Book Review: In the Belly Of the Beast by Jack Henry Abbott

In the Belly Of the Beast:

Letters from Prison

by Jack Henry Abbott

      The story of Jack Henry Abbott is tragic. First incarcerated at the age of twelve, he spent most of his life in government institutions. After reaching the age of 18, he was briefly released as an adult and committed a crime soon after that sent him straight back to prison. He began keeping journals and later struck up a correspondence with Norman Mailer who was impressed with Abbott’s writing skills. Mailer went on a campaign to have him released on parole. It became a cause celebre and Abbott got out. Mailer collected some of his writings and published them as a book, In the Belly Of the Beast: Letters from Prison. But Jack Henry Abbott got into a fight with a man in the alley behind a restaurant. He stabbed the man and got sent straight back to the penitentiary. Mailer felt humiliated by this incident and kept his distance from Abbott until the end of his life.

In the Belly Of the Beast is a collection of excerpts from the letters Abbott sent to Mailer over several years before being released on parole despite misgivings from forensic psychiatrists. The excerpts vary widely in quality, dealing with issues like prison society, the purpose of prisons, the effectiveness of prisons, and the way prison culture mirrors the culture of outside society. Abbott considered himself a Marxist and often makes attempts at writing from that theoretical perspective.

The good news is some of Abbott’s descriptive writing about prison life is excellent. He describes the cells, the cafeteria, the relations between prisoners, the behavior of guards, and other relevant things. He doesn’t just describe the appearance of the prison interior though; he describes the subjective miseries, frustrations, distress, and overwhelming sensations of hopeless he experiences in this environment. The highest points of his writing explain how it feels to spend long stretches of time in solitary confinement. This isn’t easy reading and it isn’t light. It’s downright depressing and you can see how it can drive prisoners insane. Abbott is at his absolute best when describing his emotions and states of mind.

Something else Abbott is good at is examining more abstract ideas of justice and the treatment of prisoners. Many people debate whether prisons are for rehabilitation or punishment. From reading this, you get the sense that that debate is addressing the wrong question. Abbott’s point is that, while prisons function more as punishment than rehabilitation, neither the punishment nor the rehabilitation prepare inmates for life outside the prison. The rehabilitation, educational and vocational programs are half-assed and don’t go far enough to do anything more than make it look like something is being done. It’s little more than window dressing. The punishment is harsh, unpredictable, and oriented towards maximizing control over inmates. It’s dished out in equal doses of brutality to all whether the prisoner was arrested for a non-violent drug offense, shoplifting, or mass murder. The result is that inmates adapt to this environment in such a way that when they are released into society without any help in the transition, most of them break down psychologically and either commit more crimes or kill themselves. His accusation is that prisons operate as crime factories, training inmates to be violent, paranoid, unstable and incapable of living with the freedom to make choices for themselves. Therefore, when crime rates escalate, the government uses this as an excuse to militarize the police force and strip people of their civil liberties. It also creates a social climate outside prisons where people can never feel safe. Life in the straight world is just a softer version of penitentiary life. This again plays into the hands of the government who uses the rhetoric and practice of more law and order to strengthen oppressive authoritarian structures and limit citizens’ options for the pursuit of freedom. This may be a conspiracy theory, but at least it is one that prods you to think about the criminal justice system, its effect on the wider society, and why America has such high rates of crime and incarceration compared to other developed nations. We are obviously doing something wrong and, being Americans, we are too pigheaded to solve the problem. Nor can we even effectively address it.

Now for the bad news. Abbott considered himself a Marxist and a communist. That doesn’t necessarily mean that his ideas are illegitimate. Even if you don’t agree with those theoretical frameworks, that doesn’t mean that people who use them can’t have legitimate ideas about the nature of social structures. The problem is that Abbott’s understanding of Marxism and communism are so flawed that his philosophizing often degenerates into nonsense. You shouldn’t even bother trying to relate his ideas to communist or Marxist critiques.

At his best he tries to connect prison inmates with the proletariat and the prison guards with the bourgeoisie, but that is too much of a stretch to be plausible. All he really says is that prisoners need solidarity and guards are oppressors who will be overthrown in some future revolution. Without understanding his own framework, he simply uses it to justify a black and white, us vs. them mindset. It’s more about hating the authorities and fantasizing about a violent uprising rather than solving the world’s problems. It’s a juvenile’s daydream of vengeance mislabeled as political philosophy. And that’s when the writing is at its clearest.

Most of his thoughts on these matters are little more than babbling and should have been edited out. It comes across as even more psychopathic because never once in all these essays does he mention his own role in his situation. He never takes responsibility for his crimes, writes about himself as being a victim of social injustice, and blames everybody else for his life behind bars. There is an ounce of truth to this. As mentioned before, he was raised as a ward of the state and spent most of his life being socialized in institutions for warehousing criminals, but he never looks at prisons from any other point of view. A true Marxist critique would take into account why prisons exist in the first place and then deconstruct the institution from inside the framework of the institution. Abbott is more concerned with burning everything to the ground without a plan for what to do afterwards. It’s an immature approach to politics, an empty howl of rage.

Jack Henry Abbott is an American tragedy. It’s hard to say, or even believe, that he could have become a well-adjusted member of society. But with effective mentoring, he could have pursued a career as a writer, maybe even becoming a spokesman and advocate for prisoner’s rights and prison reform. His important insight is that prisons rob inmates of the possibility of reform before parole, turning them into dysfunctionalcrime-committing machines. This results in high rates of recidivism and destabilizes society overall. But Abbott didn’t live up to his potential as a human being and In the Belly Of the Beast doesn’t live up to its potential as a book. Still, it’s worth reading as a work of outsider literature.

If you want to pursue Jack Henry Abbott’s insight a little further, the Australian film Ghosts...Of the Civil Dead, co-written by Nick Cave, is based on In the Belly Of the Beast and brings some of Abbott’s best passages to cinematic life in a highly disturbing way. It’s offensive and violent, and it will give you nightmares, but it’s also unforgettable and worth hunting down if obscure hidden gem movies are your kind of thing.

 

Book Review & Analysis: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

A Brief History of Seven Killings

by Marlon James

      Reggae music exploded in popularity during the 1970s. At the forefront of this musical movement was Bob Marley. Not necessarily the best reggae musician but certainly a great one and the most famous, he was perfect as a leader when it came to bringing reggae to the world. A lot of his softer pop songs had commercial appeal without being shallow or fake like so much top 40 music of the era. But he also had an angry side that was steeped in politics and the mysticism of the Rastafarian religion that appealed to young people moving on from the hippy movement without abandoning their counter cultural stance. Rastafarians were proponents of marijuana smoking and had a distinctly cool image with their dreadlocks and colorful clothes. As Bob Marley’s fame grew internationally, so did interest in Jamaica as an emerging nation, a country with a vibrant music scene and a tourist oriented economy. Reggae also had a strong influence on the punk, ska, and new wave music scenes that began in the mid to late 70s. A lot of reggae lyrics called for peace and love along with laments about violence and political injustice. Probably most reggae listeners weren’t aware of the events and political climate of Jamaica in the 1970s that served as inspiration for those lyrics. Gangs tied to Jamaica’s two political parties were fighting in the streets and Kingston could possibly be thought of as having a low level civil war at the time. Marlon James portrays the violence between Kingston gangs and their relation to Bob Marley in his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings.

Bob Marley is at the center of this novel...kind of. Without being mentioned by name, he is referred to exclusively as The Singer from beginning to end. The novel’s plot lines all relate to an assassination attempt on his life to prevent a free concert, his attempt at ratifying a peace treaty between Jamaica’s gangs, and his death. The Singer’s life is more of a framework for the novel and functions more as the narrative device we call a McGuffin.

This book is all about characters and situations, of which there are many. It is not a plot driven novel. The large number of people introduced to the story shouldn’t bother you. Most of them play peripheral roles and only stay around for a short time after their introduction. But there is a moderate group of central characters that stay around for large parts of the story.

One of the central characters is Papa Lo, the don of the Copenhagen City gang. Copenhagen City is a neighborhood in Kingston with ties to the right wing Jamaican Labor Party or JLP headed by Edward Seaga. They are in constant war over territory with other gangs tied to the People’s Nationalist Party or PLP headed by the democratic socialist and prime minister Michael Manley. While these gangs are politically affiliated, the parties play only a minimal role in the story. Anyways, Papa Lo is reaching middle age and starting to be concerned about surviving. He notices that there are hardly any elderly Jamaicans and he is growing weary of the gang violence even though he tells other people he isn’t. He begins taking interest in the message of the Rastafarians and is in dialogue with The Singer who has hired him to manage security for an upcoming concert. The Singer is affiliated with the left wing PNP in opposition to the Copenhagen City gang, but his intention is to bring peace to the city.

