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Familiar Stranger

A Life Between Two Islands

Duke University Press

1. Colonial Landscapes, Colonial Subjects

Sometimes I feel I was the last colonial. I was born in 1932 into a coloured middle-class family in Jamaica, still then a British colony. My first sense of the world derived from my location as a colonized subject and much of my life can be understood as unlearning the norms in which I had been born and brought up. This long, continuing process of disidentification has shaped my life. I lived in Kingston, Jamaica, as a child and youth for the first nineteen years of my life. I left for England in 1951 to study at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship; and, having decided not to go home, I have lived and worked in Britain ever since.

The story I tell focuses on how I lived the last days of colonialism, in both Kingston and London. I have chosen to close the narrative in the early 1960s, when I was entering my thirties. By then I had stepped outside the immediate impress of colonial subjugation, discovering the means to become a different sort of person. I had met and married Catherine. My life of political activism in London was coming to an end. We moved to Birmingham, where a new future opened up for me at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. These changes didn't magically resolve the unease which had been incubated as I grew up in a racially subordinate position in colonial Jamaica. It was not an ending like the fabled closures of a Victorian novel. They marked the moment when I came to understand that my life was my own to make, and that obeisance to either colonial Jamaica or to metropolitan Britain, orEngland, was not the only choice before me. Other spaces opened up. These were, I saw, spaces to be made.

In 2011 I celebrated – if that is the right word – sixty years of life in the black British diaspora. Indeed, I am the product of two diasporas. This may surprise readers who are more likely to regard the African diaspora as my primordial place of origin. But Jamaica too, as well as being a part of Africa in the New World, is a diaspora of sorts in its own right, a site of the scattering of traditions and people, of diffusion. None of the major groups which constitute Jamaican society originally belonged there. Every Jamaican is the product of a migration, forced or free. Everyone is originally from somewhere else.

My father, Herman, an amiable, stockily built brown man of lower-middle-class background, with kind eyes and a little paunch in his tropical light-brown suit, worked as an accountant. He was lucky enough, given his early prospects, to have landed a job in Port Antonio with the United Fruit Company, one of the US multinationals based in Boston which has dominated the banana trade in Central America and the Caribbean. United Fruit was known throughout the twentieth century for its expertise in summoning the dark arts in Central American politics. My father, who I imagine would have been oblivious to all this, worked his way up the ladder to be the first local – that is, 'coloured man' – appointed chief accountant of the Jamaican branch of the company.

My mother, the formidable 'Miss Jessie', was a handsome, welltailored brown woman of imposing bearing. Born to light-skinned but not well-off parents – a teacher in the Agricultural School and a postmistress – she was in effect adopted by her prosperous uncle, a prominent lawyer who owned a small estate on the edge of Port Antonio. She was taken to live there in a rather grand house called 'Norwich', which stood on a hill at the end of a palm-lined driveway looking out to the sea. In the final episode of the series Redemption Song, which I made for the BBC in 1991, I revisited the ruins of that house, which had been bought but left untouched by the singer Eartha Kitt. It was looked after by a gay man who had worked in the theatre and fashion. He lived in a single room with cupboards stuffed full of show costumes in an otherwise empty house. Like the way of life it represented, 'Norwich' was falling into decay.

My mother's uncles were local professionals – lawyers and doctors – and all their children were educated in England. If my mother hadn't been a woman, she would probably have been sent to England to complete her education too. I think she felt cheated that she hadn't been. The family had originally been slave-owners. An antecedent by marriage, John Rock Grosset, embarrassingly turns out to have been a prominent pro-slavery, anti-abolitionist pamphleteer. Plantation life constituted the aspirational model of her hopes and fears, which she recast for her own family to adopt. This branch of the family tutored her in their ways and refashioned her into one of their own. She enjoyed her capacity to dominate, to take the leading role, to play the grande dame. She carried her fearless determination – indeed, her willed stubbornness – in the very set of her body and face. Her tragedy was that, although obviously a highly competent person, after her marriage she never worked outside the family home. The domestic scene and the family became her occupation, which she dominated and governed – unlike many other Jamaican middle-class families where, at that time, the men ruled. But I think the lack of a more fulfilling public role was one of the many sources of her abiding sense of dissatisfaction.

Both my siblings – my brother, George and my sister, Patricia – were some years older than me. Pat's working life as a personal secretary was interrupted by a serious breakdown. She spent much of the rest of her later life caring for George and for my parents. She is still alive, living in residential care in Jamaica, looked after by my cousin, Sister Maureen Clare.

