My room

I have found a room. Entirely predictably, my patience with house-hunting amounted to something infinitesimally greater than non-existent. The first place I saw was pleasingly cheap but was (despite factoring in housing-cultural-relativism) a total dive. I mean, the wiring went THROUGH the bedroom window. Mmmm, that delightful ‘sleeping outdoors’ sensation, in the middle of a sub-zero Syrian winter. The second place I saw was actually reasonable and my brain started firing instructions at me: TAKE THIS PLACE! TAKE IT AT ONCE! But it was way over my budget; it was already taken; in fact I’d had to wake up the tenant (not to mention his wife and child) in the middle of the night to see it. Sigh sigh sigh.

So, when I saw a room with lots of ‘potential’ in a charming old-school Arab house with rooms around a courtyard (like the house I was born in!), I was actually reasonably decisive about the whole thing. Once I’d taken out the ‘torture chamber chic’ light-bulb (a merciless white glare) and put in a rug and few bits of nice cloth things the room actually looked kind of alright. Anyway, step 1 is out of the way...

Dinnertime conversation

“Everyone says they’re in Syria to study Arabic. Then you find out what they’re really here for.”

While humoured by this wry observation, I felt the need to clarify my position.

“But I’m really here just to study Arabic.”

Eyebrows were raised.

Landing in Damascus

Somewhat ominously, it was pouring with rain when I arrived in Damascus. Things prior to that had started nicely, with the driver my hotel sent to pick me up still being there with a bit of cardboard holding my name, despite the fact that my flight had arrived two and a half hours late.

A couple of days later, the sun came out. It was glorious.

Anyway, I'm here now. Bring on the Arabic...

Jamaica Farewell

Last days. As a rule, they tend to be good. I become emotional and everything feels very meaningful. Also, it tends to be sunny, although this is hardly out of the ordinary in Jamaica.

So it was no surprise that my last day in Jamaica was action-packed. Perhaps my piss-poor planning had something to do with the fact that so much stuff got lumped into the final 24 hours (or thereabouts). Perish the thought…

I was leaving Friday afternoon.

Wednesday night was spent the way every single Wednesday night of my time in Jamaica was spent: at the Pegasus hotel in Kingston. I have no reason to believe that any IJCHR intern that has ever existed has spent their Wednesday night in any other way. In a set-up wholly typical of our gregarious boss, interns at the IJCHR were permitted entry to a special weekly one-hour ‘party’ where free booze and delicious snacks were dutifully handed out. It was not an arrangement to be scoffed at and normally provided an ideal kick-start to an evening which consisted of moving upstairs to another bar at the Pegasus and discussing possible plans which, after being doused in a sea of gin, rum and Red Stripe, invariably failed to take off. As this was my penultimate night, there was a traditional sending-off ceremony involving a cake (with personalised icing), Jamaica-themed presents and, most important of all, a certificate to prove that all this had actually happened.

An evening of drinks and merriment was wrapped up late into the night, although I couldn’t take the traditional English approach to things and drink until I couldn’t walk, partly because I knew I had some big stuff to do the next day. I had to deliver a lecture to a group of about 70 new police recruits about what the use of force and human rights. I’d never done anything like this before.

Also, there was my scheduled visit to the Bobo dread rasta camp. Jason, the second of the IJCHR’s permanent staff, had promised to take me several times, and failed each time. This was his last chance.

Jason was both a sounding board and gateway for prospective Jamaican adventures. His response to my casual proposal to go photographing around Tivoli gardens, one of Kingston’s most notorious slums, was typically to the point:
-- Admas dem a KILL you.

We kept coming back to the idea of going to Tivoli Gardens, at least partly, I felt, because Jason so enjoyed the dark humour of this particular piece of forecasting. I also found it very entertaining. I would suggest variations on the adventure that would tease out ever more dramatic predictions of the future or, even better, tangential insights into the Jamaican street. Couldn’t I just hide the camera?
- Admas dem spot you a foreigner.
But… how can they tell?
- Every ting. Way you walk.

