TRY SIIM ON. IN OUR STUDIO. Each month, a small group is invited to try SIIM in person. These sessions are an intimate chance to experience SIIM pieces up close, get personalized fit advice, and enjoy a little moment of magic. You’ll also have the option to be photographed in your look and gain access to exclusive custom-order options and offers.

Why Jamaica Punches Above Its Weight Under three million people live in Jamaica. That's smaller than Chicago. Smaller than most international metro areas you could name without trying too hard. And yet, if you turn on a radio, anywhere on earth, there is a fair chance you will hear an idea that started right here. It might be a rhythm, a slang word, a spiritual posture, a way of standing that says, “Yuh know who me is?” as an assertion of presence. Usain Bolt won races, and then he redefined what a body announcing itself looks like - To Di World! Bob Marley made music, and then he became a universal symbol of resistance in distant places and contexts. "Wha gwaan" lives in group chats from Tokyo to Toronto. Reggae, Dancehall, Rasta, Patwa, Jerk… This likkle island's fingerprints are all over the global cultural record in a way that makes no mathematical sense. A place this small should be a footnote. Instead, it is a headline, over and over, decade after decade, in so many different fields. And why? The easy answer is Talent. Jamaica just happens to produce gifted people, over and over, generation after generation, in music and sport and so many other fields. However, talent falls short in explaining this phenomenon, because it can be argued that talent is evenly distributed across humankind. Usain Bolt's signature "To Di World" victory pose. Photo by J. Brichto - taken at the London Anniversary Games, CC BY-SA 3.0 What is not evenly distributed is motivation. The question this series seeks to explore (and maybe to answer) is, "Why does Jamaica keep doing this?" Not once. Not as a fluke of the '70s or a good decade for reggae. Continuously, across a hundred plus years and many different fields. My theory is that it isn't luck and it isn't talent. It is a reflex. Something we are trained into, generation after generation, by circumstances so specific to this island that almost nowhere else on earth developed it in quite the same way. I call it the go-round gene. And before you get all excited over the use of the word gene, let me stop and qualify what I mean. How to Make a Jamaican Jamaican children are not born with an instinct to "go-round." No. They are born into a society where that strategy is visible everywhere: in language, humour, business, politics, transport, music and everyday problem-solving. They absorb it naturally. In Jamaica, people who are flexible, socially connected, improvisational and comfortable navigating informal systems, often succeed where rigid rule-followers struggle. Those behaviours are rewarded economically, socially and culturally. The environment keeps reinforcing ingenuity over compliance. So no, Jamaicans have not evolved a biological "go-round gene." Instead, subsequent generations have been raised in an environment where creativity, adaptability, skepticism toward imposed authority and rapid social learning are continually reinforced. Over time, those traits become so deeply embedded in the culture that they feel instinctive. Someone looking from the outside might mistake these traits for something genetic because they emerge so consistently and so early in life. A Pressure Cooker… Not a Melting Pot When I was growing up, every well-appointed Jamaican kitchen had a pressure cooker. It is unsurpassed for getting a tuff, stringy cut of meat quickly into a pliable, edible condition. But it is a volatile thing, prone to exploding if not well maintained. 'Fraid a dem, bad… [I am really afraid of them]. But, the pressure cooker will ensure that your food is well cooked, till the meat slides off the bones, the bones are soft enough to chew and all the flavours are well blended. Jamaica is the pressure cooker. Jamaica sits in the middle of the Caribbean shipping lanes. It is the bellybutton. It is a strategic chokepoint. And every Imperialist power with a navy wanted it. Even now, this is true. So many different nations converged in this cultural pressure cooker. The Taíno people were in the pot first, joined by the Spanish officially in 1509 (but basically erased within a generation of Spanish contact). The British jumped into the pot in 1655 (followed by conquest, re-conquest, and a near-permanent state of upheaval). Then add Irish, Scottish and Welsh indentured servants and political prisoners (transported for rebelling against the English crown). Fling in a sizeable portion of West African people from dozens of distinct ethnic groups — Akan, Igbo, Yoruba, Kongo, and more. Force them all together into the same likkle pot, peeled of the rind that would have kept their cultures distinct at home. Splash in some Jewish merchants (fleeing persecution elsewhere), and add spice: Pirates and privateers for the heat, Chinese and Indian indentured laborers for flavour. Later on we will keep adding generations of migrants and exiles. The pot isn’t getting any bigger. And the heat and pressure is on. No society built like that can