September 19, 1997

Is Reality I a deal wid

Born Fi' Dead is definitely the most disturbing, but good book I have ever read about the Caribbean. At the end of the book, as midway through it, I was forced to ask: Is the Caribbean falling into a bottomless pit of crime and violence, as well as mindless and pointless politics?

Born Fi' Dead, by Laurie Gunst, is the story of the criminal culture that emerged in Jamaica in the Manley-Seaga years. There can be little doubt that the political gangs and the drug posses that spawned them, and which they in turn spawned, have become one of the most criminal cultures that the western Hemisphere has seen. And make no mistake about it. Negative as it is, it is Caribbean. Born and bred out of a system or as Rastas say a "shitstem" that has persisted too long. And therefore in its death throes it produces criminality to match the worst.

A bit of background is in order. Laurie Gunst is a white American, who holds a doctorate from Harvard. She lived in Jamaica teaching at the University of the West Indies. There she came to know intimately the life of the political gangs, the drug posses, their leaders and followers. She, as writer, does a superb job not commenting on the revolting violence she relates. She holds the mirror up and the posses do their death dance. She allows the gangs and the drug posses to tell their own story. For sure this is a very fine work, of what I call historical realism, perhaps in opposition to another literary genre, magical realism also created in the Caribbean and best employed by Gabrielle Marquez, the Nobel Prize Winner of Literature.

Here is one of the members of one of the gangs in Jamaica in his own words and in his own pen:

In other words, the violence, the drugs, the deaths, the murders reproduce themselves in a recurring cycle. It is a hydra-headed dragon. And it is not just a cycle. It is a whole spectrum of unspeakable brutalities. And as Laurie Gunst shows, all are involved. From the statesman, through the university graduate, trapped in a personal tragedy, and so she is strung out on crack, down to the sufferers in the ghetto, caught at a dead end, with nowhere to turn but political gangs, drugs, and a brief moment centre-stage with gold chains and bangles and money. And then death. All are consumed.

Laurie Gunst does not allow any one of us to say she is white, and therefore speaks as a First World citizen from Wyoming, with all the prejudices and biases, or as a mere liberal. She understands. And her sympathies are with the poor. She is with them and they are with her. The sufferers accept her as their witness to testify as to their condition, unvarnished but with understanding, if not empathy.

Here is Laurie Gunst in Born Fi' Dead etching in the background to the violence which is overwhelming not just Jamaica, but all of the English speaking Caribbean.

Laurie Gunst writes:

The death dance of the superstructural level produced its own macabre dance-hall-deaths in the tangle of slums.

Now let me give you a sample of the violence. Delroy "Uzi" Edwards is a gang and drug lord, leader of the Renkers. In his late twenties, and handsome. "His eyes had already acquired the faraway, affectless gaze of someone used to killing." He was short and stocky, fit as a fiddle, "with a body bulked up from lifting weights". Delroy's "Uzi" Edwards had earned his nickname from the gun he favoured "when he was a political mercenary for Seaga, in Kingston." The party, JLP, "hired him for a princely ten dollars a week during the 1980 election to shoot the PNP, [Manley's party] out of Southside, part of the neighbourhood that was Michael Manley's own constituency."

Ten dollars a week to produce mayhem! But it happened. And is happening.

"Uzi" himself relates that he had named his political gang and drug posse Renkers. "It means stinky" said he with a puckish grin. "Its like the smell when you piss against a wall." Probably it is the smell of a system that has persisted too long.

Now we come to the actual violence. Do not say you have no stomach for it, dear reader. It is all around us. And in one way or another, by omission or commission, and however insulated we are from it, however indifferent or holier than thou we feel, we are part of the problem. Truth insists that I cannot say otherwise, much as I would like to.

So Delroy "Uzi" Edwards head of the drug posse has decided to put a gang member , Norman Allwood, to death. The Renkers cleared as much as fifty thousand dollars on a good day, with a cut rate price on crack, "two-vials-for-the-price-of-one." Besides being entrepreneurs of death, they have good sales-pitch and marketing skills, you will agree.

At seventeen Norman Allwood was the Renkers youngest "soldier". He could be your son or mine. However he had been nothing but a liability to the Renkers don. Shorting "Uzi" on money and stealing crack from the Renkers stash. A few weeks before, Norman Allwood, had failed to deliver four hundred U.S. dollars he owed and "Uzi" shot him in the leg, a favourite punishment, as a warning.

