Reflections on Bob Marley at 60 (Con't)

The way I interpret Marley’s music is influenced by the mixed company in which I hear it. Among the international network of reggae DJs which is part of my community, we read Junior Reid’s anthem “One Blood” as a straight-up declaration of non-racialism, straight out of Acts 17:26. But in Jamaica the song may take on different meanings. I watched Reid perform “One Blood” on February 6 near Emancipation Park. The song got one of the biggest responses of a tame event whose organizers relentlessly promoted the officially-sanctioned “One Love” theme. Reid is a Bobo, a Rasta sect whose members often express a belief in black supremacy. And in front of wall-to-wall Africana peoples in a “Little Africa,” “One Blood” could just as easily be heard as a variant of “Africa Unite.”

On February 5 I had my hair cut at the University of West Indies-Mona. We were listening to a Marley special on Irie-FM, and when “War” came on, my barber, a big-bellied man, came close to high-stepping with shears in hand. We sang along together, the words of Haile Selassie put to music by Bob Marley. The message is both about African Liberation, but also a declaration that justice cannot be achieved without a non-racial philosophy. The barber and I may have been moved by different parts of the same song, I reflected. While the lines about “without regard to race” are what most resonate with me, for my Afro-Jamaican barber, it may have been the lines: “We Africans will fight…and we know that we will win.”

The speaker of the words in “War,” Haile Selassie, was a devout Christian (Ethiopian Orthodox). His faith surely shaped his view that non-racialism (skin color is no more important than eye color) was the best way to get rid of perpetual violence. So if we follow Garvey’s advice to look to the roots, where might this lead us?

Think again of the Biblical parallels. A once strictly Jewish faith becoming “a house of prayer for all people.” This evolved into a new recognition of our common humanity through a common Creator—“Out of one blood God created all nations that dwell on the face of the earth.” This is one of the most important scriptures in Rasta culture, as well as in the history of abolitionism. So then how does a “racial empire” fit in with the necessity to eradicate racialism?

Garvey argued that in a “racial empire,” black people should reject the heroes, and thought patterns, of other races. “Any race that accepts the thoughts of another race…becomes the slave of that other race,” Garvey argued. And he insisted: “To emancipate yourselves from that you must accept something original, something racially your own.”9

Garvey believed that Africana peoples must be emancipated through a “racial hierarchy,” a religious notion of race pride utilizing a “racial catechism,” which would be used to instill and enforce racial allegiance. His black Zionism played an enormously important role in instilling self-respect among diasporic peoples. But it was also much like a theocracy. Politically, the “ideal state” posited by Garvey combined fascism (as Garvey himself explicitly said), and imperialism. “African Fundamentalism points to Imperialism,” he insisted.10

Now, “every man has the right to decide his own destiny.” Every individual and every cultural or ethnic group has the right to name themselves and define their objective as they see fit. I have no argument with any self-definition of Africana peoples, or any other group. I agree that we still have a lot of work to do before the majority of human beings can acknowledge African peoples as a cornerstone of world civilizations. Furthermore, aside from Garvey’s use of racial language, the critique of accepting thoughts that are not our own could be very well applied to Jamaica’s neo-colonial dependency on North American commercial culture.

But I am a member of the outernational community that has been inspired by Jamaican culture heroes such as Garvey and Marley. As a man with allegiances to several cultural worlds—as an Oklahoma-born, Irish-American, Spanish-speaking father of biracial children whose skin color is about that of Bob Marley—I have had to ask myself: where do I fit in? Or do I try to fit in? I rejected the fundamentalism of my Christian parents, so why would I accept it just because the speaker has a different skin color? Or can carry a tune and a rhythm better than the people in the church where I was raised?

Tolerance and pluralism are core values for me. So when I read Garvey declaring that “whites” were the “natural foe” of Africana peoples, “irrespective whether they were American, English, French, or Germans,” then I must recognize a racial mythology that conflicts with my core values. And as a part of the audience, and as a promoter of a culture that sometimes expresses intolerant perspectives on race or gender, then I have the obligation, as Sister Carol once said to me, to express my dissent. This is part of what emancipation means.

I do not presume to tell Jamaicans anything about Marcus and Marley, as Jamaicans. But the ideals they have inspired are an international phenomenon. They have been taken up and sung by so many millions of people, and interpreted in so many ways, that the ideas and emotions associated with Marley’s songs of freedom cannot be owned. The words come from a Jamaican, but the audience is international. There is a relationship between the speaker or singer, and the audience. “The speaker is under tutelage of the audience,” as Molefi Asante once said.11

So from this perspective, I pose the question implied by my title: has Marcus Garvey’s definition of a “second emancipation” as a “racial empire” been transfigured by Marley and the Rastas? (Transfiguration has religious roots, but more broadly, transfiguration can refer to any sudden transformation in outward appearance which also indicates inner change.)

