Lover’s Rock

Kingston, Jamaica "Courtship" Romance Older Couple Vintage Postcard. Year unknown. Hippostcard

Post Independence urban Jamaica seemed to be an exciting place to fall in love. The optimism and sense of self-determination was soundtracked by Lovers Rock, with images of couples in intimate embraces swaying together on a single tile in the dancehall. But as the city changed in response to the realities of structural adjustment policies, so did we. Urban art and popular culture reflected our shifting urban environments. Land Use and transportation codified social stratification and reinforced our isolation to the extent that “geographies of class segregation became a cultural distinction” (Stanigar 2008). Inspired by the romantic urbanism syllabus, Dorraine Duncan and Jhordan Channer, co-founders of Island City Lab, explore how space and infrastructure across Jamaica influence romantic relationships as depicted in film, music, and TV.  

Love in paradise: A view from the West 

In the preface to Keith Warner’s 2000 book On Location: Cinema and Film in the Anglophone Caribbean, Alistair Hennessy notes how Hollywood dominates the images we see and questions how local cultural identities can be nurtured “in an age of accelerating technologies when viewers are bombarded by a bewildering array of images and ideas of foreign provenance which perpetuate stereotypes…conditioned by the commercial demands of the box-office?” 

This is an important provocation. Western cultural hegemony structures how the Caribbean is perceived and simultaneously influences our behaviors and norms, from our cultural practices to our choice of romantic partners. Hollywood romance films offer a useful indication of mainstream attitudes and when these productions hover around the Caribbean, they create an approximation of reality rooted in stereotypical representations.  

Island In the Sun. Robert Rossen, 1957

1957’s Island in the Sun (Robert Rossen), is set on the fictitious Caribbean Island of Santa Marta on the heels of independence as three men contend for political leadership in an upcoming election. The movie was shot on location in Barbados and Grenada (but could be anywhere in the British Caribbean) and moves between the bustling urban core, the colonial plantation, and the coast propelled by sounds of calypso music, drums and steel pans. The romance that emerges is taboo and unbridled, depicting intimate exchanges between two different interracial couples. The film was banned in several southern U.S. states for promoting miscegenation. Even though race has always been politically charged in the Caribbean, the atmosphere surrounding these couples created the perfect environment for forbidden love, a type of love only acceptable outside of the “West” in a context free from the rigid structures and traditions of the old world.

How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Kevin Rodney Sullivan, 1998

Similarly, How Stella Got Her Groove Back (Kevin Rodney Sullivan, 1998), centres a forbidden love only possible and acceptable in the hedonistic confines of an all-inclusive hotel on Jamaica’s North Coast. Stella, a 40-year-old stockbroker played by Angela Bassett, falls into a deep infatuation with 20-year-old Winston, a much younger hotel attendant. Despite the judgment she faces from Winston’s family and her friends, she flies him to California to begin a relationship. Not much is said about the motivations or sacrifices of Winston; Stella’s perspective is squarely in focus. The Jamaican beachfront hotel is coded as a fantasy, the sensual tones of 90s R&B-reggae fusion create a self-indulgent atmosphere where foreigners feel free to chase pleasure, the perfect context for the successful girl boss to get ‘her groove back’. In contrast, suburban California is distinctly reality. When Winston arrives, they struggle to make the relationship work. The awkwardness of their age gap and uneven economic power demands greater attention when bills need to be paid. 

Austere Love | Concrete jungle

While these passionate romances are set within the idyllic and natural beauty of the rural Caribbean (whether on current or former plantations), urban Jamaica has not produced the same type of love story in film. 

Harder They Come. Perry Henzell, 1972

The Harder They Come (Perry Henzell, 1972) was Jamaica’s first locally produced and written movie starring a completely Jamaican cast. A quintessential post-independence film, it follows Ivanhoe (Jimmy Cliff), a young man who leaves the countryside after the death of his grandmother, in search of opportunities in the city. After, being robbed of all his possession and struggling to find work he gets his big break as a reggae singer with a hit record on the radio, the titular “Harder They Come”. When the extractive reality of the music industry proves to be a dead end, Ivanhoe resorts to a life of crime, eventually capitalizing on his short-lived fame and becoming a folk hero on the run. Despite his economic failings, he does find love in the city. An innocent romance with Elsa (Janet Bartley) begins in a church choir and progresses during an iconic scene where Ivanhoe tows her slowly on his bicycle across a newly built highway, a powerful image of the uneven development policies, typical of a city under the  of austerity. Their romance quickly morphs into a ride-or-die love of hardship and danger as Elsa functionally becomes a fugitive because of Ivanoe’s ambitions.

