In Country

Saturday morning saw me up at 7am cooking ‘rundown’, a dish which involves grating and pulping coconut to make fresh coconut milk, then reducing this down to a thick, creamy sauce as you stew your chosen filling – mackerel is traditional, but I chose green banana, pumpkin and dumplings. In the end it was probably a little too runny to be real rundown, but it served its purpose – a big, hearty breakfast ahead of a busy weekend hopping around the countryside up around the north coast by taxi.

The plan was to head north and west out of Cockpit Country into St Ann parish, skirting the Dry Harbour mountains and from there delve deeper into the interior, into the kind of nameless rural backwaters Jamaicans generically call ‘country’. Our destination was two fold – first, we would be paying a visit to Nine Mile, the tiny hill community where Bob Marley was born and raised and where his mausoleum can now be found, and from there we would be heading to Grant’s Mountain, Monique’s family home.

Browns Town

 The first of the day’s six taxi rides took us north from Albert Town through yet more spectacular Cockpit Country scenery, an area fittingly called ‘Alps’ where the road, which has more kinks than cooked spaghetti, winds through a deep and narrow gorge flanked by spectacular cliffs and deep gullies. On reaching the northern fringes of the Cockpits, we changed taxi at Jackson Town, a ramshackle and pretty folorn-looking place whose one feature of note is a large stone Anglican church. This area of Jamaica once boasted one of the highest concentrations of sugar plantations on the island, the legacy of which remains in the scattering of rundown hamlets like Jackson Town, Clarks Town and Duncan, named after local British autocrats, their over-sized and out-of-place churches testament to the wealth of the landowners.

From Jackson Town we headed across the parish border into St Ann to Browns Town, an altogether different place despite the similarity in nomenclature. A major market town and the main point of access from St Ann’s developed coastal strip into its rural hinterland, the centre of Browns Town is dominated by two large stone churches, one Baptist and one Anglican, and, overlooking the bus depot high on a ridge, the beautiful wood façade buildings of the exclusive St Hildas School for Girls. The town’s other main attractions are a large shopping area and market, which we spent an hour wandering around before pressing on.

Nine Mile

Despite being less than 10 miles away, it took another two taxis to reach Nine Mile, changing at the one-horse town of Alexandria. Monique was now on familiar territory – she had spent her last two years at high school in Browns Town and had made the taxi journey via Alexandria on a daily basis. She had her own reasons for visiting Nine Mile, as her younger sister Latoya lives next door to the Bob Marley mausoleum with the grandson of one of his cousins. Their home on the top two stories of a beautiful pink-and-white building would be the village’s most striking feature if it wasn’t for the out-of-place orange-walled compound which houses Bob Marley’s final resting place.

Nine Mile is a place where two sides of Jamaica collide – the sanitized, commercialized and commodified Jamaica sold to tourists at extortionately high prices stuck right in the middle the poor, rough-and-ready Jamaica that most Jamaicans exist in, usually well hidden from the delicate sensibilities of wealthy visitors. I wondered what the tourists bussed in to Nine Mile from the all-inclusive resorts on packaged tours made of it - how they felt as they rattled along the appallingly rutted one-track road from Alexandria, past the tiny clapboard shops and zinc-roofed homes, up the hill and through the gauntlet of Rastas and chancers selling ganja and tours of the ‘Bob Marley plantation’ outside the mausoleum gates. I wondered equally what the residents made of the gaudy, carefully crafted tourist trap locked away behind high walls and gates right in their midst – how much of the proceeds from this cash cow actually trickled back into the community, and did the spotlight cast on the village by its most famous son benefit or hinder way of life here?

Bob's 'famous' single bed

Whatever the answers, Bob Marley is pretty much unrivalled as a Jamaican icon on the international stage, and in a country where tourism is now by far and away the biggest industry, his fame is exploited for all its worth as a selling point. This isn’t purely cynical commercialism – although some reggae purists sneer at Marley’s music for pandering to a white audience, Jamaicans remain fiercely proud of ‘Tuff Gong’, for the way he almost singlehandedly brought Jamaican music and culture to the attention of the international mainstream as much as for his music itself. His tunes still get virtually daily airtime on the major radio stations, and he is revered as a spiritual leader among Rastafarians. It was love for his music that brought me here, too – in my early teens, I idolized Bob Marley, drawn no doubt to his image as a ganja-smoking radical whose songs of rebellion and change had managed to cross over into the mainstream. I painted my first guitar in Rasta colours, with a picture of Bob himself smoking a huge joint glued to it, I read about his life, about Rastafari, about Jamaican music and about Jamaican culture in Britain. Through him, as well as the close associations between punk and the ska and roots scene in Britain in the late 1970s, I started listening to Jamaican music before I ever had any idea I might one day get to spend time here.

