When I was ten, my family moved to a house on Liguanea Avenue in Kingston. It was the first house my parents owned – they had just turned 40. The land was big – nearly two acres – and consisted mostly of a Seymour grass lawn and mature mango trees of various kinds. The soil was clay and it would resist all my mother’s attempts at flowers. My father paid 5000 pounds for it in 1963.
The house was nothing special. You could see the bones of its origins and the changing aspirations of its owners. A hodge-podge building, different floors, different windows, rooms leading into other rooms. Organic, in other words, responding to new desires. But the land was in the shadow of Jacks Hill and the house was angled right to catch the land breezes. I climbed all the trees, ate the fruit, rode my bicycle up and down the driveway until I was allowed to go on the road, later learned to drive on that same driveway, watched the clay soil split in droughts and the grass shrivel, die, and return with the rains. There I grew in privilege.
My father sold a piece of the land in the 1980s – he described it as a non-performing asset and five townhouses were built. Roughly five of the mango trees were felled – my sisters and I have different memories of the number of trees – but my father insisted that a particular mango tree remain on his side of the fence, so the boundary fence line takes a strange half circle.
My parents divorced, the house was rented, I lived there for a short while when my son was young. It survived Hurricane Gilbert in 1988. My sisters had no fond attachment to Liguanea Avenue – that’s how we referred to it, as if the house owned the street. For them, the house was unhappy and it was, but I, barefoot in the grass, windblown in the trees, found rootedness there.
My father returned to Liguanea Avenue with his new wife, grew commercial orchids on the front lawn, had people over for drinks under the tree he claimed as his, and they lived there together until he died in 2011, January 4th, as it happened. So I am thinking of him now.
‘Liguanea Avenue is down,’ my husband told me sometime in 2022. My stepmother had sold it to a developer, retaining one of the homes which will eventually pass to me and my sisters. I drove there, talked my way past the security guard and stood looking at the rubble the house had become. Did that pile hold my memories? I decided it did not.
A year later, I drove up the widened driveway and stopped at the security post. The new homes were almost complete, basic landscaping was in – mostly the palms which seem to be all landscapers and regulators want these days. The site was virtually all hard surfaces and heat radiated off the asphalt. The houses were luxurious, expensive, dull to my eyes, reproduced all over Kingston, and without any noticeable concessions to the climate crisis we are already living through. At the time of my visit, the sweltering summer of 2023 was still ahead.
I stop writing, uncertain. What case am I trying to make here? Is this just unfiltered nostalgia for a privileged youth and teenage? The house I grew up in was not deserving of preservation for any reason, it was not a graceful example of colonial architecture – and I realize we could have a debate as to whether any of those structures should be preserved at all – no public figure lived there, no historic treaty signing occurred, there was nothing memorable at all. But I do want to point out that the land it sat on, far too large for any single family, was once just trees and grass. The new houses will radiate the already scorching heat and send the runoff from all those impermeable surfaces pouring along streets, into drains and gullies, and ultimately, the sea – after, of course, the torrents have collected all manner of waste. And this is happening everywhere you look in Kingston, despite all the rhetoric about climate and green building and sustainability. Everywhere, we chase our insatiable desires.
And this is the hurdle presented by the climate crisis. Some people got almost two acres and full-grown mango trees and now those who did not say – it’s our turn. And it IS their turn, they should get what others enjoyed and more. But I tell people it’s like being in a lifeboat at sea with limited food, no rescue in sight, and the occupants of the lifeboat agree to ration the food. But on the first night, one person eats half the rations. What do the lifeboat dwellers do? Eat the rest of the food? Throw the thief overboard? No, we might curse and swear at he who took more than he had a right to, but on that morning, if we are to survive, we lifeboat dwellers must agree that we need the thief to help with the rowing, and we must reassign rations with much less to go around. And yes, the thief gets less, but enough to keep him alive.
I walked through the new townhouses at Liguanea Avenue and there I saw the last remaining mango tree still standing, inside the curved wall my father required. I didn’t know what to feel. Yes, I was glad to see the tree had survived, but it also symbolized our willingness to accept tinkering at the margins, when the changes we need to make are sweeping and radical and essentially require a complete rethink of how we humans construct dwelling places, how we make livable cities, how we might move towards what Guardian columnist George Monbiot has called private sufficiency and public luxury. How we might move to a full understanding of the precariousness of the lifeboat we are all in now, and how we might act accordingly.
Those are many of the reasons I chose to live near Highgate when planning my return to Jamaica. I am very happy and trying my best to maintain a tiny footprint. Could never live in Kingston again although I gre up in Constant Spring
Haha. Well it was a really good party.