Melville Cooke

There should be fewer people walking on the streets. The parties should be noticeably less filled with swaying figures, dressed up in their best or undressed in their less, the lines of traffic snaking along Mandela Highway and on the Portmore toll road, as well as every major thoroughfare in the city during peak hour traffic, should be shorter.

After all, between January 1, 2005, and December 31, 2006, 3,000 persons were murdered in Jamaica. Add to that about 40 under two weeks gone into the new year and the police chief's prediction of a bloody election and the much vaunted 20 per cent reduction last year is as much cause for celebration as the Reggae Boyz beating Haiti 2-0 in their last match in the Digicel Caribbean Cup for this season.

It really, really does not make much of a difference.

With Jamaica's crushing murder rate over the past umpteen years (I remember what a bloodmark it was when the murder figure passed 1,000 for a year, topping the 1980 war election year figure), though, we really should see a difference in the population. Somewhere, somehow, there should be a noticeable difference in the number of people present.

But there is not. And I wonder, where are all the murdered people, including those killed in dubious shoot-outs with the police, gone? Where are the spaces left by their passing? We know the statistics, but where is the impact of their absence?

Middle class perspective

I write, of course, from a solidly middle class perspective (despite the hair), so someone living in the more murderous areas of the country, from 'Russia' in Savanna-la-Mar, Westmoreland, where five people have been murdered since the start of the year, to Rockfort in East Kingston and Norwood in Montego Bay, St. James, would have a far different perspective. They would be able to point to burnt out houses and death spots; they would be able to recall names instead of recite statistics.

But even then, in the not-too-far future a generation will change and the absence of a sense of absence for those killed in one particular phase of the bloodletting will continue.

I also do not personally know anyone who has been murdered. Ever. Which I suspect makes me a very rare Jamaican. I do, however, know people who know people who have been murdered and the process of forgetting, of the impact becoming less and less till it all but disappears, almost invariably happens.

And I am not in the economic bracket which scoops most of the murdered in its very tight, very impoverished grip. To put it uncomfortably bluntly, many of the murdered are not missed because they were not noticed in the first place.

So, despite the crushing murder rate and 'bawling out' here and there, life goes on at the same blinding, blinging pace. Somebody who reads the news before coming to Jamaica and expects to see the streets of the capital empty will be surprised to see the party people out at the various nightspots every night of the week, tripled on weekends. We who do not live in the kill zones or fall in the category of 'gang-related' do not really miss the dead and hence do not expect to become a one-liner on the death announcements which pass for the start of the nightly news.

Even some of the more well-known murder victims are celebrated in song and dance, Gerald 'Bogle' Levy among them.

And so the dead are more like persons who have resigned from a company; their former co-workers know where they were and know where they have gone, but somebody else fills the post (or there is that infamous situation of 'posts which become vacant will not be missed') and life goes on without much difference.

Me? I am resigned to this absence of a sense of absence.

Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.