View From Mount Diablo : An Annotated Edition 9781847600936

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Humanities-Ebooks

Genre Fiction Sightlines

Tamora Pierce The Immortals Wild Magic Ralph Thompson Wolf-Speaker The Emperor Mage View from The Realms of the Gods

Mount Diablo An Annotated Edition

Edited by John Lennard

by John Lennard

HEB ☼ Humanities-Ebooks, LLP

Ralph Thompson

View from Mount Diablo An annotated edition by

John Lennard

HEB ☼ Humanities-Ebooks, 2009

Publication Data View from Mount Diablo © Ralph Thompson 2003, 2009 Introduction and annotations © John Lennard 2009 ‘Launch Speech’ © Wayne Brown 2003, 2009. Published by kind permission of Wayne Brown. ‘The Inner Part’ © Louis Simpson 1963. Reprinted by kind permission of Louis Simpson. Cover image: ‘Mount Diablo’ © John Laidlaw The editor has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Copyright in images and in quotations remains with the sources given. A material edition of this book ISBN 9781845231446 is published simultaneously by Peepal Tree Press in Leeds, and is available both from their website and from all good bookshops. http://www.peepaltreepress.com This electronic edition published in 2009 by Humanities-Ebooks LLP. Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

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ISBN 978-1-84760-093-6

CONTENTS Acknowledgements

6

Map of Jamaica

7

Introduction “a cloud shaped like his island home” Form (1) The verse-novel (and crime) Pushkin and the nineteenth century Seth and the late twentieth century The Commonwealth and Caribbean Clusters Versification and metrics Form (2) The Bildungsroman Background (1) Jamaica in World War 2 Background (2) “Blood / cheaper than drugs.” A brief history of current drugs legislation The new triangular trade Early Reception Wayne Brown, Launch speech Fr. Gerard Leo McLaughlin SJ, Sunday Observer

8 10 10 12 15 22 25 29 31 33 34 36 37 43

View from Mount Diablo

45 48 50 53 58 62 65 68 74 78 81 86 91 96

Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve

5 Annotations Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve

100 101 104 108 113 117 122 125 137 143 146 154 160 168

Bibliography Poetry Essays Journalism

175 175 177 178

Reviews of Ralph Thompson’s Work

181

Verse-Novels and Poetry Cited Bildungsromans and Memoirs Cited

182 186

6

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My greatest debt, of course, is to Ralph Thompson, not only for View from Mount Diablo itself and the many rewards it has afforded me in reading and annotating, but for his patience in answering queries, help in compiling the bibliography of his work, careful reading of the typescript introduction and annotations, and supply of some additional glosses as well as various corrections. Frequent hospitality in a fascinating house with its own stunning views over troubled Kingston, and the gracious kindness (and cooking!) of his wife Doreen, made an always interesting project a great and memorable pleasure. Professor Emeritus Edward Baugh, of the University of the West Indies–Mona, a very fine poet as well as the doyen of Caribbean critics, was also kind enough to read the typescript, and greatly improved the introduction; his generosity with his time and skill, memory and understanding, were remarkable, and deeply appreciated by an annotator always conscious of his own less than Jamaican credentials. At both early and late stages in the project Professor Kwame Dawes, another fine poet who read a draft MS for Peepal Tree, was with Jeremy Poynting rightly firm in directing me to a range of Caribbean echoes, resonances, and contexts I had missed or slighted, and the whole is far stronger for their care; Jeremy also kindly and cleverly supplied very useful wording in a score of notes. Some fruitful disagreements having remained disagreements, I should add that some of the views expressed, like all mistakes, are mine alone. Mr Aeon Forbes, of the Library Department of The Gleaner, was helpful in tracking down items for the bibliography; and Ben Ramm, editor of The Liberal, was kind enough to commission a piece on verse-novels (for the Spring 2009 issue) that helped me to focus what I wanted to argue. Louis Simpson was kind enough to grant permission to reprint the text of his poem ‘The Inner Part’, and Wayne Brown equally kindly granted permission to include the text of his ‘Launch speech’ for the first edition of the poem in 2003. Finally, I would like to thank those students at UWI–Mona to whom I have taught View from Mount Diablo, and whose responses, both enlightening and puzzled, persuaded me that an annotated edition could benefit readers everywhere. JCL

8

Introduction “a cloud shaped like his island home” Like its author, View from Mount Diablo is powerfully hybrid—a verse-novel that won the Jamaican National Literary Award in manuscript in 2001, and was published in the UK by Peepal Tree Press in 2003. Ralph Thompson (b.1928) is a white Jamaican, of crypto-Jewish and Irish stock, who received a Jesuit education. Through his absent father’s US nationality he was eligible for military service, and after graduating in law from Fordham University in 1950 spent two years as a USAF officer in Japan, but he is married to a Jamaican and has lived in Kingston save for a brief period in the 1970s when political violence forced the family overseas. Thompson’s career was largely in business, with Seprod Ltd (a large firm supplying household commodities and consumer products, for whom he was a long-serving, highly successful CEO), but included educational activism with extensive journalism, exhibitions of paintings, and latterly two well-received poetry collections—The Denting of a Wave (1992) and Moving On (1997) 1—before expanding with View from Mount Diablo to embrace the verse-novel. Itself intrinsically hybrid, that form is stretched by the generic models for Thompson’s plot, the Bildungsroman and the crime novel, and additionally distorted by wideangle narration bending an account of Jamaican social and political history from the 1930s–2000s into one truncated and foreshortened fictional life. The protagonist, reporter and family-man Adam Cole, remembers the war-years of the 1940s, and cannot be much younger than Thompson himself—born sometime in 1930–5. He married after graduating from university, c.1955, and by chapter 6 has a daughter of 15, making it the early 1970s. The violent, tragic events that dominate chapters 6–12 thus seem at first to invite mapping onto the ‘Manley Years’ (1972– 80), and the final killings might be thought specifically to summon the later 1970s, a very bloody time in Jamaica—but the ‘Manley Years’, however neat a tag, marked an escalation as much as an inception, and all later events in the verse-novel subsume continuing, generically similar events of the 1980s–2000s. The particular role of the cocaine trade in the dénouement also points to a more recent date than the 1970s, and it is clear the Jamaican history Thompson presents, if profoundly verisimilar, is as much an archetypal assemblage of chronic political and psychological 0

1

Both are published by Peepal Tree Press.

9 symptoms as a chronological account of events. Historicised narrative with explicitly political chapters create this verse-novel as (beyond its other genres) a state-of-the-nation report, shaping it “like his island home” (48). What that report fundamentally posits, theologically, politically, and culturally, is fratricide. Properly speaking, Adam’s killer Nathan is neither his blood- nor milkbrother, but he is his greatest childhood friend, a sometime heart-brother in adventure—though not education, for while Adam goes to Oxford, Nathan goes nowhere, and must grub privilege through ruthless entrepreneurial success in the drug trade/s. Adam’s parents welcome Nathan as playmate but do little for him financially, allowing him to foster ambitions and breathe atmospheres he would not otherwise have known and will never have the means to satisfy. So doing, they inadvertently make their thin care seem to Nathan like callousness, and so pave the road that leads to a reprise of Cain and Abel. Adam’s terminal death is profoundly bleak, in the personal and theological senses of love failed and perverted, but also politically, for beyond the prophylactic slaughter of a playmate it represents a defeat of investigative journalism by organised crime. Ultimately, it also speaks to the bloody brotherhood of the two major Jamaican political parties, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and People’s National Party (PNP), schismatically dividing during World War 2 and becoming with independence and its aftermaths like psychotic Siamese twins, fused through the skull but forever trying to kick one another to death. Given Thompson’s subtle mixing of specific and typical events, precision and suggestion, readers unfamiliar with Jamaica’s political development and social difficulties since the 1930s might best begin by consulting a good, short article outlining them. 1 Particular references are annotated and some general background given later in this introduction, but greater knowledge than I have space to provide of the late colonial period, West Indies Federation (1958–62), subsequent Jamaican independence, ‘Manley Years’ in the 1970s, and social and criminal trends throughout the later century, will be of real value to readers. Subsequent sections of this introduction deal with the verse-novel and Bildungsroman as formal models, including Thompson’s relation to other Caribbean examples; with the World War 2 background that dominates the early part of View from Mount Diablo and the cocaine trade that dominates its later part; and with its launch and early reception in Jamaica. 1

1

See e.g.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica or  http://www.discoverjamaica.com/gleaner/discover/geography/.

10

Form (1) The verse-novel (and crime) The term ‘verse-novel’ has (like ‘prose poem’) an intrinsic paradoxicality often taken as a sign of levity—but recorded narrative begins in verse, with the anonymous pre-classical epic Gilgamesh (written c.1200 BCE, and perhaps a millennium older). The highly wrought forms of the great classical epics, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (probably 9th century BCE) and Virgil’s Aeneid (written 29–19 BCE), attest to the advantages of verse in casting narrative, and in Virgil’s case to the explicitly political purposes verse-narrative may serve. Both lessons are reinforced by mediaeval and Renaissance examples of long verse-narrative—including the anonymous French Chanson de Roland (12th century), Dante’s La Commedia (completed c.1320), Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (1487) Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532), and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)—but later writers followed Virgil in fusing epic with romance, and were in turn followed by Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1596) and Milton in Paradise Lost (1667). Spenser in particular was by Book VI of The Faerie Queene also anticipating significant aspects of the kind of prose narrative now called ‘novels’, particularly in naming and handling character. The post-/Renaissance emergence of long prose fiction, culminating in the novel, was matched in poetry. The Restoration and eighteenth century saw many extended poems, from Butler’s Hudibras (1663–78), Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1714), and the great 1716 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses to which Dryden contributed, to James Thompson’s The Seasons (1726–30), Macpherson’s Fingal (1762) & Temora (1763), 1 and Cowper’s The Task (1785). While not in any simple way ‘novels’ all clearly contested the growing supremacy of prose narrative; in a similar fashion the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century emergence of prose autobiography had by 1800 provoked the emergence (with the first version of Wordsworth’s The Prelude) of the modern verse-autobiography. 2

Pushkin and the Nineteenth Century Long verse narratives embracing epic and romance forms continued throughout the nineteenth century, but late Romanticism saw the emergence of what has come to be 1

These were supposed ‘tales of Ossian’, and contain free translations of Gaelic fragments, but were revealed by the Mackenzie Committee in 1805 to be substantially Macpherson’s creation.

11 considered a distinct form, the verse-novel. Some contend the first exemplar is either Goethe’s Herman und Dorothea (1797) or Byron’s Don Juan (1818–24), but all agree on two continental European examples: Eugene Onegin (1831) by Russian Alexander Pushkin, giving a detailed picture of high social mores, and the epic Pan Tadeusz (1834) by Pole Adam Mickiewicz. The primary British cluster is mid-nineteenth century. The Bothie of Toper-nafuisich (1848), and the epistolary Amours de Voyage (1858), both by Arthur Hugh Clough, are primarily romances and have not prospered (though Amours de Voyage developed a ‘tourist mentality’ that influenced prose novels). Both Aurora Leigh (1857) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and The Ring and the Book (1868–9) by Robert Browning, however, survive widely in print and continue to attract numerous admirers well outside academia. To these, all plainly novelistic, should be added the posthumous publication in bowdlerised form of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850) as the seminal verse-autobiography; the ‘monodrama’ Maud (1855) by Tennyson, often thought of as a sequence but in many ways like a verse-novel; and in the US, The Song of Hiawatha (1855) by Longfellow, an imitation epic. The ‘crime novel’ was only in its infancy with Wilkie Collins, but nineteenth-century novels in general have a persistent interest in scope, and hence are liable to include crime—as many of these verse-novels did. Both Brownings also made crime an explicit generic concern—Elizabeth by way of a melodramatic, socially pointed subplot in which a seamstress is trapped in a brothel, and Robert in full measure. The Ring and the Book, at c. 21,000 lines much the longest of the cluster, is based on a Roman murder case of 1698. Browning’s account comprises ten dramatic monologues by bystanders, principals, lawyers, and the Pope, held within framing monologues by the poet-editor—a cycle of twelve books circumversifying the narrative. Browning’s interest in crime was longstanding, and murder a frequent topos of his poems; he also inherited from the Romantic poets an acute understanding of human psychopathology. The Ring and the Book is in consequence an outstanding investigation of the dynamics of murder, analysing lust, snobbery, greed, pride, and windings of self-deception in a vividly realised late seventeenthcentury culture and society. It clearly brings to Browning’s long preoccupation with spousal murder the length, scope, conversation, and criminology typical of Victorian novesl—a model Thompson absorbed when he studied it at college. 1 View from Mount Diablo may lack Browning’s length, but shares his verse-novelistic ambitions and achieves a comparable analysis of murder and realisation of its setting. 3

1

Personal communication with the author.

12 Seth and the Late Twentieth Century There are long narrative poems written after the 1860s, but the most important, by Tennyson, Swinburne, and Masefield, concern Arthurian or Trojan materials and are epic cycles; thus the verse-novel is supposed to fall into abeyance until the 1980s. There is no accepted explanation, but a case can be made that (proto-)Modernism inhibited the form: Modernist tastes for the fragmentary, evacuated, and elliptical are not in sympathy with the bulkiness required for a serious novelistic claim, while the linguistic experimentation typical of Modernist prose may seem to preclude any need for ‘verse’—a term Modernism did much to make disreputable. There are, however, some interesting examples from the middle-half of the twentieth century. The journalist-screenwriter Joseph Moncure March (a protégé of Frost’s at Amherst) produced two book-length poems in 1928—The Wild Party, “a hardboiled Jazz Age tragedy told in syncopated rhyming couplets”, 1 and The Set-Up, about an AfricanAmerican prizefighter. There is also Nabokov’s extraordinary Pale Fire (1962), a novel comprising a 999-line poem with ‘editorial’ prose introduction, commentary, and index, written partly as self-parody during extended work on an annotated translation of Eugene Onegin. Various verse-letters by W. H. Auden also invite reading as flirting with forms of the verse-novel. The strong recent revival of the form is often associated with The Golden Gate (1986) by Indo-British Vikram Seth, a great advertisement for the virtues of verse as a tragicomic narrative medium and to everyone’s surprise a genuine bestseller. But a new cluster of long verse narratives was in existence before Seth’s runaway success advertised the fact. Long verse-autobiography had been comically and satirically revived by British John Betjeman in Summoned By Bells (1960), then dramatically and politically developed by St Lucian Derek Walcott in Another Life (1973) and American James Merrill in The Changing Light at Sandover (1982). 2 Explicitly fictional as well as historical long verse-narrative had re-emerged with Mercian Hymns (1972) & The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1984) by British Geoffrey Hill, The Tail of the Trinosaur (1972) by British Charles Causley, The Arrivants (1973) 3 by Barbadian Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Correspondences: A 4

5

6

1 2

3

Art Spiegelman, ‘Introduction’, in Joseph Moncure March, The Wild Party (illus. Art Spiegelman, London: Picador, 1994), p. v. The Changing Light at Sandover collects (with a coda) The Book of Ephraim (1976), Mirabell’s Books of Number (1978), and Scripts for the Pageant (1980). There is an interesting comparison of these verse-autobiographies with US ‘Confessionalism’. The Arrivants is A New World Trilogy first published in individual volumes: Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968), and Islands (1969).

13 Family History in Letters (1973) by Anglo-American Anne Stevenson, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (1980) by Australian Les A. Murray, The Illusionists (1980) by British John Fuller, Elegies (1985) by Scottish Douglas Dunn, A Life (1986) by Scottish Iain Crichton Smith, and Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons (1986) by American Marilyn Hacker. In Seth’s wake very many more have appeared. Beside repeat offenders— Walcott developing his practice with Omeros (1990), Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), & The Prodigal (2004), Murray writing Fredy Neptune (1998), and Kamau Brathwaite editing together Ancestors (2001) 1—the most important of those written for adults are Whylah Falls (1990) and I & I (2009) by Jamaican-Canadian George Elliott Clarke; The Floor of Heaven (1992) by Australian John Tranter; Akhenaten (1992), The Monkey’s Mask (1994), What a Piece of Work (1999), Wild Surmise (2002), and El Dorado (2007) by Australian Dorothy Porter; Turner (1994) by Guyanese-British David Dabydeen; History: The Home-Movie (1994) by British Craig Raine; Prophets (1995) and Jacko Jacobus (1996) by Ghanaian-Jamaican Kwame Dawes; The Fuehrer Bunker (1995) 2 by American W. D. Snodgrass; South: An Antarctic Journey (1996) by New Zealander Chris Orsman; Out of the Dust (1997) and Witness (2001) by American Karen Hesse; The Ballad of Erinungarah (1997) by Australian David Foster 3; Bill of Rights (1998) and Bloodlines (2000) by GuyaneseBritish Fred D’Aguiar; Birthday Letters (1998) by British Ted Hughes; Jack, the Lady Killer (1998) by British H. R. F. Keating; Autobiography of Red (1998) and The Beauty of the Husband (2001) by Canadian Anne Carson; Maori Battalion (2001) by New Zealander Alistair Te Ariki Campbell; Captain Cook in the Underworld (2002) by New Zealander Robert Sullivan—and View from Mount Diablo (2001) by Jamaican Ralph Thompson. 4 Not all these late twentieth- or early twenty-first-century works are self-evidently verse-novels, and, Keating aside, few owe Seth much beyond general respect for the 7

8

9

1

1 2 3 4

Sub-titled a “Reinvention of Mother Poem [1977], Sun Poem [1982], and X/Self [1987]”. The Führer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress (1977) was added to throughout the 1980s and early 1990s before reaching its final published form. The Ballad of Erinungarah is the verse half of a diptych novel; its prose partner is The Glade Within the Grove (1996). There is also a significant group of verse-novels and -novellas for children. Australian Steven Herrick, South African–Australian Margaret Wilde, and Americans Sonya Sones, Nikki Grimes, Virginia Euwer Wolff, Ann Warren Turner, Lorie Ann Grover, Brenda Seabrooke, Paul B. Janeczko, and Mel Glenn have all written multiple narratives in verse; authors of single works are too numerous to catalogue, but a list may be found at e.g.:  http://susanwrites.livejournal.com/31126.html

14 possibility of the form. Sullivan’s Captain Cook in the Underworld, for example, was commissioned as the libretto for John Psathas’s oratorio Orpheus in Rarohenga, and Te Ariki Campbell’s Maori Battalion, in part an elegiac biography of his brother, killed in World War 2, calls itself a ‘sequence’ despite a controlling narrative. Brathwaite’s trilogies are radical experiments in form/s, assembling and implying narrative with lyric intensity and disjunction as well as innovative typography and page-design. 1 Snodgrass’s The Fuehrer Bunker assembles dramatic monologues by the high Nazi doomed of 1945 in a striking variety of stanza-forms (several with distinctive mises-en-page) and calls itself a cycle, while Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband is “a fictional essay”. Dabydeen’s Turner is a lyric sequence responding to a painting, from which narrative emerges, and Walcott’s more overtly narrative Tiepolo’s Hound, also painterly, is part autobiographical sequel to Another Life and part biography of the Caribbean-born Impressionist Camille Pissarro. Raine’s History: The Home-Movie is another auto- & family biography, while Causley’s The Tail of the Trinosaur is a children’s fable, and Hesse’s Out of the Dust a searing portrait of adolescence that won the Newbery Medal (for the best American book for children) in 1998. All, however, are book-length, individually published, more-or-less explicitly narrative poems with multiple themes, concerns, and characters in a novelistic manner, and many not only involve crime in their social sweep but specifically confront it. Fuller’s The Illusionists turns on art-fraud, Dabydeen’s Turner on murderous brutalities of enslavement, and Hesse’s Witness on Ku Klux Klan activities in the 1920s, while Murray’s Fredy Neptune involves the Armenian and Jewish genocides and Raine’s History suffers through the European twentieth century. Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask & El Dorado, and Keating’s Jack, the Lady Killer, are explicitly crime novels, concerning serial killers, while Clarke’s I & I centres on a brutal murder and extended police pursuit. Dawes’s Jacko Jacobus follows a Jamaican who flees his island only to find himself pushing crack cocaine in the US, Walcott’s The Prodigal includes a political killing in South America, D’Aguiar’s Bill of Rights is about the mass-suicide/murder at Jonestown in Guyana in 1978, and View from Mount Diablo is centrally concerned with the effects of the cocaine trade on Jamaican culture and society. In this light, while it is true that some of Thompson’s criminal topoi (such as meetings with and killings of informers, and vigilante policing) derive from prose 1

1

Brathwaite has dubbed his typographical style ‘sycorax’, and in GoloKWaTi: a tidalectics history of our thymes (2 vols, 2009) extended it from poetry to analytical prose.

15 and cinematic crime narratives, it is equally true that criminals and criminality have long been established in a verse-novel home. The back-cover blurb to Jack, the Lady Killer describes it as “one of the rarest forms known to literature, the detective novel in verse”, while Keating’s ‘Preface’, conceding that Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask had pipped him at the post, modestly admits his was “not quite the first crime novel in poetic form”. 1 The claim in the blurb might just be allowed, given its sub-generic specificity about ‘the detective novel’, but ‘crime novel’ is a wider term, and Keating (besides forgetting both Brownings) perhaps did not know of The Wild Party, The Illusionists, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, or Jacko Jacobus. In any case, a far wider history of relations between the verse-novel and crime is evident, and invites further study. 1

The Commonwealth and Caribbean Clusters Within the mid-late twentieth-century revival of the verse-novel there are clear clusters, of Antipodean (Murray, Tranter, Porter, Foster, Orsman, Te Ariki Campbell, Sullivan) and Caribbean writers (Walcott, Brathwaite, Dabydeen, Dawes, D’Aguiar, Thompson), within a generally pronounced Commonwealth distribution (add Betjeman, Hill, Causley, Fuller, Raine, Keating, Carson, Clarke, and Seth)— which poses interesting questions. 2 The works involved are hugely various, but even on first survey many (like the US works by Merrill, Stevenson, Hacker, Snodgrass, and Hesse) clearly tackle subjects that are exceptionally difficult or sensitive, defying fully sequential prose narration, and exploit the poetic and formal flexibilities of the verse-novel to outflank hostilities that inhibit more quotidian discourse. In several Antipodean and almost all the Caribbean works the difficulties of content include conflicted racial and post-colonial political sensibilities: Te Ariki Campbell’s Maori Battalion, for example, recovers historical material relating to Maori fighting units where native and imperial martial traditions fused, or failed to fuse, while Sullivan’s Captain Cook in the Underworld obliges the explorer’s shade to confront “the damage his expeditions have inflicted on the indigenous peoples of the pacific”. 3 And though 1

1

1 2

3

H. R. F. Keating, Jack, the Lady Killer (Hexham: Flambard Press, 1999), back-cover blurb, p. 6. There is also the children’s/Young Adult cluster (see p. 13, n. 4 above). Many of these works may utilise the same capacities of the verse-novel as works for adults, but their tonalities are distinct and they require separate consideration that space does not permit me here. Robert Sullivan, Captain Cook in the Underworld (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002), back-cover blurb.

16 distinct in style and other respects, from one another and the Antipodeans, Walcott’s Omeros and Brathwaite’s The Arrivants, like Dabydeen’s Turner, similarly confront the violent racial and moral horrors of the Atlantic slave-trade’s ‘Middle Passage’. As a general ground, therefore, one might posit that the verse-novel appeals to ‘post-Modernity’ (however one defines it) precisely for its hybrid capacities and political malleability, combined with the kind of careful, prophylactic selfdeprecation that comes—as Seth memorably recounts in The Golden Gate—with admitting to such an improbable, paradoxical form: An editor—at a plush party (Well-wined, -provisioned, speechy, hearty) Hosted by (long live!) Thomas Cook Where my Tibetan travel book Was honored—seized my arm: “Dear fellow, What’s your next work?” “A novel ...” “Great! We hope that you, dear Mr. Seth—“ “In verse,” I added. He turned yellow. “How marvelously quaint,” he said, And subsequently cut me dead. Professor, publisher, and critic Each voiced his doubts. I felt misplaced. A writer is a mere arthritic Among these muscular Gods of Taste. As for that sad blancmange, a poet— The world is hard; he ought to know it. Driveling in rhyme’s all very well; The question is, does spittle sell?” 1 1

Here techniques of self-deprecation are engaged to a seemingly minor end, but the passage suggests the tonal complexities whereby the mock-humble, flexible and chameleonic form can land a sucker-punch, pretending to harmless oddity but harbouring the potential to say what few may want and many need to hear. And the poets who turn to the verse-novel are correspondingly far from “sad blancmange”, knowing all too well that “The world is hard” and compellingly explaining some of the reasons why they and their compatriots find it so. 1

Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 5.1.5–5.2.8.

17 Within a Caribbean literary context, however, there is also a proudly proclaimed epic and recuperative ambition, invoking and forcibly admitting to received history the diasporic journeys of Africans into slavery and from Emancipation to recovered independence. Walcott and Brathwaite, wholly self-conscious in their ambitions, were and are great poet-figureheads of a remarkable Caribbean generation, and each provided in the early 1970s powerful, inventive, and effective models for long poetic narratives drawing together history, culture, and (auto)biography in extended quasifictive tales of self- and racial identity. There were earlier Antillean models for such work in other languages. In Dutch there is Curaçoan Frank Martinus Arion’s Stemmen uit Afrika (‘Songs from Africa’, 1957), and in French Édouard Glissant’s epic Les Indes: poèmes de l’une et l’autre terre (‘The Indies: poems of one and another world’, 1955) had behind it fellow Martiniquan Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal (‘Notebook of a Return to my Native Land’, 1939) and Guadeloupian Nobel Laureate Saint-John Perse’s Anabase (1924), famously translated by T. S. Eliot. But outgrowing all these models, Walcott and Brathwaite were Anglophone Caribbean pioneers, and the vaunted differences between their poetic interests and procedures matter less than their joint example proclaiming long poetic narratives a viable public form, worthy of being contested and reworked. These outstanding Eastern Caribbean poets, born in the same year less than 100 miles apart, have in common Emerson’s awareness that “There is a relation between the hours of our lives and the centuries of time”, 1 and both have repeatedly returned to long, simultaneously epic and (auto)biographical forms, matching a single life, or fragments of lives, with diasporic narratives of African kidnap, the Middle Passage, slave labour, Emancipation, and the quest for independence. Walcott has tried to quarry single blocks, while Brathwaite prefers mosaic assemblage, but in whatever differing ways issues of personal, local, racial, national, regional, and international identity centrally recur in both men’s work. One might thus posit that another factor generating the Caribbean (and Commonwealth) cluster is the verse-novel’s ability, through distanced poetic narrators, multiple speakers, and large casts, to handle the frictions of personal and larger post-imperial identities. Lyrics may catch one or more aspects of the processes involved, but the verse-novel’s combination of extended narratives and plural speakers with poetic intensity gives it far greater complexities of nuance and public capacities than the lyric. 1

1

R. W. Emerson, ‘History’, para. 3, in Essays (1841); see his Collected Works, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA, & London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 5–6.

18 Kwame Dawes and Ralph Thompson share that Emersonian awareness of the individual in historical time, but despite their variant ages—Thompson is two years Brathwaite’s and Walcott’s senior, Dawes 32 years their junior—both have a notably bleaker, more grimly realistic view of current events than the Eastern Caribbean pair. That is not to deny registration of terrible events in both Walcott’s and Brathwaite’s long works, but Walcott’s pervasive lyricism and Brathwaite’s combative tones and humour (latterly with his explosive ‘sycorax’ typography) supply copious energies, hopes, and aesthetic richness that make true bleakness rare. One can hardly put the Jamaican (Western Caribbean?) pair of Thompson and Dawes together as a ‘younger generation’, but both seem in ferocities of presentmoment social and political observation generationally distinct from their great exemplars, as well as very different from one another. As a black writer, consciously recovering and creating a black consciousness and history in conditions of achieved political independence and Civil Rights, Dawes remains despite his individual complexity as a Ghanaian-Jamaican (and striking combinations of religious and political belief) relatively closer to the hopes and aspirations of the empire-breaking generation. But Thompson, despite being of that generation, stands as a white Jamaican (like Adam, his white protagonist and partial self-projection) in a very differently contested position, 1 and cannot easily share in the foundational aura of hope, the charge of achievement far beyond the poetic that Walcott and Brathwaite rightly carry in schemata of Caribbean literature. Despite his seniority, and long friendship with Walcott, Thompson’s relatively late poetic work 2 thus seems more in tune with the work of younger Jamaican writers, particularly in turning from the reconstitution of histories dismembered in the Middle Passage to more current, also terrible histories that have followed independence. The force of these distinctions extends deeply into the contents and tonalities of all Caribbean verse-novels, but can be seen in choices of title, older and newer. The Arrivants and Another Life speak for themselves of their hopes, but those diminish thereafter. Dawes’s eponymous Jacko Jacobus combines echoes of the Hebrew patriarch Jacob and (Cristo[bal]) Columbus, invoking with the latter the transAtlantic voyage of epic discovery as both the root of and a counter-point to the 1

1

1

2

The differences involve class as well as race, and are complex, but one measure might be attitudes to the ‘Manley Years’ as, on one hand, a brutal but logical and probably necessary extension of the decolonising process, and on the other a misconceived drive to radical reform that threatened individual political rights and economic status. His first collection was published only in 1992, when he was 64, his second at 69, and View from Mount Diablo at 75.

19 Middle Passage. In the work of a living black writer that narrative is overwhelmingly likely at least to win through, and in greater extension must turn up with Emancipation, eventual West Indian independence, and further, voluntary migration to North America or the UK. To be offered a View from Mount Diablo, however, can never in its diabolism be good, for all it is literally a beautiful view of the island’s heart from a central height. Moreover, even if what is seen is in itself good, as the lands shown to Jesus were, the inevitable association with the Temptation of Christ 1 means the view of Jamaica is cast as the bait in a trap that would not snare one soul but forestall the redemption of all. 2 Too many Jamaican years have passed, too much blood been violently shed, to allow ideas of secular glory, political transcendence, or natural beauty to have for either Thompson or Dawes any simple appeal, and their long works, like Dabydeen’s Turner, are despite lyrical power deliberately painful and alarming to read. And beyond that, there is in Thompson not exactly despair—for “Judgement abides” (756), and even a stroke may turn on a “providential / clot” (863–4)—but a more concentrated absence of hope. The ‘generational’ contrast is illuminated by another comparison, between Walcott and fellow Nobel Laureate, Nigerian Wole ̣Soyinka, using the lens of tragedy. Soyinka is strongly comparable to Walcott as a classically-minded poetdramatist engaging directly with major figures and modes of antiquity, 3 and is also of the 1930s-born colonial generation that, literally or metaphorically, threw off the shackles of colonial servitude before (too often) succumbing to catastrophic internal violence. Living day-by-day in the rebellious imperial and post-colonial Africa that Walcott in ‘A Far Cry from Africa’ lamented from an ocean away, much of Soyinka’s finest work is explicitly tragedic, not epic, nor after the Biafran War nationalistic. A convert to Yoruban belief, Soyinka is apostate from the Christianity of his youth, and his classical engagements have been with Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, via Nietzsche. Walcott by comparison is plainly an epic rather than tragedic writer, engaging openly with Homer in Omeros and concerned throughout 1

2

2

1 2

3

Matthew 4:1–11, Mark 1: 12–13, Luke 4: 1–13. A more explicitly theological reading of View from Mount Diablo might well begin with the connections between Adam’s (suppressed) priestly vocation and attempted curacy through his newspaper crusade of the national soul. The comparison can be very interestingly extended to the Leeds and Yorkshire poet-dramatist Tony Harrison, also a great classicist and regional spokesman. See my ‘Classical Learning in Regional Voices: The Work of Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, and Tony Harrison’, in Jean-Paul Lehners, Guy Schuller, & Janine Goedert, eds, Regions, nations, mondialisation: Aspects politiques, economiques, culturels (Luxembourg: Centre Universitaire de Luxembourg, 1996 [Cahiers I.S.I.S. Fascicule v), pp. 139–49.

20 his career with the archipelagic and maritime worlds of the Iliad and Odyssey rather than the Attic tragedians. He has certainly achieved moments of tragedy, and tragic awareness may at any moment glint in a passage, but has never been a committed tragedian in Soyinka’s sense, either in poetry or drama. In one sense that avoidance of tragedy may be evidence in Walcott’s work of the religious faith (informed by his mother’s strong Methodism) he avers if pressed in interview, for sincere Christian belief potently inhibits fully tragedic vision, implying posthumous redemption and divine judgement of the damned. In another sense the matter goes far beyond the personal, for Brathwaite is equally plainly not a tragedian, for all his powers of lament—but both Thompson and Dawes, despite their own strong Christian faiths, come notably closer. Both poets may as believers affirm the possibility of divine redemption after death, and Dawes’s long works strikingly deploy hopes of sacred relief as his protagonists’ secular careers come to their unhappy ends—but the secular goes unredeemed amid lyric consciousness of substantially self-inflicted loss, waste, and confusion, as well as of the historical roots of this suffering in the imposed sufferings of slavery. Granting the careful, refracted whiteness of Adam Cole as a protagonist, and the sensitivities of Thompson’s racial and national identities, the same is true of View from Mount Diablo, and in refusing resolution through salvation Thompson opens a door to a world more like Soyinka’s than Walcott’s, filled with visions of horror neither freighted within epic voyage nor succeeded by national establishment and achievement. View from Mount Diablo is as bleakly tragedic a poem by a practicing Catholic as I know, and in its resonance with Dawes’s bleakness suggests a new tragic modality in Caribbean literature. Following Browning’s lead Thompson makes domestic Jamaican crime with its psycho- and sociopathology his central theme. He still registers powerfully in Adam and Nathan the continuing legacies of slavery, but displaces from the moral places they occupy in Walcott’s and Brathwaite’s long works the narrative and metaphors of the Middle Passage, and with them the historical drive towards national deliverance, to insist that crime can surely pay long before criminals do. Spiritual hope may remain for Adam and other victims, living or dead, but does no practical good—as in Geoffrey Hill’s vision of Hitler’s Reich, where “Too near the ancient troughs of blood / Innocence is no earthly weapon” 1—and civil hopes are vanquished by forces no individual can fight alone. Independence with its promise is 2

1

Geoffrey Hill, ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’, ll. 3–4, in Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 61.

21 long past, and all crowd and blunder, terrified or heedless, down a broad slope to secular (and perhaps spiritual) damnation. In the terminology of African-American criticism Thompson signifies on narratives of epic hope by allowing them to be expected but deliberately failing to deliver, setting before readers instead a counter-narrative that presents historical and present realities to expose false consolations. Thompson’s relationship with Walcott is as dialectic as imitative, and one twist Thompson extracts from the verse-novel as hybrid, intrinsically paradoxical form lies in his handling of the fusion of versenovel and verse-autobiography that is part of Walcott’s and Brathwaite’s legacy. For all the shared whiteness and approximately parallel chronologies of poet and protagonist, Thompson progressively creates a profound distancing between himself as poet-narrator and the wounded, crusading protagonist in whom he initially seems quasi-autobiographically invested. First with Adam’s Oxford education, then dramatically with his daughter’s rape and traumatised emigration, the autobiographical recedes and the national rises. Readers need not like or wish to celebrate the view on Mount Diablo they are finally shown, John Crows circling above Blaka’s decapitated corpse, stuffed into a handcart with the “word Judas, warning intaglio, / carved with a switchblade into the transom” (958–9), but the pressing realities the whole verse-novel has drawn in plain sight insist on its bleak validity above and beyond anything personal. The view was not, after all, that looking out from the heights, but that inward to the human and national heart, and what is seen is prophylactic murder posing as morality and justice. As Nathan with his sibilant, serpentine stutter passionately observes to Adam of the murder he ordered: S S Sorry about Blaka. Religion kill him! Drugs dealing more s s simple than faith if you play by the rules.

(1003–05)

Perhaps all one can set against that twisted bleakness, besides the inspiring energy of the poem and natural grace of a “sweet breeze still blowing steady from the sea” (100, 115, 1048), are the facts of Thompson’s work. Without stooping to caricature one can imagine that a debut verse-novel by a septuagenarian CEO from a small, historically culpable minority would not, in many cultures, have much chance of a warm welcome. One cannot suppose Jamaican literature to have ignored violence, social injustice, and political ineptitude, at least since the 1950s, but add that View

22 from Mount Diablo offers an intimate, savage critique of the last 70 years of Jamaican history, indicting both major political parties, and it is a brave publisher who would step forward. But the Caribbean and Jamaican literary traditions have, in producing one of the great bodies of twentieth-century work, grown more than bighearted enough to honour dissent, especially if passionate, and Thompson’s achievement was immediately recognised with the National Literary Award. In this exterior aspect, as well as its own, memorable treatment of savage content, View from Mount Diablo is a potent reminder that despite the post-independence disappointments of political chicanery and organised violence, the literature of Jamaica, and all the Caribbean island homes, has from long before independence done almost everything but disappoint, and continues regularly to astonish. Versification and Metrics Long classical narratives are stichic (prescribing a line but not interlineal relation), typically using the epic Latin dactylic hexameter, and many vernacular works follow suit—which in post-Shakespearean English means using blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). This remains a powerful tradition central to Walcott’s work, but writing in the Romance languages introduced complex stanzas, such as the terza rima used by Dante, and ottava rima used by Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, and later Byron—a cue followed in the heroic Spenserian stanza of The Faerie Queene. Renaissance poets, readers, and (such as they were) critics also developed in the sonnet sequence a form of implicit narrative in some ways closer to a drama in sequential tableaux (like a photo-essay or graphic novel) than to prose narrative, and later developments strongly suggest the great Jacobethan (pseudo-)autobiographical sonnet-sequences as important precursors of the verse-novel. A major variant of the sonnet is directly associated with the verse-novel. The stanza Pushkin developed for Eugene Onegin has 14 lines in iambic tetrameter (as distinct from the sonnet’s pentameter) rhyming abab-ccdd-effe-gg (i.e. crossrhymed, couplet-rhymed, and arch-rhymed quatrains + a terminal couplet); Pushkin also prescribed that the first rhyme in each quatrain be unstressed (or ‘feminine’). The reduction from penta- to tetrametrics galvanises the Onegin stanza: pentameters are long enough to take whole clauses, even sentences, lending linear unity and identity; tetrameters aren’t, and strongly tend to couplet or quatrain structures, opening the way for what Nabokov called “fluent and variable phrasing” as an agent

23 of formal ambiguity. 1 Pushkin was also influenced by Byron’s elegant lightness-oftouch in Don Juan, and used constricting tetrametrics (enforcing enjambments), and the unstressed rhymes (ensuring constant cadence curbed by enjambment) to Byronise his own approach. The Onegin stanza was used (inter alia) by Fuller, Seth, and Keating with a subByronic approach and tonalities, especially when (as by Seth) unstressed rhymes are strictly observed—but authors have complete freedom. Walcott in Omeros blended iambic hex- and pentameters in a loose terza rima, echoed in the blank tercets of Dawes’s Prophets, and similar adaptations of received narrative forms were tried by Raine and Murray. Others opt frankly for free verse (which may mean variant rather than absent metre and stanza-form) in which they can locally generate any form or layout they want while morphing the whole into the chapters of a greater design. Thompson’s strategy falls between stringency and freedom. At 1,048 lines, View from Mount Diablo is short, as verse-novels go, but it is by far Thompson’s longest poem, and his choice of a sturdy, flexible stanza, approximately the heroic singlerhymed (abcb) quatrain, is right for the varied terrain of his multi-stranded narrative. While the metre always circles iambic pentameter, individual lines are stretched to six or seven stresses, sometimes more, and some sections of the narrative (including the explicitly political ch. 4 and the political sections of chs 5–6 and 9–10) show a persistent swelling of the measure to accommodate densities of plot and weight of observation. Nathan’s stigmatic stutter and the dictions of politics, policing, commerce, tall tales, and journalism are easily accommodated by this expandable heroic line. At an aural level the influence I hear most strongly is Walcott’s, and behind him Browning and Shakespeare (rather than Tennyson, Wordsworth and Milton); but the distensions of metre with prosaic dictions carrying their own realities, and with such freight of violent action, are distinctive of Thompson. The basic model for the chassis of an abcb-stanza is common metre (the balladstanza, a8b6c8b6), but Thompson’s lengthening of the metrical wheel-base and heroic upgrading of the coachwork eliminates all major balladic features except the simple rhyme-scheme—deliberately minimal to allow narratives of contemporary events to be composed with rapidity, and additional stanzas improvised at performative need. 2 Thompson loosens things further with widespread vowel- and 2

2

1 2

Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin: Translated from the Russian, with a Commentary, by Vladimir Nabokov (rev. ed., 4 vols, London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1975), i.10. Occasionally a line stretched to a heptameter, such as 528—“the voiceless, uncomplaining dead cremated where they fell”—actually forms, as a tetrameter + trimeter, half of a ballad-stanza.

