Diary: Monday 2
December 1996: Trenchtown, or rather Mexico Town, a housing development built
by Patrick Stanigar. It won an award. It is called Mexico Town because of the
barrel roofs, barrel vaults made of corrugated iron. Of its type it is one of
the best. A town divided by trenches. There is nothing romantic about it. It is
desolate, it redefines desolation. A young man wants money, all young men want
money. My money. “Eh Boss, Me beg yuh some money” Every young man want money,
or rather respect in as much as the two are distinguishable, and bears the
scars of the quest for it. Huge scars. One from the crown of a yong man’s head
down along the jawline all the way to the neck , a huge narrow lake of
scartissue reflecting and rippling in the sunlight as he sits on a low garden
wall. He gives me a toothless fgrin through a haze of ganja smoke. His eyes are
at once focused on my potential an curiously vacant and dislocated. Another
sharp faced young man in better clothes rides a small children’s bicycle and is
insistent, as he circles around me, that I should give him money. Everything
here appears diided and connected by lines of ginorance and =its manipulation
in a meager patronage. Everyone is waiting to get out. Everybody thinks
everybody is bad in Trenchtown. Salvation lies up the hill. Up-town. The hill is what is visible in
the distance. Their own ability to change things is not seen as an option for
progress. Many do not want development for fear that there will be less of a
motive to move. Others see development as no more than legitimate loot.
Plunder. They hate in tiny fragmented groups and that hate does not reciprocate
into an equal and opposite love for members within the groups. Group loyalty is
question of pragmatic investment. It is an extraordinary poverty and
Trenchtown, does not yet represent rock bottom. There are infinite levels
further below, even in Trenchtown itself. Father Maclaughlin, my guide, has
been there from the beginning. Confessed to me that he had made many wrong
decisions, knowingly. With his hands tied behind his back as director of
housing during the PNP era, he oversaw the creation of the garrison towns,
growing on the fertile soil of a chaotic, displaced newly urban poor and their
confusion and ignorance.
“Everybody thinks
we are savages, all the uptown people, we are not savages here you know” A lady
from Trenchtown to me, May 1999.
Trenchtown is a
desolate place, true to the omen in the name, even though the area was
harmlessly named after a Lady Trench. In this area, the birthplace of
BobMarley, the geometry of confrontation takes on a dramatic simplicity. A
broad no-man’s land circumscribes the entrenched communities. Precariously
situated on the edge of one of them is a lonely police station. Before it was
built bullets used to fly freely across the divide, especially during the more
frolicsome evenings. Aimed only vaguely in the right direction, the kill was an
arbitrary piece of luck; the victim’s identity not important. It was enough
that the victim be one of them: PNP or
JLP. To prevent the main road being used by opposing posse’s, a roundabout was
blocked by a house built over the road. The urban haemorrhage was treated by
the creation of an urban thrombosis.
The no-mans’ land
is still punctuated here and there by the ruins of past acts of futile
good-will and foreign aid. A cinema lies in ruins. Community centres are places
to plunder building materials. Health clinics disintegrate under the immense
and insupportable weight of the problem. The result is a desolation which
achieves a brutal poetry echoed by the harsh words and provocative movements of
Dance Hall Culture. Further development is discouraged by the people who live
in these areas. They just want out. To them Trenchtown is a bad place; the thing they crave above all: jobs and respect, lie
beyond its boundaries. (6)
As a result they
have internalised their houses. The interiors scream of a desire for normality:
photographs of pretty babies plaster the walls, what-nots and shiny ornaments
make John Soane’s Museum look like an empty railway station. But outside,
young, empty men sit, nothing to do, on fences, smoking the weed and bearing their extraordinary typology of scars as marks
of respect and identification.