I go to close the chicken coops. It is now night and all the birds are inside their cages. I close every cage and wonder why the stupid chickens go back to the coop every night.
So concludes the chapter titled “You Shall Have Treasure” in Staceyann Chin’s 2009 memoir, The Other Side of Heaven. A 13-year-old Staceyann had just been severely beaten by her guardian as punishment for wearing a hand-me-down swimsuit. She was without parents, moved from one home to another and dependent on the kindness (or indifference) of various family members and friends in one of the poorest parts of Montego Bay.
Almost 40 years later, Chin has found herself back in Jamaica, with her flock of chickens to tend to as part of her ambitious project, Kindred on the Rock – a 70-hectare community farm in the hills of St Catherine which Chin hopes to provide. safe space for a variety of Jamaicans, especially those who may feel as displaced as she did as a child in “Paradise.”
The acclaimed Jamaican poet and activist – who for 30-odd years has made her home in Brooklyn, NY – bought the land for Kindred in April 2022 and has been building it into a community space and working farm ever since. In her first post on the @kindredontherock Instagram page, Chin wrote:
I hope people from all over the world will come to visit, work or advise us as we try to build Kindred here. I hope they will lend their bodies to build this magical place – a safe place that will welcome all who dare to come with respect and a strong foundation of inclusive politics. I couldn’t be happier, more terrified, or more excited.
When asked what prompted him to take such a leap of faith to not only purchase such a large plot of land (very hilly) but also to model it as a space for others to share, Chin revealed that experiencing the Covid-19 lockdown in New York City taught her how important space is, especially for members of historically marginalized communities who, if they lived in cities, often relied on public spaces for connected to each other and to the earth.
Chin hopes that Kindred will provide a safe space for a variety of Jamaicans, especially those who may feel as displaced as she did as a child.
Suffering from such a lack of space herself at the start of the pandemic, she wanted to offer others “somewhere where you can go outside and connect with the ground beneath your feet, where you can look up at the sky, where you can it was raining and I can catch some water.” In particular, Chin envisioned the kind of space being built by and for the community.
As part of her hopes for creating such a space, Chin named the 70 acres Kindred on the Rock, inspired by the popular novel by Octavia Butler—a science fiction writer who dreamed up for us the alternate worlds of the future that many believe to be can guide us out of the confusion and fear of our present time.
Chin was also inspired by the shared connotations of the word: “I am deeply moved by the word ‘family’ because it speaks to a community that defines itself simply by connection. I owe you something, and you owe me something. I imagine that means I owe you a favor. And you owe me the favor.”
Ccommunity building has not been smooth sailing for the Kindred on the Rock project. Chin admits that one of the hardest things about making her dream for Kindred a reality has been the entrenched class hierarchies in Jamaican society — the kind of class lines she was intimately familiar with while growing up poor in the Montego Bay-based touristic.
In her characteristically straightforward manner, Chin summed up the situation in a recent interview:
I think the natural order of things in Jamaica is that people without means see themselves as people who have to negotiate the hierarchy of power up. I still see people in rural Point Hill pushing visitors away. We tell people who visit Kindred, “You’re not a customer, you come in as a member of the community, and we expect you to participate in cleaning yourself up or helping with tasks that need to be done.” This has been a delicate balance to ask people. If people are thinking about it in the context of tourism, then it’s like, I’m here to facilitate an experience for you, rather than creating an experience together. So this has been a challenge. I have seen many people get upset in this process. But I have also seen many miracles happen. A lot of beautiful moments come out of it when people step outside of themselves and take risks and it’s well received on the other side.
There has been a variety of visitors to Kindred since its inception, in part a reflection of the variety found in Chin’s personal social circles. It started with just that circle, friends visiting from near and far to help with clearing, planting and renovating the farm – sometimes expert help, sometimes just unskilled labour, or just companionship and support.
Over the past two years, just friends grew into friends of friends, local organizations, and university student groups from the United States. In mid-2023, Kindred on the Rock hosted an inaugural group of visitors as part of Black to the Land – which consisted of four days of curated activities on the farm and the surrounding Point Hill area – and culminated with a Kindred Pride . on the Rock”. The residential program attracted mainly participants from the Caribbean diaspora and may prove to be a future source of income for the farm.
Kindred on the Rock continues to become a self-sufficient farm. Although the number varies depending on the need, the farm employs an average of about a dozen people who help with the day-to-day running of the farm, while also keeping up with necessary repairs and construction.
TTwo years after Chin bought the land, enough work had been done on the property that Kindred can sleep at least 20 people in three renovated buildings (“more if you don’t mind it being cramped,” Chin estimates).
The organic produce from the farm can feed about 30 people a week, with countless options like yellow cakes, pak choi, cucumbers, tomatoes, sweet peppers, chili peppers and, of course, eggs.
Hurricane Beryl unfortunately destroyed some of these crops. But with her particular optimism and energy, Chin is rallying support to rebuild. During the summer, she returned to Brooklyn, where she focused on organizing relief efforts for those affected by Beryl.
When asked what he most wants people to know about Kindred, Chin says:
Kindred on the Rock is a space that is still unfolding and we are looking for co-authors, co-creators, collaborators to come and help us make this space “us”. Not an “I” space, not a “you” space, not a “them” space – but a “we” space. I want to cast the net wide and invite people to come and participate in this giant experiment of what the world would look like if we had all the time in the world to talk, and all the time in the world to negotiate, and everything. time in the world to create the world we would all like to live in. How do you create a post-apocalypse world? In our time, the closest we’ve come to an apocalyptic moment is Covid. And so now it is incumbent upon all of us to go and experiment. This is the mandate of our time.
To learn more about Kindred on the Rock, visit www.mendigap.org
