I go to close the chicken coops. It is night already and all the fowls are inside their cages. I shut each cage and wonder why the stupid chickens come back to the coops every night.
So ends the chapter titled “You Shall Have Treasure” in Staceyann Chin’s 2009 memoir, The Other Side of Paradise. A 13-year-old Staceyann had just been beaten severely by her guardian in punishment for wearing a hand-me-down swimsuit. She was without parents, shuffled from one house to another, and dependent on the kindness (or indifference) of various extended family members and friends in one of the poorest sections of Montego Bay.
Almost 40 years later, Chin has found herself back in Jamaica, with chicken coops of her own to tend as part of her ambitious project, Kindred on the Rock — a 70-acre community homestead in the hills of St Catherine that Chin hopes will provide safe space for a variety of Jamaicans, especially those who may feel as displaced as she did as a child in “Paradise”.
The renowned Jamaican poet and activist — who for 30-odd years 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 since then. In her first post on the @kindredontherock Instagram page, Chin wrote:
It is my hope that people from all over the world will come to visit, or work, or advise us as we attempt to make Kindred here. I’m hoping they will lend their bodies to building this magical place — a safe place, that will welcome all who have the courage to come with respect, and a strong foundation of inclusive politics. I couldn’t be happier, or more terrified, or more excited.
When asked what prompted her to take such a leap of faith in not only buying such a large plot of (very hilly) land, but also in fashioning 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 marginalised communities who, if they lived in cities, often relied on public spaces to connect with each other and the earth.
Chin hopes Kindred will provide safe space for a variety of Jamaicans, especially those who may feel as displaced as she did as a child
Having suffered from such lack of space herself early in the pandemic, she wanted to offer others “somewhere you could step outside and connect with the land under your feet, where you could look up at the sky, where the rain could fall and you could catch some water.” In particular, Chin envisioned the kind of space that was built by and for 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 dreamt for us alternative future worlds that many believe could guide us out of the confusion and fears of our present times.
Chin was also inspired by the communal connotations of the word: “I am deeply moved by the word ‘kindred’ because it speaks to a community that defines itself purely on the basis of connection. I owe you something, and you owe me something. I imagine that that means I owe you kindness. And you owe me kindness.”
Community 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 of Kindred a reality has been the class hierarchies ingrained in Jamaican society — the kind of class lines that she was intimately familiar with while growing up poor in tourist-centric Montego Bay.
In her characteristic 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 power hierarchy upwards. I still see the folks in rural Point Hill deferring to the visitors. We tell people who visit Kindred, “You’re not a client, you come in as a member of the community and we expect you to participate in cleaning up after yourself or helping with tasks that need to be done.” That’s been a delicate balance to ask people. If people are thinking about this in the context of tourism, then it’s like, I’m here to facilitate an experience for you, rather than like we’re co-creating an experience together. So that’s been a challenge. I’ve seen lots of people chafe at the process. But I’ve also seen lots of miracles happen. Lots of beautiful moments come out of it when people step outside of themselves and take a risk and it’s received well on the other side.
There has been a variety of visitors to Kindred since its inception, in part a reflection of the variety to be found in Chin’s personal social circles. It began with just that circle, friends visiting from near and far to lend a helping hand with the clearing, planting, and renovation on the farm — sometimes expert help, sometimes just unskilled labour, or mere company and support.
Over the past two years, just friends grew to friends of friends, to local organisations, and to university student groups from the United States. In mid-2023, Kindred on the Rock hosted an inaugural cohort 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 in a “Kindred Pride on the Rock” celebration. The residential programme attracted primarily participants from the Caribbean diaspora, and may prove to be a future source of revenue for the farm.
Kindred on the Rock continues toward becoming a self-sufficient farm. Though the number varies depending on the need, the farm employs as many as a dozen people on average who help run the day-to-day farm operations, while also continuing necessary repairs and construction.
Two years after Chin purchased the land, enough work had been done on the property that Kindred can sleep at least 20 people in the three renovated buildings (“more if you don’t mind it being tight”, Chin estimates).
Organic produce from the farm can feed about 30 people a week, with myriad options like yellow yams, pak choi, cucumbers, tomatoes, sweet peppers, hot peppers and, of course, eggs.
Hurricane Beryl unfortunately destroyed some of these crops. But with her signature optimism and energy, Chin is gathering support to rebuild. Over the summer, she returned to Brooklyn, where she focused on organising relief efforts for those affected by Beryl.
When asked what she 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 in and help us make this an “us” space. Not a “me” space, not a “you” space, not a “them” space — but an “us” space. I want to cast the net wide and invite people to come in and participate in this giant experiment of what the world would look like if we had all the time in the world for conversation, and all the time in the world for negotiation, and all the time in the world to craft the world we would all want to live in. How do you create a world, post the apocalypse? In our time, the closest we’ve come to an apocalyptic moment is Covid. And so now it’s forced all of us to go and experiment. This is the mandate of our time.
To learn more about Kindred on the Rock, visit www.menddigap.org