Melville Cooke
SOMEWHERE IN Jamaica there is a factory that is not listed on the stock exchange, which the Registrar of Companies knows nothing about, which has no known source of its share capital, which has no website, email address, telephone or fax number.
Its product is highly visible, though, rising high above the road, bearing its occupants high in the rarefied air of permanent air-conditioning.
You see, somewhere in Jamaica, land of people always searching for new ways to declare that they are 'smaddy', there is a factory which manufactures SUVs. (It makes BMWs and Benzes too, but only on Sundays). It is a flexible company, which does not discriminate among Suzukis, Toyotas, Mitsubishis and Hondas, tossing in the odd Range Rover and Lincoln Navigator for good measure.
I know this factory must exist, because there is no other way that a country with a per capita income that is way shy of a double burger (with cheese) per day could have so many SUVs just rolling along.
(And by the way, beside that SUV factory is an oil refinery. And beside the oil refinery is an oil well, because there is no other way that we could afford the fuel to run these gas guzzlers).
OTHER FACTORIES
They are not the only hidden factories in the country, which drive our conspicuous consumption when all economic indicators would suggest that we cannot afford much. There is the mysterious Motorola Razr factory, which makes the slim phones just so that people can walk around in the night with a glowing 'M' pressed to their ear. There is the block-and-steel-and-cement factory, which makes all the construction, especially of some 'rahtid' mansions, not only possible but downright easy; there is the accessories factory which turns out false fingernails and hair; then there is my favourite, the 'Shitsoo' factory, which produces fuzzy dogs to order to go with the SUVs and the fingernails.
We live with an illusion of prosperity in Jamaica which presents a false sense of what is possible to especially our young people. I am not in the 'know', but I know enough to realise that much of this illusion is created by the two 'ds' which almost rhyme, death and debt. I know enough about some of the construction, some of the hotels and supermarkets that appear where there was once bushy land, the houses which go up in three months, the apartments that replace single family dwellings in communities with large land spaces, to associate them with deaths from drugs.
I know of sufficient people living on the orange light of a near empty fuel tank and a payment away from homelessness, yet presenting a cheerful face to the world, to know that near unmanageable debt is a chronic illness in this country.
I often wonder just how much of this illusion results in the large number of 'owner migrating' adverts in the classifieds, as well as the tremendous brain drain which sees three-quarter of university graduates heading towards greener pastures on the other side of the visa line. Of course I know that things are tough in Jamaica, very tough, but it is much more manageable if the reality of it being tough for most is reflected in the daily theatre of our lives, instead of the 'blinging' without real substance or industry which occurs at all levels of our society.
The illusion of prosperity, especially the debt-driven one, is shattered as people get older, but we hardly see the people who cannot afford medical care for the wear and tear of their busier years. As for the death-driven illusions, those are shattered daily and are often summed up in a single, often repeated line: "The police have established no motive for the murder."
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer
