Paint the Town Red

There have been one or two popular novels that deal with the descent of Jamaica into political warfare in the late 70s and 80s, but Brian Meeks’ novel has both the authentic insights of someone who was as an activist student leader at the centre of the events looked back on, and theshaping of art rather than sensation. Brian Meeks’ novel is a moving requiem for the years when an extraordinary ferment in Jamaican society, when reggae and Rastafarian dreams reached from the ghettoes to the University campus, and idealistic young men and women threw themselves into the struggle to free independent Jamaica from its colonial past. In portraying the violent death of those hopes and the different ways in which the participants try to repair their lives, Meeks’ sensitively written and well-structured novel speaks powerfully to the present, when even now, Jamaica’s political divisions erupt into killings on the streets. The novel begins with the release from jail after eleven years of a young Rastafarian who was involved in the political violence that erupted when forces hostile to the radical socialist currents within the 1972 Manley administration sought to destabilize Jamaican society. As Mikey takes a minibus through Kingston, his story is told as a series of carefully crafted flashbacks. A series of encounters and the memories they provoke reveal that few have escaped unscathed from those years: there are the dead, the imprisoned, the maddened, the turncoats, and those like Mikey who carry the burden of those times.