Return, p.7
Return, page 7
If Muslim and North African immigrants and refugees hit a nerve in Spain, it’s because their movement is seen by some—including the Vox party—as a return to the land from which they were expelled during the Reconquista, or Reconquest, the many wars that ended in 1492. In one inflammatory speech, in which he stressed his party’s relationship to Europe, Abascal crowed, “After all, we saved Europe from the Muslim onslaught during our 700-year Reconquest!” (No wonder American white nationalist Steve Bannon has endorsed his party.) A homeland is a place where one culture must dominate in order to stop the return of an earlier one.
Even if that return is simply the manifestation of religious and ethnic paranoia.
Chapter 3
Jamaica
Come from Foreign
The developers behind the Gates of Edgehill, a proposed community in the Parish of St. Mary, Jamaica, know how to draw crowds to their showcase event at the Toronto Botanical Garden. Host Oliver Samuels, the Caribbean King of Comedy, provides star power to a night that has already promised a guest appearance from well-known hockey dad Karl Subban, whose book How We Did It is one of the evening’s giveaways.
Anyone interested in buying a “piece of the rock” in a gated community on Jamaica’s north coast can take a slick virtual-reality (VR) tour of the two main types of homes for sale. The more affordable and smaller Diana model, at 1,658 square feet, comes with a price tag of just under $240,000 (US); the Elizabeth is a steal at $299,000 and 1,904 square feet. Both homes have three bedrooms, two bathrooms and cathedral ceilings, but the basement in the Elizabeth accounts for the extra $60,000. And for one night only, all prices are slashed by 10 percent.
If VR induces headaches or nausea, patrons can instead watch a traditional video or browse brochures promising “sunshine, swimming and socializing” and highlighting the golf course and spa. The island is poised for great things, a representative from the Jamaica Tourist Board tells the audience, and this new community offers a “great opportunity to be shining with us.”
What’s for sale tonight is not merely a home but the next phase in the lives of the exclusively Black Jamaican audience members. (Many Europeans, South Asians and Chinese call Jamaica home, but there was no sign of any other ethnic groups at this event.) The people I chat with have already reached retirement or are beginning to think about it. Even on this mild late-October night, some fantasize about a getaway from Toronto’s winters. “The sun—I miss the sunshine,” a woman who has lived in Ontario for almost forty years tells me, before also mentioning the warmth of the people and the vibe of the place. This will become a refrain when I visit the island later the same week. A younger woman speaks of ties to her family and roots that took her back to the island for a year-long visit to lay the groundwork for an eventual permanent return.
I’m not Jamaican, but even I start to crunch some numbers in my head during a monotone presentation from a mortgage broker. If I borrow against the equity in my place, maybe I can get myself a Diana and spend as much of the Canadian winter away from icy sidewalks and bone-chilling weather as my job and commitments will allow. The Caribbean setting aside, my longing for the mountain house in Aden and what’s on sale this evening stem from the same emotional place of returning to where we come from.
Investors in the Gates of Edgehill and other purpose-built communities in Jamaica understand that human desire to spend the final chapter of life closer to the land that shaped its earlier stages. Tonight, the free flow of Jamaican patties, rice pilaf and non-alcoholic beverages that you find only in “ethnic” supermarkets package that desire into nostalgia-driven bite sizes and sips.
What almost everyone in the room seems to avoid talking about is what happens to some elderly returnees when they make it back to the homeland. According to a 2018 report in the Guardian, around eighty-five returnees holding Canadian, American or British passports have been murdered in Jamaica since 2012. That number is small, given that the island takes in roughly thirty thousand returnees a year—a figure that includes those who are deported or repatriated—but the stories have acquired a certain poignancy. In most cases, the victims had returned with their life savings after working thirty or more years in the West. One British woman was killed within six days of her return. In 2017, Jamaican police recorded 1,616 murders (an average of 31 a week, according to the Guardian). Window grilles, CCTV cameras and twenty-four-hour security patrols are common—at least in the more exclusive gated communities—but they don’t eliminate the risk of being murdered in your own home. Add break-ins and assaults that don’t end in death, and you may well wonder why anyone wants to return.
