N.D.Williams' Books

After slavery, the nagging dialectical absence which was Africa, continually brought to mind in ways that white society denigrated, usually with ridicule (as in phenomena such as Pocomania, or African drumming) surfaced in a new form in the announcement by the Jamaican Marcus Garvey, firstly that black people could be proud of their appearance and identity ("Black is beautiful" was a slogan he coined), but also that finally a return to Africa might be possible. His Black Star Line was thwarted by the authorities, and he himself reviled and destroyed, but in the late 1920s he prophesied: "Look to Africa, where a black King shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is near."[1]

The subsequent crowning, in 1930, of Ras (Prince) Tafari Makonnen as the Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia awoke the interest of black people, especially in Jamaica, in the only African country which had never been colonized or fallen under the influence of whites. Ras Tafari claimed direct descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and took, among others, the titles 'King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah.' Within months, several Jamaican preachers, apparently independently of each other, began to teach that he was the Messiah who would lead the children of the slaves from their captivity in Babylon (i.e. the countries controlled by the colonizers) to the New Jerusalem of Zion in Africa. From the beginning such preachers fell under suspicion from the authorities; one of them was found guilty of sedition for preaching the doctrine and distributing pictures of Selassie, which he claimed were passports to Ethiopia.

However, the movement flourished, fuelled by the resistance shown by the Ethiopians to the invasion by Mussolini's troops in 1935. Some Rastafarians lived in isolation, but others came together to form a community outside Spanish Town, which was repeatedly raided by the police. When the community was finally broken up in the 1950s, the paradoxical effect was to increase the movement's membership by spreading their message more widely. Clashes with the authorities and the police escalated in the late 1950s, and as a result of widespread disquiet among middle-class Jamaicans, some Rastafarians requested an independent report, which was carried out by a team from the then University College of the West Indies including Rex Nettleford, and published in 1960 as The Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica. The report confirmed the group's own claims about their peaceable nature, but did not completely allay middle-class fears.

After Jamaican independence in 1962 Rastafarian ideas spread to other Caribbean islands and emigrant Caribbean communities in the US, Canada and Britain. A particular landmark was the visit paid to Jamaica in April 1966 by Haile Selassie himself. Countless thousands of Jamaicans went spontaneously to what was then Pallisadoes Airportto give him a tumultuous and chaotic but peaceful welcome, which took the authorities completely by surprise. When His Imperial Majesty looked down from the steps of the aircraft on the vast sea of faces, he wept.

Since the 1960s the movement has changed noticeably in character. Under pressure from world events such as the military coup which ousted Haile Selassie, (which enjoyed support from Caribbean troops sent by Cuba), and Selassie's subsequent death, as well as the concrete experiences of would-be emigrants to Africa, Rastafari moved away from belief in a literal return to Africa, which once had people selling their possessions and packing their bags in the hope of promised ships, or alternatively the creation of an ideal utopian state in an independent Jamaica, which palpably was not happening, towards a more mystical and spiritual sense of personal redemption.

The rise to world prominence of Bob Marley in the 1970s and the ever-increasing appreciation of his music since then, also had a significant effect. There is a strong current of belief that Marley inherited Haile Selassie's ring, and with it his messianic status, on the death of the Emperor. Though there was still persecution of Rastafarians, most notoriously in the Dominican 'Dread Act', which gave virtual freedom to military personnel to shoot Rastas on sight, current trends indicate that Rastafari is strong and growing on the islands with predominantly African populations, such as Jamaica, Barbados or St Lucia, and in the emigrant communities, although there is still a largely class-based division in which Rastafari is rejected by those with Westernized middle-class aspirations.

Rastafarians see black people as the true Jews, and draw their inspiration from close reading of the Bible, particularly the first books of the Old Testament, the Psalms, the first pages of St John'sGospel and the Book of Revelation. They believe that Armageddon (which they punningly call Harmageddon) will come soon with the destruction of the present Babylonian world order and the establishment by Jah of the New Jerusalem (Zion) as is foretold in the Apocalypse. Meanwhile they are expected to follow a strict and pure lifestyle eating only pure (organically grown) vegetarian food, drinking no strong alcohol and rejecting Western medical treatment, contraception and legal marriage. Depending on the strictness of their observation they also have a number of taboos drawn from the book of Leviticus on, for example, second-hand clothes, pork, salt, magic and witchcraft.