Jason then went on to demonstrate how a homegrown Tivoli ‘badman’ might strut and contrasted this with an impression of my walk – which looked really geeky. Did I really walk like that? Everybody in the room laughed loudly, anyway. Much to the amusement of Jason (and anyone who happened to be around) I carried on practising the badman walk and Jason, not a man who gives out compliments easily, was moved to tell me that by the end of my time, my badman walk had gotten ‘better’.

In the interim, I had learnt a fair bit about the different ways people I can tell I’m a foreigner; my walk, certainly (even Jamaicans who had lived abroad and then returned to Jamaica can apparently be spotted immediately…) but also the way I look around (gawping wide-eyed at everything instead of looking coolly ahead as if I’d seen it all before) and of course the way I talk (Excuse me, do you have any Dennis Brown?).

My plan was soon dead in its tracks in any case because, coincidentally, just days after I had the idea (and felt like I was slowly getting Jason down off his high-horse), the US government went and spoiled it all by issuing an extradition request for the don who ran the area, the most influential gangster in Jamaica. Instead, I had to entertain myself by watching the Jamaican government perform the difficult balancing act of dragging out the extradition for as long as humanely possible while not looking like it was taking political hits for the benefit of a gang lord. It would take a book to cover the issue in the detail it deserves, but here are two facts to chew on; a) in Jamaica, gangsters have for decades guaranteed the political loyalty of garrison communities for Jamaican politicians; b) Tivoli gardens is the Prime Minister Bruce Golding’s constituency. Those with sharp ears may notice that even when being interviewed by the BBC, Jamaica’s PM doesn’t go as far as deny a link between politics and criminality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5I8IWCL_Bk

Phew, what a diversion. Where was I? Oh yes, the Bobo dread. I had to go and see them. Every time I mentioned it, Jason grinned with enthusiasm at the prospect of introducing me, Ebte Selassie, as the prophet born again come to emancipate the rasta man dem and normally spent a few minutes doing impressions of some well excited Rastamen.
-- Raaaaaaas claaat, Ebte Selasie!

Unfortunately the trip was quite short because I had to rush back to the office to sort out some stuff for my lecture – pretend gun, pretend baton, stuff to say… The Bobo dread would have been delighted to have me stay overnight or for a few days but instead me and Jason hung out in their reception and had some serious chat about their world. Basically, their whole raison d’etre, as they saw it, was to organise the repatriation of all Bobo rasta to Africa. Asap. That was it. This was the crux of their entire ideology, their other political views and their understanding of history. Everything seemed to either lead to or stem from this central idea. One of the members talked to me and Jason for a good thirty minutes non-stop; the idea seemed to consume him in that half-compulsive, half-disturbing way that political ideas can take over people.

The community had their own little world, shut behind a locked gate.

Everyone was greeted with the title ‘Prophet’ – so I became Prophet Admas. Their world was a pleasant one and their décor and clothing had clearly been infected by the rich spectrum of the Jamaican countryside. Bright reds, yellows, greens and blues unapologetically danced around. On our way up to the camp, we had seen a Rastaman strutting around comfortably dressed in a rainbow-coloured man-dress kind of thing. He walked past again while we were inside listening to the lecture and gave us a warm greeting; “Blessed love, Prophet Admas, blessed love”. It really did feel like a different world.

The head rasta man explained, in painstaking detail, the steps that had been taken by the Jamaican and foreign governments to frustrate the goal of repatriation to (an unspecified) Africa and the burning need to effect the Bobo dread’s goal with the intensity of someone who was haunted by truly sincere political beliefs. I was interested in what his beliefs reflected about him more than the beliefs themselves. Actually, I drifted off, as I often did in Jamaica, into the natural beauty of the country – our setting was incredibly tranquil with lush, verdant hills rolling off in the background, clear blue skies, butterflies innocuously flitting around outside. This all provided a somewhat comical setting for our host’s burning desire to get the hell out of Jamaica. There was a striking absence of national pride in the man’s ideology.

