In 2016, the year in which Kei Miller’s novel Augustown was published, Jamaica recorded the world’s highest violent death rate for females, and for men and women in total, it recorded the sixth highest homicide rate. During that year, 1,615 people were killed, which is fifty-nine per 100,000 (O’Brien Chang). Hugh Graham in the Jamaica Observer reported a similar figure for 2017, while noting that two specific areas “colloquially referred to as ‘ghettos,’” Trench Town and August Town, had been transformed into “income-earning zones from the renting of rooms to people visiting Jamaica as well as tertiary students seeking accommodation in the case of August Town.” Despite the claim that specific areas had been transformed, a claim contested in Kei Miller’s short fiction discussed in this chapter, the murder rate remained the same for 2018. The editorials and opinion pages of the country’s two main newspapers, The Gleaner and the Jamaica Observer, posit causes, effects, and solutions with weary regularity.¹ There is also a large body of academic research focusing on crime and violence in Jamaica, as well as an established and consistent focus on these issues in popular cultural forms such as music and theatre. More recently, Jamaican-authored fiction has been making an intervention into these public debates, resulting in a wide-ranging national discourse that is constantly seeking to understand and come to terms with this phenomenon. Focusing on two works of short fiction from the collection Kingston Noir (ed. Channer, 2012), Marlon James’s “Immaculate” and Kei Miller’s “The White Gyal with the Camera,” as well as Miller’s novel Augustown (2016), I examine the ethical effect and effectiveness of literary representations of what Angela Harris has defined as “gender violence.” I argue that, while these stories occupy a complex position in relation to the spectacle of violence they represent, they simultaneously offer the potential to create an ethical distance between the narrative and its readers, a space for ethical thought, and for representations of history’s hauntings (Jolly 11–12).

Hyacinth Ellis argues that, “Violence is one of the crucial alphabets for reading and writing the Caribbean” (1). This is in part a consequence of the region’s earliest recorded history as a colonial state founded by “brutality, violent response and coercion through the use of excessive force” (4). First-hand accounts of Jamaica from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century draw attention to the ways in which violence has framed, foreshadowed, and even determined its contemporary identity. Diaries of slave-owners are replete with accounts of cruelties, unspeakable acts perpetrated against individuals, and an everyday culture of brutality.² Exaggerations and embellishments notwithstanding, early accounts of piracy in the territories around the Caribbean, including Jamaica, repeatedly describe the pillaging, sacking, and razing of communities, and the “debauchery and excess” of the colonizers (Exquemelin 100). In such accounts, as Richard Frohock notes, “Pirates finally are not just devilish rebels operating in the interstices between official colonialisms but are emblems of broader, systemic, imperial evils” (68). As the pirate Henry Morgan’s knighthood attests, their violent excesses were committed in the service of the colonial governors and the Crown (Howard 40). Forms of resistance to colonization are, therefore, as Fanon argues in The Wretched of the Earth, necessarily violent, and it is this history of violence, heroic resistance, and failure that Miller’s novel Augustown revisits with its focus on Alexander Bedward, the messianic “flying preacherman” who promised not just religious salvation but full emancipation for the poor, disenfranchised black population of Jamaica in the last decade of the nineteenth and first two decades of the twentieth centuries.

Whereas Miller’s novel directly addresses issues of colonial violence, state violence, and resistance, the concern of the two short stories is to contextualize criminal acts of violence and murder, and, in particular, to expose what several critics have described as the business, political, and criminal intersections that shape political, social, and cultural institutions and relations in contemporary Jamaica (Edmonds; Harriott; Gibson and Grant; Morris and Maguire). Despite these interconnections, the society itself is, on the surface at least, rigidly stratified in terms of class, colour, and location. In the fiction analysed, hierarchies of colour and class are mapped onto Kingston’s urban spaces. The narratives describe a world of “compartments” where the affluent areas, like those of the settlers in the colonial world, are strongly built, “all made of stone and steel”: theirs is a “brightly lit town”; it is clean, well paved and “well-fed” (Fanon, Wretched 29). These affluent areas are kept separate from the areas demarcated for the oppressed, whose “crouching,” hungry towns are “wallowing in the mire” (30). “The colonized man,” Fanon writes, “is an envious man. And this the settler knows well … ‘They want to take our place’” (30). The separation between the world of the mostly black and poor and that of the settlers or the elite in the case of contemporary Jamaica is maintained both by armed security and by the social structures that reinforce difference. Specific areas of the city are used as the subtitles of the fiction in the anthology Kingston Noir and for residents and visitors familiar with Kingston, each area is filled with meaning. August Town, the location of Miller’s short fiction, is historically resonant but also, because of the area’s proximity to the University of the West Indies, familiar to the constituency most likely to engage with his work. Marlon James’s “Immaculate” is subtitled “Constant Spring,” a mixed and mostly affluent area in the hills of St Andrew, some five miles above “Downtown” Kingston, an area synonymous with ghettos, poverty, and violence. As this fiction demonstrates, however, although the borders separating urban areas are powerfully woven into the national imaginary, these boundaries are porous and the spaces themselves are more complex and less regulated than a first encounter with the city might suggest. In Kingston, worlds routinely touch each other and there are continual moments of voluntary and involuntary encounter. The poor are required to traverse the “mire” into the uplands of respectability, even while “crouching,” and those uplands, more often than not, border sites of degradation. The violence, but also the instances of care and recognition, produced by the encounter between two worlds is the subject of several recent works of fiction that seek not merely to display the violence they represent, but to assume responsibility to combat it.³