And yet here they are at the Gates of Edgehill showcase in Toronto, some window shopping—in it for the free food and the star power—while others are negotiating upgrades and signing on dotted lines. “I think that’s something very Jamaican,” says Yvonne Grant, the director of a homeless shelter in Kingston and a returnee from England. “We still have space around us. That’s what the culture says: Have a nice house, a nice garden, a nice place around you.” This may explain why Jamaicans sometimes refer to their island by the colloquial term “the yard.” It connects the country as a political entity and the land it sits on with the dream of home ownership (elusive as the latter is to its poor, who make up roughly 20 percent of the population). The island’s 2.9 million people share 10,991 square kilometres (4,244 square miles) of richly varied topography. The largest island in the Caribbean Commonwealth, Jamaica feels even bigger because of the concentration of its population in towns, leaving rural areas underpopulated, isolated and impoverished.
Percival LaTouche shakes his head in recognition and in despair when I tell him about the sales pitch in Toronto. The chair and co-founder of the Kingston-based Jamaica Association for the Resettlement of Returning Residents (JARRR), LaTouche has watched his compatriots make their way home, only to deal with the reality of a violent society and what he believes to be a corrupt police force that may have colluded in some of the recent killings. We’re sitting in his office, surrounded by hundreds of files stuffed with news clippings and photocopies of birth certificates and land deeds. Not every item is related to a murder case, but almost every sentence from LaTouche’s mouth betrays his belief that Jamaicans should think very carefully before deciding to come home.
“It’s not hype in the media,” he scolds me when I say that the sensationalist, tabloid nature of some recent murder cases may be tainting the whole country. “Returnees will be targeted because our politicians don’t give a damn.” Politicians want the diaspora to stay overseas and keep sending remittances, he says. The World Bank estimates that between 1976 and 2017, those remittances accounted for 9.45 percent of the country’s GDP, reaching a record 17.31 percent in 2016.
Jamaicans, LaTouche says, helped rebuild the United Kingdom after the Second World War as part of a wave of immigration from then-British colonies. (Jamaica was a British colony until August 1962, when it gained independence—or as the Jamaica Independence Act refers to it, gained “fully responsible status within the Commonwealth.”) At the same time, the money they sent back to their families on the island sustained the local economy. “Had it not been for us who went away in those rough days, I don’t know where Jamaica would be.”
LaTouche knows all of this first-hand. He left Jamaica for Britain in 1958, at seventeen, to become a mechanic. He married at nineteen, and a string of children and grandchildren followed over the course of thirty years spent living in Birmingham and London. He moved up from working as a mechanic to owning a gas station, which he sold when he began shuttling between the two countries. He returned to Jamaica for a few months in 1975 and for good in 1989. “I thought that the Jamaica I left is the Jamaica I came home for. Once I’ve been invested in the country, I realized I blundered. I should never have come back.” He co-founded JARRR with seven colleagues as a way to help others navigate the complex system of the customs department and, he writes in the organization’s brochure, to protect fellow Jamaicans from “unscrupulous lawyers, building and electrical contractors, etc.”
A month after we met in November 2018, LaTouche appeared on Jamaican TV, urging the diaspora not to come home. “It makes no sense,” he told Loop News. “You spend twenty, thirty or forty years overseas working hard, only to return home for people to kill you.” His comments were in reaction to the murder of another British returnee, whose body was found in a shallow grave on her property in the community of Boscobel in the Parish of St. Mary. This is where the Gates of Edgehill has covered the costs of building a kindergarten as a gesture of goodwill to the mostly impoverished community and as an investment in the area’s economy.
