By Cousin Leroy, the Bronx.
image: “https://picsum.photos/seed/office-desk/1280/720"
So last week my manager Megan — she’s new, she’s fine, she’s trying — pulls me aside at my quarterly and she goes, “Leroy, we’re really trying to lean into cultural voices right now, and I saw on the news that Jamaica has been having some issues, and I was wondering if you could maybe, you know, share some perspective at next Thursday’s all-hands.”
And I said yes. Because of course I said yes. It’s performance review season. I have a mortgage.
Now let me be clear. I was born in Jamaica. I left in 1994. I was six. I go back when someone dies. I have been back four times since 2010. I am, by any reasonable standard, a man from the Bronx who has strong feelings about oxtail. But Megan does not need to know this. What Megan needs is fifteen minutes of Cultural Perspective during an all-hands meeting that was previously going to be about the new Slack channel taxonomy.
So Thursday comes. I put on the shirt my wife calls “the one that makes you look like you know about Africa.” I get up in front of the ninety-three people in our New York office and I say:
“Jamaica is resilient.”
Everyone nods. This is safe. Everyone nods whenever anyone says any Caribbean country is resilient. The word means nothing and it means everything and it has been doing the heavy lifting for Caribbean media coverage for approximately forty years.
I continue.
“You know, what people don’t understand is that the Jamaican spirit — the real Jamaican spirit — it’s about community.”
Megan is tearing up. I can see this from the stage. Megan is having a moment. I am going to get the promotion.
“When a hurricane comes, when the power goes out, when the roads flood — Jamaicans don’t wait for the government. They come together. They take care of each other. That’s the culture.”
This is factually true. It is also the kind of statement that, if you said it in Kingston, would get you stared at by three different people, because everyone in Kingston is aware that “not waiting for the government” and “the government is not functional” are the same sentence said with different emphasis, and the Jamaican government is a real thing that employs real people and does, on its better days, real work, and reducing the entire country to “the spirit of community” is both a compliment and a way of letting everyone in a position of responsibility off the hook forever.
But Megan does not know this. The all-hands does not know this. I do not, at this moment, know it myself, because I have entered the flow state known to every diaspora professional as Being Asked About The Homeland At Work, and in this state the mouth moves independently of the brain.
“The diaspora,” I continue, because now I am rolling, “plays a crucial role.”
We do. We send $3 billion a year. This is true and important.
“Every month, millions of Jamaicans abroad send money home to support their families.”
Also true. Also a relief to say, because it is a sentence where I, Leroy, am on the right side of the data.
“And that’s what holds the island up.”
This is where I go slightly off the rails. Because what actually holds the island up is a combination of remittances, tourism, bauxite exports, and a population of 2.8 million people who go to work every day despite the road being flooded, and reducing all of that to “the diaspora holds it up” is the kind of thing that, if said in Half-Way-Tree, would get you told, politely but firmly, to sit down.
I do not sit down. I am at work. I am on a stage. I accept the warm applause. Megan hugs me afterward. I get the promotion.
My mother calls me that evening. My mother lives in Mount Vernon. My mother has an iPhone and WhatsApp and a niece who works at our company and who forwarded my mother a clip of the all-hands.
My mother says: “Leroy. What is wrong with you.”
I say: “Mommy, it was for work.”
My mother says: “You said the diaspora hold up Jamaica. Your cousin Marlene is a nurse at UWI. She hold up Jamaica. What do you hold up, Leroy. The 4 train?”
I have no answer for this. I do not, in fact, hold up the 4 train. The 4 train is held up by a series of maintenance workers whose names I do not know and a budget appropriation that passes through the MTA board.
My mother is still talking.
“When you going back, Leroy. When last you been back. You going back for Marlene wedding in August? Because if you going stand up on stage and talk about Jamaica like you know, you going back in August.”
I am going back in August.
This is how the diaspora works. You represent a country you have not walked in for six years, at a performance review conducted by a woman named Megan, and then your mother, who has been in Mount Vernon since 1989, corrects the record from her couch via FaceTime, and you book a flight.
It is embarrassing. It is affectionate. It is the system.
Marlene, if you are reading this: I am coming. I am bringing the good rum. And I will not, I promise, say the word “resilient” to anyone the entire trip.
image: “https://picsum.photos/seed/office-desk/1280/720"
Cousin Leroy writes from the Bronx. He is not, legally, a cultural authority on anything, and has been asked by his mother to stop pretending otherwise.