Rosemary Jolly’s recent work on post-apartheid South African fiction is helpful in thinking about how fiction might combat, or make an intervention into, a history of colonial violence and its hauntings in the present. Describing the effects of listening to the testimonies given during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa, Jolly argues that witnessing on such a scale produces “deaf listening” (5), a genuine difficulty in hearing and believing the magnitude of what the witnesses and victims have to say. The effect is that the acts of violence described in these testimonies are, in the context of the hearings, “spectacularized,” displayed without the necessary distance required for ethical thought. Spectacular violence feeds a desire on the part of the viewer/listener or reader “to want to be constantly surprised by the actual occurrence of violence … [the] desire to be offended by it” (11). Such a spectacle, however, allows us to separate ourselves from it, “by judging those who perpetrate it according to our own scheme of values.” Thus we “often fail to imagine the systemic context in which violence occurs” (12). That failure is in part because the violence is “allowable” (11); it is a consequence of “how we may render some subjects allowable for violation; how, in fact we culture violence” (9). By enabling us to move closer to the subjects of violence, to see and recognize those subjects, literature simultaneously opens up a gap between our “initial perception of that event and our subsequent judgement of it” (11–12). It creates a space for an ethical response that takes into account history’s hauntings and its reach into the present. Jolly’s work, in conjunction with a reading of Frantz Fanon’s theorizing of colonial and postcolonial violence outlined below, provides an approach that can be used to interrogate James’s and Miller’s complex representations of gender violence and the effectiveness of their intervention into what might be described as a national tragedy.

Feminist critiques of the work of Frantz Fanon have pointed to the exclusion of women from his vision of decolonizing resistance, postcolonial liberation, and national culture.⁴ Although it is undeniable that the muscular, masculinist language of Fanon’s essay “Concerning Violence” (Wretched), in particular, and the earlier Black Skin, White Masks, intensify that exclusion, I would argue both that Fanon’s theories of colonial and decolonizing violence, his prescient analysis of the failures of postcolonial and post-independence nationalism, and his critique of class and culture in newly independent societies continue to be central to an understanding of state failures and the explosion of violence in the contemporary Caribbean. Further, I would suggest that his project of postcolonial liberation in fact implicitly and occasionally explicitly addresses women’s significance in that project. “Bourgeois leaders,” he writes, misrepresent national consciousness: he argues that “It is only when men and women are included on a vast scale in enlightened and fruitful work that form and body are given to that consciousness” (Wretched 165). “National consciousness” is defined as a product of liberation that develops in “contemporaneous connexion” with an international consciousness. It augurs a “new humanity [that] cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism for itself and others” (Wretched 198). Fanon’s work is interwoven with examples from fictional prose, and more frequently poetry and drama; indeed, a selection of his own dramatic work has recently been published (Alienation and Freedom), and throughout his essays and lectures, literature is used as a way of elaborating his theoretical position. In Fanon’s writing, literature does not simply reflect the nation back to itself; it is not just a “cry of protest” but “a literature of combat because it moulds the national consciousness, giving it form and contours … it is a literature of combat because it assumes responsibility, and because it is the will to liberty expressed in time and space” (Wretched 193). For the purposes of this chapter, I am interpreting Fanon’s references to “the whole people” (Wretched 193) to mean women and men. I am further arguing that Jolly’s theorizing of ethical reading can usefully be juxtaposed with a Fanonian schema: both emphasize literature’s responsibility to combat the legacies of colonialism, including its legacy of violence. Such a juxtaposition is used to analyse the potential these texts create for ethical reading, and the extent to which such a reading can suggest the possibility of a “new humanity.”

Set in Kingston, in October 1993, Marlon James’s short story “Immaculate” self-consciously echoes the murder in May 1983 of Dianne Smith, a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl from Immaculate Conception High School in Constant Spring, Kingston. Newspaper accounts of the murder, in among all the other accounts of other murders during this period, spectacularized her violent death by repeatedly exposing her violated body to the gaze of readers: she was stabbed several times by what was alleged to be an ice pick; she was raped, strangled by her school tie, and left naked, or half-naked, in a gully. Once the trial of the two accused men started, further details emerged that were repeated in even the briefest reference to the murder: among others, that there were samples of “human pubic hair found in the shoes of the deceased” and in her hand; that there were bloodstains on the white skirt of her Immaculate school uniform (“Pubic Hair Found on Deceased Similar to Shortie’s”). Inevitably, those charged with her murder, an ackee picker and his co-accused, a baggage handler, were judged according to a scheme of values in which culpability for violent acts such as these is easily assigned. They were already victims of the physical and discursive structures used to position such subjects on the margins of middle-class respectability. Living and trading, in the case of the fruit-picker, just on the fringes of the Constant Spring area of Kingston, his black body was already a transgressive spectacle. As is evidenced in these details of Dianne’s rape and murder, her gender was central to this act of violence, but subsequent media responses to the crime functioned to reproduce and perpetuate that original act of violence by constructing both Dianne and her alleged murderer within heteronormative constructs of gender relations and identities, themselves predicated on acts of violence. The priest who spoke at Dianne’s funeral began by comparing her to Saint Maria Goretti (1890–1902) who, having resisted the sexual advances of a local young man, was murdered. “After her life was investigated,” he said, “she was declared a saint of the church, a martyr of chastity and a witness to purity” (“Hundreds Hear Archbishop Carter Laud Dianne Smith’s Vibrant Life”). In a bleakly ironic reversal of the fact that gonorrhoea was identified in the semen found on Dianne’s slip, the priest concluded that the message behind the killing was that Jamaica needed to convert to the standards of Christianity which were necessary to meet the dangers of teenage pregnancy and sexual promiscuity. He added that abstinence and chastity were the answer, not contraception. Other testimonies, though less explicitly, continued to objectify Dianne’s body and to define the girl’s sexuality within heteropatriarchal discourses intersected by class and colour. A male jogger and eyewitness—who said they had regularly crossed each other’s paths in the early hours of the morning—had advised Dianne to be careful when he saw her walking to school in the dark mornings. Like several others, he focused on her physical attractiveness:

