We all knew, or would all soon learn, that by thirteen or fourteen our bodies no longer belonged to us, our hind parts and innards were now some communal meeting place for review and commentary.

I knew then that as long as I had a word that leapt aflame in my mind, I would always be living in an age of wonder.

For the men of Rastafari, the perfect daughter was everything a woman was supposed to be. The perfect daughter was whittled from Jah’s mighty oak, cultivating her holy silence. She spoke only when spoken to. The perfect daughter was humble and had no care for vanity. She had no needs, yet nursed the needs of others, breastfeeding an army of Jah’s

There is an unspoken understanding of loss here in Jamaica, where everything comes with a rude bargain – that being citizens of a ‘developing nation’, we are born already expecting to live a secondhand life, and to enjoy it. But there is hope, too, in our scarcity, tolerable because it keeps us constantly reaching for something better.

‘I want you to remember that even though we don’t have a lot of things, we’re not poor. We can never be poor because we’re rich in spirit,’

It must have wounded my father to see his entire ethos and spiritual source diluted and commercialized for the foreign masses while painfully maligned at home.

A book, I soon learned, was time travel. Each page held irrefutable power. When the sun burned so bright it made me drunk, I opened the giant encyclopedia and fell right in.

There was more than one way to be lost, more than one way to be saved.

Next to the airport, looming along the borders of our village, were hotels with high walls made of pink marble and coral stone, flanked on top by broke-glass bottles, their sharp edges catching the light in cruel warning: To live in paradise is to be reminded how little you can afford it.