Rescuers try to raise this wrecker from the Martha Brae River last year. - FileTitle: Martha Brae's Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica.
Author: Jean Besson.
Reviewer: Don Robotham
FOR REASONS which are worth thinking about, Jamaica has produced quite a few anthropologists/sociologists. Edith Clarke, M. G. Smith, Fernando Henriques, Orlando Patterson, Barry Chevannes, Charles Carnegie, myself and many others. The above group is fairly well-known to the Jamaican public. Not so well known is the author of this book, Jean McFarlane Besson.
Dr. Besson, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmith's College, University of London, is the daughter of a very prominent Trelawny family which has made numerous contributions to Jamaican public life. Her late father was the leading lawyer in the parish for many years.
For decades, Dr. Besson has been the leading expert on 'family land' as a fundamental institution of Caribbean rural life. In this book, the Jamaican public has an opportunity to make the long overdue acquaintance with the intellectual work of one of our most outstanding scholars.
The book is mainly an account of family land. Revivalist and Rastafarian religion and the family life of the poorest parts of the Jamaican rural population which has had one foot in and one foot out of the sugar industry are also discussed. This combination of wage labour on the sugar estate and small farming on a small plot of family land is an old Jamaican and Caribbean phenomenon. As Dr. Besson points out, it goes right back to the days of slavery. It is found across the French, Dutch, Danish and English-speaking Caribbean but rarely, if at all, in the Hispanic parts.
RURAL JAMAICA
The book is also an account of the history of village settlement and development in Trelawny the home parish of many Jamaican leaders, including some of the young rising stars in our reformed police force. Indeed, as Dr. Besson points out, Martha Brae is the hometown of the Honourable Hugh Shearer.
She traces the well-known independent psychology of the rural Jamaican some may say of the Jamaican in general back to this deep root. She shows in some detail how this tradition of possessing small plots of land which are inherited down the generations and which are regarded as an inalienable family patrimony has also been critical for the maintenance of rural family life and rural Jamaican values more generally. She explains how both Revivalism and Rastafarianism are anchored in family land and in fact sanction and uphold it.
Indeed, one of the most important chapters of this book is the one on traditional Jamaican rural family life. Jean Besson extends and to some extent corrects the foundational work done by the late Edith Clarke in this area. She shows convincingly that there is a stable Jamaican family system which goes back to the period of slavery, as the work of scholars such as Professor Barry Higman established in the 1970s.
The myth, propagated by earlier scholars and widely held in some quarters in Jamaica to this day, that there was no family life to speak of during slavery, is shown to be just that a myth. The oft repeated cliché that the traditional Jamaican family is weak and many Jamaicans are poor and the birth rate high because of the low marriage rates and the system of delayed marriage is once again dispelled by careful argument and empirical data.
This foolish notion reached its zenith in the colonial period during the bizarre mass marriage movement of Lady Huggins which failed miserably. Dr. Besson's work proves once again that such ideas echoes of which are heard in the values and attitudes campaign in Jamaica today represent the very opposite of the truth. Our birth rate is low and our population growth rate lower. What this work in fact shows is how strong this family system is and has been, despite the immense obstacles which slavery, poverty and now urbanisation and globalisation, put in its way. None of which should be taken to mean that our family system then or now was perfect and that we do not have very serious problems of family erosion.
This book, if read carefully, holds many lessons for the values and attitudes brigade. It shows how strong traditions of mutual aid and community support have been in Jamaican rural culture. It tends to accentuate our positives and it is only by reading between the lines that one can see the roots of our notoriously contradictory psychology: generosity of spirit and openness combined with overweening ambition, 'ginnalship', stubbornness, fractiousness and too vivid an imagination for our own good. It idealises somewhat the viability of family land, only alluding to but not really analysing the national and international forces which have inevitably undermined this in fact tenuous way of life.
CARIBBEAN FAMILY STRUCTURE
This book explains that the wrong-headed judgements of the Jamaican family are based on the fact that our traditional family system is different from the 20th century Western European middle class one. Our family system is not a deviant from this Protestant European ideal type. It is a system in its own right with its own logic and validity. It is not a nuclear family system in whole or in part. It is an extended family system.
As is common in African-derived, and lineage-based family systems generally, the main tie is not marriage but the blood tie handed down over the generations. Divorce, thank God, is relatively straightforward. In technical anthropological terms, this system does not pivot on 'affinity' but on 'consanguinity'. Descent is the key. Multiple unions are not unknown.
