Jamaican American Club Newsletter
SUMMER 2019
WANTED IN JAMAICA: EMPATHY Special points of interest:
Wanted in Jamaica: Empathy
Trivia
A Brief Tirade on Insurgency and Government
The Black Woman I Am
By Diana McCaulay One of the most frequent questions I get asked about my novel Dog-Heart is this: How did you, an uptown woman, put yourself in the mind of a 12-year-old inner city boy? (I often think the sub-text is – how dare you? And please add the word “white” before woman and the word “black” before boy, although they are never actually uttered…)
Tr iv i a Jamaica has the oldest Jewish cemetery in the Western Hemisphere. This cemetery is located at 1 Hunt's Bay in St. Andrew. It was founded by the Jews of Port Royal in the latter part of the seventeenth century when a Jewish community flourished there. The Jews excelled in the trade of gold, silver and insurance. According to the Jamaica National Heritage Trust, the site was declared a national monument on July 15, 1993.
I always say in response that I went through a period of very focused observation of children on the streets of Kingston, and then I thought about what I had seen, tried to imagine what the lives of the children were like, tried to feel what they might feel. So no, I tell my questioners, I didn’t research DogHeart, I empathized it. Since May of last year, following what is now being euphemistically called the “Tivoli Incursion” where between 70 and 120 Jamaicans died in circumstances that have never been fully explained, I have been struck by the lack of empathy in the way in which we regard our fellow Jamaicans. This is not a new
revelation; of course, we Jamaicans have always been fierce individualists. But as I continue to think about possible solutions to the apparently intractable problems of our society, I wonder if the answer is to be found in that simple word – empathy. What if we could put down the baggage we all carry – racism, classism, a host of categories by which we identify “us” and “them,” our perfectly justified hurt, rage and fear – and just ask ourselves: how would I feel if that were me?
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