Their organization is loose, their leaders being more by acclamation for their wisdom and lifestyle than anything else. They reject the idea of working for wages or profit, so that the Rasta selling products he has made himself from door to door or in the streets has long been a common sight. Their most recognizable feature is the untrimmed beard and hair worn in matted 'knotty' dreadlocks, also of biblical origin, recalling the source of Samson's strength against his enemies and captors, and also the mane of the lion, the symbol of Ras Tafari. The hair is often enclosed in a knitted woollen 'tam' in the Rastafarian colours (the red, yellow and green of Ethiopiawith black). More well-known (and contentious) is their use of ganja, which they term the Healing of the Nations or the Chalice, as an aid to meditation and reasoning.

The Rastafarian use of language has had a wide influence. There are a number of features that can be observed, some of which were in my quote at the beginning. The basic speech is Jamaican 'patwa', but instead of the typical Caribbean 1^st person subject pronoun 'me', which Rastafarians see as emphasizing a slave mentality condemning them to being the object of an alien ruler, they stress the 'I', and its plural form 'I-and-I', which means both 'we' and a kind of royal 'we' to denote the two bodies of the physical and spiritual man. 'I' is then used in other phrases such as 'Yes-I' or 'Thanks-I', or in punning usages such as 'inity' for unity, 'iree' for happy, 'ital' for pure, 'livity' for lifestyle. Many are well aware of the punning allusions to sight involved. Rastas take on a Rastafari name instead of their 'slave name', and these often include 'I', like the two who climbed the St Lucia Petit Piton with me, Jah-I and I-Sett (Seth). Rastafarians refer to each other as 'bredren', and pioneered the greeting 'Peace and Love'.

It has seldom been appreciated how much influence the movement had on 1960s culture, particularly in Britain, where 'Flower Power' ideas from California combined with the Rastafarian ideals current among Caribbean musicians on the London music scene, who regularly used the Healing of the Nations, in influencing groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

The first serious literary studies of Rastafarians occur in Roger Mais' novels The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953) and Brother Man (1954). As a journalist working in Kingston for The Gleaner, Mais would have had the opportunity to discover for himself what was going on in the poorest districts, and his portrayal of Rastafarians as gentle and peace-loving, indeed in Brother Man as the epitome of Christ-like goodness, is striking for the time it was written but broadly reflects what the Jamaican academics' report would later discover. Ras, in The Hills Were Joyful Together, is a stable point of goodness in the currents of emotion, abuse and violence circulating in the Kingston yard. One example:

When Ditty saw Puss-Jook standing before her, she gave a little gasp and dropped the dry limb. One hand clutched the front of her blouse. He took two steps towards her. She turned and fled in terror. She ran straight up to Ras, standing under the tree.

'Save me, do. Him goin' kill me. Do, Ah beg you. Don't mek him get me, do!' [...]

'All right, hush! Tek it easy, now.'

Puss-Jook looked on, a smile of amusement curling his lips.

He came slowly across the yard, making the cane whistle through the air.

Ras stood waiting for him, his arm about the trembling girl's shoulder. He could smell her fear rising up from her armpits to his nostrils. He held himself easily, waiting for Puss-Jook to come up to them.

Puss-Jook stood a few feet away. He brought the point of the cane to rest on the ground. He looked on with that same amused, contemptuous smile.

'You can have her if you want, Ras.'

Ras said, 'Howdy brother. Peace an' love.'

'Say you can have her if she tek you' fancy. High time fo' she to get a man.'

'Yuh words are wantin' in wisdom an' elegance,' said Ras quietly, as though he was speaking a sermon. 'They flow from de mout' of a fool. They not deservin' an answer. But brother, don' try to draw me anger. Go-long yuh ways befo' yuh tongue trip you. Peace an' love.'[2]

Ras is transformed in Brother Man into the rather mawkish figure of John Power, a Rastafarian shoemaker. The portrayal lacks depth, however, and while it emphasizes the idealism and non-violence of Rastafari, it completely omits the Ethiopian dimension, so that Power is indistinguishable from a Christian St Francis figure.

A far more sophisticated investigation of Rastafari can be found in the work of the Guyanese author N.D. Williams, who now lives in New York. His first novel, which won the Casa de las Americas Prize in 1976, is entitled Ikael Torass. The semi-autobiographical novel charts how the protagonist, Michael Abbensetts, moves through the three stages of the book's sections from being a 'Departurist' whose memories and experience of his Caribbean homeland are brought to a focus on the day he misses the plane out, through 'Arrivant' at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica (where, I am told, many of Williams' acquaintances found themselves portrayed or caricatured) to the final section 'Homing' where the world of Rastafarians provides an alternative to the conventional, middle-class university environment and the strident politics of 70s Jamaica.

