Preacher says there is a god shaped void in everybody life but the only thing ghetto people can fill a void with is void.
I'm not calling him a coward. I'm not saying he's stingy. But sometimes when you're too careful it just turns into a different kind of carelessness.
Daddy likes to say that, one day at a time, as if it's some strategy for living. And yet the quickest way not to live at all is to take life one day at a time. It's the way I've discovered to not do a damn thing.
Even if it never comes the point is I'll be waiting for it and the waiting is just as bad because you can't do anything else in Jamaica but wait for something to happen to you. This applies to good stuff too. It never happens. All you have is the waiting for it.
He say the point over and over, from one direction then the next with new words and the same words until he figure they get him point. But as usual white bwoi think black man stupid. Them get the message from he come through the door. Stop mess with white people.
I am slowly realising that even though the Singer is the centre of the story that it isn't really his story. Like there's a version of this story that's not really about him, but about the people around him, the ones who come and go that might actually provide a bigger picture than me asking him why he smokes ganja.
I wonder if you find this as obscene as I do that they are so quiet, as if this is work. There will be no last words. I wonder if you are crying now. I wonder if you hope somehow the Singer will hear you begging for mercy.
But you should know this.
The living, they never listen.
Make me ask you something, you think Trench Town is a favourite spot for anybody living in Trench Town? You think any of them sitting on a stoop saying, Now this is the life? Tourist funny, boy.
Bushwick. I still working my brain on how Jamaicans can come to a ghetto 5 time as big and with tenement three time as high and think they're better off. What, nobody know the difference between a good thing and a bigger bad thing? That must be for some other brother to figure out.
Hey me now... these meant something to me but they don't really give the full sense. When it starts, a boy is being buried alive. The Singer is in it but not of it, and there is a building inevitability to a climax that happens like midway, and then consequences spill out slow and certain for years and decades and may be only at the end of all that do you know why. And there are times you lose what is going on in the language and times it seems perfectly clear. And it understands real poverty in a way nothing else does.
And I forgot to mark my favourite line where he says it's so ugly a picture couldn't cover it because a picture would smooth the lines have some beauty. And then later someone else says that that beautiful line also has too much beauty.
Like the difference between poverty and the povertiresque in Pierre.
Anyway, I would read this one again and anything else by him too. It gets into something... Like Arundhati Roy says... How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everyone? No, by slowly becoming everything.
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