#sometimes the americanisation of every culture in the world is helpful

[sachart]

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[the-best-is-still-unwritten-blog]

A Brief History... of My Restored Love for Fiction

In reading A Brief History, I was borrowing a book from my aunt to help me get through my summer waiting at airport terminals and taking cute but lonely trips to bars and cafés in between the sights and scenes of continental Europe. Truly, I was exposed to beautiful stories of complex cultures, within themes of poverty and wealth disparity, the growth of gang culture interlinked with politics, cultural divides of tradition and modernity and of American idolisation and western tragedy. Mystifying prose adjoins a showcase of beautiful stories, rich personalities, Caribbean sexualities and refreshing female and queer perspectives. This book is a giant, encompassing a vast range of modern problems from the social, cultural, economic and political, which allows it the grand promise of giving every reader a different story or a fresh understanding. Its context is historically accurate even if such an account is highly fictional; this means it sheds light on modern racism by crudely and hilariously accepting and publicising the true struggles since colonisation, slavery, independence and globalisation.

A Brief History of Seven Killings’ plot revolves around the 1976 failed assassination attempt of ‘the Singer’, who we know to be, Bob Marley. It offers this story through the eyes of ‘slum kids, one-night stands, drug lords, girlfriends, gunmen, journalists and even the CIA’ but in reality, offers much more. Through a number of books within the book - 5 to be exact - each set in a different time and to multiple locations, stories and characters, a most vivid picture of life, never mind Jamaica, is painted. Truly, the patient reader will come to feel for this as real as any textbook history.

One of the most annoyingly effective writing styles for fleshing out such a robust narrative is found by telling the story through a myriad of characters. In such an ambitious book, having characters juxtaposed against another but ultimately linked to the life of Jamaica’s almost omnipotent Singer, the book arrives at a place of joy for a reader who revels in the complexities and variations of humanity. Not just being inclusive and varied, this joint narration gives the reader added reason to continue on through another chapter, another voice, another story, another Jamaica and another world.  Flicking through tense visceral scenes from one character to the next, James offers little time for recovery. Sometimes the divide in characters appropriately furthers the cleavages of scenes and scenery, from heavily cocaine-fed patois to the Americanised yuppie talk of white visitors, from those who live in the Bush or the Ghetto and ‘don’t speak good’ to the suburban and apologetic middle-classes who do. Jamaica is provided as a divisive and divided place, with different and diverging ideas of how to change or flee the so-called ‘shitstem.’ This review will feature a selection of my favourite characters and scenes and thus contains some mild spoilers, I hope this review is taken as my personal understanding and critical analysis as I refute to be asserting anything as fact.

We are introduced to Bam-Bam early, in the first story of the book ‘Original Rockers’, he is one of a number of Jamaican gang-men narrating the book alongside Papa-Lo, Weeper and Josey Wales. Having grown up in what he describes as ‘the Ghetto’, he has been scarred by the inequality of poverty, his life subverted into crime early through desperation, anger and madness. In his first chapter he argues that within poverty is madness and that reason is only for the rich. “Madness that make you follow a man in a suit down King Street, where poor people never go and watch him throw away a sandwich, chicken, you smell it and wonder how people can be so rich that they use chicken for just to put between so-so bread, and you pass the garbage and no fly on it yet and you think, maybe, and you think yes and you think you have to, just to see what chicken taste like with no bone. But you say you not no madman, and the madness in you is not crazy people madness but angry madness, because you know the man throw it away because he want you to see. And you promise yourself that one day rudeboy going to start walking with a knife and next time I going jump him and carve sufferah right into him chest” – Bam-Bam.

Bam-Bam is less than pure, his vision of the world blighted by extreme poverty and a thirst to distance himself from the parents who were viscerally killed in front of him during childhood. Such brutal scenes of violence are further brutalised through the poverty they are set in, as he holds on to his Clarks throughout his loss it becomes an apt metaphor for his hardened clinging to materialism in spite of serious emotional turmoil. His passages succinctly signify the subtlety of violence and the inevitable initiations to gang culture, a lifestyle factor that ultimately leaves him vulnerable, cocaine addicted and imprisoned during various scenes of the book. Personally, I found Bam-Bam one of the least lovable characters, his fiendishness of cocaine and the homophobic suppression of his sexuality offer a number of ways this character denies himself dignity and understanding. His envy of wealth, and the selfishness associated with it, should however be universally understood. In a world where poor means bad and rich means good, he is trapped in poverty (badness) with no education (escape) and understandably, he sees crime not just as the only realistic opportunity to change this but an obvious reaction to his experiences and upbringing.

