The Dead Yard

by Ian Thomson

  That night, memories of Jamaica kept turning over in my mind like pictures in an album: the Kingston murder trial; the warm hospitable days at PJ’s; the botanical gardens at Cinchona; the dead yard ritual in St Thomas; the Spanish Town mortuary. How well had I understood this place? Alone in the dark, I had a sudden sense of how it must feel to see this part of the West Indies for the first time, the semi-tropic greens and blues and the shallows where the slave ships once anchored. A kind of corrupted Eden. I was in no hurry to go back to it.

  Epilogue

  Take Down the Union Jack

  Each day the planes land, the cruise ships call, and the tourists arrive for their dream holiday in the Caribbean. Yet today for Jamaicans there is despair. Armed gangs, police corruption and the indifference of politicians have created inner cities of mayhem and violence, where killings take place in daylight. The violence is largely confined to the ghetto, however, so Jamaica has been able to promote itself as a haven for tourists. Without tourists - the majority of them white - the Jamaican economy would struggle; without tourists, the islanders would suffer.

  Affection for Britain remains surprisingly strong in parts of Jamaica. But with this has come a political system fatally hidebound by the colonial inheritance. Jamaican pseudo-colonials, of the sort portrayed by Sam Selvon in his great West Indian novel The Lonely Londoners (1956), survive in the Kingston law courts, in the Sandhurst-educated echelons of the army and in the civil service. The social contempt shown by some Jamaican public servants towards the poor is a legacy, in part, of slavery, and the dry rot of mistrust and resentment left by the imperial project. Ideas of social welfare and responsibility fell on barren ground in the 1960s and 1970s, and soon withered. So Queen Victoria is still on her pillar, watching Jamaica collapse. A fatalism seems to be inherent in the island: change is not possible.

  Attempts were made post-independence to develop a national culture free from British and American influence. Yet the struggle towards nationhood was hampered by the national character. Over the three centuries of British rule, a combination of servitude and race, climate and geography had resulted in a citizenry fiercely resistant to government. When, in 1962, independence was granted, Jamaicans seemed cowed, conservative, materialistic. Initially they were enthusiastic for nationalism but displayed little civic or moral accountability beyond their family or parish. (As one Jamaican told me, ‘The “I” is often more apparent in Jamaicans than the “We”.’)

  In the half-century since 1962 the hopes for a fairer, better Jamaica have not been met. The discontent is felt especially by the older generation who worked with Michael Manley to combat the effects of colonialism. Tax evasion is widespread (as it is in Italy, a country that shares Jamaica’s anti-statism); the orderly queue is unheard of; beaches are becoming polluted, archaeological sites semi-abandoned. The so-called values of the PNP - national unity, socialism - were dealt a further blow in recent years by the Jamaican drugs trade, which has dominated Jamaica far more effectively than Michael Manley ever did.

  In addition, Jamaica has a powerful neighbour to contend with. The United States has worked hard to make the island conducive to American banana, sugar and bauxite interests, as well as tourism, drugs and anti-communism. By virtue of its proximity, Jamaica inevitably attracts America’s attention and concern. And as China vies for economic supremacy in the Caribbean basin, America’s involvement in Jamaican affairs is likely to intensify - America opened a super-fortified embassy in Kingston in 2006. Barack Obama, the newly elected president of the United States, is in a position to change the old era of Jamaican-Washington relations characterised by American Republican party interests. As a black man ascended to the most powerful office in the world, Obama has even won the approval of Castro’s Cuba.

  Nevertheless, Jamaica, a nation built on violence and morose vendettas, today stands on shaky political and economic foundations. The island is wonderfully fertile, yet manufactured foodstuffs from the United States continue to overwhelm the markets. There is growing disbelief among some Jamaicans that Queen Elizabeth II should still be their head of state, when other countries in the Caribbean have become republics or are moving towards republican status. For too long Jamaica has interpreted its history, its political and cultural life through Britain. Jamaica needs to banish its psychological dependency on the Mother Country - ‘Auntie England’ - and haul down the Union Jack.

  Jamaica looks small on the map. Yet for a nation of less than three million, it exerts a disproportionate influence abroad. No other West Indian island has generated such a widespread diaspora. Jamaica is a beautiful place; the mountains, streams and coastline linger in the memory. But the Jamaican people, with their gift for humour and generosity, their creativity (and fabled aggression), are stuck in a post-colonial malaise. In the course of my visits, I saw how the heritage of plantation slavery had helped to make the malaise.