produce rigid conformity, because there is no stable "normal" long enough for conformity to set. Jamaica was never one culture, calmly absorbing newcomers. It has always been multiple, concurrent, imposed and colliding realities. From the start. In a very sumaal place. That volatile instability is not incidental to the story. It is the foundation of it. And for a time, British colonial administrators managed the pot. Plantation PsyOps The plantation system in Jamaica was not simply a cruel labor arrangement. It was, functionally, an assault on the mind. It demanded that enslaved people accept (not just endure), that they had no identity worth keeping, no culture worth remembering, no future worth imagining beyond the next cane cutting. That was by design. Physical brutality was the enforcement mechanism. Psychological erasure and domination was the goal. And Jamaican slave culture, over and over, refused the terms! Uprisings were frequent and serious enough that the island earned a reputation among the Imperialists as uniquely difficult and dangerous to control. Sabotage was constant. Slow work. Broken tools. Feigned ignorance. (Why does this sound so familiar? Hmmmmm....) Runaway slaves fled to the Maroon communities in the hills, who then fought the British to a treaty rather than a defeat. Religious practice went underground and survived there. Kumina. Myal. The roots that would later blossom into Revivalism and Rastafari, dressing African cosmology under a Christian mask. Language itself became an act of defiance. Patwa is not broken English. It is a manufactured system: African grammar and syntax wearing English vocabulary, built by people who needed to communicate in a code di Massa cyah own. Survival, under that pressurized system, required maintaining an internal reality independent of the official one. You could not let the plantation's version of who you were become the true version. You had to build another one. Privately. Collectively. And then defend it. Because your name, your family, your worship, your body were all, by law, not even yours. The only ground left to build on was the imaginary ground the enslaved built for themselves, invisible to the overseer. That habit, reality as something contested and created, not just accepted, did not end when slavery did. It became an inheritance. Meanwhile... the others in the pot paid attention. The Go-Round Gene is a Metaphor, Not a Chromosome There is no gene, no DNA marker, no single biological trait that makes Jamaicans different from anyone else. "Go-round gene" is a metaphor for a culturally transmitted reflex. Something taught by example, by proverb, by survival. Modern biology recognizes that evolution involves more than DNA alone. Researchers now study how genes, epigenetics, development, learning, culture and environmental modification interact. Some evolutionary biologists refer to this broader perspective as extended evolutionary theory, and treat culture itself is an evolutionary force. A child born in Jamaica inherits not just genes, but a sophisticated operating system refined over centuries of solving the same kinds of problems. There is no gene, no DNA marker, no single biological trait that makes Jamaicans different from anyone else. "Go-round gene" is a metaphor for a culturally transmitted reflex. Something taught by example, by proverb, by survival. It is inherited the way a family recipe is inherited, not the way eye color is. What travels through generations isn't biology – Jamaicans too mix-up mix-up for that anyway. What travels is a stance toward imposed reality: distrust it... and build around it. One house, many rooms That Go-Round reflex doesn't just show up once. It shows up everywhere Jamaican culture has left a mark, wearing a different outfit every time. The rest of this series will walk through the rooms of that house. There's the Rude Bwoy – the BadMan figure who builds and rules a whole kingdom in minds and hearts. There's the Mama, who runs households and communities on infrastructure the government never provided. There’s Patwa [Patois] itself, a lexicon of refusal pretending to be simple slang. There's the sound system culture that built its own economy, its own fame system and its own rules, without permission or license. There's the informal economy, hustling and higglering and barrels and remittances. These things all look like survival from the outside... but like sovereignty from the inside. Different rooms. Same architecture. Same reflex, applied to a different domain each time. Build the alternate reality, make it work, make it undeniable. Move on. “You’re welcome." The real export People talk about Jamaica's most significant exports as music and athletes, and both are true and both are extraordinary for a country of this size. But I think the more significant export, the one that actually explains the others, is an idea: that reality is negotiable. That the story someone else tells about who you are and what you're allowed to become is not binding. That you can build another version, right alongside the official one, and if you build it well enough, eventually the world stops asking which one is real. And there is no nation better at world building... in my opinion. That’s all I’m saying.

