by Zadie Smith
Thomson has little doubt on this matter: “Jamaica’s very social order bears the mark of the slaving past. In 1965, when a statue of Paul Bogle [leader of an 1865 rebellion and a champion of the poor] was unveiled in Morant Bay, riots ensued as locals objected to the way the Baptist preacher had been made to look too black” (my italics). This obsession with skin color, with rough justice and clan politics (both political parties in Jamaica have their respective paramilitary or “gangsta” wings, shooting it out in the slums of Tivoli Gardens)—all find their precise echo in the slave past. Jamaica’s “native” population arrived three hundred years ago, as cargo, the property of “triangle merchants” who motivated the slave trade between England, Africa and Jamaica. “A typical ‘triangle voyage’ carried trading goods (such as beads, rifles and gunpowder) from England to Africa, then slaves from Africa to the Caribbean, and finally sugar, coffee, cotton, rice, and rum on the home stretch to England. It was one of the most nearly perfect commercial systems of modern times.”
On the infamous 1782 crossing of the Liverpool slave ship Zong, all 470 slaves aboard perished; first the captain threw overboard those who had died of illness, then he began jettisoning the merely sick, still in manacles: “The entire remainder, according to one eyewitness, ‘sprang disdainfully from the grasp of their tyrants, and leaped to their death.’” If you did make it to Jamaica, you found yourself in tropical hell: “For the crime of ‘rebellion’ [it was] recommended that slaves be pinioned to the ground and burned with a flaming brand ‘by degrees from the Feet and Hands . . . gradually up to the Head, whereby their pains are extravagant.’ For ‘lesser’ crimes . . . ‘chopping off half of the Foot with an Ax.’” “Rebellions” included stealing rum, insolence, refusing to pump water and the use of improper language.
Colonial Jamaica imposed upon this bloody history a false little England; the trains ran on time (now there is no train) and everyone could recite “Jerusalem,” but Jamaicans’ African roots became a thing of shame and were largely ignored. When the British left in the late fifties, the Americans soon replaced them, first covertly when Jamaica became a Cold War pawn, and later economically when its vulnerable consumer market was flooded with cheap exports. Such history does not the foundation of a healthy modern state make, and the stability it took England six hundred years to achieve is unlikely to come to Jamaica in fifty. Jamaica is like an abused child: who can be surprised when the adult behaves so strangely?
During Thomson’s 2007 visit, a man and his family are shot dead on the principle of “disrespect”: the man had looked up a woman’s skirt on the bus. Two Mandeville youths caught shoplifting food are “bludgeoned with shovels and pickaxes, as well as bitten by dogs; one of them was unable to walk after spinal injuries.” On this island of 3 million people, five are murdered every day. Carolyn Gomes, director of Jamaicans for Justice, a human rights group, puts it succinctly: “The business of dissing and respect is homegrown Jamaican. When your life’s so degraded, you need people to respect you, you need a gun to stand out.” As Thomson concludes, notions of respect have hatched in the absence of civic values, and encouraged Jamaican men to pursue power and money “for their own sake.”
Meanwhile, the social cachet of light skin, established on the plantations, continues. Here is Sheila Hamilton, a seventy-three-year-old Justice of the Peace: “I’m not black. I’m brown. A light brown lady . . . Actually I’m virtually white.” Almost everyone Thomson interviews sooner or later reveals this color consciousness. Mary Langford, a Jamaican writer and historian of mixed race, is fairly typical. “She lived in a smart Kingston house jammed with mahogany furniture, silver polo trophies, silver teapots, and, above all, maids. The maids were very black [and this] served to highlight the ‘whiteness’ of their employers . . . She told me, ‘I’m not afraid ipso facto of Africa, or of African culture. But there’s too much ganja, too much dancehall, and too much sleeping in the afternoon.’” Many of the Jamaican elites in this book seem to see siesta as the essence of moral lassitude. In fact the only sensible thing to do in the Jamaican climate in the afternoon is nap. Soon come—“an expression which haunts Jamaican life and, to outsiders, epitomizes the Jamaican soul”—represents a local wisdom, simple common sense when it’s 103 degrees outside and there’s a hard rain coming. To put it Jamaicanly, we slow till we wan fi go fast.
