"Everyone you meet in your life - even total strangers - are already intimately connected to you. The idea that we are all separate and distinct beings is nothing but an illusion. We are all parts of a larger whole, like individual cells in a body. (…) When you look at other people, you're really looking at yourself. "
– Steve Pavlina
Good day dear Jamaica, today I have a tale to tell that I stumbled upon this morning, the Gideon Morning, a story that is a threnody and a lamentation of sorts, a story of mourning and sorrowful "woaahees" that began while we were crossing the Atlantic packed in vessels like sardine, a story of weeping and wailing that continued through slave fields and rebellions, a cycle of bitter memories and a sour history that continues to this day, it is in essence the story of Montego Bay, the story of Jamaica, the story of our lives. This story of weeping our penchant for producing wailers and wailing souls for the world and through music has made us famous. It is this same story of dead, death, dying, bitter pain, tragedy, unforgiving scars, torturous existences, that I have stumbled upon and come across, on Dec '06. At the 11th hour of December 5, 2007, somewhere in the Gulley Banks, the hills and valleys, the garrisons of the Second City, I hear the familiar round of bullet bullet bullet, kick off in the night, unanother merciless crusade to pierce flesh and break bones and shatter lives. It so happens that a few days prior I had been speaking to a very old friend of mine via internet, one Mesha-Gaye Brown, someone I hadn't spoken to for since a millennia if you get how long I'm trying to convey to you, she was in the States, doing Med etc and going about life and pondering the plight of Jamaica, and whether or not she should return seeing the hell hole we have built for ourselves. A profound question, should she? What would you tell her?
Well maybe we have told her. I bucked up the answer this morning. While at bottom road in Paradise eh, near 6 o' clock or probably a little after, "a Rasta Man buss the corner and seh Police man Missa Brown dead last night and dem jussa find him dis mawnin dung a Albion..." seeing that bottom side Paradise is close to Albion the link is fairly strong there and a mass of people descend on Albion to see the proceedings and I follow, on the way there I connect the dots, the shots I head last night, which police man name Mister Brown this is that lives on Second Street... imagine the big expletive that pops into my mind when I come to the realization that it's Mesha-Gaye's father. The same old friend from donkey years ago that I just talk to not too long ago.
Imagine my frame of mind walking into Second Street, a hobbled dirt lane, the road seemingly left unattended by Government or whichever agent responsible, chickens hob knobbing around, zinc fences, board house on the right, the Albion School's open playfield and back yard on the left, and the road turns into an incline, a mini mountain before me, and the sun peeping over on the left, the morning light trickling in this rustic nook and rural oasis in the middle of Mobay, and the mournful "eh eh eh eh" and hook line "it's too late..." thumping in my ear from some speaker box somewhere... Imagine all that... and then imagine the picture I see when I start to descend the incline of the road and walk toward a mass of people all lined up on the left, they compose of all kinds of characters intermingled, Police with long guns, gangster types, semi gangsters, old gangsters, regular folk, Rasta men, children, folks going to work and stopped, some with matter/cold still brimming at the eyelids, all standing to the left like a rising or well organized choir, all mournfully lamenting... Imagine how I have to feel next to actually see her father, gruesomely destroyed, and troubled already by scavengers. Maybe it is too late eh!
Imagine the scene, Police mourning police and people cursing the Police. One woman put it like this "Imagine eeeh, a good police enuh, a him defend we dung yah and look out fi wi, good police enuh, and Police live side a him and people call Police and dem only come, come spin round and glimpse if nutten a gwaan. Ah dem owna squadie enuh, and them just come spin round, an him a good police, Imagine if a did poor people like we, Imagine eeeh, dem owna squadie, dem nuh have a use." Imagine this is the Gideon I wake up to, this is what I wake up in, and Imagine, governments and politicians want me to believe that there is a future here, that I can build a home and life and be safe and raise children... Imagine that? Isn't it a wicked and cruel LIE???
Now its been 400 years and some more and we have been suffering, mothers weeping, how many times have had to sing "Johnny was good man," how many more children will have to go pointlessly fatherless, how many more mothers won't have husbands, how much longer will these children suffer, how many more time will we have to have a Christmas rebellion, how many more Septembers from Salt Spring will it take... how many more soldiers must give up their lives till we can live sensibly and peaceable, so that we might govern our own existence, so that we may Justice, so that the suffering will stop. Ladies and Gentlemen, in a most startling and profound, yet gruesome way, I think we have answered young Miss Brown's question. But might I ask, like on those popular game shows, is that your final answer?
Yannick Pessoa
http://yahnyk.blogspot.com
yannickpessoa@yahoo.com
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