EXCEPTIONAL VIOLENCE

Embodied Citizenship in Transnational JamaicaBy Deborah A. Thomas

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5068-2

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………..ixINTRODUCTION Moving Bodies………………………11. Dead Bodies, 2004–2005………………….232. Deviant Bodies, 2005/1945…………………….533. Spectacular Bodies, 1816/2007…………………874. Public Bodies, 2003………………………….1255. Resurrected Bodies, 1963/2007…………………173CODA Repairing Bodies…………………………..221Notes…………………………………………239References…………………………………….257Index…………………………………………289

Chapter One

Dead Bodies, 2004–2005

Early in the morning on Good Friday in 2005, I received the phone call that Jamaicans—both those living “on the rock” and those overseas—dread. “Deborah, it’s Winsome.” Winsome was my closest friend in Jacks Hill during the longest period of my fieldwork in the mid-1990s. We have stayed in touch over the years as we have both traveled to and from Jamaica—she, for a couple of years, as a hotel worker contracted for six months a year at a family-run resort in Ogunquit, Maine, and I in my usual comings and goings for research and visiting friends and family. One of the hardest-working and focused people I know, Winsome is also brilliantly creative. The roots plays she wrote and produced in Jamaica hilariously and sympathetically represented the toils and triumphs of ordinary folk in Jamaica to ordinary folk in Jamaica, creating a space for public debate about community morality and the pitfalls of “progress.” Most important for this story, however, is that Winsome was Selwyn’s partner in crime, the mother of his children, his best friend and confidante for more than twenty years, and his wife for three and a half. Having moved to Atlanta earlier that year with her three youngest children, she was waiting out the U.S. government’s residency requirement for her own citizenship and was counting the months until Selwyn’s papers would come through and he could join her.

“Them shoot Selwyn,” she whispered. “Them kill him.”

After a long, silent pause, the questions came. When did they shoot him? An hour before, after they had finished speaking on the phone. Why? They came for his gun, a licensed firearm. Is everyone else OK? I don’t know; I haven’t been able to get through on the phone. What can I do? I don’t know yet. I’ll call you back.

I hung up the phone and burst into tears. Selwyn initially had been my mechanic (and pretty much everyone else’s in Jacks Hill) but had become much more than that over the years. Most days, after taking the kids to school, he could be found in his garage tinkering with whatever car needed work, smoking herb, and reasoning with whomever stopped a while. A Rasta at heart (though he never let his hair lock), Selwyn was a self- made man who was not afraid to speak his mind but was gentle enough to be everybody’s “uncle.” A friend of mine used to say that when he laughed, he sounded like a goat, yet Selwyn was as serious as cancer.

After making a few frantic calls, the details began to sort themselves out. When he had finished speaking with Winsome on the phone, Selwyn went out with his grandnephew to pasture his goat. Gunmen met him at the gate—they were waiting for him—and told him they had come to kill him. “But yu cyaan do dat,” he said, laughing incredulously. “What yu really come fah?” They lunged for him, pulled their guns and fired. Eight times. Selwyn may or may not have gotten his own shot off, but they did manage to take his gun, shoot him with it, and dump his body into the gully behind his garage. The police were called, but hours later, when Winsome did finally get back to me, she told me they had refused to do an extensive search for Selwyn’s body. “The police are afraid,” she said, “because those men are still hiding out in the bush, and the police don’t know the bush.” Ultimately, it was Selwyn’s cousin and stepson who found his body and called the ambulance.

In Kingston, structural violence and violence related to politics or the drug trade are hallmarks of many “inner-city” areas. The rural hillside village of Jacks Hill, however—a community of just over a thousand people where I had concentrated my doctoral field research—had long been seen as existing outside these patterns, despite the fact that it is only six miles north of Kingston’s corporate area. For those familiar with the logics of space, class, and politics in Kingston, “Jacks Hill” would typically evoke the upper- class hillside moving up from Barbican Square, inhabited by some of Jamaica’s wealthiest families. However, “upper” Jacks Hill—the area in which my research has been concentrated—is the community that sits above this wealthy enclave. It is part of the East Rural St. Andrew electoral constituency that stretches above Sunset Avenue across the hilltop toward the (again) wealthy area of Skyline Drive. This part of Jacks Hill is not a depressed squatter pocket adjacent to an upper-class residential area, as so often happens in the urban Caribbean. Instead, it is a well-established community in which, during 1996 and 1997, about 5 percent of its approximately 1,400 residents were what one would identify as “middle class,” part of the national stratum of brown urban professionals and civil servants. The remaining 95 percent called themselves the “poorer class of people” in relation to these middle-class residents. Some of their families’ presence in the community dated to the nineteenth century, and many of them were either from or had family connections to neighboring rural communities. Despite the various conflicts that developed between and among community segments in Jacks Hill during the mid-1990s, in most ways it was a relatively progressive community in which middle-class and working-class families worked together for the betterment of the community as a whole. There is a long history to the forms of cross-class social action that were the norm in Jacks Hill. Norman Manley had been the member of Parliament (MP) for the community between 1949 and 1959, during which time he was able to encourage the National Water Commission to provide ninety-nine-year leases to community residents who had been living on their land without formal tenure (as the community is a designated watershed district), and the Community Council, established in 1978, was recognized in the early 1980s as one of the three most effective councils in Jamaica. The dominant discourse by both community members and outsiders, until very recently, had been that Jacks Hill was a place where the relatively rich and the relatively poor “lived well together” and where supporters of the two political parties lived side by side without incident. During 1996 and 1997, people still spoke in shocked tones about a murder that had taken place in the community in the late 1980s—the last really violent crime event most community members remembered and one that was known to have been perpetrated by “outsiders.”

However, what began as a few “isolated” incidents of violent crime in 2001—this time committed by community “insiders”—escalated furiously during the last six months of 2004. During that period, ten community members were murdered, several others were shot, and many women were raped. The intensely palpable fear and anxiety generated by these events resulted not only in a heightened discourse of violence, crime, and physical vulnerability. It also led to the overseas migration of several middle- class community members and the temporary abandonment of land and homes by roughly 80 percent of the poorer population. In a country of 2.7 million people that averages three to four murders per day (more than half of which occur in the Kingston–St. Andrew metropolitan area), this “outbreak” of violence in Jacks Hill may not seem unusual. It was, nonetheless, startling to people who prided themselves on bucking national trends in this regard. And like columnists’ recountings of events in the two national daily newspapers, those of community members were framed in relation to the discourses of “crisis,” the “failure” of the nationalist project, and the sense that there was diminished space for ordinary Jamaicans to “make a difference.” In this chapter, I talk about how these discourses came to make sense to people as both explanation and analysis and about how we might think about violence and social transformation more generally.

Veena Das has recently suggested that we situate moments of extraordinary violence within the realm of the ordinary and in relation to “the routine violence of everyday life” (Das 2007: 136). She queries, “If violence, when it happens dramatically, bears some relation to what is happening repeatedly and unmelodramatically, then how does one tell this, not in a single narrative but in the form of a text that is being constantly revised, rewritten, and overlaid with commentary?” (Das 2007: 80). I want to attempt to take up Das’s challenge—one that is about temporality as much as it is about scale—by exploring how violence in Jacks Hill remapped the material, ideological, and symbolic space of the community in three ways. First, I look at how the gang war mobilized—and by mobilizing, hardened—existing status distinctions among community members. Second, I aim to show how violence forces attention to the salient links between communities and the networks through which these links are forged, when these links are mobilized, and how they change over time. And finally, I seek to show how violence ties broader institutional structures—nationalist political parties, for example—into global circulations that are less often researched than migratory patterns or the circulation of cultural commodities (but see Nordstrom 2004; Roitman 2005). In other words, I am interested in looking at the spatial effects of violence at intra-community, intercommunity, and transnational levels, as well as the temporal logics that shape these effects.

To do so, I lay out two different but related genealogies of the emergent violence in the community of Jacks Hill. This will not be a blow- by- blow recapitulation of events and memories. Instead, what I will offer will, on one hand, lead me to tell a familiar story about transformations in the role of the state and middle-class political leadership, given contemporary neoliberal processes. On the other hand, it directs an attempt to think through what Anna Tsing (2005) has called the new “frontier cultures” created and then abandoned by those same processes. Ultimately, I argue that Jacks Hill represented a new frontier for the expansion of existing circuits of violence in Kingston. However, because the crisis generated by the violence in Jacks Hill led to a massive show of strength on the part of the Jamaican state, it was a frontier that was fairly quickly abandoned. In this case, the Jamaican state rallied. Yet the way in which it rallied exposed the unpredictability and arbitrariness that characterize its ongoing struggle for legitimacy and authority among Jamaicans negotiating dangerous terrain.