 From PNP to JLP, Cuban to American, Jamaican to Syrian, Black to White, Young to Old, Expat to Local, Traditional to Modern, Rastafari to Baptist, Religious to Apathetic, Poor to Rich, every vision of Jamaica reeks of the competition of peoples and cultures, ideas and morals. Contemporary issues here are far from ignored, with a seriously post-colonial and modern examination of race and racism presented and the understanding of this reproduced in a multi-ethnic but unarguably black culture, providing us with something as lovely but as barren as mountain scenery, beautifully stark but unarguably pure. Although overt racism has become almost unacceptable, the remnants of black oppression are still found in the global regime of idealising western beauty standards which leads to microaggressions of shadism, even (or more likely especially) in lands with majority black populations.

“Sometimes I think being half coolie worse than being a battyman. This brown skin girl look ‘pon me one time and say how it sad that after all God go through to give me pretty hair him curse me with that skin. The bitch say to me all my dark skin do is remind her that me forefather was a slave. So me say me have pity for you too. Because all your light skin do is remind me that your great-great-grandmother get rape.” – Tristan Phillips

Naively, I did not realise the Marlon James was a queer Jamaican, but in the BBC one documentary, much of his struggle during his youth and time in his homeland was blighted by his inability to accept his sexuality. Still, I wouldn’t define this story as a ‘queer read’, but it wholeheartedly offers broad and unexclusive understandings of masculinity and feminity. Weeper is another Jamaican gangbanger in Copenhagen City, his sexuality can be seen as fluid, Bam-Bam confirms for us that Weeper has homosexual tendencies when we learn of his time in jail.

“Three year in prison and a dick is just another thing to put up your ass.” -Weeper

Accordingly, there is still inequality and a binary to be found in these acts. Bam-Bam, with his hyper masculinised heterosexuality, sees this as a somewhat acceptable due to the unavailability of women, but this is only ever for the active (or dominant) partner.

“Don’t think the man who getting fucked must be the bitch. I shut him mouth and show him what my hole was for. I love you – I don’t mean that, I said.”

Weeper is clever and somewhat inspirational, a ‘ghetto’ kid with a love of books and self-education. His type is doubly conflicted in that he will be seen by many as a samfie gangster, but by his own friends as a bookworm. He leaves Jamaica in 1979 and becomes head of a Manhattan gang that distribute crack cocaine. Here we rediscover his sexuality and his awareness that what he enjoys and wants is not glorified or acceptable, whether in New York or Kingston.

“Think like a movie. This part you put on your clothes, boy wake up (but boy would be a girl) and one of you say babe, I gotta go. Or stay in bed and do whatever, the sheet at the man waist but right at the woman breast. Never going to be a movie with a scene like this bedroom ever. Don’ know. Could go back in bed right now, move in under him arm and stay there for five days […] Lookin’ at what just went up in me last night. Bad man don’t take no cock. But me not bad, me worse”

Another gay character, John-John K is introduced as the story weaves from the broken idyll of Jamaica to the greyer and dirtier New York, where a heap of Jamaicans, like many others, have resettled in an attempt to flee the ‘shitstem.’ But unknowingly, they often find a wholly shitter system with bland food and harsh weather, but the bonus of being anonymous, away and blissfully alone. Here we find good and bad, some characters find traditional employment and culture, often worth the not-so-subtle racism of American society. Others use their lack of morality (or privilege) and connections to the dark side of island life to sell crack cocaine in the neighbourhoods of New York that don’t defy the term ‘well-heeled’ - but much like their prostitutes - would be better described as completely fucking broken heeled. In the fringes of the city, in large derelict brownstone tenements, the crack epidemic of the eighties thrives on the souls of the city’s unloved. While in Jamaica the dabbling of cocaine is to the odd toot on the pipe in New York. This is the end of our story, the effects of violence and drugs complete, Josey shoots out every junkie in a crack den, including one unlucky mother interrupted with a bullet while giving head too busy multitasking with childcare and professionalism to realise. This chaotic scene is beautiful in its Irvine Welsh style brutalism, as Josey goes on a kill streak, oblivious addicts rummage through rubbish for needles in a bacground of desperate prostitutes and their johns being murdered gangland style, too busy with their work or pleasure to pause for final words.