Klash. Bill Parker, 1995.

The film depicts love in the city as fleeting and always threatened by economic hardship and the struggle to survive. Klash (Bill Parker, 1995) has a similar dizzying, carnivalesque atmosphere set within the gritty nightlife of dancehall culture. The movie follows Stoney, an American photographer who travels to Jamaica to photograph the KLA$H, the world's largest reggae and dancehall event. Stoney, played by Giancarlo Esposito, reunites with Blossom (Jasmine Guy), an ex-girlfriend who, having returned to Jamaica, has become a “streetwise hustler.” Like Ivanhoe, Blossom’s need for economic mobility supersedes any romantic desires. She inculcates Stoney in her plans to steal the box office proceeds from the KLA$H concert, a scheme that eventually leads to her death. 

People around the world gravitate to romantic media because it provokes nostalgia for first loves or yearning for a new one. These films do neither and paint an unsatisfactory and perhaps cautionary picture of romance for the Jamaican viewer. Urban romance is dangerous and at times life-threatening. There is no time or space for tenderness, softness, or whimsy under austerity.

Car man (no vehicle no romance)

Youth Promotion Sound-system members outside record shop (Beth Lesser, 1980s)

After the collapse of the downtown economy in the 1970s, residential, commercial, and government services retreated north en masse into the suburbs, effectively decentering Kingston’s urban core. Car-dependent land use patterns emerged as the backdrop for romantic interactions in the city. In this context, cars act as a datum that organizes populations along gender, sexual preference, and class lines. In doing so, they construct different urban identities in Jamaica. Archetypes like the ‘Car Man’ emerged as an oppositional class to a ‘walk foot’ and car ownership became a crucial signifier of status, particularly in the context of hostile urban environments produced by sprawling suburban development patterns. Access to private motor vehicles allow men to engage in traditional masculine performances, which might manifest as reckless driving for validation or peacocking to attract partnership but more typically playing the role as a provider (of transportation). The ‘car man’ is an extension of male economic dominance, typical in patriarchal regimes that structures the power dynamics in romantic relationships through dependency. Degrading public systems and lack of viable transportation alternatives reinforce a reliance on private relationships to meet transportation needs and increases the profile of the ‘car man’ in the dating market. 

The Car Man features prominently in dancehall, a sub-culture that commands a large influence over urban Jamaican self-identity. Dancehall lyrics are a useful entry point to understand the interconnection of masculinity, car-dependent development patterns, and access to romance in Kingston. 

"Car Man," Vybz Kartel (2010) outlines the importance of car ownership in dating choice and paints a grim picture for men who do not have this basic prerequisite for entering the dating market, as he puts it ‘No vehicle, no romance’. 

Gyal stand up inna sun, dem foot start bun dem
See a walk-foot man a come, dem run dem,
If you a walk or sidung inna bus back
Doh look a gyal weh u see at di bus stop, aye

He also outlines how cars act as a proxy for wealth at different tiers: 

Mi woulda drive a Toyota Corolla
But mi woulda neva get a gyal weh want a high roller
From you a drive Honda, you wi' get pure pretty gyal phone number” 

In "Pretty Car Man," Lady Mackerel (1998) (also known as Macka Diamond) outlines a woman’s perspective of requiring a ‘Car Man’ for a suitable partner, one who can ensure an improved standard of living. 

A bere pretty car man a rush me,
n the Benz, Bimma and Cherokee.
They say they want me to live in luxury.
Nah walk pon road mek sun come bun mi.” 

Again, the indignities of being a pedestrian in Kingston are referenced and for women, these conditions form one of the core features of a transactional urban relationships. 

Understanding how romantic relationships serve as gatekeepers for essential mobility needs, Barrington Levy in "Minibus" threatens to withhold this benefit from an ungrateful female partner. 

Girl I'm gonna take you in my Mercedes.
If my Mercedes would a full up of the disease.
Girl I'm gonna take you in my Firebird,
If my Firebird is not fast enough,
Girl put your ass on the damn minibus. 

The extension of masculinity through car ownership emboldens men (who are more likely to own cars than women in Jamaica) to chastise women who have not successfully paired themselves with a man and thus remain immobile. Mr. Vegs and Lexxus in "Taxi Fare" mock and admonish women who both lack the funds to taxi home after a street party, and who have not had the foresight or skill to secure a male date to drive them home.