24 pararhymes, but as with metrics, variation is never allowed to overwhelm basic identity of form, and visually the march of stanzas and intervenient blank lines is a powerful narrative clock in every reader’s gaze. The bulk of the heroic line goes with epic (nationwide, panoptic) aspects of the theme, and brings flexible dignity and gravitas that Thompson clearly felt essential; at the same time it inhibits (in any hands but Byron’s own) Byronic mockery, wit, and tonalities, and Thompson makes no attempt to recover them, substituting the hopes of the Bildungsroman and bitter notes of tragedy with topoi and tropes from the crime novel—manoeuvres for which the sturdy, minimally rhymed quatrain is excellently equipped. He does, however, maintain sharp awareness of line-breaks, and uses his flexible metrics to control exactly where they fall. In description—“The lower / walls were decorated with a random screed of octagons / etched in brown” (73–5)—as in narration—“He felt the mountain at his back, / hunched like a vulture, shifting its mass to be // a witness to whatever happened” (467–9)—line and stanza-breaks struggle to impose pauses, succumbing to enjambment but deflating rhetoric in the verse. The effect is repeatedly reinforced by unstressed end- and rhyme-words, including a steady flow of present participles, that hurry readers along, tipping them from one line to the next. To this extent View from Mount Diablo is a compulsive page-turner (or ‘line-turner’), but studded with phrases and passages whose crafted verse demands appreciation even as it drives compulsion. As (loosely speaking) an heroic quatrain, Thompson’s stanza acquires other literary baggages. The most general association would be with full-blown epic and verse-drama, both of value to Thompson in a poem of national scope and multiple voices, but there are delicacies too. Gray’s famous ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751), and its great modern interlocutor, Tony Harrison’s V. (1985), for example, both use cross-rhymed heroic quatrains for social commentary and investigation, and while Thompson is stylistically indebted to neither, Harrison’s is certainly an example of poetic praxis and civil intervention he would endorse and has in some ways (consciously or otherwise) sought to follow in Jamaica.

25

Form (2) The Bildungsroman Beyond its identity as a verse-novel and topoi of drug-dealing, murder and journalism drawn from crime novels and films, View from Mount Diablo is a tragic (abortive) Bildungsroman. 1 The first Bildungsroman is usually identified as Agathon (1765–6) by C. M. Wieland, and Émile, ou de l’Éducation (‘Émile, or of Education’, 1762) by J.-J. Rousseau is a vital philosophical source, but the seminal example is Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahr (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship [literally ‘learning-years’], 1795–6)— a pan-European sensation translated into English in 1824 by Carlyle, whose Sartor Resartus (1831) is a primary British example. Goethe’s novel was one of a series collectively charting the maturation of a young man by way of bad choices, worse consequences, and forceful education in ‘the university of life’. The form was naturalised in English by Dickens with David Copperfield (1849–50) and Great Expectations (1860–1); and in American letters by Twain in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1885). Later examples are numerous, and conventions constellated in the Bildungsroman found in a great swathe of fictions, but high-quality, influential instances have sustained its importance as a modern form. 2 Following Rousseau and anticipating Freud, Bildungsromans promote the role of childhood experience in shaping adult character and tend to duality, contrasting siblings or friends—features Thompson adopts. It is a vehicle for salutary fables of come-uppance, and underlyingly comedic (and self-mocking) in the protagonist’s survival as ‘a sadder but a wiser man’, speaking to both old philosophy and young alienation. There are in every society and period the drama of impatient youth and tragicomedy of mature daily existence, but the Bildungsroman emerged as political and industrial worlds began perceptibly to accelerate, mobility of peoples and ideas sharply to increase, and the gap between the experience of successive generations 2

2

1

2

This term is a Romantic coinage from MHG bildunge, ‘formation, development’ + roman, a tale or latterly novel (cf. ‘romance’). The usual translation is ‘novel of education’, but the word entered English in the early twentieth century, is fully naturalised, and does not take italics, though retaining its capital B; the correct plural both in German and English is Bildungsromans. Including James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914–15); Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (France 1934, US 1961); Betty Smith (Elizabeth Wehner), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943, filmed 1945); J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951); Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952); Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953); Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954, filmed 1957); Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960, filmed 1962); and Toni Morrison (Chloe Wofford), Song of Solomon (1977).

26 alarmingly to widen. Continuing industrialisation and urbanisation sustained all three processes in the twentieth century, and the world wars steepened the curve. Almost all post-1918 Bildungsromans deal in some measure with what has become a cliché, the contrast of an older traditional world that created older people and a new modernity creating a ‘youth’ understood to be fundamentally different. There have always been fuddy-duddies and an outside world to beckon, but from Dickens’s awareness in Great Expectations of Australian penal colonies to Lee’s testimony in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) of the pre-Civil-Rights South, Bildungsromans struggle with profound change, and (lamenting or rejoicing) with the destructive impact on individuals and communities of an unforgivingly widening world. The form has a primary place in post-colonial literature generally and the (Eastern) Caribbean in particular. Personal journeys to maturity map readily onto political journeys to independence, and such mapping is in varying ways critical to a distinguished group of Caribbean novels—most famously Barbadian George Lamming’s In the Castle of my Skin (1953), with Trinidadian Sam Selvon’s An Island is a World (1955), Barbadian Geoffrey Drayton’s Christopher (1959), Trinidadian Michael Anthony’s Green Days by the River (1967), Trinidadian Ian McDonald’s The Humming-Bird Tree (1969, filmed 1992), Trinidadian Merle Hodge’s Crick Crack Monkey (1970), and Guyanan Roy Heath’s One Generation (1981). Though not often labelled as such, V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas (1961) fits into the Trinidadian sub-group, and certainly draws on the traditions of the Bildungsroman. Many of these novels are autobiographical, relating strongly to the memoir—itself an important post-colonial form whose common tenor, where the British Empire is concerned, is wonderfully summarised in the title of the Barbadian-Canadian novelist Austin Clarke’s Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack (2005). In the context of Jamaica, especially given the political atmosphere of View from Mount Diablo, there is also Jamaican-Canadian Rachel Manley’s Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood (1996), for as the daughter of Michael and granddaughter of Norman Manley, both Chief or Prime Ministers of Jamaica, her personal growth was inextricably intertwined with political opinion, and the world she describes is strongly germane to Thompson’s work. Bildungsroman protagonists may be involved in law-breaking as a topos, but the form has rarely been as centrally involved with crime as Thompson makes it. The youth possessed by alienated anomie who drifts towards criminality is famously epitomised by Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), but the reality is now far beyond anything Salinger imagined. The ‘university of life’

27 is most likely to be prison, rather than employment, and a mortal winnowing of violent young men has become statistical reality almost throughout the Americas. Latin American Spanish sicario, for example, doesn’t simply mean ‘assassin’ but something like ‘morally null disposable teenage assassin-for-hire from the projects’—a figure for whom even the idea of the Bildungsroman is, like the future, simply an irrelevance; a stone killer who will be stone killed, as mature now as he will ever get to be. 1 That bloody dog-eat-dog bleakness increasingly dominates the world Thompson represents, and the diagnosis View from Mount Diablo offers centres squarely on the cocaine trade and paramilitary attempts to suppress it. The situation that has so badly affected Jamaica (especially Kingston) can equally be found in Medellin, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and northern Chihuahua, and if these instances are admittedly extremes the penumbra of violence surrounding them has made drug-related murder a commonplace: 2

At noon the nation’s radios cleared their throats of cornflakes and cooking-oil commercials, announced that murder quotas for that day had been routinely met, each killing routinely deprecated and denounced in cliché soundbites by the Honourable Minister of Justice.

(965–9)

Beyond moral revulsion Thompson seeks understanding, and the spiritual corruption implicit in rendering horror routine is one sliding connection he makes with quotidian behaviour, the ultimate immorality of murder echoed in lesser, daily incivilities, slippages of custom and inheritance, a want of social identity and morality producing generations seemingly more careless of history, self, and others than any on record. The crimes narrated are appalling in themselves—Louis Simpson singled out “the rape of Chantal [and] the boy begging Alexander to spare his life” as “narrative poetry at its best” 2—but beyond the criminals’ moral nullities it is underlying attitudes of habituated (and profiteering) indifference to evil that poison wider society and pose the more terrible spiritual threat. Both global and Caribbean contexts reveal the careful construction of View from Mount Diablo as a tragic Bildungsroman. For all his education, academic and through terrible loss, Adam does not survive; readers learn nothing of his wife and 2

1 2

See especially Fernando Vallejo, La Virgen de los Sicarios (Bogota: Alfaguara, 1994; trans. Paul Hammond, as Our Lady of the Assassins, London: Serpent’s Tail, 2001). Louis Simpson, back-cover blurb to the first edition of View from Mount Diablo (2003).

28 traumatised daughter after their flight to Canada in chapter 6, society and culture throughout the island are convulsed, and if Thompson does not show all wholly lost, he puts all on the brink. Adam’s killer Nathan is no stranger but a betrayed childhood friend, and the pair activate the trope that is in purest form the alienated milk-brother of another race, widely familiar from Faulkner and many lesser fictions of the old US South—but this trope too drives to an extreme end, Nathan proving one of those dangerous men who survive, and go on surviving, at any cost, as Adam with his decencies, confusions, and unwitting cruelties does not; as so many have and will not. The worthy doctor, Noel Thomas, insists on a world where: the children he helped survive slept four in a bed, sailed paper ships in dirty gutter water, rolled iron hoops down pot-holed lanes, failed their exams but learned to shoot guns at twelve, by twenty were dead. (789–94)

Events repeatedly back him up and underscore his despair, or realism. Beyond the generally murderous background of later chapters, reflecting Jamaican life since the 1970s, there are five particular murders (as well as the rape of a minor and corporate manslaughter) before the culmination of Nathan’s fratricidal execution of Adam. Nor is it clear Nathan’s evil gains him more than temporary security, or that Adam achieves either personal enlightenment or any real improvement in the public weal, so his death and Nathan’s damnation are unameliorated, readers left comfortless. This must be so, for Jamaica has not found deliverance and in reporting the state of his nation Thompson could not lie. There are also in View from Mount Diablo strong echoes of his extensive educational journalism (see the bibliography)—not in language but in thought, and pressing consciousness of a tragedy that, in a spiritual view, is more Nathan’s than Adam’s, Amber’s, or Chantal’s. The disturbed teenager familiar from more peaceful Bildungsromans becomes an infinitely more dangerous, damnable villain, eliminating whoever threatens him, including Adam, and blotting out the central consciousness of the verse-novel as he does so. Thompson powerfully modulates the effects of his bleak ending on normally comedic Bildungsroman elements, and his verse-novel’s final identity is as a tragedy of failed personal, civil, and national education, leading to subjugated death, political collapse, moral abnegation, and social mayhem—truly a view to delight the devil.

29

Background (1)

Jamaica in World War 2

The early chapters of View from Mount Diablo are dominated by Adam Cole’s childhood experience of World War 2. Jamaican history of that period is now little known, even (where living memory has failed) in Jamaica, but as a colony the island was formally at war with Germany and Japan 1939–45, and Italy 1939–43. Direct military impact was limited but German U-Boats sailed the Caribbean with Kingston’s deep-water harbour very much in their sights, so (as in the UK & US) there was summary internment for resident foreign nationals, Jamaicans of German or Japanese descent, and others deemed security risks. There were Home Guard and coastal watch forces, while 10,000+ British West Indian volunteers served overseas, many in the Royal Air Force. Additionally, after 1941, the US, assuming defence of the Panama Canal, established airfields throughout the region, including two which are now Norman Manley and Donald Sangster International Airports, in Kingston and Montego Bay, greatly thickening a connection that subsequently became ever more important. This process of displacing British with US interests can be seen throughout the Empire during the war and following decades, and its Asian forms had calamitous implications for continuing hot wars and Cold War alike. The indirect impact of the war, however, was enormous. Economic interruptions produced local hardships but kick-started businesses, especially in the marine, service, and small manufacturing sectors. Newly attractive bauxite deposits were mapped in the parishes of St Ann, Manchester, and St Elizabeth, and declared crown property in November 1942 (leading to commercial export, still a major Jamaican industry, from 1952). There was also pressurised political change. Pro-independence sentiments could in wartime be branded disloyal, and the Moyne Commission Report (on fatal clashes in 1938 between strikers and police at the construction-site of the West Indies Sugar Company plant in Frome, and associated riots elsewhere in Jamaica, Trinidad, St Kitts, and St Vincent), had its conclusions reluctantly issued in 1940, but was suppressed in full until 1945. Yet loyalty in time of need had equally to be rewarded while discontent was headed-off, and as elsewhere in the Empire, notably India, gung-ho repression released by the declaration of war in 1939 (a quality that led the novelist Paul Scott to imagine the war as a ‘moral holiday’ for empire) had swiftly to be tempered, and political accommodations reached. In 1943, Alexander Bustamante (Alex Clarke, 1884–1977), a major union founder and leader imprisoned after the 1938 troubles and interned from September

30 1940–February 1942, founded the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and, under a new 1944 constitution granting universal adult suffrage, won elections to become Jamaica’s first Chief Minister. His defeated opponents were the People’s National Party (PNP), founded in 1938 and led by Bustamante’s distant cousin Norman Manley (1893–1969), from which the JLP broke away. A wartime beginning in party-schism and bitter partisan rivalry in electoral campaigning laid the foundations of what became (especially in Federation and Independence) a sectarian curse, particularly in and around Kingston. After the war, returning veterans initially formed the core of a generation of social, business, and political leaders, not only steeled in personal character and dignity by combat experience but radicalised by political and social experiences unimaginable in pre-war Jamaica. This might be expected to have provided some immunity to domestic sectarianism and ready resort to violence, but if so it was not passed on, for the war-generation’s children, born in the 14 years of the 1944–58 constitution and therefore aged 12–26 in 1970, constitute the great majority of perpetrators and victims of political violence during the ‘Manley Years’, and supplied both enforcers and opponents of the crippling party rivalry that drove the hatreds. Adam and Nathan are a decade or so older, living through the war domestically, and have no overt party affiliations (though Adam’s employment by what is clearly a version of The Gleaner gives him putative JLP connections), but the political frame Thompson supplies and the murderous curdling of fraternal alienation makes them emblematic of party history as well as self-hatred. Understandably enough, Jamaican historians do not commonly make either the impact of WW2 or the Cold War central to accounts of post-war Jamaica, and the causes, nature, and consequences of the ‘Manley Years’ remain profoundly divisive topics in Jamaican society. Without challenging the propriety of normative histories charting aspiration to and realisation of independence, or taking any partisan position in debates about the 1970s, View from Mount Diablo supplies inter alia a corrective, complementary history (especially in ch. 4, constitutional negotiations, and the central insistence on drugs and the Cold-War context of their emergence as a problem) that invites new kinds of historiographical attention to the domestic consequences of 1939–45.

31

Background (2) “Blood / cheaper than drugs.” The later chapters of View from Mount Diablo are dominated by consequences of the international cocaine and marijuana trades. Adam Cole learns of: Russian fishermen who traded AK-47s for ganja ; bribes and bullets by the Colombian cartel clearing safe passage north for the White Lady ; the world flushing its jails of Jamaican gangsters, a new rage infecting the fight for turf back home in Kingston

(916–21)

He is also baldly warned “Maybe the Frog’s people buying silence. Blood / cheaper than drugs” (946–7)—summarising in a memorably bleak phrase a violence and philosophy that claim the lives of most major characters in the novel. But those Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947s paid for with marijuana are no more coincidentally of Soviet manufacture than the Jeeps into which victims of the police are “tossed […] heads hanging over the stern” (708) are coincidentally of US manufacture. The present incarnation of the cocaine trade was a Cold-War birth—as ties to the arms trade suggest, and the presence of a CIA man at ‘the Frog’s’ cocaine-financed party underlines, “proclaiming / Washington’s interest in the island” (817–18). In confronting this aspect of View from Mount Diablo, especially in the classroom, there are genuine problems, because informed discussion of drugs, their histories, and their realpolitik is so often marginalised. In particular, there is within Anglo-American and to some extent global culture an aggressive orthodoxy, largely of US manufacture, crudely but not unfairly summarised in the slogans ‘the War on Drugs’ (instituted by President Nixon in 1971, during the Vietnam War) and ‘Just Say No’ (associated with President Reagan in the 1980s, when the US-supported Nicaraguan ‘Contras’, or counterrevolutionaries, were most violently active). This orthodoxy is intolerant of dissent, preferring absolute assertions about the ‘scourge’ of ‘drugs’, in keeping with a militarised rhetoric of warfare, and actual militarisation (again, especially where the US is concerned) of ‘anti-drug’ interventions in Latin American, Caribbean, and Asian nations. But one need only consider that the first anti-drug slogan was prompted by the heroin trade with South-East Asia, the other

32 by the cocaine trade with Latin America, to realise that in both cases an overarching Cold-War context of US (and Soviet) attempts to manipulate regime change in nonCaucasian nations provided a framework and opportunities that drug entrepreneurs ruthlessly exploited. The aggressive intolerance that ignores these contexts is in many ways self-serving, and obscures the history of trade in and national legislation against ‘drugs’, blunting understandings of reality. It therefore also tends to conceal from readers who accept any of the simplistic views that various governments have promulgated Thompson’s careful contextualisation/s of cocaine in Jamaica . The blanket term ‘drugs’ is a hopelessly vague term to serve as an object of policy or (poetic) thought, and several distinct categories it covers are substantially represented in View from Mount Diablo. Marijuana, alcohol, and nicotine pervade the poem, from Blaka’s “Smoke of remembrance”(865) to Bevin’s “tray of gin and tonics” (587) and Norman Manley as a “vested barrister [who] chain-smoked Gold Flake cigarettes” (305). Morphine is mentioned in connections with the kidneytransplant operation in chapter 8, Aunt Millicent dying in a “morphine mist” (660) that is more than personal, and pharmacology as much as technology made dialysis and transplant possible; Amber’s “numb … body” (438–9) after childbirth also implies an epidural anaesthetic or more. Conversely, Chantal’s venereally diseased rapist apparently knows nothing of antibiotics, opening the way to his obscene, deluded actions in pursuit of the ‘virgin cure’. Biographies of various named historical characters also suggest or confirm periods of prescribed drug use (alongside heavy uses of nicotine and alcohol) that historians are only beginning to learn to consider. Most importantly, the massive scale and potency of the cocaine trade are a major element of Thompson’s national diagnosis, and its international and domestic political contexts are repeatedly shown or suggested to be causally related, even fused. The analytical implications are profound, but need to be set against a background in which the governments who most vociferously protest against ‘drugs’ are seen as morally and practically complicit with the trades they denounce, and use rhetorics of suppression to blur and conceal both hypocrisy and racism. A Brief History of Current Drugs Legislation The strategy of criminalising a wide range of chemicals is recent. The British Empire once had a substantial monopoly in South-East Asian opium, and in two infamous ‘Opium Wars’ (1839–42, 1856–60), motivated largely by trading

33 expediency, used force to overturn an imperial Chinese ban on opium use. Laudanum, a tincture of opium, was a legal drug of choice in Europe and the US throughout the nineteenth century. But the period from 1875 saw progressive criminalisation, initially culminating in the US in Prohibition (1920–33), banning alcohol. Criminalisation of a vast number of citizens boosted profits of organised crime to a level that still causes problems—but while Prohibition was repealed, and the lesson widely drawn that alcohol is better regulated by the tax system than statute law, a similar disaster has been fostered internationally by the continuing project of ‘drugs’ legislation while alcohol has been tacitly dropped from the schedule of substances covered by the term. The standard historical account, in as much as there is one, is an apparently simple tale of ‘common sense’ and ‘determined action’ prevailing, but the damning fact is that the period of criminalisation has since 1920 seen hyper-exponential growth of the drugs trade, and there are many awkward questions that the standard accounts ignore. In particular there is a demonstrable association between (waves of) criminalisation—an ongoing, open-ended process—and economic anxieties fuelling racial rhetoric about miscegenation. Racial issues also, of course, show up strongly elsewhere in analyses of the ‘drug problem’ in the US, and the ‘War on Drugs’ has often been a tool of discriminatory foreign policy. Jamaican and other Caribbean governments have over the years been repeatedly pressurised both politically and economically by successive US administrations to adopt a hard-line, militarised approach, but while lip-service has been necessarily paid, and various judicial corruptions have resulted (as with Alexander’s death-squad), many governments have been at best ambivalent, and at worst complicit with and corrupted by the huge profits the cocaine and marijuana trades offer. In considering Thompson’s ‘take’ on the Jamaican ‘drugs problem’ in View from Mount Diablo, racially alert readings are thus required. The cocaine trade is shown to unite Jamaicans of all colours and classes on both sides, offering deprived Nathan as well as parasitic Tony Blake wealth and security they could probably not have obtained in any legal way, enraging Adam and Alexander alike. Then again, “lightskinned” (674) Alexander and the Prime Minister who sends him forth to purge the nation of “gunmen and Dons” (689) may see themselves as heroic crusaders, but in their corrupting moral scorn for the “ghetto youth / suspected of dealing in coke” (719–20), whom Alexander murders, replicate post-/colonial patterns of murderous summary injustice fuelled by gradients of skin-tone—as the drunken whites Spencer and his wife do in their treatment and eventual killing of Bevin. The career of

34 ‘Squint Eye Nellie’ from Adam’s sexually abusive nanny to murderous responsibilities under Nathan also begs awkward questions about relative privilege and corruption. And underlyingly, the Jamaican government’s adoption of a USfunded attempt at unlawful suppression continuous with the militarised violence of domestic party sectarianism raises even worse questions about the sincerity of their professed aims—questions horribly deepened by the cabinet minister who is so close a friend of Spencer that he “regularly lunched // at the Great House and left with a thick envelope for dessert” (832–3), and by the payments in marijuana for AK-47s that end up in the hands of “Gunmen recruited by the Party to do its dirty / work” (505–06). There is also, thinking of Thompson as the patriotic businessman he has spent much of his career being, the consideration that the cocaine trade is (like the slave trade) a kind of compradore capitalism, in which Jamaica figures not as a producing nation but merely as a place of parasitic middlemen. While many domestic industries endure steep declines in productivity and capitalisation, and struggle to survive, a terrible price is paid nationally, at every level, for a trade beneficial within the island only to an élite few, real profits going elsewhere—and those that are retained within Jamaica tending to be spent on imported luxuries. In a real sense, therefore, the children Dr Thomas cannot save, who “failed // their exams but learned to shoot guns at twelve, by twenty / were dead” (792–4), are paying the opportunity cost of the cocaine trade—the money not made and not spent on education, health-care, and infrastructure—and his emotions at ‘the Frog’s’ lavish party imply that at some level the good doctor knows it. The New Triangular Trade Fictions about drugs and their trades often valorise or romanticise the subjective experiences of users, or fulminate about the moral failings of use and the fate commonly attached to it. Thompson avoids both well-trodden paths for a cool, disciplined approach to the reality of trafficking and its epiphenomena as realities of Jamaican life, an aspect of globalisation where barriers of race and class become permeable even as havoc is wrought. 1 The complex picture of racial, social, financial, and political corruption that cumulatively emerges turns on habituated indifference to the value of life, resonating with political events elsewhere in Latin 2

1

I am indebted to Jeremy Poynting for a strong argument about these points, and some wording.

35 America and summoning the historical shadow of that same indifference pervading the practice of slavery. Although the analogy is not made explicit by Thompson, one way of putting the case View from Mount Diablo makes about the cocaine trade is to sayit has become a new triangular trans-Atlantic trade, South America to Europe via West Africa, to rival the old and terrible triangle of the Atlantic Slave Trade between Europe, Africa, and the plantation economies of the Caribbean and Americas. Beyond geographical analogy, Latin American cocaine typically entering Europe via the West Indies (especially Jamaica and Trinidad) and West African countries, and similarities as compradore capitalism, there is a chilling functional identity. Now as then a stigmatised regional product becomes the source of massive wealth for a few at the apices of a triangular trade, while blighting and victimising in the coldest, most calculating manner vast numbers of intermediate victims. Now as then use of the product becomes economically essential to some within, but politically divides, both producing and consuming societies. Now as then legally instituted frameworks of control create widespread, semi-institutionalised practices opening victims to grave abuse and victimisers to moral corruption. It may be objected that in a specifically Jamaican context the apparently small numbers of cocaine addicts and traders disallows comparison with the utter oppression as chattel slaves of almost all, but the whole force of Thompson’s view of the cocaine trade lies in clarifying its pervasive power and enveloping reach—a source and engine of corruption as implicated in Bevin’s killing and Millicent’s manslaughter as in Nellie’s and Adam’s murders; in the evils of surviving ‘Great Houses’ and former plantations as in the faithlessness of bribed ministers in independent government; and in domestic sectarianism as in continuing international exploitations of former colonies. From a literary perspective the implicit equivalence of the Atlantic Slave and contemporary cocaine trades helps situate Thompson’s approach to Jamaican history and literature. As a white Jamaican of European origins the animating metaphor of the ‘Middle Passage’ is not politically or morally open to him yet inheres in a wide range of African-Diasporic writing. Adam as protagonist has the same limitation, but through the imminent analogy of ruinous trades Thompson brings into potent play resonances of historical bondage and current oppression, pointing common abuses of human dignity and civil possibility. In its profoundly bleak catastrophe View from Mount Diablo presents with great power and suasion, implicitly and explicitly, poetically and politically, a savage critique of Jamaica’s present drug-ridden dispensation, as above all an overwhelming human failure in which the values of spiritual aspiration and of any peaceful civilisation cannot sensibly hope to survive.

36

Early Reception Jamaicans listen, in a variety of forms, to more poetry than most people, but do not, alas, read more verse-novels than anyone else. That said, a consciousness of the burgeoning distinction of West Indian and specifically Jamaican literature has been an important element in forming an independent national consciousness, and among those who do read (for pleasure or on principle) the work of living Jamaican poets View from Mount Diablo was from its first circulations in manuscript, and substantial serialisation in The Observer (Kingston), recognised as a remarkable and challenging achievement. That warmth is embodied in the first piece reproduced here, the launch speech by Wayne Brown, both a seminal critic of West Indian literature and for many years the master of Kingston’s primary literary salon in the weekly literature supplements of the Gleaner and Observer. It also embodies an entirely delightful Jamaican tradition, for people who go to book launches expect (with the fizz and sales-pitch, and as well as the authorial reading) a proper introductory lecture, and will listen without shuffling feet for at least half-an-hour. The kind of brief thanks or anecdotal reminiscence that serve elsewhere would never do in Jamaica, and Brown gave Thompson a launch of which anyone could be proud—helping the first edition to sell 300+ copies in Jamaica, a remarkable achievement when the average sale of any new paperback title is about 70. 1 Time is one thing, column inches another. Poetry, especially Jamaican, is more often printed than reviewed in the major papers, and with rare exceptions critical wordage is very limited and criticism of serious quality correspondingly uncommon. The second piece reproduced here, Father McLaughlin’s 600 or so words in The Sunday Observer, exemplifies a respectful but notably unliterary approach. Clearly writing both as good citizen and good priest, Fr McLaughlin rightly cannot help connecting characters in the narrative to people he remembers and protests the bleakness of vision, but various factors, including his own strong faith (and limitations of space) forestall any substantive discussion of the despair Thompson explores in narrative and embodies in plot. Nor, to be fair, would space or protocol have allowed in the literary pages the kind of realpolitik about drugs, guns, dons, and (as Rastafarians tellingly say) the ‘politricks’ of Jamaica that do allow Thompson’s secular despair to be understood. 3

1

Personal communication with Jeremy Poynting, and Suzzanne Lee, of Novelty Trading Company, Jamaica, who import a large percentage of the island’s books.

37 Teaching View from Mount Diablo at the University of the West Indies—Mona in Kingston, by definition to students from the upper percentiles of Jamaican school achievement, I encounter reactions distinct from both Wayne Brown’s and Father McLaughlin’s. One pleasure of the institution is the age-range of students, and older ones remember the real events and see the symbolic ones, as Brown and McLaughlin do; younger students, however, have not always heard of specific events, and struggle to understand the poem’s historical and temporal strategies. What they understand immediately, though, is the world that Adam is also trying to understand and that kills him—perhaps because he does at last grasp it, perhaps because even at the last he cannot. And they also understand, ferociously, when Ralph Thompson comes to talk to them about writing his poem, and about living the life that enabled him to write it, and made him write it, that he offers them a View from Mount Diablo they need to understand, because they have seen it too. Wayne Brown, Launch Speech for the first Peepal Tree edition of View From Mount Diablo Terra Nova Hotel, Waterloo Road, Kingston, 2003, unpublished. This speech is reproduced by kind permission of Wayne Brown. Madame Chairperson, ladies and gentlemen: Back in the early 1930s, when Ralph Thompson here was just a toddler, there was an American poet called Wallace Stevens who, wonder of wonders, was also the CEO of a major life insurance company. Stevens tried to keep the two things, his job and his vocation, quite separate; and since America is a big country, and since there was no cable, nor even television, in those days, he managed to do so, to the point that most of the people he worked with didn’t even know Wallace Stevens wrote poetry. So when in due course he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he went to Stockholm to receive it, he began his acceptance speech by saying: ‘If only the boys in the office could see me now!’ Well, Jamaica is a lot smaller than the United States, and one assumes that the boys in Ralph Thompson’s office knew all along that their CEO wrote poetry. But it would be surprising, and gratifying, if many of them appreciated the growing distinction with which their boss was deploying words.

38 But I’ll tell you. Also back in the 30s, when the American publishing firm Scribners had just about finished preparing Hemingway’s bullfighting book, Death in the Afternoon, for publication, Hemingway’s editor, Max Perkins, wrote to him. ‘Everything seems now to be right with the book,’ Perkins wrote. ‘And you will see, when we send you the page proofs, what we have done about the words.’ Well, I was ill at one point last year, and Ralph came to see me and asked if there was anything he could do; and I told him, ‘Send me a poem’. Now, I didn’t mean, what you’re thinking: ‘Send me a poem to read’—I was in no shape to read anything at the time. What I meant was that, as editor of the Observer Arts Magazine, I often have to ‘do something about the words’ of contributors. But I have never had to do anything about Ralph Thompson’s words. And so, in the state I was in then, I knew I could pass on to the Observer, sight unseen, any poem of Ralph’s that he might send me. No writer is born with such technical assurance, of course; it is the mark of a poet who has worked selflessly and long at his craft. And in that sense, the real progenitors of View from Mount Diablo, which we’re here this morning to launch, were Ralph’s first two collections, The Denting of a Wave, 1992, and Moving On, 1998, both also published by Peepal Tree Press. In fact, if as a reader, you want a warm-up before tackling the book-length Mount Diablo, I would recommend that you go back and read the rich, and in places quite raunchy, 18-page poem, ‘Goodbye Aristotle, so long, America’, in Ralph’s last collection, Moving On. That painstakingly acquired technical assurance is the bedrock upon which the poet has erected the present ambitious and unique narrative poem, this story-in-verse of modern Jamaica: a story that coincides pretty much, in chronological terms, with Ralph Thompson’s own life and times. Now, of all the English-speaking Caribbean territories, Jamaica has been most richly blessed with poets. To call names like Denis Scott and Tony McNeill, Eddie Baugh and Mervyn Morris, Lorna Goodison and Andrew Miller and Delores Gauntlett and several others—including, most recently, Safiya Sinclair, an extraordinary 18-year-old from Mobay who reads dictionaries for pleasure—to call such names is to embark upon a roll call that’s the poetic equivalent of Jamaica’s record in the Penn relays. Why this should be, I don’t know. Perhaps it has something to do with your mountains, or your music, or the fact that Jamaica is still a predominantly rural and religion-enthralled society. Yet no Jamaican poet, to my knowledge, has attempted to date a poem of the scope of View from Mount Diablo. When, a little while from now, you each buy your copies of this book—and I say copies because Christmas is coming, and this is a book that, having arrived here

39 from England, where it was published, deserves to go right back out, to the North American and European diasporas—you’ll see where on the back cover Louis Simpson, the Jamaican-American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, declares of Mount Diablo that ‘its knowledge of the island, the entwining of private lives and politics, lifts Jamaican poetry to a level that has not been attempted before.’ You’ll forgive me for being parochial, but, quite apart from the quality of the poetry, what impresses me about such an intertwining of this poet’s private life and his country’s public one is that Ralph Thompson is a white, or at least a white-seeming, Jamaican. (I actually neither know nor care which.) And the fact that reading this poem it doesn’t seem to matter—that, in a race-ridden society like Jamaica’s, the race of the author of Mount Diablo doesn’t seem to matter—is to me like a badge of moral and artistic seriousness on Thompson’s part. Way back in the hinterland of View from Mount Diablo is an unstated weltaanschaung that says, ‘This is my country, and I claim the right to all of it, all of its beauty and all of its pain—no less than anybody else from here.’ Coming from the background Ralph Thompson comes from, that seems to me the attitude of a man of uncommon character; and—quite apart from the poetry—it is one reason why I recommend this book to you. If there’s one quality Ralph Thompson shares with V. S. Naipaul, it’s that, in his very person, he cannot help but contradict the pessimism to which he gives such persuasive voice. But make no mistake. ‘Goodbye Aristotle, so long, America,’ ends with Thompson describing himself, on a train journey, as “sway[ing] to the message of the wheels, / A splurge of hope, riding the steel conviction of the rails”. But four years later, considering this island now, the poet is irrefrangibly pessimistic. Indeed, the prologue of View from Mount Diablo explicitly announces its slant: The light that I have so long loved turns its gaze grudgingly from the old, romantic view of islands, from the stubbled silver sheen of mountains guarding valleys waking from their sleep, dew overflowing the green uplifted chalice of a leaf ...

The image is full of nostalgia: “the green, uplifted chalice of a leaf” virtually sings with the poignancy of a lost sacredness. And because, a few lines on, the sun is described as, “a complacent prison warder / twisting a thumbprint into Kingston’s face”, we are justified in hearing echoes—and I think they are conscious echoes—of Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’, with its journey from innocence to experience,

40 from the child “trailing clouds of glory” to those “shades of the prison-house” which “close upon the growing boy”. Next, in Ralph Thompson’s poem, the same Caribbean sun is described as predatory and quite mindless: “a hawk circling a laden feeding tree, / pure scrutiny without a trace of insight ...” But perhaps you see where I’m coming from. If not, you will when I remind you of the corresponding images in Derek Walcott’s poem, ‘Preparing for Exile’: “Why does the moon increase into an arc-lamp / and the inkstain on my hand prepare to press thumb-downward / before a shrugging sergeant?” Dr Thompson can correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me we’re supposed to hear the same imagery of spiritual exile and civic malaise behind his own line likening the sun to “a complacent prison warder / twisting a thumbprint into Kingston’s face’. And here’s the question. How can you produce such a brilliant and resonant metaphor for despair without eliciting the opposite emotion, admiration, in the heart and mind of the reader? And that is the unspoken dialectic that runs through this remarkable book-length poem. At every point, to the apparent failure and corruption of the society, is implicitly counterpoised the artistic mastery and moral outrage of its spokesman! Because, as the American critic Lionel Trilling once observed: “The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget he is also part of the weather!” And that is the curious and delightful paradox at the heart of View from Mount Diablo: that the calibre of its poetry is always nudging upwards the barometric readings of its civic investigations. View from Mount Diablo ranges over Jamaica’s sociopolitical history in the decades prior to, and more so since, selfgovernment. Its many and various characters, ranging from Bustamante and lawyers to a maid turned party worker and a gardener turned cocaine don, are seen through the eyes of an Oxford-educated newspaper reporter, Adam Cole, whose boyhood and youth, with their idealist young dreams and rather more furtive carnal initiations—and then whose early manhood, education abroad, and young familyman years—neatly match the glory days of these West Indian islands’ run-up to Federation and independence. Thompson gives no dates, of course; and we are not supposed to notice that he secretly concertinas time—so that, for example, the computer age occurs contemporaneously with the sociopolitical traumas of the seventies. But it’s clear that when the poem at its midpoint—in the sixth of its twelve chapters—changes—changes mood, tone, arena, everything—it’s clear that the independence decade of the sixties has been reached. The deus ex machina behind this pivoting moment is the rape of Adam Cole’s schoolgirl daughter, Chantal (the name of course means ‘Song’), on the grounds of

41 her school, which is of course—for you wouldn’t expect Ralph Thompson to miss such an opportunity for irony—Immaculate Conception. The departure of Adam’s wife—who is Chinese, and whom therefore the poet is pleased to call Amber—the departure of Amber with their daughter, Chantal, for Canada, marks the end of Adam Cole’s prospects for happiness (the end too, of course, in poetic terms, of the possibility of lyricism, of song) and the real beginning of his civic crusade as a reporter: Now when he turned his new computer on Chantal’s face floated from nowhere to fill the amnesia of the screen, the presence of her absence haunting his conscience, reinforcing the final defiance of his will. As the social fabric of the island shredded, the scourge of words spurred Adam on. He ventured where no reporter had dared to go before, lurking in shadows, turning over rocks.

Now, in these parts a crusading journalist may survive his revelations of political incompetence or even corruption. But he is less likely to survive his investigations of those running the cocaine trade; and in the second half of View from Mount Diablo, Ralph Thompson’s increasingly pessimistic diagnosis of contemporary Jamaica culminates in the murder of Adam Cole by Nathan, Adam’s family’s exgardener and his childhood companion, now turned cocaine don. In fact, for old times’ sake, Nathan offers Adam his life in exchange for the latter’s migration and lifelong silence. But Florida holds no appeal for Adam Cole— Florida which “on a monitor of the earth ... would be flat as the baseline of an exhausted heart”. Yet, in having the reporter essay instead a hopeless attempt to jump Nathan, Thompson suggests an indecipherably complex moral motivation. Adam remains to the end the professional journalist, refusing to betray his civic responsibility and acquiesce in the culture of Unmeaning which he has seen all around him. But he has also—we are led to feel—been made so weary in his soul, first as a father by the rape and loss of his daughter Chantal, and then, as a citizen, by a despairing vision of contemporary Jamaica as a version of Matthew Arnold’s “darkling plain, / swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight / where ignorant armies clash by night”, that his doomed lunge at Nathan also seems the expression of a death wish.

