which We Serve starring Noel Coward. The film inspired him to join the RAF. 'We all thought Hitler would bring back slavery and repatriate us to Africa if he won the war.' In 1943, after training in the United States as a wireless operator, Fair weather was transferred to Scotland, where his white superiors showed him a soldierly respect. 'There was no place for prejudice back then,' he explained. 'A war was on, and it was to be fought by black and white alike.' Some 8,000 Jamaicans served in the RAF during the 1939-45 conflict.
While on leave in wartime London, Fairweather joined white servicemen at the Hammersmith Palais, and in the smoky night clubs off Jermyn Street. He was filled with patriotic zeal and felt a pride in being a citizen of the Empire. In 1947 he returned to Jamaica for ten months. The island was recovering from the hurricane of 1944 and many Jamaicans were tempted to book a one-way passage to Britain in search of a better life. Fairweather, who was now an important source of knowledge about jobs and money in the so-called mother country, encouraged them to go. Britain, he told his Jamaican friends, 'was the best place for a black man to be'.
George Walters, who had been listening to the conversation, turned to me. 'But hear me now on this, my friend. England was a bad disappointment for me at first.' He could not believe that London could look so old and dead and poor — so plain different from the way it was depicted in the posters back home. In the grey, inner-city streets lined with scruffy, bay-fronted houses he desperately looked for somewhere to live. His biggest surprise was not the glum clothes or the shut-in, unsmiling faces of the landladies, but the cockney they spoke. 'After the high-class English they taught me in Jamaica, cockney sounded low class,' said Walters, 'it sounded bad and coarse.' Saying this, he sighed heavily.
Understandably, Walters had expected British people to be exactly like the white missionaries and colonials he had known in Jamaica. So the spectacle of white people doing menial work shocked him. 'Road-sweeps? I nearly died.' It was a quite astonishing reversal of roles: Caucasian hands doing a black man's work. Other shocks were in store for him. Englishwomen wore their hair in rollers in public; dogs came to sniff the packets of bread left by the milkman on the doorstep. What kind of life could spring from such squalor?
Inevitably as a West Indian 'room-seeker' Walters experienced a degree of racism. He was surprised to find himself categorised as 'coloured'. ('Room to Let: Regret No Kolored' ran the typical advert.) In Jamaica the term 'coloured' applied to people of mixed race; in England it was one of the basic words of boarding-house culture and of polite vocabulary in general. Usually, there was no violence: the aggressors, once stood up to, turned on their heels. Walters was prepared to fight back, though. 'First try rebuke by tongue,' he told me, 'then fists.'
Fairweather, like Walters, had family responsibilities in Jamaica, and routinely sent remittances. Would I take out a sum of money to his older brother Roy? Roy was a farmer who lived twelve miles outside Kingston in Spanish Town, the capital of Jamaica when Spain ruled the island. 'He talks a bit raw-chaw — rough, you know — but he's arright.' I agreed and later, with the money in my pocket, I caught the bus back home from Peckham.
Excerpted from The Dead Yard: A Story of Modern Jamaica by Ian Thomson. Copyright 2011 by Ian Thomson. Reprinted with the permission of Nation Books.
Ian Thomson’s book “The Dead Yard,” a bleak and prickly survey of Jamaica’s past and present, takes its title from one of that country’s funeral practices. When someone dies, those who loved him or her gather around the dead person’s house for a wake that can last as long as nine days. These events are often ecstatic; they’re akin to reggae versions of a New Orleans jazz funeral. People dance, the author writes, as if possessed by ghosts.
Mr. Thomson’s book is its own murmuring convocation of ghosts. He works his way through Jamaica’s blighted history — notably its three centuries under England’s colonial thumb, an epoch during which many Jamaicans were bound into slavery on sugar plantations — only to describe a present that seems almost equally grim.
This is not a book travelers will wish to place in their rucksacks, along with a Lonely Planet guidebook and an iPod stuffed with Bob Marley’s greatest hits. “One Love” is not on the playlist here. This is a book that might, if read on a flight to Kingston, tempt you to open — and then leap from — the nearest emergency exit.