Second in command of the Copenhagen City gang is Josey Wales, named after the outlaw from the Clint Eastwood western movie. Josey Wales recognizes that Papa Lo is aging out of his position. He starts plotting behind Papa Lo’s back to lead a gang of dugged up teenage assassins on a mission to assassinate The Singer. The origins and purpose of this plot are murky, but it is clear that Josey Wales has ties to the CIA who provide him with weapons, drugs, and guidance. Josey Wales’ liaison with the CIA is the freelance asset Doctor Love, a Miami Cuban exile and Bay of Pigs veteran. Doctor Love is an explosives expert who helped to blow up an airplane over Barbados in an anti-communist terrorist attack. Doctor Love also has ties to Colombian drug cartels who he later introduces to Josey Wales. This part of their relationship is of later importance in the chapters that come after The Singer’s death.

The two other characters that carry the most weight are Alex Pierce and Nina Burgess who subsequently changes her name twice before the book concludes. Alex is an American journalist for Rolling Stone magazine, sent to Jamaica to cover The Singer. He is a rogue journalist though and breaks with Rolling Stone to pursue a more lurid story about CIA connections to gun running and gang activity in the Kingston ghettos. As he pursues his story, he ends up being one of only a handful of people who know that Josey Wales is the ringleader of the hit squad that attempts to assassinate The Singer. This has consequences for him later as Josey Wales sends hitmen out to kill anyone who has knowledge of the failed assassination attempt. The danger follows Alex to New York City where he continues working as a journalist covering the Jamaican gangs, called “posses”, that are responsible for the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s.

Nina Burgess is a young, middle class Jamaican woman who wants nothing less than a chance to emigrate to America. After being seduced by The Singer at a party, she deludes herself into thinking he loves her and hangs around outside his house, hoping she can convince him to get her a plane ticket and a visa out of Jamaica. She thinks her own country is too backwards and dangerous for her. Nina is all about class mobility.

We later find her working as a prostitute in Montego Bay under the name Kim Clarke where she hooks up with an American businessman named Charles who works for a bauxite mining company. She moves in with him. The two of them use each other. Charles uses Kim for sex and as an unpaid domestic servant. Kim doesn’t love him but pins all her hopes on his promises to marry her and take her to live in America. When the Jamaican government raises taxes on bauxite exports, the American company closes down its Jamaican operations, Charles leaves and doesn’t take Kim with him. Nina/Kim later shows up in New York under the assumed named of Dorcas Palmer.

Then there is Weeper, a character of lesser importance in the beginning, but one that becomes more significant in the later New York City chapters. Weeper is an educated man, an atheist and reader of Bertrand Russell, and he is also gay. He tries to follow the honest path of education upwards out of the Copenhagen City ghetto, but gets arrested and tortured in prison by the police. After getting out, he becomes Josey Wales’ closest associate and later moves to New York to oversee the crack dealing operations there.

Otherwise there is a large cast of peripheral characters. Most of them are gangsters or gang affiliated. Despite the large numbers, there isn’t a wide range of characters though. One of them is, however, the duppy, or ghost in Jamaican English, of a man who died in the West Kingston Wars of the 1960s. Unseen by the other characters, he gives surreal narratives of murder scenes, telling us what happens before the killing and what happens to souls on the other side.

The plot, as explained above, is simple. The subplots are a bit more complex, but not by much. The complexity is in how interwoven they all are. But this novel is less about plot and more about character. More specifically, it is about Jamaica as seen through different subjective points of view. And the subtext of the novel is about thwarted ambitions for class mobility. The Singer, for instance, seemingly at the top of Jamaica as a type of prophet or king, is thwarted in his ambition to bring peace to Jamaica. First assassins try to rub him out and then gangsters use violence to make his peace treaty fall apart. After that he dies and the text carries a heavy suggestion that the CIA had a hand in his demise.

Papa Lo’s desire to retire and live to old age in peace is thwarted when he gets killed in a police ambush, probably orchestrated by Josey Wales who takes over as don in the Copenhagen City gang. Both Josey Wales and Weeper initially tried to move up in life through channels of vocational work training and education, but were beaten down by the police and found no other outlet for their desire to grow other than in criminal gangs. Josey Wales does succeed in expanding his operations by working with Colombian drug cartels to traffic cocaine to America, but meets his match when he crosses a competitor in New York. Weeper also gets killed. In New York, he finds liberation because he is able to live with minimum hassle as a gay man, unlike in the oppressively homophobic society of Jamaica. But he dies in a gang hit there too.

The desire for class mobility is further emphasized in Josey Wales when examining his motivations. As mentioned before, he tries to advance himself by learning a skilled trade, but then gets shot five times during the wars of the 1960s. As he rises to the position of don, we learn small details like how he wants a flush toilet in his house, something given to him as a payoff from the JLP, and how he refuses to talk about the business of killing and drug trafficking before finishing his morning tea. At the end of his life, his son attends a prestigious private school. His aspiration is for a middle class existence like the family that Nina/Kim comes from. And she wants to escape her middle class life by fleeing to America to escape from the crime that plagues Jamaica, making it unsafe for middle class people.

After The Singer dies, the last two sections of the novel mostly take place in America, sometimes in Miami but mostly in New York. Jamaican posses that deal crack are the central part of these back end sections.

Nina/Kim, however, does achieve her dream when she takes on another fake name, this time Dorcas, and emigrates to New York. She finds herself, in a way, by working as a caretaker for a man with amnesia. The significance is that every day, he forgets who she is and she wants nothing more than to forget her past and become someone else. This becomes another thwarted ambition since people recognize her Jamaican accent no matter how hard she tries to lose it. She later becomes an emergency room nurse and realizes something big is happening because Jamaican posse members keep showing up with bullet wounds. In the end this shows how her Jamaican-ness is a permanent part of her no matter how hard she tries to hide or eliminate it.

It is in New York City that the white journalist Alex Pierce shows up again too. While continuing to work as a journalist and author of a biography about The Singer, he meets with an inmate of Rikers Island prison. Tristan Phillips is a member of the Ranking Dons, the coke dealing posse that rivals the Storm Posse which is the American arm of the Copenhagen City gang led by Josey Wales. Tristan is a fallen Rastafarian who is a signatory to the peace treaty The Singer tries to uphold back in Kingston. Alex uses his journalist credentials to get in touch with Tristan, but he has a hidden motive. Alex fears for his life because he is one of only a couple people who knows that Josey Wales is the man who orchestrated the assassination attempt on The Singer. He also lives in fear because he killed the man who they sent to murder him in a bid to eliminate everyone who knows Josey Wales’ secret. Alex looks to Tristan for inside advice on his safety. It is through Tristan that the novel takes on a meta-narrative quality since he insists on Alex writing a book about the Kingston gangs and how they tried to assassinate The Singer. Alex, the white journalist, thereby becomes a literary persona representing Marlon James, the Jamaican author of this novel. The novel’s title is also a reference to an article written by Alex Pierce.

After Tristan assures him he is safe, Alex returns home to find a gang of Jamaican thugs waiting for him. Alex has been writing a serialized work of investigative journalism about a massacre in a Brooklyn crack house. The articles are revealing too much about the posses in involved. After a brutally violent confrontation, Alex learns that he will be allowed to live only if he continues writing articles that are approved of by the Storm Posse. This may be good news, but his wings are clipped so that his ambition to be a truth-telling journalist is thwarted. To a certain extent, all the major characters in this book get only a fraction of what they want. That fraction doesn’t go far for any of them. The theme of thwarted ambitions reminds me a bit of the poem “Dream Deferred” by the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.

The most amazing part of this novel is how it is written. Every chapter is told in the first person by a different narrator. That way we get a subjective, kaleidoscopic view of everything that is happening. The story lines and subplots are interwoven into a web of multi-dimensional perspectives so that we see each character from both their own subjective point of view and the subjective point of view of others. It’s an amazing accomplishment that this writing, in all its subtlety, is so easy to follow.

It’s also amazing how effectively this works in character building. Each of the main characters are so distinctly written that it is easy to tell them apart. They really come to life as individuals through their narratives. You might notice in the beginning that each chapter heading is the name of the character speaking. By the end of the book, these chapter headings are absent and yet it is still obvious which character is speaking. This is even more interesting in how Nina/Kim/Dorcas takes on three different names in three different locations, yet it is clear that she is all three people without the author ever explaining this. He never explicitly says, “and then Nina changed her name to Kim.” He just shows us how she is as she is and allows for us to make the connection of our own.

