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”.