A behind-the-scenes look at how AI, design, and Jamaican identity came together to create the face of the SIIM ecosystem. Introducing SIMi - Our New AI Brand Ambassador If you want to know where SIMi came from… the short answer is AI. The real answer is a month in Europe, twenty-five years of accumulated ideas, and a stubborn refusal to accept that every founder has to become a social media personality. In 2023, my brother and I spent a month traveling through Europe. Amsterdam. Rome. Riomaggiore. Florence. London. Then back home to Jamaica. It was not a business trip. But like most good business ideas, it became one. Everywhere I went, I kept noticing Jamaica. Not physically, but culturally. Jamaican music. Jamaican language. Jamaican style. Jamaican confidence. There were traces of home everywhere. It reminded me that Jamaica's audience is much larger than the three million people who actually live here. Long before that trip I had already decided to relaunch my SIIM fashion line. By the time I returned to Jamaica, that single idea had become something much bigger. Ideas cascade It started with a concierge app. Then it grew into an ecosystem. Fashion. A travel memoir. An online game. Eventually a pepper spread. Every project connected to the next. Ironically, the oldest project became the core inspiration. My book, Gallivant, tells the story of a backpacking journey I took through Asia and Australia in 1998 and 1999. That trip planted the creative seed. Years later the fashion became the first visible expression of that journey. Everything else since then has been growing from that same root. As our ideas multiplied, several friends and I formed a company. We called it The Higher Intelligence Agency, LLC and incorporated it in Florida. That decision came from a simple observation. Jamaica was never going to be our main market. Our audience is the diaspora. But it is also something we call Jamaica-philes. People who may have no Jamaican heritage at all, yet are deeply attracted to Jamaican culture. That community is enormous. Far larger than Jamaica itself. Then we ran into a problem. Me. I have never enjoyed being on camera. People who know me know this. It has never been a secret. Unfortunately, modern marketing has different opinions. Founders are expected to be visible. People buy from people. Brands need faces. I understood all of that. I simply did not want that face to be mine every single day. Around that time I came across articles about Aitana López and Lil Miquela. They were virtual influencers. Entire digital personalities with audiences that treated them as if they were real. That immediately made sense to me. I did not want an AI model simply because it was fashionable. I wanted a permanent brand ambassador. Someone who could represent our fashion brand today. Our game tomorrow. Our concierge app after that. Someone who would always remain on brand. I would always be the founder, and there are conversations that only founders should have. With Investors. On Strategy. Difficult discussions. Those still belong to me. But the daily conversations? The product launches. The storytelling. The introductions. Those could belong to someone else. There were practical advantages too. She would always be available. She would never age. She would never change careers. She would never accidentally wander outside the brand guardrails, something that can often happen when brands depend on real personalities. The idea was planted. Now we had to build her. Birthing Process This was early Midjourney Days. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I was getting very strange “pixies” out of every prompt. So we hired a designer on Fiverr, based in Canada, to create the first version. Originally, she was called SIIMSIM. The first SIIM referred to the brand. The second SIM stood for simulation. Eventually we shortened it to simply SIMi because everyone found it easier to say. Her appearance was a big deal. From the very beginning I knew she could not look generically Caribbean. I wanted her to look like she came from South St. Elizabeth, where part of my own family comes from. That probably sounds oddly specific until you understand Jamaica. I have cousins from a single set of parents where one sibling has pale skin, abundant freckles, light eyes and red hair. Another sibling has dark skin, brown eyes and kinky-curly brown hair streaked naturally with blonde highlights. Same parents. Same family. Entirely different expressions of the same genetic story. That is Jamaica. And I wanted SIMi to sit somewhere naturally within that spectrum. EARLY TRIALS Our early concepts settled around medium brown skin, freckles and striking light-colored eyes. One thing was never negotiable. Her hair. It had to be aquamarine. Or teal. For years I have worn that color myself. It had quietly become part of my own identity. Now I wanted it to become part of the brand's identity as well. The first finished image arrived in March 2024. Final SIMi complete with "Jamaican" white sand grains on her face. Fermentation Then... nothing happened. SIMi sat in a folder on my desktop, fermenting, for almost two years. I hadn’t changed my mind. The technology had just not caught up yet. Back then, creating a believable animated character meant commissioning expensive 3D work that I simply did not have the time or budget to pursue. Then, this year, commercial AI changed almost overnight. Suddenly it became possible to take a single photograph and produce a convincing talking avatar in minutes. The barrier disappeared. So, I dusted SIMi off. The process turned out to be surprisingly simple. First, I cleaned the original high(ish) resolution image in Photoshop. The designer had somehow imagined SIMi standing on a beach, complete with grains of sand on her face. I assume that was the "Jamaica" part of the prompt. Then I imported the cleaned image into HeyGen. I searched my house for the quietest room I could find and recorded my script using my phone and a lavalier microphone. I cleaned the audio in Audacity. Imported it back into HeyGen. Selected a voice with the right timbre. And pressed Play. About ten minutes later I had a talking version of SIMi. She looked like herself, and spoke my words. She still smiles a little too enthusiastically. Her teeth are perfect. Maybe a little too perfect. There are still occasional lip sync issues around certain sounds – Ms and Ps particularly. But every month the technology improves. And that is the exciting part. Today she is a headshot. By the end of this year, she will probably have a full body. Soon she will be able to travel with us. Visit the places we visit. Introduce our products. Tell our stories. Become a familiar face throughout the entire Higher Intelligence Agency and SIIM ecosystem. Ahead of the curve To the best of my knowledge, there is currently no Jamaican consumer brand using a dedicated AI-generated brand ambassador in this way. If that remains true, SIMi may well become one of the country's first. And that matters to me. I have always believed that technology should allow small organizations to do big things. We are still tiny. But our ambitions are not. The book. The fashion. The pepper spread. Runnin’ Belly (our game). The concierge app that is still waiting quietly in the wings. They all need someone to tie them together. That someone was never going to be me. In many ways, SIMi gets to live the life I probably would have lived if I had chosen different paths. She has more freedom. More time to explore. More opportunities to chase curiosity. Perhaps I get to live a little vicariously through her. Mind Yuh Mout! There is one final advantage. My mouth has always had a habit of getting me into trouble. I speak my mind. I am a thoroughly unapologetic Gen-Xer. My off-camera conversations can be... spicy. And the worst thing about this time we live in, is that an ignorant opinion you held 5 years ago, immortalized on a social media post can be erected as an indelible portrait today despite subsequent years of growth, enlightenment and new opinions. As if you can never grow beyond old ideas. As if you aren’t allowed to make mistakes and move forward. Cho. SIMi, thankfully, has no such problems. She will always stay on brand.

