View from Mount Diablo

View from Mount Diablo is a verse novel by Ralph Thompson (b. 1928), which won the Jamaican National Literary Award in manuscript in 2001, and was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2003. An annotated edition with a number of small textual corrections appeared in both material and digital formats in 2009.

The poem narrates the life of a white Jamaican, Adam Cole, born sometime in the 1930s and so growing up during World War II, during which his uncle Johann, of German extraction, is interned in the same camp as future national leader Alexander Bustamante. Adam has a close friend, Nathan, a poor black boy who is a gardener and groom, but education forces them apart. After taking a degree at Oxford University in the 1950s Adam returns to Jamaica to work as a journalist on the Daily Tribune (a version of The Daily Gleaner) and marries a Jamaican Chinese, Amber Lee. They have a daughter, Chantal, but when she is 15 (sometime in the early 1970s) she is raped in the grounds of her school, and the marriage subsequently breaks up, Amber and Chantal emigrating to Canada while Adam stays in Kingston and becomes ever more committed to crusading journalism.

A parallel historical narrative charts Jamaica's progress from Crown Colony to full independence, and its subsequent descent into serious civil violence. Corruption, veniality, sectarianism, and other elements forming what Rastafarians call the 'politricks' of Jamaica are noted, but the principal force for evil is squarely diagnosed as the international cocaine trade, in its facilitation of material corruption, in the morally deadening toleration of violence it promotes, and in the appalling opportunity cost it imposes on national infrastructure, education, and business. From this history a series of vignettes emerge, of profits turned, of a needless death on the operating table caused by a substandard generator, of extrajudicial killing by a special police squad, and of events in the life of a principal cocaine baron—Adam's sometime friend, Nathan.

Eventually an enforcer named Blaka, spurred by religious conversion, becomes an informer for Adam, whose journalism begins to expose too many secrets of the 'runnings', or details of shipments and transactions. Adam also hears the dying confession of a white middleman, Tony 'the Frog' Blake, who knows of Nathan's involvement, and so becomes an unacceptable threat to the cocaine trader—and as Blaka observes, "Blood / cheaper than drugs" (946-7). Blaka is found murdered on Mount Diablo (a central Jamaican height), "stuffed in a handcart, head severed, torso turned / to the mountain, blank eyes staring down the valley [...] the word Judas, warning intaglio, / carved with a switchblade into the transom" (955-9); another body is floating in the harbour; and Adam himself is confronted at home, and after a brief struggle shot dead, by Nathan.

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