And the stand out narrative for me is when Tristan is talking to Alex in prison. The only speech in these passages is that of Tristan; the speech of Alex isn’t written into the text. It is like sitting next to Tristan in a prison visitor’s booth where he is separated from Alex by a plexiglass window as they communicate over a telephone. These passages are especially good because of the change Tristan goes through during the conversation. At first he is hostile towards Alex, but after learning about Alex’s secrets, Tristan becomes relaxed, interested, and friendly. This is done by showing us only Tristan’s side of the conversation and his change in mood is delieverd so effectively because of the actual language used. Again the author shows us this change without explaining it.

One other great thing about this novel is the crafting of the language. It is mostly written using Jamaican English or Patwa as it is sometimes called. Marlon James, being a Jamaican author, has a natural understanding of the language and he writes it so well that he captures its rhythms and nuances in pronunciation and vocabulary. In fact, the shifting narratives give it the feel of reggae music. When listening to reggae you will notice the instruments don’t all play at once. Pauses and empty spaces in the rhythms create a depth that can’t be achieved in other ways. You might notice the call and response patterns in reggae rhtyhms too; the horns play a line of notes then stop to allow the bass and keyboards to run for a measure then stop to allow the horns space to play again, so on and so forth. The structure of shifting and alternating first person narratives operates with a similar logic. You will also learn some new vocabulary too if you read this. Words like “raascloth”, “battyboy”, “pussyhole”, and “fuckery” are repeatedly used throught the text. If you finish this and “fuckery” hasn’t been permanently etched into your brain, you probably weren’t paying much attention to what you were reading.

Finally, this book is not about the CIA’s involvement in Jamaica, but that element is a root cause of the problems being portrayed in the story. The novel starts fourteen years after Jamaica gained post-colonial independence from Great Britain. Within less than a decade, the CIA began a destabilization program in this small West Indian nation that was struggling to get on its feet and stay there. When the democratic socialist PNP party came to power in a landslide election, the CIA armed JLP affiliated gangs with heavy ammunition and the result was disastrous in two ways: the brutal violence of a rapidly escalating crime rate and a growing narcotics trade. Both of these problems spilled over into America and may have permanently damaged Jamaica as a nation. To paraphrase Josey Wales, America creates monsters and then acts surprised when they act monstrous. All this is in the name of fighting communism although I’m convinced the American government doesn’t actually care about fighting communism. They scapegoat communism for the purpose of imperialism and hegemony. If this is the case, maybe we deserve some of the crime that drug cartels have brought to our shores. Our meddling in other countries’ affairs is only perpetuating the problems we claim to be fighting against.

A Brief History of Seven Killings fills a gap in people’s knowledge of Jamaican history and culture. If you search around for books covering this subject in the decades of the 1970s to the 1990s, almost nothing can be found. Yet people worldwide are familiar with Jamaica through its music, most especially the monumental work of Bob Marley. Although this novel is fiction, most, if not all, the events in it really happened. This can be corroborated by checking a wide variety of legitimate academic sources. Marlon James crafts all that information into a novel and makes it accessible to the general reader. The Jamaican Patwa and the descriptions of extremely brutal violence might make it difficult for some people to read, but it is possibly the most important book about Jamaica that has been written so far.

 

Book Review: Miami by Joan Didion

Miami

by Joan Didion

      The United States of America attracts a lot of different kinds of immigrants for a lot of different reasons. One community of immigrants that remains a mystery to many Americans is the Cuban exile community in Miami. Joan Didion, in the 1980s, wrote Miami, a work of investigative journalism, to find out who exacty these Miami Cubans are and why they are so cut off from the rest of America.

It’s impossible to discuss the Cuban-Americans post-1950s without discussion Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution. Democracy didn’t work so well in Cuba after they gained independence from Spain at the end of the 19^th century. Politics and the economy were dominated by corruption, nepotism, gangsterism, and the influence of the American Mafia and government. Democracy eventually gave way and life under the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista continued to get worse. Then Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista regime and established a communist dictatorship that still exists in 2026. For the impoverished masses of this Caribbean island, the Revolution was a blessing. For the upper and middle classes that supported Batista, it was a disaster. A large chunk of the Cuban population took the daily hour long flights to Miami and settled in the USA. But they didn’t take to America so easily. Many of them settled in Miami and said, “To hell with the rest of America,” while establishing their own Cuban outpost in a city that was otherwise full of Jewish retirees and white ancestors of the Confederacy.

Didion identifies three main groups in the first wave of Cuban refugees. One is the far-right wing supporters of the Batista dictatorship. Second is the business and ownership class whose property was seized during the Revolution. You can certainly see their point. If the government took my property, I’d be pissed off too, not that I have any property worth seizing, but that’s a different problem. The third is supporters of the Revolution who were disappointed with its results. Understanding where these immigrants are coming from goes a long way in understanding the mindset and culture of Cuban Miami and their approach to life in America. Didion also mentions two groups in a second wave of Cuban migrants. One is orphaned Cuban children who were brought to America by Catholic charities. The other is the people of the Mariela Boatlift. The latter came over when Castro trolled America by emptying his prisons and asylums, putting the inmates on boats, and sailing them off to Florida where they were granted immediate citizenship under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966. You have to give Fidel some credit for having such a wicked sense of humor.

Didion doesn’t revisit the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, probably because it has been written about so extensively in other places. She does, rather, bring up the sense of betrayal the Miami Cubans felt when John F. Kennedy snubbed them in the wake of the failed invasion. He never followed through on his promises to remove Castro from power. This anticipates what comes later in this study when Ronald Reagan wins the American presidency.

White Americans in Miami could never make sense of the Cuban exiles who don’t follow the typical immigrant path by learning English and becoming a part of America. The Miami Cubans refuse to learn English and, although they establish themselves in high ranking political and business positions, they go through extreme lengths to keep separate from the citizens of their new country. In fact, some of them use their high rank to ensure that other Americans stay away.

By interviewing some Miami Cubans, Didion finds that there are cultural differences that traveled to America as baggage with the refugees. One source of cultural conflict is the approach to politics. While American politics have become more tribal in recent times, it is still fair to say that our political tribes are rooted ideologically in values, beliefs, and morals. Cuban exiles don’t work that way. While they are politically tribal, their politics are more about group loyalty than values or ideology. Winning means everything and if hate and violence are necessary to win, then so be it. Miami’s right-wing Cubans are not concerned with things like human rights or Constitutional law; they are only concerned with defeating their enemies by any means necessary. There is something infantile in Didion’s portrayal of Cuban exiles. They hate Castro and they hate anybody who isn’t just as hateful to him as they are. They react with confusion and disdain when other people don’t get as worked up as they are about the Cuban Revolution. It’s as if they can’t comprehend that other people could have interests in things that aren’t directly related to overthrowing Castro. This insulates them from the rest of America, as well as the rest of humanity, and they really don’t even care if that’s true.

Didion is amused at how Miami Cubans say they hate Tod Koppel because he doesn’t shout over guests with opposing opinions or resort to ad hominem attacks or name calling. They think he is weak. They were probably happy when Fox News came on the air and ushered in the professional wrestling style of toxic politics that are embodied in assholes like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. This quasi-fascistic, anti-intellectual attitude has led to friction with other Americans. For example, Cubans mobs have violently attacked anti-war demonstrators and right wing Cuban exile terrorists have blown up airplanes a number of times. At one point in the 1970s two Cuban-Americans tried to lob a bomb at the United Nations.

Didion does take a nuanced look at these people. While the majority of Miami Cubans are loyal to the Republican party, roughly 35 percent of them are Liberals registered as Democrats. They are a bit more intellectual and open to talking to white people. Didion spends a great deal of time listening to their side of the story as well. The way the Liberal Cubans put it is that most of Miami’s right-wing Cubans would act a bit more sane if the CIA weren’t actively whipping them into a frenzy over anti-communist politics. Some examples of this are given including the use of propaganda in Spanish language news media and clandestine military training camps in southern Florida. Some Cubans have easy access to stocks of guns and explosives being cached by the American intelligence and military agencies. Cuban exiles are learning how to make bombs and the government in Havana isn’t behind it.

This leads to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. As a journalist, Didion was privy to a number of Republican sponsored conferences. These meetings discussed plans to eliminate communism at any cost and the uptick in these conferences came at the same time the media started reporting on an emergency situation involving a communist uprising in Nicaragua. At the same time Reagan was actively courting support from the Miami Cuban community in a renwed fight against communism with the implication that there was an imminent plan to invade Cuba once again. Didion isn’t direct in what she says, but she implies that Reagan is planning on building up Cuban exile troops to use as proxy American fighters in a war in Central America rather than the Caribbean. By pairing Reagan’s rhetoric with commentary on Kennedy’s betrayal of the Cuban freedom fighters, it appears that Didion is issuing a warning to Miami Cubans. The warning is that America is manipulating their passions and using them to do their dirty work while the government keeps their hands clean. Reading between the lines, she is telling them not to be suckers again. If so, this is a bold statement coming from Joan Didion who was a lifelong Republican.