By now, you’ve probably realized that SIIM isn’t just a tidy likkle ting you can put on a shelf. I don’t do ordinary. I do everything at once. Picture a chaotic kitchen with Thai curry bubbling next to some Gungo Rice and Peas. Imagine a cookbook full of stories or a storybook full of recipes. My playlists bounce between Kingston, Amsterdam, and Detroit. And let’s not forget the idle-but-not-so-idle talk of online games that take you on a run through streets of somewhere you’ve never been, but somehow know. People always ask me, “What exactly is SIIM? Seems like you doin’ a lot of very different things?” Here’s the short answer: It’s a lifestyle – my lifestyle. It’s a family of products (brands) rooted in Jamaican culture, built from the threads of my life’s work. Here’s the long answer: pull up a chair, because this one starts in Kingston and takes a few detours. The Many Faces of SIIM You ever meet someone and think, “Bwoy, this person is a switch-skin?” Well, I think all of us are a little complex. We walk around with different people in our heads. And that’s how I design clothes: multiple personas built in. And not the kind you need a therapist for. No man… the kind that make life more interesting. From girlhood, I was fascinated with what fabric could do. Tie it here, wrap it there, drape it one way and it’s a skirt; drape it another and it’s a dress. Pull it over one shoulder and suddenly you’re giving Greek goddess vibes. One piece. Endless versions. And then there’s my inside-out obsession. I always wanted to make clothes so well-constructed that you could wear them the “wrong” way and no one could tell. In fact, I’ve run out the house in one of my pieces, sat down in the bank, only to discover I had on my frock inside-out. The seams were too neat, the finish too clean — even for me, lol. The front could be the back, the back could be the front… and if you wanted to make it both in one day, mi seh, go right ahead. So fashion was the SIIM brand’s first chapter because it was easiest – the part of a lifestyle you can wear, and that didn’t require a team to execute. But every ensemble, every pattern, every piece has something else underneath it. At first, a structural logic from my architectural background. Then later, a sense of arrival at some imagined event – and now, a cinematic framing inspired by my film work. A lot goes into these designs. Strings Over Buttons I couldn’t make a buttonhole to save my life in the early years, but I could make a mean string. So I leaned into it. Wrap skirts with extra-long ties. Dresses that fit with a single drawstring. The tie became part of the look and part of the freedom – clothes that adapt to you, instead of the other way around. It also says something about island life. A wrap skirt can go from market to moonlight in minutes. A wrap top can be loosened for a sea breeze or tightened for a hot night on the town. Casual, but calculated. And yes (let’s just admit it), some of my pieces are what people might call “sex-ready.” Pull one string and whoopsie… there it goes. Mind you, I didn’t set out to make clothing for rude business, but let’s be honest: we Jamaicans do have a certain reputation for living life without apology… ahem. Personality Disorder by Design That’s the fun of SIIM pieces though – they have moods. They can be demure and buttoned up (figuratively, since I still prefer strings), or they can turn up the heat. They’re simple on the surface, but with details that let you transform them in ways even I sometimes don’t see coming. That’s the whole vibe: versatile enough for a closet in Kingston or a suitcase in Kingston-upon-Thames. Convertible, so you feel like you own four outfits instead of one. Simple yet somehow complex – like your heediat best friend (who you love to the ground) and those memorable conversations about nuttin’. Laid-back but effortlessly put-together, whether you’re barefoot or in heels. From Verandah Experiments to Brand DNA When I think back, that verandah Barbie fashion show wasn’t just a play-play ting… it was a prototype for the future. I was already toying with scale, proportion, and transformation. That curiosity became a habit, the habit became a signature, and that signature became SIIM’s DNA. So these design quirks aren’t trends for me. They’ve been there from my first collection to what I’m creating now. Even as SIIM grows into a lifestyle brand, this “multiple personalities” approach stays. It’s what makes me me, and well… SIIM. Life = Tapestry = Art In 1998, I packed a bag and went to Asia for almost a year. My atlas at the time had Jamaica as the bellybutton of the Caribbean on the hip of the Atlantic. The Asian maps, though, had Asia in the middle — and Jamaica was a likkle, eeny-meeny speck about to drop off the edge of the paper. Blow-wow! Mind. Blown. What a simple likkle ting mek such a profound difference – when you realize you’re really not the centre of anybody else’s world! To Raas! That trip changed the