“People stupid. The dream didn't leave, people just don't know a nightmare when they right in the middle of one.”
Plot: A not so brief story about more than seven killings. Beginning in mid 70's Jamaica just prior to the Smile Jamaica concert, and winding through the 80's and early 1990's, and New York, and as told by a multitude of narrators, the complex and violent world of Jamaican politics, injustice and struggle for a better life.
Why read it: A challenge to read - many of the characters use Jamaican patois, so just figuring out what they are saying can be challenge, especially early on, and its a complex story that, other than a brief introductory chapter by a ghost to help orient you a little, doesn't provide much in the way of explanation as you are sifting through chapters narrated by seemingly unconnected people. But it all coalesces together pretty soon and you are left totally immersed in a constantly shifting but always engrossing story.
I saw The Harder They Come many, many years ago and was eternally grateful for subtitles. Still, I found it a bit ironic to be watching a movie that was more or less in English needing this to be understood. In reality, the subtitles weren't needed; what was gained in understanding by having them was canceled out by the loss of trying to overlay English on Jamaican tongues. Which is not totally unrelated to the point of A Brief History. Other than quickly looking up bombacloth, or one of the many variants that seem to appear multiple times on every page, I just struggled through for a few chapters until I felt confident of what I was reading. More important was deciphering motivation and allegiances, which were often clouded, unsurprising in a book that has CIA operatives and Bay of Pigs veterans hanging around on its edges.
The Singer, as he is referred to here, hangs over the book, while he barely appears in it. He is the fulcrum for the main event that everything leads to and then moves from. However, like the Singer himself, who was not easy to define, and came to represent a country in which he was part of a fringe minority that managed to scare all the wrong people. The threat they represented was different to different people - to the CIA it was communism, to the gangs that ruled much of Kingston, it was a threat to their power, and oddly it seems, to their identity.
In moving from the 70's to the 90's, we pass through a few generations of Jamaicans. Up to the late 1970's, the gangs in Kingston seem happy with just local ambitions, notably in the character Papa-Lo, the leader of one of the gangs. In a bit of a recurring theme, Papa-Lo uses people's consistency in underestimating him to his advantage, until Papa-Lo underestimates his own second, Josey Wales. Wales is the most memorable character in the book, a violent man, but one with a very sharp mind. Wales expands the groups reach into the US in the 80's through distribution of crack. Ultimately, though, Wales is brought down by his own parochialness, not being aware of the political repercussions his business causes in the US. That, and like Papa-Lo, having an underling who may be underestimated himself.
A violent book - Jamaica is not just the land of reggae and beaches. And parts of New York in the 80's and 90's wasn't much better.
