Here lies Jamaica, mother, provider, lover and friend. She fought hard and struggled long. Molested by colonizers for the bounty of her bosom and fertility of her youth; She wept as the wayward men she fed and sheltered, raped and pillaged her indigenous children, but still she was strong.
She welcomed with open arms the stolen children of her black sister, and wept for them too as they were oppressed and beaten, forced to till and turn their adopted mother for their captors benefit. She accepted with motherly grace, the lost children of her East Indian and Chinese cousins, and said these are my children, and from out of many they are one.
She bade her time, and watched the rapists leave, and her children rejoice, free of their oppressors, free of the men who had beaten and trod upon their mother for so long. Her children sang, and she danced, life was good, we were ‘free’. But these children took their freedom, and from it, took liberty - they grew lazy, grew greedy, grew spiteful, and wicked.
New found peace was broken by shots in the night and blood in the streets. Soon before long, again a coarse hand lay on her bare bosom, while another tore violently at her skirt, but now neither hand was white, instead: one orange and one green, nor was either hand foreign, but both from her own. It is these corrupt hands that led the blind and ignorant children to tear at their mother’s flesh.
She fell to her bruised knees and wailed as what was once of wood and water became tar and cement, as her children poisoned what she had given them to drink, and made barren the land given them to toil.
And so, as I speak this eulogy for our dead mother, I see you all watch, with hypocritical grief – you, who ravaged your own mother’s body, and destroyed her soul, you look at her now with broken hearts. You holler and shriek with heartache, when you are guilty.
I admit I am complicit in her murder, for I stood idly by while she died, I did not stop you and I did not call for help. I watched helplessly as you let our neighbours, distant and near, take turns with her, as the rapists before had done, till she was spent and their lust satisfied.
For this guilt, I cannot watch her be buried and I will not sing at her grave. Instead, I will leave this mournful scene, to go to some distant shore and one day tell my children, and their children after them, stories of my beautiful mother, who bore such pain, with hope for her children, only to be torn apart by the same blind and hateful brood.
And my children will tell me, that nothing so beautiful could ever have existed, and that I am a liar, and they will be right for she no longer does exist and soon it will be as if she never did. Might our consciences never grant us solace and may Jamaica rest in pieces, for that is how we have left her.
-- Unknown
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Carl Harper
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Jamaica This is VERY apt. But that is what independence brings with it, RESPONSIBILITY and SEGREGATION. When a child grows up and leaves home misfortune lead them to BEG for a dollar to survive. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfuNWjBYfs8 I would so love to return to JA where my mother was born to live, but its people do not appreciate outsiders, I've settled for another island, where just like where I live now my property is MINE and I can leave my house door open and go to sleep with any fear. I wish you luck! |
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