The Jamaican tourist board won't thank Ian Thomson. Worth $1bn a year, tourism is Jamaica's main source of income. Along with the trade in narcotics, which plays no small part in the island's 1,500 murders a year. The Dead Yard, which last month picked up the Ondaatje prize for Commonwealth travel writing, uncovers an "inbetween" Jamaica, one that's neither the rum and reggae of Disneyfied Montego Bay nor the "guns, guns, guns" of Kingston's slums. What Thomson finds in all corners, however, is a failing, mongrel nation that has slipped painfully and not entirely from British rule onto a path dictated by the political and business interests of America.
Those after The Wire-style gore should be aware that Thomson leaves the grass roots of gangland pretty well alone. He tells us that 42% of Kingston's population are under 20, but we meet few of the city's desperate teens. When he ventures to a very late-night passa-passa party in Tivoli Gardens, no mention is made of the neighbourhood's unofficial "president", the drug and gun lord Christopher "Dudus" Coke, whose recent attempted extradition to the US led to gun battles and 70 deaths. Still, the party, like every street, house and landscape in the book, beautiful or ruined, is described with skill: you can smell the sweat, sex and ganja, and feel the quaking sound system.
Thomson, a white Scot capable of combativeness and charm, meets mainly older residents with a historical perspective, among them community and religious leaders, musicians, and Errol Flynn's wife. Jamaican migrants in Britain get their say too, and the legacy of sugar slavery and British colonialism gets a kicking. The two-party politics inherited from Westminster hasn't worked, with gangs aligning with the JLP or PNP in exchange for criminal impunity.
The growth of Black Power in the 1970s led to violent discrimination towards Catholics, Jews, Germans, Scots and Chinese minorities but no more arrivistes than African blacks. In an encounter with the Rastafarian cult of Bobo Shanti, Thomson is appalled by their hatred of gays, and by the practice of packing their women off to a medical ward when they are "sick" (menstruating). In this context, the number of Jamaicans who are misty-eyed for the British way of doing things becomes less surprising.
Thomson insists this is just "a" story of Jamaica, but his opinionated snapshots and history telling are damning: there's no silver lining lurking between golden beach and ghetto.