She was an attractive girl and looked rather like what my grandmother used to describe as an ‘Indian Royal’. Dianne always looked resplendent in her Immaculate Conception High School uniform and she appeared as fresh as a flower of dawn walking with her regal composure. (“Slaying of Schoolgirl: Police See Early Breakthrough”)

In sensationalized media narratives such as these, spaces are not created between the event and our judgement of it and, as Jolly argues, “The collapse of these two moments into the moment of an event’s occurrence—the fiction of simultaneity” does not allow for “ethical thought” (11–12).

In its focus on the systems of patriarchy and hierarchies of masculinity within which such violence is enmeshed and indeed reproduced, James’s short fictional narrative intervenes into the dominant political, social, and cultural discourses that these media accounts reflect. In James’s fiction the murder of his young protagonist, Jacqueline/Janet Stenton, also fourteen and a pupil at Immaculate, is represented as an act of what Angela Harris theorizes as “gender violence”: in James’s narrative, Jacqueline’s murder is situated in a context within which the violence perpetrated against women and men is sexualized. They are targeted because of their powerlessness and vulnerability. Harris’s work, based on her study of prison populations in the USA, focuses on the practices of violence that are used by both prisoners and security workers to dominate and control. She argues that “much of the violence perpetrated by men who commit crime, as well as the men who investigate [and] arrest criminals can be described as ‘gender violence’,” framed by what she terms “dialects” of sexualized violence. Such acts are performances of a ‘“toxic” or “destructive” masculinity that rely on negative identification: not being a woman and not being gay (Harris 16). By locating its victim’s murderers in Norbrook, an affluent area bordering both the high school and a large golf club, and by identifying them as wealthy, late teenage boys, James’s fiction echoes a persistent rumour surrounding the case of Dianne Smith, one that re-surfaced in 2013, which is that a sitting MP, who is also the son of an MP and a member of a prominent Jamaican family, was implicated in Dianne Smith’s murder. James pits the powerlessness of Jacqueline and her mother against the rich, powerful residents of an affluent, securitized suburb to demonstrate the ways in which not only individual lives but also institutions are shaped and controlled by destructive masculinities. With its descriptions of the complicity of the apparatus of criminal justice in the cover-up of Jacqueline’s murder, the short story suggests that the systemic failures in the society as a whole are responsible for her death. Its governing institutions, ultimately underpinned by unregulated money and a corrupt elite, designate Jacqueline as “allowable for violation” (Jolly 9) and ensure that her murderers are never convicted. In an echo of the priest’s sermon at Dianne Smith’s funeral service and several other commentators writing at the time, James includes a response from the Jamaican Council of Churches to the murder of his fictional protagonist: “Jamaica must be going to hell when even decent little girls whose countenance would never ask for rape, get raped and murdered” (James 140).

Although the narrative affectively dramatizes the ways in which patriarchal institutions, cultures, and performances support sexualized violence, in order to put the two—Jacqueline and her murderers—in proximate relations, James’s short fiction, like the priest and the jogger, dubbed “the stranger at dawn,” sexualizes the young girl. In its focus on, and preoccupation with, adolescent sexuality and gendered sexual identities, James’s short fiction both echoes and problematizes the assumptions implicit in the phrase “would never ask for rape” (140). As Jacqueline’s mother, Ruth, is on her way to collect what is—though as yet unknown to her—the first payment made by her daughter’s killers to guarantee her silence, she struggles with conflicting feelings about her own identity, her role as a mother, and Jacqueline’s own agency. Throughout the story she attributes first Jacqueline’s disappearance, then her murder, to her daughter’s sexual activities with the “uptown” boys or men towards whom Ruth had directed her: “[Jacqueline] was supposed to go after man, yes, and a man from uptown too. But she was to make sure she get something before she give up the punani. She, Ruth, taught her that from she was eleven” (150). The “something” cited by Ruth—“some Kentucky and Canei … . Then a box to take home for your family … then money for just one thing at the supermarket” (150)—reinforces the gulf of class, money, and power that separates the “uptown” of the young men and the school, and the “downtown” of Ruth and her daughter. Jacqueline, perhaps more ambitious than her mother but also more naïve and less canny, had asked the young men for an American visa and a trip to Miami (165). Despite Ruth’s efforts to convince herself that “the plan was never to whore her out” (150), this is precisely what Jacqueline believes her mother has done. The teenager had said, her mother remembers, that “she working herself out of this fucking ghetto and nobody going stop her, least of all some damn woman who want to whore out her own daughter” (150). In other words, Jacqueline intends to use her body to achieve more for herself than Canei and Kentucky.