Taboos & Forbidden Love

Gully Queens. Christo Geoghegan, HuffPost, 2016

Homophobia is pervasive across Jamaica, reinforced culturally by hypermasculinity in Dancehall and moralized by religious conservatism. The exclusion of homosexuality from urban public life is enforced randomly through acts of social and physical violence. In dense urban environments like Kingston, the public realm is a contested space for LGBT people, where presentations of ‘gayness’ are policed aggressively, restricting access to crucial public services. 

In this context, there is a high degree of insecurity in loving out in the open. Romance therefore happens in private, but this is differentiated along class lines. LGBT people of means can insulate themselves. They benefit from the highly defined social bifurcation of Kingston where access to private motor vehicles, gated communities with amenities, social clubs, office spaces, etc. create a contiguous network of private space with very few interactions with public systems. 

Those without means must navigate an antagonistic urban environment and risk ‘outing.’ The clearest manifestation of this is the Gully Queens, a group of gay men and transgender women exiled from their homes and communities and forced to live in the gully. The gully is a network of stormwater drainage infrastructure that facilitated the decentralization of the urban core in Kingston and allowed for suburban expansion in the watershed starting in the 1940s. Since their inception, the gullies have been associated with danger, waste, and disgust and the Gully Queens take on this association, in the imaginary of the public. As discussed in Young and Gay (Vice, 2015) despite its squalid environments and the interpersonal issues between the queens, the gully serves as both refuge and third space. There is very little local media that adequately captures representations of queer people in Kingston, but the few that do offer some insight into attitudes about romance and dating in the city from this perspective.

The Abominable Crime (Micah Fink, 2013) is a documentary that follows two queer Jamaicans in Kingston. Maurice is a gay lawyer, professor, and human rights advocate who is outed by a local newspaper and receives an influx of death threats. Simone is a lesbian single mother who is outed within her community, brutally attacked, shot multiple times, and left for dead. Their fear of existing publicly within urban space is palpable but the options for escape depend exclusively on their socio-economic class. Maurice, who already has a Canadian visa, can fly back and forth out of the island and is accompanied by his Canadian husband. Simone, however, is rejected for a U.S. visa and is forced to make the difficult decision to leave her daughter behind as she illegally enters Amsterdam through Turkey as she begs for asylum. 

The TV series Get Millie Black (Marlon James, 2024) follows Millie, a Jamaican British detective who returns to the island to investigate a series of missing person cases while trying to reconnect with her estranged trans sister. It too portrays how wealth enables layers of protection for her partner Curtis, a queer man that is able to avoid (delay) “detection” because of his profession as a detective. Curtis and his spouse Daniel are able to host dinner parties and freely experience romance within the confines of their high-rise, waterfront property. This is in stark contrast to other trans women and queer men in the series, who lack housing and economic security, leaving them exposed to a homophobic and violent city. 

Kingston, a place for romance?

Young couple picnicking on the lawns of Emancipation Park. 2021. Nicolas Nunes, Jamaica Gleaner

Urban romance is frequently portrayed as transactional and conditional in Jamaican popular media, likely a response to the increasing costs of love in the context of uneven development and social stratification in cities like Kingston. Post-Independence optimism has given way to decades of austerity that have redistributed resources from ‘the commons’ to prop up private enterprise and the culture of individualism. This manifests in the very real infrastructural barriers that segregate us along the color-class line. Under these conditions, romance can feel like a luxury reserved for those who can afford to fall in love at an all-inclusive hotel like Stella and Winston, or for those who can avoid the stress of a resource-starved transportation system with their own private vehicles. Still, many continue to find meaningful and fulfilling relationships in the city.

Without the commons, where are the opportunities for chance encounters? Where do we meet to form connections? Where do we find love? What does it cost? Do I need a car as a prerequisite for dating? What are affordable dating locations? Is it safe to show affection in public? Devon House, Emancipation Park, the Waterfront, and Hope Gardens are the public spaces that you are most likely to see couples holding hands, having picnics, kissing and gazing into each other's eyes.  In these spaces, you can see glimpses of Jamaican whimsy, tenderness and romance. Perhaps these public spaces with their shade, greenery, and nature allow us a reprieve from the socio-economic hardships of the city and give us a sense of [however limited] freedom and dignity to be vulnerable with another person.