42 The final chapter of View from Mount Diablo is a tour de force. In it, several figures from Adam’s past and childhood return. In addition to Nathan, there is a “phantom Chantal”, “a schoolgirl with almond eyes” who (in what turns out to be the last hour of Adam’s life) glances at him as she crosses in front of his car at a traffic light. And there is Nellie, whom the reader first met in Chapter One, when as Adam’s family’s domestic helper she would naughtily play with the child’s private parts while bathing him, but who has long since “exchanged sex for power”, become a Party worker, refused (like Adam) to knuckle under to the cartel, and in consequence met a violent end. Finally there is Blaka, an ex-Party gunman who, having ‘found religion’, warns Adam that the cartel has taken out a contract on his life—a warning for which he is brutally murdered as an informer and his corpse left on Mount Diablo, the ‘Devil’s mountain’ which (the poet implies) Jamaica as a whole has become. And yet it was St Augustine who, famously, called poetry itself ‘the devil’s wine’. (Just look at the twist that reference gives to the whole weight of the title of the poem!) And Ralph Thompson sustains the ambiguity of his enterprise to the end. View from Mount Diablo ends with a reprise on the last line of the first chapter, a reprise which also functions as a reprieve, taking the dying Adam back to a remembered sensation of childhood innocence: “a sweet breeze blowing steady from the sea”. In other words, this too will pass. But the poetry of earth is never dead. Ladies and gentlemen, in this short synopsis I could not hope to do more than gesture in the direction of the many pleasures awaiting the reader of View from Mount Diablo. But like any genuinely major work of literature, this book comprises not only a moveable feast but a repeatable feast. You can read View from Mount Diablo time and again: each time you will find some new excellence, some subtler pun or literary resonance, some further nuance of joy or pity, secreted in this or that metaphor or simile, to delight or bemuse or—in the lingo of today’s young people—to ‘centre’ you. And all the time, reading View from Mount Diablo, you will feel the essence of Jamaica—Jamaica past and present, both—coming and coming at you. I feel privileged to have been invited to partake in its launch. And, however pessimistic the poem’s vision, it seems to me mysteriously appropriate that its launch should be taking place at Christmas.

43

Father Gerard Leo McLaughlin SJ, ‘View from Mount Diablo—a review from the Liguanea Plains’ The Sunday Observer (Kingston), 22 December 2002, pp. 10–11. ‘...He whistled for Johann but Busta came instead.’

Ralph Thompson has authored his fresh, new and unexpected magnum opus, View from Mount Diablo, after pleasuring us for many years with sweet, romantic short and long verses of traditional poetry. His two volumes published some years ago by Peepal [Tree] Press remain thrilling testaments to his skill as a poet and storyteller. But with the publication of View from Mount Diablo, Thompson tilts windmills with the likes of Beowulf in Chaucer’s time and Milton and his Paradise Lost. This town boy from Kingston matches words and ambitions with the historicopoets of the centuries while telling his tale of little Jamaica in the second half of the 20th Century. It had been a perilous wrenching birth, a desperate foetal struggle. Amber Lee survived, numb in body and soul and although another miracle was possible she sealed forever the reliquary of her womb.

Thompson’s tale tells the story of his own life, a bio-historical-poetic narrative that reveals him only a little bit and leaves the remainder to our imagination. Thompson recreates his own life (Adam Cole?) his father, South Camp Road (St Georges College?), Up Park Camp, German Uncle (Hans S...?) lawyer, Oxford (Fordham?) Mount Fuji (service in Japan?). “He would take Holy Orders, / become a priest whose worthy hands would lift the host” (unfulfilled vocation?). Though, perhaps not. (“The pale pearl buds of her breast blossomed.”) A pensive Adam lounged on his verandah, the awning raised like an eyelid afraid to blink. The lights below seemed to be torches held up by savages ready to creep forward if the eyelid lowered. (Jacks Hill residence?)

44 In the middle of the writing he leaves behind any hints of his own biography and tells the story of the Jamaica contemporary to him (and to us): the story of Independence. From the West Indies Federation, Bustamante, Manley and Neville Ashenheim (... the Jew?), he makes a gigantic leap to ganja, heroine, cocaine, Sergeant Inspector (Adams?), drug dons (no names as yet?), decapitations in the hill country, rape on the grounds of the Immaculate Conception School (why ICHS?), government minister drinking with gangster friends and leaving with a fat envelope after breakfast, his boyhood friend Nathan shooting down his lieutenant in crime for his betrayal (C Massop?), prime ministers betraying their promise of Immunity to the Special Anti-Crime Task Force superintendent, the arson-atrocity of the Orange Lane Fire, the unseen machine gunnings of the Green Bay Massacre, and the unexplained salvation of the one who escaped the slaughter and found refuge in the skirts of a Laws Street donness. One may question Thompson’s choice of historic themes for the seven decades of the past century: politics, crime, violence, rape, vengeance, drugs, corruption and child abuse. Why? Nothing beautiful happened beyond Chantal? The poet struggled with the iambic pentameter, and he succeeds, but with an effort that brings to mind the work of the Irish Poet Seamus Heaney in his translation of the text of Beowulf : There was Shield Sheafson, scourge of many tribes, a wrecker of mead-benches, rampaging among foes. This terror of the hall-troops had come far A foundling to start with, he would flourish later on as his powers waxed and his worth was proved.

Thompson tells his story with strength and imagination. If some read into the political references biases of one or the other persuasion, so be it. Finally, one is left with the difficult task of matching this epic with Mervyn Morris’ Holy Week or Edward Baugh’s new volume. On the other hand, there is no need to match. All of the above-mentioned works are fine; but this of Thompson’s is the newest finest.

View

from

Mount Diablo

46

For the grandchildren Nicolas, Sean, Natalie, Catherine, Oskar, Matthew Alexandra and Sean Joseph in the hope that the mist will have lifted when they come to the view

47

Priests, examining the entrails of birds, Found the heart misplaced, and seeds As black as death, emitting a strange odor.

Louis Simpson

48

PROLOGUE The light that I have so long loved turns its gaze grudgingly from the old, romantic view of islands, from the stubbled silver sheen of mountains guarding valleys waking from their sleep, dew overflowing the green uplifted chalice of a leaf, dangling at each new morning’s edge, testing the gravity of calyx, bud and beaded stem ; turns from pious villages at night cupping their candles in steep procession down a mountain path, a girl’s giggle muffled in the forest’s throat ; turns, confused, from the embracing absolution of a forgiving ocean washing colonial guilt like seaweed from a moon-glazed beach. Now the dream is draining from the valley shadows, edges hardening as the light changes to a harsh, uncompromising glare. The day’s sun is turning cynical, taking its early morning tally in the tarnished air, a complacent prison warder twisting a thumbprint into Kingston’s face— at high noon a hawk circling a laden feeding tree, pure scrutiny without a trace

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of insight, glint of a grin from the muzzle of a gun as a black Clint Eastwood mocks the killing field and runs that macho fable through another version. The light scars the earth, a gaze held unblinking to wither myth and drain the sap from trees. Wordsworth could not survive a squint at it. Pan the goat god has sworn allegiance to the devil’s party, swapped his simple flute for an amplifier blasting fifteen hundred watts but after all the raucous questions, a rumour lingers, haunting the land, circulating a hiss of whispers. In the city’s bursting funeral parlours the corpses glow at night, a nimbus of blue acetylene burning the darkness under the roof, lighting up the windows—crunch of bone and sinew as a foot curls slowly into a cloven hoof. To keep the awful secret, they are buried in their boots but under the leather the light still glows, even as coarse, animal hair begins to bristle around the ankles, to sprout along the shins.

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CHAPTER ONE Next door in guinea grass he trampled down a bed under a gawky lignum vitae tree, its crown knotted with perky purple blossoms like the silk bows in Nellie Simpson’s head when she was dressed for church, and there, lying on his back, sucking a sweet stalk, dizzy with delight, he felt the sky tilt as the sun singed a cloud shaped like his island home, a flight of ardent butterflies jerking yellow triangles through his eyes. Not even Nellie would dare invade this hiding place, too terrified of lizards. At seventeen, nubile Nellie was seven years his senior, trainee domestic, hired to bathe him in a portable tin tub moored daily on the lawn. In public she used a porous strainer pod to scrub his arms and back but when they were alone her black fingers roamed his private parts exciting them with predatory glee into a generous lather of carbolic soap. She squinted through a right eye permanently

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cast to starboard in an unnavigable sea of sideways glances—arrogant or frolicsome he was never sure. It was confusion, fuss, that urged him to his exclusive grass asylum, welcomed inside the boundaries of a vacant lot where the shape of leaves was sharp and clear against a candid sky, where he could grasp the heft and larger sense of argument, dream, forecast his destined role in some supreme adventure which might demand a final martyrdom. Crisis starched those years of his upbringing, Hitler and Bustamante names that reverberated through his house built three feet above the ground. The lower walls were decorated with a random screed of octagons etched in brown, the verandah three steps up, polished to a garish red, the garden beds dense with decaying cannas. When classes at his school were suddenly dismissed, the boys sent home, he had hopped a tram and on the lurching ride down South Camp road the image of sweating, red-faced soldiers, eyes doped with heat, packing sandbags beside the tram tracks, flashed like a movie sequence between the holding posts, froze and hardened into memory— incredible phenomenon of white men labouring

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in public. That night his father paced the verandah deep in the rhetoric of rum. “Traitor! Traitor!” he shouted to the cannas, “Taking unfair advantage of the war ... England’s back against the wall ... the Governor should throw Busta’s ass in jail.” Except for that sequestered, guinea-grass garden of Eden he called his own, kingdom of make-believe and dreams, evil seemed to be seeping under the skin of the world. He would take Holy Orders, become a priest whose worthy hands would lift the host, whose lips would preach repentance and salvation—especially for Nellie Simpson who would surely need it most. “Adam Cole, Adam Cole,” a woman’s voice was calling at once cajoling, urgent and commanding, so he sneaked back home, resigned to Nellie’s patronage, a sweet breeze still blowing steady from the sea.

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CHAPTER TWO Late afternoons, the shortwave GE radio with round shoulders and satin fretwork face crackled with news of war ; the Hood sunk, Coventry devastated. The hectic pace of Kingston slowed, then stalled as German submarines picketed the peaceful Caribbean sea, sinking so many tankers the flow of oil and gasolene gurgled to a trickle—meshing gears, honking horns, the swish of motorcar tyres silenced, chassis dismantled, cars converted to coaches fitted with shafts to be drawn by horses. He lost his lot to a Victory garden latticed with fences for chickens and goats, turkeys and ducklings ; forked and manured for pumpkins and peppers, dasheen and corn but a sweet breeze still blew steady from the sea. At night, the calico air-raid curtains drawn, the stars blazed brighter and the moon smiled down. He felt the sparse face and crotch hairs begin to thicken, his heated imagination nudge the elusive edge of mysteries, the quest for answers quicken.

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His German uncle, married to his mother’s sister, has swapped the Alster for the Rio Cobre a decade before a shrill, frenetic voice proclaimed to his people Deutschland über alles and betrayed their trust. Uncle Johann traded in cutlery and heavy Bavarian crystal. When he spoke spittle foamed at the corners of his chiselled mouth, the gutturals his tongue could not forget exploding little bubbles on his lips. He was at peace in Portland with his Jamaican wife but sometimes, before the bastinado of the barking dogs at dawn, he seemed to hear a fist pounding on a Berlin door, a squad goose-stepping down a cobbled cul-de-sac, a victim’s muffled sobbing and, loudest of all, the silence of citizens whose time had not yet come, an ancient Jew butting a wailing wall. The regimental major who served the detention order addressed Johann in stilted, high school German, allowed him an hour to pack and say good-bye, saluted his wife and waited for him in the garden. They took him to a camp within a camp in Kingston, huts stranded behind barbed wire fences, ordered to cinch for the duration aliens and rabble-rousers, unpatriotic labour agitators. He shared

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a hut and chores with Bustamante. The labour leader cooked for the camp and the exiled German merchant washed up cups and plates he had sold before the war at bargain prices to a nervous adjutant. Ironies thrived like weeds inside the camp and in Adam Cole’s confused and questing mind. How to tell a good Hun from a bad Hun— that was the day’s conundrum chasing round inside his brain. He rode his Hercules bike into the camp. The fusilier, bored, indulgent, allowed him to park beside the knuckled fence, a crimson sun setting at his back, the cantonment filling up with khaki shadows. He whistled for Johann but Busta came instead, striding across the deserted compound, hair electrified, on end, cotton shirt unbuttoned to the waist. Through a loose

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strand of wire he took the boy’s hand in his, sleeves rolled half-way to the elbows. His cheeks glowed a creamy, custard-apple pink. Adam kicked a tyre of his bike, in a low voice blurted the crucial question. “Do you think my uncle is a German spy?” Busta gauged the boy’s discomfort. “The governor is a racist and a rascal. When I am out of here he will be obliged

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to deal with me. We will all be free soon, this foolish war soon done, swords beaten into ploughshares. You know what is a ploughshare, boy? It is...” His words trailed to a sudden, meditative hum. “I will fetch Johann now,”— a slight bow, the lilting sound of fetch courtly and old fashioned. He watched his uncle cross the compound dressed in striped pyjamas, each step deliberate. Was he trying to make some awkward, stubborn Germanic statement? “I was sleeping,” he explained and lit a cigarette. Adam asked diffidently, “What do you think of Busta?” trying

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to keep a casual tone. “Oh, I like him, glad to have him in my hut. And he is smart, no dummkopfesel, ya,” the spittle bubbling on his lips. “A lot of boasting but a good heart. And a moneylender, a usurer, did you know? When he gets out, he will buy a big American car— a Buick he tells me, paid from union funds, of course. Oh, I am sure he’ll go far.” “And Hitler? How could such a man grab power?” Johann’s eyes squinted into the setting sun. “We Germans have a fatal knack for choosing leaders we blindly follow even to our own destruction.”

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Blindly—the word landed on a branch of Adam’s brain like a homing pigeon returning with a coded message. He wore glasses, understood the loss of sight— the slow, imperceptible but final blurring of a page, a dénouement disguised, so skilfully delayed none could predict the sad ending, an entire generation of Germans tapping white canes down Friedrichstrasse, yoked like oxen together,

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ten abreast. Gingerly Adam traced a finger over a strand of the fence, the same barbed wire perhaps that coiled its silver fists from Belsen to the huts on South Camp road, a grim foreboding that perhaps history was crafting a script for degradation, a dictatorship yet to come. The guard stirred, signalled it was time to go. Confused, Adam waved good-bye and pedalled home.

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CHAPTER THREE Nathan came scampering barefoot down the road from Silver Hill to serve as groom and gardener in Adam’s home, the odour of mildew and mist still on his skin, glad to desert a grandmother

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whom he loved all the same since his mother was dead, his father only a name. His smile was seraphic, his eyes a biblical bright but his tongue for a promising prophet 215 was flawed, stammering on words beginning with ‘S’— all other letters navigated with ease. The boy and the groom soon bonded like brothers, dauphin prince and companion of honour. In the back yard after supper they climbed a guango tree, their hallowed hiding place. 220 There, limb lifted high in the slingshot handle of a branch, they curled their toes into the skin of the bark, concelebrating cigarettes and secrets, negotiating lenient pardon for their mortal sins. One late afternoon without plans or compass they ventured on a camping trip, meandering vaguely north of the city until, disheartened by darkness, excitement blunted by hunger, they crept surreptitiously

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into a vacant porte-cochere and there fell into a hard sleep. They were gently shaken awake the following morning by the lady of the house. She lectured them on the sin of trespass but as token of forgiveness offered freshly brewed Blue Mountain coffee and scrambled eggs served on the porch, white prince, black cavalier, an ageing mulatto widow, assorted servants in the kitchen—all at peace with the place, plot and muddled history of themselves, each sharing a moiety of the boys’ unfolding adventure. That year the Gleaner reported only one murder— a lover shot by a jilted Cuban barber.

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By noon they stood on top of a mountain, toes on the brink of a valley scooping out the blue bowl of its descent into the sea, in the distance, Mount Fancy shimmering silver, symmetrical as Fuji, a shawl of mist draped over her shoulder. Nathan’s grandmother lived in a shack built when she was young by a man who one day stumbled down the hill and vanished in a cane field. Its thin walls were flung

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clay on wattle mixed with cow’s dung that hardened like cement, smoothed, plumbed and whitewashed 250 with temper lime. The door and window were hinged with strips of tyre rubber, the roof thatched.

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Nathan hugged her. “This is Mr. s s son. He have a s s strong desire to s s see where I was born.” Adam’s eyes adjusted to the inside dark ; on the same wall a picture of Queen Victoria and a forlorn Jesus, chest dissected to expose a heart shot through with arrows of light. The house lizard cringed in a crooked corner ashamed of poverty as dense as this, the woman unable to afford

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toilet paper for the outside pit latrine, obliged to head her drinking water up the hill from a stream two miles away, bucket roofed with cocoa and banana leaves to stop a spill. O green god of lizards, from the stale remnants of a shabby life like this what is left for me to share? The gecko shivered, slithered closer, head cocked to overhear their stilted, desultory conversation—would Nathan learn a trade, return to finish school? Adam announced he had won a scholarship to Oxford, would ship out shortly. Victoria smiled smugly. The prophet winced. “Will you s s stay there long?” eyes cast down, head bowed. “Five years perhaps.” The lizard resenting sacrifice without reward gazed at Mount Fancy, understood why God had made the land his masterpiece

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to compensate for the utter desolation of its people. Divine justice of a special sort! Contrite, the lizard fled. Fog stuck its tongue into the socket of the sun, short-circuiting the light.

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CHAPTER FOUR Busta as Prime Minister possessed all the power he wished, power that bubbled and fizzed like the champagne toasts he lifted in fluted glasses at the Myrtle Bank hotel or the Cumberland in London, his base abroad, host there to the British press, decked out in striped trousers and morning coat, pressing his claim for colonial compensation. The Brits offered Up Park camp— ex gratia gesture forestalling future blame

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for occupation. He returned in triumph to the island, greeted 289 by cheering crowds. But there were those who thought self-government small beer, convinced that partial freedom only whet a thirst for total sovereignty, an independent land destined to redeem the Middle Passage ; thereafter a grand alliance of West Indian states sharing black blood and blighted history, the palm tree architecture of a dream, hubris skulking at the gate. For all his flamboyant love of shine and show, his was a simple vision—to increase his people’s daily bread, to match hope and fulfilment in the intimate adventures of their hapless lives. The formal

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drafting of a country’s final constitution was not his focus. His barrister cousin, Manley, erudite, would argue for the Opposition ; a Jew, his party’s nominee— both Oxford trained in law, one brown, one white. The vested barrister chain-smoked Gold Flake cigarettes, the Jew sucking on a meerschaum pipe, flights of rhetoric going up in smoke, blending, separating ; the hub of their disagreement—a Bill of Rights. The Jew, under Sieg Heil reverberations of a war that haunted his conscience, envisioned smoke still seeping from glowing Belsen ovens, sniffed the feculence of slowly burning flesh, heard the weeping of his suffering people, believed that citizens deserved protection from the State, safe behind a shield of human rights, subject only to the living God. The barrister, a closet atheist, refused to yield that argument. Final power, he demanded, must rest in those freely elected by the people, the anointed few in a parliament sovereign, supreme, infallible. “A Westminster dictatorship,” the worried Jew insisted. After the deadlocked session, they relaxed at home— Manley listening to Mahler’s 9th, emotions he endorsed but never could express in words ; the Jew deep in his comic book collection, simple sermons

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to counterbalance the quillets and quibbles of the law. He consulted Busta at his Tucker Avenue address, gusts of breeze from the Wareika hills fidgeting with smoke from his pipe, in the background, Gladys, his beloved, who checked his spelling and warmed his bed. Busta paced the verandah. “I tell you in confidence, Mr Hoover of the FBI send me a message concerning the Black Power sickness in America, a dose of which is now infecting us. Young Claudius Henry spending all his old man’s money to stir up revolution here, training insurrectionists in these same hills and in Montego Bay. There is information

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from my chaps at Special Branch their plot is about to ripen. But before they strike, they will be charged with treason. I support Manley on the Constitution.” He hugged the Jew. 339 “You must eat more carrots, friend. They will improve your vision.”

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CHAPTER FIVE Tony Blake, a/k/a/ the “Frog”, wild white ruffian from Montego Bay, croaked about his hairy escapades in World War II. In Jacksonville I got good and sailor crocked, missed my ship by a day, was arrested for desertion. 345 The judge not joking, sentence me to death—grease monkey on a rusting convoy tanker making for Murmansk, one of fifteen full of fuel, ready to ignite if you so much as light a fag. Eight nervous weeks at sea, Jerry submarines roiling like sharks for the kill. But God watch over the naturally wicked, don’t want us messing up his clean

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headquarters. At dusk we drop anchor in that strange harbour. But more bad news. No shore leave ; after two dry months at sea, no poo—see. 355 I bribe a craven Russian roustabout to steer to a camouflaged, deserted dock, return trip to the ship arranged for first light. Everywhere on earth whores are the same, smile and smell the same, cost the same. But I get my roubles worth.

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One problem, though. While I was changing oil, the Germans bomb the fleet, a hundred pounder down the stack, my boat and buddies blown to smithereens, lucky me the only survivor. The Frog’s lower lids hung down like sagging hammocks, 365 eyes bulging like glass marbles. His wife, a buxom, skin-bleached browning, never stopped applauding the moral of his fable—the wages of sin is life! His business now was commercial cold storage for rent. Two ancient compressors kept the compartments below freezing, pipes wrapped in asbestos leaking ammonia, wheezing gauges writing their diaries in a slow scrawl across a recording graph. Checked by customs at the gate, cargo trickled into the warehouse, no taxes or duties paid until withdrawal—mutton, cod and pickled herring. That Christmas eve one compressor died, the walls wept, red lights blinked, the produce thawed. On Boxing Day he stood alone among the dripping crates and counted his losses. He cracked a case open and found inside a snapper stuffed with cocaine in a plastic pack, eyes bulging in astonishment like his. “Don’t think of phoning the police,” Nathan whispered at his back,

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a Beretta in his gloved hand pressed against the Frog’s cold storage coat. “Nice operation!” he croaked, hands in the air. “Why don’t we talk?” Nathan relaxed the pressure, lowered the gun.

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“S S Since we are partners now, you entitled to your s s share.” And what had been marginal, ramshackle and tawdry before, 390 thrived like bougainvillea blooming to full abundance in drought, overflowing, enough becoming more. The Frog bought new compressors, relagged his conscience and his pipes, bought his wife a white Mercedes and a San San villa. His views on crime were canvassed 395 by the Chamber of Commerce and other civic bodies. Nathan, his senior partner, like a mongoose, kept a low profile, breeding drug distribution cells across the island, in Miami, New York, Atlanta, Toronto, London, demanding from his minions

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strict allegiance, eyes and guns blazing when he was crossed. Because of his stammer he seldom spoke, retreated often to his Silver Hill land where, if he lived, he hoped to build a home with a view of the valley. A tree fern tendril curled a warning on his cheek. A bird’s two-note song soared then faded to an elegy in the evening fog. The memory of Adam tasted like mildew on his tongue.

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CHAPTER SIX Stoop-shouldered Adam Cole, M.A. (Oxon.), The Jamaica Daily Tribune’s star reporter, tracker of scandals and corruption in high places, crunched the keys of his dilapidated typewriter, index fingered 8 and summoned the copy boy. The story of his life curled in words over the rolling horizon of the typewriter’s pitted carriage— a pilgrimage from loneliness and the green shelter of guinea grass where he evaded Nellie’s advances, from Oxford’s mildewed digs and gaseous dinners into the urgent surge of Amber Lee’s tsunami. It had swirled into the shallow harbour

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of his heart swamping it, scouring away his crumbling Catholic guilt. He discovered that power in compression was stronger than power squandered and his minute oriental flower glowed with hoarded passion. But trust once earned, she offered her tiny body with explosive verve and wit. “Chinese girls are not inscrutable or insurmountable as you might think.” She unbuttoned her blouse. The pale pearl

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buds of her breasts blossomed to flowers at his touch. At Llandovery they discovered a deserted, crescent beach curved between the cantle of two embracing headland arms and in that swirling mesh

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of foam lust drained away, love flooded in. A lecturer in English, she shared with him a conjugal love of words, the spice that inflamed their marriage, 435 and the words made flesh—a daughter they named Chantal. It had been a perilous, wrenching birth, a desperate foetal struggle. Amber Lee survived, numb in body and soul and although another miracle was possible she sealed forever the reliquary of her womb.

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Chantal, their jewel, advanced in wisdom, age and grace, falling in her turn under the spell of words. They bubbled early on her lips, talismans she cherished to ward off evil and foretell the future. But words she learned were victims too ... 445 words uncapped by Adam’s father from a quart of rum, the slurred ‘L’s falling forward with each splash ; Amber Lee’s father in the backroom of the shop with his chums cupping mahjong tiles, the hee, hing, ho of village conversations filtering through their nostrils in a staccato screech that set her teeth on edge ; words debased by politicians, their guile

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disguised as wisdom, truth stumbling in a fog of propaganda. Adam’s words, crisply crafted on the Tribune’s pages, poised there to excoriate corruption and deceit, were blunted by outdated libel laws, a Minister of Security and Justice, more sanctimonious than the church, piously proclaiming, “If you have credible legal evidence, turn it over to the police. Otherwise stop the naming.”

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A pensive Adam lounged on his verandah, the awning raised like an eyelid afraid to blink. The lights below seemed to be torches held up by savages ready to creep forward if the eyelid lowered. The night waited nervously to end. All was flat, before him the lip of the sky and the lip of the sea zip-locked at the horizon. He felt the mountain at his back, hunched like a vulture, shifting its mass to be

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a witness to whatever happened ; a prayer half-uttered, sliced in two by an avenging knife hurled 470 in the dark ; affirmation choked off at the very thought of it ; dread contaminating the end days of the world. The phone rang and words, words heavy with doom sunk into Adam’s brain—Chantal raped 474 on the grounds of the Immaculate Conception school, the silver cross, a present for her fifteenth birthday, ripped

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from her neck. Sergeant Alexander replaced the receiver. He had no child. The horror of rape was in his head, not his heart. Even before the boy was caught and charged, he understood the motive—a sin

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of ignorance as much as lust ; the black penis contaminated, oozing yellow pus thick with the sick conviction only sex with a virgin could cure a dose of clap. Silence was quick to suck all sense from words—poor, dumb defenceless words! Down a long sombre corridor he kept hearing the echo of heavy doors thud shut, one closed door after another.

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Amber would immediately take the child to Canada. All men were vile. He could join them or stay as he pleased. 490 God refused all explanations. Thud! Unidentified, the boy was acquitted and released. Now when he turned his new computer on, Chantal’s face floated from nowhere to fill 494 the amnesia of the screen, the presence of her absence haunting his conscience, reinforcing the final defiance of his will. As the social fabric of the island shredded, the scourge of words spurred Adam on. He ventured where no reporter had dared to go before, lurking in shadows, turning over rocks. He nurtured

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informers like seeds in the garden of his contacts, watered and fed them well for information, lies exposed by cross-examination. Wounded politicians raged but The Jamaica Daily Tribune’s readership increased. Gunmen recruited by the Party to do its dirty work were redundant now in post-election truce. They demanded employment or severance pay. Still solvent with guns, they accepted an army invitation to rendezvous in first light at the Green Bay firing range for special training and possible reemployment. Bunched in clusters like moving targets on the range, gullible, they did not see the shadow of a machine-gun crouched behind a hill, ready to settle accounts, one bullet from the rotating ammunition loop for each year of service. Only one escaped the massacre into Adam’s sanctuary, a special Tribune scoop. Or the story of a street named for an orange, flames writhing in Red Stripe bottles flung into tenement houses, spewing gasoline, wicks borrowed from Home Sweet Home lamps, orange tongues preaching the brimstone sermon, “Vote for us or else ...” Snipers hid in the smoke picking off old mash-mouthed women crawling in the gutters to escape. Water pressure in the rusty hydrants was not enough

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to cope with the inferno. Adam watched the wounded piled 525 head to toe in handcarts, hurried to hospital, their rings and radios, shoes and mementoes looted, the voiceless, uncomplaining dead cremated where they fell. The Tribune editor stormed his office. “There goes freedom of the press. The administration has put newprint on official Government quota. One more of your hard-hitting, scabrous articles, we close the plant.”

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CHAPTER SEVEN Trailing a cloud of marl, whiter even than his skin, Spencer swung his Land Rover chariot down the rutted estate road flanked to the horizon with field after green field of servile sugar-cane rooted for centuries in this rich ancestral soil, bowing now to their stale-drunk master. Last night’s liquor still brewed in his gut, his lawyer’s ominous dicta spinning in his head, confusing retreat and honour.

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“You have a little power because you’re rich. But politicians are richer because they have more power. I tell you, friend, the crows have now outbred the swans and rule the roost. Strutting the upper perch, they dye their feathers, preening like peacocks in a parliament of fowls and fools. King Crow holds sway in such a cock-a-doodle of adulation, so stupefied with the banality of what he has to say, he’s forgotten how to fly.” He waved his cigar. “Time for palaver over. We must put a stop to this black orgy of retribution before they confiscate our foreign assets and bank accounts, swap

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our land for useless bonds, throw us in jail.” Spencer had sighed, sloshed another brandy. “Fuck ’em. You worry too damn much! Join us 555 tomorrow at the beach house for a drunk-up, week-end party.” Villa Spencer was bred by British Architectural Digest out of American House Beautiful, back-issues of which together with Playboy were scattered through lecherous bedrooms and stacked on the tops of toilet tanks to enrich 560 the leisure reading of guests. The villa sparkled from the top of a knoll overlooking the bay, lawns cascading down to the beach, pink and green umbrellas, striped towels, white chaise longues composing themselves into a Raoul Dufy painting. Light shards glinted from ackee and breadfruit leaves, from pimento bark, eucalyptus and royal palms but under the orchard of twisted almond trees a brown shade settled, so profound it frightened children. Spencer’s Range Rover was first to arrive, greeted by Bevin, the butler, kept busy unpacking Benzes as they pulled in. A mountain boy, he hated being near the sea, feared it, never learned to swim. But even after Independence he was proud to wear the Spencer livery—white shirt, black tie, black shoes, shiny black pants and, for the proper atmosphere,

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white gloves at meals. Back at the estate Great House during his apprenticeship, he was an eager polisher of family plate and silver shipped to the island two hundred years ago, all trace of smear

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shined off with chamois dipped in Goddard cleaner. On Sundays he would stroll among the parked tractors that hauled the cane carts, awesome even at rest— his earnest dream, promotion to the pool of drivers. On this Sunday, Spencer, his wife and guests hunkered in the tepid water at the lawn’s edge, Bevin with a tray of gin and tonics pacing the beach, mine host cajoling, “You need a nudge? Can’t you see we thirsty, boy?” Bevin prayed for a brave heart but God was hard of hearing. Slowly the water seeped into his shoes, circles of damp clamping his ankles, trousers sticking to his shins. They lured him deeper in, laughter gushing at his knees, the sea chucking his chin. Then Spencer relented, grabbed the tray and spun him spluttering back to land, back to a dry skin. “Sorry you watch spoil, boy,” Spencer slurred at dinner, throwing a wad of dollars at his feet. A gloved hand cupped the reward as Bevin bowed, long practiced in the liturgy of retreat.

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The next afternoon, Spencer’s wife, bare breasted, scampering from sun deck to her room, bucked him up, paused to flutter white fingers down his arm. “We were drunk. A joke. No harm intended,” the nap of her contrition unruffled, her smile benign. She sauntered off into the setting sun, the sea’s silver slowly tarnishing to red. The taut, unbroken line of the horizon was thin as the lip of his machete that trimmed the hedge outside her window, now the burning bush that had singed the arm she touched. Time longer than rope, he thought, the tide turning.

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CHAPTER EIGHT Plain, plump Millicent never married, had no offspring of her own, founded the Hope infant school instead, where daily on the verandah of the house inherited from her father she tried to cope with thirty children, greeting each morning with joy, the Jamaican sun camouflaging the city’s swill, warming the hovels in an ochre glow. But by noon in that unrelenting, flat light her will

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faltered. She imagined maggots in the body politic multiplying, could hear their rule of sum. Star-apple blossoms wilted at the edges, bruised and brown. She prayed divine intercession for her people split into warring tribes by scheming politicians parting the Red Sea, the promised land littered with stones for bread, baskets to carry dirty water, vinegar on demand. Noel Thomas, her much beloved nephew from Linstead, first-year medical student at Mona who boarded with her in term, tried to explain the blight but concepts like kick-backs were alien to her offended

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Baptist conscience. “There are still good people here,” she insisted. “God will not be ignored or mocked.” But God demanded of her even greater faith to cope with Noel’s sudden illness—blocked kidneys beyond dialysis, his only hope a transplant from some congruent and courageous donor. Aunt Millicent volunteered at once, grateful for the chance to prolong young life, determined to ignore

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all warnings and objections. The tests confirmed a match, the medical team conferred, the risk approved. “Into your hands I commend my spirit, Lord!” The surgeon signalled he was ready, lifted a gloved hand, nodded to the nurse and raised the scalpel. An hour later, at a crucial stage, the power failed and the stand-by generator, under-specified by an unscrupulous, unqualified contractor,

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fouled a valve, spluttered and refused to start. Millicent died. Noel survived. Word 650 of the death confused her school. “Who shot her?” the children asked, expecting a tale they often heard repeated by a bored voice on radio and TV. They cried because their teachers cried. Noel wept his eulogy in the deserted private ward, his face reflected in the water of the basin beside

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her empty bed, the image shattered by his sobs. And the October rain fell in little shovels softening the soil, helping to dig her grave. Out of the morphine mist, the sad vowels of her last invocation rang in his ears. “Lord, send them your son, a Messiah, to redress their sins, to lead them out of slavery a second time into the promised land of righteousness.”

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CHAPTER NINE Senior Inspector Alexander of the Jamaican Constabulary endorsed with stern conviction zero tolerance as his creed, despite the heavy-lidded judges nodding on their benches, the slick defence attorneys, the entire breed of bleeding liberals bleating about human rights. He dealt with savages who used acid to erase a woman’s face ; Anancy selling the same land twice ; the shifty-eyed slime (worst of his cases) who raped a half-Chiney gal coming home from school. For a cop, his face was misleading, light-skinned, blushing too easily, a nervous smile agitating his lips always on the verge of combusting to giggles, beguiling the anger caged in his chest. When the Prime Minister ordered his presence, he was again that boy who cringed before the headmaster, pants down. After the beating came the consoling embrace, justice avenged

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but the discarded switch on the ground still seemed to entwine him like a snake. Then the memory spool ran out of tape. He knew he was a sinner who deserved to be punished as did all the ungodly malefactors who dared to shout

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blasphemies in the ears of the world. The PM flipped the pages of the Inspector’s file. “Unmarried, I see. In the circumstances of this meeting I welcome that fact. We are facing a crisis of crime and violence. The country

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is under siege from gunmen and Dons,” he smiled, “yes, some political I admit. But as an engineer 690 I conclude that a countervailing force is necessary, an anti-crime unit under your command. Wipe them out, Alexander!” The Prime Minister sighed. “You will have my total support. Is that clear?” The Inspector blushed and flashed a salute that disguised his involuntary grin. Not every man 695 was privileged to serve both God and the State, resolute to rid one corner of the world from the curse of sin. So in that afternoon’s hot, anointing glare history enlisted the man to change its course. He swapped tunic for balaclava and bandolier,

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merino for orange Kevlar vest, swagger-stick for M-16. The other members of his team he sniffed out and sorted by instinct, like-minded fanatics, hungry for power and glory, committed to a regime of summary executions, the rule of law suspended. 705 Victims were lined up and shot at close range, powder burns like Lenten ashes smudging the holes in their foreheads, tossed in a Jeep, hands hanging over the stern,

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fingers writing in blood the tale of their dying. The wailing of women rose like smoke from the burning of tyres blocking the roads, curling into the ears of Amnesty International in London, Adam detailing

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in the Tribune each murderous spree. “Alexander the Mad”, he dubbed the Inspector but he was deaf to public opinion. After each sortie, cleaning his weapon, he turned 715 his eyes to the ring of mountains that guarded Kingston and saw them flex their muscles in satisfaction, their chests expanding with pride. That Sunday he raided a yard and his zeal was rewarded. A ghetto youth suspected of dealing in coke was caught in his bed

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in bright boxer shorts. Hand-cuffed, down on his knees in the dirt at the back of the shack, he implored, “In the name of Jesus, I beg you don’t shoot me,” face angled up to the morning sky, a dog barking its claim as an only witness. The boy’s muscles were smooth under a glaze of sweat. A swimmer, the Inspector concluded, the flat plane of the chest narrowing to a girl’s waist. His gaze caressed the contours of the youth’s shoulders and arms. In his head, the tape of the headmaster spooled to a stop but the switch was still on so over and over it flapped. His lips dry, a bulge blooming in his crotch,

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he stood, legs apart, looking into the upturned face, the eyes for an instant igniting, implying a shared secret. He pulled the trigger and giggled, blood blurring his balaclava, a covenant of silence declared. Back home, he fell on his knees as the boy had done and tears tickled the corners of his mouth as he tasted the salt of his sins but he prayed in thanksgiving that God had granted him strength to finish his mission. Exhausted,

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he fell into a dreamless sleep without cleaning his gun. But it happened the dog in fact was not the only witness. Ghetto eyes and a camera peeked out of a window recording the drama and Adam reported the story in the Trib. The public demanded a Coroner’s inquest. Like the sun breaking from behind a cloud, conjecture gave way to the dawning and details of truth and the mood of the country gradually turned against the Inspector.

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The Prime Minister reneged on his promise of support, convened a committee to review the use of excessive force 750 by the anti-crime squad. Before the members could meet to consider the matter, the Senior Inspector, in the course of his duties, set up a strike but neglected to wear his Kevlar vest and, keeping his hands at his sides, stepped from the cover of buildings and trees and the love of his men into the court where Judgement abides,

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into an arching of bullets that twisted and turned him and silenced forever the pitch of his giggle. His cry for remission of sins was drowned by the fusillade’s fury as he lay on his back in the clearing smiling up at the sky. The PM aborted the finessing committee and ordered an official funeral for the fallen hero instead but as Adam had warned the Alexander virus infected the Force and God only knew how fast it would spread.

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CHAPTER TEN Tony ‘the Frog’ Blake, front man for Nathan, 765 a gentleman now by official citation, hosted his annual Christmas party on the lawns of ‘Cold Shoulder’, so named to honour his humble beginnings, about which he boasted with undisguised delight, three hundred guests milling under the cut-glass glow of chandeliers strung on the branches of trees to reflect the flaunting of silver and gold, pearls overcultured by far, hung on middle-class bosoms cavalierly exposed. Leapfrogging between politicians, sycophants, cynics and friends, the Frog rasped his welcomes, bussing the ladies, bear-hugging the men, champagne glass in hand. Dr Noel Thomas, paediatrician, mingled bored and bemused among the glitterati, uncertain whether his single kidney could cope with social stress at this pitch, shocked by the tit-for-tat of cocktail banter. A woman laughed and clapped her thigh. Class was the yeast that caused the social cake to rise. These new Jamaican women from the middle layer of the exotic mix were more intuitively at ease

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with power than their profiling men, more sensual than Cleopatra. Comfortably at home in the castle of his black skin, the tribal spoils of party hacks and hangers-on stirred neither envy nor racial pride in the doctor. In his world, the children he helped survive slept four in a bed, sailed paper ships in dirty gutter water, rolled iron hoops down pot-holed lanes, failed

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their exams but learned to shoot guns at twelve, by twenty were dead. When he raised a prayer to his aunt, the teacher, now in her glory, she refused to grant him even 795 the consolation of despair. It was her healing fingers that guided his when he poked a child’s distended belly, pulled down the lids of jaundiced eyes. It was her smile that calmed the whimpers, her donated kidney that purged his impurities cleaner than dialysis.

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General McPherson, head of the Jamaican army, perhaps the world’s only serving career officer with an osteoporotic stoop, managed to salute Dr Thomas. Bent over like a question-mark, he seemed the listener always in any conversation. His ancestor was a book-keeper 805 from Scotland who had come to set the record straight at Worthy Park estate, embraced an ex-slave woman whose African genes were stronger than his to actuate

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the colour of his children’s skin. “Such a waste of energy, this,” the General gestured, his speech split between a Sandhurst accent and his natural lilt. “Will explode, mark my words. Nature abhors a surfeit.” The military attaché at the U.S. Embassy shook the General’s hand, remarked, “Glad to see you enjoying some rest and recreation,” an Alabama drawl disguising his CIA credentials, a spew of medals dripped down his chest frankly proclaiming Washington’s interest in the island. The State Department valued his dispatches based on information discreetly gathered, some from the General himself, sent

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as an earnest of cooperation, a signal of his own concerns. “Who is that genuflecting to the Prime Minister?” the diplomat asked. “One of our professors who yearns to have patois declared our official language, standard English cut from the curriculum, expunged from our textbooks. He insists that when the Prime Minister pays a visit to your President to beg for money he should speak only in patois—a new meaning to lending a deaf ear.”