This is probably Joan Didion’s best work of journalism. Her other, more popular books like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album are superficial, trivial, and underwhelming. Aside from her novels, which tend to be brilliant, Miami is the one that goes deep and wide into her subject matter, capturing nuances that her other works of journalism don’t. Despite the harsh evaluation of Miami Cubans that can be immediately extracted, she writes with a tone of neutral detachment. While she clearly doesn’t agree with some of the things the extremist Cubans are up to, she doesn’t approach them with derision. She investigates, drawing on multiple sources, and reports to us what she finds. Her conclusions are understated, but her sense of neutral curiosity when entering an alien territory is sound and fair. She has found some alarming things in the Cuban exile community of the 1980s, but she makes an honest attempt at understanding where these people are coming from without being overly judgmental. That is the strong point of this study.

The weaker point is that her writing tends to be loopy. The non-linear narrative that skips and jumps all over the place isn’t so hard to follow, but some of her run-on sentences are. There are times hen the thematic thread becomes obscured and arcane as some sentences drift on for whole pages without punctuation. Sometimes it’s like listening to a drunk in a bar mumbling to herself, weaving in and out of coherence. Not all of the book is like that, but when it happens it’s annoying. I read that Joan Didion studied Ernest Hemingway obsessively when she was young because his writing taught her how sentences work. I find that odd because Hemingway wrote terse, concise sentences that were direct in their meaning. Didion does the exact opposite. Her sentence constructions lean more in the direction of Faulkner or Joyce. Maybe at her best she is more like Norman Mailer who constructed long, complex sentences that usually made a lot of sense if you don’t have a short attention span, especially when combined with other sentences to form highly organized paragraphs.

If you’re interested in the subject matter, Miami is a good book. It would be interesting to hear what Cuban exiles think of her portrayal of them. I’m sure some of them wouldn’t like what she had to say. But I can’t find any reactions to her book online coming from their point of view, so who knows? Miami came out about thirty years ago so an updated study of Miami Cubans would be interesting too. Since then we’ve had another wave of Cuban refugees in the 1990s, an upsurge of interest in salsa and cigars in that same decade, the Elian Gonzalez controversy, an influx of sleazy Cuban politicians, like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, into our government, and death came to Fidel Castro although his communist government still holds power. Cuban-Americans rallied behind Donald Trump although for some reason they couldn’t see that he has much more in common with Castro than any Democrat ever has. Trump has been deporting Cuban refugees too so I wonder what they think of that. Cuban immigrants have spread to all corners, both urban and rural, of the United States. Most of them now have roots here and will never return to Cuba to live permanently. As for the extremist politics, all I can say is that of all the Cubans-Americans I have encountered, most of them have been good, intelligent, hard working people who are more passionate about dancing than anything else. And that’s what’s most important.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Harder They Come by Nichael Thelwell

The Harder They Come

by Michael Thelwell

      In 1972, the Jamaican produced film The Harder They Come was released in American theaters. Starring reggae singer Jimmy Cliff, it told the story of a country boy who moves to Kingston and makes a hit record. But the grim circumstances of life in Kingston’s Trench Town ghetto hold him back, so he turns to the life of an outlaw in search of freedom. The movie was a hit, drawing attention to the island nation of Jamaica, becoming a popular staple of the midnight movies, and growing to the status of a cult classic as well as a classic of Third World cinema. It also inspired a lesser-known novel of the same name, written by the Jamaican-American author Michael Thelwell. While it’s unusual for a movie to be the basis for a serious work of literature, the novelized version of The Harder They Come proves it can be successfully done.

The protagonist of the story is Ivanhoe Martin, usually called Ivan but also referrred to by his nickname Rygin. If my understanding is correct, “rygin” is the Jamaican pronunciation of “raging” and has a sexual connotation. As a boy, Ivan is given the nickname Rygin by the other kids in his village because he is a bit more reckless than the others. Ivan lives in a hillside shack near the seashore. He lives with his grandmother and helps her run the family farm. They are poor, but live a satisfying life. With just enough food to eat, Ivan spends his youth doing the kinds of things you would expect a kid to do in the jungle and on the beach. It’s a life of playful adventure and discovery, the kind of life you could look back on as an adult with fond memories. That has implications for a passage that comes later in the story.

The other villagers provide a strong sense of community. Both agricultural folk customs and church are a part of this, although the church community does not play a prominent role in the story. Another important part of the community is the village elder, an old man named Nattie who takes a liking to Ivan. Nattie is a proud man who was a member of Marcus Garvey’s UNIA when it existed. While being educated and worldly, he also acts as a link connecting the village to Jamaica’s past.

When Ivan’s grandmother dies, the boy, now a restless teenager, sets off for Kingston where all the action is. Nattie gives Ivan some advice about how to find meaning in life, but the transition is overshadowed by the Pocomania spirit possession ceremony at his grandmother’s funeral. The spirit that possesses its host foreshadows the events of Ivan’s life at the end of the novel.

This opening chapter is fascinating. It paints a vivid picture of life in the Jamaican countryside which the author romanticizes without over-emphasis. The village isn’t portrayed as utopian, but it is celebrated for its unique and satisfying qualities. It also gives the reader a chance to understand who Ivan is and where he is coming from. As his age progresses throughout the novel, his character is built layer by layer and a lot of those layers are rooted in his experiences during childhood. As a literary character, Ivan goes through changes while remaining the same person in his core. Given how his story ends, it is imperative that the reader feels sympathy for him from the start. Both the world-building and character building in this novel are top notch.

The next section finds Ivan riding a bus from his village to Kingston. This seems like a long and unnecessary diversion at first, but looking back, It functions effectively as part of the narrative and Thelwell’s portrayal of Jamaica. What this chapter does is draw attention to the relations between the people in the countryside and the capital city of Kingston. It shows how the bus passengers exist between two worlds, the two different sides of Jamaica, and how intertwined those two worlds actually are. It also builds up to the problems the naive country boy Ivan has when he arrives in Kingston.

Ivan has a rough time. After having his baggage stolen, he arrives at his mother’s single room apartment, finding her too poor to take him in. He fails to find work and ends up homeless and hungry before a church minister allows him to stay providing he work in the church’s repair shop. The shop is run by an ex-criminal named Longah who has only changed superficially since Preacha rescued him from the streets. Also staying in Preacha’s care is Elsa, a young oprhaned girl on the brink pf coming of age who Ivan falls in love with. This is where the novel really starts to take off.

The further course of Ivan’s life turns on two narrative hinges. One is his relationship with Elsa. The other is a bicycle. While working in the shop, Ivan fixes up and old bicycle frame. After being repaired, polished, and rebuilt, he takes Elsa out for a day of riding around Kingston and visiting the beach. The bicycle acts symbolically as a means of liberation. At least temporarily, Ivan is able to find happiness and relief from his poverty and disappointment. Of as much importance is the sense of achievement he gets from fixing up the bike and befriending Elsa.

But the liberation he finds through the bike is short lived. Preacha doesn’t approve of Ivan and Elsa’s friendship so he spends a whole night verbally abusing her and later kicks Ivan out of his premises. Longah later tells Ivan that Preacha intends to marry her when she gets old enough. But Longah also confesses that he plans to rape her. Later when Ivan returns to retrieve his bicycle, the only thing he has left, Longah refuses to let him take it. The two of them have a fight and Ivan stabs Longah which gets him into trouble with the law. His career as an outlaw has begun.

The narrative is layered so that all these events overlap. All the while, Ivan has been teaching himself to sing. When he gets an opportunity to record a single, he gets ripped off by Hilton, the bigshot businessman who controls the Jamaican music industry. Hilton prevents the record from being distributed to Kingston’s record stores, and forbids radio stations and dance club DJ’s to play the song. All this is simply because Hilton doesn’t like Ivan for being assertive. Hilton, the police, and Preacha are Baylon, the downpressers, as they would say in Jamaican English, the establishment that keeps people from moving up in society. Ivan is being pushed by these downpressers into a confrontation with Babylon.

When Ivan first arrives in Kingston and shacks up with Preacha, he becomes fascinated with the nearby movie theater. He spends his evenings watching American made Westerns, demonstrating how these films influence future generations of Jamaican gangsters. At the movies he makes friends with a gang in Trench Town. The kids in the gang aren’t so bad. Sometimes they get involved in petty crime or occasional street fights, but mostly they just hang out and smoke ganja.