Organised crime in Jamaica fuelling local and political rivalries are not played down and gangs in opposing communities and territories are stuck to a backdrop of serious poverty and marginalisation, seeming all too established to destabilise. Their exploitation by political groups and American influence seems to further fuel their need to escape while contradicting itself in the same breath: How is Jamaica really independent when everyone decent dreams of leaving or has already left? This desire reinforces the motives and storyline of our lone female narrator Kim, who readily pins her hopes on her one night stand with the Singer to result in visa rights and a general rescuing/escape plan. Kim, truly an independent woman, seems to contradict herself in externalising her ability to leave through her sexual and personal relations and never her own volition. Kimmy’s story has it everything it needs to earn her both my respect and my pity. An educated girl, her snobbishness is a reaction to her delicate and insecure nature in a country where she is neither pale nor dark, neither rich nor poor. She is cultured and intellectual, occupied in her fiery mind is a bold sexual energy and she features in scenes of heart-wrenching betrayal, oppression and downright abuse, continually struggling to reinvert herself and repress the situations that shaped her.

Standing outside ‘the Singer’s’ property time after time, she hopes he will recognise her and rescue her. After accidentally witnessing the infamous shooting of Marley and almost killing her father in a retaliation to a beating she receives from him after he finds out about the liaison, she becomes bound to our main storyline and runs away to Mobay with a newfound persona, her new meal ticket (or plane ticket) becoming her white American lover, even though he openly has a family stateside. The failure is hard on the reader, but harder on Kimmy; in desperation she results in paying a hefty amount for her visa, in both cash and her sexuality, before founding a new life in the run down suburbs of multi-cultural New York. Somewhat ironically, it is this move that prompts a rekindling of Kim’s love for her native land, her avoidance and repression ends abruptly in a hungry visit to a Jamaican café and the shocking news of the death of the one of our familiar Kingston gangsters.

Our story is often one of hopelessness and of discontent with the status quo being corrupt politics and rabid cutting inequalities. Of race and class determining who we are and what we do before our personality, intelligence or ideals have even the slightest chance of doing this for us. This is a world where politicians are gangsters and gangsters are political. Escaping the struggles of a post-colonial society riddled with crime and corruption is impossible if it leads to the same again, only with a different accent and a paler face. Our ideas of identity and home are bound to things that are somehow ubiquitous, following us no matter where or how we run and hide. For Kim, running is futile if all we realise is who we aren’t or where we’re not from, no matter how long we stay or how much we change. As she stops for Jamaican food on the way home, a symbolic peace offering to her homeland, she is confronted with her past, one that cannot be erased no matter how many times she changes her name or how much she learns about contemporary American art.

Jamaica is a product of imperialist greed, in this time alone we are told a story of secretive American intervention and the covert operations of the CIA in their dreams to operate a global regime. Jamaica, an island completely changed through slavery and the empires of France and Britain, now faces a new face of imperial force, the United States of America. While the island is a product of brutal colonial histories, it struggles with globalised issues stemming from these same persecutors. Leaving behind racism, homophobia, ethnic and religious tensions the island is now to deal with the growing appetites of American consumers of cocaine as Jamaica serves as an important logistic hub for the Caribbean. Alongside organised crime we find guns, violence and misery. Maybe worst of all, Jamaica is plundered of its traditions, aspirations and ideals as it continues to carry the risk and violence of submitting to helping wealthier, whiter Americans get coked up. Whereas much of the beauty of Jamaica, found in the soulful lyrics of soca and the brilliant white beaches in tourist resorts are exported for a different audience, creating an anger and a disconnect between the internal and external fictions and realities of Jamaica. I guess like Weeper and Kim, Jamaica has been used, like most of us deemed ‘unlucky’ or even just desperate, we have been victimised and we have victimised ourselves. Turning to others for safety and salvation: Kim, Weeper and Jamaica have been failed, their weakness and desperation exploited for the benefit of those more powerful or maybe just more confident (but often more moneyed and paler). A Brief History is (defiantly) not Brief but this isn’t to be criticised; as this History could never be complete; these struggles are not over. There are to be far more killings, real and metaphorical, before it could ever be.

Thank you Marlon, for the education - and the entertainment.