RESEARCH - EVENT OR WORK
Below are extracts from interviews conducted by Elaine Bauer and Paul Thompson whilst researching for the publication Jamaican Hands Across the Atlantic
The Dream of Return
Selvin Green
is a welder in an inner London computer parts factory. Born into a skilled family with little land, he was brought up by his grandmother in the beautiful mountain countryside of eastern Jamaica.
However, when as a teenager he moved into Kingston, he was delighted to turn his back on the country, seeing the city as an escape from a monotonous fate:
`Oh, it was great! When I was in Kingston, one is like you’re in heaven! Yes, it was great! Because I’m always at work… because I didn’t want to work in the fields, in the cane fields… I hate that… Kingston is the big bright lights, and everything is there.’
Perhaps most striking is the lyrical way in which he now speaks of a countryside which once, as a teenager, he had been so glad to escape. When he speaks of the Jamaican landscape, it is now in terms of observing rather than doing, as an environmentally sensitive townsman, rather than as a practical farmer or smallholder. He speaks of returning to `my home’ with the passion of a nature-lover. What draws him so powerfully is –
The lifestyle, the place, the beauty. The simplicity of life. I want to go out the back and pick a lettuce, just off the real land grown on. I want to pick orange. I want to hear the birds. I want to see the coconuts, I want to hear the wind blow between it… I want to see the bees fly up to the flowers, and I want to stand there, because I used to do that, and look at it taking the nectar from the flowers, you know?
Cos I used to do that. I used to watch, I used to get disciplined for it. When I’m going down to the stream to get water… That’s like you see a bird fly in the tree, and it make a sound, a whistle: when you look, you see another one fly, come along, and some communication going on between those two bird. These are the things I like.
Ted Oliver
a truck driver from Jamaica, lives comfortably in Canada with his white wife Candy and their two children in the three-bedroom house they have bought in a Toronto suburb. They chose this suburb because it has a good school. Ted has been in Canada since he was twenty, and Candy comes from a Canadian farm family. A crucial bond between them has been that they were both brought up by their grandparents: despite such different ethnic origins, he feels that `we have the same background’. Ted now sees his own identity as mixed – `I’m part of Jamaica, I’m part of Canada’ – and they have brought up the children to enjoy both cultures, taking them on holidays to Jamaica and introducing them to relatives there. They play both Jamaican and American music, and they cook a mixture of Italian and Jamaican food, with Jamaican most Sundays: `yam, fried plantain, ackee and saltfish, callaloo’.
But Ted’s ultimate dream is not of more success and more mixing in Canada. It is of return. `I still have my grandfather land’. He would like to build his new family a house on his family land back in Jamaica, in the Trelawney hills where he grew up, and with Candy this has become a shared vision for their future lives together:
My wife now, she's this type of person who likes to move. She have this type of feeling, `Oh yes, let's go to Jamaica and live in the woods’. Up to this morning we were travelling on the highway, she said, `Why you wanna live in this mess?’ …
Because the first place I take her in Jamaica, in the mountain, and take her in Cockpit mountain, and she loved it. First when I take her, I went to - they have a spring in the mountain, so we take our shoes off, they have these kind of plants in Jamaica, but they are big vines, and we take it and wrap it round her feet, tie it up… We walk across the canefield, we go to the spring and drink water, catch the water coming up from the ground, drink it. Go in the mountain, see the difference. She love that…
She said to me this morning, `Let us sell the house and go and live freely’. I see that. I can match myself to that.
Winnie Busfield
feels that `the major part of getting back into the system is over’, but nevertheless, even for her re-integrating was hard.
It was difficult at first. Very very difficult. Certainly was very hard. As if the whole custom had changed. People attitude was rougher, not like most of the people I knew when I was small – they’re all gone to foreign. So it was a whole generation with the new ideas, more disrespectful to adults, and so forth, so it was hard.
But I am a very determined person, I overcome all those… I am now well into the system. I fight my way into the system! Even the churches! Oh yes! Barriers in the churches.
Vivia Perrin
is a professional nurse, and in London she has been a church-goer and community activist. She has come back in that spirit - `for me, coming back, I needed that purpose’ – but she has no illusions that succeeding as a returnee is easy. She reflected on how she has watched too many others fail.
If they were from Jamaica, twenty years is enough to get them into the culture of the United States, or the culture of Britain. Then they come back, but most of them come back and they have not moved Jamaica on. Somewhere they left it. So a lot of them are disappointed, a lot of them are disheartened. And a lot of the people here, I’ve seen a big number going back to England. I don’t know what it is going to do for them, because they have sold their homes, they have severed their ties with the church, with their communities, and the money they bring here, to build a house that they’ve got here, they cannot resell at a price to go back and buy again.
Vivia says that returnees need `a network of support’, and many are disappointed not to get that from their families: `the biggest complaint you have from returning residents is from families’. She advises would-be returnees to come out for four or five years on `fact-finding tours’, checking out finances, security and so on: taking it gradually as she and her husband Albert did.
Today Winnie Busfield’s
local friends are `mainly through the church.’ She has learnt to speak patois again, and she has become a travelling missionary in Jamaica. But this very process of resettling and reintegration has brought a profound change in her sense of identity. She has come to feel that she is perhaps as much English as Jamaican.
Now, if you look at my community here, you will see that it’s mainly returning residents, so that makes it much easier, because you have so much in common… If it was all the everyday Jamaicans, I could not cope with it… I could not relate to somebody that I hadn’t shared the same culture with for forty years. You understand? … We go from England, so you have a lot of things in common… You know more about them [returnees] than you know about your own Jamaicans [neighbours and family], because most of your years you’ve spent with them… You can talk about a place in England, and they can chat about the place. Now, when I got back to Jamaica here, there is hardly any place I know… I know more of England than Jamaica…
Now, if you have gone back straight into the heart of the community, you will have more problems. Because sometimes they call us `foreigners’, oh yes. In England we were foreigners, you come back to Jamaica, your country, you’re foreigners. So you get it from both sides.