Later, after Ivan gets arrested and sent away from Preacha’s shop, he turns to more serious gangsterism, getting involved in the ganja trade. He meets up with his mentor Jose who puts him to work. What we learn through Jose is that the Trench Town ganja dealers get protection from the police who not only benefit from payoffs of protection money, but also by keeping the illegal drug trade under control. There is a chain of command with the police at the top, Jose and other wholesale dealers in the middle, and street level pushers like Ivan at the bottom. As long as the chain of command is kept intact, nobody has any problems. Ivan, who is tired of being poor and unimportant, is concerned with finding freedom so you can see where this is leading.

Jose connects Ivan to Ras Pedro, sometimes alternatively called Peter, a Rastafarian ganja seller who has a sickly son with a medical condition named Man-I. The illness is treatable, but Ras Pedro often doesn’t make enough money for the food or medicine needed to keep his son healthy. Elsa leaves Preacha’s house and follows Ivan to Trench Town and moves in with Ras Pedro and Ivan. She becomes a mother to the boy and the four of them live communally like a family, surviving on the wages of ganja profits. Ras Pedro also acts as a conscience for Ivan, counseling him to avoid violence and stay out of trouble. When Ivan wants to buy guns, Ras Pedro tries to talk him out of it but leaves the decision to him.

Another big turning point comes when Ivan has become a successful ganja merchant, buys some flashy clothes and motorcycle, and drives back to the village where he grew up. Eager to show off how he has made it in the big city, he is disappointed to find out that almost everyone he knew is gone or dead. Even worse, the village has been turned into a resort town overrun with rich white people who have no interest in the real Jamaica. Therefore, Ivan has lost his roots and the anchor in tradition that has kept him stable through all the difficult times. Sullen, angry, and disappointed, he returns to Kingston ready to explode.

Wishing to rise in the ranks of the drug dealing underworld, Ivan proposes to Ras Pedro that they farm their own ganja crops and expand their trafficking business to America. But the downpresser police and military crush the plans. Everywhere Ivan goes, there are obstacles to his social mobility. He gets into a gunfight resulting in the death of a policeman and then he goes on a rampage. After another shootout, Ivan becomes a local folk hero and Hilton capitalizes on this by releasing his record which is soon heard everywhere. As Ivan becomes more desperate and violent, he becomes more famous.

The police are not happy about Ivan. Not only are they humiliated by his crime spree and escape, but they also fear that he will inspire others to resist the domination of Babylon. Kingston ghettos are a powder kegs of young people who are bored, frustrated, and angry, feeling as if they have no future. The Jamaican police don’t want an uprising or a crime explosion. Ironically that is exactly what happened to Jamaica in the 1970s even though those events are outside the scope of this novel. What the police do is cut off the ganja supply at the wholesale level and redirect it to America. The message gets out that there will be no more ganja in Jamaica until Ivan is brought in dead or alive. This wrecks the microeconomy of Trench Town. The ganja trade is so pivotal in the cash flow of the ghetto that people begin starving. Man-I is in need of medical attention and keeps getting sicker. Elsa and Ras Pedro know that Ivan has a bounty on his head so they do what they have to do with regret. In a way, the killing of Ivan is heroic. He has to die so that Man-I can live. The sun has to set so that it can rise again later.

Thelwell’s novel works so well because of its complexity. Ivan is written so well that we can see how the different layers of his persona interact with the different layers of Jamaican society and his situation. The same can be said for other characters in the story. He isn’t a bad person. He may be reckless and mischievous as a boy, but he has a sense of pride and justice. He also has ambition and the curiosity necessary for exploring the world. He doesn’t want to live a dull life like so many millions of other average people. Later in Kingston, he tries to make it as an honest man as can be seen in the story of the bicycle and his attempt at a career as a reggae singer. But everything he works for gets taken away for no good reason. Out of frustration, Ivan turns to crime as a means of liberation when he sees no other paths forward, You don’t have to be Jamaican or a gangster to relate to his feelings of frustration, disappointment, and containment. Through Ivan, Thelwell channels a universal theme of thwarted desires. Finally Ivan becomes a hero because he has the guts to do what others are afraid of. All this results from the society he lives in which is marked by complex layers of corruption and injustice. Those layers affecting him are tied to forces of the disfunctional establishment, international economics, and even colonial history itself.

The language used is also of interest. Thelwell uses Jamaican Patwa liberally throughout the text. This might slow some readers down at first and it is worth looking up some basic information about Jamaican English. It actually isn’t hard to understand once you get a handle on it. The language, in both its third person omniscient narrative and the first person dialogues, weaves in and out of Standard English and Patwa. This makes the reading challenging but not impossible. It does place a lot of demand on the reader to reorient how they apprehend and interpret English. It does affect the cadence and prosody of the language at both a micro and macro level. The descriptive prose is vivid and detailed too. It almost feels Victorian in its attention to detail and setting. The prose does move along at a slow pace, but it is a leisurely and steady pace. It is a lot like being in Jamaica where being in a hurry will get you nothing but stress and you have to adapt to the breezy way of life which is nothing like being in a big American city.

Finally something should be said about Thelwell’s portrayal of religion. The first contact between Ivan, outside the folk practices of Pocomania in the village, is with Preacha’s Pentecostal church. On the surface, Preacha appears to be doing some good by taking in homeless teenagers and rehabilitating Longah. But as we find out, the change in Longah is only superficial. Preacha is a problematic man too. His severe religious discipline doesn’t change Elsa or Ivan on a deep level either. Preacha isn’t necessarily a malevolent man, but his devotion to God and his sexual repression blind him to what is going on in front of his face. His intention of marrying the much younger Elsa when she gets old enough also indicates he is sexually and emotionally immature. This is not a favorable portrayal of the Christian church in Jamaica.

Also of interest is the presence of the Rastafarian counter culture religion that weaves in and out of the story. Ras Pedro is portrayed as a good-hearted man who wants peace and justice, all the while acting as a counselor of wisdom to Ivan in his rowdier days. And then there is the Rastafarian rally that Ivan attends one night on the outskirts of Trench Town. The Rastafarians march on downtown Kingston, using mystical ceremonial chants and prayers to exercise the evil out of Babylon. But instead the police come and beat them up. Thelwell apears to be saying that the Rastafarians are good people and possibly a force for positive change at the cultural level, but their practices are ineffective politically. With both the Rastafarians and the Pentecostals, Thelwell is saying that religion is not a solution to Jamaica’s problems. The sense of hopelessness with the two religious organizations increases the atmosphere of frustrated ambitions that permeate the Kingston ghettos and feed into Ivan’s desire for freedom through violence.

In a way it isn’t fair to compare the movie and book versions of The Harder They Come. The movie uses cinematic language to convey ideas in ways that the written word cannot. The novel also conveys ideas using the written word in ways that a film cannot. Michael Thelwell uses the film as an outline for the novel while filling in the backstories of its characters and presenting a broader view of Jamaican society. Both the film and the book are equally successful in different ways. The best thing to do is to indulge in both and see how they enhance one another. This is one film and book combination that can stay with you long after you finish them.

 

Book Review: Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

by Joan Didion

      In the early 20^th century, the Irish modernist poet W.B. Yeats believed the end of the world had arrived. So he wrote his most famous poem called “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”. In it he described the coming of the Antichrist, a repulsive monster that would unleash chaos and mass confusion as society collapsed, leaving everything in ruins. You don’t have to be a mystical Christian like Yeats to feel the abject terror in the poem. You wouldn’t want to be anyways since Yeats’ answer to what he saw as a collapse of civilization was to support fascism. Yeats’s point of view isn’t a whole lot different from what we see in 21^st century America. If Yeats were here today he would be a white Christian nationalist and most likely a MAGA supporter. But that’s not the point here. What is important is that Joan Didion opens her essay collection, called Slouching Towards Bethlehem, with the W.B. Yeats poem. Like the Irish poet, she believed the chaos and confusion of her time would unleash a tidal wave of insanity into the world.

The essays in this book were originally written as magazine articles. Joan Didion in the 1960s was part of the New Journalism movement that included such now-famous upstarts as Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson on the liberal left and Tom Wolfe and Didion on the conservative right. Before the 1960s, journalism was always presented as being objective without any trace of the writer’s attitude in the writing. This, of course, was a lie and an illusion as journalism had typically been written as propaganda. The New Journalists were more honest. They didn’t pretend to be objective. They made their own opinions and perceptions part of the writing and they didn’t hesitate to make that clear. The New Journalists were part of the story and they weren’t shy about saying so. Now in the 21^st century, journalism is almost nothing but opinion, but both mainstream media and podcasters on the left and right are now presenting opinion and ideology as fact and absolute truth. Fact-based journalism has receded into the distant past. But that’s another matter altogether. The matter here is that Didion’s first collection of magazine articles is a relic from the moment when New Journalism was a fresh and pioneering new style of media communication.

