Between Negril and Montego Bay [2001-2021]
Throughout my childhood, summers were spent with my family in Harvey River, a village just outside of Lucea, a coastal town at the northwestern tip of Jamaica, the halfway point between Negril and Montego Bay. For me and my cousins, who spent long summer days at grandmother’s house on our family plot 'in country’, watching Shirley Temple movies until the ‘current went out ‘ or swimming with neighborhood friends in rivers named ‘Becky’ and ‘Kofi’, a trip to Lucea meant going out on the town.
Lucea is where we bought kola champagne and [beef] patties with [cheese], hung out with friends in the bus parking lots of the market, and then, when we were older, went to an all night dancehall party. During my early teenage years especially, Jamaicans my age, my cousins Archie, Jonell, and Mikey, and all of their friends, fascinated and inspired me. They had the coolest slang words, the best dance moves, and a way of life so different than mine. I wanted to be like them, talk patois like them, dance like them, live like them, my cousins in Jamaica. Taking a taxi with them to Lucea, down hills and around windy roads, to eat food and hang out and party with friends, in a country, an island that everyone said was dangerous, was incredibly liberating. Despite what people say about Jamaica, even my parents, who still express their concern when I travel the island independently, it’s the one place in the world I have always felt safe, welcome. Jamaica in general, and Lucea in particular holds a special place in my memories and I draw on that energy when I long for that feeling of family, of being at home.
‘Sugar estate in Lucia, Jamaica. 1871’, The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1871.
‘Lucia, Jamaica, West Indies’, The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1871.
But it wasn’t until I found these Victorian era photographs of a sugar estate and a busy street in ‘Lucia, Jamaica, West Indies’ in the Schomburg Center’s Digital Stereograph Collection, that I began to think of this coastal town between Negril and Montego Bay as an archive of me and my family and my unnamed ancestors who were brought there from villages in West Africa to work the land. The drive from Harvey River to Lucea, from Lucea to Negril, from Lucea to Montego Bay is haunted by the legacies of slavery and colonialism. This project uses photography and film to create a visual narrative of those colonial remains and diasporic traces, with the broader, longer term aim of writing a caption that contextualizes, indexes, and archives each image.
This project officially began in February 2020, during a family trip with my mother to visit my grandmother and cousins, but uses family photographs I have actively archived since August 2001. Visual narratives based on this project can be found at ‘Lucea, Jamaica’, which makes up part of my ongoing visual think piece, ‘Becoming with the Archive: Blackness Gender Diaspora.’