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Spencer, tall, aristocratic, in from the country for the fete, dusty and hot from the drive, quenched 830 his thirst with a brandy, acknowledging the greetings of friends, embracing his favourites. A Minister who regularly lunched

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at the Great House and left with a thick envelope for dessert shook hands. “I can’t believe that boy, the butler, tried to rape your wife. Thank God you heard her screams 835 and shot the son of a bitch before he could hurt her. Damn nonsense holding a Coroner’s inquest. Your word against a maid. But not to worry. I’ll speak with the police.” Spencer patted his thanks on the Minister’s shoulder, winked and reminded, “Roast pork for lunch next week.” 840 The Tribune reporter tugged the doctor’s sleeve. “Blake has collapsed,” he whispered. “Come quickly, please.” Noel saw the body sprawled on the verandah, a blue nimbus around the lips, a pulse still ticking in the thick neck. The doctor knelt, opened the mouth, and like a black God inspirited the breath of life into the inert sack of crumpled linen. The eyes opened, the outspread fingers collected into a steeple on his chest. Mistaking the reporter for a priest, he prayed : “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned ...” The confession burbled out like vomit, Adam Cole, the reporter, leaning closer so as not to miss a name, a place, a date. The dying declaration, exception to the hearsay rule, spooled to a stop. A curious crowd clustered at a respectful distance and already the hysteric wail

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of a siren was splitting the air. In the ambulance, the doctor, the Tribune reporter and the wife rode with Blake to the hospital but God, swayed by such a rare contribution even the devil could not shake, 860 decided this was the gangster’s finest hour, his best chance to hear the welcoming blast of heavenly trumpets and angels singing. A providential clot churned through his brain. The Frog croaked his last.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN Smoke of remembrance curled into Blaka’s eyes, floating him back to his boyhood ; village girls hand-washing 866 their blouses in the river naked from the waist, breasts bouncing, squishing water through their fists, laughing at him, trying to make him break a smile ; on a shelf in the kitchen at home, a demijohn of water and eggs piled high in a yabba, his mother so distrustful of the neighbours, each day she pushed a finger up the fowls to check the egg count before they laid. But Blaka was the culprit using a pin to prick a hole, then sucking them clean. She caught him one day, grabbed a tamarind switch and tore the shirt from his back. “Mamma I sorry” (whumm). “Boy, sorry is not enough (whumm, whumm). If you bad the Bible say spare the rod and spoil the child. It not easy to love but as God

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is my judge you will thank me for this beating (whumm, whumm).” The sermons and whippings increased, each sin reprimanded by a new barrage until one morning her raised arm froze in the air, her heart exploded.

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So, a grown man now, when the baby mother 885 kept ranting, “Blaka, you is a wutless nayga,” he brandished his machete to silence the sermons in his head, chopped a red wedge from her neck and when a neighbour knocked, he fled his village for a Kingston inner-city ghetto. There a woman organizer 890 for the Party by the name of ‘Squint-Eye Nellie’ slipped him a gun, commissioned him as chief political enforcer of bogus voting and the doling out of tribal spoils to party faithfuls. After the bloody intimacy of a sharp machete, the gun was easy—clean, swift, distant but deadly,

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between the pulling of the trigger and the stagger of the other only a slight warming of the palm, a cordite O smiling at him from the muzzle of the Glock. He served Squint-Eye Nellie with distinction, friend and foe, 900 fear and favour balanced in a jurisprudence the people understood and politicians sponsored, the lesson of the gun in one ear and out the other ; Blaka bent to such enforcement, still his mother’s son. Then one day, like a boy alone in a field kicking over stones, disconsolate, he found religion— a buried golden coin he lifted gingerly into the corroded bezel of his heart. The conviction—

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sudden, utter, unshakeable—that he was doomed numbed his shooting arm, misted his eyes. It was as if his mother, at the other end of the field, kept calling his name, cajoling him to confess his sins,

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not his mother in the flesh but Adam, her surrogate, who would take him in and grant him absolution for repented crimes. The new informer’s confession filled 915 two spiral notebooks : Russian fishermen who traded AK-47s for ganja ; bribes and bullets by the Colombian cartel clearing safe passage north for the White Lady ; the world flushing its jails of Jamaican gangsters, a new rage

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infecting the fight for turf back home in Kingston ; Nellie nervously bracing her corner against invasion. “Have Frightened Politicians Lost Control of Dons?” the reporter headlined in the Trib, to the Party’s consternation, a worried Prime Minister contemplating new elections. 925 Adam speculated that Nellie, under pressure, might surrender to the blandishments of the cartel, become an acolyte swinging coke instead of incense in her censer. Blaka warned Adam, “This Nellie woman dangerous.” He nodded agreement, remembering the eager pull of fingers in the water of the yellow tub, the warning fidget of a black fist against his balls.

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She had swapped sex for power as he had traded distraught wife and violated child for the holier companionship of words, words slowly turning to ashes as the passion and the purpose both grew colder. Then one unscheduled night during a raucous assault by rain upon the house, Blaka, the informer tapped on a window, face to glass, cold lips dripping with wet warnings of impending danger.

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“Flee, Mr Adam, flee. Them buy a contract on your life. Fly to Miami in the morning or else you dead.” “Nellie perhaps?” “No, not she. Them say before him die the Frog confess and you was there, write down the runnings and the names. Maybe the Frog’s people buying silence. Blood cheaper than drugs.” “Thanks for the warning, friend.” Damp stained the carpet where a dripping Blaka had stood.

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The following day, the air rinsed of dust 949 by the rain, the morning broke clean and clear. Leaves shone, shadows and highlights were sharp at the edges, the mountains towelled off, turning their flanks to the sun. By the side of the road at Mount Diablo’s crest, under a plastic tarp, they found his body stuffed in a handcart, head severed, torso turned to the mountain, blank eyes staring down the valley.

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A crow, the early bird, swooped low over the cart to read the word Judas, warning intaglio, carved with a switchblade into the transom. On a higher thermal others circled like black wreaths. But keener than the crows, 960 a pushing, pointing, laughing crowd converged on the corpse—men in merinos, women panting out of breath, toothless grandmothers, gleeful children, all eager to witness and wallow in the morbidity of death.

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CHAPTER TWELVE At noon the nation’s radios cleared their throats of cornflakes and cooking-oil commercials, announced that murder quotas for that day had been routinely met, each killing routinely deprecated and denounced in cliché soundbites by the Honourable Minister of Justice. News of the circling crows shadowed a chill over Adam’s heart. clogging the circuits of his brain, the horror of Blaka’s death chloroforming his will. Doors kept banging shut, thud after thud. He was naked in a long, dark corridor, impressed to basic Being, that ultimately simple yet vastly complicated state because it comprised no parts to deconstruct, more rigorous even than death itself or the vulgar transfiguration of the informer high on the devil’s mountain top. So feeble now the voice of Oxford reason! Like his father’s Alzheimer’s, one by one he purged the memory of his computer. He deleted the stored files and disks, sealed his diary and spiral notebooks in three Jamaica Tribune manila envelopes

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addressed to his editor, each inscribed in red, 985 “To Be Opened In Case Of My Death.” He locked the office, drove home in slanting afternoon, amber light, watching age spots on the back of his hands trace a map of Florida—such a horizontal landscape without a mountain or a valley. On a monitor of the earth it would be flat as the baseline of an exhausted heart. Why would he fly to such a mediocre death? At a traffic-light, a schoolgirl with almond eyes glanced at him as she crossed, phantom Chantal, imagined words of censure forming on her lips. “I was your special china doll but when I fell

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you tossed me from your love, chipped and soiled.” She seemed so real he tried to lower the window, needing forgiveness but the girl walked on, an impatient taxi honking on his tail, her white school uniform receding. 1000 Nathan was waiting when he got home, lounging on the living-room sofa, a Beretta between his legs. “You reach s s sooner than I expected. S S Sorry about Blaka. Religion kill him! Drugs dealing more s s simple than faith if you play by the rules. 1005 Is a long time we don’t talk about the early days. Grandma dead, you know.” He closed his eyes and Adam heard a distant door close softly.

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The eyes still sparkled but under the skin of the face the skull was beginning to bulge. He talked about his life in a whisper. “I keep a low profile. Is s s swagger cause most men to dead. I doubt anyone s s scorn money more than me—no chains or Lexus, no ten-room mansion on a Mandeville hill, no high complexion gals. When you leave for Oxford, it mash me up bad, leave me low. I feel you desert me, man.” He closed his eyes again. “When the money was more than I could count, it once cross my mind to leave it to you in my will but s s since it look you might die before me, no s s sense

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in that. Perhaps the University, a multi-million dollar endowment in honour of Tony Blake— ‘Frog Auditorium’, what you think of that?” He jammed the gun in his waist, began to poke in Adam’s desk where his rosary was buried in a cup with keys and paper clips. “S S Swear on this cross you will resign from the Trib tomorrow, leave Jamaica, never reveal information about my business.

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1029 Is not s s so drug man usually deal with danger but I love you, man, will respect your promise. Don’t make me have to s s shoot you, man.” His eyes blazed. “Friendship really hard. I offer S S Squint-Eye Nellie

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the s s same deal and s s she refuse. Tomorrow they will find her body floating in the harbour.” Adam knew he was in a place beyond words, in a corner of a corridor without doors or windows where some crucial secret had been hiding but could hide no more, where a man might finally know himself. Under the raised crucifix he threw his arms around the prophet’s slim neck and in a silence deeper

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than the absence of sound or possibilities, it seemed that their embrace became a dance, a twirling slowly round the room. Then he was alone, at peace, retreating footsteps a faint echo barely audible above the whisper of other voices he had loved, the guinea grass green and he on his back in the vacant lot once more among butterflies, a sweet breeze blowing steady from the sea.

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Annotations Annotations are keyed to chapter divisions and a through-line numbering of 1– 1048, but pages are also indicated. Ralph Thompson has read and sometimes commented on these annotations, or supplied a gloss of his own: his remarks appear in double inverted commas followed by ‘[R.T.]’. In annotating I have had in mind two distinct groups of potential readers— Jamaicans like those I teach whose responses to the poem show inevitable ignorance of the 1930s–40s and who lack the range of reference informed reading demands, and non-Jamaican readers for whom Jamaican reference and culture may be unfamiliar—and if a particular annotation seems redundant or obvious, I would ask readers to bear in mind the differing needs of these groups and the value of securing for the poem the widest possible understanding. .

[page 45] cover image The Scottish doctor and painter John Laidlaw, who once lived in Jamaica and married a Jamaican, is Thompson’s son-in-law’s grandfather. The painting was undertaken by invitation for the first Peepal Tree edition (2003), and combines outlines of a hill with an intrusive abstract swirl whose warning-colours and recessed black centre suggest the murderous spirals of the plot. The reds may refer not only to blood but also to the huge ‘red mud pond’ at Ewarton visible from many points on Mount Diablo (see also next note). title The primary reference is to the highest point on the main road from Kingston to Ocho Rios, an elevation of 914m (2998 ft). In contemporary Jamaican usage ‘Mount Diablo’ is the name of the northern face of the mountain whose southern face is called Mount Rosser. The summit is close to the centre of Jamaica and affords spectacular views—among them the vast scars of the Ewarton Alcan works and the ‘red mud pond’ such bauxite mining produces. The name Mount Diablo derives from the dangerous, steeply climbing early sixteenth-century trail from Spanish Town to Sevilla la Nueva, which followed the same route as the modern road. [page 46] dedication Thompson’s earlier collections of poetry were dedicated to his wife & children, and children & grandchildren respectively, so dedication to grand-

101 children alone is in sequence but also pointed. The “hope that the mist will have lifted / when they come to the view” suggests Thompson’s pessimism about any immediate solution to the problems he analyses. [page 47] epigraph From ‘The Inner Part’ by Jamaican-American Louis Simpson (b. 1923), first published in the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection At the End of the Open Road (1963). The whole poem is relevant: When they had won the war And for the first time in history Americans were the most important people — When the leading citizens no longer lived in their shirt sleeves And their wives did not scratch in public ; Just when they'd stopped saying "Gosh!" — When their daughters seemed as sensitive As the tip of a fly rod, And their sons were as smooth as a V-8 engine — Priests, examining the entrails of birds, Found the heart misplaced, and seeds As black as death, emitting a strange odor.

Simpson, a friend of Thompson’s born and schooled in Jamaica, was prophetic, the haruspication he reports an uneasy sign, but in Thompson’s appropriation nearly 40 years on the epigraphic excerpt gains from hindsight, and the whole verse-novel embodies a parallel post-independence corruption of Jamaica. In a powerful sense Thompson reverses Simpson, not seeing the seeds of future corruption but noting present corruption and asking whence it grew. [page 48] PROLOGUE [ll. 1–40] The prologue closely reworks a free-standing poem, ‘This New Light’, collected in

102 Moving On (1997). The revisions primarily make explicit (and in places perfect) a single-rhymed quatrain form, implicit but incomplete and largely undisplayed in the earlier poem. chalice (5) A goblet, specifically one used in Holy Communion, commemorating the cup used by Jesus at the Last Supper, but in slang use also a ganja-pipe. If beautiful (and deeply Walcottian) the image is already ominous, in keeping with the light’s turn away from “the old, romantic view / of islands” (2–3). calyx (7) The sepals of a flower, modified leaves protecting the bud. absolution ... guilt ... beach (11–13) The religious power is Thompson’s own, but the imagery is again strongly Walcottian, drawing on constructions of the Atlantic as chorus to the tragedy of the Slave Trade, mutely unable either to refuse its murderous and commercial part or to return the lives and history it swallowed, yet ceaselessly vocal in many registers at every encounter with the land. See l.18 annotation. the dream / is draining (13–14) The dream is the “old, romantic view”, but draws in the ‘American Dream’, and the potent vision of Martin Luther King, Jr, in his great ‘I have a dream’ speech in 1963—the year of Simpson’s epigraphic poem. thumbprint (18) An image of tallying prisoners strongly linked by Wayne Brown to Walcott’s poem, ‘Preparing for Exile’: “Why does the moon increase into an arc-lamp / and the inkstain on my hand prepare to press thumb-downward / before a shrugging sergeant?” (p. 44 above). The brutal prison warder is the first clear image from crime fiction, collocating (as Walcott does) a gesture recalling the Roman gladiatorial ‘thumbs-up’ for life, ‘thumbs-down’ for death, with the modern forensic connotations of a fingerprint. high noon (19) The time of gunfights, made famous by Fred Zinneman’s classic 1952 movie starring Gary Cooper as a lawman whose deputies, friends, and wife desert him when a dreaded gang is known to be coming to town. The shift to an imagery of Westerns becomes explicit in ll. 21–3. a laden / feeding tree (19–20) The meaning of ‘feeding tree’ shifts from one habitually used by small birds to one that, stocked with small birds, becomes a hawk’s larder. [page 49] a black Clint Eastwood (22) That is, a cold killer like Eastwood’s ‘Man with No Name’, not the reggae artist of that stage-name, Robert Brammer (b.195?), but for

103 Jamaicans Eastwood’s name summons posters and cover-art by both that ran “that macho fable through another version” (23). The popularity of cool-killer names among that generation of reggae artists—cf. ‘Dillinger’ (Lester Bullocks, b.1953), ‘Josey Wales’ (Joseph Sterling, b.195?)—anticipated glorifications of violence as well as appeals for peace by later musicians. the killing field (22) Originally a term in mediaeval warfare for an area murderously covered by enfilading fire into which the enemy (typically attacking a strongpoint) could be drawn, and retaining that sense; but also (as ‘The Killing Field’) the usual term for the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s, made internationally famous from 1984 by Roland Jaffe’s film The Killing Field. This light scars the earth (24) The light from the “sun [...] turning cynical” (16), but also at some level the quotidian afternoon sun in Jamaica, for much of the year oppressively hot and felt as a physical force. Wordsworth (26) The Romantic poet (1770–1850) praised all that sunlight revealed in nature, and was the seminal verse-autobiographer (p. 12 above). Pan the goat god ... simple flute (27–8) In Greek mythology Pan is the god of fertility, herds, and woodlands, represented as a horned, bearded man with goat’s legs; he so lustfully chased the nymph Syrinx that she transformed into a clump of reeds, from which Pan then fashioned his trade-mark ‘Pan Pipes’, whose music caused desire and panic. His hooves made Pan (and Roman counterpart Faunus) liable to Christian demonisation, but profound paganism and the importance of panic as a topos preserved him in some measure, especially in pastoral. Thompson sees him as explicitly of the ‘devil’s party’ (invoking Blake’s comment that Milton was “a true Poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it”), a DJ (and perhaps a true poet) providing massively amplified music that leads into another version of metamorphosis in ll. 32–40. a rumour / lingers, haunting ... a hiss / of whispers (30–2) In mediaeval and Renaissance allegory (including Spenser’s The Faerie Queene) Rumour is figured as a ghostly, hydra-headed beast, impossible to slay, the image mediates between goat-hoofed Pan and the eventual lycanthropy of ll. 35–40. The ‘circulating’ hiss is also implicitly the sound of amplified needles on vinyl after a song finishes. the corpses glow ... blue / acetylene burning (33–4) The switch to night is abrupt but eerie glowing is a topos of zombie films and accords with other metamorphoses in this passage, suggesting terrifying, radioactive change that turns people into lycanthropes. ‘Acetylene’ implies a welding or cutting flame, and there is an allusion to the way taxis and other vehicles used to transport drugs are, in Jamaica

104 as elsewhere, equipped with special compartments welded into bodywork. a foot curls slowly into a cloven hoof (36) As in the metamorphosis of men to goats—or swine, a feature of the ‘Circe’ episode in Homer’s Odyssey—and so reaching back to Pan (27–8) and Greek metamorphoses. buried in their boots (37) To ‘die with one’s boots on’ originally meant to die in battle, and so more generally ‘in harness’. To be ‘buried in one’s boots’ can mean something similar but even in military use has implications of hasty consignment to the earth, and readily transfers to far more sordid midnight disposals in shallow graves by murderers who need the cover of darkness. The use of boots to cover deformities, and their literary use by devils in disguise, are also invoked. coarse, animal hair begins to bristle / around the ankles (39–40) The metamorphic sequence ends in lycanthropy. Werewolves (loupgaroux in the Eastern Caribbean) are widespread in West Indian folklore, and transformative sequences of hands-to-claws and legs-to-hindquarters have been thoroughly disseminated by Hollywood B-movies (and more recently Harry Potter). Walcott has a striking sonnet, ‘Le Loupgarou’, that Thompson knows, but lycanthropy has wider resonance in post-colonial texts: in Paul Scott’s The Towers of Silence (1971), for example, elderly missionary Barbie Batchelor, who eventually loses her faith, reason, and speech, is possessed in 1944 by a vision in which “jackal packs had multiplied; men ran with them on all fours, ravenous for bones” (p. 373). [page 50] CHAPTER ONE [ll. 41–100] guinea grass (41) One of the panic grasses, Panicum maximum, growing 1–3m tall; the genus includes Common or Broomcorn Millet, P. miliaeceum, and ‘panic’ derives from the same Latin root as French pain, ‘bread’, but Thompson may have intended the ‘Pan’ connection. The common name ‘guinea grass’ refers not to the modern nation, but to that whole coastal region of West Africa, associated with the Slave Trade. he (41) The protagonist, Adam Cole, not named until l. 97. lignum vitae tree (42) Literally (and ironically) the ‘tree of life’, Guaiacum officinale or G. sanctum, commonly ‘ironwood’ and ‘palo santo’, probably named for the medicinal properties of guaiacum gum. Nellie Simpson’s head (44) The first character named proves important not only for her behaviour to Adam as a child (56–9) but also in her later, openly criminal

105 appearances (from 890–1); her “silk bows” (44) are innocent, her fingers “predatory” (58), but the motives and drives in her “head” are neither explained nor (beyond self-gratification and survival) implicit. as the sun singed / a cloud (47–8) The sunlight no longer “scars” (24) but still burns. his island home (48) Adam’s bone-deep commitment to Jamaica is a source of tragedy. too terrified of lizards (51) Lizards are in Jamaica supposed to reveal pregnancy, and have much the same panic effect on many women as spiders elsewhere. a porous strainer pod (55) Or ‘loofa(h)’, the fruit of several vines of the genus Luffa: “In my day the dried core of the fruit, long and narrow, was used as a sponge.” [R.T.] predatory glee (58) The sexual hint in “lizards” (51) is amplified, and Nellie is eventually said to have “swapped sex for power” (933). Thompson has written of more innocent childhood sexualities in ‘The Billiard Table’ (Moving On, p. 13). carbolic soap (59) A generic term for germicidal soaps containing carbolic acid, made from coal tar. Cheap carbolic is often irritant. a right eye permanently // cast to starboard (60–1) There is a pun on ‘cast’, primarily meaning ‘thrown’ but also an adjective for a squinting eye. However unfairly, such a condition of “sideways glances” (62) often signals untrustworthiness in (crime) fiction, and is preponderantly visited on servants. [page 51] grass asylum (64) In that the den is a refuge from Nellie’s sexual attentions. clear against / a candid sky (66–7) ‘Candid’ (from Latin candēre, to shine) means ‘glowing, white’ as well as ‘guileless, unposed, without reserve’. his destined role … final martyrdom (69–70) And so it proves: generic boyish power-fantasy of imperial adventure slides into a strain of noble self-sacrifice (typified in Newbolt’s ‘He Fell Among Thieves’) that had flourished early in WW1, before casualties became real. The images anticipate Adam’s dreams of a priestly vocation (93–6) and personal imitatio Christi. Crisis / starched these years (70–1) As Nellie or another maid presumably did various items of clothing, as when “dressed for church” (45); as with clothes, the starchiness implies rigid proprieties. Hitler (71) Adolf Hitler (1888–1945), Chancellor of Germany 1933–45 and the

106 principal Axis leader in WW2, often seen as the great modern embodiment of evil. See also l. 189 annotation. Bustamante (72) See p. 33 above. his house // built three feet above the ground (72–3) This refers to the common tropical practice of building houses on platforms, to use mountainside and allow cooling breezeways. Following the “dream” and “supreme adventure” (68–9) it is also a child’s ‘castle in the air’. a random screed of octagons (74) A ‘screed’ is commonly a long monotonous piece of writing, but in the building trade also refers to a strip of wood or material used as a guide to apply and level plaster, concrete etc.. Here evidently it refers to the not so smooth results of using a screed to build in concrete. polished to a garish red (76) “Before the advent of tiles upper-class houses had heart-of-pine floors; middle-class houses had cement floors lined into squares, the cement mixed with a red powder to add colour. The floors were polished daily; the powder’s brand name was ‘Cardinal’.” [R.T.] decaying cannas (77) Any of nine species of the genus Canna, native to the New World—large perennial rhizomous plants whose bright flowers attract hummingbirds. When classes … were suddenly dismissed (77–8) “Because of the 1938/39 riots in Kingston instigated by Busta. All schools were closed and the [British] military called out to set up sand-bags along the tram lines.” [R.T.] hopped / a tram (78–9) Trams provided Kingston’s public transport from 1876– 1948, at first drawn by mules and from 1899 powered by electricity; they were immensely popular, and famously eulogised by Miss Lou (Louise Bennett, 1919– 2006). The operating company was allowed to be driven into bankruptcy after post-war pressure from the bus-building and oil lobbies, and all nine lines were ripped out; similar decisions were made in cities throughout Britain and the empire, and have been bitterly regretted. South Camp Road (79) A road notorious for a large wire-fenced detention facility, used for wartime internment under the British and later for mass detentions of dubious legality during the Manley Years. Thompson seems to suggest a political or ideological as well as a topographical continuity. sweating, red-faced soldiers (80) That is, white (British) troops. flashed like a movie sequence between the holding / posts, froze … into memory (82–3) A very precise evocation of the tram’s motion framing a series of cinematic (but also highly theatrical) tableaux, branding the image in memory.

107 incredible phenomenon of white men labouring // in public (84–5) Memoirs by colonial subjects report as a shattering experience their first sight of white ‘overlords’ in a menial capacity. Thompson’s experience is typical, making good emotional (and rhetorical) sense, but the potency of the topos is a little surprising in one respect, as British ‘Other Ranks’ (privates and NCOs) certainly served in Jamaica, so the sight can hardly have been unknown. “The reference was not meant to be universal. My reaction was local and personal—I had never before seen white men doing heavy labour in Jamaica.” [R.T.] [page 52] That night … (85) Or rather not: although the events of ll. 77–85 are specifically linked to 1938/39, Adam’s father’s immediate “of the war” (see next annotation) means it must be after September 1939. “Traitor! … advantage / of the war … Busta’s ass in jail.” (86–9) The problem outlined here was common throughout the empire. Nationalists, unionists, and anyone else daring to question the blanketing necessity of ‘pulling together’ could easily become the enemy. Bustamante was interned 1940–2 (as he had been before) and is shown as such in ch. 2 (145–75). “I thought of Busta as a victim, like my Uncle, of the powers that be. I tried to paint him as a sympathetic character. Busta didn’t call out the troops, the Governor did. But Adam’s father, a right-wing alcoholic, sees him as a traitor because he is trying to win selfgovernment for the island while England is fighting for its life.” [R.T.] guinea grass garden of Eden (90) The overt emergence of a latent trope, the innocent paradises of a New World island and childhood—but only to anticipate the serpentine “evil [...] seeping under the skin // of the world” (92–3; cf. the epigraph) and Adam’s immature fantasy of priestly vocation (93–6). the host (94) In Holy Communion the consecrated wafers that in Catholic belief are the transubstantiated body of Christ, and in Protestant beliefs symbolise it. would preach repentance and salvation (95) In the end Adam’s journalism manages neither, for himself or anyone else. “Adam Cole, Adam Cole,” (97) The first mention of the protagonist’s name, triggered by mention of Eden. From Hebrew ha adamah, ‘the ground’ or ‘earth’, and so also ‘a man’, Adam’s Christian connotation is clear, but also has connotations of ‘red earth’ in contrast to ‘Cole’ (coal) as a metonym for ‘black[ness]’. a sweet breeze still blowing steady from the sea (100) A line almost identically

108 repeated as ll. 115, 1048. On-shore breezes, generated locally during afternoon and evening, are often valued and named, typically as ‘the doctor’ or equivalent for the relief they bring. [page 53] CHAPTER TWO [ll. 101–208] shortwave GE radio (101) General Electric were among the pioneers of radio; short-wave signals can be sent over greater distance than medium-wave, allowing international wartime broadcasts. The image of families clustered around such GE sets “with round shoulders and satin fretwork face” (102) is powerfully associated with the early days of WW2 and Churchill’s radio-broadcasts. the Hood sunk, / Coventry devastated (103–04) HMS Hood was an Admiralclass battle-cruiser built in 1918 and sunk with great loss of life by the German battleship Bismarck and heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen on 24 May 1941 in the Battle of the Denmark Strait. The mediaeval centre and cathedral of Coventry, in the British Midlands, were destroyed in a blitz of April 1941. (In the first Peepal Tree edition ‘Coventry’ was mistakenly italicised, implying reference to HMS Coventry, a light cruiser built in 1916 and sunk by air attack in 1942.) cars ... / fitted with shafts (110–11) “The wartime shortage of petrol forced businessmen to convert their motor cars to horse-drawn buggies.” [R.T.] a Victory garden (112) The term during both World Wars for domestic gardens that were turned over to vegetable and fruit production to combat food shortages. dasheen (114) The common Caribbean name for a ‘dryland’ variety of taro, Colocasia esculenta, grown for its large, starchy tuber. a sweet breeze still … (115) That is, despite the lost guinea-grass den. See also ll. 100, 1048 annotations. calico air raid curtains (116) Calico doesn’t have its general modern sense (coarse, brightly printed cloth) but the old British sense, a heavy, plain cotton cloth. Air-raid (blackout) curtains were a legal requirement, intended to deny enemy pilots any ground fix (hence brighter wartime stars, 117), and to prevent injury if windows were blown in. [page 54] Alster … Rio Cobre (122) The Alster is a tributary of the Elbe in northern

109 Germany, Hamburg being at their junction. The Rio Cobre rises just south of Mount Diablo and flows into the sea at the west end of Kingston Harbour. a decade / before a shrill, frenetic voice proclaimed (122–3) The voice is Hitler’s, coming to power in 1933. Johann presumably left Germany in the early 1920s amid devastating hyper-inflation. “Whatever the chronology, I saw Hitler as a metaphor for all the anti-democratic governments in the world. I felt that his progress to full dictatorship was gradual like blindness and I could see signs of this happening in Jamaica especially under the Manley government, state of emergency, police powers etc.” [R.T.] See also l. 193 annotation. Deutschland über alles (124) From the opening line of ‘Das Lied der Deutschen’ (wr. 1841) by A. H. Hoffman von Fallersleben (1798–1874): “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt” (Germany, Germany above all, above anything in the world). Set to a melody by Haydn the poem has provided the German national anthem since 1922. The current anthem doesn’t use the first verse, but the Nazis did and the phrase “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” is identified with the aggressive expansionism of Hitler’s Reich—ironically in some ways, as Hoffman, writing before German unification, meant ‘the idea of a unified Germany before anything else political’, not ‘my country right or wrong’ or anything worse. Thompson’s “betrayed // their trust” (124–5) invokes that irony, as Hitler’s failed war caused the partition of Germany from 1945–91. Bavarian crystal (126) High-grade clear glass, used for cut-glass bowls etc., from the southern province of Germany where Hitler first enjoyed popular success. the gutturals / his tongue could not forget (127–8) Gutturals (harsh sounds produced in the throat) are common in German and a feature of a ‘German accent’ in other languages. bastinado (131) Properly, a beating of the soles of the feet; more generally, any hard beating with a stick or cudgel. a fist pounding on a Berlin door (132) From Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933 domestic persecution and repression began, directed largely against Jews, who from 1934 were progressively stripped of rights. a squad goose-stepping … (133) All Nazi paramilitary forces had ‘squads’; the goose-step, strongly associated with Nazis though by no means peculiar to them, is for formal military display, front leg raised high and straight at each stride. the silence of citizens whose time … (135) Alluding to a famous remark made in 1968 by the German theologian Martin Niemöller (1892–1984): When Hitler attacked the Jews I was not a Jew, therefore, I was not concerned.

110 And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore, I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then, Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church—and there was nobody left to be concerned.

an ancient Jew butting a wailing wall (136) ‘Ancient’ suggests a long-preserved faith, and is used of isolated Jewish communities with long, unbroken records. The Wailing Wall, into which worshippers push written prayers, is a remnant of the western wall of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and one of the holiest sites in Judaism. regimental major (137) Not the Regimental Sergeant-Major, a senior NCO, “Just an officer in the British army stationed at Up Park Camp sent to arrest Johann— no personal relationship between them. Not the ‘nervous adjutant’ of l. 148.” [R.T.] a camp in Kingston, / huts stranded behind barbed wire (141–2) In South Camp Road (see l. 79 annotation). There is a savage pun on ‘stranded’. [page 55] a nervous adjutant (148) Nervous because he realises he faces ‘good citizens’ over whom he would not notmally have such authority. See l. 137 annotation. a good Hun from a bad Hun (151) The term ‘Hun’ (for a German) is dated in context, having flourished in WW1; the usual British WW2 term was ‘Jerry’. The slight archaism reflects the colonial setting (slang takes time to propagate), and invokes the source-word, Huns as a ‘barbaric’ first-millennium Germanic tribe opposed to the ‘civilised’ Romans. The “conundrum” (152) Adam ponders is central. Hercules bike (153) Manufactured in Birmingham, UK, and exported throughout the empire. fusilier (154) Originally a soldier armed with a fusil, a light flintlock musket; in fusilier regiments of the British Army, the standard term for a private. the knuckled fence (155) “Barbed wire with burrs of steel like knuckles at regular intervals.” [R.T.] the cantonment (156) Pronounced ‘cantoonment’—the usual imperial term for an army-barracks and associated housing, churches etc., giving the sense ‘white, protected area’. hair electrified, on end (159) Though well-combed in official portraits,

111 photographs and news-footage often show Bustamante as rather wild-haired, an image he cultivated. cotton shirt unbuttoned to the waist (160) Then far more than now a shocking deshabille, indicating Busta’s personality; on one occasion during the 1930s he bared his chest at police, inviting them to shoot him, and is being similarly rebellious in internment. custard-apple (163) A common name for Annonaceae, esp. Annona squamosa, A. reticulata, and A. cherimola (which has a distinct fruit), all found in Jamaica. a racist and a rascal (167) The Governor 1938–43 was Sir Arthur Richards (1885–1978); history does not speak so ill of him, but (as for most colonial governors, certainly war-time ones) Busta has a point. [page 56] this foolish war soon done (170) In common Jamaican speech foolish/ness has great force and is used to express disapproval, disappointment, and frustration; ‘soon done’ is also in common use and the register catches the speech of a man at once light-brown bourgeois and a self-proclaimed ‘man of the people’. swords beaten / into ploughshares (170–1) From Isaiah 2:4: “And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” You know … boy? (171) The schoolmaster’s question and terminal vocative are reminiscent of Walcott’s portrait of his teachers in Another Life, ch. 12. dressed in striped pyjamas (176) An image unhappily summoning cheap cotton uniforms inmates of Konzentrationlager were forced to wear, typically Jewish victims of the Sho’ah (‘Holocaust’)—an association that leads to “Belsen” (204). dummkopfesel, ya (183) Literally ‘block-headed donkey, yes’; ‘dummkopf’ is a common German insult, but ruder than ‘blockhead’. the spittle bubbling / on his lips (183–4) Cf. ll. 127–8 and annotation. a money-lender, a usurer… he’ll go far’ (185–8) Born Alex Clarke, with probably a degree of self-invented biography before his arrival back in Jamaica from Cuba, Panama and the USA in the 1930s, Bustamente exemplifies the labour leaders of the time, not themselves workers, who used labour organisation as a means of personal advancement. Bustamente was a money-lender and supremely egotistical, naming the labour union he founded (BITU) after himself.

112 The hint of corruption (buying the big American car from Union funds) is one of Simpson’s “seeds / As black as death, emitting a strange odour”, and with the egotism of the split with Manley in 1943 a precursor of the politics of the 1970s and 80s. (On Bustamente, see James Carnegie, Some Aspects of Jamaica’s Politics 1918–1938, Kingston, Institute of Jamaica, 1973, pp. 96–127.) “And Hitler? How could such a man grab power?” (189) Adam’s precociously adult and political question remains a major historiographical topos. [page 57] Blindly (193) The emphasis given this metaphor invites thought. Johann’s answer, grossly inadequate as an explanation of Hitler’s rise to power, is pitched to Adam’s age: the connection with Adam’s understanding of myopia (195) is similarly pitched, but ll. 196–201 flare out far more widely to a vision of political blindness leading all to destruction. a homing pigeon … a coded message (194) Pigeons, whose use in WW1 as messengers is quite widely known, were also used in WW2. blurring of a page (196) “Like the blurring of time sequence in the narrative, a critical strategy of the poem.” [R.T.] a dénouement disguised … the sad ending (197–8) Another oblique reference that points to one of the poem’s central questions: when were the seeds planted? Friedrichstrasse (200) A major (shopping) street in central Berlin. yoked like oxen together, // ten abreast. (200–01) The image is traditional but regimented movement summons mass displays of marching and torchlight processions characteristic of early Nazism. barbed wire (203) Barbed wire was invented in the 1860s–70s to control cattle in the US Mid-West, but was immediately seized on by the military, used by the British to create the first concentration camps during the Boer War (1899–1902), and became after WW1 indelibly associated with the horrors of its use as a defence against attacking infantry. See l. 155 annotation. Belsen (204) In full Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Lower Saxony where in 1943–5 an estimated 50,000 civilians died. Though neither an extermination camp (Vernichtungslager) nor the worst Konzentrationlager, Belsen is notorious as the first major camp liberated by the British, in April 1945, and through broadcasts by BBC reporter Richard Dimbleby (some of which can be heard at  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/4445811.stm) became the means by which 1

113 the world learned of the Nazi genocide. Film of Belsen is still a primary basis of the public image of that genocide. degradation (206) Literally ‘stepping (back) down’, from Latin gradus, a step— an important term in moral understandings of political tyranny. a dictatorship yet to come (206) A reference to the dubious legality and certain brutality of the summary imprisonment camp created on the same site at the height of the violence during the Manley Years. “I had in mind the moral collapse of Jamaican society and a future threat to democratic governance.” [R.T.] [page 58] CHAPTER THREE [ll. 209–80] Nathan (209) In Hebrew, ‘he [God] has given’—the prophet who rebuked King David for arranging the death in battle of Uriah the Hittite because he coveted Uriah’s wife Bathsheba (2 Samuel 12:1–15); hence a “promising prophet” (215). down the road / from Silver Hill (209–10) Silver Hill is a village high in the Blue Mountains and often in cloud, hence Nathan’s “odour of mildew and mist” (211). his mother was dead, his father / only a name … (213–14) Nathan’s orphan status is perhaps stigmatic, and ominous, suggesting his lack of moral underpinning. The problem is cyclicality: the mother presumably left Silver Hill, but in trouble and death had to return her (illegitimate) child to her mother; Nathan now also leaves—but not to any better fate. seraphic (214) From ‘seraphim’, an order of angels in Catholic theology often linked to images of smiling. stammering on … S (216) Like Nellie’s squint, Nathan’s hissing stutter seems stigmatic, making him the serpent in this (false, fallen) Eden. dauphin prince / and companion of honour (218–19) The ‘Dauphin’ (/ df n, d fã/) was the heir to the French throne (as the ‘Prince of Wales’ is to the British). The Companion of Honour (CH) is a prestigious British monarchical honour, but in lower-case is a common term in court societies for personal friends of a monarch—a reminder despite their closeness of the indissoluble barriers of class and race between the boys. a guango tree (220) Or Saman or Rain Tree, Samanea saman; a large, symmetrical spreading tree up to 20m (66 ft) high and often wider than tall, hence isolated and ideal for climbing. The typical rise-fork-dip profile of main branches

114 makes a “slingshot handle / of a branch” (220–1) vividly clear. lenient pardon … mortal sins (224) Catholic theology distinguishes ‘mortal sin’, of mind and soul which without confession, repentance, and absolution damns, from lesser ‘venial sin’, of mind and body. Allowing for teenage years, one might expect Adam’s and Nathan’s sins to be primarily venial (adolescent lust), but the ‘seven deadly sins’ (pride, anger, covetousness, lust, envy, gluttony, sloth), of which all teenagers are capable, lead to mortal sin. The harsh judgement is ominous, pointing corruption of the idyll not by outside forces (such as Hitler) but by an unrepentant, self-excusing fall into damnation. a camping trip, meandering vaguely / north of the city (226–7) An idea ripe with nostalgia: neither children nor grown-ups would now undertake any such trip. The hills north of Kingston, from Stony Hill to Skyline Drive, have seen much development, and in some communities violence. disheartened by darkness (227) Jamaica is at 17° north latitude, so sunset is between about 5.45 (Dec.–Jan.) and 6.45 (Feb.–Nov.). [page 59] porte-cochere (229) French, ‘door for coaches’; a roofed structure covering a driveway outside a house-door, to provide shelter to enter or leave a vehicle. the sin of trespass (232) All sin is trespass; Adam’s and Nathan’s offence is more obviously the crime of property trespass, so the lady’s religious diction is striking, and her ready forgiveness and breakfast bounty uneasily conjoin with “lenient pardon” and “mortal sins” (224). Yet they also lead to the emblematic tableau of white, black, and mulatto, of high and low degree, “all at peace // with the place, plot and muddled history of themselves” (236–7). each sharing a moiety (238) “An undifferentiated part of a whole” [R.T.] That year the Gleaner reported only one murder (239) An inconceivable thought now: in 2005 the police reported 1,641 murders, or about one every five hours; by most measures Jamaica (and particularly Kingston) has since the early 1970s been among the most murderous places on earth. a jilted Cuban barber (240) Even the one reported murder is a crime of passion by a foreigner, and barber (associated with violence through e.g. Sweeney Todd). Mount Fancy / shimmering silver (243-4) “Three miles on from Newcastle is Green Hills, a cluster of houses one of which my family owned. A little farther down the hill there is a view to Buff Bay, and in the distance a beautifully

115 symmetrical mountain to rival Fuji called Mount Fancy. I don't know if that is its correct name.” [R.T.] symmetrical as Fuji (244) Mount Fuji is the highest peak (3,776m, 12,389 ft) in Japan, so exactly symmetrical a snow-topped cone that it is sacred; Thompson saw it personally during his military service in Japan. when she was young (246) Time-spans are vague, but presuming Nathan’s grandmother to be about 50, a date in the 1890s would fit. wattle (249) Interwoven poles and branches or reeds as framework for a wall; hence ‘wattle and daub’. temper lime (251) “Kilned limestone used in the banana and sugar industry to prevent disease” [R.T.] [page 60] Mr. s s son (253) Cf. ‘Mister Son’ (in Moving On), which begins: Life funny fe true! She calls him “son”, her only child, and we servants add the “mister” not because him head is gold— look how it shine—but out of respeck and consolation fe what did happen.

