Melville Cooke
AT THE end of Anthony Winkler's The Painted Canoe, the new doctor in Charity Bay, Portland, looks through the window of his office as he dreams of moving on and up in life, away from the rural roots that he is ashamed of.
The 'brown' man is mulling over the juicy possibility of marrying an American woman when "the ambling figure of an incredibly ugly man carrying a sail pole came into view... The fellow was monstrously ugly, his face disfigured by a swollen, elongated jawbone... The hand of God on such an ugly, bestial-looking creature? The doctor asked himself sardonically... The doctor shook his head in amazement to think that a man as learned and gifted as himself - a doctor! - could have risen out of the same abyss of superstition in which that monstrous-looking brute now wallowed."
The doctor's observation about Zachariah Pelsie, the central character in Winkler's first novel, may have been extreme and compounded by the fisherman's deformity, but it is reflective of the way in which many of better economic standing think about the poor. The tendency is to believe that there is no joy in their lives, that they are not happy, that they are perpetually dissatisfied.
Yet, the most obviously happy people I have encountered have been poor or certainly not financially well-off.
The poor laughs from a different space. It is something that cuts across the rural/urban divide, as I first noticed it in the Morant Bay market as a child and again as a 24-year-old on a number 48 or 46 bus heading to and from the Gleaner Company. It is an unrestrained laughter, yet not as pretentious as the tittering of the sophisticated or as ostentatious as the bellow of the wealthy.
HAPPINESS IN DANCE
The happiness is also reflected in the wave of dance moves that has swept over dancehall music and especially at street dances. I have stood up and watched the wild abandon with which people whom I believe to be not financially well off, jump 'pon de river, pon de bank', 'willie bounce', 'rock away', 'chaplin' and 'look outa road'. It is a sheer joy that comes from a deep place.
What causes it is best explained by sociologists and such the like, but I can say from personal experience that apart from my wife and children, I am no happier now than I was as a UWI student in the early 1990s, when hunger was a good pal of mine.
It may have something to do with expectations, in that many poor people have no lofty aspirations and so are satisfied with what they have.
That satisfaction often escapes the better-off, who fall prey to the definitions of happiness that are pushed on television, not only through the obvious route of advertising but also through the images of happiness in sitcoms, soaps and movies.
Of course, the poor are also exposed to these images, but there is a difference between when a mango is just beyond reach and when it is so high up in the tree that you can only comment on how inaccessible it is.
So, if you are among the better-off, do not for one moment think that you are any happier than the person with a bunch of bananas on his head and a machete in hand, or pedalling a bicycle to 'uptown' to work on a construction site.
Of course, there are those who will write off that satisfaction as lack of ambition, but who is anybody to define ambition for someone else?
And when I speak of the poor, I do not refer to the homeless and those headed to the infirmary. For as I read somewhere (it may have been in a Mark Wignall column), one poor person made the distinction with "we poor, but we no poverty".
Mel Cooke is a freelance writer.