His final resting place

One of the things I love about reggae, about Rastafari and about Jamaican culture in general is how clued up it is socially and politically. Unlike Britain, where the ‘culture’ we’re spoon-fed via the radio, newspapers and TV is bland, sonambulent and purposefully moronic, in Jamaica it is impossible to avoid what adds up to a very lucid and coherent attack on the global political and economic circumstances that keep people here poor and downtrodden. In conversations, in song lyrics, in newspaper articles, in graffiti, you are constantly aware that people here know the score – that the world is dominated by a corrupt, greedy and intrinsically racist system that keeps a mostly white minority rich at the expense of the coloured minions, that money and power are the root of all evil in the world. Yet in spite of this awareness, Jamaican culture also despairs at its own powerlessness to overturn the system they collectively denounce and improve its collective lot. For all the messages of hope and empowerment preached by Bob Marley and scores of other reggae stars, Jamaican society has come to hold up an increasingly troubled and violent mirror to the ills of the world at large. Moreover, Bob Marley might have been the man who took this peculiarly Jamaican insight into humanity’s problems to the wider world, but his transformation after his death (and even before) into a hugely lucrative commercial brand sums up how Jamaican culture seems doomed to imitate what it opposes. Nine Mile isn’t so much a shrine to a visionary who foresaw a better world as a temple to the power of the dollar, where those left behind in the mad capitalist dash are barred by high walls from its hallowed inner sanctum.

One Love (if the price is right)

Ok, so maybe I could have forgiven the cheesy commercial sheen of the place a little more if it had actually been any good, but for the $20 US entry price, it’s pretty crap. For that price, you get a 20 minute tour past the rooftop of his grandparents’ house where he was born, obviously extensively refurbished, before heading up Sugar Hill, or ‘Mount Zion’, to the two-room hut he shared with his mother, Cedella Booker, up to the age of 13. Inside is the ‘single bed’ you are told he sang about in ‘Is This Love’, although seeing as he wrote this song years later when he was living in Kingston and apparently about his wife Rita, I find this hard to believe. From there, you visit his mum’s tomb, and then cross to see the tomb of the big man himself, set six foot off the ground in a large marble tomb, enthroned with flags, pictures and gifts from visitors around the room. This part at least I will confess had a kind of serene charm about it – I’d earlier bought a candle, proceeds from which go to the local basic (infants) school, and once lit I was invited to walk around the tomb. As I seemed to be the only visitor, there was an eerie silence over the hill, and I perhaps felt something close to being moved as I walked round the Rastaman’s shrine.

But that was as good as it got. There’s little else in the way of photos, displays or other information about Bob Marley’s life, no attempt to create a historical record of his life at Nine Mile or at any other time. What you do get is a constant hard sell, from the two gift shops selling outrageously over-priced tat (I considered buying a sweet, ten-page picture story book based on ‘Two Little Birds’ for Daisy, until I was informed it cost $20 US), the swanky bar selling hamburgers, Tequila and Red Bull rather than jerk chicken and white rum, and the guides looking for tips The whole place has nothing to do with Jamaica and everything to do with meeting the expectations of foreigners, all at a suitable price. Which I could deal with if the profits from this place were being invested in Nine Mile, or any of the thousands of other ordinary communities scattered right across Jamaica, and being used to make a difference to the lives of ordinary people who have little hope of escaping difficult lives of hard toil and uncertainty. But I suspect most of the cash made by this place goes straight to the Bob Marley estate, keeping his wife, family and no doubt an army of administrators living a life of pampered luxury.

Monique back home

Ok, high horse dismounted. Our next stop was Grant’s Mountain, which involved another two taxis, one back to Alexandria and another back the same way before branching off the road to Nine Mile, to reach. Monique had told me the place she had grown up was pretty remote, but I hadn’t even begun to imagine just how remote. Although perhaps only 15 miles from Browns Town as the crow flies, the uncompromising landscape of tightly packed, steep hills, their sides scattered with the rust-red smallholdings of local farmers, coupled with the fact that the only way in and out of this area is a narrow, rutted carcass of a track which forces cars to roll along at snails pace, this place really does feel like the middle of nowhere. I thought Albert Town was out in the sticks, but it’s a metropolis compared to the tiny hamlets of maybe five or six buildings which make up the scattered farming communities in the heart of St Ann.

