‘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. An interesting thought thrown into this poison-infused pot is that violence is another imperial legacy; flogging, we are told, was only abolished in 1998. The statistics are frightening: 70 per cent of Kingston’s ghetto dwellers are illiterate; the 46 per cent labour force of women is the highest in the world; 42 per cent of the city’s population is under 20. Thomson is told that once a kid so much as touches a gun his life expectancy is down to zero. Then again: ‘If you don’t have a gun, the drug men kill you — if you do have a gun, them kill you even worse.’
There are, though, shafts of hope throughout Jamaica. Thomson writes of the Alpha Catholic Boys School and Orphanage, with its orchestra led by the bandmaster:
‘I don’t want the wrappings or the tinsel — just the gift! You hear? All right, let’s go!’ With Jamaican rumbas and reggae played soulfully . . . . rip-roaringly . . . this was exemplary. . . music you would not believe.
Thomson felt that he was going to levitate out of his seat.
The legacy of imperialism can still suddenly smother all; at the ‘very British’ Jamaican Judge Small’s funeral in Kingston, the congregation is told how he relaxed every weekend in Edwardian knickerbockers, giving his daughter five shillings to recite stanzas of Gray’s Elegy. A product of pre-war British education — replete with such useful advice as how to make a snowman at Christmas — the judge was praised for practising the ‘major export’ of the empire — British justice. ‘Never put your wishbone where your backbone ought to be’, Judge Small had liked to tell his children. All that glittered, though, was not gold; the Governor General, whilst sipping Earl Grey tea, saw the return to Jamaican spirituality, with the uniting of her churches, as one way to save Jamaica:
‘Save Jamaica?’ ‘Yes, save Jamaica. What else can you do to a nation that has lost its way?’ The question, undigested and acid, lay heavy on our conversation.
I have spent many intoxicating months on the island, seeking out the British architectural legacy; the 17th-, 18th- and 19th- century castles and Palladian sugar factories and slave hospitals, as well as marble monuments to rival Westminster Abbey’s — the very symbols of the imperial power that Thomson argues is holding the country back from achieving a true democracy — and I must take issue with his demand for their destruction. More than that, a fervent plea should be made for their preservation. They are buildings in which today’s islanders can take greatest pride; after all, they were built by the skill and sweat of their forefathers. As Thomson himself writes, tourists are Jamaica’s only hope now and these historic buildings could and should become the new trumpet voluntary for tourism in the Caribbean: rare architectural pickings in landscapes as rich as can be found on God’s earth.
Our Jamaican journeys were very different; a difference most vividly realised when at Port Antonio, Thomson writes gloomily of the ‘alien pubic hair’ found in the lowest type of cheap-rent rooming-house, whereas I was cheering the church memorial to Annesley Voysey, grandfather of Britain’s Arts and Crafts architect. Nevertheless, he and I are both spot on the same in our love of the country. I feel, though, that there is more hope for Jamaica than we read of in this terrific book. Not only that, but to eradicate this country’s imperial past — which in one way or another is its only past — cannot be the way forward.
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