After a quick fire forty minutes or so in the camp, Prophet Admas had to zoom back to the office, collect a gun and baton lovingly made out of cardboard, silver foil and plastic bags by his colleagues and then off to the police recruit training centre to deliver a lecture on the use of force and what ‘oooman rights’ (this denotes a class of organisation as well as a set of principles in Jamaica) have to say about it.

In the event, the lecture went well. I achieved my main goal, which was to try and get a reading on what the new recruits actually thought about human rights. Interestingly, while professing to find it distasteful and incapable of extending its universalism to the welfare of police officers, they did actually agree with all the content I covered. I came away from the session – there had been some fantastically energetic debating – with the feeling that the new recruits were a largely untapped force for good as far as Jamaican society was concerned.

After a long day, I rounded off my last day at work by attending a drinks reception at the British High Commission. With the kind of painful irony that is only possible in environments of the highest seriousness, the reception was being held to celebrate the arrival of a senior police officer on secondment to assist the worryingly trigger-happy Jamaican Constabulary Force; this was none other than Cressida Dick, the police chief who oversaw the Jean Charles de Menezes operation.

Being brought along to such events was one of the many perks of working at the IJCHR. One of the best conversations I heard was between Yvonne Sobers (a remarkable lady who ran an organisation called Families Against State Terrorism that campaigned against police brutality in Jamaica) and the senior judge of the Court of Appeal, Jamaica’s highest court. Pleasingly, despite (or maybe because of) her unremittingly serious day job, Yvonne was a rambunctious chatterbox of a woman, constantly giggling. The judge and her were having the kind of discussion about COMPUTERS that creates inter-generational conversation gulfs that are simply unbridgeable; I was reduced to a nodding smiley face. The senior judge, free of his court outfit and the look of constant exasperation that he wore whenever exercising his duties, had been recast as a slightly bumbling, rather cute old Jamaican man. The conversation started with some basic chat about computer literacy, which naturally enabled the judge to demonstrate just how great his mastery of Microsoft OFFICE and EMAIL were, following which things got more light-hearted:
- But this is the really important question – this shows how in tune you are with computers –
- Yes?
- Are you on FACEBOOK?

Sadly the Commissioner’s wife had, it appears, gone slightly ‘cold’ on the IJCHR intern cohort. Allegations that it had something to do with individual interns’ behaviour at the last party we attended at the Commissioner’s house have yet to be substantiated (but the assumption is yes).

Anyway, that’s it. Stories of Rastitutes, my thespian side, solicitors wearing panties and barristers wearing boxers, entire afternoons spent in the sea bobbing around to Gregory Isaacs and near-addiction to straight rum will have to wait for face-to-face conversations, sometime, somewhere.

Jamaica. What a country.

Alpha Boys School

There was no way I was going to leave Jamaica without visiting the Alpha Boys School. Not some kind of training ground for future investment bankers but a care home for orphans and disadvantaged children run by the Sisters of Mercy. The Alpha Boys band has nurtured some of Jamaica’s finest musical talent, for example the insanely amazing (and actually insane) Don Drummond.

I got the opportunity to have a private concert by the cream of the crop – the older boys band. Typically for a bunch of 16 year olds, they had two personalities: one for the adults and one for themselves. When they talked to me they were excessively polite not to mention painfully shy – I don’t think a single one of them made eye contact with me throughout their performance. As soon as they had to talk to each other however, they were brash and strikingly direct in their criticisms of each others’ performances. The drummer was apparently below par – ‘im new sa’: not only did he have to undergo the humiliation of listening to the band leader apologise profusely (and largely unnecessarily, as far as my tone-deaf ears were concerned) for his performance, he was promptly replaced by a drum beat on the electronic keyboard and ordered to cease shuffling in the background, so as not to distract the others.

When all was said and done, however, the music was sublime. The song that made my heart open up was their version of ‘Jamaica Farewell’, a song that is so wonderful that (a bit like ‘I’ve Got Rhythm’) it seems to sounds brilliant no matter who performs it. That’s not to downplay the wonderful performance that the Alpha Boys Band gave. As I listened to it, I had that (by now familiar) feeling of complete and utter happiness that made me want to never leave Jamaica…

Down the way
Where the nights so gay
And the sun shine daily on a mountaintop

I took a trip on a sailing ship
But when I reach Jamaica
I made a stop

Sad to say, I’m on my way
I won’t be back for many a days

My heart is down
My head is turning around
I had to leave a lickle girl in a Kingston town

….I must declare my heart is there
Though I’ve been from Maine to Mexico...

