ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Island People. Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Читать онлайн.Название Island People
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781782115601
Автор произведения Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Издательство Ingram
Some months had passed since the main celebration of Jamaica 50. The blandishments of that time—including the “Nation on a Mission” theme song its leaders had commissioned to go with it, with its patriotic verses mouthed by reggae stars and sprinters—were starting to fade. I’d timed my visit, though, to coincide with the island’s annual celebration of Black History Month. In the United States, we’ve grown used to our cafeterias breaking out paper place mats each February depicting Sojourner Truth and Martin Luther King. In Jamaica, Black History Month also congrues with a yearly salute to the local music that’s made Black History its great theme: in 2008, the government proclaimed that every February, forevermore, would officially be “Reggae Month,” too. That week in Kingston, the University of the West Indies was to host a conference on “Global Reggae, a’ [at] yard and abroad,’” which promised to attract a devoted tribe of scholars and obsessives outlining Jamaica’s nation-branding efforts, and the culture behind them, in panel discussion form.
Jamaica is hardly the sole world nation in the early twenty-first century to have embraced a branding agenda. England has its “Cool Britannia” ad campaign; Korea, its “K-Pop.” In an era when the public sphere can feel like a marketing consultancy, even artists and grade schoolers know that it’s not the product, it’s the brand. But the branding concept’s uses and abuses, in a society whose forebears’ flesh was once singed like cattle’s, was striking. Striking, for that history. Striking, for how Jamaica’s attempts to forge a Pavlovian link, in the world’s mind, between the island’s flag and its charms, involved a process of at once touting and quieting its foremost pathologies—for sex and sun, frenetic energy and violence. Brand Jamaica was striking for how all its facets, from sports to music to frolicking tourists, were implicated within the garrison complex that came during the 1970s and ’80s to rule and ruin island life. And it was striking, too, because of what Brand Jamaica’s story could maybe reveal about the larger fortunes of the old Third World.
Since the Cold War’s end, many members of that fraternity of less have seen their economies, devalued and debt-ridden, advance little. When Marley sang, “Today they say are we free / only to be chained in poverty,” in 1973, Jamaica had a dollar whose value still equaled that of a U.S. greenback. Now a single American dollar bought one hundred Jamaican ones. Yet Jamaica had demonstrated a remarkable gift, like many of its Third World peers, for exporting its people to First World cities. And those cities’ cultures, if not their civil politics, have thrived on the toothsome frisson, “ethnic” or “exotic” (choose your queasy word), of those migrants’ pepper and sounds. In this complex of fresh spring rolls and green tofu curries and cumbia-for-white-folks, Jamaican reggae’s image and sounds held a prideful place. This is a fact, to Brand Jamaica’s touters, that was extremely crucial. How and whether it mattered at all, or could be made to matter, to the Jamaicans with whom I filed off that flight in Kingston, not one of them a dreadlocked singer or a world-class sprinter, was another question.
* * *
WE STEPPED THROUGH the balmy night air to enter an arrivals hall bedecked with yellow, green, and black bunting. A large banner hung on a back wall. It was affixed with the hummingbird-adorned Jamaica 50 logo and a prosaic message—“WELCOME HOME”—that echoed our flight attendant’s protocol breach and evinced how its hangers hoped Jamaica’s birthday might resonate for this émigré nation. The line at immigration for JAMAICA/CARICOM entrants was, as usual in Kingston, much longer than the one for foreigners. At the customs desk, a uniformed agent stamped my passport with a perfunctory nod. His approach toward my magenta-haired friends was more dilatory. The women hoisted their bags onto the agent’s steel table and glared daggers at his colleague, whose dog sniffed at parcels perhaps full of new Nikes for their cousins, or bras and cell phones to sell. With hustlers’ mores and the outsized manner of a people about whom the song “Everybody Is a Star” might have been written, the members of Jamaica’s émigré nation are certainly on a mission—if not, most times, the patriotic one their government had hailed in its Jamaica 50 theme song, and that the island’s largest cell phone company, by the baggage claim, touted on another wall-sized mural. “NATION ON A MISSION,” it yelled in 1,000-point type, above where the phone company Digicel’s logo was affixed to a photomontage of Bolt spreading his seven-foot wingspan to the world, as Shelly Ann Frazer-Price, “di pocket rocket,” who also won London gold, sprinted from the ghetto where she grew. Stepping beneath another banner hailing the nation’s fiftieth, I paused after customs. There, by the money changers’ booths, a more homely pantheon entombed its elder heroes in papier-mâché.