The trip here was a poignant one for Monique as it was the first time she had returned to her childhood home since her mother and brothers had fled to Spanish Town following the trouble which saw two of her brothers get badly hurt and the whole family fearing for their safety. I could tell she was a little nervous – as we drove past the house she’d grown up in to visit her grandmother on her father’s side first, she pointed out where her brothers’ assailants still lived, and said she wouldn’t dare walk out on the road after dark as she’d once done without a second thought for fear of running into one of them. Her grandmother unfortunately wasn’t home, having headed off to a Nine Night, the Jamaican equivalent of a wake held the night before a funeral, a few miles back down the road towards Alexandria. But I was introduced to her Uncle Roy, who talked to me about his farm and his crops while absentmindedly cleaning the grass from a large stem of ganja buds, before we made a brief pilgrimage for Monique to visit the guy she believed had saved her brothers’ lives by intervening in the fight to get them in his car and to hospital.

Uncle Turdy's house

As Monique talked more about the incident, I began to get a feel for the depth of the sense of loss she felt for her family because of what had happened in its aftermath. Although she, the eldest of the five children her mother and father had together, had long since moved away from Grant’s Mountain, having lived in Ocho Rios, Spanish Town and Old Harbour in the previous seven years, she clearly felt this was her family home, the place where her mother had spent most of her life, where her brothers had a livelihood guaranteed from the land. She was definite that none of them could ever return, the threat of reprisals and revenge hanging heavy.

I saw in concrete terms what they had lost when we returned to the family home. The yard where she had grown up stretched up a steep incline and contained three houses, two fronting the road and one further back up the hill. The house in front to the left was home to her Uncle Turdy, her mum’s brother, her Aunt Karen and their children, and included a small shop on the lowest level, accessed via a trapdoor and ladder from the one other room inside the building, which served as bedroom and living quarters for the entire family (as is still common right across Jamaica, in town and countryside, kitchen and bathroom were located in huts out in the yard). Immediately to the right of this home is a larger and more ornate house, with a wide veranda running the length of the front facing the road. This was built and occupied by another of Monique’s uncles, and the entire right half was occupied by a much larger shop than the one found in Uncle Turdy’s home. The house up the hill was the smallest of the three, and was where Monique lived as a child. The surrounding yard is covered by tomato, pumpkin, cabbage and onion plants.

Monique's childhood home

We found these latter two homes unoccupied, dusty and still strewn with scattered clothes, DVDs, bedding and even ornate plastic flowers - as Uncle Turdy put it, they’d long been taken over by Anansi, the Jamaican spider spirit. After the second of Monique’s uncles had moved away, her family had moved down the hill into the larger house, but still made use of the one up the hill. Both had been abandoned in a great hurry after the attack on the two brothers (Monique was relieved that someone had seen fit to at least clean up the blood). It wasn’t just the sudden severance with the family’s past which hurt Monique, though – in these two homes, the shop, the rich vegetable patch that filled the yard, and the fertile farmland that lay around, she saw a future for her brothers and her sick mother that doesn’t exist for the family in Spanish Town, struggling as it is there to scrape together any kind of income and troubled by the lure of the gangs and the violence which entice too many of the city’s jobless young men.

