Ronald Thwaites | Old house and red neckties

As a people we pay scant attention to the 40 per cent of Jamaicans who live abroad. Oh yes, we depend on them mightily to keep our hopes, households and economy afloat. But what about their struggles, the concerns of their existence; the shared heartbeats of culture which make us all, here and there, who we are and want to be?

Last week, Dr Grace Virtue, a girl from the bush-mouth of Cross Keys in south Manchester, now an accomplished scholar in the United States, bared her soul-case and, by extension, that of the multitude of Jamaican-‘israelites’ who carry our collective identity and culture abroad. Her book, from Old House to Red Neck-Tie, is a personal journal, but also a journalist’s documentary of a poor, black country girl struggling and achieving, confirming her Jamaicaness, her worth and ours, first in the chronic inequality of JamRock and later the entrenched white supremacy of the United States.

EARTHY GOODNESS

Her tale is not a wail of complaint. It is the brutally honest story of unfair difficulties, of earthy goodness, of mangling struggles and unlikely, spirit-satisfying successes.

After all, how likely is it that an often-hungry student of Cross Keys High Secondary would become holder of an earned PhD? But then why not? The crime of Jamaica’s slavery and colonial past is the deliberate or negligent suppression of the brilliance of tens of thousands of people like Grace. The grievous sin of our present, for which I acknowledge some responsibility, is that we connive to perpetuate that human waste. Graduating illiterates, innumerates and social misfits is proof of guilt.

OLD HOUSE VALUES

The old house in Grace Virtue’s life was the one-room dwelling precariously sitting on somebody else’s family land, home, tabernacle to a large family, not far from relatives and within a caring community. She lists, as the most fortunate of us can, the inestimable advantage of two married parents, materially poor but with fine values and industrious habits who balanced each other’s strengths and weaknesses to make enough out of very little, to preserve family values and to prize education more than all the ephemeral baubles and rotting consumerism which the one radio station and flickering black and white TV of the pre-and-early independence age had begun to purvey.

MUCH WORSE

It’s much worse now of course. For it is arguable that what we are doing to ourselves nowadays is as bad or worse than what others did and still do to us.

FREEDOM IN AMERICA?

Grace’s account of finding a place of respect in the American academic and public service establishment is the tale of having to contort her essence in the face of the assumption, even among the black establishment, that Caribbean women of her type and origin are not up to scratch.

This book chronicles the scary danger which she and others who cannot hide that they come from “s…t hole” countries, face from the Red Neck-Tie character of Trump’s nativist vision for America, now so up-in-your-face and powerful. This, even as the new Windrush generation, line up to board the modern air-borne equivalent.

WHOLESOME VALUES

The values of Old House, the peasant communities of extended families who cohered around church, burial society, cooperative, day-for-day labour, have been ravaged by bauxite mining and tenure insecurity, the resulting migration, the deliberate favouring of the commission-agent economy over primary producers. Those people valued honesty, self-respect, cooperation and Bible-based dignity despite imposed material want.

THE ANTIDOTE

The virtues fundamental to the Old House culture, albeit weakened by self- inflicted wounds, are the surest antidote to Red Neck-Tie arrogance and hedonism in Washington as in Kingston. Grace’s story will expand the consciousness and perhaps stir the rage of all who read it. Activism should follow. And that will be good.

RED NECKTIES AND THE CONSTITUTION

Last week too, Bruce Golding led a conversation on constitutional reform and expressed his disappointment that the reform project is fizzling for lack of consensus among our leaders. I shared his honest regret that decades of political and social engagement resemble male pimento trees – plenty foliage and flowering but no bearing.

But why? Bruce notices that the younger generation of politicians tend to be more rabid tribalists than those of more mature seasoning. The conceit of power and now big salaries attributed to elected status are seductive lovers. He should have gone on to acknowledge that the entrenched first-past-the-post system, the unwillingness to rein in prime ministerial power, are, among other causes, the original sins of our distemper and contempt for consensus.

CHARTER OF RIGHTS

Bruce Golding deserves credit for swallowing spit, resisting the hubris of office and reaching out to Portia, together advancing the liberty of God’s Jamaican people through the passage of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, to date the most far-reaching reform of the Independence Constitution. What similar, genuine behind-the-scenes as well as cross-party public consultation is taking place now?

That those core rights and freedoms and the mechanics of governance which support them, are now being questioned by those who have arrogated to themselves the power of constitutional reform, is our present dangerous reality. Their machinations, their “phasing,” must be resisted. When it comes to our fundamental law, an electoral majority does not give a government the right to tell the people, without prior respectful listening and heeding, how they should bind themselves to mutual and inclusive advantage.

That’s what happened in 1962, much to our present disadvantage. Processes must be consistent with the integrity of desired outcomes. Ends do not justify means. It is worse when the process has been so autocratically and politically selective, so superficial and so secretive as to explain the public’s scorn and dismissal.

A CHOICE

Coming from someone like him, Golding’s realistic prediction of stalemate must have stung our rulers to the quick. The challenge of tomorrow’s independence memorial is to reaffirm the values and processes of the Old House culture rather than slide into the noose of the red neckties.

Rev Ronald G. Thwaites is an attorney-at-law. He is former member of parliament for Kingston Central and was the minister of education. He is the principal of St Michael’s College at The UWI. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com