Can we find our way back home?

THE TRUE essence of life in Jamaica used to be found in the deep rural trek up rocky hillsides and down into the green lushness of hauntingly beautiful valleys. It used to be the path where we walked barefooted down gently sloping farm plots of yams, sweet potatoes, corn and coco, and then back home to pigs, goats and a cow or two.

Life used to be a hot meal of boiled yam, dasheen and huge, tightly rolled dumplings with spicy, corned pork, cooked by a fireside in a detached kitchen. People spoke to each other, cracked jokes, laughed hard and shared the honesty of their humanity. Then they went to bed early – and some made babies.

Neighbours were judged not by the heft of their material possessions, but by their nearness and the commonality of the social realities. A lot of those social realities included pit toilets, bedbugs, no light, the absence of running water, and high rates of illiteracy.

In the days before Independence, many of us had little, but the family unit was intact and our tribal nature was kept safely buried. In 2019, most of that pre-Independence flavour has been irretrievably lost, as young people in rural areas in the late 1950s were lured by the bright lights of Kingston city in their search for a better way.

Many of those who now make up the children and grandchildren of those who saw the lights, but were not led by it to social and economic betterment, are present in that ring of inner-city communities surrounding Kingston city.

And, of course, Kingston city has long shed any pretence it had of social and economic promise, and has itself become a part of the very thing it was never supposed to be. In many instances, the economic blight, social fault lines and daily stress scripted the dysfunctional behaviour of many of our people living in those areas.

‘WRONG ADDRESS’

By the 1970s, many of those who lived in, say, Kingston 12 and 13, were afraid to give potential employers their correct addresses because of the activities of a few armed renegades given outsized relevance by criminal politicians.

Those who fought long and hard and escaped the viral clutch of the ghetto, didn’t want their children to attend the same schools where ‘ghetto children’ spent their days. Uptown dealt with uptown, downtown was left to fend for itself, and the politicians revelled in the class divide.

The poorer downtown settlements provided the politicians with the certainty of the vote. The uptown, more educated set of people were problematic but, at the very least, uptown provided the politician his home spot, sometimes his swing voters, and definitely the place from where he made his electoral raids of downtown communities once every five years.

In our quest for betterment, we have cast aside the template that kept the family together when we were significantly poorer. In 2019, we hustle for the dollar, but our aggression in that pursuit is dangerously poised right at the surface. And, of course, every day that we spill our anger, we lead our children on a dark path of vileness and the need to hit back in rage.

Politicians and social scientists cannot magically hoist any ‘rod of correction’ or whip out a wand from fairyland to solve our seemingly intractable problems. It has to come from deep within ourselves, where we want to return to that warm home of love and peace and meat in the fridge.

We need to hate what we have become before we can begin to regain the awesome potential inside us.