The Jumbi Life is a work of fiction loosely based on the experiences of the author who lived in self-imposed exile on a small Caribbean island back in the early nineties. It is semi auto-biographical and intertwined with an allegorical sub narrative that reinforces the theme of the main story line.
"The Jumbi Life" introduces you to Cosmo:
Cosmo could tell you that the world was a happier, kinder sort of place when he was a kid, but perhaps it wasn’t. It disturbs him to see how very little things have changed. Sure, we went to the moon, and now almost everyone in North America owns a computer and carries a cell phone. Our technology marches onward, but Coz is not so sure we have become better people. When he was a small boy, he grew up watching American soldiers get killed in the jungles of South Vietnam on television. His dad said they were fighting communism.
Don’t get the wrong idea. Cosmo is very upbeat, but the ugly head of Cynicism was reared in the American suburbs, the place where Cosmo had unfolded many lifetimes ago. There he found that everyone wants pretty much the same things. Families buy station wagons, later replaced by SUV’s. Children are picked up from soccer practice or the Mall, and everyone drives through the local McDonald’s restaurant on picturesque Sunday afternoons. No one really travels, but they do go to Florida on vacation in the summertime. They go to the beach and get sunburned, and they visit the Magic Kingdom together where Mickey and Pluto live.
Once they return, they settle back into their routines, working nine to five, paying the insurance bills, and attending P.T.A. meetings and such. Sadly, they sometimes find that in many ways for the American dream to exist, everyone must be very much asleep.
These folks are not bad. It’s just that they are not really helpful all cocooned safely together either. It seems they believe that the world is divided into good and evil, so they associate what they don’t comprehend with snakes that bite and coerce, with darkness, and with unknown and unnecessary risk. They become paralyzed by a kind of narrowness which is popularly referred to as ‘The Box.’
And that’s how it is here on Earth sometimes.
