Power Ballad Beach by Alex Mormoris
This life writing piece by Alex Mormoris – shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize – reflects on Jamaican diasporic experience and Windrush history, punctuated by the music of Tom Jones.
The 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open until 30 June 2025. Read the full guidelines and submit your work.
On the public beach at Ocho Rios, I am yet to realise freedom as a state of mind. Instead, heat beats me down into relaxed submission atop the rented sunbed. I breathe deep trying to fill up on vitamin D and paradise, listening to the sounds of the beach.
Splashing: From two older brothers escorting a wilful sister toddler to the sea for her first swim. She’s serious about her play, positioning her escorts and armbands just so.
Laughing: From cousins separated by continents, but bound by blood. They’re sat in the shallows — debating who won the race to the water. Their bond is brief but it strengthens them to know they are loved beyond the horizon.
Bottles clinking: a grandfather and self-appointed guardian of the box meals, awoken at his post, after which he’d succumb to Wray’s overproof rum and sun. Rumour has it he almost drowned as a child; the experience left him living a lifetime metres from the sea, but too scared to learn how to swim. ‘Me too handsome for the water. Last time I visit, mermaids nah let me leave,’ he explains.
Under them all is the sea. Its metronomic tides keeping time for the soundscape of love and life, on a beach as plentiful with Black joy as sand.
Just as I’m about to make a pledge of annual pilgrimage, I hear history. The sound of which is known to repeat, rhyme, and echo. But this day was given voice by, of all people, Tom Jones.
‘I saw the light on the night that I passed by her window …’
The sunbed suddenly shrinks, its plastic edges eating the fabric centre as it forms a seat high up in the heavens of Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium. I feel the winter wind punctured by pitch-side pyrotechnics — as the crowd roars at the Six Nations rugby match starting between my feet. Our tickets to Delilah’s home were touted on the day, my Dad and I agreeing it’s more important being on the halfway line than close to the action. ‘Surprised they haven’t closed the roof, still don’t get the worst of rain up here,’ he says, battling with the crowd and the wind to be heard. But I can think of better ways to dodge the rain.
I open my eyes and return to Ochi, peering round to where the music is coming from. I’m praying that a mass of obnoxious, red, peeling bodies haven’t stalked me across the daydream. Zombies of my past now engaging in on-tour antics at the cost of paradise. The waves continue to break as I’m flooded with forlorn judgement and imagined dread. Just once, let them see our light and pass by the window, without having to break in and colonise. Thankfully, as I locate the source of the sound, I’m met by the much less violent image of a man wielding a machete. He’s opening coconuts. Nobody else seems to have noticed the collision of Cymru and Columbus Heights; the beach backing track hasn’t changed from splashing, shouting, and snoring. Outside of the diaspora – where the Black experience is never plural – the Jamaican love for classic rock 'n' roll, country 'n' western, and Tom Jones is seldom known. Inside the diaspora, it’s just seldom understood. Regardless, Jones has set my mind running, not quick like Bolt, but evasive like Williams. I decide on liquid sedation to quiet the creeping scepticism invading my serenity.
‘... As she deceived me I watched and went out of my mind …’
Why why why did we ever leave this place? As I wade towards the coconuts through clouds of herb and waves of spice, I remember my Nanny’s answer: ‘They can take everything but your education.’ I hand over Nanny of the Maroons a $500JD form, exchanged for a coconut and Samuel Sharp as change. What could have been if not for the lies like coal that fuelled Windrush. Promises of work, wealth, and opportunity — but, in fairness, never respect, or your pickney’s protection from deportation. Nor now remembrance of how the blitzed bog was rebuilt by Black hands; how they bought homeownership, healed the NHS, and left Ska so deep it exposed Northern soul. Windrush’s tonnage is overloaded with legacy. Yet those who gave so much couldn’t fit enough love in the barrels banded together as life rafts — sent for family left in the Caribbean Sea. Around 6,000 barrel children made the journey; it can only be estimated 90,000 did not. What would a generation of aptitude and ambition have achieved on the newly independent island? My eyes scan down to the fence at the end of the beach where locals are called trespassers. They would have at least risen from beneath the heel of Sandals.
As I sip the coconut, I know I’m asking the wrong question. All of the mango, papaya, and plantain can’t change the past. But if leaving was a mistake, why not return?
‘... I could see that girl was no good for me but I was lost like a slave that no man could free …’
My eyes fall once more on the cousins with so much to catch up on. I asked Nanny, too, why not come back? Trying not to echo the racists that justify my question. ‘My family is here.’ A simple spell that makes my aunties, cousins, and I clasp hands, transmogrifying into the iron anchor of the otherwise ethereal HMT Windrush.
