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  • A Scarcely Spoken Past
  • David Scott

Together with a friend, my mother’s father left Sri Lanka (then, British Ceylon) in the second decade of the twentieth century and, having stopped off, so it is said in the Canary Islands and perhaps elsewhere as well, eventually found himself in Jamaica (then too, of course, a British colony). Who knows what motivation prompted this journey halfway across the imperial world. Who knows what imagined horizon he traveled toward. His name was T. H. Samil (the initials standing for Tana Hewage—his ge, or family name). In Jamaica, he became T. H. Samiel. He was Sinhalese, from a small town called Angulugaha in the south of the country, not far from the port city of Galle. I never met him. He died in 1956. I have little idea of who he was. His family in Sri Lanka, it appears, was in the jewelry business, and in Jamaica, Samiel established himself in the trade, opening a store in downtown Kingston, on Harbour Street, near the fabled Myrtle Bank Hotel. This was the great hotel of its age in Jamaica. It had been converted by the colonial government from an entertainment and social center of sorts into a grand hotel in preparation for the Great Exhibition of 1891. Like much else in Kingston, Myrtle Bank was destroyed in the 1907 earthquake, but by the time my grandfather arrived in Jamaica it had been rebuilt and sold to the United Fruit Company.

For a while Samiel seemed to prosper in his business—enough, anyway, to support some members of the growing population of Indians in Jamaica and to send money back to Angulugaha, to build the house to which he must have dreamed of returning. But, alas, this was not to happen. He formed a union with a woman of Indian descent from Black River, St. Elizabeth, named Iris Black, with whom he had three children. My mother, Myrrol, was their firstborn. I never knew Iris either; she died in 1945. Samiel didn’t marry her until after their second child, Arthur, was born. Only Lilavati was born in wedlock. What was he waiting for? Did he wonder what it would mean [End Page vii] to marry an Indo-Jamaican, what it would mean to take her back to Sri Lanka to his family? In any event, Samiel never returned home. Was the late marriage itself a sign of defeat, disappointment, the end and not the beginning of the promise of the journey? Going back to Sri Lanka seemed no longer an option.1 Certainly it appears that Iris and Samiel were not very happy together. Indeed, she eventually left him, taking my mother with her—to what appears to have been a hard, joyless, precarious life. My mother scarcely spoke about Iris or about her own childhood and adolescence; she shared few anecdotes that might have offered my siblings and me a window onto her past. And when she did speak of the past, it was invariably with a great deal of anger and bitterness. There was too much unpleasantness. This contrasted sharply with my father, John, who spoke a lot about his childhood, all the towns he’d lived in, and whose mother, Bridget, at least I knew.

The hegemony of the Afro-creole in the Jamaican national story meant that being a “half-coolie,” as I was often designated (at school, on the football field, in teenage social circles), was at best an ambiguous status. Even in being a young Rastafarian—a “coolie dread”—there was clearly something unearned in the identity, and not only because I was obviously middle class. The founding narrative of slavery gave “blackness” a potential positive value not only in the scale of authenticity but in terms of a sense of entitlement on the basis of that original wrong. Unlike in Guyana and Trinidad, perhaps, the Indian in Jamaica had a social presence of sorts but no cultural-political claim. Nothing in the way of recognition was owed for the fact of indenture: it shaped, in other words, no national wound; it had incurred no moral debt in the anticolonial imaginary. And thus the national discourse had...

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