Ficshun

So it finally happened. I knew it had to. Sooner or later. It couldn’t last forever.

I found a cool nightclub in Kingston.

It’s called ‘Fiction’ though all the uptown Jamaicans I hang out with call it ‘Ficshun’, a pronunciation I occasionally didn’t laugh out loud at. Ficshun! The hyperactive DJ was incapable of listening to one track for more than 45 seconds and was likewise hostile to the idea of mixing songs of similar genres into one another. I loved the man. What else to do but mix ‘Wake me up before you go go’ into Vybz Kartel?

Anyway, the DJ had something which is increasingly rare in his profession: he played music that actually made you want to dance. Once you’ve got that, you can’t help but like a club really. I also got a terrific opportunity to witness the miraculous spectacle that is young Jamaicans on the dancefloor; never have I seen a nation of amazing dancers. It must be part of the national curriculum, or a requirement before you get a passport, or something.

Blue Mountains 1 Admas 0

Me and Liz had decided that we were going to go the Blue Mountains; the picturesque mountain range that greets me every morning as I stroll to the bus stop. Remember those?

Being a man, I naturally wanted to go to the peak, which was the highest point in Jamaica. Some cursory research revealed the following facts:
- the view is best at sunrise
- the peak takes three to six hours if you leave from a very remote place near the mountains
- said remote place was a good 3-4 hours from where I lived

Adding these new bits of information together, it quickly became clear that the itinerary was not going to involve a lie-in. The plan was to head up for Sunday. Today was Saturday. Saturday evening.

-------------------------------

I don’t tend to miss appointments that I have to wake up for. I think this is because I am both a worrier and a very light sleeper. So when I have something important to do the next morning, it usually weighs so heavily on my mind that I wake up repeatedly in the middle of the night, terrified of oversleeping.

So, come Sunday, I woke up and the time on my mobile phone read 00:35.

I had woken up early. Fifteen minutes early.

As I stumbled out of bed in the pitch black and turned on the light, my body and my brain were trying to talk to each other. My brain was on surprisingly good form, given the hour; it was ticking off the list of items I needed to take in my rucksack (bananas, jerk chicken from previous night, cereal bars, snickers bars, juice, bottle of Pepsi) and telling my hands to do various things (make bed, put on clothes). My body was definitely trying to communicate something, mostly, I suspected, sheer confusion at what exactly was going on. But I ploughed through. The taxi was due to arrive at 1am.

The plan was as follows. Our housekeeper had sourced us a taxi through a friend that would take us to Mavis Bank, our drop off point. My predictably last-minute efforts at organising the trip (start time for making plans: 4.25pm the day before) had resulted in a somewhat stripped down approach to the adventure. So, ideally, one should be taking a ride to a remote drop-off point near the bottom of the biggest mountain. This is still some distance from Mavis Bank and the roads there are seriously dodgy, so ideally (there’s that word again), you’d need to source a 4 x 4  for the second leg of the trip. Really smart people with guide books and planning skills do things like get there at a reasonable hour, spent a few hours kipping in a little hotels and then jump out of bed in the middle of the night to make the trek in time for the glorious sunrise.

Hmm. My planning had started a bit later and those pesky guides who would escort me from Mavis Bank to the interesting part of the Blue Mountains proved really very tricky to get hold of. I should have anticipated that. In fact, none of the numbers listed in my guidebook seemed to get me anywhere. One of the numbers took me to a gruff man who, while having impeccable taste in Jamaican music (he was listening to some wondrous, heart-stopping rocksteady when I called), really didn’t know what I was talking about and was positively incensed when I called back to double-check whether I had dialled the right number. I almost gave up at this point. My next thought was that I should just do the trek without a guide. My knee-jerk ‘How hard can it be?’ instinct began to take over and I started to imagine myself in a fine tradition of impromptu explorers of beautiful yet challenging natural landscapes. Rose, our housekeeper (a rock of common sense), was not having any of this. ‘Ye mad?” she inquired. When she said this (not the first time I have heard her say this to one of my plans), I knew that I was suggesting something stupid. Crap.

