In an interview on Jamaica

Your third book is Evan Jones’s Stone Haven.

This brief novel is key, I think, to understanding the life and politics of Jamaica today. The novel filters five decades of island history through the life of a single Jamaican family in Portland parish. Grace, a Quaker missionary from America’s Midwest, has defied her family by marrying a ‘coloured’ Portland planter, Stanley Newton. Stone Haven is the name of the house that Stanley builds for Grace on their marriage in 1920, and which becomes the focus of the Newton dynasty’s increasingly clamorous sexual and political improprieties.

‘Clamorous sexual improprieties’ – that’s a great phrase. It does make me think that one of the reasons Jamaican culture is so popular in Britain now is that British culture, historically, is quite repressed. 

I think we have a view of Jamaica as being a rather laid-back place where there are no problems – 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. All of this collision of different views about sex comes probably from slavery where the plantocrats tended to be very abusive of their charges. I think today there remains the sense that it’s a fatherless society, where the father is going to be absent, and he’s busy procreating with other women, to put it very crudely.

Evan Jones himself was a typical product of this mish-mash of different cultures and peoples that you find in Jamaica. In America, pre-Civil Rights, Evan Jones would have been described as ‘yellow’ and in Jamaica as ‘red’ and in England as ‘half-caste’, to use that horrible expression. When Jones first went to America, he found himself in a railway station with signs for separate compartments for ‘whites’ and ‘coloureds. Because he was a mixed-race Jamaican, he didn’t know which compartment to go into, so he just stood on the platform. I think the colour bar in the United States shocked Jamaicans who settled there, especially during the war. But they began to see it as preferable in some ways to the subterranean racism in 1930s Britain. At least in America it was very clear-cut. It’s more complicated in Britain.