Paradise lost

‘Jamaican history’, wrote Karl Marx, ‘is characteristic of the beastliness of a true Englishman’. In The Dead Yard, Ian Thomson laments the consequences, with the grim conclusion that the British planters cast Jamaica aside like a sucked orange once they had exploited their estates. Having shaped Jamaica’s past for good or ill, Britain has not helped to shape its future for the good. Today, blessed by nature with startling beauty and cursed by history with such startling evil, the country does not know whether to laugh or cry; and Thomson addresses this dilemma with depth and brio as well as despair. Often too with delight, as his ever observant eyes and ears pick up — with joyful-for-us results — the culture, colour and customs of the country. ‘You a Preacher Man?’, asks a market ‘higgler’ (trader), mistaking Thomson’s notebook for a bible.

When I say no, she tried to sell me a ‘roots’ drink, said to aid sexual potency. ‘It big you up nice, my dear, and make you evva ready for love’. Jamaicans call these concoctions ‘front end lifters’. I do not think they work.

Here though, laments Thomson, is a country that has failed; that since the first flowering of independence in 1962, has been unable to cast aside the restricting mantle of ‘Missus Queen’ and her attendant associations (although, by way of cocking a sniping snook at this allegiance, as Thomson points out, the Queen’s likeness, tiara and all, painted on a wall in Trenchtown, has for years been plugged through with bullet holes). Slavery, he writes, runs through island life like the black line in a lobster, forever infecting Jamaica with the post-colonial malaise of a deadly trinity of drugs, violence and crime.