Ian Thomson

Death wears bling: the glory of London’s Caribbean funerals

Ian Thomson applauds the grand rituals of West Indian funerals in his review of Charlie Phillips’s How Great Thou Art

issue 29 November 2014

Death is big business in parts of the Caribbean. In the Jamaican capital of Kingston, funeral homes with their plastic white Doric columns and gold-encrusted ‘caskets’ are like a poor man’s dream of heaven. The dwindling belief in an afterlife — the consolation that we might ever join our loved ones — has taken much of the old-time religion out of the West Indian funeral.

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