Going Home to Teach

This morning on the way to work, I finished re-reading Anthony Winkler’s “Going Home to Teach.” I hadn’t read it in a while, but found it while cleaning out the garage this past Sunday morning. Anthony Winkler is a really gifted author and he has a talent for clearly reproducing the essence of raw Jamaica, even if it is a Jamaica that existed before I was born. He also wrote “The Lunatic” which I need to find and re-read again as well. He is a white Jamaican who currently lives in Atlanta, GA.

This book “Going Home To Teach” recounts his experiences when he returned home to Jamaica to teach back in the 1970s. Those were tumultuous times for Jamaica, when Michael Manley was in power and socialism was the philosophy du jour. Many people left, while Winkler was coming back. The book has a lot of pathos, humour, and drama; but what really makes it impressive and relevant to me are the observations on Jamaican, American and English culture. Here are some samples. I don’t necessarily agree with all his observations, but I think they are worth noting.

On being white in Jamaica, specifically referring to his American wife’s experience:
“To be white in a black country with a long English colonial history is to be a pariah, an ambiguous entity. It is to be simultaneously respected and despised, to arouse suspicion and curiosity, to evoke defiance, rudeness, envy and condescension. It is to be separated from that inalienable birthright every white American enjoys in his own country; the expectation of being treated with indifference in a public place. When you are white in a black land like Jamaica, you are no longer merely a man, or a woman, or a child. For good or ill, you are also immediately transmogrified into a living symbol of a detested colonial past.”

On Jamaican and American attitudes towards economic roles:
“The American nation is essentially a confederation of economic tribes known as businesses and corporations, each with its own totemic history, identity…when you work for an American corporation it defines you, moulds you…and eventually changes your values and perceptions...Americans are reared with the expectation that a large part of their personal identity will eventually be defined in adulthood by an economic role. One becomes what one does…Jamaicans DO their careers, their occupational pursuits; Americans BECOME them…This wedding of personality and occupation is a most peculiar trait for Jamaicans to comprehend mainly because they have inherited from their own cultural experience a deep-seated dislike for ready-made economic roles. Jamaicans revel in the expression of an idiosyncratic self, and reject any occupational role that brings with it blanket expectations of the self. Why this is so no doubt goes back to our experience with slavery when we waged and endless war of passive resistance against the slave master’s desires and struggled hard to repudiate what he wanted us to become.”

On “getting on bad”
“This expression has a peculiar meaning to the Jamaican, and no known equivalent in America. To ‘go on bad’ is to employ the behaviour of the lower class in a sphere of life where it is outlandishly inappropriate. One cannot ‘go on bad’ in a true democracy like America, but only in a society that separates people into classes by a strictly prescribed code of manners. Under the Englishman’s colonial blueprint, the ragged brute in the streets is expected to rant and rave over grievances and raise his voice in profanity, but not the tuxedoed gentleman at a formal dinner. And should the gentleman so behave for whatever reason other than rare excusable drunkenness, he is said to have ‘gone on bad.’ His sin is not so much bad behaviour as it is a degenerate hybridisation of manners-bringing the lower-class brute into the drawing room- and the penalty is social expulsion. He simply will never be invited back.”
The unfortunate thing is that many times, getting on bad is the only way to get anything done! He notes this in the anecdote that follows this quote, which I won’t replay here.

It’s a great autobiographical novel told from a point of view that I haven’t even considered too much; that of the person who is born in Jamaica and is just as Jamaican as I am, except that he is white. It is an accurate snapshot of Jamaica in the 1970s as well. Well, I assume that, since I wasn’t born then :D At any rate, I highly recommend it. Also read the rest of his books: “The Lunatic” “The Painted Canoe” “The Great Yacht Race” and “The Duppy”. I have read them all except for the last one, those I have read have been very good also.