Instead of going to school, and with the complicity of her mother, Jacqueline struggles up to Norbrook in her mother’s high heels to meet the young, wealthy boys she believes will provide her with a way out of poverty and the ghetto. This is despite the fact that she has successfully gained a place at Immaculate, one of the most prestigious high schools in the capital. It is significant too, that whereas in the case of Dianne Smith, all her siblings were at prestigious high schools in the capital, and in fact her sister also attended Immaculate, James’s protagonist Jacqueline Stenton travels every day, unprotected, from Trench Town, a downtown ghetto community, to the city’s affluent suburbs. The narrative’s focus is in fact not Jacqueline but her mother who, having handed her daughter over, however unwittingly, to these uptown sexual predators, accepts their payment in exchange for her daughter’s memory:

Ruth Stenton still has the memory of how she felt when she got the second registered letter containing seventeen thousand dollars. You start to forget. You start to realize that hard as it may be, some little girl do ask for it. (168)

The references to the mother’s willingness to prostitute her daughter and her daughter’s seeming willingness to comply, complicate both what it means to “ask for rape” and how a character is made “allowable for violation” (Jolly 9). As with the newspaper reports of Dianne’s violated body, the details of Jacqueline’s bestial abuse, her rape, “more than once, by more than three men, some more forceful than others” (James 148), and her murder, are repeated throughout the story in the bald, formal prose of police and coroners’ reports. Her broken and torn body is displayed in these accounts, yet her interiority is concealed by the repeated return to images of her damaged body, and by the fragmented narrative’s competing accounts of her. Is she, as the other school girls imply and Ruth claims, “a little dutty gyal” (124), or is she “a fine student, about to do well in the GCE O Levels” (140)? She is further concealed by the disembodied, italicized phrases of the monologue used to narrate her final moments. The effect is to spectacularize this act of gendered violence and to problematize or limit the possibilities for empathetic engagement. As with the wrongfully accused sky juice vendor who, in James’s short story, is beaten and tortured into confessing and who remains in the margins of the narrative, both Jacqueline and her mother are placed outside the schema of values within which the implied reader is situated. This complex positioning of the story’s female characters, however, makes a process of ethical interpretation more urgent. Read in dialogue with its critique of the city’s class divide, power imbalance, and its inadequate systems of justice, the narrative suggests that regardless of how sexually available men and women seem to be, no-one “asks for rape.” James’s narrative demonstrates that the rape and sexual abuse of men and women is an exercise of power, allowed not by the individual victim but by political, social, and religious institutions.

Although Kei Miller’s “The White Gyal with the Camera” also situates its victim at its margins, despite the fact that she is the centre of its plot, in this work as in the later Augustown, the experience of violence in contemporary Jamaica is expressed as an outcome or consequence of non-recognition, itself an act of colonial violence. Miller’s short story begins with what we assume is the murder of the “white gyal,” a journalist who had travelled on her own to August Town to photograph its residents. This community is guarded and patrolled by the August Town don Soft-Paw⁵ who, the narrator explains, reinforces the community’s feelings of fear and insecurity.⁶ In contrast to Soft-Paw’s act of violence against a trespassing young student, the don respects the photographer’s fearlessness, her midnight wanderings, her determined efforts to be part of the community and to connect with its residents. He is mesmerized by her photographs: he had never before seen August Town “in the way that he was seeing it then—almost beautiful” (55) and through her eyes, he too is “almost beautiful” (55). It is clear by the end of the story, however, that whereas the don had mistaken her gaze for recognition, it was in fact a narcissistic, self-affirming gaze. What she had seen was not him, or August Town, but her own projection of an idealized, glossed, and incomplete version of the Other. She is, furthermore, a fictional equivalent of Miller’s cartographer, participating in what Trinh Minh-ha terms “legal voyeurism” (69): her photographs are an act of appropriation.⁷ Sensing his own loss of control, Soft-Paw sends one of his men in to remove the camera from her room so that he can look at himself for himself, and in so doing take ownership of his self in representation. Finding the camera gone, she becomes hysterical, rushes into the street naked to “box the camera out of Soft-Paw’s hand,” and “box him in him face” (67). The photographer’s response to what she believes she owns reveals the limitations of her vision: the perceived beauty of August Town is transformed into ugliness, described as the photographer “[s]eeing us for who we really was. And maybe she thinking she been in Jamaica for six days, but is only now that she really arrive” (65).

Mutual recognition, then, is a constituent component of the story’s narration of violence and in Fanon’s writing, it is essential to postcolonial liberation. In his critique of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic, Fanon argues that in the colonial situation recognition is not reciprocal because “the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work” (Black Skin 220). In the post-independence context of the story, the poor, black marginalized Other has to demand recognition: “Thus human reality in-itself-for-itself can be achieved only through conflict and through the risk that conflict implies … . I do battle for the creation of a human world, that is, of a world of reciprocal recognitions” (Black Skin 218). Recognition is a prerequisite for freedom but, as Fanon argues, “It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained” (Black Skin 218). Although Soft-Paw cannot be argued to be consciously participating in the struggle to achieve freedom through recognition and the mutual acceptance of the Other’s humanity, an ethical reading of the narrative, focusing on the gaps it creates between his act of violence and its representation of his need to be recognized as human, can suggest that Soft-Paw’s violence is indeed an example of the “savage struggle” of the disempowered for recognition.