Intergenerational guilt resides in many places, but for us it was born on the plantations where my ancestors toiled — acres above the coast where I now idle. What did the sounds of the beach mean to them? The enslaved no man could free, until rebellion and capitalism agreed it was more cost effective to turn them into consumers. Finally capturing Nanny, and Samuel, putting them in their paper money prison; destined to be remembered, but never resurrected. Those once considered property had a life expectancy of seven years. I consider again the coconut at the end of my straw — the Appleton estate I’m adding aged longer.
‘… She stood there laughing
I felt the knife in my hand …’
The sun and the rum go down quickly here. Hanging low, joining auburn hands with the sea and the sky, before it’s pulled beneath the waves of emotion. I remember the first time I came here and realised I wasn’t home. The same spectre of death returning now to lay its scythe upon yet more of my naivety. I see now the certainty that its two brothers plus a sister, not husbands with their toddler daughter. I see the bloody multifunctionality of the coconut machetes, and hear the echoing domestic abuse anthem underscoring all these constants that are only half of my identity equation. Equally, everything about me is made in foreign — clothes, appetite, build, but especially that insipid question of belonging.
I dream about this place. It’s buried deep in my soul, part of what I carry from those who survived. Maybe they dreamt of the freedom to idle by the sea. But what if those beach sounds and metronomic waves were just a haunting memory of the shores they were taken from — the sweat of their brow the closest they ever came to the sea. I don’t even know their names, let alone their dreams, let alone their wishes for me. My mind is coming to rest, this is the last anxious mental fidget, reconciling my physical freedom with the intellectual bondage of the history that precipitated this homecoming. A journey only made possible by using that freedom to continue selling my labour to the same masters. I stay there a while under the twinkling sky, I have nowhere to be — no home to go to; and tomorrow I return to the master's house.
‘… So before they come to break down the door. Forgive me, Delilah I just couldn’t take anymore.’
‘Ya know lotta people cry when dem make dis journey …’ says Winston the taxi driver ‘… alright if ya wanna cry.’ The journey doesn’t make me want to cry as we cross the parish rivers; but the destination after Sangster Mo-Bay, maybe. There is no part of this airport that isn’t filled with a clinical light, under which I examine myself, standing in the queue for premium. I wish that made me happy. The beautiful economy queue catches my eye, the working class with wings; it’s as eclectic – and problematic – as it is safe. Good people are under no illusion that they own the world, but simply forced to exist at its margins. Some look back at me — we both know where I belong, and where is a more comfortable illusion of home. But breaking through the door is a definitive act; I’ve tasted the free drinks and I’m not coming back.
But in premium is the incontinent, post-continent Mr and Mrs Britannia. ‘I’m not coming back here, Tom. They’re all slow.’ Mr and Mrs Britannia have spent the fortnight bemused by flavour and heat, confused that everything isn’t accompanied by bacon, and personally slighted that those they voted to be deported and exploited haven’t welcomed them with open arms. Now clouded by their dub-pression, they’ve lost their patience. The subject of their ire is a grey-haired, dreadlocked couple at the head of the line, who are taking their time. He’s on his last lock and she’s having to explain things to him with great care. This is not their second holiday of the year, it's possibly their last ever. A homecoming, or reunion, or the end of nine night. Whatever the occasion, they’ve picked up too much baggage before being dragged back by another anchor dropped by Windrush.
‘I don’t know what’s so hard for these stupid people to understand, Delilah.’ My anger rises like a welt from the tongue lashing; my fist closes, crumpling my passport. Then Dred Solo and the Grey Queen are done, royalty is moving onto duty free. As he goes, Dred Solo looks at me with a smile and strength that reassures me he pays no mind about the space and time he takes up — he ain’t got enough left for that expense. I realise neither am I so rich. Closing my eyes, I hear the waves again.
Before I realised freedom as a state of mind, I thought it was a place, an island paradise beyond the horizon. I feared I would drown before I reached it. Yet those metronomic waves carry adventure, family, joy, and love. Those waves didn’t stop for Tom and Delilah, or history, or justice, and they certainly won’t stop for me to find home. I realise I’m ready for when they come to kick down my door, to tell me no land or nation is my own. Most of the world is waves and we’ve been sailing for generations.
The 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June. Submit here.
Image: Frederic Edwin Church, Sky at sunset, Jamaica, West Indies, 1865
