Karen Fog Olwig is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of Global Culture, Island Identity: Continuity and Change in the Afro-Caribbean Community of Nevis and Cultural Adaptation and Resistance on St. John: Three Centuries of Afro-Caribbean Life and a coeditor of Caribbean Narratives of Belonging: Fields of Relations, Sites of Identity.

CARIBBEAN JOURNEYS

Duke University Press

Contents

Chapter One

Individuals in the elder generations of the Muir family described the family as part of the respectable middle class of Jamaican society. This social position was attributed to the family's ability to maintain a well-kept two-story home; the family members' mastery of good manners and proper English, which gave them the confidence and ability to move in the higher social circles of the colonial society; and the family's livelihood, which allowed it to employ people rather than be employed. A clear subplot of the narratives was that the family had gained its social skills over several generations of proper rearing and British education. This social mobility had involved, among other things, the move of Emma Muir, the "founder" and matriarch of this family, from the small African Caribbean village of Refuge to the British colonial town of Falmouth.

The family members' desire for upward social mobility within British colonial society, and their strong identification with British colonial culture, could be described as a form of identification with a hierarchical imperial system. This sort of analysis, however, would ignore the strong feelings of relatedness and belonging, rooted in a loving and caring family home, that the individuals emphasized in their narratives. The intent of this chapter therefore is to understand how the elder members of the Muir family, who grew up in Jamaica, viewed their particular family background in the colonial town of Falmouth-the ways in which it has given meaning and a sense of common purpose to their life trajectories and thus provided them with a source of belonging and identification of importance to them, wherever they have settled. The opening quote is from Emma Muir's narration of her life story:

I was born in 1900, on the first of January, in a little village called Refuge. My mother was Elizabeth; my father, Sam Fernandes. I went to school there in the village. When I was fifteen I went to Falmouth to learn dressmaking, and in the afternoon I studied with a teacher in order to pass the student-teacher examinations so that I could become a teacher. These were my intentions, but they never matured! I sat for the first- and second-year exams, but when I was seventeen years old, I met a fellow. He was working on the Panama Canal, but because his mother was sick, he had come home for a visit, and he never returned. We were married in 1917. Then we started having children-first one girl, then four boys, and then three girls. We had eight children all together.

When I met Emma Muir in 1996, she was living in her daughter Jessica's home in a typical London suburb, with terraced houses, a high street with various shops, a green park, and easy access to the city via the "tube," the London subway system. In the 1960s, when Jessica and her family had moved into the neighborhood, it was almost entirely white English, but it had since become ethnically mixed, having had a large influx of immigrants from the former British colonies, mostly in Asia. Indeed, the home where I interviewed Emma might be described as Asian, Jessica's husband being Sri Lankan. Emma was one of the most recent arrivals, because she had moved in with Jessica just a month or so before I came, having lived most of her long life in Jamaica and the United States. It was not clear whether she was there for a prolonged visit or whether she was actually going to stay. This did not seem to matter to Emma because, as she explained, the family-wherever it was-was her home. When I asked Emma to tell me her life story, however, she dwelled on the life she had lived in Jamaica, particularly in Falmouth, where she spent most of her adult life. This was where she had married and raised her eight children, who, along with their children and grandchildren, provided the most important framework of her life. But it was also the place where the family had developed the sense of moral values and proper manners that Emma regarded as so essential and therefore had imparted to her children.

Today Falmouth is the small, sleepy capital of Trelawny parish, located a little more than twenty miles east of the fast tourist area of Montego Bay in northwestern Jamaica. When Emma was born, however, it was still a busy harbor city serving as a transshipment point for sugar cane grown on the large plantations in the surrounding countryside. Jamaica has been described as the "Caribbean core" because of its long history of plantation production, which meant that more than 800,000 Africans were transported to the island (Besson 2005: 17). Trelawny itself has been one of the main areas of sugar production in Jamaica, and in 1800, when the slave-based plantation economy was at its height, this parish had the greatest number of plantations in Jamaica (Besson 2005: 18). The plantation society was still strong when Emma grew up in the early twentieth century, and it has left an important legacy in the form of a hierarchical societal order based on race and class that still suffuses Jamaican society.