The abandoned bottom house

Sadly, stories of displacement and loss are far from unusual in rural Jamaica. Despite the richness of the land and its beguiling, genteel beauty, life remains punishingly hard. When we bumped into Uncle Turdy on the road up to his house at 6.15, he was just returning from working fields he had reached at 7am that morning. Although most farmers can grow about enough to feed their families, earning money is difficult, and somewhere between the long hours it takes to plant, maintain and reap enough of a surplus to be worth selling, families have to make long trips to market to join the armies of other folk selling their small stocks of fruit and vegetables. Little wonder that many farmers in these fertile hills are to some extent or the other involved in ganja production – when we had a look round the top house in Monique’s family yard, we found the bathroom had been converted into a drying house for marijuana, with a bale of perhaps 40 or 50 five-foot stalks hung up boasting the largest crop of bud I’ve ever set eyes on. Despite the risks of getting caught, ganja remains the farmers’ most reliable cash crop, given the insatiable appetite a huge proportion of the Jamaican population have for it. Finally, it isn’t just the struggles of poverty that drive people away from the country into the towns in search of non-existent jobs – the violence that drove Monique’s family away is just as much a problem in the countryside as it is in Jamaica’s urban ghettoes, a symptom of a people with an appetite for taking matters of justice into their own hands as much as it is a hangover from the cruelties of slavery or a by-product of poverty. The next morning, as we walked through the hillside on our way to get a taxi at the marginally larger hamlet of Murray Mount, Monique pointed out a burnt-out house that she said had once been the largest and most beautiful in the area. When its owner got into a land dispute with a neighbour and took the pretty rash step of shooting him dead, the community responded by burning his home and all his possessions to the ground, leaving destitute a family which was already doomed to losing its father and husband to a life in prison.

Puerto Seco beach

After scraping together a meal of rice and avocado (Monique hadn’t bothered warning her relatives we’d be dropping in and we’d missed the evening meal by the time we arrived) and watching some of the world athletics championship on TV, we bedded down in the large empty house at the bottom of the hill, which although it lacked power at least could be securely locked. We tidied the bed the best we could by candle light and tried not to think about the bugs scurrying everywhere across the bedroom and bathroom. Unfortunately, the dust in the empty house didn’t do my allergy-prone sinuses any favours, and by the next morning I was sneezing uncontrollably and wouldn’t stop for most of the day. We woke to light drizzle, the mist from which only made the high tops and deep crevasses of the hills even more ethereal and beautiful from before, and after a breakfast of mint tea, fried plantain and fried dumplings, bid goodbye and were on our way.

Just like Dr No

The final destination of our St Ann’s odyssey was, despite the rain, the beach, namely Puerto Seco beach in Discovery Bay. The journey involved another three taxi rides, back through Alexandria, Brown’s Town and then down to the coast, during which I witnessed a new personal record for people-cramming – four adults and three children in a Corolla, plus the driver. Discovery Bay is disputedly claimed to be the place where Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ Jamaica in 1494 – although historical records suggest he first stepped ashore on the island a few miles west at Rio Buenos, it is still claimed that he first sailed into Discovery Bay’s large and tranquil crescent-shaped harbour, only to be deterred when he found no sign of fresh water streams or rivers running into the sea. Nowadays, the bay’s main feature is a huge red-stained industrial complex where the majority of Jamaica’s exported bauxite is loaded into cargo ships to be processed into aluminum in the USA – the plant was also used as the baddie’s hideout, Crab Cay, in the Bond film Dr. No. Despite the ugly plant, Discovery Bay is beautiful and the white–sand beach just what I had been yearning for. It’s also apparently pretty popular with Jamaicans – I was surprised to see buses chartered for day trips from Kingston sat in the parking lot. I even forgot all about my sneezing for a while as I lolled around in the shallow, crystal-clear waters.

What I didn’t realise while I was lolling around on the beach was that Discovery Bay was that very afternoon hosting the semi-finals of a major island-wide community Twenty20 cricket tournament. Had I listened to the radio properly in the days beforehand, I would have definitely spared a couple of hours beach time to go and watch as my adopted home town Old Harbour were one of the teams in action. Despite being wild card outsiders, a second consecutive century in the tournament from local hero and rising star of West Indies cricket, Andre Russell, propelled Old Harbour to an easy win and the final. Russell, whose aggressive fast bowling and explosive batting have already earned him a regular place in the West Indies one-day and Twenty20 teams, is widely rated as a future global star of the game – would have been nice to have been able to say I saw him in action for his home town smashing a century in 50-odd balls. Oh well, you can’t win them all.

The only other news I have to report from my weekend jaunt is more of a confession really. After 13 years of staunch vegetarianism, bolstered in recent times by a not-quite-so-strict vegan ethic, I succumbed to the temptations of jerk chicken. I make this confession without any hint of guilt or regret – I had already come to terms with the fact that I would try some of the famous and fiery barbecued meat while I was here, and I’m damn glad I did because it was bloody gorgeous, especially the burnt crispy bits like gristle, skin and bone ends. Apologies to any readers of a more delicate disposition to whom I may have caused offence.