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“Nearly every Jamaican knows someone who has been threatened with a gun or knife — or murdered,” writes Ian Thomson early in his book about the island. Certainly it’s hard to avoid grim statistics when talking about the place — the poverty levels; the social deprivation (it has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the English-speaking West Indies); above all, the murder rate — around 1,500 a year in a population of 3m, a figure that puts the country in the same safety league as South Africa and Colombia and ensures that most tourists drawn to the island spend their time hiding away in their holiday compounds.
This baleful image of the country is one that is reluctantly endorsed in Thomson’s latest travel book. As he tours the island from Kingston to the north coast, the tales of violence just keep mounting up.
There’s the youth shot dead by police in downtown Kingston on the morning Thomson ventures into the area; or the man whose shaved skull and stitches as he answers the door betray the pistol-whipping he received the week before from burglars. Then there’s the elderly Jewish lady who recalls being tied up with rope while a gun was put to her husband’s head. The intruders, she reassures Thomson, had shown unexpected “kindness” during the robbery. “Yes, they hurt my hands with the rope,” she explains, “but I honestly don’t think they would have killed us.”
Thomson is a veteran of the Caribbean’s more intimidating corners; a previous book, Bonjour Blanc, told of his chastening experiences on Haiti. As in his earlier outing, the style here is impressionistic. Drawn to the country partly by his love of reggae and ska (he can be remarkably prescriptive in his tastes), he presents a series of encounters with locals of all different colours and opinions, the mix washed down with generous and sustaining draughts of history and politics.
The question that dominates the book is the one asked in the first paragraph, when Thomson comes across a seemingly irate woman at a meeting of the Jamaican Historical Society. Many locals are thoroughly nettled by their country’s image abroad, and complain that they get blamed by outsiders for every crime in the Caribbean, wherever the incident originally happened. “You visitors are always getting it wrong,” the woman berates him. “Either it’s golden beaches, or it’s guns, guns, guns. Is there nothing else in between?”
Thomson is strikingly brave in his attempts to provide an answer. He travels to Kingston’s notorious Seventh Street, where rival political gangs shoot it out for control of the area, and where the bust of Elizabeth II in the local community centre is, he can’t help noticing, riddled with bullets. He heads to the slums of Spanish Town in search of an old Jewish cemetery (the country has a significant Jewish population) and has to be accompanied on his trip by a shotgun-toting guard.
Many of the most impressive people he comes across are the priests and volunteer social workers trying manfully to hold back the tide of crime that seems about to submerge them. One of the most striking portraits is of Pastor Bobby, who acts as a broker between rival Trench Town gangs, and who rides to work in his Japanese 4x4 with “three mobile phones…clipped to his waist like grenades”.
Much of the book is both subtle and telling. Thomson is good on the equivocal position of the Jamaican “returnees” from overseas, whose wealth is often begrudged and who in turn can be bracingly rude about the locals. He’s strong on the minutiae of social stratification and the racism that persists but that everyone denies (the Chinese have had particular problems here). He is sound, too, on the extraordinary levels of power retained by the old elite, on the endemic corruption and the invidious way that politics has encouraged and fed gang culture (in the 1980 election 900 people died in the vicious street battles).
Above all, he is fierce about the pernicious effect that slavery has had on the island, and the negative legacy of British rule. Jamaican sugar was once an economic cornerstone of the empire and drove the island’s slave trade; but as the staple’s importance declined, so did British interest in its then colony. Many of Jamaica’s most persistent problems have their roots in this double history of neglect.
For all its strengths, though, The Dead Yard is not without its problems. There is in the book not much of the joy that visitors can often find on the island. One could also argue that Thomson’s trawl of the country is not as representative as it could be. He seems remarkably uninterested, for one, in the mass-participatory religious groups that, particularly away from Kingston, provide an important support network in a country where social provision is minimal. He can, as well, be too hypnotised by Kingston’s violence and too little drawn to the calmer rhythms of the countryside.
