Big little India

Little India, Singapore – the Sunday eve of Deepavali

 

The underclass of Indian labour in Singapore. Unappreciated and unseen. Taking over a bright little corner of the sterile city state and filling it to the brim with big colour, sounds, sights and smells. Reclaiming the street one day a week.

 

 

 

 

 

The constant roam

Guizhou province, China – enroute from Guiyang to Bijie

 

I’ve realised that I am perfectly content being alone and in the field, surrounded by friendly strangers and the electricity of discovering the deep unknown; digging through the layers of humanity and seeing more and more how fragile we are and the very base needs that ultimately govern our actions.

In the highlands of Guizhou province, the thin, brisk air, the characteristic carved mountains of old chinese etchings – this is a life that breathes. It is real and earthy, uncensored and fully unadulterated. 

I’m not sure if I could ever give this up… Not when I feel like I’ve just begun on such an incredible journey and everything else has just been the prologue to the rest of my life. That everything has led to this: an open heart, burning curiosity, a pervading sense of solitude, a quick grin (and even quicker laugh), a pen, a notepad, my camera(s), the big, wide world and forever, the constant roam.

 

She lives!

Melbourne, Australia – in the locked box of my apartment.

 

SHE LIVES!

http://www.yingangphoto.com

 

thanks to the genius of adam at http://www.adamjohnson.net and craig at http://www.rinzen.com… the two handsome daddies to my new baby.

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.