  Jamaica’s very social order bears the mark of the slaving past. In 1965, when a statue of Paul Bogle was unveiled in Morant Bay, riots ensued as locals objected to the way the Baptist preacher had been made to look too black. A more confident nation would not have reacted in this way. But Jamaica remains unsure of itself and of its past. Jamaican planters had regarded slaves on the same level with beasts. In the last analysis, many things in Jamaica still turn on the bias of class and colour.

  When I visited Zede and Millicent Hudson, elderly returnees in Portland parish, Millicent was lying on a bed in a back room. She had lost most of her hair, yet her eyes seemed resilient. ‘My wife’s ill,’ Zede said to me, ‘she’s had strokes and all that kind of thing.’ She could hear us, though, and she smiled whenever a place of fond remembrance - the Peckham Mecca, a pub in Lewisham - was mentioned.

  The Hudsons had left Jamaica in 1961, a year before independence. For thirty years they scrimped in south London, trying to assimilate. Zede’s job was to operate the lift in the pedestrian tunnel to the Isle of Dogs beneath the Thames. (‘Up and down I went, all day.’) Through all their hardship and vexations, they dreamed of going home. Like many Jamaicans at this time, they saw their migration as an interlude, a stage they would survive sustained by the promise of return. And in the long term, one day, return would be possible.

  In the meantime, their Jamaican pride had no greater satisfaction than to hear relatives back in Portland say they must be quite wealthy now, after their years in England. (‘Wealthy’, that is, by Jamaican standards.) In 1994, Zede and Millicent decided to return. ‘I wish we’d stayed,’ said Zede, the muscles ridged out tense on his jaws. The moment they set foot in Jamaica, they were overwhelmed by a sense of hostility.

  Each day a Revival church behind their new house began to chant and drum in praise of the Lord. The noise they made overstepped the limits of decency, Zede told me. He and his wife could no longer think of the congregation’s ‘rudeness’ without flinching. ‘From six o’clock every morning, every day seven day a week, they knock that drum,’ Zede said. ‘Yes, we’ve been battered a whole heap of devil noise and drumming.’

  It was a shock for the Hudsons to find how unkind Jamaicans could be to home-comers. The church ignored their complaints and continued to shout their hallelujahs. ‘Every one of them is still stomping their hymns and other racket,’ Zede went on. ‘Me and Millicent, we can nevva sleep.’ Instead they cat-nap during the day, until the next burst of church-house rhetoric disturbs them.

  Oddly, their story seemed to parallel my own impression of modern Jamaica. Zede and Millicent, quiet people trying to lead a quiet life, had come home to a place that had failed to achieve democracy - a true democracy - after independence. ‘The Jamaica that we return to, nowadays,’ Zede told me, ‘it give me a bad feeling.’ In many ways, theirs was a very Jamaican story - Jamaican in its frustration of a hope.

  Further Reading

  The following books and articles - academic and general - were of invaluable help to me in writing The Dead Yard. Dates in entries refer to the editions consulted, not
to first publication.

  General

  Brodber, Erna, A Study of Yards in the City of Kingston (Kingston, Inst. of Social and Economic Research, University of the West Indies, 1975); Campbell, Leeroy James, Grow Jamaica: A comprehensive look at the economic, social and spiritual impact of the cannabis (ganja) industry in Jamaica (Ocho Rios, Bright Morning Star Press, 2002); Cargill, Maurice (ed.), Ian Fleming Introduces Jamaica (London, Andre Deutsch, 1965); Cassidy, Frederic G., Jamaica Talk: Three hundred years of the English language in Jamaica (London, Macmillan Education, 1982); Didion, Joan, Miami (Granta Books, 2005); Ferguson, James, Traveller’s Literary Companion to the Caribbean (London, In Print, 1997); Gambrill, Linda (ed.), A Tapestry of Jamaica: The best of Skywritings (Oxford, Macmillan Caribbean, 2003); Howard, David, Kingston: A cultural and literary history (Oxford, Signal Books, 2005); Naipaul, V. S., India: A wounded civilization (London, Andre Deutsch, 1977); Palmer, Andrew, A Diplomat and His Birds (Wheathampstead, Herts, Tiercel Publishing, 2005); Senior, Olive (ed.), Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage (Kingston, Twin Guinep, 2003); Shaw, George Bernard, ‘Interesting Interview with Mr. Bernard Shaw’, Daily Gleaner, 12 January 1911; Thomas, Polly and Vaitlingam, Adam, The Rough Guide to Jamaica (London, Rough Guides, 2003); Wardle, Huon, An Ethnography of Cosmopolitanism in Kingston (Lewiston, Edwin Mellen Press, 2000); Williams, Joan, Original Dancehall Dictionary (Kingston, Yard Publications, 2003); Winkler, Anthony C., Going Home To Teach (Kingston, LMH Publishing, 1995).

