Machine
But Jamaican
society is not machine-like. Machines have been forced on it by the small
section of society that is at ease with the metaphor of machinery. The only
machine for which a real passion exists throughout the levels of society, is
the car and failing that, the motor-bike or the bicycle. The Jamaican attitude
to litter has thus created landscape which has become a museum of technological
innovation, introduced, broken and discarded and rusting, reclaimed y the wild
and unstoppable growth of God’s geometrical exercises.
Take Serge Island
Dairies, most of its terrain is an archeological site of machinery which is
rusting away. It is an encyclopedia of progress. Many machines have done elegant
service. Others have proved useless. There is a beautiful little miniature
tractor from the 1930’s, tiny, now serving as an uncertain monument. It is
beautiful on the one hand. But its rust smacks of opportunistic display. The
fact that it has not been preserved, painted etc. means that its function as a
monument is merely contingent, a happy chance.
This is
emblematic, but we shall come to that later.
On the other hand,
there is the saw-mill. A beautiful relic of teleological efficiency. Two
revolving axes driven by a single loud motor, have been arranged along the
longitudinal roofline of the basilical factory barely given form by the large
flapping tattered skin of corrugated iron. Beteen them they drive a whole host
of wood-working machines, imported from the States and old. The whole thing
works but it is hardly used. Only to make wooden palets for the milkcartons.
Just outside of
the compound, a ten minute drive up the river, there is an old hydraulic power
station, not so old, ten years perhaps. The dam, much older is still standing,
although the concrete is cracked. Land erosion has caused the dam to hold up
not water but mud, a huge volume of mud and sand along the surface of which
crawls a shallow river, over barren sand and large dead pebbles. A huge pipe
leads from the top of the dam down to the vestiges of a turbine. The money had
been invested and the power station has never worked. It now has become part of
an ominous landscape.
Countless cars
mark the road as monuments, a memory of madness, folded by the violence of
their crazy reckless speed, or whole and exhausted after years of service.
Jamaica sometimes,
to a foreigner, appears like a country drunk with forgetfulness reluctantly
awakening to bitter memories.
Waiting is a
phenomenon akin to acceptance of the dislocation of the machine that this
society has never become. Jamaican society is not machine-like, much of it is
anti-machine. But then, nor is any society truly machine-like, evn though there
have been attempts to make them as such. So let me explain what I mean. The
metaphor of the machine has had an enormous sway in the century following
Gallileo, Kepler and Newton. De la mettrie is an obvious example, but the
machine as a metaphor for a healthy, orderly society has been very compelling
as an organising principle, introducing standards of human conducts and the
like. As such our ways of describing success often uses traces of the machine
metaphor: the show is running well;
the fact that a machine itself uses metaphors of another order, like running,
does confuse the issue: an process that is running well is being compared to a
machine, a well-oiled machine.
The paradigm of
machinery has undergone an understandable reaction. First of all the machine is
not a metaphor indigenous to Africa. Society in Subsharan Africa was far more
stable than that of Europe, serviced by far more permanent images. As such, the
machine, the metaphor of the machine has never exercised its compelling view on
the African contingent of Jamaica as it has done in the industrialised nations.
Life here is not a machine. But there is a far more insidious reason for the
lack of a machine aesthetic. In Jamaica, slavery nearly succeeded in turing its
objects into machines, literally. STOP
The compound
collision of these continents, and the consquent rupturing of established ways
of being has itself produced new ways of being. The collisions, and their
concommittent rupturings forced a loss of identity. The search for an identity
and for a collective ego one has generated an extraordinary capacity for
intense feeling that expresses itself in all sorts of ways.
There are many who
wear their feeling like clothes, alternately there are equally many who
sublimate it. There are many preachers and much chatter in Jamaica. The chatter
represents a sublimation, a denial, an escape which does not want to see the
awful side of life: they are largely responsible for the architecture of
retreat.
It is the
derivative which holds sway over Jamaica’s desire for material wealth. The
machines working the factories are those which are cheap becuse they have been
discarded by the well-off countries, having done their duty or unable to
according to the West’s demands. D&G works with bottling machines which
used to work elswhere and discarded in the surge for renewal. Jamaica is the
end of the foodchain as far as recycled machinery. Only in its struggle to keep
up does Jamaica justify its third world status. Where it is independent it is
vibrant.