way I saw my country, my place in the world, and myself. I recorded it all in my journal – the details, the disorientation, the moments of epiphany and sudden recognition. Those pages became Gallivant: A Travelogue, now part of the SIIM product line. But even that isn’t really just a travel book. Full of recipes, poems, photos, and musings, Gallivant is the blueprint for how the SIIM brand tells stories: deeply personal, culturally specific, but with an open invitation for others to step in and see the world from a different perspective (maybe through my Jamaican eyes). If you’ve met me, you know I can’t keep food out of a conversation for too long. So, SIIMSIMMA (our upcoming scotch bonnet pepper spread) is as much a brand statement as any SIIM garment. It is island heat, complexity, and a little unpredictability – all wrapped up in something deceptively simple. It’s also my answer to the question: “What does Jamaica taste like when it’s bottled for the world?” So food became part of the SIIM brand expression because it’s culture you can taste. Like our language, our cooking style is improvised, ethnically layered, and endlessly adaptable. I like to think of technology as another kind of architecture – building invisible structures that people move through, or that move them. That thinking is behind SIIM’s future expansions into online games and tech experiences: immersive, playful, and infused with Jamaican perspective. My way of saying that dis likkle island can be as digital and forward-thinking as anywhere else. Cho! Every one of these threads is tied to the skills I’ve honed working for other brands. I’ve designed national celebrations, crafted immersive environments for household names, and helped build fictional worlds for feature films. My work has taught me how to translate ideas into lived experiences – how to make people feel part of something bigger. SIIM is simply the point where all those skills, stories, and ambitions braid together into something that belongs to me, and by extension, to you. The beauty of a lifestyle brand is that it doesn’t have to pick one lane. It can walk, run, dance, and skip… sometimes all at once. And if that sounds a little chaotic, well… welcome to Jamaica. Welcome to SIIM.

SIIM is a Jamaican culture HQ for what we wear, read and taste, wherever we live. Explore apparel, home goods, food and stories rooted in Jamaican culture. BE INSPIRED View Lookbook DISCOVER Top off your look with some unique accessories. SIIM TINGS CHAT BOUT Follow us on Insta Load more

Follow your curiosity with SIIM: explore Jamaican culture, Patwa, travel, style, food, art and design, and the stories that inspire everything we create. OUR INSPIRATION PATWA Learn about our language of resistance, its rhythm, and identity. Chat Patwa. PATWA [aka Patois] FLAVORS Learn about Jamaican flavours, memory, culture, and connection. This is where the ideas behind SIIM live. Jamaican language and culture, curiosity, style and story... evryting in one neat likkle place. Welcome! EXPLORE STORIES First-hand accounts of curiosity on the road. Follow the Road. STYLE For us, personal style is a form of storytelling. Be inspire, and find your voice. TRAVEL+ CURIOSITY Cultivating curiosity as our way of moving through the world, one destination at a time. Discover Your Next Destination LONG TALKING Read our Blog. Join the conversation ART+ DESIGN For SIIM design is a way of life. Design Your Life. JAMAICANISIIM Jamaica is an endless source of inspiration for us. Explore the culture. LATEST ARTICLES

< Back Nowhere Else 03: Coffee from a Boneyard When the ground beneath you has survived fire, drowning, and its own erasure, what does it grow? Blue Mountain coffee is what happens when a plant is planted in the poorest, most abused dirt and told to make do. I am standing in a cloud of mist that never quite commits to being rain, over 1,000 metres above the Caribbean Sea, cradling a steaming cup of something that can run $140USD a pound at the estate gate... ten times what the coffee in an average kitchen costs. The ground under my boots does not know it is famous. It has no idea. It doh bizniz. Once upon a time, this place was nothing but bad temper. A chain of volcanoes coughed up out of open water some 140 million years ago, along a subduction zone. An angry exhalation. Molten rock cooled into schist and blueschist. Dense. Glittering. Faintly blue-black stone forged like a blade. This was the island's first draft of itself, written entirely in hot rocks and fire, with no life, no soil, no forest, not a trace of the tranquil postcard in the idyllic boutique hotel. After the fire went out and things cooled off, around 45 million years ago, the island did the least dignified thing a landmass can do. It sank. Not dramatically, all at once. No. Slowly, stubbornly, over tens of millions of years, sliding back under the ocean like a child returning to bed after being told the drama has passed. The sea took its time