Jamaica

1 December 2012 RVA 1100 hrs

Jamaica

If you’re like me you probably don’t often have the opportunity to be abroad twice in the same year. Well, that is the fortune that has befallen me this year since after the trip to Spain I waited an entire three months to leave again for Jamaica. 

To offer a musical accompaniment I will post a song by Dennis Brown, the “crown prince of reggae” who I had somehow never heard of. We encountered a lot of his music as well as lots of good music permeating the whole country. The people love music and even the music that they seem to listen to now is good and not lame club crap. It is popular to set up soundsystems, which are massive amps that blast reggae, and play dominoes and hang out in public places. It is not the quietest country, and baying dogs and roosters crowing are common sounds. Goats walk around like they are out doing errands, even if a lot of them are tied up by the side of the road.

So here is a Dennis Brown song, chosen as it takes from Psalm 23 liberally. The song conveys it well, even with its 80's production, but Jamaica is a grateful and positive place in so many ways. I think that a real spirit of gratefulness is everywhere in Jamaica, as people are poor but very content and filled with a sense of grace and wonder at their blessings. The people commonly quote from the Bible and proclaim their faith even as they have very little (possessions, not faith). They also have a strong connection to nature and to the Earth, since they depend on it for survival in a much more palpable way that we do here in a developed and modernized country.

The reason for going to Jamaica is that my brother Justin lives and works there in Kingston, and my mom and I went down to experience a different sort of Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving Day I ate snapper and rice and peas, alongside a Red Stripe. I was wearing shorts and occasional dogs wandered onto the patio where we were eating, and of course ganja smoke casually floated by as well. Our server, a dreadlocked man in an Orlando Magic Dwight Howard jersey, set near our table in silence, then left on his motorcycle for five minutes, and returned to consume a cup of some sort of steaming hot tea. It was not really what you’d call the Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving, even if I’m sure my cheeks were ruddy since they always seem to be.

Justin has assimilated about as well as a white man (I kept thinking of the Clash song “White Man in Hammersmith Palais” while I was there) with blonde hair can in a country where everyone is quite black. He goes to the market in Kingston on market days and haggles with the sellers for his coconuts and sorrel juice, and whatever else, saying that the market isn’t that different than the ones he encountered in Khartoum, Sudan over the last few years when he was there. For me, I have to admit that I often felt a little on the spot since in certain places they don’t see white people that often, and the language is very difficult to understand at times, even if it is classified as English. One of our drivers, an older man who had a grandfather’s calming air (I am intentionally veiling Justin’s job by the way), who knew him well said that “he moves about this country like he was born here.” One of his favorite customs seems to be stopping for the coconut jellies. Basically, a machete is a tool that every Jamaican household has, and one of their common uses is to chop up coconuts for the juice and the “jelly,” which is the pre-ripe coconut meat that remains inside the shell of the green, young coconut. Here’s how it works: You stop at one of the million wooden roadside huts where they sell fruits, and negotiate a price. It seems to be customary to sort of argue with the price unless it is exceptional, and the coconut seller will usually make up some bogus reason for the unfavorable price, or blame Hurricane Sandy (the hurricane conveniently seemed to have extra supernatural ability to affect everything flawed on the island that we encountered). Once you settle the price the guy/girl chops the coconut in a V pattern on the skin, creating a circle where you can insert a straw and drink the juice, or just dump it into your face, which I sucked at. Luckily there was only one stop sans straw. After you drink the juice you return the shell to the seller who chops it in half with the machete and half chops an “ital spoon,” (a Rasta term for vegetarian with no salt) as Justin called it, which is created by chopping a sliver of the shell itself which can be removed to created a spoon which can be used to scrape out the jelly and the coconut meat, depending on the maturity of the given coconut. 

Coming back to the 23222 here where I in my own way exist in a similar contrast, you can’t help notice that many of the black people are much paler than those in the Caribbean, of course easy to explain based on the racial mixing and history of the two regions. There should be not controversy or any offense taken at this observation as it is patently obvious to anyone that dares allow themselves to admit that they notice the ethnicity of those in their immediate surroundings. In other words, unless you’ve lost your sense of sight you’d agree with me.

So the trip was great even though I am still sick after experiencing a 50 degree temperature change in one day. I also get sick in some way almost every time that I am on a plane. Big deal.

My impressions of Jamaica: A poor country, which can easily inspire pity even as there are instances where vultures descend on you trying to get you to buy Chinese made knickknacks, marijuana, or calabash or bamboo sourced flatware. I was offered to have my hair braided only once, which I declined. The “ganja” is certainly omnipresent and it is very common to just smell it wafting by like it’s no big deal. We didn’t stay at any of the barricaded all inclusive resorts where they keep the riffraff out so we had to fend for ourselves, but we also got to see more of the “real” Jamaica, as we were told by a few people, as if there is a reality contest going on. In my experience in the Third World (yes, an obsolete term since the second world is basically gone) you only want to get to a relative level of “real” until you bleed into the “scary” or “idiotic to be in as a tourist” categories. This didn’t happen and I felt like Jamaica was safer that advertised, but I always feel that way about foreign countries since I like to eschew the paranoia that people lay on me about being abroad. I found that the utmost code of the Jamaican people is honesty and respect. It is necessary to look people in the eye, engage with them, and then firmly reject their salesmanship of coffee bean necklaces or bamboo shot glasses. The customary handshake is one of the weirder ones, where you slap into a handshake like a lot of Americans do informally, except you maintain your grip and rub thumbs, like you’re declaring an affectionate thumb war. The fist bump is also common and the word “respect” is uttered a lot, as well as “let me reason wit you me brethren,” and the like. The “th” sound is not pronounced the way I would but sounds like the letter T so “thing” becomes “ting,” and so on. The accent can be impenetrable and it seems like the younger people speak with the patois whenever they are speaking with other Jamaicans, but not as much with the whites. Justin can use patois effectively, and what surprised me was that Jamaicans do not find that patronizing, nor do they ridicule it like it is “their” speech and white people can’t use it. I guess they see it as a sign of respect and inclusion, and like any foreign language- even though it is just English that has been highly mutated- the people who speak it always like to see an effort on the part of foreigners to speak their language (maybe with the notable exception of Parisians, who of course are world famous for their snobbery, and have the peculiar talent of living in the world’s most visited city and maintaining an overall hatred of outsiders).

I don't have a conclusion here, but it was a great trip, and I managed to needlessly bash Paris while recounting it!