In the end, I used some local knowledge to find something of a compromise – my co-worker at the Council, Jason, told me that if I just popped along to the Mavis Bank police station, they could put me in contact with a local guide. Ah, Jamaica. I yearned to trust the flippancy of such a typically Jamaican set-up, but deep-down, I obviously didn’t believe it – I had to at least check that the police station existed. It did. As to be expected, the police officer on the other end of the line was bemused at my clearly socially unacceptable insistence on details. Just turn up, ok?

As I hadn’t been able to get hold of any of these hotels and given that my plan had only taken form at around 9.30pm on Saturday, it seemed sensible to adjust the timetable accordingly. So, a 1.00am departure it was.

The taxi ride to Mavis Bank was really wonderful. I was so tired I felt like I was in a trance throughout. The town we passed through was eerily quiet; garish neon signs illuminated an occasional group hanging out or a meandering night-walker. Slightly unusually, we were being driven by two people: Rose’s friend, whose extreme friendliness would have been a bit more palatable had I not been trying to get by on two hours’ sleep and his cousin, a quiet but very nice young Rasta.

And the music was sublime, classic roots – the fiery heart of Jamaican music. Creaking out of a barely functioning car tape-player (the way all good old music should be heard) Peter Tosh was coolly incensed, Bob Marley sang his heart out before his voice broke and Jacob Miller pleaded with the police.
- Please, Mr Officer
- don’t lose your temper

I was amazed that someone was actually at the police station when I turned up. The young officer had (not unreasonably) been napping but dealt with it all, getting hold of the guide and telling him to get his ass down to the station. While the young officer went back to bed, me and Liz entertained ourselves by eating bananas and hoping that when the guide did turn up, it would be in a 4 x 4.

He didn’t. And it took him a couple of hours. Also, for good measure, my dreams of reaching the peak were laughed off by the guide. We’d be walking for 24 hours! he said. I settled for a smaller peak. Our guide was fine, if a bit aloof. He certainly didn’t start off well – once he’d got me down off my mission to climb the peak, he proceeded to just point at the nearest peak (more of a hill) and ask if that was ok. I had to keep prodding him until he pointed at something halfway decent which would take, you know, at least six hours and give me something to talk about. Also, he didn’t exactly win my confidence when, upon us coming across a river right at the beginning of the walk (still dark) he uttered a loud, surprised ‘Oh!’. Not what you want to hear.

Anyway, in the end, it rained heavily. I don’t think I’ve ever been as tired and hungry as I was on the way back down. Lesson: something about planning things.

When we got back, I did some wide-eyed enthusing about the music in the car-ride to Rose, who responded in her wonderfully unruffled, typically Jamaican manner.
- Rastaman ‘ave good music.

Unity Church

I went to church on Sunday morning. I’d been curious to see a Jamaican church after my weekend trip to Port Antonio. Port Antonio is a lush, quiet town with some of the most beautiful beaches I’ve ever seen in my life (but that’s another story).

I had seen glimpses of the church-going culture around Kingston, older men standing around at bus stops on Sunday mornings, dressed in full suits despite the sun’s merciless glare. On the bus route to Port Antonio, my curiosity was stoked by a fleeting glimpse of a church service being carried out underneath a marquee; rows and rows of immaculately dressed Jamaicans, gathered in the shade for what I imagined to be a highlight of their week.

What really convinced me, though, was that I met a preacher man; but a nice one this time. We had a minister staying at our house over the weekend; he was from Detroit, Michigan and had come to give a weekend sermon at the local church, the Unity Church. The minister was a very interesting man. He talked intelligently about religion and seemed fascinated by the world.  He was the kind of man who would casually refer to you as “my brother”. His conversation was peppered with heartfelt statements that, out of an English person’s mouth, would sound miserably sarcastic or unforgivably sanctimonious. “My brother”, he would say to me, staring me in the face, “we need to care about young people because young people are the future of our world”.