The comparison points particularly to Nathan’s otherwise standard English, at least in front of his grandmother—and Adam? s s son … / s s strong … s s see (253–4) The first instances of Nathan’s hissing (serpentine) stutter—in powerful concatenation, as if he chooses ‘s’ words. Queen Victoria and a forlorn // Jesus, chest dissected ... (256–7) Victoria died in 1901, confirming the shack dates to the nineteenth century; the formal domestic display of ruler and saviour (in the lurid form of a Sacred Heart) is an old-fashioned epitome of loyal virtue here still redolent of value, but ironised in the inefficacy of both powers, and in some senses time-expired (though the equation of colonial power and sacred redemption is deeply uneasy). shot through with arrows of light (257) The rays of the Sacred Heart, but making Jesus sound like St Sebastian, riddled with arrows for his Christian faith at the orders of the Roman Emperor Diocletian (ruled 284–305); another malign

116 transformation of light—see ll. 24, 47, 279–80, 566 annotations. to head (262) To carry on her head. O green god of lizards … for me to share? (265–7) “The authorial voice. The lizard who would normally expect to find sustenance from the surplus of a household where it lives, is embarrassed at the abject poverty which Nathan’s grandmother must endure. She would be about 47 years old at this time.” [R.T.] This voice introduces the curious drama of ll. 267–80 with which the chapter ends: the gecko approaching, desiring, overhearing, resenting, and fleeing in contrition from a “stilted, desultory” (268) inter-generational conversation in which the issue of Nathan’s future (options: blue-collar work, return to school) triggers Adam’s hurtful announcement of his Oxford scholarship (options: unlimited). a scholarship to Oxford (271) As much if not more a matter of prestige than money; considerable family resources would still be needed to travel and subsist. The timing is unclear, as Oxbridge candidates are now usually at least 18, which would (like the simple possibility of travel) suggest a post-war date, perhaps in the 1950s—and the episode is another instance of telescoping time, beginning with Adam’s and Nathan’s adventure as boys but ending with Adam’s imminent departure as a young man. His scholarship would have been the outcome of intense competition for a handful of places, the preserve of the élite schools and their largely upper- and middle-class intake. . Victoria smiled smugly (272) Though whether at evidence of ‘empire working’ or at the separation of friends of differing ethnicity and colour is unclear. The prophet (272) Nathan; see l. 209 annotation. “Five years perhaps.” (273) An Oxford degree in arts takes three years, and extended stay in the UK would require a job or money; the puzzle anticipates the blurred length of time Adam is away (see l. 409 annotation). The lizard … fled. (274–9) A difficult sequence: one paraphrase might be that the lizard, angered by Adam’s privilege and Nathan’s lack, sees the beauty of the Jamaican landscape as divine consolation for the living damnation of its inhabitants, but so recoils from the blasphemy of its thought that it contritely flees. [page 61] Fog stuck its tongue … short-circuiting the light. (279–80) An astonishing image, continuing the dreadful alterations to light (24, 47, 257); fog and cloud are common at Silver Hill (see ll. 209–10 annotation) but tonguing a light-socket is a

117 terrible method of prison-suicide for the desperately determined; cf. the prisonwarder (18). [page 62] CHAPTER FOUR [ll. 281–340] This chapter again problematises time. In one sense chs 4–5 form an historical interlude occupying the period of Adam Cole’s absence in Oxford (he returns in ch. 6), but the explicit introduction of the drugs plot in ch. 5 is critical thereafter, and the historical politics of this chapter (which manages to cover most of 1944–62 and in some ways heads into the late 1960s) suggest what produced and shaped the world in which the terrible things that happen later in the poem are possible. Busta as Prime Minister (281) One might suspect error here, as Bustamante became Prime Minister only in 1962–7 (though inactive from ill health after 1964), but was Jamaica’s Chief Minister 1953–5, and de facto chief minister as Minister for Communications 1944–53. The earlier period must be meant, yet the specificity of the “Brits offered Up Park camp” (287) seems to point to 1962— but sections of camp land had been demilitarised and made available from the early 1950s, to build Tom Redcam Road, the Library Service HQ, and the Kingston & St Andrew Parish Library. This is one of the passages whereby Thompson makes his history as much emblematic as figurative, and suggests in Busta a satisfaction with the glamour of power rather than the need for responsibility.. Myrtle Bank Hotel (283) “On the waterfront in downtown Kingston, entrance from Harbour Street. It was built by the United Fruit Company to accommodate guests who came to Jamaica on the banana boats. It was bought by the Issas in the Forties and subsequently destroyed by fire.” [R.T.] the Cumberland in London (284) Near Marble Arch, and very upmarket. Up Park Camp (287) See l. 281 annotation. self-government … partial freedom (290–1) For Jamaica in the period 1944–58 (under the 1944 constitution granting universal adult suffrage) self-government meant a degree of elected ministerial power, while real executive power still resided with the Governor and through him with the UK government. to redeem the Middle Passage (293) One of Thompson’s few overt references to the experience of enslavement. a grand alliance of West Indian states (294) That is, the West Indian Federation

118 of 1958–62, which Bustamante supported (or did not denounce) before 1958, but opposed during its existence, helping to precipitate the 1961 referendum that took Jamaica out of the Federation in 1962—triggering its collapse and returning Bustamante to government. The evocation of Federation in ll. 295–6 (“sharing … a dream, hubris skulking”) contrasts the aspirations of the original architects with the ambitions and arrogance of a generation of West Indian politicians who put the temptations of personal and national power before the federal dream. The palm tree was the symbol of Federation. hubris (296) Human impertinence and insubordination (as to the gods) that in classical tragedy leads to extravagant, extended punishment. his (297, 302) That is, Bustamante’s. [page 63] His barrister cousin … vision.” (302–40) Even with detailed historical knowledge this passage can be confusing, as events were. Constitutions were negotiated for the Federation and subsequently for an independent Jamaica. For the Federal elections of 1958 the JLP were confederated with other national parties in the Democratic Labour Party, technically led by Trinidadian Ashford Sinanan, and the (governing) PNP similarly confederated in the West Indies Federal Labour Party, led by Barbadian Grantley Adams—so references to constitutions/parties often have multiple possible interpretations. “I conflated all the attempts at framing a Jamaican Constitution. This was a bipartisan effort. The JLP was in power but Busta was not intellectually interested in the details. He delegated them to Neville Ashenheim, a party member, a Jew and a brilliant Oxford trained lawyer who could stand up to Norman Manley. I saw two ideological strands common to all the attempts and, of course, I knew Manley and Busta personally and had had several discussions with them on social occasions. One strand was the Fabian Socialist (Manley) who saw Parliament as supreme, the people with no justiciable rights. The other strand was influenced by the Jewish tradition of justice for the individual (Ashenheim) which took on greater poignancy after Hitler. So the confrontation was over a Bill of Rights. Manley wanted something watered down, Ashenheim wanted something strong. Under ordinary circumstances Busta would have taken Ashenheim’s advice but Black Power was beginning to cause problems in Jamaica and Busta sided with Manley to reinforce State power. This was understandable but a tragic mistake as things

119 have worked out.” [R.T.] For a sense of other issues at stake see the verbatim reports of the parliamentary ‘state of the nation’ debate in The Gleaner, 26 & 28 January 1963. Manley (302) Norman Manley (1893–1969), Chief Minister of Jamaica 1955– 62—not to be confused with his son, Michael Manley (1924–97), Prime Minister 1972–80 & 1989–92. a Jew, his party’s nominee (303) Sir Neville Ashenheim, Jamaica’s first Ambassador to the US (1962–7), sometime chairman of the Gleaner, and a strong JLP supporter. meerschaum pipe (306) Meerschaum (‘sea-foam’) is fine white mineral clay (hydrous magnesium silicate) from which pipe-bowls are made. “Manley was a chain smoker; Gold Flake cigarettes were a popular local brand; Ashenheim smoked a pipe and used it effectively to outpause his opponent in debate.” [R.T.] Bill of Rights (308) A statutory statement of essential liberties etc., named for the British Bill of Rights passed in 1689, and commonly used for the first ten amendments to the US Constitution, passed together in 1791. Sieg Heil (309) ‘Hail Victory’, a Nazi slogan chanted at rallies etc.. (In the first Peepal Tree edition the phrase was misprinted as Seig Heil, glowing Belsen ovens (311) A difficult slippage: the phenomenon invoked is the Sho’ah (see next annotation), and implicitly Vernichtungslager (extermination camps) created solely to facilitate genocide using industrial-scale gas-chambers and crematoria. Six such camps are recognised, all in Poland—Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno (Kulmhof), Majdanek, Sobibór, & Treblinka; Belsen, while a vile place (see l. 204 annotation), had neither gas-chambers nor crematoria. subject only to the living God (315) In Judaic sacred historiography this is a contentious issue. The events usually known in English as ‘the Holocaust’ were initially (from as early as 1933, when Hitler came to power) dubbed in Yiddish der dritter cherbm, the third ‘cherbm’—and as the first and second ‘cherbms’ were the historic destructions of the Temples in Jerusalem, understood as divine punishments, Nazi persecution was thus adjudged of divine origin. ‘Holocaust’, used from the mid-1950s, has similar implications: it means “a whole burnt offering; a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire” (Sh. OED). Only Hebrew sho’ah, ‘destruction’, chosen by Jewish scholars in 1940 expressly because it is without theological implications, avoids the idea. In arguing for a Bill of Rights Ashenheim wanted state power limited by individual rights, and particularly that the state should renounce all powers of death, rendering back to God that which

120 should be God’s (in both Judaic and Catholic theology), while “closet atheist” (316) Manley had no such belief. See also ll. 302-40 annotation. “A Westminster dictatorship,” (320) An idea much discussed in the UK in the 1980s as Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister 1979–90) used elected majorities in ways many found tyrannous. In Jamaican terms the issue most obviously at stake would be Michael Manley’s second term (1976–80), when partisan polarisation made for similar feelings. “The Westminster model in Jamaica is a Prime Ministerial dictatorship, not sufficient separation of powers. Maybe I imagined the confrontation but I thought it had dramatic appeal.” [R.T.] After the deadlocked session, they relaxed … (321–5) A false lull, bringing vivid depth to Manley and Ashenheim, but opening into Busta’s disturbing speech to end the chapter. Mahler’s 9th (322) The ninth and last Symphony by Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), written in 1909–10, is often thought his most intense. He was aware of his wife’s infidelity and felt torn between musical tradition and innovation. The symphony embodies a struggle between tonal and atonal music that places it at the watershed of nineteenth-century romanticism and twentieth-century modernism. For the listening Manley it may enact tension between a world of romantic hope for individual liberties and knowledge of a tentieth-century world of war and totalitarian oppression. his comic book collection (324) Presumably American; Marvel Comics, for example, was founded in 1939. [page 64] quillets and quibbles of the law (325) Echoing Shakespeare, 1 Henry VI 2.4.17, “these nice sharp Quillets of the Law”; both quillets & quibbles (from Latin, quid libet, ‘as you please’, & quibus, dative/ablative plural of qui, quae, quod, ‘who, what, which’) are ‘nice’ moments of legal distinction or grammatical manoeuvre, consequential for the scope of law but hard for non-lawyers to follow. Tucker Avenue address (326) In Edge Hill, near the present National Stadium; more prestigious in the 1950s–60s than now. Wareika hills (327) Wareika Hill (454m, 1,490 ft) is a subsidiary summit at the southern end of Long Mountain, just south-east from Tucker Avenue, to Kingston’s west; I have not seen the plural ‘Wareika hills’ elsewhere. Gladys, // his beloved (328–9) Gladys Maud Longbridge (b. 1912), Bustamante’s

121 long-serving secretary, whom he married in 1962; her Memoirs of Lady Bustamante (1997) are an entertaining and important record. Mr. Hoover of the FBI (331) J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972), astonishingly from the age of 29 Director for 48 years of the US Bureau and then Federal Bureau of Investigation (1924–72), and the most notorious US bureaucrat of the twentieth century, associated with hyper-vigilant anti-communism, political surveillance of individuals on a vast scale, obsessive record-keeping (thousands of files were shredded the night he died), and a perverse private life. Martin Luther King Jr was assiduously bugged by Hoover and regarded as a communist. the Black Power sickness (332) ‘Black Power’ is a term for militant aspects of the Civil Rights Movement, particularly associated from 1966–7 with Trinidadian-born Stokely Carmichael (latterly Kwame Ture, 1941–98), from 1967 with African-American Huey P. Newton (1942–89), and from 1968 with AfricanAmerican Eldridge Cleaver (1935–98). Initially non-violent, it became associated with Newton’s Black Panthers, Cleaver’s justifications of rape as political activism, and racial separatism. In a Caribbean context it has unhappy associations from 1970 with the failed ‘Black Power Revolution’ and consequent State of Emergency in Trinidad, but is another example of Thompson telescoping time, as the Claudius Henry episode relates more to the emergence of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King than to Carmichael, who was of a younger generation. Young Claudius Henry … these same hills (333–5) Summarising a complex episode: Claudius Henry Sr led the Rastafarian African Reform Church, linked to the First Africa Corps, a militant New York group that robbed banks to buy guns. In 1959–60 (coincident with the Cuban Revolution) ARC and FAC activists established a guerrilla training camp in the Red Hills near Kingston; Henry was arrested early, but his son, Claudius Henry Jr, took over leadership, and killed two British soldiers before being arrested himself. The Henry Rebellion is sometimes linked to the ‘Coral Gardens’ incident of 1963, when an attack on a petrol station and police by six Rastafarians triggered an over-reaction by the state that some Rastas still refer to as tantamount to a pogrom. Special Branch (337) The organisation within a (British model) police force that deals with politics (as distinct from ‘Uniformed Branch’ and CID). carrots … improve your vision (340) This conflates a joke about Busta’s selfproclaimed expertise in diatetics with a larger jest. Vitamin A in carrots is good for eyesight in a general way, but the claim that they improve vision is usually

122 traced to a disinformation story generated by John Cunningham (1917–2002), the RAF’s most successful night fighter-pilot in 1940, to conceal the invention of radar. In this context Bustamante presumably means ‘political radar’ as much as anything else—awareness of Claudius Henry and his ilk—and his representation reflects movement to the right in older age, and to a strongly anti-Cuban position after Castro’s seizure of power. “Busta was a health freak, known for advocating carrot juice for better eyesight. Hence the double meaning of "vision".” [R.T.] [page 65] CHAPTER FIVE [ll. 341–408] a/k/a/ (341) Also known as. Jacksonville (344) A major civilian and naval port in north-east Florida. grease monkey (346) In naval slang an engineering hand; more generally a mechanic (and in the US a derogatory term for Latinos). Murmansk (347) A major port on the Barents Sea in north-west Russia, the primary destination for war materials in both world wars. a fag (349) Standard British slang for a cigarette. Eight nervous weeks at sea (350) The Murmansk and Archangel Convoys of 1942–5 had to round the northern cape of occupied Norway, were within German aircraft- and submarine-range for most of the route, and were among the most brutal theatres of the war; for a gripping fictional account by a veteran, see HMS Ulysses (1955) by Alistair Maclean (1922–87). no poo—see. (355) That is, ‘pussy’, the vulva/vagina; Blake was presumably going to say ‘poontang’, standard US military slang with the same meaning. There is also a possible pun on ‘poo’ = ‘shampoo’ = ‘champagne’/drink (i.e. there were two dry months at sea, with nothing to drink—see?—the sailor’s other preoccupation). roustabout (356) A manual deck-labourer; a casual worker for the heaviest jobs. [page 66] changing oil (361) “Sexual release, appropriate language for a ‘grease monkey’” [R.T.] a hundred pounder / down the stack (362–3) That is, directly down the funnel, ensuring complete destruction—if the boiler were working, as it would not be at

123 anchor. Blake’s story is probably self-exculpating cover for deserting, as in Jacksonville, but it is hard to blame anyone who survived one Murmansk convoy from wishing to avoid a second. like sagging hammocks, / eyes bulging (365–6) Explaining the Frog’s nickname. skin-bleached browning (367) That is, a relatively light-skinned mulatto (a browning) who has used cosmetics to whiten her skin-tone. the wages of sin is life! (368) Signifying on Romans 6:23: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord”. the walls wept, red lights blinked (378) “Condensation resulting from breakdown of the refrigeration plant and alarm lights that the temperature was rising” [R.T.] On Boxing Day (379) 26 December, the Feast of St Stephen, when in the carol (and in this context with a dire pun on ‘snow’ as cocaine) “all the snow lay round about / deep and crisp and even”. snapper (382) A term with variant regional meanings; in Jamaica it usually means ‘red snapper’, Lutjanus campechanus or L. blackfordi, both important food-fish. cocaine (382) From which there will be no going back; see pp. 34–9 above. As the date is unclear, so is in which direction the cocaine is being smuggled: Jamaica has had a serious domestic problem since the 1980s development of ‘crack’, but the greater problem is trans-shipment between South America and Europe (or the US), which brings massive corruption to aspects of government and daily life (see ll. 398–400 annotation). Nathan whispered at his back (384) As if he had simply materialised from Silver Hill, appearing at will—suggesting the extent to which, though given an individual biography, he is emblematic of a hydra-headed trade. [page 67] a Beretta (385) Beretta is an Italian marque known throughout the twentieth century for semi-automatic pistols, many smaller and more elegant than US designs; the large Beretta 92F (and variants), made famous by the Lethal Weapon and Matrix series, was manufactured only from 1983. “S S Since … s s share.” (389) Nathan’s stutter returns as he relaxes. like bougainvillea blooming … / in drought (391–2) The brightly coloured and distinctively tropical bougainvillea (an entire genus) needs very little water, and stays in vivid flower while much else wilts.

124 enough becoming more (392) Playing on the proverbial ‘enough is as good as a feast’, and recalling a striking conversation about criminal insatiability between ‘Johnny Rocko’ (Edward G. Robinson) and Frank McCloud (Humphrey Bogart) in John Huston’s classic noir movie Key Largo (1948), to which ‘more’ and ‘enough’ are central. McCloud also famously says “One Rocco more or less isn't worth dying for!”—an attitude shared by many characters here. relagged his conscience / and his pipes (393–4) “Rehabilitated the plant with proper insulation, also insulated his conscience about being in the drug trade” [R.T.] There is an additional pun, ‘(old) lag’ being British slang for a convict. a San San villa (395) In Portland, on the north-east coast, San San was once a very fashionable development, visited by celebrities (drawn by the residences of Noel Coward and Ian Fleming further west), and still has a faded grandeur today. like a mongoose (397) A familiar Jamaican sight, especially in Portland and St Thomas; mongooses (Herpestes auropunctatus), introduced by planter William Bancroft Espeut of Spring Garden, Portland, in 1872, to control cane-rats, are now pests throughout the Caribbean and New World, and legendarily brave and sly, as Nathan becomes. A Jamaican proverb observes ‘Mongoose seh, If yu don’t take chance, yu nuh man’ (if you don’t take a chance, you’re not a man), and there is a well-known mocking song, ‘The Sly Mongoose’ (which can be found at  http://www.unlockingthearchives.rgs.org/themes/journeys/gallery/resource/?id =490), about a government official who attempted to ‘buy the affections’ of one of the daughters of the Revivalist prophet Alexander Bedward (1859–1930). breeding drug distribution / cells across the island, in Miami … London (398– 400) This summary narrative compresses more than historical time. Before the coming of crack in the later 1980s domestic cocaine distribution was limited (and geared largely to the business district of New Kingston and upmarket tourist hotels/resorts), because powder cocaine was then marketed as a rich man’s drug, selling by the gram for up to US$100; the $5 ‘rock’ of ‘crack’ was a stunningly successful marketing operation democratising the drug. But Jamaica has been an entrepôt for international distribution of cocaine to all the cities mentioned from the mid-late 1970s. There is also a very efficient internal market in marijuana, which has an international distribution arm that was far bigger in the 1960s–80s than it is now (hydroponics having enabled mass cultivation outside the tropics). Thompson’s summary effectively conflates all four markets (domestic/international, cocaine/marijuana) over three decades: the move has emblematic force, but sacrifices verisimilitude. No single criminal has ever had the complete control 2

125 implied to Nathan—as the level of urban turf conflict makes clear. retreated often to his Silver Hill land / where, if he lived … (403–04) A dreadful answer to ll. 269–70: “would Nathan learn a trade, / return to finish school?” A tree fern tendril curled / a warning on his cheek (405–06) Tree ferns are those with a woody trunk and leafy crown, typically of the families Dicksoniaceae and Cyatheaceae; ‘tendrils’ are young fronds, which emerge as coils that unfurl as they grow. This one’s warning is presumably (as Nathan studies his “view of the valley”, 405) that things will continue to unfold. There may also be a suggestion that Nathan is facially scarred, indicating his status as a ‘hard man’. A bird’s two-note song (406) “A bird common in the Newcastle hills called a solitaire; it sings in two notes, one high, one low, a lovely lament.” [R.T.] the evening fog (407) The same mountain fog and cloud that “stuck its tongue / into the socket of the sun, short-circuiting the light” (279–80). The memory of Adam tasted like mildew on his tongue. (408) Adam re-enters in the next line/chapter; mildew discolours, distastes, weakens, and rots. [page 68] CHAPTER SIX [ll. 409–532] The pivotal chapter, compressing Adam’s return, marriage and family over 15+ years. Structurally ch. 6 divides chs 1–5, all beginnings (Adam’s in 1-3, Nathan’s in 3 + 5, Jamaica’s via Bustamante in 2 + 4), from the triad of chs 7–9, each centred on a new character, and running in parallel. Later chs also move forward in time from a point reached somewhere in mid-ch. 6 to the eve of the final events of chs 10–12. Stoop-shouldered Adam Cole, M.A. (Oxon.) (409) The stoop reflects scholarly bending over books but blurs Adam’s age and the time-frame. ‘Oxon(iensis)’ identifies an Oxford degree; Adam would have taken a BA after three years and been able (under a bizarre Oxbridge privilege) to convert that into an MA after three further years—so at least six have passed, but precision is (deliberately) impossible (see l. 273 annotation). Jamaica Daily Tribune (410) A fictional paper; Jamaican newspapers have at times pursued investigative reporting and at others backed off. “I meant the Gleaner, Jamaica’s most powerful newspaper, founded in 1834.” [R.T.] star reporter, / tracker of scandals and corruption (410–11) The figure of the investigative reporter developed in the 1920s–30s, disseminated by Hollywood as

126 much as in real newsprint empires; it entered a new league with the 1972 Watergate story by Carl Bernstein (b.1942) and Bob Woodward (b.1943), which forced the resignation of US President Richard Nixon in 1974. The reporter-protagonist is also a topos in crime fiction. index fingered 8 (413) “This came from my memory that journalists indicate the conclusion of a piece by the number 8 at the bottom of the page. If one is a ‘hunt and peck’ typist the 8 on the typewriter is hit with the index finger.” [R.T.] copy boy (413) In hot-metal printing, an apprentice employed to carry ‘copy’—the text of an article—to sub-editors and compositors. the typewriter’s pitted carriage (415) On typewriters the point of impact by a key was fixed, so the paper had to move: the carriage was the assembly of roller, guides, and inserted paper that moved right with each letter and shot back left with each ‘return’. evaded Nellie’s advances (417) Cf. ll. 58, 64. Oxford’s mildewed digs and gaseous dinners (418) Mildewed is echoed from l. 408 (see annotation); ‘digs’ are lodgings; Oxford dinners may be ‘gaseous’ in inducing flatulence with rich food and wine, or in generating convivial hot air. the urgent surge of Amber Lee’s / tsunami (419–20) Adam’s wife, a Jamaican Chinese, is abruptly introduced. Amber is fossilised tree-resin, long venerated, and in Jamaica used (in real and substitute forms) as a talisman in Myal and Obeah ceremonies. When Thompson wrote, tsunami (Japanese, tsu, port + nami, wave), if always signifying overwhelming might, had not yet entered the global lexicon through the dreadful Indian Ocean tsunamis of 26 December, 2004, which killed 230,000+. the shallow harbour // of his heart (420–1) An open criticism of Adam, developing his gauche announcement of an Oxford scholarship at Nathan’s grandmother’s house (265–80), and suggesting life to date—a privileged white childhood, the privilege of Oxford—has left him complacent and unreflective. Amber Lee's sexuality is a partial awakening.. Kingston is a notable deep-water harbour, as Jamaican school-children were taught under empire, so the idea of a shallow harbour has force for Jamaicans. power in compression / … power squandered (422) A comparison between casual sex and loving sexuality, graphically drawing on the image of a piston, but horribly and ironically connecting with Blake’s “compressors” (370, 377, 393). hoarded passion (424) Despite the seemingly positive context ‘hoarded’ (as dragons do gold and jewels) is at odds with ‘passion’, anticipating the assault on

127 Chantal’s ‘treasure’. inscrutable or insurmountable (427) Concealing two terrible puns, on ‘screw’ and ‘mount’ as verbs of sexual conjugation. [page 69] Llandovery (430) In St Ann’s Bay, on the north coast just west of Ocho Rios. cantle (431) Literally, the raised, rear part of a saddle. that swirling mesh // of foam (432–3) A more ominous image than Walcott’s habitual, influential comparison of beach foam with white lace; mesh may entrap. There may also be a reference to an iconic scene in the 1953 film of From Here to Eternity where Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster embrace in the surf. drained … flooded (433) As both waves and tides may. a conjugal / love of words (434–5) Punning on conjugal, ‘concerning marriage’, and conjugate, ‘to inflect a verb’. the words made flesh (436) Signifying on Latin, Verbum caro factum est, ‘the Word is made flesh’, from the Ordinary of the Catholic Mass ; the meaning of ‘incarnation’. Chantal (436) Wayne Brown says the name means ‘song’ (p. 45 above), from French chant, ‘a song’, as Adam and Amber probably believed, but Thompson would know that the name was originally given in honour of the Catholic saint Jeanne Frémiot (1572–1641), Baroness de Chantal (in Saône-et-Loire), from Old Provençal cantal, ‘stone, boulder’. As events progress the song Chantal brings to Adam’s heart becomes a stone weight. another miracle / … the reliquary of her womb (439–40) “Refused to have any more children, perhaps had her tubes tied off. This may have antagonized Adam and contributed to his later decision to remain in Jamaica.” [R.T.] A reliquary is (primarily in Catholicism) a coffer for holy relics—typically (supposed) bonefragments of a (martyred) saint, and so more tomb than womb. Chantal, their jewel (441) Continuing the image of “hoarded passion” (424). the spell / of words (442–3) Which one might expect a poet, and (thinking of the divine Word, or logos, of St John’s Gospel) a Christian, to endorse, but which is also potentially a spell in the bad sense of enchantment or irrational constraint; the troubling instances of ll. 445-60 immediately follow in crescendo. The fact that words as talismans or spells manifestly fail Chantal and are debased in the mouths of drunkards and politicians is central to the despair of the poem.

128 mahjong tiles (449) Mahjong is a Chinese game of skill involving chance played with marked tiles; purportedly of ancient origin it is probably a mid-nineteenthcentury invention, and both in China and Jamaica (where there is a significant Chinese minority) is strongly associated with gambling hee, hing, ho / of village conversations (449–50) “Conversations in a Chinese village before migrating to Jamaica” [R.T.]. A play on the stereotypical mimicry of Chinese speech by non-Chinese speakers. [page 70] blunted by outdated // libel laws (456–7) “Which permit a journalist and his publisher to be sued for defamation even when the exposed person is a public figure. This is not the case in America and England is beginning to follow the American example.” [R.T.] a Minister of Security and Justice (457) No government minister has any business saying what this one does in ll. 459–60: if private individuals named in newspapers consider themselves to have been libelled, they should sue, so an independent judiciary can decide if libel has been committed or truth told. The only justification this minister (probably responding to pressure from the named) could offer is that Adam’s articles were causing sufficient national unrest to warrant political intervention—at best a policy of shooting the messenger, at worst state-protection of cocaine-barons. A pensive Adam … of the world. (461–72) Adapted from ‘Vigil’ (Moving On), which like the poem reworked as the Prologue, ‘Death of a Don’, ‘Mister Son’, and ‘Goodbye Aristotle, So Long America’ (all also in Moving On) can in retrospect be seen as studies towards View from Mount Diablo.. like an eyelid afraid to blink (462) Echoing ‘the Frog’s’ “lower lids ... like sagging hammocks” (365); besides the obvious sense of terrified and corrosive alertness to attack at any moment, the unblinking eye summons surveillance. It is associated with (i) the Pinkerton Detective Agency, whose logo was an open eye with the words ‘We Never Sleep’ (whence ‘Private Eyes’, first cousins to investigative journalists); and (ii) Sauron’s emblem of a lidless eye in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, where it symbolises (among other things) the totalitarian ‘Big Brother’ who is always ‘watching you’ of Orwell’s 1984. The lights / below (462–3) Kingston at night: Adam’s adult home isn’t specified but must (like Thompson’s) be somewhere in the hills above Liguanea plain,

129 elevations of 240–550m (800–1800 ft) with panoptic views of city and harbour. seemed to be torches … / ready to creep forward if … (463–4) Again summoning Nazi torchlight parades and echoing the idea of an internal enemy conquering (despite flaring lights) through wilful blindness (see ll. 122–3, 193, 200–01 annotations). The three monkeys who heard, saw, and spoke no evil (and Niemoller’s famous apothegm; see l. 135 annotation) are also resonant, but there may also be reference to older Hollywood, Tarzan-type films with white men in peril from African hordes, and to the child’s game of ‘grandmother's steps’ where players creep up on the target whilst they are turned away, not looking. The night // waited nervously to end. (464–5) A rare transferred epithet, evoking collective apprehension of peaceful citizens who begin to doubt basic security. lip … lip … / zip-locked (466) Transforming Adam’s beautiful panorama into an image of insular enclosure, and horribly anticipating a corrupt sexuality that intrudes from l. 474. If ‘zip-locked’ has its proprietary sense (from Ziploc, plastic strips that press together), there are implications of silent, airtight closure as well as threatening gestures commanding or promising silence (as by drawing finger and thumb across the lips in a zipping motion). He felt the mountain … / like a vulture, shifting … to be // a witness (467–9) Vultures do not wait on life, only for death as an opportunity to feed; the image recalls the poem ‘Jamaica 1980’ by Lorna Goodison (b.1947): I am spied on by your mountains wire-tapped by your secret streams your trees dripping blood-leaves and jasmine selling tourist-dreams

Goodison, however, was probably not thinking (as is easily supposed) about the violence as internal, but of the widespread, almost certainly justified belief that the later 1970s saw an extensive CIA campaign to destabilise Michael Manley’s government and ensure the election in 1980 of the pro-US JLP under Edward Seaga; Thompson’s “to be // a witness” is notably more passive (see also ll. 813– 16 annotation). The inanimate is animated with an implacable ruthlessness as a metaphor for a society that has lost its humanity. Every specific image of Thompson’s sentence (467–72)—mountain, vulture, witness, prayer, avenging ... hurled, affirmation choked, dread, end days—is also constellated around elderly missionary Barbie Batchelor in The Towers of Silence (1971; vol. 3 of the Raj Quartet) by Paul Scott (1920–78): Thompson saw the TV adaptation of the

130 Quartet when it was first broadcast in Jamaica in the later 1980s, and though not a conscious source for the poem there are a striking number of strong echoes. words, words (473) Alluding to Shakespeare’s Hamlet 2.2.195–6: Polonius asks “What do you read my Lord?”; Hamlet replies “Words, words, words.” Chantal raped (474) As with the blunt statement of “cocaine” (382), there is terrible simplicity of fact but a morass of implication. Rape of a virgin schoolgirl for the reasons given in ll. 480–4 represents appalling individual cruelty and civic inability to value others’ lives, rights, and choices. The perpetrator’s motives do not appear directed specifically against Adam’s journalism, yet trigger a reckless crusade against criminality, leading back to the cocaine barons, and so ‘making it personal’—a topos of crime films, especially (after Michael Winner’s Death Wish, 1974) vigilante responses to murder and/or rape. In broad (post-)imperial terms the centrality of interracial rape puts Thompson in extended novelistic and memorial company, especially with the specific trope of rape (and all forms of sexual exploitation) in slavery; but the black rapist and Anglo-Chinese victim also invites comparison with the long line of Anglo-Indian fictions animated by (suppositious) interracial rape and racial stereotypes of sexual threat—notably Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) and Scott’s blistering revision, The Jewel in the Crown (1966; vol. 1 of the Raj Quartet). the grounds of the Immaculate Conception school (475) A common Catholic name but a real school. Fr McLaughlin asks “why ICHS?” (p. 48 above), and Wayne Brown answers “you wouldn’t expect Ralph Thompson to miss such an opportunity for irony” (p. 45); but while the motives for rape (and memory of Chantal’s hard birth, 437–40) hideously deepen irony, more can be said. ICHS has extensive grounds, offering a venue for such a crime, and a suggestive history (see  http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/pages/history/story0015.html). her fifteenth birthday (476) Time-compression is here extreme: Chantal was born only at ll. 437–40. “This would make Adam about 40 years old in 1969/70, the beginning of Michael Manley’s socialist regime.” [R.T.] 3

[page 71] Sergeant Alexander (478) First mention of the figure who will dominate ch. 9. Even before … he understood the motive—a sin // of ignorance as much as lust (480–1) A difficult passage to assess. These are Alexander’s bigoted thoughts, but what exactly does he understand before knowing that the motive was, “the

131 sick conviction only sex with a virgin / could cure a dose of clap” (484–5)? The ‘virgin myth’, though hard to find documented, is said to be quite widespread in Jamaica, though with what degree of genuine belief is moot. The youth’s ignorance (of bacteria, antibiotics, reason, righteousness) is in any case striking, for any responsible adult could have cured it. From the 1990s the ‘virgin myth’ has been associated with South Africa’s terrible AIDS epidemic, and so with more recent but related African AIDS denialism (which denies a causative link between HIV and AIDS, and asserts a massive racial conspiracy to poison black Africans with ‘toxic’ antiretroviral drugs). a dose of clap (484) Gonorrhoea, infection by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae. A venerable piece of slang: “Probably from obsolete French clapoir, bubo, from Old French clapier, brothel, from Old Provençal, rabbit warren, from clap, heap of stones, perhaps of Celtic origin” (American Heritage Dictionary). a long sombre corridor … echo of heavy doors / thud shut (486–7) Invoking hospital and prison as metaphors for what happens to Adam as his family depart. The rhyme-sequence of this quatrain—‘dumb / corridor / doors / another’—is abbc, despite the pervasive half-rhyming the only formal variation on abcb. abbcquatrains are rare and hard to generalise about, but may be regarded as a deliberately failed form of arch-rhyme (abba), where mirror-symmetry constantly turns back on itself to defeat narrative progress (associated with the normative abcb). The best-known arch-rhymed stanza (in iambic tetrameter) is associated with traumatic grief in ‘In Memoriam A. H. H.’ (1833–50), Tennyson’s great poem-cycle of haunted bereavement: an ominous association as Amber and Chantal depart. to Canada (489) Whither many (wealthy and middle-class) Jamaicans fled as violence and what the wealthy saw as the confiscatory socialism of the ‘Manley Years’ deepened; hence the large Jamaican community in Canada. Options were limited, and Canada the nearest large Commonwealth country to the Caribbean— so the former empire ironically provided escape from an independent Jamaica seen as incapable or tyrannical. All men were vile. … / God refused all explanations. Thud! (490–1) These dramatic lines, in their simplicity verisimilar to the reductive, polarising effects of Chantal’s trauma on Amber and Adam, take an enormous risk, for the whole poem pivots on them and they cannot have been easy for a Catholic poet to mean with such ferocity. Four sentences form a syllogism of sorts + coda: the first term, the vileness of fallen man, is pure Christian dogma but resounding with extreme

132 feminist responses to rape and patriarchy, and confirming the failure of the marriage (perhaps in some ways on the rocks since Chantal’s birth). The middle term (“He could join them or stay as he pleased.”) registers catastrophic collapse and violation of the sexuality celebrated in ll. 419–33, and asks again about Adam’s “island home” (48)—the mystery of his commitment to a Jamaica that destroys him. The last term, an agony of the faithful since faith began, became after 1945 a theological problem of deforming urgency, expressed in May 2006 by Pope Benedict XVI during a visit to Auschwitz: In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?

 http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/05/28/D8HT5KOG0.html. 4

The coda (“Thud!”) is Adam “hearing the echo of heavy doors / thud shut” (487– 8), but also a blow, and in this context seems a personal audio-signature for what Nietzsche famously called the ‘God-shaped hole’ left by the collapse of faith. Unidentified … acquitted and released (492) The accused could not be legally identified because Chantal was not there: her understandable flight helped paralyse the system, but the outcome epitomises a US-derived practice of law wherein procedure is allowed to forestall justice (a topos in crime fictions of vigilantism & revenge—see l. 474 annotation). his new computer … floated from nowhere (493–4) The first home-computers became commercially available only in 1977 (Apple) and 1981–2 (other brands), so time has again jumped; assuming Adam was born c.1930, and given his time in Oxford etc., the earliest possible date for Chantal’s rape aetat. 15 is c.1970, but for “new computer” no date before 1977 will do and one in the 1980s is more probable. If it was a workplace computer, the date would be later still, and the reference to Chantal as a screen saver puts the computer technology in the 1990s. the amnesia of the screen (495) A fine phrase catching multiple ideas, most critically the association of new (especially digital) technology and the world it is producing with erasure of the past—partly because new entertainments etc. displace books and other cultural sources of knowledge, partly through the ways computers store and structure data and affect how knowledge is processed. There may also be reference to computers ‘forgetting’ when turned off what is in RAM, as early computers required users to save to floppy disk every time. the presence of her absence (495) A paradox with a long history in metaphysics

133 and theology. “Chantal’s absence is so strong it has become a palpable, constant presence in Adam’s consciousness. The concept of ‘Being’ as such can be applied to all realities, if all realities agree in this that they are not absolute nothing. The concept of ‘Being’ is the simplest of all concepts, since it cannot be resolved into simpler notes. (Walter Cunningham, Ontology, Fordham University Press). I return to this metaphysical concept in ll. 972–80.” [R.T.] reinforcing … his will. (496) There is an ambiguity: is it Adam’s will, exerting defiance, that is reinforced, or defiance of his will? If the latter, Chantal’s rape, or an unreported refusal by Chantal and/or Amber to return to Jamaica, could be “the final defiance”; if the former, reading forwards to ll. 497–503 suggests “his will” is to bring down structures that have allowed his daughter’s (and his and Amber’s) victimisation. Philosophically, ‘will’ is associated with Nietzsche, whose ideas were crudely appropriated by the Nazis, so while Adam’s will to oppose injustice by exposing its roots is in a very important way a matter of civic virtue, it is also, if not tainted, clouded from the very beginning. In the harshest view this might be taken as the first hint of a reading in which Adam’s grand campaign is deprived of nobility as well as success; see l. 532 annotation. the scourge / of words spurred (497–8) ‘Scourge’ has associations with Christ’s Passion, driving ‘spurred’ closer to its radical sense of galling a horse’s flank. where no reporter had dared to go before (499) Echoing the introductory voiceover in the original Star Trek, where Captain and crew will “boldly go where no man has been before”: what matters is the tawdry flavour of self-romanticising populist rhetoric. lurking in shadows, turning over rocks (500) Necessary clichés of investigative reporting but less glamorous than ‘daring to go’ (499), unhappy and potentially dangerous in their metaphorical origins, and suggesting the finding of ‘the Frog’, with a nasty, lurking pun in ‘rocks’—as of crack cocaine? nurtured // … seeds … garden … watered (500–01) A sequence of images summoning cultivation of marijuana, coca, and opium-poppies as much as more homely botany ... [page 72] lies exposed / by cross-examination. (502–03) ... but shifting dizzyingly to law, and the Socratic trial-process of seeking after truth that for Chantal’s rapist never happened.