  History

  Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770-1820 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971); Brendon, Piers, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997 (London, Jonathan Cape, 2007); Bridges, Revd George Wilson, The Annals of Jamaica, 2 vols (London, John Murray, 1828); Bryan, Patrick, The Jamaican People 1880-1902 (London, Macmillan Caribbean, 1991); Curtin, Philip D., The Two Jamaicas: The role of ideas in a tropical colony 1830-1865 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1955); Ferguson, James, A Traveller’s History of the Caribbean (Oxford, Windrush Press, 1998); Heuman, Gad, ‘The Killing Time’: The Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica (Knoxville, The University of Tennesse Press, 2000); Segal, Ronald, The Black Diaspora (London, Faber and Faber, 1995).

  British-Jamaican relations

  Appleyard, Bryan and White, Leslie, ‘The Ghetto’s in the Mind’, Sunday Times Magazine, 10 October 2004; Bostridge, Mark, Florence Nightingale: The woman and her legend (London, Viking, 2008); Gilroy, Paul, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London, Routledge, 1992); Glass, Ruth, Newcomers: The West Indians in London (London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1960); Hall, Catherine, Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and colony in the English imagination 1830-1867 (London, Polity, 2002); Hinds, Donald, Journey to an Illusion: The West Indian in Britain (London, William Heinemann, 1966); Johnson, Howard, ‘Decolonising the History Curriculum in the Anglophone Caribbean’, Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History, XXX, 1, 2002; Lamming, George, The Pleasures of Exile (London, Allison and Busby, 1984); Manzoor, Sarfaz, ‘Britain’s Darkest Hour’, Observer, 24 February 2008; Noble, Martin E., Jamaica Airman: A black airman in Britain in 1943 and after (London, New Beacon Books, 1984); Owusu, Kewesi (ed.), Black British Culture and Society: A text reader (London, Routledge, 2000); Patterson, Sheila, Dark Strangers (London, Tavistock Publications, 1963); Sedley, Stephen, ‘No Law at All’, review of ‘A Jurisprudence of Power: Victorian Empire and the rule of law’ by R. W. Kostal, London Review of Books, 2 November, 2006; Walmsley, Anne, The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966-72: A literary and cultural history (London, New Beacon Books, 1992); Winder, Simon, The Man Who Saved Britain (London, Picador, 2006).

  Politics

  Beckford, George and Witter, Michael, Small Garden ... Bitter Weed: Struggle and change in Jamaica (London, Zed Books, 1982); Carroll, Rory, ‘Jamaica slums locked in violence’, Guardian, 1 April 2008; Foot, Hugh, A Start in Freedom (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1964); Gray, Obika, ‘Predation Politics and the Political Impasse in Jamaica’, Small Axe, XIII, March 2003; Gunst, Laurie, Born Fi’ Dead: A journey through the Jamaican posse underworld (London, Payback Press, 1999); Hart, Richard, ‘Federation: An illfated design’, Jamaica Journal, xxv, 1, 1993; Kaufman, Michael, Jamaica Under Manley: Dilemmas of socialism and democracy (London, Zed Books, 1985); Manley, Rachel, In My Father’s Shade: A daughter’s insight into the man behind the prime minister’s mask (London, Black Amber Books, 2004); Nettleford, Rex, ‘The Michael Manley-Kari Levitt Letters’, Small Axe, 1, February 1997; Rodney, Walter, The Groundings With My Brothers (London, Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1969); Schwarz, Bill (ed.), West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003); Small, Geoff, Ruthless: The global rise of the Yardies (London, Warner Books, 1995).

  Slavery

  Desmond, Adrian and Moore, James, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, slavery and the quest for human origins (London, Allen Lane, 2009); Hall, Douglas (ed.), In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica 1750-86 (London, Macmillan Caribbean, 1989); Hochschild, Adam, Bury the Chains: The British struggle to abolish slavery (London, Macmillan, 2005); Jack, Ian, ‘Britain is built on sugar: our national sweet tooth defines us’, Guardian, 13 October 2007; Lewis, Matthew, Journal of a Residence Among the Negroes in the West Indies (London, John Murray, 1845); McMahon, Benjamin, Jamaica Plantership (London, Effingham Wilson, 1839); Rediker, Marcus, The Slave Ship: A human history (London, John Murray, 2007); Shepherd, Verene, I Want to Disturb My Neighbour: Lectures on slavery, emancipation and post-colonial Jamaica (Kingston, Ian Randle Publishers, 2007); St Clair, William, The Grand Slave Emporium: Cape Coast Castle and the British slave trade (London, Profile Books, 2006); Turner, Mary, Slaves and Missionaries: The disintegration of Jamaican slave society 1787-1834 (Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 1982); Walvin, James and Craton, Michael, A Jamaican Plantation: The history of Worthy Park 1670-1970 (London, W. H. Allen, 1970).