LaTouche believes that Jamaicans who return of their own choice still have it easier than the involuntary returning residents, which is his preferred term for deportees from mostly North America and Europe. The Jamaican homeland return story can be divided along these voluntary and involuntary lines. Jamaicans refer to both groups of people as “come from foreign,” but the stigma that deportees (the term I and most of my subjects and commentators use) face has more to do with class than national pride. Francis Madden, a retired social worker who volunteers for a number of organizations that help deportees and the poor in Kingston, says that even though more Jamaicans travel for work or leisure than, say, two decades ago, going to foreign countries remains a big deal. And so is returning home after violating visa terms or as a result of a court order. “You’re in a worse place. You’ve failed. You have no ambition,” she says, explaining what some communities in Jamaica think of deportees.
Exact figures vary, but according to statistics from the island’s national security ministry and obtained by the Jamaica Observer newspaper, 9,425 people were deported over a four-year period ending in September 2016. The US (which sends a monthly charter flight of deportees to Kingston) returned 4,153, the UK 1,345 and Canada 931. The rest were deported from other parts of Europe and the Caribbean. This is the highest ratio of deportees to general population in the world.
Unlike returnees, who use their savings to shield themselves as much as possible from violence, deportees often return with little money and no family to speak off. And as I found out during my visit to Kingston, many soon find themselves counted among the homeless. Their return stories confirm a larger narrative about economic disparities that run along racial, political, class and rural-versus-town lines. And yet, friends and contacts from the island tell me that perception is worse than reality, and that they take the right precautions and have rarely experienced any issues. Against this context, returns feed into facts and misconceptions about the island’s history of violence, which has existed side by side with its reputation as the slice of paradise that property developers and holiday resorts promote.
In writing this chapter, I’ve become aware of the binary of “paradise” on one side and “violent place” on the other when it comes to telling stories about the island. As someone from the Arab Muslim world, I know the damage that reductive narratives can have on communities, both at home and in the diaspora. The people in the following pages have shared stories of lives touched by violence and joy, rejections and warm welcomes. While the truth is always somewhere in between, it would be irresponsible for me to underplay the role guns, drugs and murders play in the return experiences of Jamaicans. Blame me and not Jamaica if the stories dwell too much on the island’s darker side. It’s a reading of the situation that reflects my own anxieties around violence.
* * *
In 1962, the year Jamaica became independent after more than three centuries of colonization, the homicide rate stood at 3.9 per 100,000—among the lowest in the world. This fact and not nostalgia explains why older returnees recall a generally peaceful country. In 2018, the rate reached 47 per 100,000, which was actually a drop of 21.9 percent from the record-setting previous year. By comparison, Canada had a homicide rate of just under 1.5 per 100,000 in 1962 and 1.8 in 2018. In taking credit for the 2018 decrease, Jamaica’s prime minister, Andrew Holness, promised to bring the rate down to 16 per 100,000 over a ten-year period.
Security and crime experts may differ on some of the causes of modern Jamaica’s history of violence, but they (and political analysts) agree on a quartet of factors: politics, drugs, gangs and poverty. Each intersects with and reinforces the others but has also acted independently of them. Police ineffectiveness and alleged corruption shadow all four.
The three decades leading up to independence laid the groundwork for contemporary Jamaica’s struggles with violence. The formation of the island’s first trade union in 1938 effectively launched its two political parties and the decades-long rivalry between them: Alexander Bustamante founded the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), while Norman Manley led the People’s National Party (PNP). (The men shared a personal history as cousins born to mixed-race parents.) A system of patronage, or “clientism,” emerged in which politicians (patrons) from both parties bestowed money, job opportunities and perks such as housing on their supporters (clients) in exchange for votes. In a city already divided along uptown (white, mixed-race and affluent Blacks) and downtown (working poor and migrants from rural areas), urban fragmentation intensified.
What became known as garrison communities evolved along political lines, and supporters of one party faced harassment, physical violence and even death when caught on the other’s turf. In 1966, the JLP created the community of Tivoli Gardens, which became one of its strongholds in Kingston. The PNP claimed Hannah Town and Jungle, among other areas. Politically motivated violence, researchers suggest, became endemic.
