Title : Jamaica Journal (Vol.29 No.3, December 2005-April 2006)
Editor: Kim Robinson-Walcott
Reviewer: Mary Hanna
This rich collection of articles and creative literary offerings reflects editor Kim Robinson-Walcott's close affiliation with the University of the West Indies. She has tapped colleagues who are established in various fields of scholarly endeavour to share with the public insights into the arts, sciences, history, and medicine of contemporary Jamaica, and has produced an exciting compendium of treats for the intellectually inclined.
This edition of the Jamaica Journal is a clever smorgasbord that delights the eye and the mind - with the exception that its pristine presentation is unfortunately marred by an error in the binding whereby some pages are printed out of sequence and the list of Contents is incomplete.
Jean D'Costa's keynote article 'Roger Mais's Jamaica' is most welcome. It centers discussion of the man and his works on the changing Jamaica between Roger Mais's early childhood at the beginning of the last century and the Jamaica of the '50s when his novels were published.
evocative narrative
D'Costa weaves an evocative narrative around Mais's upbringing in the hills, his politics, and the Jamaica of today that pays tribute to the changes in a society of 'Us' and 'Them' and the one that is now driven largely by violence. She wonders what Mais would make of today's Jamaica. The article is illustrated vividly with the covers of Mais's novels in their original editions - paintings by Roger Mais in clean, clear colours celebrating the common people, the 'Them' of his Jamaica.
Robinson-Walcott has used the cover for The Hills Were Joyful Together as the cover for this issue of the Jamaica Journal: a clever and appealing choice.
The next article, 'Kingston's Dancehall Spaces', targets the location of various dancehall venues over the years. This angle on the dancehall phenomenon is socially astute and opens a way to discussion of the development of dancehall in Kingston over the years. Sonjah Stanley Naah is to be congratulated on a carefully researched and well reasoned discussion with informative details and illustrations.
examples of Baugh's work
Concerning sculpture, Rex Nettleford's tribute to Cecil Baugh is illustrated with four definitive examples of Baugh's work, and in the field of painting, David Boxer's tribute to Osmond Watson is similarly beautifully contextualised with vivid illustrations.
These articles are reproductions of commemorative speeches given at the artists' funerals and are both personal and informative.
Following this opening section on the arts, a photo essay 'Protecting Our Medicinal Plant Heritage: The Making of a New National Treasure' offers an introduction to some of the Jamaican medicinal plants presently in the specialized garden of the University of the West Indies, and some of the recipes that the writers, S. Mitchell and M.H. Ahmad, have gathered on field trips across Jamaica.
superb piece
The authors pay tribute to Jamaica's folk medicinal knowledge and the people who practise folk medicine and they point the way to further reading in this fascinating field. The article records 30 of the 366 plants presently recorded by scientists and field workers in the university gardens.
In a superb piece, 'Monuments, Memorialisation and Decoloni-sation in Jamaica', Verene A. Shepherd discusses the changing nature of monuments in the island. Shepherd takes the time to examine the debate that has raged over Redemption Song, the monument by Laura Facey-Cooper in Emancipation Park. She asks: 'If not Facey's monument, what then should memorialise trauma and the battle to end slavery, a battle that was an essential forerunner to the modern decolonisation process?'
Her discussion encompasses the debate over the Bob Marley statue and ends with this quotation by Toni Morrison, calling for the right kind of memorialisation for black colonised countries:
fascinating, beautifully illustrated article
No place you or I can go to think about or not to think about, to summon the presences of or recollect the absences of slaves; nothing that reminds us of the ones who made the journey and of those who did not make it.
James Robertson, also of the History Department at UWI, offers a fascinating and beautifully illustrated article, 'As the John Crow flies: a preliminary survey of Aerial Images of Jamaica'. His discussion of the art of aerial photography and the history of aerial photographs in Jamaica makes intriguing reading.
Robertson has done careful research in private collections and in the archives of businesses and speaks with great authority on the making of aerial photographs and what can be gleaned from studying them. Like Verene Shepherd's offering, this article, well researched and full of eclectic information, is of the high standard that we expect from the Jamaica Journal.
'Finnish Sailors Among World War II Internees', by Suzanne Francis Brown, and 'East to West: The Indian Presence in Jamaica', add to the variety and new information that this issue offers. These articles are fun as well as cleverly argued; 'Finnish Sailors' contains some wonderful facsimiles of correspondence that are discussed in the body of the text.
Olive Senior and Richard Hart are honoured in reproductions of the citations read at their award ceremonies under the title 'Musgrave Gold Medallists of the Institute of Jamaica'.
Once again the photographs accompanying these pieces are of high quality and the gold medalists for 2004 are well represented.
Under the heading 'Books and Writers', this issue of the Jamaica Journal offers a fine short story, 'The Comforting Arms' by Sharon Leach. This tale of sibling rivalry and the tourist industry continues the life experience of Sugar, a worker at a north coast hotel, that was started in the anthology Blue Latitudes.
sexual escapades
of the tourists
In order to make ends meet, Sugar lends herself to the sexual escapades of the tourists and resents her younger sister for her pregnancy. Sugar must work out her anger and come to an understanding of her sister Celine's situation and ultimately offer her 'comforting arms'. Leach writes with panache and ability to select telling details to support her painful human stories.
She is an excellent up-and-coming Jamaican writer and it is a pleasure to see her represented in this prestigious journal. Similarly, poet Tyrone S. Reid offers four vivid poems of sustained and hidden violence. His 'To the Shrink at Bellevue who Insists I am Bipolar' is a honed blade of words to make up for the absence of real blades 'to kill you with'.
Reid is a poet worth watching.
Book reviews by George Graham and Rupert Lewis spotlight Near Death Experience: A Holographic Explanation by Oswald G. Harding and From Garvey to Marley: Rastafari Theology by Noel Erskine respectively. These reviews are solid articles in their own right and enhance interest in the books they discuss.
Both are timely and ultimately deal with consciousness. An article by Neville McMorris, 'Images of Einstein', completes the collection in this issue and rounds out the offerings with a powerful discussion from the field of science and technology.
This issue of the Jamaica Journal is fulsome and carefully compiled. Its articles will repay reading for years to come.