This struggle has a history, of course. As a result, we might most productively conceptualize frontiers not only in spatial terms but also as temporal constructs, themselves subject to (as well as reflecting) the vicissitudes of the state’s ability to instantiate biopolitical power, an ability that, in turn, has something more generally to do with the ways early patterns of exploration and exploitation shaped the range of possibilities for postcolonial state formation in the Caribbean. In other words, the story of contemporary violence in Jamaica is one that stretches back further than is usually acknowledged (but see Bogues 2006), but it is one whose older structural underpinnings are often obscured by more recent pressing concerns about the development of democratic political participation after the Second World War. Moreover, as has also been the case in the United States, the mobilization of a nationalist aspirational slogan that privileges unity—”Out of Many, One People”—masks the centrality of violence as an organizing principle of state formation in Jamaica, both historically and in the post-colonial period. Selwyn’s murder, and the broader conflict in Jacks Hill, gives us a window onto these more general discussions, and it is to that story that I now return.

GENEALOGIES I: STATUS, POWER, AND PRESTIGE IN JACKS HILL

Selwyn’s death was only the latest in a series of murders that was rocking Jacks Hill, but because Selwyn was not involved in the gang war that was taking over the community, his death was surprising. People felt that “if they could kill Selwyn, they could kill anybody.” The gang war itself was shocking, not only to a local community that had to deal with the immediate fallout, but also to a national community that did not understand how to read the violence in Jacks Hill in relation to the usual landscapes of crime and gang war in Jamaica. Ordinarily, murders of this sort tended to be concentrated in urban areas rather than rural outposts—though these two spatial frames are never as mutually exclusive as they are often purported to be, as people regularly circulate between Kingston neighborhoods and their family roots “in the country,” a circulation that becomes especially clear during election periods. Moreover, if they were not retributive killings, they usually had the consolidation of a drug route or political contracts as their motivation. Jacks Hill, however, unlike most rural communities, is a hillside community accessed only by two roads and a series of ancient paths that run through the foothills of the Blue Mountains; it therefore is not a significant vehicular throughway to other villages. Moreover, the community holds no history of either a sizable drug trade or partisan warfare, having elected Members of Parliament from both the People’s National Party (PNP) and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) in relatively equal numbers over the years. As a result, what was going on in Jacks Hill did not make sense on the national map because it fell outside the usual terrains of violence. Furthermore, as I mentioned earlier, within most Jamaicans’ social maps of Kingston, Jacks Hill refers to one of the most exclusive residential areas of the capital city. Indeed, the neighborhood has been canonized within the popular sphere of dancehall culture as the referent for wealth and power. (I am thinking, for example, of Lady Saw’s “Man Haffi Mind Wi.”) This means that newspaper reports of events in Jacks Hill needed also literally to put the community on the map. They did this by renaming the area “Jacks Hill Village” and describing it as “a depressed community sandwiched between Jacks Hill and Skyline Drive—two of St. Andrew’s more affluent upper-class neighborhoods” (Walker 2004b).

Newspaper reporters, however, came onto the scene only after the particularly spectacular disinterment and (re-)shooting of the body of one of the gang leaders in June 2004 (“Dead ‘Don’ Dug Up, Shot” 2004). This was several years into the escalating violence, according to most community members, and only after “outsiders” had begun to make their way into the community. For Jacks Hill “insiders,” genealogies of the conflict typically began with a fight that happened during a soccer match on the community’s playing field in 2000. Although that fight centered on two individuals, it brought to life the status distinctions that sometimes divide members of the poorer population in Jacks Hill, mapping social distances between people who live “up the road” and those who live “down the road” and between people whose families have been in the community for generations and those who are more recent arrivals who tend to come with fewer resources. These distinctions are structured around the unequal distribution of resources such as education, the ability to migrate and develop legitimate and regular transnational networks, and a particular kind of relationship to the handful of socially conscious middle-class people who moved to the area during the 1950s and 1960s.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from EXCEPTIONAL VIOLENCEby Deborah A. Thomas Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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