Throughout Miller’s narrative, however, it is made clear that, in part, the photographer could not recognize August Town because its residents did not recognize her. The narrator reflects: “She had to have her own story, but is like it was a story no one did think to ask bout. For all the talk we did talk to her, we never get to know her” (“The White Gyal with the Camera” 59). Furthermore, through the use of an unnamed first-person narrator, the narrative itself keeps the Other, the photographer, “within [her]self” (Black Skin 217), fixing its gaze only on her whiteness and her gender. Although the narrative does not condone what we assume is the final act of violence, nor does it suggest the victim’s collusion in her own vulnerability and abuse, through its exposure of “the white gyal’s” naked, hysterical body and its repeated constructions of her as vampiric, as other than human, the narrative seems to deny her the full recognition it allows Soft Paw. Yet the same time, the story’s focus on the gendered nature of this act of violence disturbs a reading of the necessary life and death struggle of the neo-colonized to be recognized. More than simply presenting violence either as a spectacle or as a necessary act of retribution, this short story attends to the complex intersections of colour, gender, culture, and class that result in the “white gyal’s” murder, which is, in the narrative, removed from full view.

Kei Miller’s later novel, Augustown, further develops the intersectional perspective sketched in his short fiction. Through its use of women as agents rather than shadowy presences, through its focus on reciprocal acts of recognition outside of a framework of alterity (“alterity of rupture, of conflict, of battle,” Black Skin 222), and through its dialogue with the past, the novel assumes responsibility to combat discourses of neo-colonial violence. Augustown is set in 1982, at least two decades before the events that take place in the short story and before August Town, a socially complex community of just over 12,000 inhabitants, had achieved the status of a garrison town. Its route from what Christopher Charles describes as “a community of peace, where the residents of this politically divided community allegedly resolved their differences without resorting to violence” (38) to its identity as a garrison community exemplifies the inextricable connection between party politics and organized crime in contemporary Jamaica. Although in the 2002 elections the People’s National Party won, defeating the party of government, the MP for the constituency that included August Town lost his seat, thus angering “PNP hardcore supporters” (Charles 40). Following this defeat, there was a sharp rise in the murder rate and the community became divided into “corners” or small collective, social spaces patrolled by criminal dons, each reflecting their loyalty to a political party. Garrisons such as these have functioned, as Edmonds has argued, as a state within a state (54), or what Rivke Jaffe defines as an alternative model of sovereignty. The income received primarily from drug trafficking, protection rackets, and the occasional largesse of politicians has meant that these areas are self-governing, often with their own well-developed systems of security. Violence is regularly meted out to dons by their rivals within their own or in other garrison communities. These areas are frequently police-free zones, as the international scandals surrounding the extradition of the well-known criminal don Christopher (Dudus) Coke, or to a lesser degree Donovan “Bulbie” Bennett, illustrate (Gibson and Grant; Edmonds 66). The representative MPs for these areas are also either reluctant or unable to visit their constituents, preferring instead to contract out representation to their criminal clients (Charles 50, 57–59). Although most critics and commentators agree that politicians fund these communities, creating and sustaining “tribal loyalties between a political elite and their working class clients (clientism)” (Edmonds 57), until the Dudus debacle, most politicians had denied this link.

While Miller’s short story is set in the garrison community of a post-2002 August Town, events in the novel Augustown and, in particular, the author’s return to the figure of Soft-Paw, foreshadow the organized criminality that would define this community in later years. The focus of the novel, however, is less on criminality than on the roots, the nature, and the social contexts of violence in postcolonial and post-independence Jamaica. The choice of “the fictional valley of Augustown—a community that bears an uncanny resemblance to and shares a parallel history with a very real place: August Town, Jamaica” (“Author’s Note,” Augustown n. pag.) is historically significant. It was the home of the charismatic preacher and black nationalist, Alexander Bedward, the novel’s “flying preacherman,” a Christian Revivalist preacher, whose movement flourished during the last decade of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth centuries, attracting the support of “thousands of Jamaica’s dispossessed people” (Palmer 24). Bedward’s movement ended formally in 1921 with his incarceration in a mental asylum, but its political significance and the threat it posed to the colonial establishment is evident in the fact that he and his followers had been subject to continuous police harassment since the 1890s, when Bedward was first arrested for sedition. As Rupert Lewis argues: “The Native Baptist movement of Bedward goes back to the peasant activity of the 1840s, which culminated in the ‘Great Revival’ of 1860–61, and in the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865” (36), and its connection to this history of revolt has meant that Bedwardism can be described both as the object of and a response to colonial violence. That the rebellion of the mid-nineteenth century still resonated in early twentieth-century Jamaica is evident in contemporary accounts of that period, such as Herbert T. Thomas’s record of policing in rural Jamaica, which refers to the parish of St Thomas as an area of “bad repute throughout the island ever since the events of the rebellion of 1865” (76).⁸ Thomas’s autobiographical account details several instances of violent struggle, or what he describes as the activities of a “mob.” He describes, in this period, struggles over land ownership and land rights (102–04); struggles against police violence and the militarization of the police, notably during the 1902 “riots” in Montego Bay (110–27). What is most significant about Thomas’s narrative, however, is that these accounts of violence are interspersed throughout with references to the black population of Jamaica as “savages,” as “barbaric,” and “uncivilized.” He rails against the politicization of race, or what he refers to as growing “race hatred,” and repeatedly denounces Garvey’s UNIA, and its newspaper The Negro World, introduced into Jamaica by the leaders of a “certain church in this island, which consists exclusively of negroes” (23). The church was almost certainly the Native Baptist Free Church, of which Bedward was an elder. Of the paper, Thomas writes that its “avowed” objective was “to excite the hatred of black against white by innuendoes and lying calumnies of the vilest description” (23). Both Bedward and his followers were aware of a historical tradition of struggle, and their movement both responds to that tradition and participates in the organized opposition to the state violence that the policeman’s narrative describes. Their commitment to black consciousness and the defeat of what Bedward termed the “white wall” (Lewis 36) links Bedwardism to Garveyism, an international, black political movement that overlapped with and echoed the politics of Alexander Bedward. His preaching and philosophy “attracted the most oppressed section of the poor peasantry and semi-proletariat masses out of which Rastafari came later” (Lewis 37).