  Travel accounts

  Abrahams, Peter, Jamaica: An island mosaic (London, Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1957); Beckford, William, A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica, 3 vols (London, T. and J. Egerton, 1790); Gosse, P. H., A Naturalist’s Sojourn in Jamaica (London, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1851); Long, Edward, The History of Jamaica or General Survey of the Ancient and Modern State of That Island, 3 vols (London, T. Lowndes, 1774); Macmillan, Mona, The Land of Look Behind: A study of Jamaica (London, Faber and Faber, 1957); Nugent, Maria, Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805 (Kingston, The University of West Indies Press, 2002); Sloane, Sir Hans, A Voyage to ... Jamaica with the Natural History , 2 vols (London, printed by B.M. for the author, 1707, 1725); Trollope, Anthony, The West Indies and the Spanish Main (London, Chapman and Hall, 1860).

  Religion

  Banbury, Rev. T, Jamaica Superstitions or The Obeah Book: A complete treatise of the absurdities believed in by the people of the island (Kingston, Mortimer C. De Souza, 1894); Besson, Jean, Martha Brae’s Two Histories (Chapel Hill and London, University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Hopwood, Andrea, ‘Jamaican “Dead Yard” Cultures and Customs Through the Years’, Death and Bereavement Around the World, vol. 2, ‘Death and Bereavement in the Americas’ (New York, Baywood Publishing Company, 2003); Hurston, Zora Neale, Voodoo Gods: An inquiry into native myths and magic in Jamaica and Haiti (London, J. M. Dent, 1939) Langford, Mary Jones, The Fairest Isle: History of Jamaica Friends (Richmond, Friends United Press, 1997); Seaga, Edward, ‘Revival Cults in Jamaica’, Jamaica Journal, III, 2, 1969.

  Africa, Rastafari, Maroon culture

  Barrett, Leonard, E., The Sun and the Drum: African roots in Jamaican folk (Kingston, Sangster’s Book Stores Ltd, 1976); Beckwith, Martha Warren, Black Roadways: A study of Jamaican folklife (North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1929); Bilby, Kenneth M., True-Born Maroons (Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2005); Chevannes, Barry, Rastafari: Roots and ideology (New York, Syracuse University Press, 1994); Dunham, Katherine, Journey to Acco
mpong (New York, Henry Holt, 1946); Grant, Colin, Negro With a Hat: The rise and fall of Marcus Garvey and his dream of Mother Africa (London, Jonathan Cape, 2008); Hart, Richard, Slaves Who Abolished Slavery: Blacks in rebellion (Kingston, University of West Indies Press, 2002); Sandbrook, Dominic, White Heat: A history of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London, Abacus, 2008); Smith, M. G., Augier, Roy and Nettleford, Rex, The Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica (Kingston, University of the West Indies Press, 1960).

  Music

  Bradley, Lloyd, Bass Culture: When reggae was king (London, Penguin Books, 2001); Chang, Jeff, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A history of the hip-hop generation (London, Ebury Press, 2007); Cooper, Carloyn, Noises in the Blood: Duality, gender and the ‘vulgar’ body of Jamaican popular culture (London, Macmillan Caribbean, 1993); Fordham, John, Jazz Man: The amazing story of Ronnie Scott and his Club (London, Kyle Cathie, 1995); Katz, David, Solid Foundation: An oral history of reggae (London, Bloomsbury, 2003); Reynolds, Simon, Rip it Up and Start Again: Post-punk 1978-84 (London, Faber and Faber, 2006); Salewicz, Chris, Rude Boy: Once upon a time in Jamaica (London, Gollancz, 2000), and Redemption Song: The definitive biography of Joe Strummer (London, Harper Collins 2007); Steckles, Garry, Bob Marley (Oxford, Signal and Macmillan Carribean, 2008); The Clash, The Clash: Strummer, Jones, Simonon, Headon (London, Atlantic Books, 2008); Younge, Gary, ‘Chilling call to murder as music attacks gays’, Guardian, 26 June 2004; Zephaniah, Benjamin, ‘Stop This Obscenity: ... time to leave Brother Bob [Marley] alone’, Guardian, 12 March, 2004.