In my time living abroad, mostly in Toronto, Tradewinds gigs took me all over North America and to Mother England, and, of course, all over the Caribbean. But for several years after I moved to Grand Cayman in 1981, I chose not to visit Jamaica. The two islands were only 40 minutes apart by air. There were daily flights, the service was good, the fare was reasonable, and there were no immigration or customs hassles. But I didn’t go, and the reason is very simple. I had concerns about going there to perform
From Canada, where I had lived for 22 years, and then in Cayman, the media had left me with the very definite impression that I would be a risk visiting Jamaica. The stories were rampant and varied in subject, but they were almost all negative, some approached horrific, and without actually saying so, this information was telling me that visitors to the country were taking great risks. Apart from the physical dangers of robbery, assault, injury and even worse, there was also concern about drinking water, the need to bribe to get proper service, irregular electricity supply, and the absence of safe public transportation. The spectre of crime was powerful. This was not a place you wanted to go with your family. Time and again, when the discussion of a Jamaica visit arose, the overarching concern was the feeling of not being safe. Reasonable people I knew would flatly tell you, “I’m not going there.”
As a result, when my Guyanese friend Colin Cholmondeley, then living in Jamaica, invited me over, I balked. Colin went on to assure me that the picture the media had left me with was skewed; that in fact, I would enjoy Jamaica immensely – he loved living there – and that I should come and see for myself. After about a year of this back-and-forth with Colin, whose judgement I respected, I took the plunge and got on the plane to Kingston.
It was a revelation. I was almost instantly caught up in the beauty of the island – Jamaica is the most beautiful island in the Caribbean and I have seen most of them – and the verve and grace of the Jamaicans was impressive. The people I met through Colin and his wife, and people I later met casually, were wonderful, generous, languid folks you couldn’t help liking. Certainly I saw the seedy side of Kingston, but I also saw a country of great span and excitement. I saw, in effect, what the media had neither the interest nor the capacity to show me. As a result, I became enamoured of the country and visited it many many times in the ensuing years. I had seen the other side.
The wider point I write to make here that it is so with every nation on earth. You can never know a place from what the daily media tell you. I wrote in a previous column in this paper that the media, by its very nature, are not dealing with the whole picture. Based on what we know from the media of Baghdad, for example, we would never go there, but there are uplifting and warming lives being lived in that city every day. People are falling in love, and getting married and children are laughing and dancing in that centuries-old Iraqi culture that has glories beyond belief. That other Baghdad, the one beyond the bombs, is the one we never know from afar.
Similarly, the Trinidad of kidnappings and that horrendous murder rate, and drug crime and gang warfare, is not the whole picture. The Trinidad culture remains thrilling and replete with laughter, and soaring scenery, and many people live in that place joyfully with no desire to live elsewhere.
My narrower point is that it is the same way with Guyana. If you stay in Toronto or New York and base your view on the media, you’re not dealing with the full picture. The friend of Kit Nascimento in Miami, for example, who read the dire headlines in a Guyana newspaper recently and threw it away in disgust as a place he would not return to, is reacting to an incomplete picture. Certainly the crime is there, and the decay, and the litter of Georgetown, and the awful things we do to each other is this country, and to live with that reality is a heavy burden, but that is not the only side. There is another Guyana side by side with that.
It is the Guyana full of funny, generous people, many of them with little, but willing to share that little. The media, by its transitory nature, cannot show you that. The media cannot capture the feeling on your skin of the East Coast breeze, and the smell of pineapple when you come off the plane at Timehri. The media cannot transport you into the session I had with the Republic Bank staff recently, telling funny stories about Guyana, singing songs we all know, sharing in an exuberance I can’t find in any other country because it is “a Guyanese thing”. All right, that’s a cliché, but like most clichés, it’s true.
The media do not and cannot convey the sparkle of life that runs through a cricket crowd when the Guyana team plays at Providence. It cannot capture the fierce energy, and even the struggle of life, that you get in Bourda Market. Some years ago I travelled for the first time on the road to Lethem with my friend Bernard Ramsay, and the experience of coming out of the forest canopy into that sudden sprawling Rupununi Savannah sky is nothing short of magical. The media can never show you that.
Be clear. I would be out of my mind to attempt to diminish the trauma that life in Guyana is. What is portrayed in the media is true. It is real. But real as it is and true as it is, it is not the only reality and not the only truth. There is more. There is much more. So that if your impression of a place is formed by what the media tells you – and that is often exactly the way it is – then your impression is skewed. To know the full reality, to know the other half, you have to journey to the place yourself. And you cannot just come in your mind, you have to come in your body. You have to come and see and smell and taste and touch and hear and experience and wake up and go to sleep, and everything else in the spectrum of human encounter and then you will know the full reality. And then, yes, that may still not be enough for you to want to come and live here again, but at least then you will then be deciding based on the whole picture.
When you live outside Guyana and read the newspaper and throw it away as the full reality of what life is there, you don’t have all the information. You have to do as I did in Jamaica. Come and touch for yourself on the other side.
(This column was originally published on December 14, 2009)