The minister didn’t doubt his duty to make the world a better place; but, fortunately, he was genuinely interested in the world he was trying to improve. Making the world better was not a personal mission; it was just the way things were. I warmed to him. His positivity was fairly infectious. In the mornings, as I sleepily attempted to navigate the kitchen without talking to anyone, he would greet me with a hearty handshake and a hug.

Hilariously, the minister’s wife, who had accompanied him to Kingston, was a take-no-bullshit corporate lawyer who wore her conservative politics as a badge of honour. In a manner that I found strangely reminiscent of George Bush Jr, she labelled her husband’s constant focus on helping youths and improving the world “radical”.

So, I found myself at the Unity Church on Sunday morning. It was a very hot day and I was already drenched in sweat by the time I got to the church. An old man with a friendly face shook my hand and welcomed me as I arrived.

I could see why people would want to go to a church like the Unity Church.

To call it a friendly place would be an understatement. Early on in the sermon, the speaker asked the audience if anybody was attending for the first time. Along with a few others, I stood up. The speaker welcomed us and told us that she hoped we would come regularly, but if we didn’t, she was nevertheless honoured to have us, and we should feel welcome to come again any time we wish. Everyone clapped for us, and the band played us the ‘Welcome song’. After I left, several people thanked me for attending their church.

Also, there was a band; a fantastic band. They played music without any singing, which was wonderful, but they also accompanied the hymns, often with the kind of sound that I wouldn’t associate with churchgoing hymns; conga drumming, ska-era piano and brass sounds and some seriously virtuoso trumpetry. As the service commenced with the crisply attired church crowd launching into ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ to the tune of ‘Kumbuya’ (rambunctious tambourine-shaking and all), it was difficult to suppress the thought that the people here might actually look forward to coming to church.

The minister spoke about fear and courage. Not in an abstract way, but in relation to how he saw these concepts affect the lives of normal people – fear of failure, fear of poverty. Living in a constant state of fear. He was a former psychiatrist and he was obsessed with the psychological impact of fear; how it cripples the mind and leads people to close themselves off from the world outside. He read out the definition of courage twice.

- Courage is the quality of mind or spirit that enables one to face difficulty, pain or danger without fear.

It was an interesting morning.

Towards the close, the main speaker was beginning to overdo things a bit and had to rein herself in, with some help.

- Anyway, Jesus tell me to shut up me mout cos ‘im do de rest.

 

Beverley Hills

Beverley Hills is a posh community in Kingston. It used to be a gated community but now they have a one way system that makes it tricky to drive through it unless you really need to. And a private security firm overseeing whatta gwan in the area.

The houses there are all very big. This is my house.

This is the view from the balcony (again).

This is the view on the way to work.

And this is what I see as I walk through the front gate.

That is all.

Body Language

Jamaicans’ body language is fascinating. People in downtown Kingston are animated, loud. Initially I thought that people’s bodies and their mouths were communicating totally different things. This is because, to a British person, what people's body language communicated seemed rude or aggressive. However, people seemed generally quite nice to each other. What was going on?

Our regular lunch venue is Salad Scene in Kingston. You order your food from the till and then pick it up from the counter. Never, in my entire month here, have I once seen the young women who work behind the counter receive anything less than grief from collecting customers. The main kind of eye contact is the glare and, despite the presence of a reasonably straightforward system of numbered receipts, the customer side of the counter is a choir of kissing teeth.
- Ye cyan't wrap de ting fa me? [kisses teeth]
- Gyal me aks you fi tree wata  [kisses teeth]

In another example, today, while waiting for a bus, I saw a bus conductor jump off a slowly moving mini-bus onto the pavement in front of a smartly-dressed woman (he's already fallen below British standards of socially acceptable behaviour at this stage).  The mini-buses actively solicit customers. He then proceeded to point at said woman as if to say “You!” and then gestured at his mini-bus with an angry dismissiveness, as if to say “Come on, get on the bloody bus, get moving!”. This was his attempt to offer her a ride! She shook her head without saying a word and he jumped back on the mini-bus and it zoomed off.

