The Dead Yard

by Ian Thomson

  Oddly, as the soundtrack to modern blackness, dancehall rarely promotes black as beautiful. Reggae, with its righteous pre-slave-ship spirituality, had offered hope of deliverance to ‘downpressed’ Jamaicans and encouraged a generation of British-born black West Indians to confront a part of their heritage - Africa - that their parents had largely shunned. Magnificent Afro-centric albums emerged in 1970s Jamaica, among them The Right Time by the Mighty Diamonds, Bunny Wailer’s Blackheart Man, Marcus Garvey by Burning Spear, Augustus Pablo’s King Tubby Meets the Rockers Uptown and - most righteous of all reggae albums - Satta Massagana by the Abyssinians (quoted by the Clash on their album London Calling). These records have a hymnal, incantatory quality and infectiously heavy bass lines that few white groups could hope to emulate. They can also be almost Stalinist in their insistence on repatriation to Africa (‘The whole world is Africa,’ chant Black Uhuru) and the wickedness of the white man. Yet dancehall has given up the fight entirely and regressed to dull, computerised rhythms. The journey from Horace Andy’s ‘In the Light’ to Sean Paul’s ‘Shake That Thing’ cannot easily be called progress.

  In recent years, the homophobia of some Jamaican dancehall celebrities has tarnished Jamaica’s image abroad. Few commentators can agree on the source of the homophobia. Evangelical church groups have not helped; neither have Jamaican politicians, who cynically foster a dislike (or worse) of homosexuals. During the 2001 general elections the JLP adopted the song ‘Chi Chi Man’ by T.O.K., which urged the burning and killing of male homosexuals or ‘batty bwoys’ (literally ‘arse boys’). The opposition PNP, not to be beaten, used ‘Log On to Progress’ as its 2002 election campaign slogan-a reference to ‘Log On’ by the singer Elephant Man, which similarly advocated kicking or stomping on homosexuals. The British Home Office has refused entry to dancehall stars known for their anti-homosexual liriks, most infamously Buju Banton and Beenie Man (‘I’m dreaming of a new Jamaica, come to execute all the gays’).

  Fear and loathing of homosexuals - in which British colonial rule is implicated - has a long history in Jamaica. The island’s anti-sodomy laws, an inheritance of the imperial Victorian administration, state:Whoever shall be convicted of the abominable crime of buggery (committed either with mankind or an animal) shall be liable to be imprisoned and kept to hard labour for a term not exceeding 10 years.

  The prohibitions, deriving from the English Act of 1861, show to what a dismal extent Jamaica has absorbed values from colonial Britain. The island’s anti-homosexual laws, endorsed to a certain degree by the black nationalist middle class, have percolated down to the poor, who are easily manipulated by holy-roller Churches: Pentecostalists, Seventh Day Adventists. Similar laws exist elsewhere in the Anglophone Caribbean, as well as in Fidel’s Cuba and in many countries in Africa and Asia. Yet Jamaica is outwardly the most homophobic of the West Indian islands. A white man seen on his own in Jamaica (as I discovered to my exasperation) is often assumed to be in search of boys. Homosexuals are occasionally stoned, ‘cutlassed’, shot and raped (sometimes even at police stations). According to a recent poll, 96 per cent of Jamaicans are opposed to any move to legalise homosexual relations.

  Jamaica has a vibrant homosexual community, yet the consequences of being ‘outed’ are so dire that homosexuals may themselves resort to expressions of violent homophobia just to deflect attention. One might have expected Jamaicans, with their brutal past under imperial Britain, to have some empathy for minorities and difference. Instead they have fallen into a meanspirited and self-enslaving ignorance. In August 1997 the Jamaican government announced that condoms were to be distributed in Jamaican jails as a preventative against the spread of AIDS. The mere implication that a portion of Jamaican prison life was homosexual was enough to turn ‘straight’ inmates against ‘chi-chi’ inmates, sixteen of whom were murdered in riots within the jails.

