When an Untouchable Dies: Ode to Dexter 3D Pottinger

That night I lay in bed, my lover to my left as the kind of security that love creates wrapped itself around me in the warm yellow bed room. I, like most of us, brought my phone to bed, scrolling to unwind, or to catch up on the news or the gossip of the day; then the news hit me. It felt like an anvil fell from my phone into my chest leaving a heavy pressure there that even now I am unable to move. His face rested on my phone screen with the words RIP right above him. I tossed the phone to her mostly out of fright but also to share the news. She looked at the screen and said, “No.” She returned the phone to me quickly, “that’s not true,” she said. He was more her friend than mine. But in that moment, we both wanted the same thing; we both wanted it to be a hoax. After all, the internet is known to do even more cruel things than that. As I scrolled it became truth. Nothing was going to change it. He was dead.

For me he was a symbol more than a friend. A symbol of something that is assumed as unattainable in Jamaica, he was a symbol of possibility, beauty, difference and pride. He was untouchable. He was the man most people knew or assumed to be gay but who no one rose a finger to touch in this country that was documented by some as the most homophobic country on earth.  He stood in direct opposition to the image of the Jamaican man, the hyper masculine gyalis. He was a fashion designer, a director, a make-up artist and an inspiration to many, but to many a sweet heart and to others a mentor.

I immediately thought of the last time I say him. It was last weekend at Haven and Stones Throw on Saturday and Sunday. He was dressed fiercely on both occasions; when is he never. He never said anything to me. Today I imagined he nodded. I don’t know how to speak to superstars, no matter how I planned to. As I reflected on that night, I regretted not saying: hey Dexter how are you, long time, you look really good, as always, thank you for making me feel so much more comfortable in my own skin just by showing up here as your truly authentic self, especially this summer when I feel that this is an extremely difficult thing to do. I would have said it all in one breath. I regretted never telling him how I saw him, admired and was proud to share a community with him.

Then fear slowly overcame me. The room felt unsafe, as if at any moment now someone would walk in bludgeon me and leave me for dead here in this house and no one would find me for days. Once I had a reoccurring daydream that I was being stabbed to death by some random soul who just had the desire to murder someone and I, because of my need to isolate myself, would be at the wrong place at the wrong time. I no longer have that dread. Because I understand it. I understand it as an embedded sense of fear created by the fact that I live in on very violent island. People are murdered here in Jamaica for reasons that we can’t fully understand. Maybe its related to the psychological trauma that we carry in our DNA as descendants of slaves, or maybe it’s the poverty, maybe it’s the crab in a barrel mentality whose part and parcel is bad mind and jealousy, maybe it’s the political structure that created garrison and separations that gave rise to Dons and area leaders, maybe it’s just the stress of the hardship of life, maybe it’s the lack of vision for the future, or maybe we aren’t what we use to be in the past-we are no longer our brother’s keeper, maybe we have simply been surviving for too long and now we are eager to thrive at whatever expense. Who really knows, but this year the murder rate is already over 1000.   

While fear grew in me, the report of the neighbour who heard Dexter’s scream for “Help!” for “Murder” and the screeching car leaving his house at 4 am, had become a part of the news. This quickened my fear. His neighbours in his community had not come to knock on his door, or dial the police, or check in later the next day. And as I stayed up regretful and now fearful I thought of him as a statistic, and my heart grew heavier. I stayed awake watching the door and my lover sleep through the night. I wondered how I would go when death came and if I too would be ignored and found only when decomposition had already begun. Once a story surfaced of a woman in the United States who was found almost skeleton, I exhale that he was found between a day or two after his death. His family came toc heck on him. He was loved. Maybe then I drifted off to sleep.

The next morning, I listened and waited for the world to stop. I was deeply saddened. Dexter’s death shook me more than my uncle’s passing and maybe just few bars lower than my father’s death. I waited for something to happen to say to the world that something, someone magical had left us. But there was no pause, no breath except on the news, in the sighs and the exhalation of his friends on social media, their circles, some bars and corners. I drove around town screaming something great has left us, please stop let me mourn with you, let me feel like I belong in his death the way he made me feel as if I belonged in life. I found refuge in a bar in uptown Jamaica. It was a place where I am as open as the bible on the pastor’s lectern on Sunday morning. A few people came and I told them my worry. I told them that I was scared that the newspaper’s depiction of his death, its implication that he died because of his sexuality and my concern that this was going to be his truth. That Dexter would die just another gay man in Jamaica. I was scared that this is how someone so great would be remembered. I became aware of something reaching from into the back of my throat, something I could not voice but I could feel already possessing me as dread.  

The dread had begun to take its shape as I talked about the way I have been feeling in this island now that I had returned, saying quickly that I know that he wasn’t killed because he was gay, but maybe we, the gay people, are not as safe as we think we are. Dexter’s death had pulled at the seam of safeness. Although murder is rising at an alarming rate in Jamaica, it is not the norm. It by its very nature carries with it the language of hatred. Being stabbed with a knife was nothing more than that hatred intensified; for whatever reason. And that hatred pushed me into my story of this summer.

