A Conversation with Book of Memory editor Michael Kuelker

The scene for the following conversation is set at a rumshop called Jamaica Nice, a fictional place of the editor’s imagination. Jamaica Nice is culled from a composite of roadside shops where, during the seven-year research and development phase of Book of Memory, the editor would often stop for directions, bun and cheese, bottled water, rum, beer, orange juice, aloe juice, vegetable patties, jukebox music, conversation, the sound of Jamaican patois flowing like rivers, sometimes just a sports score.

Let us make the setting a nudge in the road just outside Sav-la-Mar on Jamaica’s southwest coast, and have the conversation take place on a Sunday morning. The heat is lurid, the morning very bright. Shops like this one vary; some are tiny mini-marts in board structures, while others are large concrete shells with an emphasis on beer and rum. This one is whichever suits you, as you sit on a stool at a wood bar and watch the road through an open window or door. A cricket game on a television set with the sound off behind you gains the interest of a couple of middle aged men, also parked on stools; otherwise, people stream in, for their snacks or portion of flour or soft drinks, and out.

Jamaicans stroll past the shop, attired for the church, carrying their Bibles. They are dressed very well, filing by in small groups with remarkable color and crispness, and you wonder how much they rue the dust from the road. Motorbikes whizz by, giving you a look at who is riding, but the cars churn past too quickly for you to notice much. A talk show on the radio is airing from a boombox and, later, Jamaican pop music. After a while you want to catch a breeze to soothe your face (the spot you’re sitting in is airless), and your ears strain to discern what the churchgoers down the road are singing. You step into the sunlight, which gleams from every surface. Everything appears washed in light. This is Jamaica Nice.

For those of us who are too tired or too busy to read your book, or even the reviews of it, would you very quickly summarize it?

Book of Memory is the spiritual memoir of a Rastafari elder in Jamaica , the country where this cultural and spiritual liberation movement began. Won’t these people at least read the back cover? We received a great blurb from Bob Marley historian Roger Steffens. I think that once people get a feel of the text, you know, physically touch the thing —

Probably not. Assume nothing, and let’s hustle to the next question: Why do you say that “ Book of Memory is a board house”?

The people who live in board houses number in great multitudes in the world. Where is their literature? Prince has lived in a board house for much of his life, which is as I say typical for many people but marginal in terms of proximity to the power centers of Jamaica and of the world at large. What he has to say has implications for all. Prince has a message about love, justice and rebellion, and Book of Memory, as I conclude in the Afterward, is a house at the edge of the neighborhood, outside the gate, just beyond the border.

Also, in Rasta vocabulary, the word structure refers to the human body. Prince has a lot to say in the book about what we feed ourselves. The word structure can signify a physical thing as well as a pattern of thinking. I’m calling attention, too, to the fact that Book of Memory is a structure which is situated, contextual and constructed. That’s true of every text, of course, but what is new in this case is the grain of the voice of the composer, Prince, whose thinking is very traditional and yet millennial, representative but singular.

So few books by Rastafarians in their own words ever get published. This is one book which, we hope, will spur other oral histories.

How did you happen to work with Prince Williams in the first place?

I met Prince quite by accident the first time I traveled in Jamaica, which was January 1992. He was reasoning with some Rastas at Cotton Tree, a place I briefly describe in my first interjection in Book of Memory, where I had stopped for a beer. This happened at a time of deep curiosity on my part about the cultural reference points in reggae music, especially its relationship to Rasta consciousness. Reggae is a very flexible and dynamic art form. Anyway, when I returned to Jamaica three years later, I sought out Prince, who fortunately for me lived nearby, and he was generous with his time as I asked questions about Jamaican culture and the Rastafari movement. Some of what he said was recognizable from the literature and music I was immersing in, but he also had a worldview and voice that I thought was remarkably his own.

At Christmastime in 1996, I sent him a book of oral history and a note asking if he would like to work on his own narrative. He said yes. We began the work the next March. I have been to Jamaica twice a year since then, and each trip had something to do with Book of Memory, spending time with Prince, taping reasonings, traveling somewhere.

Doing the work opened me to many opportunities. To learn, first of all; to go to Jamaica not only as a tourist but as someone doing cultural work, which affected how I trod through the place; to help construct with Prince a piece of Jamaican literature. And, most importantly for me, to befriend a remarkable Rastaman.

What went into the decisions about what to include and not to include?

Think of what you ultimately want when you are going to buy stereo equipment. You want accuracy of sound. This is really my goal for Book of Memory, an accurate representation of Prince’s life and his thinking as a Rastafarian in as full a context as possible.

My guiding question was, What book does Prince want to give us? The book had to have his voice, his design. Once we got into it, I went over a lot of the issues and details of the manuscript with him. I’d give him versions of the manuscript as they became available, because the project was taking so long and I wanted him to see that there was indeed progress slowly being made – although I stopped that once he told me he was giving away these drafts of the book. I didn’t want us to get bootlegged.

