A00293 - Books of the Month for the Month of June 2024: Searching for Zion: Jamaica

 "I knew this Zion was a holy place, a dwelling to roost, a country that was supposed to offer some kind of cure for the long disease of slavery. Maybe I'd find the Zion they sang about in Jamaica, in spite of my father's warning.  I hadn't found it in Israel.  But I knew next to nothing about the religion that underscores so much of what we hear in reggae, which is not only protest music but also sacred music.

"My plan was to talk to the Rastas on their home turf.  Funnily enough, the nightclub I danced at in Tel Aviv -- The Rasta -- moved me to visit reggae's homeland.  Since my trip to Israel, black folks who'd been brave or troubled enough to strike out from "home" for the Promised Land had begun to inspire me."  (Searching for Zion, pgs. 66-67.)

*****

"So here I was, flying into Kingston rather than Dublin.  One thing became clear when I arrived in Jamaica, I was a white woman.  It didn't matter what I said to the contrary because in Jamaica, race is more purely a construct of skin tone.  I stood out in Kingston's Trench Town, Coronation Market, and Emancipation Park.  It was impossible to blend in.  I was the easiest mark for miles.  "Hey, white lady," jeered a Rastafarian selling homemade brooms on Orange Street.  "How you like me country?" (Searching for Zion, pg. 68.)

*****

""Jamaica's an abysmal, God-forsaken place," said Rodney Turner, former manager of reggae star Peter Tosh and current musicology professor in the Reggae Studies Unit within the Institute of Caribbean Studies at the University of the West Indies.  I guessed he was my father's age, somewhere in his early sixties.  He wore a white linen shirt that matched his white beard.  His skin was the color of a brown egg.  I sat with him at a bar in the Pulse Complex on Trafalgar Road, drinking Red Stripes.  Both of us were drunk.

"Rodney," I asked, emboldened enough by the beer to redirect the conversation, "can you enlighten me?"  I asked him how a single faith could espouse both the righteous humanism of Bob Marley's "War" and the intolerant vitriol of Buju Banton's "Boom Bye Bye.

"Well, Jamaica is supposedly homophobic," he began.

"Time magazine describes Jamaica as the most homophobic place on earth," I pointed out." (Searching for Zion, pg. 96.)

*****

"Do you feel this is Babylon, like the Rastas say?"

"We're still living in a slavocracy," He answered.  "We hardly have any full whites left but their descendants still see themselves as masters.  Mulattoes like you live up in those hills" -- he pointed farther uptown -- " and blacks who look like the Africans who came off the slave ships live down there."  He pointed downtown."  (Searching for Zion, pg. 97.)

*****

"We live in two Jamaicas," he continued.  "All you have to do is look who's at the top and look who's at the bottom to see these inequalities are about race, not class."  

*****************

Bottom line, for the author, Emily Raboteau, Jamaica is not Zion for people of African descent, and for various reasons, will never be.

Nest up Ethiopia.

Peace, 

Everett "Skip" Jenkins

Fairfield, California

July 13, 2024