134 politicians raged / but ... readership increased (503–04) A first explicit opposition of political and commercial interests. Gunmen … post-election / truce (505–07) An account compressing many phenomena, but most applicable to the 1976 and 1980 elections, the latter held in the shaming light of Bob Marley’s ‘One Love Peace’ concert in 1978 (itself following the attempt to assassinate him before the 1976 election and his twoyear exile in London). The fall in violence in Jamaica in the early 1980s is often connected with a rise in reported violent crime in the black communities of Manchester (UK), London, and Kansas City, MO, in the mid-1980s, suggesting many gunmen had emigrated, but have since returned, voluntarily or through deportation; cf. ll. 919–20 annotation. the Party (505) Pointedly neutral: both the PNP and JLP are implicated in political violence. dirty / work (505–06) “That is, intimidate voters, use murder for political advantage—a new phenomenon in Jamaica.” [R.T.] solvent with guns (508) A phrase combining the capitalism of the arms trade (and so asking the telling question of where guns and the money for them came from) with a double pun on solvent (flush, in/a solution). Green Bay firing range (509) In late 1977, with Michael Manley’s PNP in power, a sting operation was mounted by the JDF at Green Bay; on 5 Jan. 1978 five of ten alleged JLP gunmen lured there were machine-gunned to death. The ‘Green Bay massacre’ shocked the nation and still does; despite an enquiry, much is disputed and no-one was convicted; see  http://www.jamaicagleaner.com/gleaner/20060430/news/news5.html. the shadow of a machine gun (512) Cf. the vulture ‘hunched’ ‘at Adam’s back’ (487–8). There may also be reference to Sean O’Casey’s play The Shadow of a Gunman (1923). ready to settle accounts (513) Continuing monetary metaphors from l. 508, and implicitly raising the economic forces of the arms and drugs trades. one bullet … / for each year (514–15) A grotesque parody of gifts for retirement after long service, perhaps summoning the Catholic rosary. Only one escaped … a special Tribune scoop. (515–16) “My fiction in order to make Adam the only outsider to know the truth of what happened and to expose it.” [R.T.] a street named for an orange (517) In western downtown Kingston, near Jones Town; the Orange Street fire on 19 May 1976 killed 11 people; as with the Green 5

135 Bay massacre, there was an unsatisfactory enquiry: The press report implying that the JLP were the arsonists was in itself a blight on the state of the media [...] It was obvious that a political stage was being set to blame the JLP for extreme violence. Those on the ground politically, so to speak, knew that the gunmen came from Arnett Gardens. But it was not until long after when a commission of enquiry was established under Mr. Justice Small that, in the testimony before the commission from persons who asked to be heard in secret, it was disclosed that the arsonists were from Arnett Gardens. A report on the secret sessions was submitted by Justice Small but it was repressed and never published. (Edward Seaga in the Sunday Gleaner, 25 June 2006)

Readers should consider that Seaga was the JLP leader at the time (though not when he wrote, having retired in 2004). The event is also mentioned in the famous dub poem ‘Me Cyaan Believe It’ by Michael (Mikey) Smith (1954–83): Deh a yard de odder night when me hear 'Fire! Fire!' 'Fire, to plate claat!' Who dead? You dead! Who dead? Me dead! Who dead? Harry dead! Who dead? Eleven dead! Woeeeeeeee Orange Street fire deh pon me head an me cyaan believe it me seh me cyaan believe it

The critical connection with the Green Bay massacre and other events (such as the Rema evictions of 2 Feb. 1977) of which it is emblematic, is the use of state forces by a government of one party against individuals labelled as criminal, and maybe so, but also agents of the legitimate opposition. Especially in the West Kingston heartlands of PNP and JLP such events formed a crucible in which from at least the mid-1960s an unholy brew of sectarian politics, big money, popular outrage, the arms trade, and the domestic/international drugs trades fused into a status quo that has seen the Jamaican murder rate (after a slight dip in the early 1980s) rise steadily to a level now about double that of the worst of the 1970s. At

136 moments Jamaica has come close to tyranny and to revolution or civil war, and the corruption of politics achieved in the 1970s has yet to be undone. Red Stripe bottles (518) The use as Molotov cocktails of iconic Jamaican beerbottles, associated with the good-time image of West Indian cricket and tourist destinations, is a potent irony; the issue of alcohol is also implicit. Home Sweet Home lamps (520) “Kerosene lamps with cotton wicks and lamp shades bearing the message "Home Sweet Home", ubiquitous in rural Jamaica and ironic with reference to the ghetto.” [R.T.] orange tongues // preaching the brimstone sermon (520) Poetically, tongues of orange flame and a hellish sermon, with the obvious pun on Orange Street; politically, ‘orange’ summons the Ulster Protestant ‘Orangemen’ (from the settlement of Ulster by William of Orange) who famously preach ‘brimstone sermons’. The allusion is sharp, comparing Ulster’s sectarian Protestant–Catholic divide (which drove much of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ of 1969–99, in which c.3,000 people died) with the sectarian party divide in West Kingston in the later 1970s, and more generally in Jamaica. See also l. 517 annotation, and next annotation.. Snipers hid in the smoke … (522) Another dismaying resonance with Ulster, this time the ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre of 30 Jan. 1972 in London/Derry’s Bogside: 14 were killed and 13 injured by British paratroopers. old mash-mouthed women (523) Without front teeth, so their mouths appear crumpled; ‘mash’ is the usual Jamaican term for damage—cars are ‘mash up’ in accidents and roads by heavy rain. Water pressure … not enough // to cope (524–5) Low pressures, brown- or blackouts, phone outages etc. are common in Jamaica ; cf. ll. 646–50 annotation. [page 73] the voiceless, uncomplaining dead cremated where they fell (528) The collocations are common in elegy—”voiceless”, “uncomplaining”, and “dead” all occur in Shelley’s ‘Adonais’—but there is an echo of Walcott’s memorable last line in ‘The Gulf’, “age after age, the uninstructing dead”. Thompson’s line is notably hypermetric, an iambic heptameter whose fourteen feet conceal a tetrameter and a trimeter (the break comes after “dead”), forming the 8–6 pattern of ballad stanzas (see pp. 25–6 above). The Tribune editor … official Government quota (530–1) “Adam, outraged by the events, would have written articles so strongly attacking the government that

137 a threat of putting newsprint on official Government quota was made. This is a fact and publicly acknowledged but I don’t think that publication of the Gleaner was actually interrupted. Michael Manley referred to the Gleaner as the "whore of North Street" and Trevor Munroe led demonstrations against it. I had in mind the kind of articles John Hearne actually wrote about the events for the Gleaner. There is something of Hearne in my conception of Adam. The editor, probably Theodore Sealy, would not really have been upset by Adam’s articles—after all he could have vetoed their publication—but is rather sharing with Adam that having to stop publication might be a real possibility.” [R.T.] Trevor Munroe (b. 1944) is the author of The Politics of Constitutional Decolonization (1972) and founder in 1974 of the explicitly pro-Soviet MarxistLeninist Workers’ Liberation League, later the (now defunct) Workers’ Party of Jamaica. The importance given by Thompson to the white Jamaican John Hearne (1926–94), a novelist, journalist, and teacher is striking: Hearne was a close personal friend of Thompson’s, and beyond Hearne’s tendency to protagonists who are relatively privileged whites in colonial contexts, his first novel, Voices Under the Window (1955), set in Jamaica in the later 1940s or early 1950s, features such a protagonist who is ‘chopped’ to death in a riot (see ll. 887–8 and annotation). It is also notable that Hearn was on several occasions physically attacked and beaten by political minders for the highly critical tenor and content of his journalism; on at least one such occasion he recuperated at Thompson’s house (personal communication with the author). scabrous (532) Adam’s words were “crisply crafted / on the Tribune’s pages” (454–5); now they are infected with multiple sores, as if Chantal’s contamination by her rapist has spread to Adam’s work. the plant (532) ‘Plant’ means the printing machinery—i.e. cease to publish. [page 74] CHAPTER SEVEN [ll. 533–612] The first of three chapters overlapping in time with one other and ch. 6 (see headnote), each introducing a new character around whom it revolves and representing in emblematic figures an aspect or constituency of Jamaican politics. Spencer stands for the less than 1% of the Jamaican population that is white, largely (not exclusively) a wealthy colonial rump fallen on harder times, often resentful in a generically racist way but unwilling to forsake a lifestyle Jamaica still affords them

138 that the UK would not marl, whiter even than his skin (533) Marl (or bog lime) is clay mixed with calcium and magnesium carbonates, including lime, typically in the form of seashells; greatly valued as a fertiliser, it lightens soil to which it is added. Spencer (534) The name need not be symbolic, but may summon Hugh le Despenser (1262–1326), 1st and only Earl of Winchester (second creation), an exiled, recalled, and executed royal favourite, memorably ruthless and dissolute in Marlowe’s Edward II (c.1592). his Land Rover chariot (534) A famous British marque as imperial conveyance; in Jamaica as elsewhere SUVs now serve the same function as status symbol and (illusory) armament. estate road flanked to the horizon with … / … servile sugar cane (535–6) That is, an old ‘Great House’ (stately home) and surrounding estates, dedicated then as now to sugar, the historic foundation of Jamaican wealth but greatly declined as an industry; it is also the source of Appleton Rum, like Red Stripe beer and sinsemilla an iconic Jamaican product—hence the “stale-drunk master” (538). this rich ancestral soil (537) “Belonging to Spencer’s ancestors, the white plantocracy which at the time and even now exists to some extent.” [R.T.] stale-drunk … liquor / still brewed (538) The clichés of inebriate expatriate life have an unfortunately substantial truth. Alcohol was a major factor in imperial life, as social lubricant, consolation, and costive, and has not ceased to be so. ominous dicta (539) Signifying on Latin, obiter dicta, ‘things said in passing’, remarks by a judge having only incidental relevance to a case; hence, generally, passing comments—here of terrible as well as casual import. spinning … confusing retreat and honour. (540) The paradox for colonisers after independence: to what polity/community does one belong? ‘Should I stay or should I go?’ often has a sense of relative risk, but ‘should’ is a moral issue. Discretion is the better part of valour, but retreat is rarely thought the better part of honour. “We left Jamaica in 1976, unable to cope with the political terrorism and to save our sanity. There was hardly any active role that a white man could play to return the island to some semblance of order.” [R.T.] “You have … in jail.” (541–53) The words in inverted commas must be understood as the voice of a particular, racist character, not an authorial view, although there are among the slurs and resentments aspects of truth, especially as seen from a white Jamaican perspective. power … rich. / richer … more power. (541–2) A blunt equation, implying that

139 Jamaica is less a democracy than a criminal plutocracy. the crows have now outbred / the swans (543–4) “That is, black people have outbred white people and, in a democracy with one man, one vote, control all political power.” [R.T.] In any Jamaican context ‘crow/s’ means primarily ‘John Crow’, the Jamaican turkey vulture, Cathartes aura, a large, common bird (wingspan 2m, 6–7 ft) with potent status as an omen of death; they emblematically attend Blaka’s corpse at ll. 957–60. Beyond this, and the symbolisms of colour and number (flocking vs solitary behaviour, fecundity), there are literary echoes: the ‘Ugly Duckling’ (1843) of Hans Christian Andersen (1805–75) typifies one group; others reach back to Shakespeare’s description of Britain amid the Roman empire as “In a great Pool, a Swan’s-nest” (Cymbeline 4.3.137). In the wider sense, birds of the genus Corvus, crows also have rich symbolism as harbingers of battle and as tricksters—an Amerindian tradition influentially mined by British poet Ted Hughes (1930–98) in Crow (1970). roost … strutting the upper // perch … dye … peacocks (544–5) The avian metaphors become increasingly absurd: neither swans nor crows have communal roosts to rule, and swans neither strut nor perch. a parliament of fowls and fools (546) Alluding to The Parlement of Fowles (c.1372–86) by Geoffrey Chaucer (?1344–1400), 699 lines in rhyme royal, a dream-vision in which three eagles pay court to a female and argue with a duck about the relative merits of courtly love and proto-bourgeois pragmatism. The pun on ‘parliament of fools’ has been commonplace ever since. King Crow (546) A complex multiple allusion: beyond the triumphant Crowtrickster (see ll. 543–4 annotation), the most important are to ‘King Log’, in one of Aesop’s fables a floating log whom frogs elect their king, and ‘Jim Crow’, systematic racial discrimination in the US south after Emancipation. There is also an echo of King Louis in the Disney cartoon of Kipling’s Jungle Book (1967). “Time for palaver over. … throw us in jail.” (550–3) Though possibly neutral, palaver has a particular sense of a meeting between (colonising) Europeans and local chiefs—an African-inflected equivalent of Amerindian ‘pow-wow’. The rest of the lawyer’s speech raises a wry question about his unstated racial identity, as probably mulatto as white, and his racist litany, if predictable, is not altogether stupid. Michael Manley, for better or worse, did act in a way economically and sometimes forcefully harmful to the wealthy in Jamaican society, and many fled. this black orgy of retribution (551) “Overstated bombast—but there were many black leaders who insisted that since blacks had been exploited by whites for so

140 long, it was the blacks’ turn to do the exploiting, especially in the acquiring of wealth.” [R.T.] swap // our lands for useless bonds (552–3) “This is in fact what the Manley government did. The Land Bonds were issued to avoid a constitutional challenge of expropriation of property but the face value of the bonds had to be heavily discounted to produce any cash for the dispossessed owners.” [R.T.] [page 75] “Fuck ‘em. …” (555) The verse-novel’s only four-letter obscenity, not by chance in a white voice; Jamaicans have fine patois obscenities, but standard obscenities now heard widely in the US and UK remain strikingly absent from conversation. The phrase sets up a sexual twist (see ll. 601–12, 734–40 annotations). the beach house (556) “Villa Spencer” (557), not the “estate Great House” (577). a drunk-up, week-end party (556) As certainly happened, and happens, among expatriate communities (see l. 538 annotation). There is a flavour of carefree excess in the 1960s–70s (between the invention of the pill and the coming of AIDS), of the famously debauched late-imperial white societies of Kenya and urban India, and of desperate revelling in times of danger and defiance. British Architectural Digest / out of American House Beautiful (557–8) Famous glossy magazines but the national adjectives are added. Both Architectural Digest (founded 1920, now published by Condé Nast) and House Beautiful (founded 1896, always published by Hearst Corp.) are US: the distortion may mock Spencer’s derivative taste, or carefully distance any specific real-world reference. Playboy (559) The infamous high-quality softcore magazine founded by Hugh Hefner in 1953; depending on date, Playboy might be thought classy—it carries serious fiction and interviews—but distribution throughout the house is tacky. The villa sparkled … lawns … beach (561–3) No location is specified but the Villa must be on the north coast, perhaps in Portland, like Blake’s “San San villa” (395) or further west, between Noel Coward’s ‘Firefly’ and Montego Bay. a Raoul Dufy painting (565) French Fauvist painter, 1877–1953, noted for brightly coloured beach and waterfront scenes. Light shards glinted (566) As they may by the sea—but this is another monstrous transformation of light; see ll. 24, 47, 258, 279–80 annotations. ackee and breadfruit … pimento … almond trees … children (566–9) Plainly this is an important picture, but why? These trees are all common in Jamaica; the

141 point about almonds (Prunis dulcis) may be their sweet and bitter forms, the latter, having 6–8% of cyanide compounds, being potentially deadly; the morbidity of the bitter-almond orchard is then an image of growing destruction, but suggests a different poison, the sea-side grove as a drug-route. Spencer’s Range Rover (570) The car was a “Land Rover chariot” (534), and the shift is another time-blurring device: Land Rovers have been made and widely exported since 1948, but the Range Rover model, introduced in 1970, was only widely distributed after 1987 when it began to be exported to the US. Bevin, the butler (571) The name ironically summons Ernest Bevin (1881–1951), British statesman, minister of labour in Churchill’s wartime coalition government (1940–45) and Foreign Secretary in Attlee’s post-war government (1945–51). The multiple alliteration (Bevin, butler, busy, Benzes) is slightly mocking, and in crime novels one should famously be suspicious of butlers—a topos on which Thompson will later signify (see ll. 834–9 annotation). Benzes (571) That is, Mercedes-Benzes, cars of conspicuous consumption. A mountain boy (572) As Nathan is. the sea, feared it, never learned to swim. / But even … (573–4) The opposition of a “mountain boy” to the sea is simple but verisimilar, part of the point being that poor Jamaicans born in the interior will not see much if anything of the seaside as children; inability to swim is thus common, and “But even” is a complication, setting Bevin’s social conservatism (574–5)) suggestively at odds with his frightened insularity—as much a self-imprisonment as Adam’s lips of sea and sky “zip-locked at the horizon” (466–7). he was proud to wear / the Spencer livery … // white gloves at meals (574–7) “Livery—a distinctive dress provided by someone of rank or title for his retainers. Spencer is an insensitive snob.” [R.T.] On the white gloves see ll. 599–600. [page 76] family plate and silver (579) A traditional aristocratic investment; eighteenthcentury Georgian silverware is often very fine, and highly collectable. chamois … Goddard cleaner (581) Chamois (chammy, shammy) leather is a soft suede, once made from the hide of the chamois goat antelope, Rupicapra rupicapra, but now from sheepskin; Goddard make a famous brand of silver polish. parked tractors / … cane carts (582–3) With mechanisation the size of cane carts dramatically increased, and an assembled cutter + cart is as big as a combine

142 harvester. Huge Appleton cane-lorries still regularly scare drivers on the main southern roads leading towards the distillery at Maggoty. his earnest dream, promotion to the pool of drivers (584) Almost the classic boy’s dream of engine-driving, setting Bevin up for what is to come. On this Sunday … in the liturgy of retreat. (585–600) Little in this encapsulated, four-stanza scene requires explanation, but the unpleasant, hard-toforgive episode, in one sense trivial despite its eventual consequences, does heavy duty in emblematising an entrenched racial incivility and disrespect that empire fostered but that is distinct from imperialism proper (which in later British phases could be as icily polite as it was deadly). Bevin prayed / for a brave heart but God was hard of hearing (589–90) Much as for explanation-seeking Adam “God refused all explanations” (491). Paul Scott’s Barbie Batchelor (see ll. 467–9 annotation) eventually decided that ‘God is Deaf’, or hears only in silence. “Sorry you watch spoil, boy,” (597) Spencer’s slurred patois is as unlikely to be appreciated by the well-dressed Bevin as his demeaning demotion from butler to the pejorative ‘boy’. a wad of dollars (598) “The worst kind of paternalism passing for caritas” [R.T.] (Caritas is Latin, ‘charity’, the greatest of the three heavenly virtues, comprising love of God, one’s neighbour, and oneself: see 1 Corinthians 13). Presumably Jamaican not US dollars; the term ‘wad’ for money, boosted internationally in the 1980s by Harry Enfield’s character ‘Loadsamoney’, suggests the wadding used in muzzle-loading guns, as if the money is fired at Bevin. A gloved hand … retreat. (599–600) The white gloves serve their turn; ‘liturgy of retreat’, recalling “On this Sunday” (585) to close the scene, superbly evokes a topos of slave and later black memoirs, the conditioned, self-protective pseudohumility necessary to survive the acid racism of segregated and oppressed life. [page 77] bare breasted, / scampering … bucked him up (601–02) “In Jamaican usage to ‘buck up’ does not mean physical contact, rather to meet unexpectedly. The wife is as paternalistic as the husband, unashamed of her nakedness before a servant, apologizing by blaming bad behaviour on drink.” [R.T.] the nap // of her contrition unruffled (604–05) Nap here means primarily the surface texture of cloth, but also ‘sleep’, implying invalidating spiritual vacuity.

143 She sauntered off … (606) Clichés of the setting sun frame the sibilance of the alliterated ‘s’—an echo of Nathan’s hissing stutter in a lesser but cognate evil? the sea’s silver slowly tarnishing to red (607) Continuing alliterative sibilance poisons both natural beauty and Bevin’s pride in polishing the family silver (578– 81). However natural at sunset, redness also ominously suggests rust and blood. The taut … horizon // … thin as the lip of his machete … singed (608–11) Recalling Adam’s “lip of the sky and the lip of the sea // zip-locked” (466–7), and the sun that “singed / a cloud shaped like his island home” (47–8). Bevin’s dark, machete-armed desire for the white woman is a malevolent (but real) cliché of imperial id and superego, but “the burning / bush” (610–11) summons God’s speech to Moses (Exodus 3:2) while context and the sexuality in “burning” activates ‘bush’ as ‘female pubic hair’. Time / longer than rope, he thought, the tide turning (612) “‘Time longer than rope’ is a Jamaican proverb signifying that there will be time enough for satisfaction, to set things right. A measure of patience.” [R.T.] The lines summon other proverbial wisdoms (time heals all wounds, give ‘em enough rope etc.) but unsettles all with syntactical ambiguity—“the tide turning” literally (in as much as the Caribbean has noticeable tides) or metaphorically, which also summons the worm turning, a final set-up for ll. 734–40. [page 78] CHAPTER EIGHT [ll. 613–64] The shortest chapter (13 stanzas, 52 lines), and the second of three introducing new characters (see previous two chapter-headnotes). Plain, plump Millicent (613) The name doubly suggests multitudes (milli-cent) as well as innocence, and lacking a surname she stands for many ordinary Jamaican women—often seen as the backbone and major workforce of Jamaican society. never married, / had no offspring of her own (613–14) The three elements don’t always go together: much is implicated. Jamaican murder-victims are predominantly male, as are the imprisoned and solitary emigrants, contributing to an imbalance that makes for spinsters—a situation implicated in the widespread Jamaican distinction of a man’s ‘girl’, ‘baby mother’, and ‘wife’. The topos of a spinster’s sublimation of maternal capacity in teaching again echoes Barbie Batchelor (see ll. 467–9, 589–90 annotations). the house inherited … (616) Such humble, valuable private house-schools (and

144 churches) are still common in Jamaican slums, as once throughout empire. camouflaging … warming … ochre glow (618–19) Apparently positive sunlight, capped with the painterly mellowness of “ochre”, but (as in the Prologue) rapidly heating to an “unrelenting, flat light” (620) that saps will and destroys confidence. maggots in the body politic (621) “Even someone as simple and good as Millicent has become aware of the corruption in the system, although like many good Jamaicans she does not believe that it is as pervasive as made out to be.” [R.T.] The metaphor of the body politic has lately been disregarded but underpins such terms as ‘corporation’ and ‘commonweal(th)’; it is historically associated with stratified, monarchical societies in which each ‘member’ (limb, organ) has and knows its place, but equally implies healthy mutual dependency. Maggots have medicinal uses but signify putrefaction as (with the notorious exception of the New World screw-fly, Cochliomyia hominivorax) they eat only dead tissue. their rule of sum (622) A mathematical principle of counting and set theory— bluntly, that if doing x and y are mutually exclusive, and there are a ways of doing x and b ways of doing y, then there are (a + b) ways to choose; the implication is of a mechanical progression given great power by narrowness, blending with a less technical understanding of maggots multiplying unstoppably as necrosis spreads. There is also a derogatory echo of ‘rule of thumb’—neither is the needed ‘rule of law’. Star-apple / blossoms wilted … (622–3) “An echo of Walcott’s collection The Star Apple Kingdom (1979), written as a tribute to Michael Manley whose original vision, like the star-apple blossoms, is now wilted at the edges.” [R.T.] The star-apple tree, Chrysophyllum cainito, is common in Jamaica. bruised and brown (623) Like Millicent, presumably; brown would in Jamaican terms signify lighter rather than darker skin, and hence mixed racial ancestry. She prayed … vinegar on demand. (624–8) This long sentence is litany and lament, collocating images from sacred understandings of Jewish/Black history as diasporic torment and promised delivery but corrupting them, as polit(r)icians and unscrupulous ministers (religious or political) corrupt sacred texts by mobilising them against their flocks. It seems closer to Marx on ‘the opium of the people’ than to any Christian understanding of the divine militancy Millicent metaphorically desires. The collocations of bread/stones, baskets/water. and water/vinegar are all biblical topoi. Noel Thomas, her much beloved nephew (629) Widening Millicent’s emblematic status, the name collocates Christmas and the doubting apostle.

145 Linstead (629) An inland town in St Catherine, celebrated in a song, ‘Linstead Market’—a lively venue well-known since at least the mid-nineteenth century. medical student at Mona who boarded / with her (630–1) The medical school at the University of the West Indies campus at Mona, in upper east Kingston, was until the mid-1970s the only one in the Caribbean; study is expensive and extended-family boarding commoner than in wealthier countries. kick-backs (632) Not simply bribes, but de facto tithes or taxes—a stream of payoffs from (criminal) revenue, cutting people in and building complicity, hence stability and invulnerability; a primary agent of systemic corruption. [page 79] God will not be ignored or mocked (634) Developing Galatians 6:7, “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap”; another echo of Barbie Batchelor (see ll. 467–9, 589–90, 613–14 annotations), stricken by this text at a critical moment as her faith fails. dialysis (637) Chemically, separation of molecules by diffusion; medically, mechanical purgation of blood. Choice of an onerous purgative process is pointed. some congruent and courageous donor (638) “Congruent meaning a matching kidney so not subject to rejection, usually only available from a relative. Even in the best of circumstances a kidney transplant is a dangerous procedure.” [R.T.] determined to ignore // all warnings and objections. (640–1) Beyond general caution, objections might be from Protestant sects like Jehovah’s Witnesses (strong in Jamaica) who believe much medical procedure, including blood transfusions, to be sinful. What transpires is more mundane and deadly. The tests … the medical team (641–2) The first successful kidney transplants were in 1952, but until 1964 only transplants from living donors were possible. “Into your hands … Lord!” (643) From Luke 23:46, “And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.” Millicent rightly thinks herself a martyr, but to what extent it is redemptive or even Christian martyrdom is painfully moot. The surgeon signalled ... scalpel. (644–5) A sequence of dramatic glances and gestures familiar from Hollywood film rather than reality; giving way to ... An hour later … refused to start. (646–9) ... a sequence of events familiar from reality rather than film or fiction. Exposure by earthquake of substandard con-

146 struction is probably the most familiar chain-of-events, but the ground has been prepared by low water-pressure at the Orange Street Fire (524–5), and ‘cursed bad luck’ at individual citizens’ and the body politic’s expense is grimly familiar to every modern Jamaican. Word / … confused her school. “Who shot her?” … TV. (650–3) “The children assume that in Jamaica people usually die from being murdered; so used to news of murder, so insensitive to death, they only cry because they see their teachers crying.” [R.T.] Thematically, this continues the corruption of Adam’s journalism (532) and the divine logos. the water of the basin (656) A favourite image of Walcott’s for the Caribbean as baptismal font, chalice, or grail; here one might ironically suspect a kidney-dish. [page 80] the October rain … (658) Jamaica is reckoned to have two rainy seasons, May– June and October–December, spanning the hurricane season (when it is baking hot unless ...). The “shovels / softening the soil, helping to dig her grave” (658–9) imply ‘male rains’, downpours that erode soil and tarmac alike (‘female rains’ are prolonged, fertilising drizzle). Out of the morphine mist (660) Literally the “morphine mist” Noel and Millicent would have been in prior to the operation, and the “pain killer administered to Millicent as she lies dying from the botched operation caused by the power failure” [R.T.] “Lord, / … out of slavery a second time / into the promised land …” (663–4) A second biblical litany from Millicent conflating Jewish and black sacred historiography; see ll. 624–8 annotation. The explicit reference to slavery recalls the mention of the Middle Passage (293), and imagery of deliverance has strong links with Rastafarian theology. [page 81] CHAPTER NINE [ll. 665–764] The last of three chs introducing new characters (see headnotes to chs 6–8), but distinct (i) in that Alexander has already been mentioned (477–84), and (ii) as the first of three chs each of 25 stanzas (100 lines) driving a return to overt violence, and bringing the plot to the brink of catastrophe in the shorter final ch. 12. If Spencer

147 and Millicent (with Noel) in chs 7–8 represent a white colonial rump and a Jamaican lower-middle class with women as its backbone, Alexander stands for a conservative (authoritarian) lower-middle class with institutionalised, uniformed order as an ideal. Senior Inspector Alexander of the Jamaican Constabulary (665) The Jamaican Constabulary Force (JCF) was established in 1867, following the Morant Bay Rebellion (1865), and if rules of recruitment changed with independence its basic organisation and militarised character did not. Its present establishment is 8,500 and actual strength in 2001 was 7,940 (of whom 1024 = 17.8% were female, and 844 = 12.5% detectives). Alexander investigated Chantal’s rape as a sergeant (477); there is no rank of ‘senior inspector’, the grades being constable, corporal, sergeant, inspector, assistant superintendent, deputy superintendent, superintendent, senior superintendent, assistant commissioner, deputy commissioner, commissioner. Sergeant to ‘inspector’ is only one promotion, but ‘senior superintendent’ would be five; for the task he is now given (though his squad’s size is uncertain) the higher rank would on paper be more appropriate, but in practice officers picked to lead semi-legal death squads are usually more junior—and expendable. The imaginary rank is another device blurring the time-frame, which could now be anything from 1976–2002, though the profound lawlessness of the late 1970s is still in the atmosphere. zero tolerance (666) This accelerates temporal blurring (see last annotation), as, while the origins of the phrase are unclear, it only became widely known in the 1990s as a policing tactic adopted by Mayor Rudy Giuliani in New York City. despised the … judges … defence attorneys … liberals (667–9) A familiar topos of crime fiction and revenge/vigilantism plots (see ll. 474, 492 annotations), as horribly real as clichéd. The underlying problem is a weakness of adversarial systems in which justice depends less on truth than victory over an opposition. He dealt with savages … (670) Another familiar topos of fictional policemen who want to ‘bend the rules’, but in a post-colonial context a bitter irony. acid to erase / a woman’s face (670–1) “In domestic disputes Jamaican men often resort to this method of disfigurement” [R.T.] Newspaper reports and common belief suggest that Jamaican women also have resort to acid. Anancy (671) Or Anansi, a major god in West African belief and myth, spiderlike as well as human, with many responsibilities; the King of Stories and a trickster, hence a type for the land fraudster. (worst of his cases) (672) Readers are emotionally primed to agree, but can or should a non-fatal rape, however disgusting, be the “worst” case known to a

148 ‘Senior Inspector’? If he did not himself work Green Bay, Orange Street, or other major crimes, it is inconceivable by the mid-late 1970s that Alexander would not have worked multiple murders of women and children. Fr McLaughlin’s complaint (“Nothing beautiful happened beyond Chantal?”— p. 47 above) seems generally misconceived, but here has some resonance. a half-Chiney gal coming home from school (673) Another disturbing sign of Alexander’s thinking (cf. ll. 480–1 annotation), reducing Chantal to one aspect of her racial heritage and in separating ‘gal’ and ‘school’ sexualising her (as ‘schoolgirl’ posits innocence). Alexander need not intend racism to be racist, and is halfway to legitimising the rape—much as he “understood the motive” (480)? For a cop … misleading … light-skinned … (674) There may be an implicit argument about gradients of skin-tone in the JCF, and so the consciousness of relative dark-/lightness that pervades Jamaican society; this grades into a different observation about assumed facial immobility and humourlessness in policemen his lips / … combusting … beguiling // the anger caged in his chest. (675–7) A strangely mixed metaphor, setting up the chapter’s crux and finale (ll. 718–36, 751–60), but leaving readers with an unfocused sense of perversity, anticipating the notion of the ‘English disease’ (see next-but-one annotation). The caged anger is also “part of Alexander’s suppressed homosexuality” [R.T.]. When the Prime Minister / ordered his presence (677) Like “the Party” (505), the PM is scrupulously unnamed; what is problematic is that a PM should be able so to summon a middle-ranking policeman to receive private orders for war. that boy who cringed … in the ears of the world. (677–85) “The headmaster is the father figure, at once feared and desired. Alexander feels he deserves the beating.” [R.T.] A memory with heavy freight: collocation of schoolboy nakedness (“pants down”), caning, and “the consoling embrace” suggest what was once called the ‘English disease’, sadomasochistic homosexuality induced by school beating and abuse—but allows a reading in which Alexander was, by beating, made aware of his homosexuality (cf. 725–32). The psychological case thus made is charted through phallic and Christian connotations of “snake”, leading to Alexander’s self-condemnation as “a sinner” among “ungodly malefactors” (‘male-factors’?) deserving punishment for blasphemy. The great prose study of such a man is by Paul Scott, in the white, déclassé, probably homosexual and sadomasochistic Anglo-Indian policeman Ronald Merrick of The Raj Quartet.

149 [page 82] “Unmarried, I see. / … I welcome that fact. (686–7) The PM presumably means that with such risk to police lives and limbs, an unmarried man is less likely to be cautious; armies disapprove of marriage for a similar reason. For readers primed by ll. 677–85 it sounds like an obituary’s final ‘He never married’, tacitly indicating homosexuality—and if the PM knew of Alexander’s (repressed) orientation, might ironically gloss as righteous his expendability. Dons … some political (689) The usual Jamaican term for crime bosses, especially the party-connected garrison-rulers of West Kingston, derived from Puzo’s The Godfather (and Coppola’s film) reporting Sicilian–American use. But as an engineer / I conclude (690) No historical PM had an engineering degree: Hugh Shearer (JLP, 1967–72, a cousin of Michael Manley) had no degree; Manley (PNP, 1972–80, 89–92) was a graduate of the London School of Economics; Edward Seaga (JLP, 1980–9) holds a Harvard BA in Social Science; and P. J. Patterson (PNP, 1992–2006) is a lawyer holding degrees from UWI– Mona and the LSE. Presumably this PM sees himself as an ‘engineer’ of society. Wipe them out, Alexander! (692) Wholly abrogating the rule of law: something like this did happen in 1970s Jamaica, and again with a special anti-crime unit in the early 2000s, but not in isolation. Various (Brazilian, Argentinean, Chilean) ‘death squads’ of the 1970s–90s are notorious; the UK government had a ‘Shootto-Kill’ policy in confronting IRA paramilitaries in Ulster, and the Spanish government sent covert assassins after ETA members in Spain and France. More recently there has also been a serious issue with extra-judicial killings in Guyana. blushed … involuntary grin (694–5) Recalling the strange metaphors of ll. 674– 7, and developing them into Alexander’s self-armouring epiphany of ll. 695–702. to serve both God and the State (696) Often valorised as a conjunction but very problematic: the force of the long-eighteenth-century settlements (from the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 to the American and French Revolutions) is separation of church and state, guaranteeing freedom of conscience and worship to all. Sin must not automatically be crime. the curse of sin. / So in that … hot, anointing glare … (697–8) Recalling Alexander’s self-damnation in ll. 682–5 and the many harsh transformations of Jamaican light and afternoon heat (24, 47, 258, 279–80, 566), here also transforming Alexander by anointing him (as king or bishop). balaclava and bandolier (700) Signs of lawlessness: balaclavas, woollen hoods,

150 are associated with terrorism via the IRA and other European terrorist groups; bandoliers (chest-straps with loops and pockets for ammunition), though used in almost all armed forces, are associated with guerrilla forces. merino for orange Kevlar vest (701) Merino is a high-grade wool, Kevlar the DuPont Company’s brand-name for polyparaphenylene terephthalamide, five times stronger by weight than steel and used for bullet-proofing. swagger-stick / for M-16 (701–02) A swagger-stick is an officer’s short cane, held under an arm; use by a police officer testifies to militarisation of the JCF. Armalite M-16s are US-made, .223 (5.56mm) calibre magazine-fed assault rifles, introduced in the late 1960s for troops in Vietnam, and a favourite of the IRA and other terrorists as well as death squads; the only serious Western challenge to Soviet Kalashnikovs ( see l. 917 annotation) as the assault weapon of choice. he sniffed out … by instinct, like-minded fanatics (703) Perhaps too easy a glissade: fanatics may sense one another’s extremisms, but easy or rapid ‘sniffing out’ is not obviously verisimilar; evidence about death-squad formation suggests prior association and facilitating higher powers as well as mid-level instincts. powder burns / like Lenten ashes smudging … (706–07) Shooting at close range produces characteristic burns from muzzle-flash; “In Catholic liturgy an ash smudge is placed on the forehead of the congregation (on Ash Wednesday only, not all through Lent) to remind that ‘dust we are, to dust we shall return’” [R.T.]. tossed in a Jeep (708) “Common practice by the police: the injured criminal is randomly driven around in the Jeep to make sure that he is dead before he can receive medical attention.” [R.T.] Police use of a US-made Jeep, not Spencer’s British “Land” or “Range Rover” (534, 570) suggests new patterns of influence; the US was intensely concerned by Manley’s rapprochement with Castro’s Cuba, and after Seaga became PM in 1980 were as eager to woo as he was to be wooed. Police use of this tactic is still widely rumoured and credited in Jamaica. [page 83] dying / burning / ears / detailing (709–12) As wrenched monorhyme burning/ detailing is loose, so ‘dying’ is bound in, as are the medial ‘writing’, ‘wailing’, ‘blocking’ & ‘curling’, with ‘smudging’ & ‘hanging’ (ll. 707–08) . burning / of tyres blocking the roads (710–11) “A common form of community protest in Jamaica.” [R.T.] Amnesty International (712) A charity concerned with human rights violations

151 worldwide, active in Jamaica since the 1970s because of concerns about police tactics, prison conditions, and capital punishment. each murderous spree (713) ‘Spree killer’ became an official FBI designation in the 1980s, with ‘serial killer’; the difference is that ‘spree killers’ kill on one occasion in multiple locations. Alexander is in uniform a serial spree killer. “Alexander the Mad” (713) Signifying on ‘Alexander the Great’ (356–23 BCE). but he was deaf to public opinion (714) Adam’s articles form ‘public opinion’. sortie (715) An armed patrol or attack that leaves from and returns to the same position (typically a camp or strongpoint), implying the besiegement of the police and their lack of progress. cleaning his weapon (715) Necessary maintenance becomes a fetishised ritual among addicted gun-users. the ring of mountains that guarded Kingston (716) To the south Kingston opens to the sea, but there are mountains to the east and north, and the arc from Long and Dallas Mountains through Skyline Drive, Jack’s Hill, and Stony Hill seems to hem the city. flex their muscles … / their chests expanding (717–18) Alexander’s macho fantasy of mountains endorsing summary ‘justice’ plays unhappily against Nathan’s and Bevin’s mountain origins, and Adam feeling “the mountain at his back, / hunched like a vulture, shifting its mass to be // a witness to whatever happened” (467–9). Given ll. 725–36 there is also an eroticised allusion to bodybuilding and such icons as Charles Atlas. That Sunday … silence declared. (718–36) Like “this Sunday” (l. 585), introducing a contained episode at once normative and a distinct, telling moment of social and moral fracture. a yard (719) The US sense (area round a house) is current in Jamaica but there are important wider senses, including a central tenement courtyard, and Jamaica as island-home (cf. ‘yardie’). A ghetto youth / suspected of dealing in coke (719–20) Tellingly, given the racial mixtures of Jamaican society, ‘the ghetto’ is a normal term for the poorest, most violent districts of West Kingston (Trench Town, Tivoli Gardens, Jones Town) and Spanish Town. Local coke-dealing suggests a later date than other details: until the 1970s Jamaican marijuana was exported for cash, but once the island became in the 1980s an entrepôt for cocaine payment was in product, necessitating establishment of a domestic market. “In the name / of Jesus, I beg you … (722–3) Non-violent Jamaican society

152 remains strongly Christian and piety can have force. The boy’s muscles … silence declared. (725–36) Confirming Alexander’s (repressed) homosexuality and sadomasochism (677–85, 686–7). Beyond specific relevance to corruptions of (post-)imperial policing, male homosexuality is highly controversial in Jamaican (and African-/American) society—but far more often in the context of violence against than by ‘batty men’ (‘bottom-men’). More general association of murder with sexual arousal has been a great theme in real and fictional crime throughout the twentieth century, summarised in the German ‘Lustmord’, lust-murder, and in the FBI’s VICAP-programme and theorised aetiology of serial killers (see l. 713 annotation). Louis Simpson singled out this scene and Chantal’s rape as achievements of the poem. the tape / of the headmaster spooled … flapped (729–31) Recalling the “memory spool” (682); on reel-to-reel tape-recorders tapes were not fixed to spools and when they ended continued to revolve with the loose end flapping. [page 84] the eyes for an instant … a shared / secret. (734–5) The secret may be a fantasy, or Alexander’s sexual-homicidal desires and the boy’s ability to fulfil them. and giggled (735) The “nervous smile agitating his lips / always on the verge of combusting to giggles” (675–6) finally combusts. blood / blurring his balaclava (735–6) An odd phrase, as a woollen balaclava is not obviously blurr-able, but implying great proximity (cf. ll. 706–07). a covenant of silence declared. (736) “A conspiracy among Alexander’s squad to cover up the killing.” [R.T.] As with the earlier Sunday episode (585–600) a sacred image serves as termination: in Christian theology ‘covenants’ are God’s agreements with man as revealed in scripture; the ‘Great Covenant’ with Israel comprised those with Noah, Abraham, Isaac, & Jacob (Genesis 9, 17, 26, 28, 32), and their culmination in that with Moses. There is also the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Jamaica signed on 19 Dec. 1966 and ratified on 3 Oct. 1975, and which both Alexander and the PM (“Wipe them out”, 692) clearly violate. ‘Covenant of silence’, used to describe cover-ups and tacit acceptances of violence (as against women, for example), here extends to political and public acceptance of illegal state-violence (setting-up the witness and Adam’s story, 742–8) but irony is even more bitterly dubious in that the boy has in any case been permanently silenced by death.