Stand back and witness the bonfire Mr. Thomson makes from the kindling of modern Jamaican society. He calls it a place with “no recorded ancient history, religion or civilization of its own.” It is “a nation built on violence and morose vendettas.” It is “vexatious” and “fear-ridden.” It has a low literacy rate and is “one of the most violent countries in the world.” It has no credible justice system. Eight of 10 children are born to unmarried mothers.
It goes on. “The doctor-to-population ratio in Jamaica is currently 1 to 5,240, one of the lowest in the world.” He suggests it may be a “failed nation,” in a state of “moral decomposition; a hating and hateful place” and “a kind of corrupted Eden.” About its capital city, he declares: “Everyone in Kingston — uptown, midtown, downtown — seemed to be frightened of everyone else.”
It’s little wonder, as he writes in a preface to this edition (“The Dead Yard” was first published in England in 2009) that most bookstores on that island have declined to stock his book.
Mr. Thomson is a British journalist and critic whose previous books are “Bonjour Blanc,” about Haiti, and a biography of Primo Levi. “The Dead Yard” arrives in the United States having picked up some snowballing acclaim. The book’s dust jacket informs us that in Britain it is already the winner of the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and was named the Dolman Travel Book of the Year.
I wish I could join in this stately applause, but I am puzzled by it. On a purely aesthetic level, this book is a grind — it has no through-narrative, no argument, no grease. The author spreads out his research not in any kind of linear fashion but like a man having a rummage sale, inviting us to pick through it with him.
“The Dead Yard” has the jumbled personality of a Wikipedia entry. Mr. Thomson tells us almost nothing about himself beyond the fact that he has a “soft, educated face” and that his father has recently died. He does get hilariously stoned once or twice, but he does not enjoy this experience as much as we enjoy reading about it. For all of his negative assessments, he’s not even agreeably cranky. He’s a blank.
For a critic, his descriptive prose groans under comatose adverbs and adjectives. About a band, he writes: “The trombonists played soulfully, then picked up rip-roaringly.” People at another concert wear “spiffy” tracksuits and “glittery” jewelry.
More fundamentally, you never feel that Mr. Thomson has gotten particularly close to contemporary Jamaica. He does get out and about. He drops into churches and a whorehouse and a Rastafarian community and a leper home; he goes fishing; he visits Noël Coward’s old house. But not much happens during these desultory outings. Each is over in a couple of pages.
Most of this book is taken up with interviews; Mr. Thomson swings from one to the next as if from vine to vine. Most are so static that he could have done them over Skype. More problematically, nearly all these interviews are with people who are quite old.
I have nothing against old people and hope to become one myself. But by focusing on them so relentlessly, he gives us a skewed and brittle picture of Jamaica. These are people whose glory days are behind them. It’s no surprise that they think the country’s glory days are in the rearview mirror, too. It’s as if he’d written a book about modern Japan by interviewing the living World War II veterans.
Among those Mr. Thomson interviews are Errol Flynn’s ex-wife (Flynn spent a good deal of time at his home in Jamaica); Perry Henzell, the director of the 1972 film “The Harder They Come”; the 95-year-old mother of Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records; and aging musicians, politicians and gallery owners. A few of these interviews are a hoot. Blanche Blackwell, it turns out, was one of the writer Ian Fleming’s lovers in Jamaica and was supposedly a model for his character Pussy Galore.
Still, where are the street kids, the young politicians, the rappers, the hackers, the idealists, the groupies, the schoolteachers, the chefs, the narcotics kingpins, the bloggers, the wilyentrepreneurs?
I fear I am being as hard on Ian Thomson as he is on Jamaica. I did like many of his crisp observations. He writes: “Slavery runs through island life like the black line in a lobster.” In a storm, he notes how the palm trees “banged their heads on the lawn,” as if they were bass players in a metal band.
He’s got a sweet ear for dialogue. “It vex me — cos I always flew the Union Jack in my heart,” a woman says. Her husband adds: “It nah matter how you go; dead’s dead.” When the author buys toilet paper from a dreadlocked man on the street, the man says, “Arright, man, rispeck.” Mr. Thompson notes the way that “Jamaicans can have a cockneylike difficulty with their aitches.”
There’s a bit of nice humor here too. “No problem; when Jamaicans say that,” Mr. Thomson reports, “invariably there is a problem.”
Still, his take on Jamaica is similar to mine about his book: “I was in no hurry to go back to it.”