But this is the norm. There seems to be a general expectation that people will shout at you, get to the point without any nonsense about politeness etc and you’ll likewise get to the point back to them. Lunch is a bit late? Need to get someone on your mini-bus asap? Just say so. There’s no such thing as a mumbling Jamaican.

My boss has a great example of Jamaican directness. A tall, attractive blonde intern from a few years back was inundated with total strangers shouting “Hey, white lady!” at her on the way to work, from as far away as across the road. Unsurprisingly, this annoyed the intern. My boss' advice to her was that, if anybody shouted out at her, she should simply go over to them and introduce herself (“Hello, my name is Sandra”). This solved the problem. How? Well, people continued to shout at her, but they now waved and shouted “Hey Sandra!” from across the road, which the intern didn’t mind at all. She waved back.

And the teeth-kissing is great. A generalised state of dissatisfaction. It’s like a socially acceptable “For fuck’s sake”.

Jamaican Love Songs: A brief history

1969
Give me some lovin’
Give it to me now
I need a whole lotta kissin' girl
Give it to me now
I need a whole lot of huggin' girl
Give it to me now
I said sweet sweet sweet loving yeah
Give it to me now

Girl you know it’s you that I love love love
So come on, and give me all your love love love

(The Pioneers)

2009
Rememer di first fuck
Remember di first time pussy hurt up
Push in a inch it buck and it stuck
Remember di two drop a blood pon yuh frock
Yuh tell mi yuh madda ago beat yuh fi dat
Two day lata me seeyuh come bak
Yuh tun big woman yuh come fi tek cock

Baby...
Mi tek weh yuh virginity...
Mi tek weh yuh virginity...
Mi tek weh yuh virginity
So sing for me...

(Vybz Kartel)

A brief introduction

Four weeks into my time in Jamaica, predictably having forgotten to pick up a diary at the airport, terrified of forgetting everything about my time here and feeling a strange need to share my experiences, I’ve decided to write something.

So where to start?

Home is a massive house in ‘uptown’ Kingston. Included in the cost is delicious Jamaican food twice a day and a balcony with a slightly better view than my old flat.

Work is a small human rights organisation in ‘downtown’ Kingston.

Weekends (so far) have been mostly spent on beaches.

 Home + work + weekends = life.

In between it all, I am trying to look and listen and see if I can catch a glimpse of something interesting….

Dominoes

Now that the school term has started, getting to work is a significantly bigger headache. Prior to the influx of neatly uniformed mini-Kingstonians, I had been impressed by Kingston’s bus transport system. Not only did the buses boast air-conditioning and music (one of the few places in the city where you could chance on some decent reggae, but more on that later), but they were pleasingly half-empty and, what’s more, so were the roads! London, I felt, could learn a lot from Kingston.

How things have changed. Thanks to the mass of schoolchildren, I now have to leave for work an entire hour earlier. Otherwise I risk being stuck in traffic on a hideously overcrowded bus. With a preacher man screaming at me.

Yes, the preacher. He is not there every day, but often enough. He’s loud. He’s intense. He’s full of moral outrage. He assumes that he has your full attention.

Fifteen years in London have hardened me to this kind of behaviour. Sharing buses and trains with singing/dancing/lecturing weirdos who had cheerfully waved goodbye to any notion of an objective idea of reality; such experiences instil a reflex. Certain kinds of behaviour, after a while, do not register. People drinking beers on public transport before noon? I don’t see them. I remember an early morning bus-ride in Stamford Hill; a man pacing up and down the bus, mumbling incoherently in animal-like grunts, with trousers hanging around his knees. He smelt horrific. Can of lager in hand, he’d sporadically scream abuse at some invisible enemy.

I didn’t even see him. I only remember the episode because I noticed an older woman, who reminded me of my mum, sat next to me, in tears, horrified at the spectacle.