153 Back home … his gun. (736–41) The prayer attests to Alexander’s sense of sin, however he may justify himself, but that sleep is so demanding he fails to clean his gun suggests the sexual satisfaction he derives from killing. Ghetto eyes and a camera … (743) A hidden witness is a perennial topos, but “camera” has implications: it is only since the 1990s, with digital cameras, camcorders, and CCTV, that the idea of witnesses going to the media has become normative; nothing precludes a mid-70s date, but plausibility lessens. Adam reported the story (744) “The witness who filmed the killing was one of Adam’s informers and turned the evidence over to him.” [R.T.] The public demanded a Coroner’s inquest. (745) In English & US law coroners have a duty to investigate deaths by unnatural causes, and are required to hold inquests in such cases; abrogation of inquests for deaths at the hands of security forces is a sign of official violations of human rights. conjecture / gave way to the dawning and details of truth (746–7) A somewhat romanticised view—depending on the time-frame: a first journalistic scoop in the 1970s might be thought a revelation, but at any later time there would be a greater sense of someone saying aloud what all already knew. convened / a committee to review … (749–50) This did happen in 2002 with regard to the most recent anti-crime squad, subsequently disbanded. but neglected to wear / his Kevlar vest (753–4) See l. 702 annotation; Alexander’s action ironically reverses ‘suicide by cop’ (deliberately inducing shots by waving e.g. a replica weapon) into a kind of ‘cop suicide by gunmen’. into the court where Judgement abides (756) The capital ‘J’ implies divine judgement, abiding where human justice fails, but “court” suggests ‘courtyard’, summoning the “yard” (719) where Alexander shot the youth. an arching of bullets (756) A suggestively transferred epithet: arching would most obviously apply to Alexander’s back, implying his being struck in the chest—where his “anger [was] caged” (677). [page 85] the finessing committee (761) A rare sarcasm: it was initially the “committee to review the use of excessive force / by the anti-crime squad” (750–1). as Adam had warned (763) Presumably in his “story / in the Trib” (744–5). the Alexander virus infected / the Force (763–4) Another metaphor complicated by uncertainty of time-frame and Alexander’s homosexuality: the word ‘virus’ is

154 old, but modern understanding of ‘viruses’ as pathological agents developed only in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and its current usage from the mid-1980s in AIDS publicity and from computing. Whatever the complications, killings by and of policemen bulk annual Jamaican homicide statistics, and there are occasional trials of policemen for using excessive force. (A notorious recent incident was the ‘Braeton killings’ of 14 March 2001, in which police killed seven; six policemen charged with murder were acquitted on 11 Feb. 2005.) [page 86] CHAPTER TEN [ll. 765–864] The second of three chapters of 100 lines leading to the catastrophe (see previous headnote) and the pair of ch. 5, also about Tony Blake. a gentleman now by official citation (766) No gentleman by birth, Blake has reached a position in which he is deferentially addressed and treated as one. ‘Cold Shoulder’, so named to honour … (767) “The name ‘Cold Shoulder’ for the Frog’s mansion is an ironic reference to his business of commercial refrigeration.” [R.T.] To give someone the cold shoulder is deliberately to ignore or refuse them, probably from a Scottish custom of welcoming desired guests with a hot meal of good meat, but giving unwelcome ones a poor cold cut. cut-glass glow … flaunting of silver / and gold (770–1) Conspicuous consumption and display remains marked among Jamaican social élites, founded in part on the low cost of local labour and contrasting with the (extreme) poverty of many Jamaicans; catered parties with marquees and decoration are frequent. pearls overcultured by far (772) More sarcasm (cf. l. 761): ‘natural’ pearls are the response of certain oysters and mussels to an irritant grain of sand or parasite; most pearls are ‘cultured’ by seeding oysters with such an irritant. There is no condition of ‘overculturing’, and the phrase applies to wearers rather than gems. middle-class bosoms cavalierly exposed (773) Jamaican society remains conservative about immodesty of dress (cf. ll. 601–02 annotation), and in general (as elsewhere) working-class culture more so than middle-class. “More and more middle-class women are abandoning traditional prudishness of dress.” [R.T.] Yet there is also a parallel and more extreme development in dancehall culture, in which women are encouraged to wear very short shorts called ‘batty-riders’ (bottom riders) or even shorter and tighter ones called ‘pum-pum printers’ (outlining the pubic mound and labia); lyrics and dances are also explicitly

155 sexual, and the contradiction between approved sexual repressiveness and highly sexualised practice is a striking feature of Jamaican society. Leapfrogging … the Frog (773–5) As well as the dreadful pun, ‘leapfrogging’ suggests Blake’s dependence on pushing others down that he may rise. sycophants, cynics (774) Sycophants (Greek, sūkophantēs, an informer) seek favour through flattery; a cynic (Greek kuōn, a dog) is now one who doubts the possibility of altruism and thinks all motivated by selfishness. bussing (775) Kissing (Scots Gaelic bus, ‘lips’). the glitterati (778) A 1950s coinage, glitter + literati (‘people of letters’), with a derogatory sense from the superficiality of glitter and (supposed) impracticality of literary discussion. his single kidney (779) Once Millicent’s, as readers are reminded at ll. 799–800; as kidneys filter metabolic wastes from the blood for excretion in urine there is a joke about filtering ‘social waste’, of which Blake’s party is full. shocked by the tit-for-tat … (780) Though not needed, a pun on ‘tit’ is activated by the “middle-class bosoms cavalierly exposed” (773). Class / was the yeast … (781–2) A challenging metaphor, principally referring to a process whereby under imperialism class among the colonised is suppressed by racist overlordship but with independence emerges as an intra-racial engine of discrimination. the middle layer / of the exotic mix (783–4) The CIA World Fact Book (2005) gives the ethnic demography of Jamaica as “black 90.9%, East Indian 1.3%, white 0.2%, Chinese 0.2%, mixed 7.3%, other 0.1%”, total population being 2.73m, but the 91% ‘black’ figure conceals considerable variation, and Jamaica is to the eye a rainbow nation. more intuitively at ease / with power (784–5) “Perhaps this should read ‘more intuitively at ease with position’? In a class stratified ex-slave society it is not easy for an emerging middle class to be at ease with its new status, or instinctively to understand noblesse oblige. The women are more comfortable with it, using intrigue more discreetly behind the scenes than the men who compensate for self-doubt by ‘profiling’. Men profile at parties by the way they dress and whom they are seen talking with. Noel Thomas, the doctor, is mature enough to eschew such posturing.” [R.T.]

156 [page 87] Cleopatra (786) Cleopatra VII (69–30 BCE), Pharaoh of Egypt (51–30 BCE), lover of Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony, immortalised in Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra (c.1608) as the great sensualist: Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety. Other women cloy The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies; for vilest things Become themselves in her, that the holy priests Bless her when she is riggish (2.2.271–6)

in the castle / of his black skin (786–7) Signifying on the seminal West Indian novel In the Castle of my Skin (1953) by Barbadian George Lamming (b.1927), but also on Walcott’s Epitaph for the Young (1949), from which Lamming adapted the phrase. the tribal spoils of party hacks (787) A hack (a horse used for riding or driving, as in ‘hackney carriage’) came in the eighteenth century to mean a writer for hire; hence ‘hack-work’. Thompson’s phrase tellingly equates ‘tribal loyalties’ (natal identity claiming priority over legal and/or moral obligation) with hack-work. neither envy nor racial // pride (788–9) Envy, presumably, of “tribal spoils”; “racial // pride” is more complex, relating to a meretricious, implicit claim by “party hacks” that in making themselves wealthy they advance black standing. sailed / paper ships in dirty gutter water (790–1) “Sailing paper ships was a popular entertainment for young ghetto boys especially after heavy rains when the open drains were flooded.” [R.T.] rolled / iron hoops (791–2) A popular Victorian children’s’ game, obsolete in most places by c. 1900 as the “iron hoops” came from coopering (barrel-making). guns at twelve, by twenty / were dead (793–4) Children are often valuable to crime syndicates precisely because they usually cannot be prosecuted, even if arrested; with legal majority their value ceases. This comment also signals the imminent failure of the underlying Bildungsroman model (pp. 29–31 above). his aunt … / now in her glory (794–5) Millicent: the biblical phrasing implies redemption and heavenly reception after death, but makes more acute the venal circumstances of her needless and undeserved death. the consolation of despair (796) In the sense that if one despairs of being able to

157 make a difference, there is no obligation to struggle; to Christian eyes the phrase is challenging, as despair (slighting the redemptive power of God) is a mortal sin. There is an allusion to the De consolatione philosophiae (Of the Consolation of Philosophy, 524–5) by Boethius (Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, 475–525), concerning destiny and free will. a child’s distended / belly (797–8) From malnutrition, which ironically bloats. her smile … her donated / kidney that purged (799–800) As Millicent in ch. 8 stands out from all others (especially Spencer & Alexander in chs 7 & 9), so her altruistic, self-risking, example is here in shaming contrast to “flaunting” “tribal spoils” (771, 787). General McPherson, head of the Jamaican army (801) That is, the Jamaica Defence Force, combining all military services, politically commanded by the PM but since abolition of the defence portfolio in 1974 under the Minister of National Security & Justice (as is the JCF). McPherson is fictional, but seems a strong representative of the JDF’s (fairly beneficent) tradition. an osteoporotic stoop (803) Osteoporosis is a condition in which bones lose density, leading to weakness; spinal fractures produce a characteristic posture. managed to salute / Dr. Thomas (803–04) “Just a social greeting but military men often salute involuntarily. ‘Salute’ could also mean one humanist’s respect for another.” [R.T.] from Scotland (806) Thompson has family connections with Scotland through his daughter’s marriage, and speaks of the country with affection. at Worthy Park estate (807) In St Catherine, on the Rio Cobre; notable for River Sink, where the Cobre disappears underground for 6km. McPherson is loosely a neighbour of Adam’s Uncle Johann (see l. 122 annotation). embraced an ex-slave woman (807) Doubly confirming a voluntary liaison (embraced, ex-), not a slave-master’s rape or coercion. to actuate (808) To activate; put into motion or move to action. [page 88] Sandhurst (811) JDF officers in the army section are still largely trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the principal British Army officer training school on the borders of Hampshire, Berkshire, and Surrey. “Will explode … (812) A mild parody of clipped military phrasing. Nature abhors a surfeit.” (812) Signifying on the proverbial ‘Nature abhors a

158 vacuum’; ‘surfeit’, connoting excess and disgust, is associated with Henry I of England (reigned 1100–35) who died of a surfeit of lampreys (eel-like fish). military attaché … CIA credentials (813–16) For obvious reasons real figures are not available, but it is clear many intelligence operatives, including those of the US Central Intelligence Agency (very active in Latin America from the 1950s), often officially serve as military attachés. The “Alabama drawl” has no intrinsic significance, but associates the man with a former slave-state. Although the matter remains subject to controversy and denial, many Jamaicans believe firmly (with good reason) that the CIA were active in destabilising the pro-Cuban Manley government in the late 1970s; see also ll. 467–9 annotation. rest and recreation (815) A US military term (‘R and R’) denoting leave from active duty, popularised during the Korean & Vietnam Wars (1950–3, 1963–75). a spew // of medals dripped down his chest (816–17) A third snap of sarcasm (cf. ll. 761, 772), anticipating Blake’s “confession … / like vomit” (851–2). (In the first Peepal Tree edition a full-stop was wrongly printed after “credentials” (816), and the ‘a’ of “a spew” was capitalised.) Washington’s interest in the island (818) See l. 708 annotation. State Department (818) The US ‘Foreign Office’. dispatches (819) Another military term, reports from an active front. information discreetly / gathered (819–20) Unlike that gathered by Adam, not least in his dangerously overt attention to Blake’s dying confession at ll. 852–9. the General himself … own concerns (820–1) Most obviously arising (given a 1970s date) from increasing politicisation of the JDF; see ll. 509, 801 annotations. an earnest (821) A token of intent. genuflecting (822) From Latin genū, knee + flectere, to bend: a term, now specifically Catholic, for a kneeling bow, as to a church altar on entering and leaving the aisle; hence loosely any act of obeisance. the diplomat (822) That is, the military attaché (813). “One of our professors … a deaf ear.” (823–8) This satirically exaggerates, but some black nationalists did (and do) adopt positions pointing towards this extreme—particularly under the influence of Black Power (332). ‘Standard English’ (824) has declined in Jamaica to a point at which basic student competence is a significant problem in higher education. Any particular reference would probably be to Barbadian poet-scholar Kamau Brathwaite (b.1930), who taught at UWI–Mona 1963–90: “To heal the traumas of colonialism […] the denigrated Creole language should be introduced into the education system”; see

159 his History of the Voice (1984). pays a visit … / … to beg for money (826–7) Suggesting a date after 1980, when Edward Seaga’s JLP government (1980–9) reversed Michael Manley’s foreign policy by breaking with Cuba and courting the US—not least for financial reasons, as Manley’s redistributive social policies had caused serious economic problems and flight of capital. A minister (832) Presumably (given ll. 838–9) of National Security and Justice. lunched // at the Great House (832–3) In effect, dining with the slave master. with a thick envelope for dessert (833) That is, a cash bribe—though for what, exactly, is moot; there is the possibility in ll. 568–9 of drugs involvement (see annotation), and advantage can always be taken of the sympathetic ear. [page 89] “I can’t believe … with the police.” (834–9) A terrifying speech: “that boy, the butler” is Bevin, tormented at Spencer’s party and teased by the bare-breasted wife he is now said to have tried to rape (571–612). There is dismissal of what should be a matter of course, the inquest (cf. 745), class-inflected comment about Spencer’s “word / against a maid”, and a promise to pervert the course of justice by “speak[ing] / to the police”; all stand ironically against the baseless cliché of a guilty butler. The actual shooting (835–6) is exactly 100 lines after Alexander’s murder of the boy. winked … “Roast pork for lunch … (840) A sly, multiple pun: ‘pork’ in Jamaica is (for its paleness) a slang term for white people, who may be financially or otherwise ‘roasted’, while in the US ‘porkbarrel’ politics refers to ‘fixed’ state spending concentrated in a particular constituency to benefit incumbents while costs are borne by all taxpayers (the term is believed to derive from plantation practice, slaves being allocated unwanted remnants of slaughtered pigs). The Tribune reporter … the doctor’s sleeve (841) Adam and Noel. Adam’s presence and anonymity is presumably part of his private campaign, but may also imply that his nervous editor (529–32) has punished him with a society beat. a blue nimbus around the lips (844) A nimbus (Latin, ‘cloud’) is radiance around a deity, a halo, an aura of glamour, and dark rain-cloud: religious associations begin a theme extending to the chapter’s end, and rain anticipates Blake’s torrential confession. Blue lips medically indicate oxygen starvation, hence the doctor’s kiss of life.

160 fingers collected into a steeple (849) Blake creates his own church to prompt his confession; there are further puns on ‘collected’, suggesting church collections of money and liturgical collects (abbreviating Latin ōrātiō ad collēctam, ‘prayer at a gathering’), brief prayers that vary with the day but usually precede the epistle. Mistaking / the reporter for a priest (849–50) Not unreasonably, given Adam’s mission to reclaim justice from evil and childhood fantasies of vocation (92–6; cf. 913–15). “Bless me, Father, / for I have sinned …” (850–51) The ritual words beginning Catholic confession. dying declaration, exception to the hearsay rule (854) Courts generally require evidence to be given under oath by a witness who may be cross-examined; hearsay, statements or gestures made outside court, are inadmissible, but exceptions include statements made in the belief of impending death by a witness who died. Blake’s death makes his confession admissible, as Nathan understands. spooled to a stop (855) Recalling the memory tape that ran in Alexander’s head (682, 730), and exactly repeating a phrase from l. 730. A curious crowd (855) Among the crowd must be someone who understands exactly what has happened, and sets in motion the rumours that reach Blaka (in ch. 11) and Nathan. [page 90] the doctor, / … reporter … and the wife (857–8) A curious trinity: how Adam talked his way into the ambulance, and whether it is ethically acceptable for a reporter to do such a thing (however fine his motives), are good questions. a rare / contrition (859–60) In the first Peepal Tree edition an erroneous comma appeared after “rare”. but God … decided … singing. (859–63) Taken seriously, God’s providential intervention, redeeming Blake’s soul, promises a way forward—if Blake can be saved so can we all—but is in tension with Noel’s life-saving actions “like a black God” (846). A providential / clot … (863–4) “A massive stroke, providential because the Frog did not suffer long, thought he had made a good confession and could not now be indicted for dealing in drugs. Not a bad way to go.” [R.T.] The Frog croaked his last. (864) A terrible compound pun, combining the traditional noise of frogs with croaking as (i) a hoarse form of speech (such as

161 Blake’s confession); (ii) to die; and (iii) to kill. [page 91] CHAPTER ELEVEN [ll. 865–964] The last of three chapters of exactly 100 lines (see headnote to ch. 9), and an addition to the sequence of chs 7–9 introducing characters (Spencer, Millicent and Noel, Alexander). The appearance of ‘Blaka’ (‘blacker’?) as gangster-informer immediately after the death of Blake challenges readers to relate them, and the underlying point of the successive Blake/Blaka tales may be to defuse any suggestion of racism: black, brown, or white, it is morality and civility that matter. Smoke of remembrance (865) “Ganja—i.e. marijuana” [R.T.] Besides general associations of candles/incense with memorials, the natural image of smoke contrasts with the mechanical ‘spool’ of Alexander’s memories of abuse and Blake’s confession (682, 730, 855). breasts / bouncing (867–8) In ease and naturalness a contrast with Spencer’s wife’s bare-breasted ‘bucking-up’ of Bevin (601–05) and the ornamented, muchon-display bosoms at Blake’s party (772–3). a demijohn of water (870) A large, narrow-necked glass or earthenware bottle encased in wickerwork; from French Dame Jeanne, ‘Lady Jane’, the shape of the encased bottles suggesting a stout, well-dressed woman—here catching at Blaka’s tough-minded mother. yabba (871) From Twi, ayawá, ‘earthen vessel, dish’; a Jamaican and Trinidadian term for a large, flat-bottomed clay pot, usually with an everted rim, used as a storage-jar or cook-pot. “This and the following ten lines are transposed from my poem ‘Death of a Don’ in Moving On, a pastiche of Tennyson’s ‘Morte D’Arthur’. The original verse is in dialect and begins ‘All mornin long / de pow pow pow of gunshot / did echo in the ghetto, / down de alleys and across de yards’. Compare this with the opening of ‘Morte D’Arthur’: ‘So all day long the noise of battle roll’d / Among the mountains by the winter sea’.” [R.T.] a tamarind switch (876) A switch is usually a single length of flexible wood, but a tamarind switch is made from three braided and oiled lengths of tamarind (Arabic, tamr Hindī, ‘date of India’), the durable heartwood of a fruiting tree, Tamarindus indica. Jamaican law defines flogging as corporal punishment with a cat-o’-nine-tails, whipping as use of a tamarind switch on naked buttocks. Such punishments fell into disuse after 1969, but were revived in the 1990s (see e.g.

162  http://193.194.138.190/tbs/doc.nsf/(Symbol)/15cd9e9f5ce87175c1256e980046 0a18?Opendocument) and are still controversially used in schools (see  http://www.corpun.com/jms00106.htm). Many associate a predilection for corporal punishment in Jamaican and other Caribbean societies with the legacy of slavery, and think it a factor in adult violence. (whumm) (877, 878, 881) Recording at least five strokes—even by ‘harsh’ standards a very severe response to childhood misdemeanours. If you bad … this beating (878–81) In the first Peepal Tree edition the inverted commas around these two sentences were misplaced. the Bible say spare the rod and spoil / the child. (879–80) Proverbs 13:24 is usually cited as the source of this famous adage—but the KJV reads “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes”, and both the RSV & NIV retain ‘hate’. The source of the usual form is the comic poem and satire on Puritanism Hudibras (1663–78) by Samuel Butler (1612–80): “Love is a boy, by poets styled, / Then spare the rod, and spoil the child.” The sermons … exploded. (882–4) A vignette recalling Alexander’s “anger caged in his chest” and death by “an arching of bullets” (677, 757). whippings (882) A legal as well as emotive term—see l. 876 annotation. barrage (883) Suggesting an indiscriminate rain of blows, and concealing ‘rage’? the baby mother (885) See ll. 613–14 annotation. 6

7

[page 92] a wutless nayga (886) That is, ‘a worthless nigger’, also playing on ‘witless’. The phrase is perhaps intended to collocate with the episodes of beatings as a further seed (a phrase of self-contempt with its roots in slavery) of the present violence. he brandished … to silence (887) Recalling Alexander’s flaring, sexually inflected violence fuelled by repression. his machete … / chopped a red wedge (887–8) Machetes (often ‘cutlasses’ in Jamaica) are common tools, the weapon in most working-class domestic murders; ‘chop’ is the usual verb for such killing. (See ll. 530–1 annotation.) fled his village for a Kingston / inner city ghetto (889–90) An archetypal journey to the big city, in Jamaican context summoning the seminal film The Harder They Come (1972), written by Perry Henzell (1936–2006), who directed, & Trevor Rhone (b. 1940); protagonist Ivanhoe Martin (Jimmy Cliff) is based on a gangster shot by police on 9 Sept. 1948 on Lime Cay. The film’s influence

163 extended through a 1980 novel by Michael Thelwell (b. 1939) and 2006 musical. the Party (891) A second careful neutrality—cf. l. 505. “Squint-Eye Nellie” (891) No longer “nubile” (52), signalling in her first appearance since l. 99 the beginning of the novel’s final movement. tribal / spoils to party faithfuls (893–4) Cf. “tribal spoils of party hacks” (787). After the bloody / intimacy … Glock. (894–9) The argument that distance in killing by gunshot facilitates murder is often heard in Jamaica, and has force, but rests a little uneasily here after the bloody shootings by Alexander and squad, of Alexander, and of Bevin (706–09, 735–6, 757, 835–6). only a slight warming of the palm (898) Not the friction-heat of ‘chopping’. Glock (899) An Austrian defence company that in the early 1980s began to manufacture pistols that have been massively successful thanks to simplicity of design/ ease of use, reliability, and low price (c. 65% of law-enforcement agencies in the US now use Glocks). Glocks have a reputation as ‘plastic’ guns invisible to X-ray because they use some exterior polymer, a fact misunderstood by the US guncontrol lobby and disseminated by Hollywood. The recent manufacture of the first Glock implies a date well after the ‘Manley Years’ for this part of the action. friend and foe, // fear and favour … sponsored (900–02) An important addition to the argument in three balanced phrases: after friend/foe and fear/favour, “jurisprudence the people / understood and the politicians sponsored” stands in contrast to the official jurisprudence shown in Chantal’s rape, Alexander’s extralegal killings, and Bevin’s murder to be an incomprehensible failure. Brutal as Blaka’s representative regime may be, it is clear-cut, a notion that sets up events in the rest of ch. 11 and ch. 12. “Community justice meted out by a Don is a form of jungle justice which some politicians encourage.” [R.T.] One should also realise that for inhabitants of the ‘garrisons’ ‘jungle justice’ may be the only ‘official’ protection available, resort to the police being forbidden. the lesson … out the other (902–03) A dreadful pun, in that the lesson (for others) is being shot through the head. Blaka / bent … mother’s son (903–04) There is a pun on bent, as ‘inclined’ and ‘warped’; “Brought up with violence, Blaka is carrying on the tradition.” [R.T.] Then one day … of his heart. (905–08) Blaka’s conversion is hard to assess, in that the image of the “buried golden coin” is both valorising and mercenary. There may be an allusion to the unnamed wife of Manoah and mother of Sampson, who was alone in a field when an angel appeared to her (Judges 13: 9), or a reference back to Adam’s childhood amid the guinea grass.

164 bezel (908) Bezel here extends from its propoer gemmological sense, the faceted part of a gemstone between girdle (where it is held in the setting) and table (flat upper surface), to a band (presumably metal, and hence “corroded”) that holds a gem in place, and is implicitly a strap constricting Blaka’s heart. [page 93] Adam … / who would … grant him absolution (913–14) Developing Blake’s dying misidentification of Adam as priest (849–50), itself recalling his childhood fantasies of priestly vocation (93–6). In Catholic confession, absolution for sins that are crimes is supposed to be conditional on surrender to legal authority. Russian fishermen … invasion. (916–22) A complex passage summarising a swathe of drugs history, from the 1960s, when Russians based in Cuba traded for marijuana, through massive development of the cocaine trade in the 1970s–90s. The pattern of Jamaican emigration and (forced) return is implicit, successively driven by the political violence of the 1970s, the effects of Marley’s ‘One Love Peace’ concert in 1978, and accelerating return in the 1980s–90s to political and criminal violence. See ll. 919–20 annotation. AK-47s (917) Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947, a Soviet-made, .308 (7.62mm) calibre, magazine-fed gun, the first true assault rifle in the modern sense. Designed in 1947, and widely distributed within the Soviet block from 1956, its simplicity of manufacture and use made it by the mid-1960s the standard weapon of guerrillas and other insurgents, as it still is. the Colombian cartel (918) There have been successive major Colombian cocaine cartels: the primary reference here is to the Medellin cartel, run by Pablo Escobar (1949–93), dominant from the late 1970s–1980s; it was succeeded in the 1990s by the Cali cartel, run by Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela (b.1940); the Norte del Valle cartel has dominated from the late 1990s. The Medellin cartel initially developed the trans-Caribbean cocaine routes into the US and later Europe. the White Lady (919) Cocaine. the world flushing / its jails of Jamaican gangsters (919–20) The story is hard to detail, but it seems clear that from the early 1980s (as political violence declined) many gunmen went abroad, and resulting increases in UK & US convictions of Jamaican nationals led to harder-line policies of deportation, especially after changes to US law in 1996. Equally, it should be noted that there is a counter-argument positing that these people become criminalised in Europe

165 and the US, and are then deported to Jamaica. In any case, between 1990 and 2002 at least 22,000 Jamaicans were deported back to the island, and figures for 2005 show 3,319 deportations, of whom 39% had drug convictions and 58% home addresses in St Andrew, St Catherine, and Kingston. However those who are hardened criminals became so, there is real concern in Jamaica, not least Nellie’s (921), about the effects of returned deportees on domestic crime. bracing her corner (922) “In Jamaican slang protecting territory and influence.” [R.T.] “Have Frightened Politicians Lost Control of Dons?” (923) The only Tribune headline given, a telling question: certainly the balance of power that in the early 1970s lay with the politicians has shifted, and they find themselves riding the proverbial tiger. Comparing ll. 529–32, where the paper’s editor worried about the danger of Adam’s “hard-hitting, scabrous articles”, it is clear the time-frame has now advanced beyond the point reached at the end of ch. 6. the Party’s (924) More careful neutrality; cf. ll. 505, 891. swinging coke instead of incense in her censer (928) A censer or thurible is a vessel for burning incense, used in Catholic Mass. As coke is also a kind of coal, the line is punning as well as euphonious, terrible, and frightening: it turns on the pressure indirectly exerted on Jamaicans by Colombian cartels (who pay their middlemen in product, not money) to develop a domestic cocaine market as large and efficient as that for ganja. Aromatic “incense” stands in for aromatic ‘Herb’, and there may be a further pun on ‘incense’ as ‘to agitate, inflame’—which cocaine does and marijuana doesn’t. remembering the eager pull / of fingers … (930–1) Recalling Nellie’s sexual abuse of him as a child (56–9). a black fist (932) In stylised form the emblem of the Black Power movement, mentioned exactly 600 lines earlier (332). [page 94] She had swapped … both grew colder. (933–6) Another complex comparison: both Nellie’s and Adam’s exchanges are forms of survival, but while Nellie as a woman without means or protection might reasonably be thought to have had little if any choice about bartering sex, Adam’s decision to remain in Jamaica after Amber and Chantal had fled was his own, and his exchange of familial for public obligation a far more individual bargain. The “words slowly turning / to

166 ashes” recall Dead-Sea fruits or apples of Sodom (Calotropis procera), which contain salt, were described in classical antiquity by Josephus and Tacitus, and made famous by Thomas Moore (1779–1852) in Lalla Rookh (1817): May Life’s unblessed cup for him Be drugged with treacheries to the brim.— With hopes that but allure to fly, With joys that vanish while he sips, Like Dead-Sea fruits that tempt the eye, But turn to ashes on the lips! (‘The Fire-Worshippers’, pt 2, ll. 480–5).

holier / companionship of words (934–5) “A misplaced idealism now beginning to wear thin.” [R.T.] the passion and the purpose (936) A common collocation in theology. both grew colder (936) Perhaps echoing Jesuit poet G. M. Hopkins (1844–89): Áh! ás the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie ; And yet you wíll weep and know why. (‘Spring and Fall’, ll. 5–9).

one unscheduled night (937) That is, without a (secret) arrangement to meet. a raucous / assault by rain (937–8) Steep-pitched rooves, timber construction, and above all the common use of corrugated galvanised iron roofs mean heavy rain drums exceptionally loudly in many Jamaican houses. Them buy … drugs (941–7) Although there are earlier patois constructions (such as “soon done”, 170) Blaka’s speech is the first extended representation of patois, achieved using little more than pronominal case and verb tense. More phonetic spelling or challenging grammar would have been possible but minimalism is a poetic and diplomatic economy. The forceful, floating “Them” in “Them buy”, “Them say” is accurate but transmits a malignant blurring of agency, and the vivid images culminate in a terrible truth: “Blood / cheaper than drugs.” write down the runnings (945) “‘Runnings’ is Jamaican slang for insider knowledge of what is taking place or how deals are made.” [R.T.] the morning broke clean (950) Another image of light becoming edged, as are the “highlights … sharp”(951)—but the basking mountains are more peaceful.

167 By the side … down the valley. (953–6) The arrangement of Blaka’s corpse serves many purposes: for the killers decapitation etc. points to exemplary punishments for betrayal, while for Thompson they follow from the sharp edges of the light; the “blank eyes staring down the valley” summon Nathan’s similar view from Silver Hill (402–08). This dead stare of Blaka’s is the final ‘view from Mount Diablo’ the verse-novel offers, and is turned away from the natural view from the height. under a plastic tarp (954) That is, a waterproof tarpaulin. A crow, the early bird (957) ‘John Crow’, the Jamaican turkey vulture; see ll. 543–4 annotation. [page 95] Judas (957) Judas Iscariot, betrayer of Jesus. According to Matthew 27:3–8: Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself, and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, / Saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that. / And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself. / And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood. / And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter's field, to bury strangers in. / Wherefore that field was called, The field of blood, unto this day.

But according to Acts 1:15–20: And in those days Peter stood up in the midst of the disciples, and said, (the number of names together were about an hundred and twenty,) / Men and brethren, this scripture must needs have been fulfilled, which the Holy Ghost by the mouth of David spake before concerning Judas, which was guide to them that took Jesus. / For he was numbered with us, and had obtained part of this ministry. / Now this man purchased a field with the reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out. / And it was known unto all the dwellers at Jerusalem ; insomuch as that field is called in their proper tongue, Aceldama, that is to say, The field of blood. / For it is written in the book of Psalms, Let his habitation be desolate, and let no man dwell therein and his bishoprick let another take.

168 Blaka’s lonely conversion (905–08) and equally lonely end may summon Judas’s solitary self-slaughter in the gospel and/or the curious and bloody details of Acts. intaglio (958) A design carved into a hard surface, so the ground is in relief; the opposite of a cameo. transom (959) A flat board forming the stern of a boat—transferred here to one end of the cart. men in merinos (962) As Alexander was before he donned his Kevlar vest (701). The merino (vest) as the comfortable, casual garment of ‘taking your ease’ works in deliberate contrast to the horror of the scene. all / eager to witness and wallow in … death. (963–4) The dreadful, ordinary crowd so drawn to the corpse, summoning images ranging from ambulancechasing to zombie movies, as well as Doubting Thomas’s need to dabble fingers in Christ’s wound and merely vulgar curiosity, recalls the vision with which the prologue ends, and infuses moral corruption into society at large. “Jamaicans seem to have a morbid fascination with death and examining dead bodies.” [R.T.] [page 96] CHAPTER TWELVE [ll. 965–1048] The final chapter and thirteenth section—making a baker’s dozen, and summoning the hours of the clock approaching midnight, months of the year approaching midwinter, and the biblical symbolisms of 12/13 disciples, tribes of Israel etc.. the nation’s radios … (965) The opening recalls that of ch. 2, contrasting eagerly heard and exciting/depressing war-news with vacuously routine murder-statistics. murder quotas (967) A final sarcasm—or just exhausted truth: with the murderrate running at 5+ per day, and rising year on year, it really does feel like a quota system, and neither newspapers nor politicians know what to say. the Honourable Minister (969) Presumably the same one who spoke so chillingly and immorally to Spencer at Blake’s party (832–40). chloroforming his will (972) Chloroform (trichloromethane, CHCl3) was a usual anaesthetic well into the twentieth century and a standard manner of drugging into unconsciousness, as part of a kidnapping etc.; a topos of crime novels. On Adam’s will cf. l. 496. Doors kept banging … thud. (973) Cf. ll. 486–8. He was naked … Oxford reason! (974–80) A complex passage: the idea of Adam’s sense of reduction to simplicity is clear, but the exact terms and their

169 relations are opaque. “Adam feels emotionally and physically trapped, reduced to basic ‘being’ in an ontological sense. Hence, reason, even Oxford intelligence, is no longer of any importance, cannot save him.” [R.T.] impressed / to basic Being (974–5) ‘Impress’ presumably has a sense of forcible conscription, while ‘basic Being’ has a theological sense (see l. 495 annotation) and represents the bare, forked animal to which we may all be reduced, a culmination of Adam’s losses—wife, daughter, passion, purpose, words. to deconstruct (977) A verb that became widely known and used from the 1980s, because of its use in French literary theory. the vulgar transfiguration / of the informer (978–9) In Christian theology the transfiguration of Jesus is a specific event on Mount Tabor —“And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart, / And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light.” (Matthew 17:1–2)—that in the West is commemorated on the last Sunday after Epiphany (falling in Feb.-Mar.). Thompson may have been thinking not of Blaka’s death but the strange power of his corpse to attract vulgar observers, and its dead radiance, yet he does seek to make amends (there is no hint that what he confesses to Adam is motivated by any monetary reward), goes out of his way to warn Adam (though he clearly knows what risk he is taking) and in general behaves with notable courage. The image of his transfiguration on the hill thus can be read less ironically: clearly there is a savage irony in the mystical vagueness of the Biblical transfiguration and the sordid particulars of Blaka's murder and mutilation with crowds who come to gawp, but maybe Blaka is to be seen as having acted in a Christlike way. the devil’s mountain top (979) Mount Diablo. So feeble … reason! (980) The contrast of Adam’s present-day Jamaica with his memories of Oxford is strong, but in the UK Oxford’s reputation, beyond a general intellectuality, is as the ‘home of lost causes’ and the ‘city of dreaming spires’; reason as logic would be more associated with Cambridge or Edinburgh. Alzheimer’s (981) A degenerative brain disease marked by progressive loss of memory and cognition; first described in 1906 by Alois Alzheimer (1864–1915), and very much on the international agenda from the 1990s as incidence increased and better understanding of predisposing factors became disseminated. deleted the stored files / and disks (982–3) A symbolic rather than technical summary—hard disks cannot be deleted, though clearly everything goes—but consistent with deliberate vagueness about time and earlier reference to systems

170 that would have used floppy disks, which can be wiped and reformatted. [page 97] “To Be Opened … My Death.” (986) “Not so much for legal purposes but to leave a record of his work in trying to expose corruption.” [R.T.] In crime fiction such letters are usually a form of life-insurance, allowing negotiation with a dangerous party; what happens to them here is never specified, but in as much as the data they contain derives from Blake’s confession, Adam’s death renders all such information legally inadmissible (because it was only he who heard and could admissibly report Blake’s dying words). slanting afternoon, amber light (987) Neither red nor green, but anticipating the “traffic light” (993) and recalling Adam’s wife (as “slanting” may her ethnicity). age spots (988) Or ‘liver spots’, ‘solar lentigines’—minor discolorations of skin most exposed to sunlight (hands, neck etc.), affecting those over 40; there is also some evidence associating them with stress. such a horizontal landscape (989) Florida’s highest point is 105m (345 ft). monitor … / … flat as the baseline … (990–1) Again symbolic rather than technically accurate (cf. 982–3): the term ‘flatlining’ to indicate death has had wide currency since Joel Schumacher’s 1990 film, but is not medical; there is no term ‘baseline’ in electrocardiography. to such a mediocre death? (992) The first suggestion that the manner of one’s dying may be as or more important than the when and why of it, and inviting comparison with Blaka’s death as well as recalling Adam’s commitment to Jamaica. with almond eyes (993) Indicating some Chinese heritage. china doll (996) A bitter pun, playing on Chantal’s half-Chinese ancestry and the porcelain collectables, and continuing into “chipped and soiled” (997). you tossed me from your love (997) “Adam is projecting his own guilt at having decided to remain in Jamaica rather than immigrating to Canada with his family.” [R.T.] Adam’s responses to the rape were in many ways self-centred, making it a personal cause when Chantal’s need might have been more for his continued parenting. her white school uniform (1000) Indicating a pupil at Immaculate Conception. Nathan was waiting … (1001) As he has from l. 408, Adam’s “mildew on his tongue”.