The book reflects some of my impulses, too. For instance, I wanted the book to take note of what one can hear in Jamaica . When my feet are on this beautiful and complicated island, I am acutely aware of sound. Music is everywhere, for one thing, not only reggae and dancehall but other genres, including gospel, country and American hip hop and R&B. You hear music in cabs and busses, music is anywhere there is a beach, there’s music coming out of the church house down the road, it’s pouring out of shops. My antennae are out for everything. To the sound of Jamaican speech itself, which has very melodic qualities, and to the nuances of Jamaican speech, such as when Prince describes being ‘Christianlies’d’ when he was growing up. To the countless environmental sounds. One must listen well. The book communicates silence, too.

In the background of the fictional rumshop where this ostensible conversation is taking place, just as Morgan Heritage’s “Don’t Haffi Dread to Be Rasta” (an actual song) is playing from the boombox, the conversation is interrupted:

“Excuse me, sah.”

With that, a dread sidles up carrying a big canvas bag. After apologizing for breaking in, he says that he’s passing through with fruits. Would either of you like to buy a cup of fresh-squeezed orange juice? The price is J$150 (about US$3), and it’s at the outer range of what he can afford for such a thing, but Kuelker doesn’t feel like chiseling the man down on his juice, which stains the shirt he wears. Kuelker says yes, he is thirsty. The sale made, the dread holds out an orange above a clear plastic cup and releases its juices with two very tight, trembling squeezes. Orange after orange withers under each rapid clench of his impressive grip, and soon the cup brims with juice. The encounter ends with an exchange of “Give thanks,” and the dread trods off.

Ah, but the juice comes from sour oranges. Kuelker recoils as inauspiciously as he can. He takes another taste, for it is a fresh tropical fruit made possible by a slightly expensive display of brute force. But honestly, he finds it undrinkable.

If you don’t want that juice, I’ll take it. By the way, what does Prince think of Morgan Heritage coming out with this song a few years ago saying that you don’t have to dread your hair in order to be Rasta?

This question of dreadlocks and Rastafari comes up in one of the chapters where Prince and I attend an annual Rasta commemoration. One of the invited speakers ended his reasoning by quoting the title of this song. But not everyone is so inclusive in his or her definition of Rastafari. The MC of the event, a Rasta leader named Junior Manning of Pitfour, Jamaica, regained the microphone and respectfully distanced himself from the speaker. Manning said that you do haffi dread to be Rasta, adding that the dreads have to grow from the heart.

Not everybody’s singing from the same page of the hymnal as it were. This is just one example of how Book of Memory opens up to some of the cultural contexts.

I asked the question of Prince, and he replied that to be a Rasta you don’t have to be black but you do haffi dread.

You took seven years to edit Book of Memory. That seems like a very long time…

I like what Annie Dillard says in The Writer’s Life: Writing a book, full time, takes between two and ten years. I had to learn a great deal about Jamaican history and culture before I was able to write decent footnotes, of which there are many. The footnotes have a supportive function. They explain some of the things which Prince doesn’t, and they refer to some of the important primary and secondary sources for what Prince is saying.

Then you’ve got the logistics of setting up and running a limited liability corporation while you do the work of the book and the work you do to pay the house note. So the seven years it lasted from the first of our taped reasonings to the final edit came in ahead of the Annie Dillard deadline.

What’s your favorite part of the book?

Those moments when I was struck with an immediate and lasting recognition of beauty.

One was when Prince answered my final question. I describe the setting the two pages beforehand – a light rain falls on the roof of his house on a melancholy Saturday afternoon; I had to leave Jamaica the next day – and I ask him whether we’re finished, whether he’s told me all that we, the readers of his book, need to know about Rastafari. He gives us gold. I’ve read that page probably a couple hundred times, and I still love it.

Another is the first time I saw Prince Tebah & the Sons of Thunder [at a Rastafarian cultural event in 1999 described in Book of Memory], a group of Rasta drummers. A very compelling performance amid an amazing confluence of energies.

Beyond having a favorite part as such, I am excited to get the book out there so people can read the intertextuality and see how Prince layers his images and themes, in the kind of way which can happen only in a book, and how they ultimately contribute to Prince’s message. This is a fresh piece of literary fruit, no question about it.

Interesting, but it doesn’t sound heartwarming.

Nobody will confuse our book with Tuesdays with Morrie.

What’s your next book?

A novel set in Jamaica. Look for it in ten years, maybe a jot sooner.

Book of Memory is available through Amazon.com and Ernie B’s Reggae [www.ebreggae.com] beginning Nov. 1. See www.CaribSound.com for more on Book of Memory, and details about Communication Drums, the debut CD by Jamaican Rastafarian drummers Prince Tebah & the Sons of Thunder.