Old Testament prophets began to evolve beyond the idea of a merely tribal Jewish God. The Rastas, a “community of prophets,” underwent a similar evolution, as they interacted with a global audience. They had sighted the Creator “through the spectacles of Ethiopia,” as Garvey said. But like the Jews in Babylon, they came to understand that this was an international God. Thus when Marley voiced, on a global stage, the metaphor of an Exodus of Jah people, he conveyed a sense of community that in the final analysis was not racial. When Marley sings “none but ourselves can free our minds,” he echoes Garvey. But the “we” here has changed. Marley’s interviews make it clear that he saw this process of emancipation as multi-racial, although people of African descent claimed a privileged role as the “cornerstone” of this collective emancipation.

If we were to ask the question, emancipation from what, and towards what, the answer could not be definite. Certainly one can point to the transformations, in Rasta culture, of racialized slogans to less racial forms. Early Rastas said “death to white oppressors.” This later become “death to black and white oppressors,” and later still, “death to black, brown, and white oppressors.” The opening of a concept of oppression that goes beyond race leads towards much broader forms of emancipatory thinking, such as Marley’s line in “Survival” that we live in “a world that forces lifelong insecurity.”

Emancipation from mental slavery thus requires resistance against a multi-faceted Babylon System, of which racialism is just one part. The nature of my own attraction to Rasta has to do with I-and-I consciousness. This ideally leads not only to non-racialism, but to respect for all life. If the creator is everywhere, then we must show respect for all Creation. This requires some sense of kinship with people who look different from us, or hail the Creator by a different name, as well as with Mother Nature. Hence, two cores ideas of Rasta, as popularized by Marley, are trodding lightly on the earth, and non-racialism, i.e. One Blood.

But in the real world, Rasta is all but dead on the streets of Kingston today. When I listen to Irie-FM in a cab on Hope Road passing Marley’s old house-turned-museum, it seems almost entirely disconnected from the new Kingston, the new T.G.I.F. full of SUV’s in the parking lot.

Sometimes I look around here, and think that it’s really the concept of a “racial empire” that has triumphed, along with American-style consumerism. Many of my students express a reflexive belief in “Black dominance.” They refer repeatedly to the “white man” as the symbol of all they think they oppose.

Binary thinking, black/white or otherwise, is a form of mental slavery. But it is difficult to even talk about the possibility of commonality and difference co-existing. Efforts to establish a common language are read as an attempt to whitewash the cultural differences we treasure.

The problem is “the insidious confusion of race with culture which haunts our society,” as Ralph Ellison once wrote.12 We get our appearance (our phenotype) through our genes, but our culture is a learned language. So to think that we can determine someone’s intelligence or culture by their skin color or phenotype is one of the most fundamental forms of mental slavery. It is a “diseased imagination,” Frederick Douglass once said. It is also a “master metaphor,” as Kenneth Burke puts it, and as such, a mental shackle that prevents us from developing the broader sense of family or kinship that is a precondition for dealing with all our contemporary crises.

If we can project all blame onto our “other” or enemy, then we don’t have to recognize the ways in which we are similar to our other. A colleague tells me about a student who announced that North Americans were the Antichrist. She herself was wearing a T-shirt with an American flag. Presumably, like virtually all my students, she was looking at the world through North American cable TV, and imbibing a fundamentalist message that divided the world starkly between good and evil, just like the leaders of the nation she claimed to oppose.

The Jamaica now celebrating Bob Marley’s 60 th earthday has barely begun to come to terms with its neo-colonial relation to American commercial culture. In a column in the Daily Observer, Becki Patterson observed that hedonist partying and “the worship of material things” have become “an essential part” the new Jamaican way of being, just as it is for Americans of all colors.13 But many people imagine that their “blackness” provides them some sort of moral immunity for copying the worst of American materialism.

African unity in the service of movement out of Babylon seems to me like an emancipatory idea. African unity as a version of racial self-absorption seems to be another form of mental slavery, “just another illusion.” I can only speak for myself here. But at this hour, I am much more concerned with how people live than their skin color, language, faith, or sexuality. Surely emancipation in the 21 st century requires us to begin asking questions such as: What systems of domination do our lifestyles support?

It seems we need “a new framework for emancipation,” as Horace Campbell wrote.14 One overdue manifestation of that might be an emancipation from a fixation on Bob. Will we be forever milking Bob? I have been impressed by how Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas has framed the issue. As he travels around Mexico, he says repeatedly that the Zapatistas, while revolutionaries of a sort, think of themselves and expect to be treated as just one point of reference, rather than as models. Investing too much in one model is a form of mental slavery that prevents the multi-centeredness and flexibility people need to deal effectively with their own unique challenges. As Bob sang, “I know it’s impossible to go living through the past. Things are not the way they used to be.”