Unlike extended families in West Africa where the vast majority of Jamaicans originated, the Jamaican extended family is not co-residential but dispersed. It does not count descent in mainly one line but through both. As is often the case in West Africa there are more ways than one to get married. Marriage itself is regarded as a process and not a one time event. It has to prove itself over many years and in diverse respects before it can be legalised. Wise, if you ask me.
Indeed, this very sensible attitude also prevailed among the lower orders in England, Scotland and Wales at least into the 18th century with their 'handfast' and 'broomstick' marriages no need to bother with 'churching.' Simply seal it with a handshake. Not for nothing did people speak of 'Merrie England'. That was, of course, before Methodism, Presbyterianism, Baptism, the Victorian era, middle class morality and the Salvation Army, seized hold of the minds of the poor, defenceless English working people. But it is still prevalent in white England where, happily, the rate of illegitimacy continues to be the highest in Western Europe, except perhaps for Catholic Austria.
One upshot of this emphasis on 'generation' (our word for 'descent') and the ensuing caution about marriage ('nuff teeth'!) is the commonplace phenomenon of children born out of wedlock and plenty half-brothers and half-sisters and adopted family. One of the unsung strengths of this entire family complex is its inclusiveness. Who in Jamaica does not have many such 'halves' in their family who are not discriminated against in any way but treated as fully fledged 'wholes'? And these ties endure forever unbreakable! The generosity of spirit (as well as the 'bad mind' and 'grudgeful') behind this is remarkable but taken for granted. Likewise the culture of mutual aid. How such a durable and effective family system came to be regarded as weak and 'disorganised' is itself something worth studying.
CULTURE BUILDING
One of the reasons to read Dr. Besson's book is to understand and appreciate these qualities of our culture and to grasp what an enormous achievement it is. Indeed, a clear purpose of this book is to celebrate what Dr. Besson calls 'culture-building' by Afro-Jamaicans and how creative this process has been. This stance is far too self-congratulatory and insufficiently self-critical. But it raises a most interesting point for Jamaicans today.
Jean Besson makes it clear that she is a daughter of the Trelawny planter class and "in Britain I am regarded as 'white' (with a perm)." At the same time she proclaims the African part of her Jamaican heritage "My maternal family is rooted partly in the peasantry of the parish of St. Elizabeth. My mother's father, Albert Angelo Myers (1878-1966), son of David Solomon Myers and Margaret Elliot, was from an Afro-Jewish peasant-shopkeeping family in the village of Top Hill, where their house yard, provision ground, and family land can still be seen" (pages xv-xvii).
It is not exactly a common experience (I am trying to be tactful) for a white Jamaican to even vaguely allude to that part of herself which is of African origin. The trend rather is in the opposite direction: physical and cultural whitening or, better yet, 'browning,' rules roost and roots. In fact, the unsurprising thing is that this denial-searching for one's non-existent 'Scottish' or 'Jewish' ancestor, or better yet, 'Arawak great-great grandmother' seems to be strongest among brown or half-Chinese' or 'quarter-Syrian' Jamaicans who are so obviously of African descent. I name no names!
Strange to relate, they are never identified and rarely identify themselves as also half- (usually three-quarters!) African. As the wife of one well-known politician once explained to me proudly, "I am cocoa-brown!" Dr. Besson will have none of this denial. She affirms her Afro-Jamaican heritage and obviously regards it as a vital part of her own personal strength and foundational for the well-being of Jamaica. This is one of the great merits of this book. But in this era of 'bling-bling' culture high and low, will others follow her example?
DIVISION
In this connection, it is worth noting that Dr. Besson is well aware of the divisions in Jamaican society and culture. Indeed, the title of her book, Martha Brae's Two Histories, refers to the deep racial divisions in Jamaican society. At the same time she basically rejects that other resurrected cliché the 'Two Jamaicas' thesis. The book is an affirmation that, deep divisions not withstanding, there is also one Jamaica. This oneness is shared across social strata and ethnic groups but it is a oneness which has to be built. A favourite phrase of hers, used perhaps too frequently, is that of "culture-building" which she clearly regards as an essential part of getting Jamaican society, past and present, to work.
Unfortunately, the book is really written with an academic audience in mind. As a result it contains many technical sections (too many) rehearsing various arcane academic debates. Most may find these sections tedious, even incomprehensible. I would urge the reader to persevere. There is so much for us to learn about ourselves from this very informative work.
Publisher: Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
