In our time
Jokes about Jamaican ostentation abound — jokes mostly told by Jamaicans themselves. You pull up next to a woman at a stoplight and notice she’s perspiring heavily, even though her windows are up, implying her air-conditioner is on. The explanation: her car’s air-con has stopped working and she can’t afford to fix it, but she doesn’t want the cars that pass her to know it.
Or — same stoplight scenario — you notice the guy next to you talking away on his cell phone. What you can’t know is that he isn’t, really; that his phone has had its service stopped for non-payment, but he doesn’t want you to know it.
There was even the story of the homeowner, in the electricity-less aftermath of Hurricane Ivan, running his lawnmower so that (can this be true?) his neighbours would think he owned that treasurable socio-economic marker: a generator.
And so on.
Now, there’ll be no kudos for me for saying this here, but, at least among the middle classes, Jamaican ostentation is a fact, and most times it’s objectively quite comic. It’s also a consequence, no doubt, of the most entrenched and obsessively subscribed to class system in the Caribbean. (Unlike Trinidad, eg, Jamaica was ruled by the British from very early in the colonial era.)
Everybody (and this is of course a generalization, but still valid in the sense that generalizations are) — ‘everybody’ in Jamaica lives publicly at the very limit of whatever their financial wherewithal permits.
The guy about to change cars who, financial common sense suggests, should content himself with a two-year-old Honda Civic, will instead, by the most tortuous and creative bookkeeping, manage to be seen next driving a spanking new Rav 4.
The junior clerk who really needs some basic items of home clothing (some new T-shirts and flipflops, eg), will go without them in order to turn up in the office in sheer stockings, or fancy sandals, say.
Now, socialist types will find this funny; funny-contemptible, I mean; and maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. But past a certain point, as the national economy sinks into recession and the class struggler discovers that, no matter how desperately he or she twists and turns, s/he just can’t keep up certain appearances any more, the joke stops. The suffering which such types endure as a result is real. Not to realize this, in one’s smug egalitarianism, is simply to be unkind.
There’s been very little discussion publicly of the effects of the current global recession on Jamaica. (In oil-and-gas rich Trinidad, by contrast, Mr Manning did raise the subject last week — if only to assert, nonsensically, that his government wouldn’t allow the Trinidad economy to go into recession.) And yet, all around you in Jamaica, you can see and hear the quiet desperation of people who just can’t hold back their standard of living from slipping any longer.
And this is taking place at every level.
My helper, who’s an absolute gift and has been with me for several years, last week asked me, for the first time ever, for an advance on her end-of-week salary. Not a gift, you understand, but a (very short term) loan. And yet it plainly embarrassed her to ask it.
A few weeks ago, the car park attendant at an institution I regularly visit, long an exchanger of joshing pleasantries with this columnist, approached me sotto voce, all cheeriness gone. Turned out he was asking for a donation, aka begging: something to do with an allegedly sick mother in the country. Giving him what I could (or rather — full disclosure — giving him less than I could have) it was nonetheless hard not to mourn the loss of that casual but bright ‘relationship between equals.’
But travel up the socio-economic scale, and the same thing’s happening.
At the post office, a junior clerk you’ve always dealt with tries to sell you a ticket to something or the other.
The head waiter of a restaurant you’ve always patronized when you could afford it, a man of a certain age, and a dignified, true professional at his job, is suddenly gone, and you notice the place now seems paupered of customers and staff alike.
The grown son of a friend moves back in with his parents, his little North Coast business having failed; turns out the cruise ship tourists aren’t spending money ashore any more, just taking a look around before returning to their ocean liners.
Also back under her parents’ roof is the young schoolteacher (such an animated, charming kid, with such bright dreams!), abruptly retrenched. And ditto the returned graduate who’d only just moved out to live on his own.
As for this columnist — for, on an ascending economic scale, I’m more or less in the next slot up — I’m lucky (as the traffic cop said grudgingly who stopped me recently in the futile hope of finding my ‘papers’ out of date) to be driving at all, never mind that to save gas I’ve started leaving my air-con off and the car windows open. I guess he would have said the same thing if I’d told him I eat mainly chicken and mince these days; or that I turn on the hot water for barely 20 minutes a day, and no longer leave on my eaves’ lights at night; or that I recently ‘graduated downward’ from Royal Oak to ‘whites,’ and from Blue Mountain coffee to some generic brand, and haven’t rented a DVD in ages. And, of course, he’d be right. (Although, being a writer, I’m at least spared any social expectation, at all. Writers are basically classless people.)
But keep moving on up the scale…
The dentist who, for years, has undercharged you — so much so that you’d fondly concluded she had a soft spot for you — abruptly starts charging, not just the going rate, but the high end of the going rate; and you notice that nowadays her waiting room’s usually almost empty.
The specialist medic you were on campus with as a kid begins, for the first time since you’ve known him, opening for business on Saturdays as well as weekdays. A middle-class couple, friends, are selling their home and moving into rented accommodation ‘for the time being.’
This one, a mother, has had to fire her helper; and so her weekends are no longer her own, and no longer days of rest and relaxation.
That one had long planned to send her kid to university in the States. Now, chastened, he’s heading for UWI. (Whether he’s right to be chastened depends, of course, on what course of study he’s pursuing; there are still excellent departments in the UWI, never mind that others have fallen to offering mainly a sort of crowd control these days.)
And so on. The point is:
Whether it’s merely a matter of no longer being able to keep up appearances, or a matter of genuine hardship, the suffering occasioned by the current economic downturn is real. And the fact that it’s mostly an untellable grief — that so many people see it as somehow also shameful, this thing that has happened to them, seldom through their own fault — only makes it worse. The unreality — the strange unreality — of living amid so much acknowledged grief!
These are hard times in our ‘blameless Caribbean,’ but also vaguely spooky times. So little is what it seems, any more.