Miller’s Augustown is situated within this history of the struggle of poor black people in Jamaica against racism and their disenfranchisement by all sections of the ruling class. It connects Bedwardism to Rastafarianism and it emphasizes the valorization by both movements of black African culture and identities. In an echo of early twentieth-century Bedwardism, the narrative intervenes in colonial discourses of race hatred and racially motivated oppression. In addition, the novel inserts a consideration of gender identities into the ideologies articulated by the Bedwardites and their contemporary followers, and points to the important role that women play in connecting and maintaining communities. As I argue in the concluding pages of this chapter, in its use of women as agents rather than as passive narrators and bystanders, in its focus on reciprocal acts of recognition, and through the recovery of hidden or discredited religious and cultural practices, Augustown the novel performs an intervention into discourses of violence, allowing us to imagine the systemic context within which violence occurs, and creating a space within which ethical judgement can be made. The postcolonial present, the novel suggests, is a liminal space haunted throughout by the unspeakable violence of its colonial past.

Augustown is narrated from the point of view of those who, like Alexander Bedward and Gina, the young mother killed by armed police who had come to investigate the assault on the school teacher of Augustown Primary where her son is a pupil, have flown skywards to become spirits, floating “inside” the blue sky looking down on the “green and blue disc of the earth” (3). The focus, from above, is on the events of “11 April 1982,” and the history that has informed and produced those events (5). The narration begins at the end of that day, when Gina’s son Kaia returns home with his locks forcibly shorn, as we later learn, by the same teacher. By opening the novel with a reference both to Bedward and to the violent negation of Kaia’s identity, Miller registers his concern in this novel with Jamaica’s history of epistemic violence, and in particular the violent subjugation of the knowledge, practices, and beliefs of its majority poor and working-class, black population. In response to the little boy’s hurt, his great-aunt Ma Taffy (Irie Tafari, originally named Irene) narrates her own memory of Bedward’s last sermon in August Town, after which he ascended skyward. The flight itself is a mark of resistance to colonial oppression: it is freedom made manifest, and is evidence of having successfully refused the physical subjugation that a diet of salt perpetuates. In an echo of Earl Lovelace’s representations of the flight of Guinea John in his 1996 novel Salt, and with reference to contemporary Rastafarian beliefs, Ma Taffy says:

The old people used to talk these things. They say many of us was born with the ability to fly, but we lose the gift when we start eating salt. Is like the salt weigh us down. That’s why bucky master make sure to feed us salt fish and salt pork and all them things, so that those of us who could fly would lose the gift. (68)

A similar “gift” is the Bedwardites’ knowledge of the “healing stream,” which was first greeted with scorn and scepticism, then proven right by government scientists: “For how did he, an unlearned man, know that the dirty Mona River was full of magnesium and zinc and sulphur?” (66).

As these scenes demonstrate, the older woman, Ma Taffy, is central to the community’s connection with its past of successful resistance and alternative ways of knowing. The novel’s concern with the significance of gender roles and identities is not only evident in its dominant narrative voices but also in its depiction of a culture of violence: violence is the grammar of everyday intimacies and it is the means by which problems and disputes are solved in the everyday. Ma Taffy and the young Kaia hear “in another lane, not far away … Mr. Desmond having brutal sex with his common-law wife, Monica … Monica screaming out ‘Murder!’ or ‘Him a guh kill me!,’” then emerging “completely naked with her eyes swollen” (20). The young Soft-Paw is described as a “soldier” and a “warrior,” fighting a war and expecting to be killed (38), and Ma Taffy expresses her fear that when Gina sees her son’s cut locks, she will “explode” and that Soft-Paw will retaliate with his guns (40–41).

These examples from Augustown demonstrate that the violence narrated in Miller’s texts—both his novel and his short story—reflects the gendered social and intimate contexts within which the narratives’ victims and perpetrators are situated. It is reflective of the society’s heteropatriarchal cultures and institutions, and is woven into the language of the everyday. In “The White Gyal with the Camera,” Soft-Paw, the community’s don, encounters a university student who finds himself wandering at night into August Town:

Soft Paw just flick out a knife and push the blade into the young man’s back, not so deep that it could kill him, but deep enough. The fellow bawl out loud. I remember the scream. But they say Soft Paw never flinch and he run the knife down the back like he was opening a woman’s dress. (55–56)

In this example, the male aggressor feminizes the body of his male victim; thus his assertion of masculine dominance through an act of violence serves to fix gender hierarchies in place.

