Jamaica emancipated

Negril, Jamaica – at the pirate cove with kirk, swimming and listening to his stories of a place he loves and hates all at once.

 

Reading about Jamaica’s history of slavery and colonialism, I’ve come to look at this place through a new set of eyes. The poverty, so easily romanticised with its peeling paint, ramshackle homes and braided barefoot children, is now a sad consequence of a vastly skewed ideology of white supremacy.

There is a system that has been put in place by middle class, English (or should I say British) educated, so-called “brown” Jamaicans – not to be mistaken for the black variety. Unrepresentative of the masses, I’m learning about a system that is structured to promote the success of those that manage to fit within colonial-influenced ideals, and marginalising those that don’t. Sound familiar? I suppose it does.

It has only been about 150 years since the official emancipation of Jamaica, but the struggle to keep up with the first world has left an indelible imprint on a people that were dispossessed and then forced to adapt to a system that doesn’t really want to let them in anyway. Tourism and missionary work has formed newer versions of an old horror story. Again, the disadvantaged classes of African Jamaicans are catering to the whims and demands of a predominantly white world to earn a measly living, in the hopes of striving towards a high level of “civilisation” – a term frequently used in the post-emancipation era and now changed to the more politically correct “socio-economic progress”.

Although, who am I to criticise… the paramount tourist that I am? I chase the exotic and vacation in the idea of living the “authentic” life of people foreign to me. Then I return home to my cushy lifestyle and place the immense issues of survival that press in on my periphery on a shelf for another time to worry about.

 

 

Maroc moderne

From Fez to Marrakech, Morocco – and everything in between.

 

Bursting at the seams with contradiction, my version of Morocco was a continuous slideshow of chaos and heat. One particularly sweltering evening, Jemaa el fna felt like a panicked nightmare… smoky darkness, tribal drum beats, the hum of a thousand people and piercingly predatory eyes everywhere. Groping hands and that hackle-raising feeling of being watched from every angle with no route for escape. Cobras, wizened magicians, drug pushers, the mob (as in ancient Rome, not the modern one), streetfights – all scattered in the midst of this nocturnal melting pot, eerily lit by gas lamps and naked bulbs. Whole decapitated sheepsheads were hanging in the blanketing heat and the chilling echo of ululating cries floated across the square. It felt like a place of dark secrets and sinister ambition.

I saw a man lose his camera to a bold thief who stepped right up to him, slice the strap around his neck with a pocket knife and his accomplice racing up to swipe it off the ground to disappear into the milling crowd. As you can imagine, I was a little nervous.

The night before, in exactly the same place: Cheery hubs of dancers, acrobats, tourists and locals alike, all wide-eyed with anticipation at the spectacles on show. Food stalls and orange juice wagons calling out their wares in fierce competition, children alternating between sad, puppydog hustler faces and the insuppressible grins of youth and a night full of adventure and possibility ahead. 

I’ve experienced the gentlest and most chivalrous of men here, as well as the sleaziest and most disrespectful… children who saw me as an opportunity to turn an easy buck and others who wanted nothing more than to help a stranger and to show me the beauty of their home. I’ve seen a towering mosque of immense intricacy calling to prayer with a voice of such deep passion and committed devotion, the people flocking in response, respectfully attired and heads lowered in humility… and an open space filled to the perimeter with people rabid with theft, drugs and sexual predation beneath the shadow of the mosque. 

I don’t know whether I’m happy or sad that “modernity” will probably bring about the eventual sanitisation and regulation of such disparity. There’s a magic and mystery here. Black magic, white magic, all jumbled into a coagulation of crumbling ochre walls, soaring palms, henna stained hands and flowing white kaftans upon a myriad of tiled mosaics. 

 

 

 

Miss Magone

London, England – a warehouse in east London, my kinda place..

 

The English with their avant garde fashion and Radiohead. I find myself back here again and again. Is it any wonder? 

 

Coup de foudre

Paris, France – L’Opera with Avril and a Miu Miu dress.

 

The city that turned love into a cliche I never tire of.

For Emma, forever ago

 

Sydney, Australia – photo shoot for Sewn with Emma Johnston

 

The girl can move. 

Miss Berlin

Berlin, Germany – various locations

 

Berlin is still in the throes of adolescence. She has been pummeled into submission repeatedly by regimes held together by the plinths of fear and propaganda and is now just beginning to shake her hair out in a defiant loosing of her liberty. 