In her analysis of modern Jamaican society, Diane Austin-Broos (1994a: 218) notes that Jamaica has "at its core a sense of persisting hierarchical order. This is a sense of hierarchy that acknowledges ranked, inherited forms of difference." In this hierarchy, "social class and color groupings jointly present the major issues of status that constitute a Jamaican sense of hierarchy" (Austin-Broos 1994a: 214). Categorizing others on the basis of such distinctions, however, is no longer socially acceptable. Rather, a cultural value system has emerged where people are appraised according to their morals and behavior. As noted by Jack Alexander, "middle-class life and background is distinguished from lower-class life and background by virtue of being responsible in contrast to careless, civilized and socialized in contrast to unsocialized. So it is the presence of socialized and civilized characteristics in one party and their absence in the other party that results in the two parties having nothing in common" (Alexander 1973: 307). Jamaican society is thus hierarchical, not just because individuals have unequal access to vital resources such as land, education, and employment, but also in the sense that it is characterized by an intricate cultural system of differentiation based on perceptions of similarity and difference related to people's position in society.

While a "sense of hierarchy" permeates Jamaican society, Jamaicans have different ideas about the nature of this hierarchy and their place in it (Austin-Broos 1994a: 219), and notions of similarity and difference therefore are subject to a great deal of negotiation as people position themselves and others within the hierarchical social order. As Lisa Douglass (1992) has shown in her study of elite families in Jamaica, the family plays an important role in this negotiation and practice of hierarchy, especially among those who aspire to identify with the upper classes. It is within the family that a specific outlook on life and a certain mode of behavior, identified with a particular class position, can be acquired as a natural "habitus" (Douglass 1992: 247). Those who identify with the upper classes and the middle classes, and thus seek to demarcate themselves from individuals located lower in the social hierarchy, will tend to emphasize the importance of the family rather than kin. This is because the family can be defined as a more exclusive group of people with whom one shares "cultural principles of likeness, including ideas about the meaning and relative value of color, class, and gender." The family therefore can distinguish itself even by "minute types of differences gleaned in social practices," whereas kin is seen to comprise all blood relatives, regardless of their social position (Douglass 1992: 22). This does not mean that the family is an instrumental unit constructed for the purposes of mobility in the social hierarchy. Rather, the "cultural meaning, social values, and moral principles" associated with family life become the "content of family sentiment" (Douglass 1992: 265), or-from a slightly different theoretical point of view-that which leads to the sense of relatedness (Carsten 2000) that defines and gives meaning to a specific family unit and its position in society.

When Emma Muir began her life story in Refuge and moved on to Falmouth, she not only described her Jamaican origins in relation to named geographic localities. She also located herself-and her family-in a particular place in Jamaican society reflective of the kind of Jamaica with which she wished to identify. Emma's Jamaican identity, in other words, was rooted both in an island society that had since become an independent nation-state and in a very specific socially defined place in Jamaica. This was that of the middle class that emerged between the African Jamaican lower classes, struggling to realize their freedom after the abolition of slavery in 1834, and the upper class of British plantation owners and representatives of the British colonial regime, seeking to maintain their privileges in the plantation society. While Emma and her children described their Jamaican background in such a way that the family could be seen to belong to the respectable middle class, their narratives should not be viewed as merely serving the purpose of claiming a specific class position for the family in Jamaican society. As emphasized earlier, the particular mode of life that a particular family sees as its own becomes constitutive of family relations and sentiments and thus of the notion of relatedness that makes a family. As foundational family narratives, the life stories related by the family members therefore are selective, as any family's stories of the past will be (Douglass 1992: 92), because they seek to convey an understanding of that mode of life that family members cherish and have come to associate with their particular family and its Jamaican origins.