with the burial. Coral built on coral. Shell on shell. The soft, accumulating deaths of untold small creatures compressing into limestone, nearly a mile thick in places. A limestone shroud laid over the volcano's bones with divine patience. Then, roughly ten million years ago, Mother Earth changed her mind… again. Tectonic plates, bracing drunkenly on each other like Mr. Wray and his Nephew on a payday Friday night, forced the whole mass back up into the air. And it has stayed up since. Dripping. Indignant. Thoroughly rearranged. The island came back up wearing its new limestone skin. To this day, seventy percent of Jamaica is that pale, fossil-riddled rock, an ancient seabed doing its best impression of solid ground. But not here. Not on this mountain. Not on this spine shrouded in mist. Here, weather and water and time washed the shroud clean off, soaking the limestone away like an old price tag. What's left standing in the cloud is the original fire-formed rock, the oldest bones of this island, wearing none of the soft limestone flesh the rest of Jamaica inherited from the sea. This soil is not fossil soil. This soil is keloid tissue. Healed proud and raised above the surrounding skin. Onto this keloid, in 1728, a colonial governor dropped a single coffee seedling, itself a wanderer several times over. Ethiopian by birth, matured in Yemen, shipped to the vanity gardens of a French king, handed off to Martinique, and finally passed hand to hand until it landed here, almost as an afterthought. It should have died. It should have stayed a footnote. It caught and grew. Decades later, this stony ground was handed another hard gift. French planters fleeing Haiti's revolution poured across the water with their coffee expertise intact and their enslaved laborers in chains. They put both to work. Six hundred plantations within a generation on this mountainous spine. Tens of thousands of people working ground that had been forged in flame, drowned for millennia, and forced back into daylight, only to be scraped and plowed. The soil here is barely soil. Thin. Stony. Leached of nitrogen and phosphorus by ceaseless drizzle. By any ordinary standard, this is bad soil, a poor inheritance from a miserable rock. The human system built on top of it was no better. It collapsed the moment emancipation ended forced labor in 1838. The industry that had depended on slavery fell apart so completely that by 1943 Jamaican coffee was an embarrassment. Meanwhile, the lowly Blue Mountain coffee berry, growing in dirt-poor soil under a blanket of cloud, taking ten or eleven months to ripen instead of the usual eight, sulked its way toward maturity. Slow reticence turned out to be the entire secret. Sugar and acid and whatever mysterious third thing separates a good cup from an unforgettable one have more time to concentrate in a bean that isn't being forced ripe by generous ground or forgiving weather. Nobody fed this plant well, and that is precisely why it is extraordinary. In 1953, Jamaica established the Coffee Industry Board. Their mandate? Drag Jamaican coffee off the precipice of ignominy. The coffee plant, growing in mean dirt, and the Jamaican coffee farmers with two handfuls of nothing were required to make do. The same year, 1953, that Jamaicans rebuilt this crop's reputation on their own terms, a Japanese trading company became the first to buy it direct… and dem nuh leggo yet. By 1981, that company owned actual acreage on this mountain. Today, somewhere between two thirds and four fifths of everything this old boneyard produces, leaves for a single foreign market before most Jamaicans can taste it, let alone learn why it's exceptional in the first place. We perfected the survival mechanism: ground poor enough to force greatness out of a plant; a people stubborn enough to rebuild an industry from nothing. Then, through ignorance, through not knowing our own story well enough to ask for the value of it, we let someone else become the ones who get to savor what we built. That failure deserves its own reckoning... a nedda time doh... Cho. Anyway... Stand here long enough in the mist, and this whole mountain looks less like agriculture and more like a surreal dreamscape. John Dunkley's tangled forests come to mind. Shadow and glint and something faintly alive moving just beyond sight. The coffee shrubs cradle their small white blossoms like confessions… or offerings. The ground beneath them, forged, drowned, risen, stripped bare, scraped and planted by wanderers, worked in chains, abandoned, rebuilt by people who eschewed the old system and rebuilt it anyway to their own standard, with their own name. A name stamped on every export bag since 1953. That is what is in my cup. Not romance. Just every damned thing this stony patch of ground has survived, distilled down to something I can hold in one hand, with an aroma to summon angels and raise the dead. Mi betta drink it before it get cold. That's all I'm saying. Previous Next