The Brooklyn Rail

JAMAIKA begins at the end: a photograph of an empty room after its inhabitants have departed for the last time. The window at center is lidded by dirt. On the floor, there’s a crushed aluminum can, a strip of tape—detritus that will soon become more rubble when the slated demolition is complete. An afternoon glow gilds one dingy, water-stained wall to a creamy caramel, a color that’s replicated in the facing endpapers. It’s as though the book itself is a room, the paper sheets its walls; between these covers, we are invited into a place that no longer exists.

Portuguese photographer José Sarmento Matos’s book JAMAIKA documents Bairro da Jamaica, an unsanctioned and overpopulated neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon that was home to a largely Black community with roots in São Tomé and Príncipe, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Cape Verde. The foundations for Bairro da Jamaica were laid in the 1980s, when a developer went bankrupt midway through the construction of several apartment buildings. In the following decade, the incomplete structures were occupied by immigrants unable to afford traditional housing or sign leases because of their undocumented status. Without infrastructural utilities or sanitation, residents subsisted on siphoned electricity and water. Entire families lived in single rooms; in several of Sarmento Matos’s photographs, the bed flips function between kitchen countertop, play area, and space of repose.

The book’s epigraph quotes Kid Robinn’s song “Perspectiva,” the full lyrics for which are also scrawled in ballpoint pen across a sheaf of proportionally smaller matte pages bound midway through the book. He raps, “Sick of hearing ‘go back to where you came from’ / As if they’re not to blame / For having colonised us / … And here we are, abandoned by the State.” The song bears witness to an ongoing reckoning with empire; it is no coincidence that the inhabitants of Bairro da Jamaica immigrated from post-imperial nations, many of which continue to speak Portuguese as their official language and are underwritten by precarity born of wars for liberation and subsequent civil conflicts.

These geopolitical conditions play out on the ground in state-condoned marginalization. In 2000, the public auction sale of the neighborhood to a private developer precipitated an elaborate game of bureaucratic kickball involving the buyer, the municipal government, and state tools for low-income support—none of which wished to take responsibility for rehousing Bairro da Jamaica’s roughly seven-hundred occupants. In January 2019, the neighborhood became a rallying point against police brutality and systemic racism when a video of officers beating community members during an arrest went viral. The demonstrators’ bywords: “Há várias Jamaicas” [There are many Jamaicas]. These protests coincided with a renewed government initiative to relocate residents to adequate housing—a process that concluded in February last year. Jamaica has since been razed, making way for a public park.

Although extensive annotation of each photograph is provided at the book’s end, JAMAIKA leaves this complex history between the lines in preference for an intimate portrait, unsensational yet sharply critical of state neglect. Unfolding in fifty-five images taken between September 2020 and October 2023, the resulting document quietly presents the day-to-day lives of a handful of families with whom the photographer developed friendships. These include Alda Pontes, shoulders canted and skirt eddying, as she dances with herself in a mirror; Roberto Cravid (alias Kid Robinn), whose penmanship graces the book’s cover, thus dubbing it “Jamaika” with a K; framed by gauzy pink curtains, Lurdes Menezes looks straight at the camera, her eyebrows hinting a teenager’s spunk. Despite the shabbiness of their backdrops, the scenes are poignant in their familiarity.

The book’s layout and the photograph’s framing reflect the interpenetration of private and public, while paying homage to the resourcefulness of Jamaica’s residents who created the walls they needed with their own hands. In one image, lengths of thin cloth billow from a rusted metal armature, an improvised sun shade for a christening party. In another, four-year-old William Coxi hides under the covers with a phone, while his mother Aurora and brother Diego lounge and converse an arm's length away on the same bed. The composition places William at the opposite end of the shot from his mother and brother, each side sequestered in a private sphere by the dividing line of the book’s gutter.

Interspersing these subtle images are signs of change—boxes packed, vacant rooms, demolished walls. Slowly, one life is exchanged for another. JAMAIKA is not ordered chronologically, and several pages fold out in a simplified animation, a before and after that compares Bairro da Jamaica with what follows. In one full-bleed spread, five-year-old Clemente Sousa plays with a balloon at his home in Jamaica, while his sister Analese watches television. The page opens to reveal Clemente, three years older, seated on the floor of his new home where pristine sheetrock replaces raw, porous cinder blocks. In a smaller, single-page photograph, Aurora Coxi walks through the night with William, illuminating their way with her cell phone flashlight. Aurora wears the same pink pants in a full-bleed fold out, but now she and her son are climbing the brightly-lit stairs of their new apartment building. The penultimate page shows an old woman, Maia Nazaré, outside a building at night, her hand resting lightly on the white wall beside her as though in communion. On the final page: a pile of broken brick and pebbled concrete. This Jamaica is no more.