Some years ago I dipped my head underwater, nonchalantly peeking at mediocre tropical life several hundred yards from golden-white Negril sands. Dodging corals and microbes, I surfaced to adjust my snorkel only to hear these pulsing waves drift to sea, passing the clear breakers that traveled inland (“Bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-BWAA-BWAA”).
No voices carried so far from shore, but I knew what that beat meant: The vengabus was coming.
This was my collision with a beautiful culture? This was an escape from American banality?
Get ready to shift priorities next week. The world turns upside down, or so it seems. But you’d be better off taking a dare — bypassing the hacknee travel agency — and strolling to the local theater, because spring break is all performance.
Imagine the world on its side instead; it’s a hamburger, or for the sake of the picture, a jerk chicken sandwich. Invert the meat and the bread, replace the tropics with our temperate zones. You’re there already.
We have named these places Cancer and Capricorn. We see infection and excess. But these words and images are forgotten under the tropical veil, the illusion that temperature and atmosphere relate.
Here are the vices of industrialized, mechanized, literate lands imposed on “innocent” native cultures. Missionaries converted savages, or so the course packs say. But we depart next week to leave school behind, so forget what you have learned.
Which part is savage? What happens in Kingston stays in Kingston, right? In Jamaica I was told yellow stands for the sun, green for the land, red for revolutionary blood and black for the “na-a-tives.”
Who are these natives? They are usurped peoples, living under the sun in diaspora on the lands marked with the blood of extinct societies. The world is pregnant with these colors; they are not unique to the tropics. Show me a place that isn’t a land of wood and water.
We celebrate urbanity these days for its gritty overpopulation, its centrifugal interaction of humans and the consequent human vices.
Marginality is pushed into the main frame of the picture, because modernity’s conflict with nature begets human nature and its products: noise, sex, drugs, disease.
Tell me it’s not savage to walk the beach in Negril and be solicited for a “blow” or “8-ball.” State Street is more than urban. It’s a conflagration fueled by urbanity and saturated with diversity. We leave town to escape the cold and escape this meta-urban existence.
It’s true. Out destination is something else. Cancun and Kingston are ur-urban. They are the hyperbolic result of ultra-density and vice. They are New York and Los Angeles inverted, taken to their biological and historical limits.
Do not be afraid to drink the water. Instead be prepared to drown in fucking and toxins. It’s savage and a little expensive. It’s ourselves, intensified.
It’s post-modern colonialism, but not in a geo-political sense. This is a cultural collision of a different kind. We encounter these reaches to encounter ourselves and fool our friends into believing we met someone new or went somewhere undiscovered. We rollick at this experience, and we should.
If I can believe Amos is an ironic prophet, he said we should. Sacrifice and reverence are not the answer to our three transgressions, or four if we concede what happened in Kingston stays with us. Come off it when you return.
I’ve made no sacrifices. I did not have to borrow. I opted for a Steinbeckian journey to the North and the South of California. I’ll see warm weather and family and old friends.
There is plenty of vice in Madison to revel in, and plenty of weekends left to drown. But I had to survive Cancer and Capricorn to earn them. What cultural collision is not beautiful?
Lars Russell ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in journalism and ILS.