Jamaicans are currently involved in a process of “monumental heroization,” as Petrina Dacres has written in Small Axe.15 During the racialized controversy over the unveiling of the “Redemption Song” statues in Emancipation Park, Carolyn Cooper spoke of “the grandeur of emancipation.” “Our emancipation monument needs to be unequivocally majestic,” she wrote.16

The legacy of slavery, abolitionism, and emancipation is certainly “monumental.” But the memory of slavery in Jamaica, in its monumental form and in popular consciousness, seems to involve African peoples breaking their own chains, and then showing implacable opposition to their former white masters. Yet both slavery and the opposition to slavery were international and “multiracial” phenomena. I am struck by the degree to which the whole history, literature, and culture of abolitionism has all but been erased from public memory in this part of the Caribbean.

The ecstatic reception of Marley in Europe (as well as in Asia and Africa) was foreshadowed by the enthusiastic response to Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists in the 19 th century. The deep roots of the international mobilization against slavery, and the movement towards new forms of emancipation, can be seen in the drawing of a slave ship which was reproduced on Marley’s masterpiece Survival.17 This representation of the middle passage was produced by English abolitionists beginning in the 1780s as a tool to achieve the first emancipation.

The international and multiracial coalitions that successfully mobilized against slavery, and various forms of apartheid, are also heroic movements that need to be memorialized. The legacy of that resistance--an immortal monument of our struggle towards a second emancipation—is everywhere visible and audible in the world’s embrace of Marley’s music. Perhaps that is the most majestic memorial to “the grandeur of emancipation.”

NOTES

1) Philip Potter, “The Religious Thought of Marcus Garvey,” in Rupert Lewis and Patrick Bryan, Garvey: His Work and Impact (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1991), 162.

2) Victor Stafford Reid, “The Cultural Revolution in Jamaica after 1948,” talk delivered at the Institute of Jamaica in 1978; reprinted in The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, ed. Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh (1996), 177.

3) Carolyn Cooper, “Righteous Reggae,” Jamaica Observer 12-14, August 1994, quoted in Norman Stolzoff, Wake The Town and Tell The People: Dancehall Culture In Jamaica (Durham: Duke UP, 2000), 244.

4) Later in “Ambush In the Night” Marley inverts this verse, in a powerful expression of the self-determination that can come from having alternative sources of knowledge:

“Well what we know/Is not what they tell us

‘Cause we’re not ignorant, I mean it/And they just cannot judge us”

5) My music writing and some radio shows can be accessed at http://www.gregorystephens.com

6) My first impressions were published as “Fashion Dread Rasta: On the One in Jamaica with Bob Marley’s Children,” Whole Earth Review (1987).

7) Reception of Whirlwind : Marcus Garvey’s son Julius Garvey got into a shouting match with the American producer Stanley Nelson after a showing in Jamaica, calling the film “a lynching of the character of Marcus Garvey.” Basil Walters, “Uproar over Garvey Film,” Jamaica Observer (Feb. 22, 2001).

8) Ian McCann, Bob Marley: In His Own Words (London and New York: Omnibus Press/Book Sales, 1993), 54. I have taped interviews with Marley in my possession in which he affirms that a white man can be a Rasta, that Rasta is non-racial, that Asians can also sight Rasta, etc.

9) Marcus Garvey, “African Fundamentalism,” in Robert Hill and Barbara Bair, eds., Marcus Garvey: Life and Lessons (University of California Press, 1987), 7-8, my emphasis.

10) racial catechism, and Imperialism: Life and Lessons, xxv; 23. Fascism: “We were the first Fascists,” Garvey told Joel A. Rogers. Garvey wrote that “Mussolini and Hitler copied the programme of the UNIA.” Black Man 2:8 (December 1937), 12; Life and Lessons , lviii.

11) Molefi Asante, The Afrocentric Idea (Temple UP, 1987).

12) Ralph Ellison, Collected Essays (Modern Library, 1995), 43.

13) “Party is the post-modern replacement for religion and the worship of material things is an essential part of this way of being.” Becki Patterson, “Party, Opiate of the people.” The Daily Observer 1-12-05.

14) New framework, Horace Campbell, “Garveyism, Pan-Africanism and African Liberation in the Twentieth Century,” in Rupert Lewis and Patrick Bryan, Garvey: Work and Impact (Africa World Press, 1991), 170.

15) “monumental heroization,” Petrina Dacres, “Monument and Meaning,” Small Axe 16 (September 2004), 149.

16) “the grandeur of emancipation,” Carolyn Cooper, “Enslaved in Stereotype: Race and Representation in Post-Independence Jamaica,” Small Axe 16 (September 2004), 160. “I observed [on the TV show Question Time (CVM)] that the racial politics of the monument could very well be conceived as ‘out of one white woman, two stark-naked black people.”

17) The history behind the image on the slave ship reproduced on Survival is discussed in Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 (Routledge, 2000), 16-40.

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Gregory Stephens is Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Film at the University of West Indies-Mona. For access to his writings, interviews, and radio shows visit http://www.gregorystephens.com. Contact: gregory.stephens@uwimona.edu.jm.

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