yamaye
Land of Wood and Water
“Jamaica”
2300
Boo doom boodoom! dang. crash! bang!! To escape the pain, we pitch ourselves out, straight onto Portland Bight construction site. And for a second, as we shift into Ke Ara selves, our hearing is shattered.
Muffled and clad in plastic now, the extent of the construction stretches before us. Huge barges pump a mixture into vast machines, rubble is being loaded, all clouded in dust and shrieking hot.
We touch our visors and can see through the earth and boulders of the island — pipes running under mountains to building sites all over: Hellshire Hills, Cockpit Country … The last reserves of wooded land and naniki, gone. As the mixture from the pipes is poured into gigantic 3-D printers, building parts are churned out.
Completed complexes are covered by air-conditioned glass domes, and inside them, green gardens and turquoise pools shine, like precious flowers guarded in laboratories. On the shores, waterfront and luxury-resort domes enclose a piece of sea with artificial beaches and wave machines. Inside one, a plastic-looking Ke Ara serves a reclining human-looking Ke Ara, and a Jamaican iguana also lounges, under tanning lights.
Scuttling away from the crazy construction, we are corralled in a packed street between identical box-shelters. We stream with the plasticized Ke Ara into a bubble resort, on their way to work for the more human-looking managers, their tourists, and wealthy residents.
A plastic-clad Ke Ara jostling past shoots onto our visors,
[They may look more human, but they are without much humanity. They are the hoarders and spenders.]
Inside the spotless resort, we escape from the kitchen and enter an airy lobby. Destination machines flash their hyper-coloured screens at us, glowing and calling. They are advertising Caribbean chain resorts. I drift.
[Don’ go no farther, Amana.]
[But wait, my elders dem know we’a stray, yeh, but dem also know we l’arning.] I touch a screen and instantly we’re both encapsulated and suctioned into an air tube.
Smooth as silicone we’re delivered and released into a lavish casino hall, in another resort, in Kingston.
I hustle after Skelele as he quickly joins the workers signing out and leaving.
In this city the contrast between bubble life and local life is greater. The tiny housing units are jammed together tightly and more plasticized Jamaican Ke Ara hustle the streets. These people are different somehow. We tune ourselves in, closer. In this smooth, flexy body, a food fuels resilience, defiance of the destructive ways carried in this same body. Sonic history is in the blood, in the way we move and communicate, the integrity in the spine.
We bore our way through.
[They mus’ have naniki here, somewhey …]
[Girl, you don’ understand my people. My elders’a watch ’pon me ALL de time, always. We don’ have no time for dis!] He tries to move faster, but can’t in the crowd.
We pass a Rastaman stirring a bubbling pot of ital, serving a steaming bowl to a child. As she blows the steam to eat, reggae and dub music notes rise and stick on to her plastic-clad shoulders. She laughs as the bass chords bounce.
A dapper grandpa and granny serve a set of people at the front of their unit — mento and rocksteady festival dumplings. Respect dipping hands, inna timing bow, giving and receiving the fresh golden balls.
We pass a busy ska jerk chicken pit, then a Dancehall Queen spots us and hails me out.
[Come fuh yuh Dancehall Bammy!] handing me a round cassava and red-coconut sandwich that’s vibrating with the deep loudness. [I don’ forget you, dahling.]
She winks and Skelele shyly collects his.
He grins at me as we bite into the Bami bold sweetness, breaking into a run as the crowd thins.
Soon as we round the corner though, RAAAGGGHH, scrap, dash, and a pack of ferocious stray dog duppies, rogue naniki, attack us.
Pelting the Bami at them, we barely outrun them, scale up onto a mixing machine and jump. We jump, trusting our sea-core selves to protect.
Transforming, suited up, we slide into the concrete-plastic mixture, in the ducts, down, underwater to the mixing centre. Guami-ke-ni, help us. Release us from this senseless mission. Migration is how we reach, is how we roll, but why this?
Shuttle-tumbling, we head into the great knot of pipes and silos, snakes leading through a master oil rig, tubes leading out in various directions to islands, pumping oil, plastic, liquid glass, steel, and cement.
Plopped into a towering vat, we can see that the air, and sea surface too, hums around that mega centre. Super-speed boats, air shuttles, drones, droids, and bots scuttle around, in and out of the hub. As if trying to make a new volcanic island.