Now Norman Allwood has done it again. Stolen crack. He is to feel Uzi's wrath.

"They say it takes more heart to beat somebody than to stab or shoot them" said Conroy Green one of the Renkers members, as he mused as to why Uzi chose to discipline Allwood the way he did. "I guess it is easier to pull the trigger of a gun."

So the Renkers lit into Allwood and beat him unconscious. When he came to and began to whimper and writhe, Kenneth Manning got vexed. Blasted vex. Manning was in his fifties, the oldest man in the posse and a relative to Uzi. He walked over, got some scalding hot water and poured it all over Allwood. "Manning was kind of you know ---- laughing". Allwood, the kid, the crack stealing kid, his skin started to strip as the scalding water boiled him. He moved. "Oh you not dead yet?" said Manning. He was laughing at him in his death throes. After that they left him hanging, chained to a beam. "He died sometime during the night."

Make no mistake about it. There is at work in this the cold, conscience-unaffected terror, of the natural born killer. Killing is a laughing sport. And it is not just the younger generation. The Renkers are made up, of you and I, from 17 to 50. It is to this we have come 35 years after Independence! It is a reality that will not go away until displaced and replaced.

The incident I related from Born Fi' Dead is an incident. But it recurs and recurs. In Nassau. In Georgetown. In Port of Spain. In St John's - Remember the Customs Comptroller's murder or Arah Hector's. In cricket - Remember the murder of Jeff Stollmeyer, President of WICBC or in Codrington - Remember the Challenger Yacht murders. It is everywhere. Don't dodge. We are being consumed. Rather we are consuming ourselves in an endless cycle of crime and brutish murder. Jamaica is but an extreme expression of this Caribbean reality - Cuba excepted.

So wrote William Butler Yeats. It is as true of Ireland as it is of our land, the Caribbean.

We had fed the heart Madison Avenue images of prosperity, sometimes called "higher standard of living", more recently known as "better quality of life". The heart has grown brutal from wanting the fare, and never getting it. And now we are determined to get it by any means necessary. Our mauby pockets cannot attain the champagne fantasies. And since there is more substance in our enmities - we were educated in family, Sunday school and school to trust no one, -- to co-operate with no one. After all, partnership is a leaky-ship. So, loveless, weaned on this anti-social proverbs, and by any means necessary, we aim at fantasies, even using religion, as our enslavers did, as a cloak for the dagger of greed.

So goes a dance-hall rap. It is telling and chilling. It is h a p p e n i n g .

And says one of Laurie Gunst's characters in Born Fi' Dead:

This is some distance away from Bob Marley's immortal Take the chains off you mind. Brother Bob thought it was possible then, in the heady seventies, to overcome the colonial mentality which trapped us in self-contempt and routine brutality of word one to another. Brother Courtney thinks that in the 90's "our minds are gone also." And who is to blame?

And do not think that this is one sufferers bleak vision.

Take this then, if you so insist. Judy Mowatt holds a concert, and Trevor Phillips a real life character in Born Fi' Dead attend fully remembering when he hung out with Bob Marley. Remembering when Judy Mowatt, the elegant singer, now, used to perform with Bob Marley's back-up-chorus, the I-Threes. Trevor Phillips notes that Judy Mowatt still carries "Bob's torch singing anthems to African womanhood and beaming her female self-respect into Jamaican music scene that is dominated by dance hall; they don't sing about much else besides pussy and guns."

The degeneration reaches every where. From the slackness of unaccountable politicians to the slackness of dance hall, which regales our ears from morning till night on government radio, if you please. A steady diet of slackness. Slackness, to be sure, is to be regular. The norm. A paper here, put out by the government, uses the coarsest indecent language, not as reported speech but as part of its own commentary, in print. And not Prime Minister, Priest or Pauper utters a single, solitary word of protest. Slackness overwhelms. From top to bottom. At the same time ghetto youths are charged in Court for indecent language, while national informers spew forth the same, in print, with impunity, and without disturbing a feather. The hypocrisy is crass. It too is a kind of violence which assails us.