Yes, it’s a relic or an artifact, if you will. The collection opens with some underwhelming essays. The first is about murder and adultery in a quiet California suburb. This is followed by a time Didion hung out with John Wayne on a movie set in Mexico. She waxes poetic about how great he is while he babbles about nothing important or interesting. Then there is a piece about a conservative think tank that doesn’t do much thinking. These are all trivial works of journalism and I couldn’t care less about any of them.

It picks up a bit in an article about Carmel, California where the folk singer Joan Baez has opened a meditation center for hippies. The conservatives in the town want to kick them out but can’t scheme up a good enough reason to do it legally. There certainly can’t be any noise complaints since the hippies spend most of their time there meditating silently and peacefully. Their big crime is being different. Didion obviously isn’t one of the hippies, but she definitely takes their side when the cranky conservatives hold town meeting about the problem that really isn’t a problem. It’s a more exciting essay, but nothing so great.

This brings us to the titular essay. “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is all about the counter culture of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene around the time of the Summer of Love. In her characteristic style, Didion writes about what the people do without so much concern for why they do it. Most of this involves her hanging out with young hippies while they do drugs and listen to music. The hippies inhabit communal living spaces in houses and a warehouse. If you’ve spent any time in the drug scene, you’ll know the kind of places she writes about. She is friendly with them, even non-judgmental and without an air of condescension. But some hippies around the Haight-Ashbury scene are suspicious of her and refuse to talk.

While all of this mostly looks harmless enough, the essay does show a growing awareness of darker elements creeping in. Hard drugs show up more and more often. Sleazy people are coming in and preying on runaway teenagers. The essay ends with performance artists walking around in blackface and drugs being given to little kids. Without directly referencing the Yeats poem, it is easy to see what Didion is implying about the future of America.

This is actually a very superficial portrayal of the hippy counter culture. It was a complex and multi-layered social movement that resulted from a wide range of issues and attracted people from a multitude of backgrounds. There was far more to it than a bunch of lazy kids who dropped out and sat around doing drugs because they couldn’t handle the responsibilities of life. Certainly some of them made bad decisions, but not all of them permanently ruined their lives. Most of them weren’t the types of people who would give LSD to a four year old child. The hippies didn’t usher in Armageddon. Instead they brought some much needed social and cultural changes to the American landscape and beyond, some of which are changes that the conservatives of today are directly benefiting from. The media would have you think that the Manson murders and the Altamont concert proved the hippy dream had failed. It’s more accurate to say that the vast majority of hippies simply grew older and moved on to other things, taking some of the new values along with them. That isn’t giving up or selling out. It’s maturing. It’s a process that is as much biological as it is cultural. But you can’t deduce any of this from Joan Didion’s writing because she takes a black box approach to journalism. Her concern is with what people do, not why they do it. That surface level approach leaves most of the story out.

The remaining two sections have personal statements about Joan Didion herself. One of the more memorable ones, “On Morality”, relates back to “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” without mentioning it. She addresses the issue of morality being a practice of community values, a kind of roadmap for conduct within that society. But then what happens when individuals are outside the boundaries of that society? They have to adapt and possibly reinvent rules or morality in order to survive. Didion brings the Donner Party into the discussion. Those were the 19^th century pioneers who got trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains during a snowstorm and resorted to cannibalism for survival. The point of this is that their ordinary moral codes had to be suspended when they were forced into a situation outside the boundaries of ordinary living. Survival would have been impossible if the Donner Party had strictly adhered to a moral doctrine that didn’t apply in their unusual situation. This brief essay, which I think is the best one in this anthology, can retroactively be applied to her essay about the hippy counter culture. Like it or not, young people embrace new ideas and those who are too inflexible to adapt to an ever changing world are the ones who suffer for it the most. Joan Didion is explaining moral relativity and how it functions. This is quite interesting considering her conservative political views. I tend to think of her as a moderate Republican, if not an actual Democrat, who supported a party that didn’t align with her values.

The Donner Party comes up in other essays. Didion identifies with them because she descends from an ancestral line of pioneers who settled in the Sacramento Valley of California. Those settlers, once they stopped on the West Coast, were faced with a new situation requiring a new set of standards and lifestyle. While they didn’t have to resort to cannibalism like the Donner Party, they were faced with a similar void of morality making it necessary to adapt and build up society from scratch. Applying this principle to her other essays and novels, it can be deduced that California is still in a state of formation. This might account for the shallowness and lack of soul that characterize the Californians in her writing. Didion extends this idea in her essay about white Americans who settle in Hawaii, specifically mentioning the real families she portrays in her novel Democracy.

I have to admit, after finishing Slouching Towards Bethlehem I couldn’t remember most of what I had read. Joan Didion’s writing just didn’t stick in my mind. Possibly that’s because this is a collection of magazine articles. Magazines are full pf ephemera and tend to be little more than literary fluff. They are written for people riding the subway or waiting in a dentist’s office waiting room. New Journalism or not, these articles are surface level reportage, mostly of things that aren’t that interesting to begin with. Joan Didion never does a deep dive into anything here. I get a lot more out of her novels. This book is a museum piece. I think it has value as an artifact exemplifying the style known as New Journalism from the 1960s, but on its own it doesn’t carry much weight.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Jamaica White by Harold Underhill

Jamaica White

by Harold Underhill

      According to Jamaican folklore, the plantation mansion of Rose Hall in Montego Bay is haunted by the ghost of Annie Palmer, also known as the White Witch of Rose Hall. As the story goes, Annie Palmer murdered three of her husbands, practiced occult rituals in secret chambers under the mansion, and was finally executed during a slave rebellion in the 19^th century. Now her ghost, hungry for revenge, is said to wander around the plantation grounds.

Rose Hall, in more recent times, was bought by an American businessman who renovated the mansion and turned it into a museum. Night time tours, for those willing to fork over enough cash, are given. These excursion come complete with Scooby Doo style explorations of secret passageways splashed with blood, underground tunnels, and seances. These tours would not be complete without scary stories about Annie Palmer. So some people in the Jamaican tourist industry have a vested interest in keeping the legend of the White Witch of Rose Hall alive.

I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for gothic horror. I don’t literally believe in ghosts or haunted houses, but when gothic horror is at its best, such things function as metaphors anyhow. So when I found Harold Underhill’s historic novel Jamaica White, purported to be the story of Annie Palmer and her life at Rose Hall, I thought I was in for an interesting creepshow. This novel did turn out to be creepy, but not for the reasons I expected.

James Arthur is the novel’s protagonist. He arrives on the docks of Montego Bay after a voyage from Manchester, England where he grew up in poverty. In a desire for power, wealth, and a ticket out of the working class slums, Arthur takes on a job as a “buckra”, an overseer, on a Jamaican sugarcane plantation named Rose Hall.

Arthur meets up with Broderick at the wharf. Broderick was once an Irish murderer, living on death row in an English prison. The jailers struck a deal with him. If he agreed to work as a colonial plantation boss, they would spare his life on the condition that he never return to England. After arriving at Rose Hall, Broderick’s self-discipline, sadism, and sociopathy made him rise in the ranks to become the head buckra of Rose Hall.

Arthur is taken to his bungalow where he meets two other characters of lesser importance in the plot. One is Mary Lou, a slave woman who cooks, cleans, and does sexual favors for him. The other is Wilson, a rum-drinking alcoholic who used to be a school teacher. He got fired for protesting the use of corporal punishment in the classroom and so got sent to work in Jamaica to get rid of him. Wilson acts as a voice of conscience in the story. He doesn’t like slavery, but he depends on it for work. Convinced that it will eventually end, he holds educational classes for slaves who want to learn how to read.

So far so good. The characters are distinctly drawn and effectively introduced. The world building is of high quality with vivid descriptions of the plantation and surrounding jungle. The narration goes step by step to draw the reader into this world and the story with all the elements building on each other to create a fantastical literary space. Despite being a place of slavery, the plantation and its surroundings are described as enticing, sensual, and elysian. Underhill has a definite talent for using language to create mood, atmosphere, character development, and plot. But at a certain point in the novel, I begin to feel his talent is wasted.

When Broderick first shows Arthur around the plantation, the new buckra gets a first taste of what is to come. One of the slaves gets a severe whipping for stepping out of line. Arthur is initially shocked by this, but gets over it quickly. After dark, Broderick brings Arthur to a dungeon where the house servant named Venus is chained to the wall. Broderick gives Arthur a whip and commands him to flog her as part of the training. Arthur obeys and again feels disgusted before silencing his conscience and continues learning how to be cruel.

