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// Ian Thomson
© DR
The Dead Yard: Tales Of Modern Jamaica
During the 70s and early 80s I was obsessed with Jamaica. I idled my days away in the record emporiums between Dalston Junction and Seven Sisters and amassed stacks of pre release 7” singles that relayed the latest news from Yard. My own leftist politics were easily aligned to the socialism of the People’s National Party and the social living espoused by the mighty Burning Spear. The Rastafari’s penchant for prophesy, righteousness and redemption might not have sat squarely with Marxist ideology but in the dancehall beneath a web of cables, entranced amid soul stirring vocal harmonies and embraced by an easy stepping bass line, you simply conceded that ‘who feels it knows it!’. Jamaicans have a way with the English language and it’s only when you’re there, on that island of 3 million inhabitants, that you get the full flavour. During the visits I made to Jamaica I was fortunate to meet a lot of different people, from different strata of Jamaican society, and it’s the diversity of encounters in this book that drew me into Ian Thomson’s bold exposure of contemporary Jamaica. The Dead Yard takes its title from a Kumina wake, a Nine Night in St Thomas, that the author attended, an event that immersed him in the African retentions of another age. However, this book is about Jamaica today and it attempts to unravel the psyche of a Caribbean country with an astonishing global impact but underpinned by explosive violence, catastrophic extremes of wealth and a genuine danger of self destruction. Thomson deals with close encounters. He gets in tight with the people he meets. You can smell the place, you can feel the heat, the dust, the tension. He intuitively follows his leads and they take him into places alternately dangerous and bizarre. He plunders the legacy of slavery in search of insights and under the epithet Out Of Many One People he not only visits the Revival Tent and the Bobo Ashanti encampment, he seeks out Sephardic Jews, Hindus and Chinese Buddhist converts to Catholicism. We step inside the homes and offices of academics, politicians, lawyers, returnees from Britain and the remnants of the plantocracy. Everything is given a context, this man has done his homework and each step of his journey, whether to a decaying Great House or a deprived murderous Spanish Town, seems to elevate the complexity and the impossibility of Jamaica shedding its current reputation for ‘guns and man slaughter’ for an abundant, non Americanized, old time land of ‘wood and water’.
The Dead Yard: Tales Of Modern Jamaica by Ian Thompson is published by Faber.
Paul Bradshaw / Straight No Chaser
book jamaica
// ALSO
- Collectorama - Story of Mister Soul
- Live Wire
- Black Man’s Cry - The Inspiration Of Fela Kuti
- Joe Bataan & James Pants live at Cargo 11 June plus dates in Leeds and Birmingham
- Quantic and his Combo Barbaro album launch tour starts Friday 5 June at the ICA
- Ivory Coast: artists speak out
- Sweet Reggae Music, JA roundup
- Musically Mad, Musically Mad - Roots Reggae Sound Systems
- Youssou N'Dour, Interview
// ALL IAN THOMSON'S REVIEWS
The Dead Yard: Tales Of Modern Jamaica
12/08/2009
// BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Dead Yard: Tales Of Modern Jamaica (Book)
Faber -2009
>> Read review
// LINKS
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