In a way that rings entirely true, Williams describes the series of chance meetings, missed appointments, sudden appearances and disappearances, completely independent of European schemes of schedules and clock times, by which Michael becomes aware of the Rastafarians and what they might offer him. First the Rasta imitators, a group of disaffected students christened by one shocked right thinker the 'malcunts',  who exude a certain danger and excitement that remind him of his working-class school friend Skully Wilson, take him to 'check on the bredda'. But he later meets more authentic Rastafarians, the country teacher Im, who has been sacked for expounding Rastafarian ideas, and Ras Alphonsus and Jah Mighty, who give him ambivalent insights.

His meeting with Im takes place one Christmas when he is looking after his girlfriend's flat. Im's appearance is described first:

...my eyes slowly focussed on the knitted tam and the angular face, and I said, 'Jesus Christ' half in apprehension; it might have been my subconscious speaking for his face bore a close resemblance to pictures of Christ they hung in every classroom back in St Francis. Later I was to discover how easy it is to see Christ in every bearded tam wearer, carrying a tamarind crook and peculiar weary sacrificial expression on his face.[3]

The narrator uses the same gently ironic tone as Im, who has refused all but a glass of water, tells his life story, his experience as a three-year-old seeing the look of affection on the face of an itinerant Rasta selling yardbrooms when his horrified mother sets their dog on him, and later as a schoolboy his discovery of his father's hypocrisy. To his parents' distress he has become a Rastafarian, and explains to the protagonist, who he casually christens Ikael, about the corruption of the society they live in: "Babylon burning. Rome on fire again!"[4]

He drums with his fingers the way Skully had done when a teacher had given him detention. Im explains it as 'communing', an expression of powerlessness but at the same time a discovery of a source of spiritual energy, but only as a result of suffering. It grows dark as their conversation continues, and Michael, from habit, gets up to put on the lights. Im rebukes him:

That man fearful of darkness?'

'Look... Im, this isn't my place. I'm only... I'm just putting on the lights...'

'That man don't tell I why...'

'Cause it's dark, and I can't see, and I don't want anybody coming in here from inside...'

'Ikael. man...'

'... and look, my name is Michael, right?'

'Hold on, nuh. Man and man don't need light but enlightenment...'[5]

The contrast between technology (electric light as messageless medium) and spiritual awareness could not be clearer. Im leaves him thinking about the mystery of the dry river-gully whose water has disappeared as though it had flown away. To find out where it went it is necessary to go back to the time when the water flowed, the metaphorical search for both African and spirtual origins.

Another time Im and the protagonist want to attend a meeting at which a man from Africa is to speak, but due to mix-ups and missed buses they miss the meeting. Only a handful of the brethren are still there:

This is what I will always remember — the strange power of bredren in meditative silence, broken occasionally by the wind playing in overhanging trees through which the moon poured fragmented light. [ ...] They seemed immersed in dream, deep wish, the flame of love, the fire of anger, the love of remembrance, as if what they had just heard, what we had travelled over 120 minutes to hear and just missed, was a miracle of revelation. They were conscious, however, of the earth on which they stood; with the watchful, alive weariness of lions pausing in stride to lift their heads, all turned and listened when they heard a movement down the passage way. [...] Soon we were in circle and passing the weed from hand to hand. Long concealed, half buried ways of feeling were suddenly very real; after centuries that fire in the forest clearing still glowed with living embers. Community was, still and despite, possible.[6]

A noteworthy point is how the despair of loss which drove so many slaves to prefer death is replaced in Rastafari by this new awareness of the earth as an exile's intimation of home. This resonant description is immediately relativized by the author with the statement: Freud would have loved this place. Religious passions running loose in the streets, the fetish about hair and dirt and ganja and no pork! Enormous repressions, I'd say, of one kind or another.[7]

The two other Rastafarians presented are Ras Alphonsus, who teaches the protagonist about 'iditation', the importance of living in harmony with nature and listening to the true divine voice within the self: I-nity, beloved. Unity is falsehood, the crooked way, the trick of the Pope, the loop of the politician. I-nity is the fulfilment of the individual within the consciousness of His I-mannence. Is freedom from scatta scatta scatta — all that reggae and migratin'. Is the horn listening to the drum listening to the flute listening to the heartbeat, yu na see't. Is the loyalty of I & I, not the oppressive royalty of I.'[8]

However, it is noticeable that he spends all his time lying in the hammock and makes others, the women and girls, provide refreshments. Jah Mighty is another recognizable type, Rastafarian only when it does not interfere with his pleasures, unreliable to the point of solipsism.

