Shane Aquart, Contributor

There's a Malawian proverb: 'Your Mother is still your mother even if one of her legs is too short.'

My mother has green hills for breasts and rum for milk; her vagina is shaded by a fragrant logwood fur, and sweet and cool runs the river from her sex. The blue sea is coloured in her eyes, her skin is mahogany, and her flesh is the sweet Julie Mango. My mother is an island (every man, don't they say, is an island). My mother is a memory. My mother is love and smiles and warm days in warm places with cows. I am my mother's son. My mother's son loves another woman now.

I promise not to try not to mess with your mind, she said to me in a dream that seemed decidedly like reality as I drove down a battered road where First World engineers were being flummoxed by Third World initiative, and a Jamaica Hope crossed the dusty ruts, her great big udders filled with milk that would spoil, undulating as she walked, her horns turned down, her fur a mixed masala.

I eat salt fish and ackee in a foreign country with absolutely no sense of the irony, as Taurrus Riley sings 'She's Royal'. I'm happy here, I think to myself, in this place that is so like Jamaica in so many lovely ways and not at all like Jamaica in all those ways that are the most important. Cayman is clean, efficient and service-oriented; the roads are fixed, the infrastructure works, there are amenities, manners, nice manners, and hope, and groceries full of wonderful variety. But there are no hills, no green lush, cool hills. And the memories are all new.

The hives hummed, I remember, under the hot shade of Yallahs' Logwood trees, Haematoxylum campechianum. A father and 'uncles' in long sleeves and mesh-covered hats smoked the hives till the bees were drunk, as children sat at a safe distance and chatted, laughing, loving life, waiting their turns to sample the 'Billy Bee' before it reached a bottle. Tiny shafts of sunlight broke weakly through the prickly branches - logwood, in a strange twist of fate-ishness, led to the founding of the colony of Belize (British Honduras), the same Belize to which these same men were already in the process of migrating, having all already moved their monies and their lives offshore in the late 60's-industrial growth rate minus two per cent, 2.5 million Jamaicans live abroad. Lethargy and the inertia of depression have left my mother moribund; she lies in a sordid bed.

Percentage of the population below the poverty line: 34.2 per cent (and then some).

Exchange rate: $1US = $66 JA.

I remember parity; I remember two to one; I remember my mother young and fresh and her flesh desirable.

A golden boy dancing to an American soundtrack on the very Jamaican country gateposts (the kind with the wide flat top slightly bigger than the base and the name of the house on the post) of what had been a little Spanish fort, that had since been built into a colonial British highland bungalow. 'Lonely Teardrops'. The green picket gate was open, the grass green except where the cars had driven on it, the cut stone garden wall covered with garlic vine, its purple pungency bzzzzz-ing bzzzzz-ing with bees, a chubby white baby girl toddling messily through her little life. My pastoral mother retains glimpses of her former youth, like the faded movie queen seen through the very filtered lens of an expert cinematographer. And she does look good on film: green and exciting, quaint, colourful, exotic, beautiful, lush, sensual, a sweet burning spliff in her lips, her breasts round, her hips wide and welcoming. Come back to Jamaica. And she is all those things, just not as much of them as she used to be. Heavy rates of deforestation; coastal waters polluted by industrial waste, sewage, and oil spills; damage to coral reef ...

The mornings there smelled green, with Guinea fowl, Pearl Grey Numidae, cackling and scurrying and spotted delicately white, while we walked up the hill beneath the vast umbrifery of old poincianas, to feed the weaned calves. Many of my best memories take place within those 10,000 reggae-licious square kilometers. But: Corruption is a major concern. I like the tone of that sentiment: my mother is (epidemically) corrupt; tief little and tief big in order to feed her 'me ah pop style' culture has caused her to rot all the way to the sociopolitical core. Corruption dirties her. GDP per capita $4,600 (based on a 2.7 million population).

And so here I sit, quietly - GDP per capita $43,800, 1$US = 84 cents - eating salt fish and callaloo today at another elegantly stylish table, listening to elegantly stylish music; here where corruption is not a malignant neoplasm (there is corruption everywhere). The juxtaposition is - I set down my knife and fork - enjoys one of the highest outputs per capita and one of the highest standards of living in the world ... And yet ...

- Shane Aquart