There are multiple scenes of tirture throughout the story. They are vivid in their detail and go on for longer than they need to in order to get the point across. Broderick is also sexually promiscuous with the slave women and even indulges in pedophilia. On one hand you can say that this descriptive writing needs to be so detailed to show how inhumane slavery truly is. It also serves the purpose of building Broderick’s character as a psychopathic sadist. One the other hand, the descriptions of torture are so indulgent that they read like passages from the Marquis de Sade. What I mean to say is that Underhill writes about slavery as though it is a fetish. He writes as though he takes delight in all the fine details of the torture. I’ll come back to this later.

All of this builds up to Arthur’s meeting with Annie Palmer, the owner of the Rose Hall sugarcane estate. Up until that point, Arthur only hears about her through other characters. Her reputation precedes her as stories circulate about her frequently having sex with Broderick and the strongest of the male slaves. It is also said that she murdered her husband to inherit control over the plantation. But before they meet, Broderick commands Arthur to kill a slave who tries to sabotage the machinery in the sugar mill. After the killing, Arthur goes through the same cycle of disgust and suppression of his conscience. Then he gets incapacitated by an illness.

Annie Palmer demands that he be brought up to her mansion so she can nurse him back to health. In the process of Arthur’s recovery, they get emotionally close and begin a sexual relationship. Arthur falls madly in love with her, but of course she is only playing with him. He is too naive to see that. After he becomes healthy again, Annie takes him to a waterfall in the jungle where they have sex. The eroticism in this novel is just as graphic and indulgent as the passages where slaves are tortured. At this point the writing becomes outright fantasy and it is easy to forget the story has anything to do with slavery. In fact it reads like a description of paradise. As the narrative goes on, it becomes more apparent that the practice of slavery is a deliberate part of that paradise.

At this point, I can reiterate that the writing in this novel is great. The sequential progression leading up to the meeting between James Arthur and Annie Palmer is effectively handled even if it isn’t entirely original. The description and character building are consistently strong. Annie Palmer is an especially well-drawn character combining elements of sensual beauty, intelligence, and social charm all wrapped up in a woman with a strong and commanding personality. If you ignore her darker side, her role as slave owner and her ability to be cruel without mercy, you could be forgiven for finding her attractive. In fact, if you like strong, commanding women it would be surprising if you didn’t.

In the course of Arthur getting to know Annie Palmer, he appears to be building up to a moral awakening. He feels disgusted by the violence used to control the slaves. He agrees with the alcoholic Wilson, the man who tries teaching the slaves to read, that slavery is morally wrong and must end sometime in the future. But as he continues working as buckra on the plantation, he gets closer to Annie as their sexual trysts become more common. Annie Palmer, as it turns out, thinks of herself as a visionary. She acknowledges that slavery is terrible, but she justifies the practice by saying that great empires can only be built through cruelty. Her long range dream is to turn Jamaica into another Roman Empire. This could well be a delusion of grandeur, but Arthur swallows it whole. This is the point where the novel loses my sympathy. Any moral awakening that Arthur may have been on the verge of having is crushed as he becomes more fanatical about his love for Annie Palmer.

As Arthur becomes increasingly more devoted and less concerned with the welfare of the slaves, she loses interest in him, begins to humiliate him, and eventually shuns him. Meanwhile, a slave rebellion is brewing up with Venus, the house servant, playing a major role in it. The entire plantation, including the mansion, is set on fire and all the white people are killed except for James Arthur who is saved by his sexual servant Mary Lou. The rebellion is arbitrary. It functions more as a means of climaxing a plot rather than delivering poetic justice. It is an explosion to distract the reader from the mundane plot in which the relationship between Arthur and Annie Palmer fizzles out. The key to understanding this is in the final passage when James Arthur is returning to England on a ship. As he lies face down on his bunk, he is crying because he lost Annie Palmer, the woman he was madly in love with and the one he pinned his fantasies of future wealth and power on. He has no gratitude, or even any thoughts for Mary Lou, the slave woman who saved his life. James Arthur’s story ends without any moral redemption.

That’s the whole problem with this novel: it just doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t make a statement. It doesn’t take any definite moral stance. The message is vague and weak. Sure there is something to the slave rebellion, but the slaves aren’t fully humanized in any way. They are mostly in the background or else used as objects for labor, torture, or sex. Venus does have her own monologue at the end, but it does little more than explain the plans for the rebellion. Her subjectivity is only suggested. Mary Lou is entirely objectified too. She appears to like Arthur but it’s never made clear why. And the only white people who have any pity for the slaves are pathetic losers who don’t have enough will to do anything aside from continuing to work as buckras, sustaining the practice they claim to hate.

It’s possible the author is attempting to examine the nature of power and domination in the character of Annie Palmer. If so, it’s not clear what he is trying to say. Her flippant attitude that slavery is a necessary evil when doing great things is sickening, but she isn’t written as a villain. In fact she’s written as desirable and seductive. In fact, she bears some resemblance to Wanda von Dunajew, the dominatrix in Sacher- Masoch’s Venus in Furs. And James Arthur isn’t far from Severin in the way he worships her. Actually Annie Palmer reminds me a bit of Elon Musk and his belief that empathy is a weakness that prevents great men from doing great things. Arthur is like the kind of shlubs that admire Musk for his ruthlessness and power even though Musk has made it clear that he despises the entire human race. That is an all inclusive hatred and the shlub fans are a portion of the humanity he despises. But if this is the point of the book, it is weakly stated and too vague to be of any value. In any case, if empathy is nothing more than an obstacle to great achievements, I’d say that great achievements are not important. I’d choose empathy over greatness any day.

Again, I will restate my opinion that this novel is excellently written on a technical level. But the content is such crap that the form gets overshadowed. The over-indulgence in sex and violence is a big part of that. It’s not that I’m, squeamish. I’ve read and sometimes enjoyed my share of transgressive writing. I’d even say there is a time and place for detailed descriptions of the cruelties of slavery. You could argue that such excessive description is necessary to show how cruel it actually is. When written into the proper context that is true. But there is a problem of proportion in this story. The passages about torture and sex are longer and given far more attention than any other elements in the narrative. The author seems to take great delight in his scenes of sadism and then takes just as much delight in pairing them with long and detailed passages of erticism. After seeing what Annie Palmer is responsible for on the Rose Hall plantation, you’d have to be a really sick person to want to fuck her over and over again, let alone fall madly in love with her and worship the ground she walks on. I think Harold Underhill’s intentions are to indulge in a sick, racist fantasy while throwing in some insincere details about moral conflicts so that readers don’t outright dismiss him as a complete piece of human shit. If he has some other intention, I’ve missed it because he didn’t articulate it clearly enough.

If you want a Caribbean twist on the gothic horror genre, Jamaica White isn’t a good choice. It does have a castle, but there isn’t any witchcraft and there aren’t any ghosts. The only thing scary about it is the passe attitude the author has towards the brutality of slavery. It’s nothing but an eroticized fantasy of white supremacy, power, domination, and violence. It might appeal to people who are indifferent to racism. It might appeal even more to Nazi pigs who sexually fetishize racism.

Jamaica White doesn’t even incorporate any of the Jamaican folklore surrounding the White Witch of Rose Hall. Academic folklorists have traced the legend’s origin back to an early 19^th century novel about a slave rebellion set in Cuba. Over the years, details about a female plantation owner were added; they derived from a real woman, who didn’t live at Rose Hall, but had three successive husbands. They all died of natural causes and she never killed any of them. It is true that Rose Hall once had a slave rebellion, but Annie Palmer never existed except as a fictional character in ghost stories told around campfires by Jamaican storytellers late at in the night. The current owners of Rose Hall have a vested interest in keeping the legend alive since their profit margins depend on it. I didn’t like this novel, but if I ever get to listen to the the legend of the White Witch of Rose Hall being told by a Jamaican person in the flickering lights of a campfire, I’d be fascinated.

 

Book Review & Analysis: Democracy by Joan Didion

Democracy

by Joan Didion

      The lifestyles of the rich and well connected aren’t all they are cracked up to be. Take it from Joan Didion, the author who reveals how mundane people actually are by stripping away all the explanatory psychology and decorative frills that go along with literature. Her novel Democracy is about a political family that lives in the public eye. But when it comes to understanding them, the political life is little more than some details in the background.

Joan Didion herself speaks directly to the audience as the narrator in the first person. Her literary persona is immediately collapsed since her role as narrator is the same role she plays in life. Joan Didion was a journalist and as a journalist she plays the part of covering the protagonist, Inez Victor, writing articles about her for magazines and then piecing them together to form this novel which traces her life up to 1975. This postmodernist style isn’t any different from the fragmentary and non-linear style of Didion’s other novels. Along the way, the narrator provides a meta-narration, commenting on how a work of fiction is written and how choices in descriptive language are used to communicate emotions and information about characters and situations. In this way, Didion doesn’t break through the fourth wall by addressing the audience directly; there is no fourth wall to begin with.