The pockets of joy in Jamaica (and in this book) are mostly provided by people trying to make—as George Bernard Shaw once recommended in the Kingston daily the Gleaner—a “Jamaica for the Jamaicans.” Thomson finds a bit of hope in the village descendants of the Maroons, runaway slaves who formed their own communities and retained their Gold Coast heritage, and have no desire to enter the ghettos of Kingston, and also in the self-sufficient Rastafari community (although their most famous pleasure proves somewhat self-defeating: “The more you smoke,” one of them tells Thomson, “the more Babylon fall”). Meanwhile, Jewish, Indian and Chinese Jamaicans appear to thrive, much to the annoyance of the black majority. With their own languages, schools and religious institutions, these minority communities were not subject to a state perversely determined to turn Jamaican saplings into English oaks:
A school inspector in rural Jamaica asked a group of children, “How many feet has a cat got?” The question was put in strenuously clipped Queen’s English, any departure from which was considered “bushman talk.” A long bewildered silence followed until a Jamaican teacher re-phrased the question in patois: “How much foot have puss?” A forest of hands went up.
I have made this book sound depressing; it isn’t. The vibrancy and resilience of Jamaican culture emerges everywhere: in the verdancy of the soil, the ingenuity of the patois and the music played in the streets. I’m sure various Jamaicans will have various bones to pick with Thomson: it’s a little galling to have a backra tell you what’s what. Is he bemoaning American ascendancy in Jamaica out of nostalgia for British power? (Why spend so much time interviewing what’s left of the Princess Margaret/Errol Flynn/Ian Fleming set?) If I have a central objection, it’s his conservative take on the music. Thomson is, like a lot of white guys of his generation, a fan of old-style reggae, of jazz and ska and rocksteady, but balks at hip-hop and dancehall:
It seems to have lost its moral bearing and declined from street celebration to the degraded soundtrack of venality, with scarcely any ideology left in it . . . [G]iven 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.
Though I’m no Sean Paul fanatic, I think Thomson’s missed an opportunity here. By “Shake That Thing” I assume he refers to “Get Busy,” a radio and video hit of 2003 that prominently features that lyric. The song is a fantasy, certainly, but not of the guns, rims and bitches kind that Thomson dreads. Sure, Sean Paul steps out of a white Escalade, but where does he go? Into a suburban Jamaican-American house. Upstairs he politely salutes the old-timers, husband and wife—who are cooking up salt-fish dumplings and playing domino—before entering the basement for the party, where he begins toasting—emceeing—over his own record. Down here, young Jamaican men and women dance in rival gangs, displaying awesome and equal skill, vying to outdo one another in moves that would make Pina Bausch want to join the girls’ side. Their clothes, their hair, the way they move their heads and hands—you’ll find it all copied in Monrovia, in New York, in Tokyo. (Thomson knows this: “Britain’s indigenous culture is now so influenced by Jamaica that a Jamaican inflection is hip among white British teenagers. Black Jamaican culture is youth culture in London.”) And when Sean Paul, who is, in the Jamaican parlance, “yellow,” moves in on the hot girl at the party, the thing to note is that she is black. Not yellow, not café au lait, black-black. A little later the father of the house gets sick of the noise, grabs the mic and shuts the party down—his authority is accepted. No one pulls out a piece, reminding us that the great m
ajority of Jamaicans are peaceable people. To me the scene says: what if all this beauty and talent and style and wit and smarts had a real home, not on the set of a music video but in a functional nation? I pray it soon come.