But the preacher in Kingston gets under my skin. I feel that the passengers don’t mind him that much. I will occasionally hear a faint “Amen” from a passenger or two. The preacher does not seem to have even the faintest appreciation of the inappropriateness of his sermon. His tone of voice is cleansed of irony, unwaveringly superior. You feel that he has never doubted himself.

The sum of these two factors is that I find the experience difficult to laugh at.

So, at the moment, I am quite pleased at having to leave the house at 7 o’clock in the morning.


On the bus ride home, you see interesting things happening outside the bus. Once, I saw a man walking around Parade (Kingston’s bustling, hectic main square) wearing nothing but a ragged T-shirt. The look on his face told you that, even if his body (all of it) was here, his mind was somewhere else. He drifted blankly through the throng of Kingstonians selling their wares on the street and shouting loudly at one another. Nobody noticed him.

People on the street selling goldfish which, cruelly, are not packaged in water. Surely they’re dead?

Groups of Jamaican men huddled around a small wooden table on the pavement, playing dominoes. I don’t know whether or not dominoes is the national sport in Jamaica, but it is very popular. It is a great game; you can set up anywhere with a surface, it’s easy to pick up, tough to master.

The premise is simple: match up your dominoes to the ones that have already been played. The first to use up his dominoes wins (I had never played before arriving in Jamaica).

Every Friday, our office goes down to Rae Town, a small fishing town in Kingston, to play dominoes, drink beer and be serenaded by the likes of Sam Cooke and Bobby Darin. The men who hang around the bar are seasoned domino players. One regular says very little, but breaks into a shy smile whenever he wins, which is extremely often. He doesn’t know it (well actually he probably does), but when I’m playing, I’m trying to figure out how he does it...

We play dominoes as competing pairs, which is when the game really becomes strategic. When I play against him, my seasoned opponent appears to have the power to know what pieces I hold in my hand. I am still figuring how this works exactly. I think it has something to do with memorising.

There are seven variations of each domino. For 6, there will be 6:blank, 6:1, 6:2, 6:3, 6:4, 6:5 and 6:6 and so on for each number. What the skilful domino player does, I think, is through some methodology I have yet to make sense of, keep a ‘running score’ of the outstanding dominoes. By seeing what domino you play, the experienced player can work out the likelihood of you having a 6:4 as opposed to a 6:2. As the game proceeds, my opponent becomes more and more sure what I have in my hand.

As I say, I have only just started playing. Perhaps after a little while it will become obvious and this entire ramble will seem a bit foolish. For now, I still don't understand why I keep losing...

Express Taxis

Without a doubt the biggest downside of living in Kingston is the need to get taxis everywhere after dark. Crime is a serious problem in Kingston.

Our house’s preferred taxi service is Express Taxis.

And what a service they provide.

-Good evening Express
-Hi. Can I get a taxi to downtown Kingston?
-Seven minutes sir

They give you ETA’s to the nearest minute. They always arrive early. And they get you to your destination in the fastest time legally (or thereabouts) possible.

It’s the kind of efficient operation that you can’t help but admire. After some investigation, I've worked out how the system works:

1. the operator calls out asking who is available to pick up the ride.

2. the fastest to respond (by their ‘call name’ – normally something punchy and easily recognisable over the radio) has ownership of the ride provided they get to the point of pickup within the operator’s ETA (seven minutes in our example).

3. If they get there even one minute late, the ride becomes open to the fastest driver to reach the point of pickup.

In practice this means that a driver, not being the allocated driver, who is around x minutes away from the pickup point, where x = ETA given to customer, could, and normally does, take the risk of zooming to the pickup point on the off-chance that the allocated driver will have just missed the ETA. For this reason, the customer will often find that the taxi scheduled to arrive in five minutes will arrive on his doorstep in two. For the driver knows the cost of arriving even one minute late in the dog-eat-dog world of Express Taxis. It’s the kind of self-assured, well-organised capitalist machine that Henry Ford would have approved of.

One of the great things about the system is that the players respect the rules. If a driver attempts to pick up a ride that has been allocated to another driver before the ETA has elapsed, then the rule-breaker hands over the entire fare he has made.

So there it is, an efficient, self-regulating free market system. And they said it would never work...