Perhaps the most extraordinary portrayal of a Rastafarian in Williams' work is contained in the short story 'Zeke' from the collection The Crying of Rainbirds (1992). The story is told by a literary narrative voice making a television documentary about Zeke's life. Born Bedward Moffit, he ran aware from his rural home to become a reggae superstar, but 'no one would buy his pain'. He received extravagant praise for his 'performance poetry' from a famous literary figure, who then disappoints him by 'becoming inaccessible'. After an attempt to set up a school for 'ghetto youth' he is disillusioned when, in spite of initial enthusiasm, people begin drifting away. He goes through a phase of running maniacally through city streets, and another of standing at intersections holding up traffic, before meeting Peter Shury, a businessman's son, who becomes his first disciple. Together they go to the hills where they 'capture' some government land, plant vegetables and some 'herb for the mind'. They meditate on the Bible ("The King turn to the Bible like a pilot to a compass.") and talk about the 'movement inside' and about Africa. Says Shury:

'Right there so I knew I had to use my life to play music, to make a tunnel of light with sound so that people could see through the haze of fear, self-love, money problems, to the movement inside.'[9]

One morning Zeke wakes up racked with pain: 'Pain hold me down on my chest, round my neck and shoulder, like some iron clamp. When I turn this way pain follow me like a chain; turn that way, it just rattle on me. All the try I try I couldn't move.[10]

The memory of the Middle Passage drives Zeke down towards the sea, starting to sing. This leads to the misunderstanding with Mr and Mrs Zybowski, American tourists who are shopping in the market. Mr Zybowski recognizes in him a singer he would like to get under contract, or at least capture on camera. Mrs Zybowski is so shocked that she drops the soursop fruit she is holding. The market traders assume that the 'dutty Rasta' has committed some crime and pursue him to the harbour throwing stones and sticks at him. Zeke, by now, is kneeling naked at the water's edge, where he has an extraordinary epiphany as the crowd reels back, assaulted by smell: It occurred to him that human labour on the island was as much in chains now as then; that men and women toiled under the sun and the years went by and there was nothing, nothing they could point to with pride as their achievement. Zeke was overcome with a terrible feeling of despair, of anger. Right at that moment, feeling very much the feeling of any hapless slave who might have stood on that spot centuries before contemplating his new world, Zeke's bowels had gone into motion. He was not unaware that he had soiled himself. He felt no shame, no fear. There was just this overpowering notion that nothing had altered; his time was standing still; his island world was neither shrinking nor expanding. Three hundred more years would pass and someone else would stand on these shores and discover the same baleful truth. A never-ending cycle, as monotonous and unbreakable as the sun's daily passage across the sky.[11]

At this point Zeke, having smeared his limbs with mud and excrement like — as Mr Zybowski, who has read his National Geographical, realizes — Papuan tribesmen preparing for spiritual rituals of shamanic flight, starts swimming. He swims all the way to Africa. Sometimes he is driven back by storms, and once he is mistaken for a mythical sea creature by yachtsmen and shot at. Finally he arrives on the Guineacoast. When the television crew ask to film Zeke's grave, they are forbidden to; they are not even allowed to take away the flowers of the tree like island poui that grows on his grave, recalling the Glastonbury thorn. They can only return with "the fragrance and the petals of our tale."[12]

Middle-class distrust of Rastafarians in the islands that have defined their independence in Western terms, of the sort that leads to the harbour scene in 'Zeke', is picked up by Williams in 'Monkey Wrenching Snaps' from the collection Julie Mango.

Hunter Michel Valcin, who describes himself as "Child of his island's Independence. Citizen of the world,"[13] is the son of a respected magistrate, but now lives and teaches abroad, in New York State. There his island accent is the occasion for various patronizing remarks. Invited to visit Yardborough, an old friend who now lectures at the island university, he is shocked by the heat at the airport which: "mugged him as if he were a tourist".[14] He is picked up by a Rastafarian, who loses his own car, and disappears in the middle of a village with the words 'Soon come' for a quick joint, and who bears a name incorporating the 'I' with glorious incongruity: Bikesman: "Is long time now," he began, settling back, his elbow sticking out the window: "Long time I man study this island/world situation... the futility of politics, or the politics of futility — See't? —either way you deal the cards, is sufferation for the righteous... Now, I & I reach one conclusion: the only true salvation from and for the hege/money — See't? — of oppressor nations is for I & I to recover that original ground of the spirit... Selassie-I, the true vine!"

Hunter was flabbergasted. He couldn't think of anything to say. Just off an aircraft, a survivor of Customs and Immigration impertinence, here he was being sermonized by a fellow named Bikesman about man's search for that original ground of the spirit. And, next, being asked about his position on this issue.[15]

Hunter remembers his Latin teacher's words: 'Odi profanum vulgus et arceo...'