• • •
Danzy Senna is about the same color as Sean Paul, and in 1998 wrote a very good and (as it turns out) prophetic essay called “Mulatto Millennium,” which poked fun at the new American fashion for all things mixed race. She went on to write Caucasia, a clever semi-autobiographical novel about a family constructed like her own: white mother, black radical father. Something about her own physical ambiguity (not to herself, but in the eyes of the people who look at her) has given her an unusually deep insight into identity. What if, depending on how you wore your hair, people took you to be an entirely different genre of person? Not that she ever puts it as bluntly as that: instead there’s a subtle shape-shifting always at work, as characters respond to one another on the basis of superficial signifiers which, in a culture gone visual, seem to mean everything. In her new collection of eight stories, You Are Free, the misleading binary of black/white is still there, and to it another has been added: mother/non-mother. I confess I much prefer Senna on the former topic. On the matter of race she is never less than acidly playful; on motherhood she is dogmatic. An exception is the excellent opening story, which adroitly mixes the two themes. “Admission” tells a middle-class fable of an intellectual black couple trying to get their toddler into a fancy daycare (“I heard Will and Jada got wait-listed”). They apply only as a sort of joke and expect to be rejected, but when they are accepted the man objects both to the cost and the pretension (“We will have to scale back—seriously—just so the kid can get to sit in a classroom with future Rich Fucks of America”) and lays down a veto. The woman realizes suddenly how desperately she wants it (“I don’t want Cody to rot away in a public school”).
The story seems, at this point, a too-close reflection of one of the more reliably tedious moments in a middle-class life—and then it flips. I won’t tell you how, because the power of Senna’s stories lies in this gift of the flip, which seems to me an aesthetic response to the human experience of being “flipped” oneself, in the perspective of others. All the stories that deal with race have a steely humor to them (a lovely story about a mongrel dog begins, “The bitch was a mystery. She didn’t look mixed, more like some breed that hadn’t yet been discovered. Strangers on the street were forever trying to guess her background”), and even the most obviously constructed premises work, perhaps because Senna sees, and has lived, the elaborate construction that is race. One story, “Triptych,” tells the same short tale of a family at dinner, three times—but in each version the family is of a different race. You learn this not from descriptions of their skin but from tiny cultural markers: the posters on the wall, the name of the dog, what they’re eating. It’s subtle and unnerving, the baggage you bring to each retelling of the situation. It’s “situation” that’s Senna’s great strength (the prose itself is quiet, unshowy): “There, There” has the fine premise of a girl reading on the Internet about a suicide that’s taken place at her boyfriend’s place of work, but when he comes home he doesn’t mention it, and this fissure of non-disclosure widens throughout the evening until it becomes a chasm between them. Senna has Carver’s gift of revealing the things we (don’t) talk about when we talk about love.
Given all this subtlety and smartness, it’s strange to find motherhood treated so baldly, and with a weird hint of triumphalism. In “The Care of the Self,” we are clumsily asked to compare and contrast our heroine, Livy, who has left the single life in New York to have babies and grow schlumpy in New Mexico, with Ramona, a skinny, glamorous friend who used to be married to a man called Julian: “Livy always left those dinners with Ramona and Julian more distressed than when she’d arrived, nearly bludgeoned by the happiness of their union. She even wondered some nights if the real reason they invited her over was to remind themselves that it was better to be married than to be alone.” But now the tables have turned and Ramona is single. She comes to visit new mother Livy and take them both to a spa, where Ramona shows off her wonderful body and talks a lot about “pampering.” Senna’s light touch is gone; we are meant to hate Ramona, and we do: “It was as if Ramona had come to New Mexico to see just how awful married life, mother-life, could be—and she would leave newly reassured of the superiority of her life being single, free, back in the city.” Ramona, who likes Pilates and “examin[ing] her toned and glowing figure in the mirror,” has career aspirations to “combine life coaching with being a personal trainer.” She doesn’t stand a chance.
Meanwhile, Livy, despite her unkemptness and mild marital difficulties, is proud to realize that she is happier than Ramona, and that it’s a deeper, more meaningful happiness. She has transcended the vanity of childlessness: “It was over. She knew . . . that it was over, this romance with herself.” This unsisterly point is made again a little later: “She felt the daughter-self, young and vain, dying, and the mother-self, huge and sad, rising up in its wake, linking her to nothing less than history.” This idea, popular these days, that motherhood immediately confers upon women the wisdom of the Buddha, fails to explain why we mothers find our own mothers to be such royal pains in the ass. Nor does it explain how some childless women, such as George Eliot, seem likewise able to link themselves with the huge and sad weight of history. If motherhood makes you such a good, unvain person, if it’s such an evolved state, how come we feel the need to judge so harshly our sisters who choose not to have children, or who, for reasons beyond their control, end up not having any? (In New York, in the same week, Ramona is both beaten up in the street and finds out her husband is gay.)