Kingston, where we lived, was a typical, large, bustling, overcrowded, often ramshackle colonial city. It looked out on a circular harbour, one of the safest and most magnificent of its kind in the world, which was almost fully enclosed by a narrow snake of land, the Palisadoes, at the end of which stood what was left of the old town, Port Royal. This had been the main base of the British pirate fleet which, in the Elizabethan period, harried the galleons from the Spanish Main on their way from South America back to Europe with loot from the silver mines. In fact piracy, though a freelance illegal venture, had an ambiguous relationship to the Crown. One of the most notorious pirates, Sir Henry Morgan, actually became for a time a governor of the island. Most of Port Royal had been destroyed or submerged by an earthquake in 1692, which everyone believed was a just and fitting judgement on its wicked, licentious way of life, on its vice and illicit wealth. People said that if you listened hard you could still hear the bells of the cathedral tolling beneath the waves – pleading for forgiveness, perhaps?

Jamaica itself, the tropical island, still resides deep in my being. Much of the south and parts of the north are relatively flat, ideal for planting sugar cane. Elsewhere the land is steeper, suited to bananas, citrus fruits and a range of local delicacies. The estates and cattle farms are on the flatter terrain. Coffee is a high mountain crop. A lot of the interior is thickly wooded, subtropical and promiscuously fertile. Behind Kingston rise the high peaks of the Blue Mountains, which form part of a longer mountainous spine running almost the full length of the island. Everywhere, the narrow roads climb their perilous way up the hillsides and plummet down again into the valleys.

Deeper in the interior was the terrain of the 'country people', especially the subsistence peasant families on half-acre smallholdings or scratching a livelihood in the hillside villages, as well as the day-rate labourers, cane-cutters and banana-growers and those who serviced village life. On their tiny family plots they grew anything that could be consumed, or taken down to the weekly market and sold alongside the flotsam and jetsam of local rural life: re-tread tires, clapped-out motor parts and multiply renovated electrical goods. The dwellings of the poor subsistence farmers often consisted of tin-roofed huts and rough, lean-to wooden houses perched precariously on the terraced hillsides, every inch of which was used productively.

Except in the most remote areas, a multitude of small villages emerged at road intersections, often consisting of nothing more than a few shacks clustered around an improvised bar or an all-purpose store. Sometimes, as in the more remote Cockpit country, the terrain breaks up into jagged, serrated peaks and troughs. At regular intervals the main roads pass through crowded, sweltering, small country towns. The roads hugged the sea wherever possible, or ran just inland from long, sandy beaches fringed by coconut palms. The undergrowth offered shortcuts to the glaring-white sand and the majestic blue-green rolling waves of the Caribbean lying beyond. All along the coast were small fishing villages. The finest of these became much touted by the travel industry as centres of the tourist holiday 'paradise'.

The seat of government had been established by the early conquistadors in Spanish Town, with its imposing examples of early architecture still intact in the main square. The British transferred the capital to Kingston. Today, half the population lives in and around Kingston. It is by far the most important urban centre, and dominates social, political and cultural life. When I was growing up its streets ran down to the harbour and the docks. The smaller side streets sported a multitude of tiny, improvised businesses – tailors, hairdressers, shoemakers, freelance mechanics, day-labourers, domestic servants, gardeners, washerwomen, hairdressers, self-employed odd-job people mending clothes and shoes, dressmakers in an economy not yet addicted to the ready-made, untrained mechanics and a legion of ingenious repairers. These improvised ventures coexisted alongside the large, swanky department stores selling upmarket or foreign branded goods. This was the commercial and administrative centre of Jamaican life. It still contained the House of Assembly, the law courts, lawyers' chambers, the cathedral, the headquarters of many established companies, the old Ward Theatre, some of the government ministries, the stadium, the Institute of Jamaica, the art gallery and, at its rim, the craft market, whose sellers competed raucously to win the favour of passing tourists. One road out of town passed the asylum – the old Rockfort, with prisoners digging at the chalk face – the hot baths, the seaplane wharf and the road out to the airport.

However, in more recent times the balance of the metropolis has shifted remarkably. As one drives up the foothills towards St Andrew's, the residential part of Kingston, the manicured lawns of 'uptown' Kingstonians indulgently spread themselves across the landscape. The gardens are well tended (everyone up here has a gardener) and the houses grand (everyone has servants, now called 'helpers'), although the grandest are often in showy bad taste. The more prosperous Kingstonians have moved higher up still, taking refuge in the surrounding hills which look down on the city. The Hope Road leads to the edge of the city and takes you up to the University of the West Indies Mona Campus, the Hope Botanical Gardens, the Reservoir and my old school, Jamaica College. Then, suddenly, it ends at Papine Corner and begins the vertiginous climb up to Mavis Bank and into the Blue Mountain mist.