VILLAGE ORIGINS

Emma, as noted, began her life story by noting that she was born in Refuge and by mentioning the names of her parents and the fact that she had gone to school in the village where she was born. However, she quickly went on to relate that she had moved at a young age to Falmouth, where she met and married her husband and established a home. In the narrative that followed, she said no more about her roots in the village. When, in my second interview with Emma, I asked her to tell me more about Refuge, she did not paint a particularly favorable picture of the village:

You wouldn't know it unless you go there. It is just a little backward village that I left when I was fifteen. Imagine, when I was in Jamaica recently, a relative of mine wasn't well, and a fellow I knew asked me whether I would like to go see him. And I said, "Sure!" So he took me there, and I went there in my ninety-seventh year. And it hasn't improved. There has been no improvement, just from driving through. It had an elementary school. And it had a Roman Catholic church and a Baptist church. It had no banks, no nothing. Just a small village. [But who lived in the village?] Oh, lots of people! Poor people, and people of little means, you know-not wealthy people, either. But there were lots of estates in those days, where the people worked. To make a livelihood. [Sugar estates?] Sugar farms, cane. English people lived there. They had plantations there. When I grew up, there were English people living there, all over on the estates. They owned the estates. There was Oxford, there was Cambridge. You know all the names from here. [So there were English estate owners and poor people who worked on the estates?] Right, and afterwards there were factories, and, you know ... [Did the workers live in Refuge or on the estates?] The workers had their little homes in Refuge, and they lived there and they worked on the estates.

When I asked Emma whether it had been difficult for her to move from the village to the big town, she replied, "No, I mingled well. I thought well of myself." She attributed the ease with which she had gained acceptance in the town to her mother's good upbringing, her mother having shown her "the right way." Thus, the mother had made sure that Emma attended school every day and took music lessons, sent her to Sunday School every week, and checked that she knew her "memory gem," a "verse, or a golden text" that she had to learn for Sunday School. And perhaps most important, the mother had insisted that Emma speak "proper" English, not the "broken" Jamaican that was widely spoken in the village. Indeed, her mother had spoken standard English very well herself. This was highly unusual, because black people-like Emma's mother-rarely mastered this form of English:

My mother was dark in complexion. There were two Portuguese ladies living in our district, who looked after the Roman Catholic church. And one of them said, "When Elizabeth is inside speaking, and if you don't know, you would think that it is an English woman in there, speaking, because her speech is so lovely." And we couldn't speak the patois; we couldn't do this in those days. She would pull us up over the rope and correct us.

For Emma, her mother's insistence that she speak "proper English" meant choosing a better life for her:

Some people haven't got the intellectual or common sense to grasp it [proper English], or don't even want to. They don't want to either, Karen, you know. They just want that language [the patois]. So we all choose our own way in life. Some choose the patois; it is a choice that you have to make, what you want to make out of life.

This better life meant distancing oneself from other villagers who might be a bad influence-for example, because they spoke the patois: "I wasn't allowed to have too many friends. I wasn't allowed to roam about with everybody, mix with everybody. Not really, no."

Emma professed to have little knowledge about her mother's family, who had lived in the village for several generations and represented her black Jamaican background. She remembered her grandmother, who lived nearby in Refuge, and described her as "black" and "loving and caring," and added that "color didn't matter to you." When I asked her about her mother's father, she said she did not know anything about him or who he was. She knew her father's parents and was aware that they had come from Portugal, but did not know how they had ended up in Jamaica. They had "an estate, a cultivation" in the area, but she had never been there, she explained, because it was far away and she had no way of getting there. They did not own a big estate, she explained when I asked her about this, because such estates were all owned by the English people. However, she remembered fruit and sugar-cane juice being brought from her grandparents' estate to her home. Her father was in business and owned a number of stores that were run by "native" people.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from CARIBBEAN JOURNEYSby KAREN FOG OLWIG Copyright © 2007 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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