Show Us as We Are: Place, Nation and Identity in Jamaican Film

FOR VERY GOOD REASONS, THE HANDFUL OF books on anglophone Caribbean cinema mostly treat it as part of a larger, regional endeavour.1 Apart from Cuba, few places in the Caribbean can support their own film industry, and production proceeds by fits and starts. Despite this, the long history and cultural specificity of Jamaican film-making have resulted in a body of work that repays a closer look. Rachel Moseley-Wood’s study does not set out to be a history of Jamaican cinema, or even a comprehensive overview. What she offers is a series of case studies of key films, from pre-Independence documentaries through the seminal 70s moment of The Harder They Come (1972) 2 to Better Mus’ Come,3 made in 2010. Setting each of these within the parameters spelled out in her title – place, nation and identity – she asks what they have to tell us about how Jamaicanness has been conceived and represented on film, how this is shaped by generic conventions and how it has changed over time. The first part of the title, Show Us as We Are, sets up an expectation of the cliché “telling our own stories” variety – the idea that certain people and perspectives have direct access to the ‘truth’ or to more ‘real’ versions of it than others. In fact, the words are taken from an editorial in the Daily Gleaner in 1913, objecting to a British film company’s dramatisation of Jamaicans as “halfsavage natives” who kidnap a missionary for ransom. “We want”, it declared, “to be shown just as we are . . . as a colony without a colour problem” (2–3). Seizing on this quotation, Moseley-Wood makes it her project to deconstruct its underlying assumptions and demonstrate how irony and contradiction are built into it from the outset. Far from cliché, in other words, she proceeds to lay out a nuanced argument for a plurality of perspectives inflected by class, race, gender, politics and history. In this regard, the title is misleading and one might have wished for a more effective clue to its purpose – “contesting place, nation and identity”, for example.