Inez grows up in Hawaii with her sister Janet. Both of them marry into powerful families. Inez marries Harry Victor and Janet marries Dick Ziegler. The Zieglers are wealthy and well-connected members of the business class in Hawaii. And Harry Victor is a rising star in the Democratic party. His involvement catapults him into the Senate and in 1972 he runs in the Democratic primaries for president but loses. Because of this, Inez, who bears a passing resemblance to Jacqueline Kennedy, is a glamorous socialite in the public eye. In her home life, Inez is a mother of two.

There is a darker undercurrent to her marriage though. During her younger days, she falls in love with Jack Lovett, a CIA agent and arms trafficker. Throughout their lives they admire each other from a distance. But during a family vacation in Jakarta, Indonesia the two run into each other. The family vacation coincides with anti-American riots breaking out in Jakarta, mirroring the point where Inez and Harry begin losing interest in each other. Jack Lovett helps the family to escape to a cabin in the mountains outside Bandung and while there, Inez and Jack rekindle their interest in each other.

Jack Lovett subsequently gets deeply involved in espionage activities as the Vietnam War escalates and Harry Victor runs his presidential campaign on an anti-war ticket, similar to George McGovern who, as we now know, also lost the election, unfortunately giving Nixon another term in office. Inez’s heart is torn between an anti-war politician and a CIA agent with no political or ideological affiliation. This symbolizes her weak identity and it is something that her persona, fed to the public by the media, in incapable of seeing.

The relationship between Inez and Jack comes to the forefront of the novel when Inez’s father kills Janet and a Hawaiian man in her home. After the murder, the Ziegler family gather for dinner. During the meal, Jack Lovett walks in and from there he reconnects with Inez. The murder is the turning point where Inez and Harry’s shaky relationship falls apart, revealing it to be more a marriage for the public eye as opposed to one of domesticity. As Inez’s sister dies in the hospital, it is Jack who is there for her emotional support.

Other details get revealed through the murder. One is that Janet might have been cheating on her husband and the affair complicates the relationship between the Ziegler family and the established political and economic order of Hawaii. The Hawaiian man killed by Inez and Janet’s father is tied to a powerful Hawaiian family who were about to close a deal selling low-grade swamp land to the Ziegler family for development. Because of the murder, the deal will fall through. Jack Lovett is connected with all this because his arms dealing is somehow tied in with the Ziegler family’s businesses. But all of these interconnections are murky and not fully explained. The whole mess serves to underline the disconnection between Inez’s family and the Zieglers who are all white settlers and intruders in the Hawaiian islands. The theme of disconnection among the wealthy elite is a theme that runs throughout the novel.

Another theme that gets brought into the foreground because of the murder is the dysfunctional relationship between the parents and children in the Victor family. The son Adlai, no doubt named after Adlai Stevenson though I’m not sure why, is an underachieving student who is getting involved in the anti-war movement on his campus. The daughter Jessie works in a fast food restaurant in Seattle after a suicide attempt. She has just gotten out of rehab for heroin addiction. When Harry Victor arrives in Seattle to take his kids to Hawaii for Janet’s funeral, Jessie decides on a whim to move to Vietnam. Her motivations aren’t clear, but she seems hungry for excitement and hasn’t put any thought into her decision.

After arriving in Vietnam, Jessie gets a job as a cocktail waitress in a country club for Westerners just as the embassies begin evacuating all Americans from Vietnam due to their losing the war. Jack Lovett flies to Vietnam to retrieve her, using his CIA connections to find her and transport her out, utilizing a string of secret military bases in the South Pacific and eventually leaving her in Hawaii. Soon after, Jack Lovett dies in the swimming pool of the hotel in Jakarta where he mysteruously met up with Inez and her family while they were on vacation several years before. The important part of Jessie’s naive escapade is that she would have gotten stuck in the danger zone of post-war Vietnam if the Victor family didn’t have connections in the CIA through Jack Lovett. Jessie most likely would have been imprisoned or executed as North and South Vietnam reunited under the communist government.

The murder also brings one other issue out into the open in the character of Billy Dillon, a man whose job it is to manage the public personae of the Victor family. He works behind the scenes to advise the Victors on what to say in order to minimize controversy and maximize their positive public image. When Inez’s father commits murder, Billy Dillon is called in to first help negotiate a lenient sentence with the Hawaiian judiciary and second to control messaging in the media to cut down on the perceived severity of the crime. Didion demonstrates the efficacy of this in the text by making it unclear why the killing happened and what it meant to the killer. There is a direct connection between the first person meta-narrative of Joan Didion, who explains her literary technique in the course of telling the story, and Billy Dillon who uses the same semantic tricks to manipulate a receptive audience’s perceptions. Billy Dillon again carries the theme of disconnection since he symbolizes the fracture between media image and the private life reality of the Victors. On a private level he is even further a representative of disconnection because he is secretly in love with Inez even though she appears not to be aware of it.

Inez, in the end, drops out of American society. She only becomes her true self after the failure of her marriage and the death of Jack Lovett. She can no longer depend on others, especially men, to support her. Her epiphany comes when Jessie runs away to Vietnam and Inez’s privilege is used to rescue her. This is paired in the story with televised media images of Vietnamese refugees desperately clinging onto American helicopters as they lifet off from military bases. It is important that these images are shown on TV since this demonstrates how cut off Inez is from the real world. She only knows about the refugees through the news media, just as the public only knows her through the same channel. The refugees don’t have the luxuty of being rescued by their own personal secret agents. They have to risk their lives en masse to even have a hope for survival. And Jessie simply gets rescued because her family has powerful connections. This drives Inez to find self-actualization by running a refugee resettlement program from a mosquito-ridden bungalow in Kuala Lumpur. She abandons her life of wealth, privilege, and fame and finds herself by saving the Southeast Asian people without privilege, wealth, or connections who are becoming displaced from their homelands and way of life. Inez ends up being no longer disconnected, no longer living an empty domestic life, and feeling fulfilled and integrated by using what privilege she has to benefit others.

This novel is not exactly a political drama. In fact, the political drama mostly happens in the background and only emerges into the main narrative at certain points. It is really about how mundane the problems of an elite ruling class actually are. Being wealthy and connected, they have powerful mechanisms to help them manage their dysfunctional relationships, but these mechanisms fracture them as human beings. Incapable of knowing themselves, they become vapid, empty husks without any true purpose. Inez and her familial relations are socially disconnected from the state of Hawaii they have chosen, as intruders, as a place of settlement. Inez is disconnected from her public media persona which is managed by Billy Dillon. She is disconnected from her husband and family. She is also disconnected from Jack Lovett who she loves, but only at a distance. She has no sense of identity because she lives through other people who have only fragmentary ties to her. It is only when she clears away all the debris of her social life and media image that she can begin to relate to herself as herself. If this isn’t a simplified version of Hegelian philosophy, I don’t know what is. The political sides of the story are like shadows in the background, partially shaped by the Victor and Ziegler family relations. The background politics are distorted shapes and only vaguely connected to them. The real politics are those internal to the nuclear and extended families. And their problems aren’t any different from the kinds of problems families outside the ruling elite have on a regular basis.

Stripped of all the political noise, this familial drama is basically a soap opera. It’s a surface level plot with superficial twists about people without much depth. Even more so, it is a soap opera because where else would you find such WASPish rich people with names like Dick Ziegler, Harry Victor, or Jack Lovett? They are such wonderbread bland characters that even the name Inez sounds exotic in comparison. Even the tropical location of Hawaii does nothing to enhance their character. This novel could be set in Ohio, Nebraska, or Iowa and it wouldn’t make a difference. Like all of Joan Didion’s novels, this one takes place almost entirely on the surface, but the interplay of those surfaces reveals something about the hidden truths of the people inhabiting a Didion world. A lot of times the hidden space that gets revealed is filled with little more than emptiness. Until the end of the story, this is true of Inez.

Democracy is the type of novel that needs to be read more than once if you want to pick up on all the subtle nuances. It is also the type of novel that needs to be thought about after you’ve finished reading it. Although its simple plot isn’t hard to follow, it was difficult to connect with during while reading. After finishing and allowing for some distance, it was easier to piece all the fragments together into a whole for clarity so that its themes could be considered. This might be a frustrating process for readers who wish to be spoon fed information with clear explanations. This is too bad because if you take a step back and allow the pieces to fall into place, it makes for a challenging but provocative novel. This isn’t Joan Didion’s best work, but it is good enough and certainly deserves a second reading.