  It has been pointed out how deeply ‘feminised’ Jamaican culture is. Baby boys are coddled as little princes; and Jamaican men, as in parts of West Africa today, may be pampered and indulged by their mothers. Edith Clarke, in her classic (if now rather dated) study of rural Jamaican life, My Mother who Fathered Me (1957), spoke of the ‘grandmother household’ where grandmothers - especially maternal grandmothers - are the childminders for their daughters who go out to work. Today the chief female in most families - what Jamaicans call the ‘woman-a-yard’ - continues to be the grandmother. Many reggae songs glorify mothers and grandmothers (such as ‘Mother’s Tender Care’ by the Ethiopians or ‘Mother’ by Burning Spear) but no reggae song that I know of honours the father. Fathers are not obviously a part of Jamaican popular music; the father is the parent most likely to be absent.

  So Jamaican mothers, with their spoiling ways, have helped to create an ‘almost entirely feminine’ environment for their male offspring, argued the Jamaican journalist Morris Cargill in a 1965 essay. Unfortunately, there is no father-image to leaven the imbalance; so while the boy may, and usually does, grow up into ‘a fine example of the masculine physique’, according to Cargill, his attitude to life is ‘extraordinarily feminine’. Jamaican men may compensate for their ‘femininity’ by a precarious, over-exaggerated masculinity, which can express itself, like a long-pent-up balloon, in eruptions of violence and even sexual peculiarity.

  In 1998, for example, the Jamaican dancehall singer Bounty Killer released a song, ‘Can’t Believe Mi Eyes’, which expressed incredulity that men should dress in tight trousers: in his view, tight trousers were an effeminate display of gayness. Yet some dancehall stars, with their shaved eyebrows, diamond earrings, white suits and lovingly manicured nails, present an almost Gloria Swansonlike image of womanly adornment. In Jamaica a homosexual man is sometimes called a ‘Maama man’.

  In compensation for its ideological nullity, dancehall culture has developed a seamy jargon, dancehallese, as lively as any eighteenth-century thieves’ cant. The sublanguage seems to celebrate Kingston as a place glutted with sensation: lurid, sexually dangerous. ‘Batty riders’ are tight pants disguised as shorts; ‘bumper riders’ likewise expose a woman’s ‘bumper’ (bottom); ‘cargo dung’ is extra-showy jewellery. The word ‘buffilous’ was translated for me (by Bas) as ‘sexy’; ‘punnani’, vagina. ‘Go low’ means to have oral sex (considered unmanly in thrusting dancehall culture); ‘roach killas’ are shoes; and ‘twin cam’ is a bisexual man. ‘Bashment’, or party, has been replaced by the pidgin Spanish ‘passa-passa’, in island patois, ‘confusion’ or ‘mix up’.

  Bas smiled brightly. ‘And I have another one for you - “anaconda”.’

  ‘Penis?’

  ‘Right.’

  As with hip-hop, parental discretion may be advised with Jamaican dancehall music (sometimes known as ‘Yardcore’).

  At about five o’clock the party mood changed as flotillas of expensive-looking cars began to arrive. The women passengers, dressed in Lycra batty riders, tumbled shrieking out of the four-byfours and - that ultimate symbol of inner city success - the ‘bimmer’ (BMW). Soon the women were skanking and flexing in the middle of Spanish Town Road, their men break-dancing in vaguely lewd James Brown routines.

  A first paleness of dawn, and the passa-passa was still fairly bouncing with metallic ragga and deejay patter from Alonzo. I watched transfixed by the raw display of flesh. A woman naked save for a brief V of black lace was gyrating with a man on top of a giant speaker, their embrace only a little short of copulation. (‘Ruba-dub’, the erotic body language of the Jamaican deejay, is well named.) When the girl with the gold ankle chain asked me a question - ‘Wan compn’y?’ - it was time to leave. Back at PJ’s house, in the oyster light of dawn, Kingston looked almost romantic, the old imperial slave depot tinged with silver-greys and greens.

  4

  Slaving

  Jamaica’s oldest sugar estate, Worthy Park, was founded in 1670 and is still in operation. It stands in fertile plains an hour’s drive from Kingston, and one day I was invited to lunch. The sound of cocktail-
making-a clinking of crushed ice against glass - greeted my arrival as bow-tied waiters served at a long table draped in linen. The elite of Jamaica’s sugar industry was enjoying French wine and chilled soursop juice. They ate well - steak, lobster mayonnaise - and many of them turned out to be related to each other.