Downtown Kingston used to be the main shopping centre, reached by bus and tram; but these shops have since become dispersed across the city uptown into US-style malls. The narrow roads to the harbour led into the heart of lower Kingston's massively poor, casual-labour or unemployed ghetto areas where living conditions were poverty-stricken, dwellings often no more than corrugated-tin shacks clustered around shared tenement yards, with the only available running water from a common standpipe. Some of these became notorious ghettos, like Trench Town and Tivoli Gardens, the no-go, garrisoned centres of rival political factions and of petty and organized criminal activities – the topic of Bob Marley lyrics.

These landscapes represent my sharpest memories of Jamaica, more so – perhaps surprisingly – than the people who inhabited them. Time has overtaken the latter. But I often relive the forbidding climb along precipice-sided potholed roads up into the mountains; then beginning the descent on the other side down towards the north coast, with the aquamarine ocean glimmering seductively ahead through the trees. The wind has a balmy softness in the early morning before the sun sets fire to everything. The body unfolds from inside as the day warms up. (I have never really stopped being cold in Britain.) The sea has a powerful, enticing presence in my memory: swimming before breakfast, the water still as glass; or at midday, sliding through the ever-changing green depths at Discovery Bay; or in the afternoon, riding the surging,spume-tipped – and scary – ocean waves at Boston Beach, followed by jerk-pork and festival barbeques. Festival, I should explain, is a cross between bread and dumpling.

I recall looking up the ravine at Bog Walk Bridge (then with room for only one car at a time) at the immense bamboo fronds swaying in the wind, and the orange and yellow blossom of the poinciana and poui trees; the lush, subtropical mountain vegetation that runs alongside the twisting Junction Road to my favourite part of the coast, Port Antonio; or clambering over the rocky waterfalls when we stopped at Castleton Gardens to drink fresh coconut water straight from the nut. I have discovered since how much memory of 'the old country' is carried by migrants in food and cuisine. I am still addicted to Jamaican cooking: the creole blend of spices and seasonings – garlic, thyme, pimento, spring onions, Scotch Bonnet hot peppers. I still crave the favourite national dishes, simple and plebeian though they are: fricassee chicken, rice and peas, plantain, salt-fish and ackee, curry goat, fish fritters, pigtail and stewed peas, escovitched fish, callaloo, shrimp, conch soup, 'run down' patties – usually made from salted mackerel and coconut milk – and so on. These smells and tastes bring back an entire life which, for me in London, is no longer mine.

One potent memory is the spread of foods you can still find at the Saturday morning markets. I recall how the higglers brought their produce down from the hills in straw baskets carried on their heads. Setting up the market, they created an atmosphere of bustle and hilarity as they greeted one another, reviewed the week in stories and anecdotes, recycling gossip and scandalous tales or rehearsing grievances. This was a very Jamaican scene with its high drama, loud contention, joshing and jostling, taste for exaggeration and caricature, its (often manufactured) sense of outrage – performances which Jamaicans manage to stage on even the most chance encounter. In fact nothing escaped these ladies' eagle eyes. However relaxed they seemed, they were always proprietorially on guard behind their improvised stalls, keeping a sharp lookout for pilferers too inclined to use their casual familiarity to help themselves in passing.

These memories represent now, for me, not so much specific recollections as a sense of generalized absence – a loss, especially acute since I will probably never be well enough to see them again. They guarantee that I shall be Jamaican all my life, no matter where I am living. Though what that actually meant for me, in terms both of the practicalities of my life and of where my sense of belonging was to be located, was much more problematic.

I'm conscious of this feeling of ambivalence as I sit and write. It shadows the words as they form in my mind. I didn't set out to write this book in order to recover my memories of the past. Of course, the question of memory is – tantalizingly, inescapably – an issue. But I don't think I had a clear memorializing project in mind for the book. I certainly don't think of what I write as a memoir in any formal sense, or even as a rehearsal for a memoir. I'm more concerned here, as I have been in much of my more professional academic writing, with the connections between 'a life' and 'ideas'. I've never wanted to write a memoir. I've kept very little of the sort of correspondence on which such accounts extensively depend. Now in my eighties, my memory is at best fitful, episodic, unreliable and no doubt fanciful. In addition, as a result of recent sight impairment, I haven't been able to consult documents which would validate its judgements, although I have had many rich and informing conversations with friends who figure in the story or know parts of it better than I do. But I have not checked its accuracy and I'm responsible for its errors of chronology, fact or judgement.

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Excerpted from Familiar Stranger by Stuart Hall, Bill Schwarz. Copyright © 2017 Catherine Hall. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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