Another story, “What’s the Matter with Helga and Dave?” is again devoted to this straw figure of the perfect woman. This time it is Helga, a new mother, but apparently not the right kind: “[The baby] looked only a few months old, but I could not imagine that the mother—with her svelte shape and placid expression—had ever carried a child inside her, much less pushed one out.” Helga also commits the crime of telling the protagonist, another new mother, not to breastfeed after two months (“You should see what it does to your breasts when you’re done,” she warns). The more slovenly and tired the protagonist feels, the more perfect Helga seems to be, but by the end of the story perfect Helga is of course revealed, in fact, to be deeply miserable and unsatisfied (“Dave despises me. I really think he wishes I was dead. We haven’t touched each other in months”). And the protagonist ends up breastfeeding Helga’s baby. Reading this book, I had the same bittersweet sense many women had when they saw a black president arrive before a female one. On race, perhaps, we’re finally getting somewhere. But whatever became of sisterhood?
On Wild Girls, Cruel Birds—and Rimbaud!
The two best books I read this month—The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed—are far from new, published in 1969 and 1974 respectively. Their author is now eighty-one years old. Trying to describe their majesty, I feel like one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s intergalactic interlopers taking her first step on alien soil—I haven’t been so taken with an ulterior reality since I closed the wardrobe door on Narnia. It’s not often that we finish a novel with the thought “What is gender, anyway?” or “What does it really mean to own something?” But these feats of anthropological Verfremdungseffekt are what Le Guin (herself the daughter of an anthropologist) achieves, with her unclassifiable inhabitants of the planet Winter (who grow genitals only during acts of passion, known as “kemmering”). Or her anarchist-cooperative Odonians, natives of Anarres, who possess no concept of either ownership or hierarchy. Le Guin’s The Wild Girls is a slim publication containing one story, an interview, a few short poems, a brief meditation on the virtues of modesty and an angry essay about corporate publishing, “Staying Awake While We Read,” previously published in Harper’s. The poems are underwhelming (“The Next War”: “It will take place/it wi
ll take time, it will take life/and waste them”), while the essays and especially the interview are zingy and pugnacious (“The only means I have to stop ignorant snobs from behaving toward genre fiction with snobbish ignorance is to not reinforce their ignorance and snobbery by lying and saying that when I write SF it isn’t SF, but to tell them more or less patiently for forty or fifty years that they are wrong to exclude SF and fantasy from literature, and proving my argument by writing well”). The strongest reason to pick up The Wild Girls, however, is its Nebula Award–winning title story, a tale of master–slave culture on a strange planet. Here we find the City, where Crown people live; meanwhile, down in the country, the Dirt people subsist. The Dirt people are an oppressed nomad tribe. Sometimes Crown men go on forays into Dirt country to kidnap wild girl-children and bring them back to the City to be used as slaves or else cultivated as concubines. The City world has inscribed codes of conduct—ways of eating, sleeping, dancing, speaking—the intricacy of which would suffice for a cycle as long as Le Guin’s own Earthsea series, yet somehow she sums up this complex community in a handful of pages.
“Show, don’t tell,” goes the worn-out workshop mantra: Le Guin shows us how. She never recites long lists of terminology or boring (to me) Tolkienesque genealogies. Her worlds are simultaneously factitious and naturalistic—we wander in and find them fully formed, populated by characters deeply embedded in imaginary habitats:
In the evening they came to the crest of the hills and saw on the plains below them, among watermeadows and winding streams, three circles of the nomads’ skin huts, strung out quite far apart . . . The children were spreading out long yellow-brown roots on the grass, the old people cutting up the largest roots and putting them on racks over low fires to hasten the drying.