The land has history upon history of wars, revolutions, submission and domination, bloodletting and celebration, while the city holds its multi-layered culture close to its heart. Here, there are sub-cultures that still have time to percolate, out of reach from the mass media machine waiting to find the next “movement” to turn into the latest lopsided haircut and skinny jean. 

She is coming out of a fractured and nervous disposition to find herself whole and back in the game. The streets are thronged with short-but-good-time-seekers and a people who are yet forming an idea of who they are within a greater national and international context. 

Berlin: 18 years old, thirsty for adventure and just beginning to get a sense of how glorious adulthood can really be. It shows.

 

 

 

 

 

Significance in retrospect

 

 

Port Sandfield, Canada – a cottage by a lake.

 

It is only when a moment feels lost that the memory of it takes on significance.

 

An age

 

Clarke Quay, Singapore – an old shop house that has served as the living and office quarters for a family business spanning four generations.

 

See him for what he really is. A reluctantly aging man whose dwindling purpose in life is to see the end of it as best as he can. A man who looks upon the face of his grown children, searches for things he might still teach them, and perhaps some small way to keep them by his side.

 

 

 

 

The price(s) of salvation

 

Shanghai, China – Yu Fo Si Jade Buddha Temple, Anyuan Lu 170

 

The Festival of the Dead. A time when the souls of the underworld are free from purgatory to roam the living world and invited to Buddhist temples to feast and be appeased by their relatives during a three day vigil of incense burning and paper offerings.

Buddhist temples all over the world open their doors to the general public and the devout to pay their respects in a haphazard production that belies the facts and figures reserved for a select few.

Ensconced within the heart of the temple compound at Yi Fo Si, within a gilt lined hall, smoky with the fragrance of incense from a rare wood found exclusively in the jungles of Vietnam and Indonesia, 400 people are lined in silent and strategic rows. They wear identical black robes and pray separated from the cacophony of the jostling hoards outside. The front row is given to the highest paying local patron to the temple. The second row is given to the highest paying foreigner. The cheap seats are in the back.

Price List:

Front row prayer seats – US$200,000

Second row prayer seats – US$100,000

The cheap seats at the back – US$3,000

One strand of fragrant rare wood prayer beads – US$15,000

Twenty sticks of rare wood incense – US$100

*All available from the temple shop

 

The total cost of the festival to the temple each year is approx. one million USD.

 

 

 

 

For the idea of home

 

Hainan Island, China – ancestral homestead in a small village about 2 hours drive from Sanya beach resort (host to Miss World beauty pageant 2007)

 

(The journey)

Verdant mountains, lush country, industry abounding everywhere. We were on the Eastern Expressway, travelling from Sanya to the village of our maternal ancestors. Stretching around me were glistening rice paddies and sun darkened farmers in conical straw hats weaving their way through the harvest. Here and there, we would spot brick farmhouses adorned with the ubiquitous line of laundry strung like a ragged necklace. I raced through this countryside, sucking up as much of it as I could, ensconced with my luggage in the back seat of a teeny, weeny, seaweed green chevvy that smelt vaguely of stale underarms, face to the wind and casting frequent grins of exhilaration to my sister in the front seat. 

(The destination)

We are finally here. 2 hours of lawless highway and another half hour of bumpy dirt road later, Ling and I have been safely delivered to our ancestral home – the same one I stayed in when I was about 5 years old – also the place I last saw my great-grandmother all those years ago when she was 102. 

I am totally blown away.

The way my relatives live here – eking out an existence by their bare hands, with the help of several water buffaloes, chickens, pigs and a couple of mangy dogs (trained as “guards”, but function more as leftover food disposals). The roof over my head has housed 7 generations of blood relations. It has seen the industrial revolution, the cultural revolution and is now languishing unaffected through the digital revolution. 

I visit the rudimentary prep school that mum built over 10 years ago, watch livestock put to the knife in preparation for the feast the villagers are holding in honour of our return to the homestead, use a mixture of mandarin and hainanese to converse with the wizened, old matriarchs and stay up most of the night winning over the local kids by teaching them how to use my digital SLR and photoshop. I am then woken at 4am to witness the final slaughter of the last 5 chickens and 2 geese (because word got out about how enthusiastic I was in photographing the initial 2 chooks in the afternoon), and seeing as I am already awake, I rock down on my haunches and get in the vegetable prep assembly line. Snowpeas, spring onion and celery, here I come. 

I can honestly say, it is an incredible experience – squatting outside on a dirt path that serves as the outside “wet” kitchen, taking part in a task that was probably done by women of 5-6 generations before me in exactly the same spot… Women whose gene pool I share and who could never imagine how far my life has taken me from this place.