In his report Confronting the Don: The Political Economy of Gang Violence in Jamaica, researcher Glaister Leslie notes that by the 1960s, politicians were arming groups with guns instead of sticks and stones. A group of men defended an area and answered to a don (leader), who in turn reported to the political directorate. Both parties gave free rein to the dons within their locales, “enabling them, in effect, to become the rule of law in some instances.” Several dons and their gangs continued to corral votes for their political allies, but thanks to the drug trade, they also operated outside the patronage system. Many gang members began as political goons before organizing themselves into groups that controlled territory and operated their own patronage system, a de facto government within the local government. Some of these groups have even crossed borders, becoming part of transnational crime syndicates.
In addition to being the largest exporter of cannabis in the Caribbean, Jamaica has for decades been a transit point for South American cocaine destined for North America and Europe. This has increased the power and reach of its gangs. As trade routes shifted to Central America and Mexico in the 2010s, competition among gangs for the reduced business led to several turf wars. The spike in the homicide rate between 2014 and 2017 reflects the social cost of heroin’s scarcity as a resource, according to a study by A2 Global Risk, a security risk management consultancy. Other shifts in the criminal underworld reflect the US kingpin strategy, which focuses on targeting gang leaders and letting the ensuing jockeying for position among lower-ranked members consume their lives and weaken their influence.
Gang culture and police incompetence—and some say helplessness—collide in a world where indifference to the latter’s authority adds to a “perceived sense of lawlessness,” according to a report from the US State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security. The police make arrests in only 44 percent of homicides and convict just 29 percent of perpetrators. In Confronting the Don, Leslie suggests that most firearms seized on the island can be traced to three counties in Florida with large Jamaican populations, while ammunition enters the country through legitimate channels (for policing purposes) but makes its way to the underground market, better known as the informal economy of drug and gun cultures.
This shadow economy lies at the heart of Jamaica’s struggles to eradicate poverty. Young men gravitate to gangs when they are twelve to fifteen years old. Some reports estimate that men fifteen to twenty-nine commit 85 percent of all homicides in the country. (The same age group, inevitably, tops the victim lists.) Although youth unemployment decreased in 2018, it averaged almost 30 percent between 2012 and 2017. These figures cover both urban and rural areas, but the latter’s experience of poverty connects to the former in different ways. Commentators describe Jamaica as the most resource-rich poor nation on earth because of its varied agricultural output, fisheries and livestock. But growing local produce is one thing; selling it in a market where cheap imports dominate has left farmers accepting a loss and has driven younger workers into populated urban centres, where they’re more likely to be recruited by gangs.
Deportees enter this mix of political war, drugs, gangs and poverty at a huge disadvantage. The police and the ministry of national security attribute much of the high homicide rate to the return of Jamaican gang members from the United States and elsewhere. A 2001 analysis by the ministry put the number of involuntary returnees who resumed criminal activities within the structures of existing gangs at 20 percent. The charter flights that bring US-based deportees to Jamaica have come to be known as “convict planes.” Scholars of violence and crime don’t dispute the fact that gangs sent many members to the US in the 1980s as operatives, but they believe the role of deportees in current crime statistics is much lower. A comprehensive 2008 study in the Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice suggests that deportees commit only around 4 percent of all murders in Jamaica each year.
“It’s a matter of who you were here before you left Jamaica,” says Damian Hutchinson, the director of Peace Management Initiative (PMI), a non-profit organization that uses alternative dispute-resolution methods to curb community-based violence. Men who were involved with gang activity can’t expect their years in the US or the UK to wipe the slate clean. The memory of what a deportee might have done before “going to foreign” persists. “He could have hurt someone. He still has that reputation, and someone wants revenge.” But even Hutchinson sees the stigma against deportees as mainly social: “Someone getting deported doesn’t go telling people that because they don’t want to be judged.” Deportees don’t get voter IDs, he says, so this creates challenges in integrating them back into society. If their deportation after years or decades of living in the United States, Canada or Britain calls into question who’s American, Canadian or British, then their return also raises doubts about their Jamaicanness. When it comes to Britain, deported Jamaicans talk about a particular kind of betrayal: the “motherland” has turned them away and the “homeland” of Jamaica is also rejecting them.
