26 August 1999, 821 words
If you have a fair complexion and a good income and a superficial character, you will find Jamaica a wonderful place to be.
Never mind what you hear about the high murder rate. Nearly all the 550 persons murdered for the year were killed in the ghettos, which as a high-brown, prosperous, shallow person you would never be caught dead in. (I'm speaking literally, of course.) Besides, that figure isn't even accurate: there have actually been a further 200-plus people killed, usually in shoot-outs between Jamaican police and criminals. But when Jamaican police shoot anyone, including innocent bystanders, it's not murder. The dead bystanders, you see, were only poor people.
So you needn't worry. If you've the right skin-colour and dress well, the police are there to serve and protect you. And it's not to say that the police don't get disciplined when they transgress: four officers have been suspended with three-quarter pay for their role in illegally gathering 30 homeless people from tourist centre Montego Bay in a truck in the dead of night and dumping them in the non-tourist parish of St Elizabeth. This is a big step in a society where, just a few years ago, a policeman who fatally shot someone during a street protest was suspended for a month with full pay. In Jamaica, you see, police officers who do wrong are punished with paid vacations.
In fact, the only reason those four officers were suspended at all was because the media made a big stink about the incident. The Jamaican media report the news quite thoroughly. Mind you, unlike Trinidad, there's hardly ever any news about robbery or rape or fatal accidents. But that is because, the third night after I arrived there, the first fifteen minutes of the TV news dealt with the five murders that had occurred the previous day. In Jamaica, if you only get robbed, that's good news and, as politicians quite rightly point out, the media rarely report good news.
But Jamaica has several newspaper columnists and radio talkshow hosts who sharply criticize the upper-class and the government for their ennui. This is somewhat significant since all Jamaican columnists and talkshow hosts are themselves upper-class. (In a country where five percent of the population holds 100 percent of the bank accounts, it is safe to assume that a middle-class doesn't really exist.) The country has trenchant journalists like talkshow host Mutty Perkins, who is liberal and blunt about it, and columnist/editor Franklyn McKnight, who pulls no punches in his well-informed commentaries. The Jamaica Observer regularly writes editorials about the plights of the disadvantaged.
On the other hand, the head of Jamaica's media association also runs the government's information service. Go figure.
I had gone Jamaica courtesy BWIA to do research for a novel I'm writing. In the journal I kept for my short stay there, I wrote on July 21, the day after I arrived in Kingston: "The two outstanding details have been the largeness of the sky and the unkempt look of the place: the cracked roads, half-kept gardens which look as though they're about to overgrow the houses. It adds to the look of a place literally returning to the bush. There's also the smog, so thick it even hides the hills."
Depending on where I was, the society struck me as either pretentious or desperate. The only exceptions were Montego Bay, which knows it's a tourist town, and the endless glossy-green hills between there and Kingston. July 23 entry: "Jamaica has a Bob Marley Museum. They also have a celebrity graveyard with plots already assigned. You always hear the argument in Trinidad that it is this kind of thing we need to do if we are to be a truly civilized country. Yet, in every important sense of 'civilized', Trinidad is ahead of Jamaica. The exception therefore disproves the argument. In the papers, there is a report from a New York-based human rights group which tells of children being kept in overcrowded jail cells with hardened criminals. Like Trinidad, Jamaica has plenty street children. And, for me, that is the best marker of a society's civilizedness or lack thereof - how it takes care of its children."
Mind you, this is the opinion of a visitor who is chocolate brown and earns only a modest income. These attributes probably make it impossible for me to enjoy, let alone understand, Jamaica. Still, any Trinidadian who can afford it, and who gets disgusted by our many controversies, should visit the island. You should return with a better outlook, either on the principle of hitting your thumb with a hammer because it's so nice when you stop, or on the basis of Ambrose Bierce's definition of happiness in The Devil's Dictionary: "An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of others." Then again, if you're that shallow, you might well end up staying there forever.
Copyright ©1999 Kevin Baldeosingh