Jamaican filmmaker and scholar, Esther Figueroa, is the UH Hawaii, Manoa English Department’s Visiting Distinguished Writer in Residence this semester, teaching Caribbean literature and creative non-fiction.
There’s so much I could say about this woman’s courage, soulful to the point of heartbreaking clarity, and unflinching dedication to documenting the corporate and colonial (but those are kinda the same thing, aren’t they?) cannibalism of Jamaica’s shores, reefs, rivers and other natural resources. She has literally witnessed and made us witness to the disappearance of her country. Through her lens we experience the insanity of over building hotels to satisfy the insatiable desire for foreigners who don’t mind killing the place so they can perform ritual fantasies with Jamaica’s culture and beaches.
Go to her YouTube channel (see Figueroa Films) and view some of her work. Her feature length documentary, Jamaica for Sale, is enlightening, relentless and a genuine displacement of the tourism industry’s narrative of that place. I can’t imagine anyone with a mind or heart seeing this film and still thinking a vacation in Jamaica is a good idea.
If you have the opportunity to hear Ms. Figueroa, do so. She will be in Henke 325 from 12-1:15, as part of the Center for Biographical Research brown-bag series.
And PS- Fig-leaf’s first novel, “Limbo,” a story about Jamaica, is due out in the spring 2014. Seeing her in person here in Hawaii is, indeed, a genuine treat, a gift from the spirit of resistance to spirits in resistance.