If the general tone of Williams' presentations of Rastafarians is positive, more serious criticism emerges in two specific areas: sexism and homophobia. In the story 'Beach' (from The Crying of Rainbirds) St Remy retakes possession of his island on a Sunday morning, standing in reverence contemplating the natural spectacle, before swimming in the ocean as though part of its element. But then, thinking of Crusoe and Friday, he sees four white legs. One of the girls, without asking permission, photographs him and, in revenge, he seduces her companion and subjects her to consensual rape although, to his annoyance, she appears not to have noticed that is what has happened. One recalls Earl Lovelace's theme that the black man, in liberating himself from the ideas of slavery, expresses his liberation at the expense of women.[16]

Homophobia appeared in Williams' first description of Rastafarians in Ikael Torass. Two Americans, thinking that a country where cannabis is a sacrament must be a paradise of individual hippie freedom, sodomize each other with the doors wide open on the university campus, to the disgust of the 'malcunts', who see their actions as 'the wickedness of Babylon'. In the later story 'Batty Bwoy, Divert!' (from Julie Mango) there is a darker sense of threat in the Rastafarians in New York Citywhose conversation the narrator is meant to overhear when they talk about "Batty bwoy fi burn in hellfire." These Rastas, who dress in fashionable clothes and drive an expensive Japanese car displaying traffic tickets to show they have no respect for 'Babylon system', describe their treatment of a gay:

"So we jump 'pon him. Beat him till 'im bawl. Kick him in his balls. Him curl up like a little girl, and the more him bawl, the more we stamp 'pon him, kick him, mash up 'im face."

"Me had to pull the dred away, else him woulda kill the batty bwoy."

"Him lucky. If I had my gun I woulda push it up 'im backside... and... boosha... boosha."[17]

Though these men clearly have little in common with the principles of Rastafari, the story goes on to show how it echoes the attitudes of elders, which result when a desire for purity calcinates into fundamentalism to be enforced by extremism. The narrator remembers one of the first victims of Aids on his island, taunted by voices "rushing out like guard dogs to snap at his ankles, snarling from behind Selassie's palace gates at his wayward soul" saying: "Jah go lick you with diseases, batty bwoy!"[18] He turns on them: "You fellas... you children of Zion... you so quick to punish, so ready to judge. I don't mind if you wait forever for ships of salvation to take you back home. Just leave me alone."[19]

In the novella My Planet of Ras (1997), a German tourist called Kristal Marie Braun visits Jamaica in 1969, the year of the Woodstockfestival and the first moon landing; her discovery is of a new planet and alternative society centring on three Magus characters: Selassie, reader and healer with herbs, Ikael, artist-painter, and Kilmanjaro, master drummer. The reason a German protagonist is used would seem to be a comparison Williams develops between cults of personality, specifically that of Hitler or Hirohito and the Emperor Ras Tafari of the visit to Pallisadoes three years previously: "a riddle as profound as those twin births from the same egg: Brandenburg Bach and the Belsen bakers".[20] Here Williams enlarges on one of the more curious aspects of Rastafari: why is Haile Selassie seen as the incarnation of God? And why the emphasis on 'I'? An interesting light is thrown on these questions by a startling parallel.

At the end of the twelfth century the Cathar heretics of Languedoc, against whom the so-called 'Albigensian Crusade' was launched, asserted that the Church of Rome was "the Great Whore of Babylon, Satan's citadel and the seat of all damnation, not in any circumstances could they tolerate what they described as superstitious practices and gross material errors."[21] The Cathars were the last organized Gnostics in Europe, heirs of a religion which developed at the same time as Christianity only to be ruthlessly suppressed because of its doctrines. Gnosticism teaches that the human being contains a divine spark of the true God, but is now in exile in the material world, which is the work of a demiurge. To be human is to be a slave to delusions of reality. Not intellectual abasement before an institution like the Church, but spiritual movement to try to unite that divine spark with the unknown God will bring salvation.

Rastafarians, then, sojourners in a strange land, by their belief that God is incarnated in Haile Selassie also see the divine in man, black man, and thus become associated with a Gnostic tradition which, as I have described elsewhere, is still very much alive. The danger in this, as the Churches do not tire of stressing, is the solipsistic enthroning of one's own error. But what is gained is the freeing of the individual imagination, and the understanding, or as they say 'overstanding' that language, the Word, is the source of the divine, and this provides the creative fire to destroy the manacles of slave memory in an alchemical process of story that even we, the descendants of European perpetrators, can share and use for our own redemption songs.            

©Michael Mitchell, University of Warwick, 5^th July, 2004.