Official men are cited in court for criminal arson, drug wheelings and dealings, but it is the Reporter not the officially sanctioned arsonists, or the killer with counterfeit, who feels the weight of exparte injunctions and the like. Meanwhile the intelligentsia sneer, in their myopic seeing investigative reporting as scandal-mongering. The best lack all conviction. That too is a form of violence.

But maybe it was always there. For Laurie Gunst reminds us of a trip to Port Royal with one of her professor friends. "We both loved Port Royal for the echoes of the past; although the place is nothing but a sleepy fishing village now, in the seventeenth century it was the Sodom and Gomorrah of the English Caribbean. Every slave ship bound for the English colonies unloaded some of its surviving passengers at Port Royal, while sea dogs like Francis Drake and Henry Morgan whored in the waterfront brothel. There were so many criminal enterprises that the women had a jail of their own"!!!

And I must insist none escape the dread scene. It consumes us all. Not even the student in the so-called Ivory Tower of UWI. Here is Professor Gunst now: "My tutorials had twenty or thirty students each and they were all supposed to read the same books from a meagre library and produce a weekly paper. They competed with other students for those books like dogs scrapping for scarce bones. The reserve books had a way of disappearing, or of coming out of the stacks with entire chapters ripped out by some desperate scholar. I was lucky if one or two came to the meetings having read anything. No one could afford to buy the five paper-backs I had assigned for the American history course. They cost between fifty and two hundred dollars each in Jamaica's IMF-emasculated currency, and that was double what my students spent on food in a week."!!

This dread scene is everywhere. Few, the Drakes and Morgans are insulated by wealth.

Nor is Laurie Gunst unaware of the superstructural origin of this horror at the base. She is all too aware. As she wrote in the specific case of Jamaica, which can be generalised to the Caribbean:

Dato Tan has replaced the CBI here. The "shitstem" continues.

The goons, were the gangs, and became the drug posses. The violence spread, the murders became endemic. It is happening here too.

What is the origin of it all?

By putting the squeeze on Third World countries, neo-liberalism, sometimes called, Globalisation, drove up unemployment. Neoliberalism thus generated thousands of recruits for the drug trade, growers, mules, smugglers, enforcers, the lot. And by "freeing-up" financial markets, mobilisation makes it easier to repatriate drug profits and invest them, ultimately in the new conglomerates, or multinationals which rule the world.

No matter how much money the U.S. government pours into drug interdiction, trade liberalisation, the swan song of our time, has rendered international borders the most porous they have been in decades. Between 1993 and 1994, the year of NAFTA's birth, the number of trucks entering the United States from Mexico soared from 1.9 million in 1993 to 2.8 million in 1994, a 50 per cent increase. Locating the odd vehicle with a hundred kilos of coke stashed away among the other commodities, becomes more and more akin to finding a needle in a haystack. The trade booms with trade liberalisation. The one fuelling the other as Capital begets more capital at the top, while producing murder and mayhem at the base.

The coke money fuels the fantasies / The heart's grown brutal from the fare / More substance in our enmities / Than in love. Things fall apart. The challenge is to go beyond neo-liberalism, and its murder concealing clichés, like privatisation.

But, and it is a crucial 'but', is it possible, in a new economic arrangement to give the sufferers at the base, especially the young, a stake and a say, through public companies, including leadership of these. And so make them, now uprooted, belong. Belong through construction and re-construction.

Is it possible to give the social drop-out new and modern skills equipping her and him for a variety of endeavours, at once social and technical, and so save him and her from becoming a coke-mule and later a coke-head?

Could the sufferers themselves own and control aspects of their own economic life, so ending their long historic dispossession, as they invest and expand, not for accumulation's sake and conspicuous consumption, but for those who come after?

Could we extricate ourselves from the cultural tentacles of others, and from our own creative well-spring create new forms which deepen our sense of the beauty of human effort in a variety of activities?

Is it possible to provide essential nutrition and essential health-care on a level playing field and not state-of-the-art white-elephant hospitals designed by the foreign elite to suck us deeper into their debt trap?

Is it possible that we can create our own eco-tourism site and attractions on Guana Island and not yield to Dato Tan's tinkling brass and sounding symbols, for he is but a new Moody-Stuart who knows us even less, and wants it and us all at a peppercorn price?

Baldwin Spencer, to be sure, is convinced that these possibilities are attainable. Here and now. Some by sudden flight others, indeed the many, by toiling upward through the night.