  The estate is run jointly by Robert Clarke (whose family own Jamaica’s Gleaner newspaper) and Peter McConnell. Tough white country folk, they lamented the decline of the island’s sugar industry and the ruinous state in general of Jamaican agriculture. McConnell, a silver-haired man in a pink sports shirt, said to me, ‘We’ve lost the know-how. We can’t run sugar efficiently any more.’ Sugar has been in crisis in the West Indies ever since the plantation system collapsed under Queen Victoria. Between 1848 and 1910 the number of plantations in Jamaica shrank from 513 to seventyseven, many being sold for less than the price of their sugar boilers. In 1897 a Royal Commission was sent to the British Caribbean to investigate the dilapidated industry. It was recommended that the islands diversified their crops, as dependence on a single industry hindered development. Once sugar was dethroned, however, Worthy Park was plunged into debt; and Jamaica, no longer vital to the British economy, became one of the Empire’s many dark slums.

  Like the rest of Jamaica, Worthy Park was today waiting on a government promise of money, otherwise it might not survive. McConnell and Clarke, ahead of the game, had diversified into non-sugar crops such as citrus and pineapple; they produced the Tru-Juice fruit drink known to all Jamaicans. Yet every year the estate lost thousands through praedial larceny (crop theft), a crime for which some Jamaican planters would like to bring back flogging. ‘A few strokes with a tamarind switch never did anyone any harm,’ I overheard a guest say. (Flogging was abolished in Jamaica only in 1998.) Worthy Park employs armed rangers to keep out the thieves; the shootings, sometimes fatal, are not always reported to the police.

  The waiters, with their plantation-bred obsequiousness, hurried to whisk away flies from our plates. Though most of the guests were white, few of them seemed to be afflicted by Anglophone pompousness or snobbery. (Robert Clarke’s wife, Billy, came from Kentucky.) Until independence, Jamaica had been largely and inevitably British, but the island is increasingly American now, which is a change not always for the worse. The United States Peace Corps, for instance, has been in Jamaica since 1962, working in HIV/AIDS education, birth control, water sanitation and environmental projects.

  However, America displays no greater openness towards Jamaica’s black community than the colonial British did. It would have been unusual for a Worthy Park planter to marry a black Jamaican. Blackness, in the white (and perhaps also the black) Jamaican view, connotes not merely colour, but also ill manners and a lack of culture. The prejudice has passed into modern Jamaica from the days of slavery, when a black skin signified captivity and a lowly, field-hand status.

  The McConnells had come to Jamaica from Ireland in the nineteenth century, lured to this sad green island perhaps by the promise of wealth. Opposite me sat Joanie Desnoes, Peter McConnell’s wife, a frail, blue-eyed blonde with ringlets. ‘You’re a writer,’ she said to me, in lightly Americanised English. ‘Do tell me what you think of Jamaica.’ I made some polite remark, which seemed to satisfy her. She was an heiress to the Jamaican Red Stripe beer family and, to judge by her French surname, descended from French planters who had fled from revolutionary Haiti during the slave uprising there of 1793 to 1804. Like most of the guests, then, she had been born in Jamaica out of hybrid, transplanted identities.

  According to the eighteenth-century historian of Jamaica, Edward Long, the ‘Creolised whites’ of the island had peculiar characteristics that distinguished them from Europeans. The men tended to have ‘deeper’ eye sockets, for example, as a guard against the sun’s glare. I looked round the table: no deep eye sockets, only a striking whiteness of complexion.

  Most of the Worthy Park guests, being wealthy, carried guns. Violence was never far away; in 1967, Peter McConnell’s mother was murdered by her chauffeur, a killing that shocked even Jamaica. The killer, twenty-five-year-old Joseph Spencer, strangled Nora McConnell after he had been sacked by her.

  By five o’clock the last of the guests had left Worthy Park. Robert Clarke, a stop-watch on a cord round his neck, offered to take me on a tour of the estate. In his jeep we drove past ruined sugar-grinding and boiling houses, which had produced the coarse brown muscovado granules that fed the British sweet tooth. When the estate was at its peak of production, in the mid-1700s, Britain was importing 100,000 hogsheads (63-gallon casks) of sugar a year from the West Indies. The value of British imports from Jamaica alone was five times that from Britain’s thirteen mainland colonies in North America; Worthy Park’s sugar, destined for the docks and refineries of Liverpool and Bristol, was king.