Generally, though, Thomson is a fine and tough-minded guide to what he calls this “corrupted Eden”. His book may not reassure the tourists heading for their walled compounds next winter, but it will certainly give them a glimpse of what is going on around them.
The Dead Yard by Ian Thomson
This baleful image of the country is one that is reluctantly endorsed in Thomson’s latest travel book. As he tours the island from Kingston to the north coast, the tales of violence just keep mounting up.
There’s the youth shot dead by police in downtown Kingston on the morning Thomson ventures into the area; or the man whose shaved skull and stitches as he answers the door betray the pistol-whipping he received the week before from burglars. Then there’s the elderly Jewish lady who recalls being tied up with rope while a gun was put to her husband’s head. The intruders, she reassures Thomson, had shown unexpected “kindness” during the robbery. “Yes, they hurt my hands with the rope,” she explains, “but I honestly don’t think they would have killed us.”
Thomson is a veteran of the Caribbean’s more intimidating corners; a previous book, Bonjour Blanc, told of his chastening experiences on Haiti. As in his earlier outing, the style here is impressionistic. Drawn to the country partly by his love of reggae and ska (he can be remarkably prescriptive in his tastes), he presents a series of encounters with locals of all different colours and opinions, the mix washed down with generous and sustaining draughts of history and politics.
The question that dominates the book is the one asked in the first paragraph, when Thomson comes across a seemingly irate woman at a meeting of the Jamaican Historical Society. Many locals are thoroughly nettled by their country’s image abroad, and complain that they get blamed by outsiders for every crime in the Caribbean, wherever the incident originally happened. “You visitors are always getting it wrong,” the woman berates him. “Either it’s golden beaches, or it’s guns, guns, guns. Is there nothing else in between?”
Thomson is strikingly brave in his attempts to provide an answer. He travels to Kingston’s notorious Seventh Street, where rival political gangs shoot it out for control of the area, and where the bust of Elizabeth II in the local community centre is, he can’t help noticing, riddled with bullets. He heads to the slums of Spanish Town in search of an old Jewish cemetery (the country has a significant Jewish population) and has to be accompanied on his trip by a shotgun-toting guard.
Many of the most impressive people he comes across are the priests and volunteer social workers trying manfully to hold back the tide of crime that seems about to submerge them. One of the most striking portraits is of Pastor Bobby, who acts as a broker between rival Trench Town gangs, and who rides to work in his Japanese 4x4 with “three mobile phones…clipped to his waist like grenades”.
Much of the book is both subtle and telling. Thomson is good on the equivocal position of the Jamaican “returnees” from overseas, whose wealth is often begrudged and who in turn can be bracingly rude about the locals. He’s strong on the minutiae of social stratification and the racism that persists but that everyone denies (the Chinese have had particular problems here). He is sound, too, on the extraordinary levels of power retained by the old elite, on the endemic corruption and the invidious way that politics has encouraged and fed gang culture (in the 1980 election 900 people died in the vicious street battles).
Above all, he is fierce about the pernicious effect that slavery has had on the island, and the negative legacy of British rule. Jamaican sugar was once an economic cornerstone of the empire and drove the island’s slave trade; but as the staple’s importance declined, so did British interest in its then colony. Many of Jamaica’s most persistent problems have their roots in this double history of neglect.
For all its strengths, though, The Dead Yard is not without its problems. There is in the book not much of the joy that visitors can often find on the island. One could also argue that Thomson’s trawl of the country is not as representative as it could be. He seems remarkably uninterested, for one, in the mass-participatory religious groups that, particularly away from Kingston, provide an important support network in a country where social provision is minimal. He can, as well, be too hypnotised by Kingston’s violence and too little drawn to the calmer rhythms of the countryside.
Generally, though, Thomson is a fine and tough-minded guide to what he calls this “corrupted Eden”. His book may not reassure the tourists heading for their walled compounds next winter, but it will certainly give them a glimpse of what is going on around them.
The Dead Yard by Ian Thomson
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