Diana McCaulay
DO YOU have any empty cardboard boxes?" I ask the supermarket manager.
"Don't tell me you're leaving us too!"
"As a matter of fact I am," I reply, "but only for awhile."
"You're lucky we have any left, every day people come for boxes," she says, shaking her head.
For weeks now, everything I've done has been carved with the edge of endings. It's fanciful, because although I am leaving Jamaica for an extended period for the first time since I was 17, I'm just going to study. Still, it seems like a leap off a cliff from which there will be no retreat. (I have a vivid imagination, it's the curse and blessing of many writers).
So this is how it goes, my departure. Eating breakfast, I wonder if I will have to buy a new box of cereal before I leave. Can a week be measured by a box of cereal? Will these oranges last? These tomatoes? It strikes me that whenever I travel for short periods of time, I'm always amazed to come home and find fresh food has survived my absence, because I feel as if I've been away for months. Now looking at it the other way, I know the remaining time is not enough to finish a half-empty box of cereal.
I see Jamaica with lovelorn eyes, always have. How is it possible to love a country, I ask myself? It is merely land and water, it is not a person, it cannot love back, it does not rest a gentle hand on the back of your neck, or visit you in hospital, or call to find out how your job interview went. A country is not animate, it simply exists, it does not notice its nationals who are transients anyway. And we Jamaicans are more transient than most, all of us from some other place and so many of us longing to leave, to be anywhere but here. Yet I have no other word but love for my feelings for my island home.
I am not in denial about my country, however. Wrapping crockery in newspaper, I see a recent headline: Is there any hope for Jamaica? More and more I wonder what hope there can be when public sector leadership seems so oblivious to the realities of our lives, the economic stagnation, the crime, the breakdown of every single social system.
Packing boxes
As I join the droves of people packing boxes, seeking other, better lives in countries not our own, I reflect there can be no more damning indictment of the present administration than this: 65 per cent of Jamaicans want to emigrate.
With the weary sense of outrage that life here produces, I read in The Gleaner that hundreds of people have been employed to plant trees under the Lift Up Jamaica programme and are in fact merely littering the land. Organiser Paul Buchanan says it's not that bad. It seems this is the only response from officialdom these days: Nothing is that bad. Sure, we're using taxpayers money to plant trees during the worst drought in years thereby guaranteeing the non-survival of the trees if a few dozen were even to be planted by mistake.
Sure, 19 people have been murdered in a week, but hey, crime rates are falling, didn't you hear?
Lawlessness
I'm writing this on a Sunday night and next door a neighbour uses a lathe. The screeching of machinery has been going on for hours, I want the peace of my Sunday evening. Surely I should be entitled to that. But there's no-one to call, not in Jamaica. I risk my life if I go to remonstrate with the neighbour myself and the police are uninterested in mere noise. We consistently fail to see the connection between the disregard of all laws and rampant crime.
Yet from my balcony I can see three trees: ackee, breadfruit, otaheiti apple. With the addition of a little protein and a pinch of literary licence, I could lean out and pick a complete meal, courtesy of Jamaica. It's August and it's hot, yet in the day a fierce sea breeze blows through my apartment bringing smells of sea gulls, diesel fumes and ozone. Outside the garden wilts. The National Water Commission says there's only 60 days of water left in the Mona reservoir. By all accounts, I'm heading to a place of grey skies and rain. I suspect I'll rust.
FOOTNOTES
Dr. Raymond Wright, of the Petroleum Corporation of Jamaica, called to clear up the mystery of the Moving Mound in Holruth Park. Seems PCJ is donating a statue to the people of Jamaica and the mound was to be its base, but a bus bay was planned for the given spot, so it had to be moved.
My next column will be written from Seattle, Washington, in early October. I'm hoping to report I've seen whales patrolling a very different kind of coast. Bye for now.