171 a Beretta between his legs (1002) For Beretta see l. 385 annotation; its position here raises a question about its potency substituting for sexuality. “You reach s s sooner than I expected. (1003) Another example of Nathan’s apparent omniscience and ability to appear at will. Religion kill him! (1004) “Nathan blames Blaka’s religious conversion for his becoming an informer and hence being eliminated on Mount Diablo.” [R.T.] Drugs // dealing … rules. (1004–05) Cf. ll. 900–02. Is a long time … Grandma dead, you know.” (1006-07) Adam may know but readers don’t, though it is not unexpected as she was born in the nineteenth century (246, 256–7) and we are now anywhere between 1980 and 2000; “long” and “early” are (besides l. 1048) the last blurring of the time-frame. Adam heard a distant door close softly (1008) Cf. ll. 486–91, 973. [page 98] under the skin … / the skull was beginning to bulge (1009–10) Recalling the corrupted metamorphoses of the prologue, culminating in lycanthropy (27–40). “Nathan is now gaunt with age. The skull is also associated with evil.” [R.T.] He talked about / his life in a whisper. (1010–11) As Blake finally confessed in a croak (see l. 864 annotation). “I keep a low profile. … (1011) “This and the twelve following lines are my attempt to rescue Nathan’s character from the archetypal dumb criminal. His sensitivity and sense of irony were perhaps cultivated when, as a young man, he was a part of Adam’s family and shared many of its cultural values.” [R.T.] Is s s swagger cause most men to dead. (1012) Cf. ll. 22, 889–90; Nathan has no lauded and feared nickname, and no overt wealth to attract police and rivals’ attentions, just a terrible reality. no chains … gals. (1013–15) The usual trappings of a high cash income: chains are jewellery (‘gold bling’); Lexus is Toyota’s marque for luxury vehicles; Mandeville, the capital of Manchester Parish, about 100 km (63 miles) west of Kingston, is at 628m (2061 ft) with a pleasant climate, and has been described as the most English city in Jamaica with notably large, elegant houses, a town green etc.; and desire for ‘high-complexioned’ (light-skinned) gals as a status marker is a logical extension of Jamaica’s intense confusions about colour and worth. “When you leave … of that?” (1015–23) Nathan’s speech is clear in detail, rich in import: the mind revealed is sophisticated, droll, ironic, and in the worst

172 reading of “s s since it look you might die before me” tormentingly cruel. The speed with which Nathan moves from explaining that he is not really motivated by money and display to making his heartfelt complaint of abandonment is moving and deliberately places the white/black betrayal at the heart of Nathan's motivation. His claims of a fall in which resentment of Adam’s unthinking, boastful acceptance of unearned privilege played a significant role are underpinned by the multiple ironies of “Frog Auditorium”: even considering his own death, Nathan ironises his need for a white front-man. There is a desperate mingling of thwarted love, the wounded need (as a black man) to show Adam that he has succeeded despite the betrayal (leaving Adam the money in his will), and the cold, clear mercilessness with which he will deal with Adam for threatening his business and security. his rosary (1025) In Catholicism the rosary is a form of devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, in which particular prayers are said in multiples of ten up to 150; hence also a string of beads on which such prayers are told, with a marker—often a crucifix, hence “this cross” (1026)—at the alpha/omega point. Among the interesting issues here are that Adam seems to have abandoned any religious practice involving his rosary, but Nathan knows where to find it. “S S swear … her body floating in the harbour.” (1026–34) In one reading, the second part of Nathan’s speech glides ever downward: the opening seems reasonable, but with “have to shoot you” (where ‘have to’ has only expedient force), the blazing eyes (in the bulging skull, 1010), and the revealing observation “Friendship really hard” (especially if mistaken for overlordship and control), the glissade to Nellie’s murder is complete, and her death is the cue for the final action of the plot. In another reading, the logic of Nathan's position gives him no choice, and his offer can be seen in terms of residual love and friendship. The fact that Nathan shoots Adam can, supported by Thompson’s confirmation of the ambivalence of Adam's movement to grasp Nathan (see ll. 1039–40 annotation), be seen as a response to a perceived attack, making it possible to believe that there is an element of tragic misunderstanding in the fatal action. [page 99] a place beyond words (1035) As words were a place beyond wife and family. in a corner / of a corridor … could hide no more (1035–7) “Perhaps more logically at the dead-end of a corrida [bullfight], the existential moment of being

173 able to face death bravely.” [R.T.] The sense of labyrinthine entrapment develops from underlying paradoxes—how cornered is a corridor? how can anything hide in such a blank space, like a prison cell?—which perhaps owe something to Emily Dickinson (1830–86), especially “One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted— / One need not be a House— / The Brain has Corridors—surpassing / Material Place—” (Johnson 670, ll.1–4). The ultimate impossibility of hiding is a commonplace and a specifically Christian topos invoking Divine Judgement, as well as Nathan’s criminal reach … finally know himself. (1037) … but this final knowing signifies on a secular philosophical tradition usually summarised in the Greek gnōthi se auton (carved in golden letters in the lintel of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi) or Latin nosce te ipsum, ‘Know Thyself’, implying self-knowledge as the end of all enquiry. Under / the raised crucifix (1038–9) Which Nathan must be holding aloft. threw his arms around / the prophet’s slim neck (1039–40) “Reference at this point to Nathan as a prophet suggests the possibility of mercy. At one and the same time throwing his arms around Nathan can be construed as an embrace of love or a manoeuvre to wrestle the gun from him.” [R.T.] a silence deeper // than the absence of sound or possibilities (1040–1) Some readers have doubted Adam’s death, but only death has this utter a silence. a dance, a twirling (1042) In effect, of the woven strands of the verse-novel, held between Adam’s and Nathan’s Jamaican lives in their island home. The phrase also summons the idea of a life as ‘a dance to the music of time’, the title of an allegorical painting by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), more recently borrowed by Anthony Powell (1905–2000) for a 12-volume roman fleuve (published 1951–75) that similarly uses a life to focus a national century. retreating footsteps (1044) Nathan’s; a topos of crime fiction. the guinea grass (1046) Where Adam had a childhood den (41–2) which then seemed exempt from the “evil … seeping under the skin / of the world” (92–3). on his back in the vacant lot (1047) Compounding the childhood memory with the deaths of the ghetto youth and of Alexander (719–36, 753–60). butterflies, a sweet breeze blowing steady from the sea. (1048) In both previous versions ‘still’ appears—“a sweet breeze still blowing steady from the sea” (100), “but a sweet breeze still blew steady from the sea” (115)—and third time pays for all, though after Nathan’s extended speech there is a terrible auditory awareness of the line lurking unspoken: ‘a s s sweet breeze blowing s s steady from the s s sea’. Butterflies were for Thompson’s generation potently associated with violent

174 terminal death by the classic WW1 novel Im Westen Nichts Neues (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970), and its seminal film adaptation—Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930); the film ends with the death by sniper-fire of the protagonist, on whose dead hand a butterfly briefly settles. As last line the steady breeze also stands for an indifference of nature to human existence and death, recalling the change in the mountains from things Adam felt “hunched like a vulture” to animals that comfortably turned “flanks to the sun” (468, 952): the underlying point relates to the initial (traditional) notions of a New World Eden and man’s corrupting presence in its Fall, but also inform a secular view of the human capacities for perceiving beauty and creating ugliness. What Thompson does not endorse is the tragic vision of human indifference that can develop from such a view, importantly for the twentieth century in W. H. Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux-Arts’, which ends by describing a painting of the death of Icarus, whose wings failed, plunging him into the sea: In Breughel's Icarus, for instance : how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster ; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure ; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water ; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. (ll. 14–21)

175

BIBLIOGRAPHY Works by Ralph Thompson Poetry Magazine and Newspaper Publications ‘Florida’, in London Magazine (ed. Alan Ross), vol. 27 (May 1987), p. 119. ‘A Jamaican Childhood—four poems: ‘Carpenters’, ‘Cycling’, ‘Ablutions’, ‘Senses’’, in Jamaica Journal (ed. Leeta Hearn), vol. 21.2 (May/July 1988), pp. 61–2. ‘Cavafy at Terra Nova’, in Carib (ed. Edward Baugh), No. 5 (1989), pp. 53–4. ‘Mr. Goodman’s Last Visit Abroad’, London Magazine (ed. Alan Ross), vol. 31 (May 1991), pp. 72–7. ‘He Knows what Height is’, ‘Jamaica Farewell’, ‘Leda’, in The Caribbean Writer (ed. Erika Waters), vol. 5 (1991), pp. 30–3. ‘Death of a Honda Rider’, ‘Driving through Kingston’, in The Caribbean Writer (ed. Erika Waters), vol. 6 (1992), pp. 9–10. ‘The New Light’, in Ariel (ed. Victor Ramraj), vol. 24 (July 1993). p.53. ‘Mister Son’, in The Caribbean Writer (ed. Erika Walters), vol. 9 (1995), p. 11. ‘Roots’, in Upstart 1 (ed. Carol Barac & Marilyn Riech), 1996, p. 100 ‘Outside the Artist’s Studio’, in London Magazine (ed. Alan Ross), vol. 37 (July 1997), p. 51. ‘A Long, Productive Life’, ‘The Mason’, ‘Woman in a Bottle’, in The Mississippi Review (ed. Frederick Barthelme), vol. 24 (1997), pp. 150–4. ‘Mister Son’, in The Jamaica Observer, August 16, 1998, p. 25. ‘Time and Tide’, in The Jamaica Observer, November 1, 1998, p. 19. ‘History Anyone?’, in The Jamaica Observer, February 27, 2000, p. 13. ‘Jamaican Gothic’, in Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora (ed. Afaa Weaver & Kwame Dawes), vol. 2, number 2 (Fall–Winter 2000–2001), p. 138. ‘Construction’, in The Jamaica Observer, January 28, 2001, p. 9. ‘Good-Bye Picasso’, in London Magazine (ed. Alan Ross), vol. 40 (February/March 2001), p. 85. ‘Prophesy’, in The Jamaica Observer, February 18, 2001, p. 13. ‘Silence’, in The Jamaica Observer, March 4, 2001, p. 9.

176 ‘Uncle Bishop’, in The Jamaica Observer, August 19, 2001, p. 2. ‘Roots’, in The Jamaica Observer, August 26, 2001, p. 13. ‘The Birdman’, in The Jamaica Observer, October 7, 2001, p. 7. ‘Smile you are on candid camera’, in The Jamaica Observer, November 9, 2003, p. 5. ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Leaf Raker’, in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review (ed. Tom O’Grady), Winter 2004, pp. 38–9. Book Publications ‘He Knows what Height is’, in Ian McDonald & Stewart Brown, eds, The Heinemann Book of Caribbean Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1992), p. 214. ‘A View of Dingle Bay, Ireland’, in Mark Mcwatt & Hazel Simmons-McDonald, eds, A World of Poetry for CXC (London: Heinemann, 1994), p. 43. ‘A Long, Productive Life’, in Dulwich Festival Review Competition Anthology 1996 (London: Left Bank Press, 1996), pp. 23–4. ‘Red Bird’, ‘Concerti’, ‘Flight’, in Wayne Brown, ed., Bearing Witness: The Best of The Observer Arts Magazine 2000 (Kingston: The Jamaica Observer, 2000), pp. 185–7. ‘Visit to an artist’s studio’, ‘Construction’, ‘Silence’, ‘Uncle Bishop’, ‘Roots’, in Wayne Brown, ed., Bearing Witness 2: The Best of The Observer Arts Magazine 2001 (Kingston: Twin Guinep, 2002), pp. 215–18. ‘Conversation with Keats’, ‘Leaf Raker’, ‘Leap of Faith’, ‘Other Things that Go Bump in the Night’, in Wayne Brown, ed., Bearing Witness 3: The Best of The Observer Arts Magazine 2002 (Kingston: Twin Guinep, 2003), pp. 226–30. ‘Dinner Party’, in Stewart Brown & Mark McWatt, eds, The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 108–9. ‘Hold an island in your hand: Introduction to Maria LaYacona’s Jamaica’, in Maria LaYacona, Jamaica Reverie 1955–2005 (Mansfield, OH, & Kingston: Marco Press, 2006), pp. 9–10. Collections The Denting of a Wave (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1992)

Comprises ‘Carpenters’, ‘Ablutions’, ‘Cycling’, ‘Fences’, ‘Harbour View’, ‘Rain’, ‘Hurricane’, ‘He Knows What Height Is’, ‘Death of a Honda Rider’, ‘Cavafy at Terra Nova’, ‘Walking at 4 a.m.’, ‘The Road’, ‘Jamaica Farewell’, ‘The Forest Is Your Life’, ‘Florida’, ‘Sanibel Beach’, ‘Refuge’, ‘The Crane’, ‘The Virgin Mary at Wellesley College’, ‘Icarus at Cape Canaveral’, ‘Leda’, ‘Sally’, ‘After Love’, ‘Waiting’, ‘Anniversary’, ‘After Dinner’, ‘Anatomy Lesson’, ‘On Turning Fifty’, ‘In Contemplation of a Poet’s

177 Head’, ‘Homo Sapiens Prime’, ‘For Mothers’, ‘For Sons’, ‘Questions’, ‘My God’, ‘Sufficiencies’, ‘Priorities’, ‘Morning Mass in Kingston’, ‘On the Death of a Fish’, ‘Reflections’, ‘Time and Tide’, ‘Feeling Slightly Ill-at-Ease in Someone else’s House’, ‘Clocks’, ‘What the Cloud Saw’, ‘Silence’, ‘Kingston/Baghdad’, ‘Ars Longa’, ‘Mr. Goodman’s Last Visit Abroad’, & ‘The Other Island’. Moving On (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1998) Comprises One: Moving On: ‘Looking back’, ‘Mister Son’, ‘The Billiard Table’, ‘Capricorn’, ‘Uncle Seymour’, Early Encounter with the British Raj’, & ‘Goodbye Aristotle, So Long America’; Two: Crossings: ‘Tillich’, ‘World’s Greatest Sinner Confesses to Pope’, ‘Good Friday in a Tourist Town’, ‘Hic Est’, ‘Old Man Swimming’, ‘Woman in a Bottle’, ‘Outside the Artists’s Studio’, ‘The Marathon Man’, ‘Veterans Hospital’, ‘A View from Dingle Bay, Ireland’, ‘I Don’t Remember Innsbruck’, ‘Rain’, ‘Dunn’s River Falls’, ‘Haiku’, ‘& ‘On the Way to Melrose Abbey’; Three: This New Light: ‘Death of a Don’, ‘A Death in the Family’, ‘Dinner Party’, ‘Vigil’, ‘Epiphany’, ‘Wake Up Call’, ‘Thief’, ‘The garden’, ‘Lesson from a Daughter’s Marriage’, ‘History Anyone?’, ‘Moonstruck’, ‘Chamber of Commerce Ball’, ‘Third World’, ‘On Learning of a Daughter’s Late Pregnancy’, ‘Stephanie’, ‘Noblesse Oblige’, ‘The Mason’, ‘Playing the Odds’, ‘Watching Walcott Receive his Nobel Medal’, ‘A Long, Productive Life’, This New Light’, ‘That Time of Evening’, & ‘Mountain Time’.

Verse-Novels View from Mount Diablo (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2003; 2/e, with minor corrections, introduced and annotated by John Lennard, Leeds: Peepal Tree, & Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2009) Recordings Taking Words for a Walk: Poems by Ralph Thompson, with liner notes by Edward Baugh (New York: Intermedia Foundation, 2006; CD 7450) Comprises ‘Looking Back’, ‘Carpenters’, ‘Ablutions’, ‘Early Encounter with the British Raj’, ‘Jamaica farewell’, ‘What the Cloud Saw’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Leda’, ‘Sufficiencies’, ‘Mr. Goodman’s last Visit Abroad’, ‘Old Man Swimming’, ‘Goodbye Aristotle’, ‘My God’, ‘A Long Productive Life’, ‘Good Friday in a Tourist Town’, ‘Waiting’, ‘Leaf Raker’, ‘Talbot Thwiggs’, Vigil’, ‘Jamaican Gothic’, ‘Death of a Honda Rider’, ‘The Garden’, ‘Dunn’s River Falls’, ‘Taking Words for a Walk’, ‘Espousals’, ‘End Game’, ‘This New Light’, & ‘Silence’.

Essays ‘On being perfectly honest’, in Vistas (ed. Michael Dash) vol. 1, number 1 (January 1994), pp. 1–4. ‘Imagination and the broken Vase’, in Vistas (ed. Michael Dash) vol. 7, number 1 (March 2000), pp. 1–4. ‘Foreword’, in Gerald Leo McLaughlin, Jesuitana Jamaica (Kingston: Arawak Publications, 2000), pp. vi–viii.

178 ‘Tertiary Education in Jamaica’, in The Caribbean Journal of Education (ed. Donald Wilson), vol. 23 (September 2001), pp. 64–9. ‘Louis Simpson in Jamaica: an interview by Edward Baugh and Ralph Thompson’, in The Journal of West Indian Literature vol. II, number 1 (2002), pp. 48–61. ‘On Writing and Painting’, with 9 plates, in Jacqueline Bishop, ed., Writers who Paint, Painters who Write: Three Jamaican Artists (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2007), pp. 32–45.

Journalism Educational Journalism in The Gleaner ‘The Promise of Early Childhood Education’, May 6, 2002 ‘Early Childhood Education—the cost implications’, May 16, 2002 ‘Educating Children of the Poor’, August 18, 2002 ‘The Education Debate—neglect, politization’. August 23, 2002 ‘Young, Blighted and Black—the tragedy of early childhood education in postindependent Jamaica’, September 2, 2002 ‘Positioning Education as Jamaica’s major Development Tool’, November 21, 2003 ‘The 2002 CXC Results’, October 22, 2002 ‘The Teachers Strike—a Practical Compromise’, February 11, 2003 ‘CXC Results—Total Disaster’, October 3, 2003 ‘Getting Education priorities right’, October 10, 2003 ‘Ghastly Grades CXC results worse than reported’, November 14, 2004 ‘Education in a Fragmented Society’, May 9, 2004 ‘Education on the Ropes’, November 14 2004 ‘Good News—CXC Results’, October 2, 20005 ‘Candidates and Empty Promises—Part I’, February 5 2006 ‘Candidates and Empty Promises—Part II’, February 7 2006 ‘Humanising Tertiary Education’, May 21, 2006 ‘What will the New Administration do about Education?’, December 16, 2007 Educational Journalism in The Jamaican Observer ‘See to Early Childhood Education’, April 12, 2002 ‘More Power for Principals’, June 4, 2006

179 General Articles in The Gleaner ‘Executive compensation—a private sector model’, December 10, 1999 ‘What is justice?’, March 2, 2000 ‘Goodbye to Anancy’, April 4, 2001 ‘Federation revisited’, July 13 2003 ‘The Morality of Gambling’, February 3, 2005 ‘What is legal, what is ethical?, May 22, 2005 General Articles in The Jamaican Observer ‘Joke without a Punch Line’, June 11, 2000, pp. 3, 15. ‘Patterns—a Jamaican family saga’, January 13, 2001, pp. 3–11. ‘Remembering Alan Ross’, March 11, 2001, pp. 10–11. ‘Ralph Thompson’, an address at the opening of Laura Facey’s exhibition, November 25, 2001, pp. 4–5. Reviews ‘Celebrating the Spirit’, a launch-speech for Bearing Witness: The Best of The Observer Arts Magazine 2000, in The Sunday Observer, December 17, 2000, p. 7. ‘Freeing Her Hands to Clap’, an address at the launch of Delores Gauntlett, Freeing Her Hands to Clap, in The Sunday Observer, June 10, 2001, pp. 5, 13. ‘Riparian Richness’, review of Ian McDonald, Essequibo, in The Journal of West Indian Literature, vol. 23 (September 2001), pp. 115–20. ‘Derek Walcott, Tiepolo’s Hound’ in The Jamaican Observer, May 7, 2000, pp. 4–5. ‘I Been There—Sort Of:A launch-speech for Mervyn Morris’s new collection’, in The Sunday Gleaner, December 10, 2006, at http://www.jamaicagleaner.com/gleaner/20061210/arts/arts2.html 8

Editorials in The Gleaner 2004 January 7 ‘The education imperative’ January 8 ‘Crass care for the elderly’ January 10 ‘Help for illegal immigrants’ January 12 ‘Education needs cost sharing’ January 16 ‘Recruitment of teachers’ January 18 ‘A constructive role for PTAs’ January 24 ‘Missing the IT boat’

180 January 28 ‘Cruelty to children’ February 6 ‘Gun licence scandal’ February 18 ‘Shame on some JPs’ February 20 ‘Some good news, but—’ February 23 ‘New ideas for teacher training’ February 24 ‘Coping with refugees’ February 27 ‘Keeping tabs on region seven’ February 28 ‘No more illegal buildings’ March 4 ‘Expanding PALS’ March 12 ‘Welcome to AT&T’ March 14 ‘Aristide should be welcomed’ March 19 ‘Terror in Madrid’ March 27 ‘Night of the machetes’ April 11 ‘Salute for a brave Simpson Miller’ April 13 ‘The tentacles of decadence’ April 14 ‘Justice system ineptitude’ April 17 ‘Problems of sidewalk garages’ April 22 ‘The perils of fire’ April 25 ‘Seaga’s Caribbean perspective’ April 28 ‘ A bloody disgrace’ May 10 ‘Licensing teachers’ May 12 ‘More British help’ May 13 ‘Barbarity in Iraq’ May 14 ‘Father Albert’s ministry’ May 15 ‘Lights, camera, action’ May 16 ‘Role of independent schools’ May 17 ‘Disaster preparedness’ May 22 ‘Loss of innocence’ May 24 ‘Some hope for education’ May 28 ‘Banking on education’ June 7 ‘The Johnson vision’ June10 ‘The Reagan legacy’ June 12 ‘Honouring Maroon music’ July 8 ‘Face the crisis squarely’ July 11 ‘Good news for early childhood education’ July 23 ‘Saving courts from arson’

181 July 28 ‘PSOJ spotlight on education’ August 1 ‘Educate the public on CCL’ August 21 ‘Knee-jerk reaction to change’ August 23 ‘The abortion debate’ August 27 ‘It’s not good enough’ October 29 ‘That Petrojam fire’ November 14 ‘State power vs Civil liberty’ November 19 ‘Misguided lobbying’ November 22 ‘Sex education for parents’ November 25 ‘Raising the age of consent’ November 28 ‘Irresponsible university students’ December 3 ‘The mills of justice’ December 9 ‘Outsourcing medical technology’ December 10 ‘The bizarre JLP saga’ December 15 ‘What price the highway project’ December 16 ‘Good education report’ December 26 ‘Greater professionalism required’ December 27 ‘Protecting Fern Gully’ December 29 ‘Banks back education’ December 31 ‘Protecting liberty’ December 27 ‘Listening with a third ear’

Reviews of Ralph Thompson’s work The texts of various reviews are available online, at: http://www.peepaltreepress.com/review_list.asp?au_id=76 9

Simpson, Louis, ‘Ralph Thompson, The Denting of a Wave’, in Caribbean Review of Books, No. 7 (February 1993), pp. 10–11. Gershator, Phillis, ‘Ralph Thompson, The Denting of a Wave, in The Caribbean Writer, vol. 8 (1994), pp. 147–9. Reiter, Thomas, ‘Ralph Thompson, Moving On’, in The Caribbean Writer, vol. 13 (1994), pp. 217–20. Phillips, Phillipia, ‘View From Mount Diablo: deserving award winner’, in The Daily Gleaner, December 21, 2002, p. F4. Reckord, Michael, ‘Thompson’s Scream’, in The Daily Gleaner, December 21,

182 2002, p. F4. McLaughlin, Fr. Gerard Leo, S.J., ‘View from Mount Diablo—a review from the Liguanea Plains’, in The Sunday Observer, December 22, 2002, pp. 10–11. Morris, Mervyn, ‘Poetry of the Two Jamaicas’, in Poetry News vol. 12 (Winter 2005–06), p. 5. Hanna, Mary, ‘The Poetry of Ralph Thompson’, in The Sunday Gleaner, September 3, 2006, and at http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20060903/arts/arts3.html 1

Verse-novels and Poems Cited Some works are out of print in the (first or superior) editions cited, but may remain available, in whole or part, in a poet’s selected or collected work, or on line. Second-hand on-line searches will also locate most editions cited.

Arion, Frank Martinus, Stemmen uit Afrika, in Antilaanse Cahiers 3.1 (1957); Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1957; Rotterdam: Flamboyant Press, 1978. Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando Furioso (trans. Sir John Harington, 1591; ed. Robert McNulty, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) Betjeman, John, Summoned by Bells (with illustrations by Michael Tree, London: John Murray, 1960; with illustrations by Hugh Casson, London: John Murray, 1989) Boiardo, Matteo, Orlando Innamorato (trans. Charles Stanley Ross, Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) — Ancestors: A Reinvention of Mother Poem, Sun Poem, and X/Self (New York: New Directions Press, 2001) Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, Aurora Leigh (London: Chapman & Hall, 1857; ed. Margaret Reynolds, New York & London: W. W. Norton, 1996) Browning, Robert, The Ring and the Book (in 4 vols, London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1868–9; ed. Richard D. Altick, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 & London & New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) Butler, Samuel, Hudibras (1778; ed. John Wilders, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967) Byron, George Gordon, Lord, Don Juan (in 6 vols, London: John Murray/John Hunt, 1818–24; ed. Jerome J. McGann, in Byron’s Complete Poetical Works, vol. 5, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)

183 Campbell, Alistair Te Ariki, Maori Battalion: A Poetic Sequence (Wellington: Waite-Ata Press, 2001) Carson, Anne, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse (New York: Knopf, 1998) — The Beauty of the Husband (London: Cape, 2001) Causley, Charles, The Tail of the Trinosaur: A Story in Rhyme (Leicester: Brockhampton Press, 1972) Césaire, Aimé, Cahier d’un Retour au Pays Natal (1939; Paris: Bordas, 1947; édition définitive, Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956) Clarke, George Elliott, Whylah Falls (Vancouver: Polestar, 1990; rev. ed., 2000) — I & I (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions, 2009) Clough, Arthur Hugh, The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich (Oxford: Francis MacPherson, 1848; ed. Patrick Scott, St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 1976) — Amours de Voyage in Poems (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1862; ed. Patrick Scott, St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 1974) Cowper, William, The Task: A Poem in Six Books (London: for J. Johnson, 1785) Dabydeen, David, Turner, in Turner: New and Selected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994; Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2002) D’Aguiar, Fred, Bill of Rights (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998) — Bloodlines (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000) Dante, Alighieri, La Commedia (trans. Dorothy L. Sayers & Barbara Reynolds, in 3 vols, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949, 1957, 1964) Dawes, Kwame, Prophets (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1995) — Jacko Jacobus (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 1996) Dunn, Douglas, Elegies (London: Faber & Faber, 1985) Fuller, John, The Illusionists: a tale (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980) Glissant, Édouard, Les Indes: poèmes de l’une et l’autre terre, with etchings by Enrique Zanartu, Paris: Editions Falaiza, 1956; trans. Dominique O’Neill, as The Indies, Toronto: Editions du GREF, 1992) Hacker, Marilyn, Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986) Harrison, Tony, V. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1985) Hesse, Karen, Out of the Dust (New York: Scholastic, 1997) — Witness (New York: Scholastic, 2001) Hill, Geoffrey, Mercian Hymns (London: Andre Deutsch, 1972) — The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984)

184 — Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) Hughes, Ted, Birthday Letters (London: Faber, 1998) Keating, H. R. F., Jack, the Lady Killer (Hexham: Flambard, 1999) Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, The Song of Hiawatha (Boston: Ticknor & Fields, & London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1855) Macpherson, James, Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763), in The Poems of Ossian and Related Works (ed. Howard Gaskill, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996) March, Joseph Moncure, The Wild Party (Chicago: Pascal Covici, 1928; illustrated and introduced by Art Spiegelman, New York: Pantheon, & London: Picador, 1994) — The Set-Up (Chicago: Pascal Covici, 1928) Merrill, James, The Changing Light at Sandover: including the whole of The Book of Ephraim, Mirabell’s Books of Number, Scripts for the Pageant and a new coda, ‘The Higher Keys’ (New York: Atheneum, 1982) Mickiewicz, Adam, Pan Tadeusz (trans. Kenneth Mackenzie, London: Dent, & New York: Dutton, 1966) Murray, Les. A., The Boys Who Stole the Funeral (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1980) — Fredy Neptune (Manchester: Carcanet, 1998) Nabokov, Vladimir, Pale Fire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1962) Orsman, Chris, South: An Antarctic Journey (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1996; as South, London: Faber & Faber, 1999) Perse, Saint-John, Anabase (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Française, 1924; as Anabasis, trans. T. S. Eliot, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949) Pope, Alexander, The Rape of the Lock: An heroi-comical Poem (London: for Bernard Lintott, 1714) Porter, Dorothy, Akhenaten (St Lucia, QLD: University of Queensland Press, 1992) — The Monkey’s Mask: An Erotic Murder Mystery (Sydney: Hyland House Publishing, 1994; London: Serpent’s Tail, 1997) — What a Piece of Work (Sydney: Picador, 1999) — Wild Surmise (Sydney: Picador, 2002) — El Dorado (Sydney: Picador, 2007) Pushkin, Aleksandr, Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin: Translated from the Russian, with a Commentary, by Vladimir Nabokov (rev. ed., in 4 vols; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975)

185 Raine, Craig, History: The Home Movie (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994) Seth, Vikram, The Golden Gate (New York: Random House, & London: Faber & Faber, 1986) Simpson, Louis, At the End of the Open Road (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1963) Smith, Iain Crichton, A Life (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986) Snodgrass, W. D., The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (Brockport, NY: Boa Editions, 1995) Stevenson, Anne, Correspondences: A Family History in Letters (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, and London: Oxford University Press, 1974) Sullivan, Robert, Captain Cook in the Underworld (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002) Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, Maud, a monodrama in Maud and other poems (London: Edward Moxon, 1855) Thompson, James, The Seasons (1730; with ‘The Castle of Indolence’, ed. James Sambrook, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) Tranter, John, The Floor of Heaven (Sydney: Collins Angus & Robertson, 1992; Todmorden: Arc, 2000) Walcott, Derek, Another Life (London: Jonathan Cape, & New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973; annotated edition, ed. Edward Baugh & Colbert Nepaulsingh, Boulder & London: Lynne Rienner, 2004) — Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, & London: Faber & Faber, 1990) — Tiepolo’s Hound (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, & London: Faber & Faber, 2000) — The Prodigal (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, & London: Faber & Faber, 2005) Wilde, Margaret, Jinx (Sydney: Penguin Australia, 2004) — One Night (Sydney: Penguin Australia, 2006) Wordsworth, William, The Prelude (1799, 1805, 1850), all in Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, & Stephen Gill, eds, The Prelude, 179, 1805, 1850: Authoritative Texts, Context and Reception, Recent Critical Essays (New York & London: W. W. Norton, 1979)

186 Bildungsromans and Memoirs Cited Amis, Kingsley, Lucky Jim (London: Victor Gollancz, 1954) Anthony, Michael, Green Days by the River ((London: André Deutsch, 1967; with an introduction by Gareth Griffiths, London: Heinemann, 1973 [Caribbean Writers Series])) Bellow, Saul, The Adventures of Augie March: A Novel (New York: Viking, 1953) Carlyle, Thomas, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh (London: Chapman & Hall, 1831) Clarke, Austin, Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack: A Memoir (Toronto: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2005) Dickens, Charles, The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (which he never meant to be published on any account) (serialised 1849–50; London: Bradbury and Evans, 1850) — Great Expectations (serialised 1860–1; in 3 vols, London: Chapman & Hall, 1861) Drayton, Geoffrey, Christopher (London: Collins, 1959) Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952) Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahr (in 4 vols, 1795–6; trans. Thomas Carlyle as Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, in 3 vols, Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1824; Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1991) Heath, Roy, One Generation (London: Allison and Busby, 1981; Flamingo, 1984) Hodge, Merle, Crick Crack Monkey (London: André Deutsch, 1970; with an introduction by Roy Narinesingh, London: Heinemann, 1981 [Caribbean Writers Series]) Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (serialised 1914–15; New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1916; London: The Egoist, 1917) Lamming, George, In the Castle of my Skin (London: Michael Joseph, 1953) Lee, Harper, To Kill a Mockingbird (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1960) Manley, Rachel, Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1996) McDonald, Ian, The Humming-Bird Tree (London: Heinemann,1969) Miller, Henry, Tropic of Cancer (Paris: Obelisk Press, 1934; New York: Grove Press, 1961) Morrison, Toni (Chloe Wofford), Song of Solomon (New York: Knopf, 1977) Naipaul, V. S., A House for Mr Biswas (London: André Deutsch, 1961)

187 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Émile, ou de l’Éducation (La Haye: Jean Néaulme, 1762) Salinger, J. D., The Catcher in the Rye (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951) Selvon, Sam, An Island is a World ((London: Allan Wingate, 1955) Smith, Betty (Elizabeth Wehner), A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (New York & London: Harper and Brothers, 1943) Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorn Clemens), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Co., & London: Chatto & Windus, 1876) — Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Colleague) (New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1885) Wieland, Christoph Martin, Agathon (in 2 vols, Frankfurt & Leipzig: n.p., 1765–6)

Ralph Thompson is a Jamaican. He has been published in a number of journals, including London Magazine. His previous publications include The Denting of a Wave and Moving On. He paints as seriously as he writes poetry; his work features in Jacqueline Bishop’s Writers Who Paint, Painters Who Write, Peepal Tree, 2008.

Cover image: ‘Mount Diablo’ by John Laidlaw

£12.99

ISBN 9781845231446

poetry/criticism

Peepal Tree Press is home of the best in Caribbean and Black British fiction, poetry, literary criticism, memoirs and historical studies. www.peepaltreepress.com

Ralph Thompson

“A remarkable achievement. Its knowledge of the island, the entwining of private lives and politics, lifts Jamaican poetry to a level that has not been attempted before… strong, imaginative, fascinating in detail. … This is narrative poetry at its best.” Louis Simpson

View from Mount Diablo an annotated edition Edited by John Lennard

A crime-novel in verse, View from Mount Diablo explores the transformation of Jamaica from a sleepy colonial society to a post-colonial nation where political corruption, drug wars, and avenging authorities have made life hell. The resentments class and racial privilege provoke underscore both the turmoil in society and the relationships at the heart of the narrative, between Adam Cole, a dreamy white boy driven by personal tragedy to crusading journalism, squint-eyed Nellie Simpson, once a servant, then a political enforcer, and stuttering Nathan, gardener and groom turned cocaine baron. Beyond this trio is a dazzling array of real and fictitious characters including Bustamante, coke-trade middleman Tony Blake, the informer Blaka, who finds religion, a corrupt plantation owner, and a murderous police officer. In a time when ‘Blood / cheaper than drugs’, View from Mount Diablo asserts the power of art to tell the truth, to use form and selection of incident to shape unmanageable circumstance into meaningful narrative, and touch the heart to stir the citizen to action. Rich with religious implication, this is a prophetic work of exasperated love, abandoning the softening light of ‘an old romantic view’ for a ‘harsh, uncompromising glare’ and blending lyrical narrative with appalling tragedy. This annotated edition offers a full introduction situating Thompson’s verse-novel in its formal, Caribbean, and global contexts, and provides detailed notes explicating background history, real events transposed into fiction, and the skilled foreshortening that maps an individual life onto a national calamity. View from Mount Diablo won the 2001 Jamaican National Literary Award.

Ralph Thompson is a Jamaican. He has been published in a number of journals, including London Magazine. His previous publications include The Denting of a Wave and Moving On. He paints as seriously as he writes poetry; his work features in Jacqueline Bishop’s Writers Who Paint, Painters Who Write, Peepal Tree, 2008.

Cover image: ‘Mount Diablo’ by John Laidlaw

£12.99

ISBN 9781845231446

poetry/criticism

Peepal Tree Press is home of the best in Caribbean and Black British fiction, poetry, literary criticism, memoirs and historical studies. www.peepaltreepress.com

Ralph Thompson

“A remarkable achievement. Its knowledge of the island, the entwining of private lives and politics, lifts Jamaican poetry to a level that has not been attempted before… strong, imaginative, fascinating in detail. … This is narrative poetry at its best.” Louis Simpson

View from Mount Diablo an annotated edition Edited by John Lennard

A crime-novel in verse, View from Mount Diablo explores the transformation of Jamaica from a sleepy colonial society to a post-colonial nation where political corruption, drug wars, and avenging authorities have made life hell. The resentments class and racial privilege provoke underscore both the turmoil in society and the relationships at the heart of the narrative, between Adam Cole, a dreamy white boy driven by personal tragedy to crusading journalism, squint-eyed Nellie Simpson, once a servant, then a political enforcer, and stuttering Nathan, gardener and groom turned cocaine baron. Beyond this trio is a dazzling array of real and fictitious characters including Bustamante, coke-trade middleman Tony Blake, the informer Blaka, who finds religion, a corrupt plantation owner, and a murderous police officer. In a time when ‘Blood / cheaper than drugs’, View from Mount Diablo asserts the power of art to tell the truth, to use form and selection of incident to shape unmanageable circumstance into meaningful narrative, and touch the heart to stir the citizen to action. Rich with religious implication, this is a prophetic work of exasperated love, abandoning the softening light of ‘an old romantic view’ for a ‘harsh, uncompromising glare’ and blending lyrical narrative with appalling tragedy. This annotated edition offers a full introduction situating Thompson’s verse-novel in its formal, Caribbean, and global contexts, and provides detailed notes explicating background history, real events transposed into fiction, and the skilled foreshortening that maps an individual life onto a national calamity. View from Mount Diablo won the 2001 Jamaican National Literary Award.

Humanities Insights These are some of the Insights available at: http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk/ General Titles An Introduction to Critical Theory An Introduction to Rhetorical Terms Modern Feminist Theory Genre FictionSightlines Octavia E Butler: Xenogenesis / Lilith’s Brood Reginald Hill: On Beulah Height Ian McDonald: Chaga / Evolution’s Store Walter Mosley: Devil in a Blue Dress Tamora Pierce: The Immortals History Insights Oliver Cromwell The British Empire: Pomp, Power and Postcolonialism The Holocaust: Events, Motives, Legacy* Lenin’s Revolution Methodism and Society The Risorgimento Literature Insights Jane Austen: Emma Conrad: The Secret Agent Eliot, T S: ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ and The Waste Land English Renaissance Drama: Theatre and Theatres in Shakespeare’s Time* Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury Gaskell, Mary Barton Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbervilles Hughes: New Selected Poems* Ibsen: The Doll’s House Hopkins: Selected Poems Ted Hughes: New Selected Poems Lawrence: Selected Short Stories Lawrence: Sons and Lovers Lawrence: Women in Love

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Also Available from HEB Jared Curtis, ed.,   The Poems of William Wordsworth: Collected Reading Texts from the Cornell Wordsworth.   3 volumes, ebook and paperback. Colin Nicholson, Fivefathers: Interviews with late Twentieth Century Scottish Poets Keith Sagar, D. H. Lawrence: Poet ebook and paperback Ralph Thompson, View from Mount Diablo