The Diaspora in Context – The Real Potential

by Margaret Reckord Bernal

Current discussion across Jamaica reverberates with the question of the participation of diaspora people, local people, and in what institutional and structural  way this will take place. 

Is it legal representation? Is it temporary voting rights /partial voting rights? Is it intervention through the government mechanisms abroad – embassy – high commission – consulate – national organizations?

The matter is replete with opinion, comment, dictate , ultimatum.

I wish humbly to suggest that this discussion presupposes a premise which is inaccurate and /or multi-faceted at the very least.  Our Jamaican diaspora is not outside of our Jamaican nation. It is an inseparable, integrated, ever existing extension of our island home. 

Our diaspora is, was and always will be – Jamaica.

The diaspora is an emotional entity. It is a living breathing life force. It is heart. It is memory.  It is our  very soul –  and it has always been this way. As far as known Jamaican history extends, the people who built this country up, established, planted, created a Nation – a rainbow coloured cosmos of the world’s nationalities. And no sooner done, formed physically and emotionally than the people evinced both an inward and an outward vision. 

That is why today when the discussion about diaspora rights and involvement are hotly debated, my suggestion is that the starting premise needs to be re- focused. Jamaica is both a place and it is a state of mind. 

The migrant states adamantly: “Anywhere mi is in dis worl, ah Jamaica mi deh!”

 He tributes Miss  Lou – “Whether you’re in Toronto or London or Canada – ah Jamaica yuh deh!” 

That is the power of the diaspora, this compelling self-identification.

We would not examine, predict and pontificate on the  rights of the Jamaican citizen to  describe themselves as Jamaican. 

The diaspora citizen offers an opportunity for us to recognise an audacious, extended, vigorous power to the meaning of the  word –” migrant”.

Throughout its history Jamaican migrants have travelled out to build the world. Bluefields, Nicaragua is a place reached by an arduous sea and swampland journey. This has been true since  the 1740’s when the  area  came under the control  of colonial Jamaica – in  sometime alliance with the indigenous Miskito. Their last king died in Kingston Public hospital in 1908. The destination you arrive at  today is Jamaica control reincarnated –  a community which could be Little London, Manchioneal, or Sandy Bay, Hanover. 

The audacious spirited belly-laugh, the language, the look, the food, the cadence of voice and instrument  is the same even though these migrants arrived  hundreds of years ago  seeking jobs, building communities, drifting in all directions across Central America absorbing new languages, creolising them but keeping home heart-close.

Jamaican migrants have built worlds.

The world of the Panama Canal – in the Culebra Cut where thousands labored and thousands died. 

Pres. Theodore Roosevelt in Chicago, 1904 –“The Panama Canal … the greatest material feat of the 20  century – greater than any pre-existing feat in any century”

Jamaican healer, Mary Seacole, learning that there were needs to be met and monies to be made in housekeeping, catering and nursing, arrived in Las Cruces, Panama in 1850. 

She threw a tablecloth over a tavern table and with her assistant cowering beside – slept out the first night and in the morning, started her new life as healer and businesswoman.

It was her same migration story 30 years earlier. 

At 18 years old, Mary Seacole, born on East Street Kingston, equipped with healing skills taught by her mother, practical experience observed in the Up Park Camp military hospital – set off for England.  She carried baskets of herbs, medicinal barks, aromatic topical condiments like cinnamon and sage. Later, on the battlefields of the Crimea, she would reunite with soldiers she had first tended in her hometown. 

Early migrant entrepreneurs and visionaries went to West Africa in 1780 –  established missionary churches, married, set up trading stations, schools and governance institutions and went on to work across the communities of early African kingdoms.

Traveling out from “yard” was never anything new to the Jamaican people. What was remarkable though was that decade after decade, century after century, this energy and enterprise was a consistent, persistent feature of the migrant Jamaican.

Migrants going in their tens of thousands to Cuba, to Panama, to Costa Rica and onward to California, northward to Canada, across the Atlantic starting the Windrush flotilla, docking in the Thames.

The energy of these migrants in nation building was consistent, herculean, underpinned by an unfailing love for their homeland and commitment to building their native Jamaica as well as their current city of abode.

This emotional connection is a remarkable and dearly cherished hallmark of the Jamaican diaspora. It rises to a fever-pitch, at times of deep necessity. Hurricane Gilbert (1988) impelled a Jamaican nurse in Seattle, to organize and stock a trailer with supplies and drive 3,000 miles down the west coast to Miami to deliver a lorry load of Love destined for her homeland.

It drives organisations across northern UK cities to intervene in their workplace when an opportunity for help to their homeland 5,000 miles away presents itself.

 In 1950s Nottingham, UK, at the Raleigh Bicycle factory – the Jamaican workforce facing imminent layoffs as sales declined, created a solution. Independent of the factory sales protocols, they reasoned out an intervention, wrote back to Jamaica, amassed an order for hundreds of Raleigh bicycles and saved the day at their new Nottingham workplace and benefited their old homeland.

It is the same emotional intensity of love and connection that drives migrants monthly to collect school bags, computer sets, groceries, clothing, sneakers, track suits and ship a steady stream of small love packages back to Middle Quarters, Windward Road, St. Margaret’s Bay, St. Elizabeth – clinics, hospitals, basic schools, community centres and children’s homes. It is the same connection that has created Jamaica Caribbean student associations on university campus after campus across North America.

Their ongoing remittances and Western Union emergency monies are legendary. As are the continuous streams of barrels and love and goodwill, and the picturesque varieties of homes sprouting across every parish. And grandchildren with varying world accents who populate deep rural Jamaica at holiday time. 

This is a remarkable population. Our diaspora people who have never separated from their homeland. Let us never consider separating from them.

There is no separation. Space and time are illusionary when love and heritage is the binding force. We should frame discussions about these shining pioneers in this light – Our family, Our folk. And pay tribute and give thanks.

Margaret Reckord Bernal, an independent Heritage consultant, sociologist and poet has worked locally and internationally with Jamaican communities and creatives to document and promote  Jamaica’s cultural  heritage – especially during her 11 year tenure at the Jamaican Embassy in Washington DC. Contact artsjamaica@gmail.com