Similarly, and in one of the first, sustained acts of police brutality described in the novel Augustown, a process of humiliation is intensified by the police officers’ attacks on their victim’s masculinity. Petey, the gardener, wrongly accused of stealing money from his employer, is first subjected to a torrent of violent abuse and then shot: “Petey’s head explode like a bright green jackfruit that fall and buss on the ground below” (12). The insult “Dutty yard bwoy!” (11) aimed at Petey is a routine form of degradation used during the colonial era that condemns the subject’s blackness and suggests a deficient masculinity. In this scene the police perform a version of hegemonic masculinity that, while mirroring the structures of patriarchal dominance within which they are marginalized and disempowered, also transforms those they violently subjugate into “less than men.”

The description of the unwarranted arrest of Clarky the fruit seller, who is referred to throughout as “the gentleman,” is also used to address the narrative’s preoccupation with epistemic violence. While in prison, his locks are cut, reflecting the habitual cutting of Rastafarians’ locks by the police in the 1982 setting of the novel. This action targets what are perceived as transgressive versions of masculinity; in cutting his hair they destroy what Rastafari believe to be their source of strength (133), a final act of emasculation that follows the boot in the stomach and the beating with the baton, “a second time. A third time. A fourth time. A fifth time. The Rastaman was now being handcuffed and dragged off to jail” (127). As in James’s short fiction, the disempowered and marginalized stand in place of the less visible and thus unaccountable elites. They are punished on behalf of those who are beyond the reach of ordinary corporals and gunmen, and who are protected by the institutions the elites themselves control. In Miller’s novel these otherwise disempowered characters are, as the insistent references to “the gentleman” suggest, re-humanized, and this act of recognition creates a space in the narrative for ethical judgement, for an understanding that in the Jamaican setting of the novel, simply to be poor is a crime.

In a performance that mimics the policemen’s own mimicry of hegemonic masculinity, the teacher, Mr Saint-Josephs, cuts the locks of his six-year-old pupil, Kaia. His is an act of epistemic violence that seeks to restore what the teacher experiences as his own precarious masculinity, made worse by his refusal to recognize his homosexuality. After more than two years of an only very occasionally consummated marriage, Saint-Josephs was left with a wound, “a sense of shame and inadequacy that he will never shake … [and] a sense of himself: a self he does not care to know but which he most certainly is” (61). Teacher Saint-Josephs, already marginalized and unaccounted for, can only punish those who are seemingly weaker and even more marginalized:

Ungroomed little hooligan … with that picky-picky hairstyle. If you ask me, I did the boy a favour. For look at his skin. Look at his high colour. He could be a big somebody in this country, but he is making out like him is a little bush African. (224)

In cutting Kaia’s locks, Saint-Josephs is also attacking what he correctly identifies as a celebration of blackness. In contrast, he is unable to recognize himself as who he is, a black man and a homosexual. His negating misrecognition is punished first by Gina, who stabs him in the eye, and later, when he is transformed by the narrative into a naked, “one-eyed madman” whose “long, crusted penis is often seen dangling by his knees while he walks about” (232).

Juxtaposed with, though not counterwriting, these scenes of violent retribution, Miller’s novel presents the possibility of a new humanism achieved through mutual recognition. This is presented not as a successful outcome of violence, but in dialogue with violence. The narrative’s nonlinear structure and its collapsing of chronological time serves to situate the Bedwardites in dialogue with characters such Saint-Josephs, the police, as well as with full-length articles from early twentieth-century editions of the Daily Gleaner newspaper denouncing Bedwardism as a practice that is “almost below the level of rational human beings” (Augustown 95),⁹ and extracts from the American writer Harry Franck, whose 1920 travelogue Roaming Through the West Indies, like Thomas’s work cited above, describes the Kingston residents as less than human: “swarms of negroes shuffle through the hot dust, cackling their silly laugher, shouting their obscenity, heckling, if not attacking, the rare white men who venture abroad” (Augustown 87). These early twentieth-century accounts are used intertextually and speak to the persistence and repetition of such perspectives several decades later and in a post-independence context where Ma Taffy still has to insist, against everyday evidence to the contrary, that “for people to be people, they had to believe in something, they had to believe that something was worth believing in” (35) and further, that that belief constitutes a form of self-belief and an affirmation of an oppressed people’s humanity.

The novel closes with acts of reciprocal recognition between its female characters and in this way the novel, like Miller’s and James’s short stories, inserts a consideration of gender into its representations of violence and conflict. Although the narrative is not linear, the plot is structured around conventionally realist stagings of coincidences and unexpected interconnections. The central coincidence is the meeting of an almost white, upper-class Jamaican woman and the young, black, dreadlocked Augustown resident Gina. They become known to each other as Miss G. and Mrs G. When this upper-class woman, who is also the Headteacher at Augustown Primary and therefore knows both Teacher Saint-Josephs and Kaia, lets an unknown young black woman into her Beverly Hills residence, the relationship that follows structures the novel’s central act of recognition, making that act as significant as the “‘autoclaps’” (155–59) that includes Gina’s violent death. Following the same young girl’s awful act of violence, and prevented from returning home because of the police road blocks, this upper-class near-white woman leaves the school and goes down into the valley. She is drawn to that “troubled community … the warm night of Augustown … [had] wrapped itself around her in a welcoming way. The night seemed to tell her that she was part of this” (232–34). Assuming that what she will find there is a community of humans, she sits side by side with Ma Taffy, in among the debris of police violence.

