“Jamaica has many personalities,” my guide, Lucretia, advised me as we rounded a bend in the road on the way to an unspoilt stretch of coast home to fishermen and farmers. I tore my gaze momentarily from the car window, as farmland and glittering ocean spilled into the distance, and nodded in agreement. By this time, I’d been on the island a few days and I was starting to see what she meant. Jamaica is often reduced to a string of cliches: there’s the Bob Marley tours, the all-inclusive resorts, the marijuana aficionados. But between the beach parties and neverending skank beat of daily life, you’ve got a world of people doing incredible things that go unseen. In my brief time here I’d met artists, conservationists and locals proud of their communities and eager to show them off. They’d opened my eyes to a side of the island I hadn’t considered: a thoughtful, artistic place where even the capital held unexpected treasures.
Indeed, when I arrived here I had allowed a day to see Kingston, the folly of which was soon revealed. This restlessly creative city is intent on reinventing itself and I had left little time to see its progress. But in the downtown National Art Gallery, I found the perfect introduction to the country, past and present.
The museum’s collection extended up to and beyond Jamaica’s gaining of independence in 1962, as it severed 300 years of British rule. The museum’s Dwayne Lyttle steered me around early wooden carvings by the island’s indigenous Taino people (“of course, the most famous artefacts are in your British Museum”) and examples from the colonial years, when wealthy sugar and tobacco plantation owners commissioned artists to capture their likenesses and riches.
Perhaps most interesting of all were the works of the nationalist movement that started with the arrival of an inspirational British-born artist and educator called Edna Manley in 1922. She was married to Norman Manley, the first premier of Jamaica, and is still a revered figure here. The country’s top art school is