  No longer. A decayed planter’s house, redolent of days of gambling and dissolution, lay mouldering in guinea grass. Beneath it were shacks built to accommodate the estate’s 700 workers today. Among their other duties, the workers must clear the land for irrigation canals, cut cane, cut bush and gather field trash for fuel. Robert Clarke, bouncing behind the wheel of his jeep, made some barbed remark about the ‘sociologists’ who complained of a white man’s injustice. ‘Don’t talk to me about slavery,’ he said. ‘We run a clinic, we provide facilities for football and cricket teams. So our slaves’ - he joked - ‘are well looked after.’

  Thirty years ago, in the 1970s, boxing matches were held at Worthy Park, when overseers laid bets on the cane-cutters as they fought in the ring. Jamaica is a land with a continuous memory of slavery and slavish abasement. Slavery runs through island life like the black line in a lobster. Even today the cane-cutters are not encouraged to leave the plantation or to sell their services elsewhere; they are considered the property of Worthy Park.

  In London I met James Berry, the Jamaican poet and children’s author, who lives in a retirement home in Turnham Green. Though Turnham Green is not an obviously Afro-Caribbean part of the British capital, nevertheless I had come to speak to Berry about slavery. When I arrived he was listening to Duke Ellington’s Black Brown & Beige, a sympathetic beatnik figure in turned-up jeans.

  ‘God! What a country - Jamaica!’ Berry exclaimed.

  Every time he returned to his birthplace there was trouble: political violence, corruption. Things had not been too bad once - in the days when people still had ‘respect’. But how Berry disliked going home now. There was nothing left, he said - everything was rotting into the sugar-cane fields. In his more recent poetry Jamaica emerges as a byword for all that is most despairing about the British West Indian condition:Me not going back to dat hell Jamaica.

  Me have more pain there than I can tell.

  But surely, I asked, things had been ‘worse’ under the colonial British. ‘That’s what you’d like to think’, Berry replied. ‘But, you know, there was discipline back in them days. Look at the roads now, they’re like hellholes. We can’t even build a decent road! And the estates - they’ve run to seed, they’re full of emaciated cattle.’ Berry added with anger: ‘Jamaica’s stagnancy sickens me - what progress have we made since independence?’

  Slavery, in Berry’s opinion, had not been entirely erased from Jamaica. Violence was central to the system of slavery and the spirit of this violence continues to haunt modern Jamaica. The island was still run by overseers; only today the overseers were a motley of party bosses, armed ‘badmen’ and corrupted police. ‘Does that not remind you of slavery?’ Berry knocked back a tot of rum, then tilted out a jigger more. ‘The greed of the few over the manifold misery of the many? Oh my Lord,’ he said. ‘Oh my good Lord.’

  When Berry left Jamaica for England in 1948, at the age of 25, the crush of humanity on board the immigrant ship made him think of the Middle Passage - the feared Atlantic crossing of slaves from Africa. By the journey’s end the SS Orbita’s stairs smelled of vomit and urine. Sixty years on, however, Berry felt no sadness at leaving Jamai
ca as the island still had nothing to offer. But what really troubled him was unutterable: he could hardly put into words, though he said it anyway, ‘Jamaica has not been better off since independence.’

  Something had gone terribly wrong in Jamaica for Berry to say that. He too had had a vision of a modern Jamaica freed of imperial Britain, where there was equality among black, white and brown, and life was transformed for the better. That dream had yet to be realised. An old man in Turnham Green, Berry was happily fulfilled as a writer, or almost fulfilled, yet bitterly disillusioned with his birthplace.

  For three centuries slavery had been the only reason for Jamaica’s existence. Jamaican society was created from slavery. Jamaican customs and culture were fashioned by slavery. Typically, British planters cast Jamaica aside like a sucked orange once they had exploited their estates in order to fritter their fortunes at home in England. Outside Georgian London the greatest concentration of absentee and retired Jamaican planters was in the Bristol suburb of Clifton. There, in their cocked hats and fashionably buckled shoes, the new men of capital were envied for their conspicuous and easy wealth. George III, the story goes, was peeved to encounter a ‘West Indian’ (as white planters were then known) whose coach was more resplendent than his own. ‘Sugar, eh?’ the king loudly proclaimed.