there are no rites
for those who have returned ...
there are homecomings without home.
--Derek Walcott
My recent return to Jamaica would, I hoped, be my final homecoming. After some twenty-five years of living and teaching in Europe, I could at last become anonymous in Jamaican society. I would no longer be on parade before the prying eyes of foreigners.
"You's a foreigner, no?" a taxi driver soon asked, however. "But you trying to talk like we...."
The condescension in that voice brought awareness of an unbridgeable distance separating the two of us. Clearly, I would have to be wary. Treated as a foreigner abroad, I now risked being treated as a foreigner at home.
I had spent roughly three-quarters of my adult life outside Jamaica, but this homecoming was intended to be an irrevocable statement of my commitment to the rock of my birth, from which so many had fled, especially in the gun-troubled and empty-shelved years of the late 1970s.
Jamaica is a land of stubborn social and economic contradictions; abject poverty coexists almost uncomplainingly with flaunted wealth. Many foreigners marvel in surprise at the swimming pools and satellite dishes; perhaps many more marvel in relief, as well as in barely feigned disbelief, at the copybook picture of racial and religious tolerance Jamaica--within the framework of a formal system of Westminster-type constitutional and pluralistic democracy--presents to them. But beneath the surface seethes an undeclared war in which nervous tensions and the futile, surface vigilance of the ubiquitous burglar bars and grilles--like cages for frightened animals--predominate.
The popular perception in the Jamaica of the 1980s is that such devices offer effective protection against gunmen--but, of course, they do nothing of the sort. Firearms can be fired through them, and it has not been unknown for them to be removed by criminals using hydraulic jacks. At most, these devices offer little more than temporary respite against intruders. A psychosis of fear has clearly gripped the population in Jamaica; one prominent journalist said to me, "I'm not going to live without my grille, man."
Two decades ago such a remark would have been unthinkable. Guns, like so much else, were first widely imported to Jamaica from the United States. They were first widely used in the political campaigns of the post-1962 period. Subsequently, their use spilled over into the areas of personal vendetta and crime. Politicians no longer control the gunmen, in the sense that the latter would still exist, if the former were to disappear.
A new gun culture has sprung up. "Me love the gun bad, man!" confessed one teenager with a laugh. The M16, sometimes called "white lady," is much in evidence among both the uniformed and plainclothed police alike. Plainclothesmen with heavy firearms tend to saunter into nightclubs and go-go clubs and nonchalantly lay these weapons on counters. When
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