Miller’s novel is careful not to create an act of closure that overwrites the violence that precedes it, but rather to keep the violence in view since, as Fanon suggests, closure and forgetfulness have been a cornerstone of the failure of the post-independent state. Fanon describes the coming to voice of twelve million black colonized people who “howled against the curtain of the sky. Torn from end to end, marked with the gashes of teeth biting into the belly of interdiction, the curtain fell like a burst balloon” (Black Skin 222). Following this achievement of agency through struggle and violence, however, Fanon considers that the monument built to mark this struggle for liberation will be commemorated by the figure of “a white man and a black man hand in hand” (Black Skin 222, italics in original). In the novel Augustown, moments of mutual recognition, facilitated though not produced by the final “autoclaps,” are not the end: history’s revisions will result in ever more cycles of struggle, conflict, and violent refusals of a people’s negation. As the narrator affirms, “No. It wasn’t going to be OK” (234): history cannot be rewritten with one gesture and those with money and access to power such as Mrs G. must recognize their responsibility for and complicity with institutional failures that contribute to the subjugation of Jamaica’s black and poor. The novel’s closing scenes present just a moment of recognition between the poor, who are the victims of a seemingly endless cycle of violence, and those who are protected and separated from the poor and disenfranchised. By bringing readers too into closer proximity with seemingly distant characters, the novel enables some understanding of the “systemic context in which violence occurs” (Jolly 12).

Despite its history of colonial violence and anti-colonial resistance, early twentieth-century Jamaica was, according to policeman Herbert T. Thomas, a relatively peaceful place: it was “comparatively free from serious crime” (369) and people rarely resorted to lethal weapons. In addition, he claims, “Those horrifying cases of wife-beating that figure so constantly in English criminal records never disgrace ours” (369). Rates of murder and manslaughter began to rise exponentially from the mid-1960s, when there was an average of 104 cases per year. The rate of politically motivated violence reached a crescendo in the early 1980s, the period during which Miller’s novel is set and, having mutated into criminal violence fuelled by the drug trade and the proliferation of guns, the murder rate has risen more or less continually in the decades following (Ellis 5). The texts analysed in this chapter counterwrite popular depictions of violence in contemporary Jamaica that discount the lives of the poor and alienated, who remain, as Hyacinth Ellis argues, in conditions of “extended slavery,” a kind of “social death,” where “there can be no value assigned to the sanctity of life” (6). Both James’s short fiction and Miller’s texts repeat explicit acts of violence, but in so doing force readers to confront a culture of brutality that has, in its repetition, become almost banal. Despite these displays of violence, however, the intervention performed by all three narratives is one that forces readers to recognize the lives of the poor and disregarded who do not share the same social space as the works’ implied readers. Representations of gender violence are central to these narratives, but in their focus on the historical, social, and political contexts of gender and violence, and in their examination of the complicity of individuals from all sections of the society with such acts of violence, these fictions assume responsibility for “registering what has become deniable, and therefore unspeakable” (Jolly 5) in the context of contemporary Jamaica.

Notes

1. 1 The Gleaner newspaper was known as the Daily Gleaner until 1992 when it was changed to The Gleaner.

2. 2 See, for example, Douglas Hall, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86; Matthew G. Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor, Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica; and Phillip Wright (ed.), Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801–1805.

3. 3 See, for example, Suzanne Scafe, “Re-mapping Social Division: Kingston in the Fiction of Brian Meeks and Diana McCaulay,” and Robin Brooks, “The Haves and Have-Nots: Class, Globalization and Human Rights in Diana McCaulay’s Dog-Heart.”

4. 4 See the following critics, most of whom focus on Fanon’s Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1989). Ella Shohat, “Imaging Terra Incognita”; Anne McClintock, “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race, and Nationalism”; Kadiatu Kanneh, African Identities: Race, Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures.

5. 5 The name of the fictional character “Soft Paw” echoes that of the “reputed gangster” Christopher “Dog Paw” Linton, who has been in custody since 2010, accused of the murder of two women and a six-year-old boy in Bedward Gardens, August Town, Jamaica (Barrett).

6. 6 Although Christopher Charles’s influential essay describes August Town as a “garrison community” (31), it is perhaps more accurate to suggest, as he does in the body of the essay, that specific areas or “corners” are patrolled by dons or gang members and made inaccessible to outsiders—a point that I will take up again later in this chapter. Miller’s short story, however, identifies its character, Soft-Paw, as the don who patrols August Town as a whole. Jason Cross further argues that August Town’s identity as a “garrison community” has fluctuated in recent years, noting that in 2016, there were “zero” murders in August Town, but many more than average in 2018.

7. 7 In Kei Miller’s poetry anthology entitled The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion (2014), the cartographer represents the point of view of the colonizer who uses his “science” to try to order and rationalize the unfamiliar. He says to the Rastaman: “What I do is science. I show / the earth as it is, without bias … I aim to show the full / of a place in just a glance” (18). The Rastaman presents an opposing point of view. He argues that not everything seen can be ordered and rationalized.

8. 8 Morant Bay is a town in the parish of St Thomas.

9. 9 Miller fictionalizes the article from the Daily Gleaner dated 15 December 1920, but the later article, from 30 December 1920, is reproduced verbatim. Both articles refer to Bedward’s “ascension” (“Bedlam Let Loose at August Town” and “Bedwardites Look for ‘Ascension’ To-Morrow [sic]”).