A man-sized figure in antique cottons, first in line, had “Sam Sharpe” inked on a plate at his feet: Sharpe led a rebellion of Jamaica’s slaves, in 1831, that helped force its owners to abolish slavery throughout their empire. By Sharpe’s side was Paul Bogle, the Baptist preacher who led another uprising, a few decades later, of ex-slaves now freed from bondage but still chained in poverty. Marcus Mosiah Garvey, next up, was unmistakable in his Horatio Nelson hat: he founded the United Negro Improvement Association in 1917 after emigrating from Jamaica to Harlem, and helped the world’s black masses see themselves as a diaspora like the Jewish one. The two men here whose papier-mâché skin was painted lighter than the others had led Jamaica’s drive to independence in 1962, and founded the two parties that define its politics still: Alexander Bustamente, the populist demagogue who formed the JLP (and Jamaica’s first government), and his first cousin Norman Manley, the high-minded barrister (and father of the country’s fourth prime minister, Michael Manley), who birthed the PNP. The last figure in this lineup was its sole woman. Recognizable for her gender and her head scarf, Queen Nanny of the Maroons was the eighteenth-century matriarch of the island’s runaway slaves. She led the Maroons’ fight for freedom—but she’s a figure perhaps most recalled by school kids now, on this island of women-led households whose culture’s mores can feel matriarchal and misogynist all at once, for her alleged ability, when faced with the redcoats’ muskets, to catch their bullets in her cunny and fling them back.
Such are the nobler ghosts of Jamaica’s past. Its popular heroes of now derive their fame from the rather different sources cited by my taxi driver when I asked him, as we pulled out of the airport, about the current “runnings” in town, and he eased us onto the road running down the sandy spit of land, jutting out and around Kingston Harbour, on which the airport sits. The Palisadoes, as this piece of land is called, has been a center of Jamaican civilization since the pirate Blackbeard beached his ships here and, in one of the taverns out by its tip, befriended a wisecracking parrot called Jefferson, who clutched his shoulder till the end.
“Badness!” my cabbie cackled as he sped down the drive, shooting a knowing grin in his rearview mirror. “Badness and bad men! Dat’s wha gwaan deh.”
His tone was winking: a play both on the expectations visitors bring to his island and Jamaicans’ mordant image of it. But his words’ sense that Jamaica’s great product, never mind its rum or reggae, was “bad men” and their doings is hardly rare on an island long dominated by pirates. Jamaica is located some ninety miles to Cuba’s south and a similar-length sail west of Hispaniola and was first settled by Taino Indians, from the Yucatán; the island’s indigenous paddled dugout canoes onto these croton-covered shores a couple of millennia before Columbus’s men, lowering dinghies from his Pinta and Santa Maria, did the same. It is by a variant of the Taino’s name for this lush land (Xamayca: Land of Woods and Water) that Jamaica is still known. Claimed for Spain by Columbus in 1494, the island remained in Spanish hands until it was wrested from their grip by the British in 1655, from which time the island’s sheltered proximity to the sea-lanes by which Castile’s ships ferried silver from mines in Mexico and Peru, across the Caribbean’s aqueous heart, toward Havana and then Seville, meant that Jamaica’s first notoriety on the world stage was as a haven for crooks.
So