This was the hardest summer of my life. I had been away from Jamaica for two years doing an MFA in Creative Writing at UWI St Augustine, joining a class of students for a semester at University of Guelph in Canada. I returned home for summer holidays. And I began to feel safer in my skin as a gay woman.  I came home as a Timberland wearing, bagging pants and long sleeve shirt woman. I came home a butch, walking with a Connor McGregor gait and had met life in rings leaving it with little or no dignity at the end. The summers blows were unforgettable.  While tending to family business of visiting my uncle who lay on death’s bed at the University Hospital of the West Indies a young man for whatever reason fired blank shots with his mouth from his  gun-finger shaped hand simultaneously shouting “Sodomite” at me; a few days later while walking through Papine in the space of less than thirty minutes:

Me: Miss you have ripe pear?
Vendor: yea (hands me one)
Me: please make sure a no rotten pear you a sell me
Vendor: a pickney me bear! How many pickney you have?
Me: what?
Vendor(laughing): me have children. The only way to know if the pear good is to check with the tree. It alone can tell if you the fruit good. 
Me to my self. Yes bitch, that's right dress up that shit leave my womb out of your mouth now so me can buy you spoilt pear. 
(Regret buying the shit as I walked away)

Walks out of cook shop, where I bought my dinner for the night.
Woman: watch that deh lesbian gyal

Rastaman: yes empress me know you a par with a real Congo man otherwise me woulda put in my application

Walks to taxi stand

Taxi man who has taken you to Papine from Halfway Tree countless times: Batty gyal

And those were just two stories. My summer home had become a haven of bitterness and abuse. In addition to the fact that my muse had left me this summer and was replaced by a voice of dread and death; never before had I felt so unsafe in my country.

The dread that had begun to possess me because of my own experience with home had begun to take shape. I had already begun to ask myself: Is Dexter’s death a sign for me to leave to find refuge in another land where hate is less policed, less normal, less comfortable? As I spoke I remembered that the day the world became aware of Dexter’s death I watched a dancehall dancer the Beast inciting mob action against Shebada-a flamboyantly effeminate male who plays lead roles in many plays. Later that day Dexter was dead.

My mind had begun to form connections. These men had formulated patterns of survival that kept them safe. All gay people do. Especially here in spaces where hate is so definite: almost tangible, almost visceral. It thrives in policing and church marches and dancehall lyrics. It lingers in parent’s disdain, lost friends and gully queens. It shows up as job discrimination, joblessness, homelessness and illegal means of attaining financial independence. And so, to respond to the hurt there are closet doors, living out loud, reclusive existence, blatant rebuttals, strategic movements, conclaves for survival to name a few. Being gay means that you have no choice but to develop strategies to escape the hate that lingers around you. You have to develop modes of behaviour, safe spaces and warring tactics. In this way, some become masters unfazed by the advent of death, or criticism, mob aggression, violence or throw word. They become untouchable.

My dread was simple: Was I untouchable? Had I been living in a cocoon and had it made me oblivious to the reality of the most homophobic place on earth? Can I survive here against the sentiments of hate?

Anger tickled me. Its root was that woman who heard that beautiful man, that symbol of everything I wanted to be screaming to stay alive and had ignored him. Had she always ignored him? Where their parties and gatherings that she watched and wanted out of her neighbourhood? Had she ever called the police to shut off the dance? Why didn’t she save him? Why didn’t she allow him and my sense of safety to survive that horrible incident? I turned to her and shouted to the people who would listen: they should lock her up too, as an accomplice to murder. But this is Jamaica, the no informer state. A man turned to me and said this is how these places work if they don’t accept you they are in the business of silencing you, they will do everything to reduce you to nothing, even ignoring your screams for help. And I knew this had nothing and everything to do with Dexter’s sexuality. This was Jamaica. I remembered Usain Bolt’s interview on profile about his own treatment because he didn’t belong to the community he had earned his space in; left everything on the track for. No matter who you are, where you come from if you are a square peg, you simply cannot fit in many spaces.

I had a drink. The watering hole seemed to be crowded with people who knew Dexter as the magical being I was mourning for. I wondered why the world hadn’t stopped today to sing Kum By Wah Me Lord for this man who wore his skin like a prince. I searched the bottom of my glass and my social media for the answer.

And that is when Foota Hype showed up screaming his hate, determined to have his say in the bit. And as he made his point, outing an emerging comedian, equating gay people to paedophiles, spewing a rationale of poverty and weak mind as the reason so many men become gay, and saying he was doing it for his son, heaping his self-righteous indignation on women who support these gay men by labelling them as barren, ignorant of his own misogyny, his failed ideology, his moral weakness and principled ridiculousness. I found myself responding, heaping in quick succession rebuttals for his ill framed arguments and wondering if he couldn’t hear his own stupidity. Joy returned with each of my responses. My survival instincts kicked in. I stood on a soap box my own self-righteous baring its chest while reminding me of Maya Angelou’s statement that in this world there has to be a place where no matter what happens that belongs to you and only you and where no one can enter. My pride and joy returned, because despite his death, Dexter knew his secure space and he lived in and through it, forcing us by our very presence to do the same. I came home and slept.

The next morning, I recognized that the night before I had talked myself into acceptance, I made his death logical without the details surrounding the police’s arrest of a suspect. I realized how he died were not the details I cared about. Who killed him and why, were the minor fragments of his story. His truth was the end. I had already discovered that he lived his life as himself, not owned by any ideas of humanity, built on his own rules. And his death connected so deeply to the sore spots of our nation. He worked and played in an industry that was categorically opposed to his existence and he thrived. And he was not made of stone and brick, he was human and death and its cycle was inevitable as will be mine.

I watched a Vlog recently that reminded me that we construct our stories according to how we see ourselves. And that in fact, we remove what doesn’t serve us, saying what does to ensure that the person we want to be remains intact. The most impressive thing is when the story we tell ourselves about us is the same story people tell of us at our death. Then that will be untouchable, and everything to be proud of. Dexter remains the face of pride and a reminder that life is simply what you make it, live life to the fullest and never be afraid to be yourself.