Some Thoughts on Jamaica

Jamaica and the CI are intertwined...though both deny it. "Culture," a code word for...something like identity... shared in some ways in the thick broth of pre-1962 Jamaica when Cayman was part of that colony. The roots still interconnect in ways no one could ever understand.

We know little about the decline and fall of colonies other than that they usually melt with considerable pain to their inhabitants. The US was no different...struggling with identity pains up until the end of Civil War and even far beyond. It seems the anger of slavery lasts centuries and rightly so. What was done to Africans in bringing them to the New World was truly unspeakable. Nearly the whole of the Jamaican National Gallery focuses on identity, dislocation and emancipation. "Freedom" "Respect" ...Rastafarianism...all black empowerment ideas link back to the anger of colonial slavery and abuse.

I've never seen a Malcolm X poster on a street in the US, but there are many in Jamaica including one in the main national commemorative park. It is that sort of anger.

Jamaica feels like that student in the 30th percentile of a class who is good looking, charming and warm...one you are really hoping for. But that student, because of their challenges at home, etc. keeps slipping back into the likely doomed bottom 25%. Jamaica flirts with being South Africa...Kingston is more like Johannesburg than not....but it also flirts with being paradise. Come to think of it, so too does South Africa. The British chose choice prizes to plunder and to love. What an extraordinary marriage and evil sin was their colonial empire.

At once a kleptocracy and the most religious place on earth (there are more churches there than any other place per capita...I'm told Italy is second...) Jamaica is an angry revivalist hustling combination of New York, Johannesburg, Cayman and (I'd guess) Costa Rica or Cuba. It is even too disorganized for US gangs to rule. Each person is a separate hustling individualist.

The government now is said to be good. They try (with seeming futility) to chase corruption out of the police and government in general. Corruption is, of course, the hardest issue in public administration and probably the least studied. Jamaica is the laboratory as is Eastern Europe...Africa is the laboratory gone out of control. So too perhaps is Mexico out of control.

So beautiful...so angry. Worth seeing. Leave your valuables at home.