Londoner in Jamrock

Jamaica isn’t all blue skies and palm trees. One of my favourite Jamaican sayings, “see me and come live with me”, means to know someone on face value and to know them intimately are two different things. The same can be said for the island.

Just because you visit Ocho Rios or Montego Bay for a couple of weeks each year and eat ackee and saltfish every Sunday doesn’t mean you have any experience of what it means to live in Jamaica. You know the cardboard cut-out experience fed to you by foreign all-inclusives. You’ve appreciated snapshots of the island’s stunning scenery and if you’re lucky, you know what a mango should taste like. But you know nothing about box food, bag juice, bad mind, zinc fence, the sweetness of custard-apples and the bitterness of papaya leaf tea, market day, what it feels to like to live in the same country your ancestors were enslaved, what it feels like to have no water for weeks, what it feels like to be truly grateful when all you have to claim is life. You might not have experienced the myriad angles of the place’s silencing beauty – the lush green mountains of Portland, the desert-like, cacti-dotted planes of Saint Elizabeth and the rainbow of blues from sky to sea in Westmoreland.

I don’t know everything there is to know about Jamaica, nor do I necessarily want to but I have peeked into the culture enough to know swapping London for Jamaica is like spinning a dial, you move from monochrome to sun-emblazoned life in technicolour; life in its rawest, realest, most painful and most exquisite form. The island has blown me open hard and fast as a hurricane and I’ve found myself there, in the jewelled fragments left behind.

Gratitude was one of the first things I learned. Not the rehearsed thankfulness you’ve read about in a self-help book or practise daily in a journal, but the kind of gratitude you see in the frenzied chaos of Jamaica where life is not guaranteed: you don’t take it for granted or wish it away; you clutch it with both hands like the precious entity it is. You try to treat each day as a cloudless sky of opportunity and if you can’t, at the very least, you give thanks for the chance to be blessed enough to be a part of it.

Not every lesson is one of upliftment though. There is a reason, for example, why phrases like “reddy eyed”, “ginal” and “dutty badmind” are a part of the vernacular. There are Jamaicans who will hate you even before they’ve met you, for reasons they themselves cannot fathom. I’ve had friends turn on me in Jamaica quicker than the weather on a London summer’s day.

So, why live there? Why not crawl back into the cocooned convenience of London? I always do, but the island still hasn’t lost its allure because Jamaica ineffable, many-sided and difficult to grasp. Just when you think you have the place pinned down, it escapes you. You cross rivers bare-footed at the outskirts of the city and experience acoustic sets that hush your worries. You meet friends who become your family. You start falling in love over roasted plantain, mid a backdrop of turquoise waters. You wake up one serene morning and pick your own breakfast, fresh from the plant. Someone hears you humming at lunch and an hour later, you are gazing over the San San hills of Port Antonio with a mic in your hand at one of the island’s iconic recording studios, standing in the spot where Alicia Keys, Rihanna and Amy Winehouse have all created albums. They invite you back.

After you have learned that your own company can be the best company, spent a morning admiring the blue line where the sky meets the water, been hushed by a sunset or meditated on a mountain’s magnitude, you start to remember the things which make your heart sing. Things you thought about before life told you where you needed to be. There in those sublime, still spaces you start remembering who you are.

Perhaps because the island has so little artifice, it reflects back to you a purer version of yourself. I began writing. Unceasingly and voraciously. I wrote differently to before. I wrote from a place of unchecked authenticity, pouring myself onto the page. And the response was different.

I love London. This relentless, ever-changing city is my home. But as one of my friends, often reminds me, “ain’t no weh quite like yard.”