Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Let’s talk about Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a Residence Among the Negroes of the West Indies.
Yes, well, this is a tremendous book. He was someone a little bit like Lady Nugent, although he’s more fiercely anti-slavery than she is. What I love about Matthew Lewis is that you see in his journal entries this incredible strain of British Gothic running through. Perhaps one should call it Jamaican Gothic because a lot of British accounts of the island are inflected with these gothic conventions. And Lewis is very much saturated in all that. So, from a literary point of view it’s fascinating. But from a political point of view it’s even more interesting.
Lewis’s father owned an estate to the east of the island, and in his first visit to Jamaica in 1818 Lewis expected it to be this perfect paradise. Instead he found it a perfect hell. He found that the overseer had created his own private kingdom, like a Kurtz figure out of Heart of Darkness, subjecting his slaves to this appalling white man’s violence. Lewis made, I think, two more trips to Jamaica during the last three years of his life, and this journal was published 16 years after his death. I’ve read his gothic novels (The Monk is the most famous), and I don’t think anything else he wrote is half as good as the Jamaican journal he kept between 1815 and 1818.
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Ian Thomson is a writer, critic and journalist. He is the author of Primo Levi: A Life (Hutchinson, 2002), which won the Royal Society of Literature’s W H Heinemann Award in 2003. His account of contemporary Jamaica, The Dead Yard, was published by Faber in 2009. ‘I think we have a view of Jamaica as being a rather laid-back place where there are no problems,’ he says. ‘Although, in my experience, in Jamaica when they say “no problem” there is one. The other side of all of this is that it is quite an uptight culture in many ways, and there’s a lot of Victorian morality, particularly with the churchgoing population, which is massive in Jamaica. There is a lot of what they call a “fenky-fenky” attitude towards sex, which is actually quite prudish.’ He says 1950s Britain was unmindful of the Commonwealth and disinclined to help Jamaicans. Italians in Britain after the war, selling ice cream and confectionery, were made to feel more welcome, despite having fought on Hitler’s side in the conflict. And yet Jamaicans, British subjects, were not treated as such.
