V5. Wint-Dissertation

The Dissertation Committee for Traci-Ann Simone Patrice Wint Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Dissertation:

After Paradise: Jamaican Tourism and Nationalism in the Wake of Colonialism

Committee:

Edmund T. Gordon, Supervisor

Lyndon Gill

Deborah Thomas

Lisa Thompson

João Vargas

After Paradise: Jamaican Tourism and Nationalism in the Wake of Colonialism

Traci-Ann Simone Patrice Wint

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin August 2019 Dedication

To Naima and Zora. My music and my poetry. My inspiration and my reason.

Acknowledgements

One, one cocoa full basket, every mickle mek a muckle, and I could not have done this alone. My journey to this point has been circuitous and without the support of a large community of friends, family, scholars, and mentors I would not have made it through what at many times felt like a Sisyphean task. I am grateful that this work benefitted from a committee of scholars generous with their time and their knowledge, who supported me not only as a scholar but as a whole person. My advisor Edmund T. Gordon has made it clear time and time again that he does not like long introductions or awkward displays of praise, but he and I have been on this road too long for me to let his humility stop me, so even though I know this will probably make him cringe, I have to say thank you. Thank you Dr. Gordon, for taking me under your wing when I was a young, doe-eyed, overly eager graduate student with too many too big ideas and grand impractical plans. For encouraging me, and guiding me, and reminding me that yes, I can do ‘all the things’ just not all at the same time. And thank you for still being there – a steady force with a box of tissues in your office– when the shine of it all faded (as graduate study is wont to do) and the big ideas started to feel too small to matter and life got in the way. Thank you for your commitment to Black Studies and Black liberation and for always pushing me to examine how my work aligns with these politics. Thank you for always asking the hard questions. I am eternally grateful for your mentorship and for the way that you have led by example in teaching me to approach research and pedagogy with both rigour and compassion.

Likewise, I thank Lyndon Gill for encouraging me to enjoy the writing and to lean into the artistry. Lyndon, I truly appreciate your always pushing me to think beyond the obvious and to approach theorizing with equal parts precision and fancy, and I thank you for starting every interaction with a reminder to find and be light. I am grateful for Deborah Thomas and Lisa Thompson who have provided for me the best possible models of what an amazing scholar/artist/mother looks like. Thank you for pushing me intellectually while supporting me personally, for being my inspiration and my example, and for reminding me that we don’t have to choose. Thank you also to João Vargas, whose ability to ground the seemingly abstract is unmatched. Thank you for encouraging me to think through and not just about. This project would not have been possible without the interlocuters and friends, old and new, who allowed me to pick their brains and let me into their conversations, their circles, and their lives. Thank you to Lesley-Ann Welsh, Natalia Welsh, Abishai Hoilett, Duane McDonald, Keron Salmon, Dutty Bookman, Carlo Less, Brian-Paul Welsh, Carla Moore, Jaevion Nelson, Emprezz Golding, Steven Golding, the whole Team Jamaica crew, and my entire TVJ family. I would also like to thank the broad community of scholars who have shared their time, ideas, articles, and comments and have supported this project and my intellectual and professional advancement in some way. Thank you especially to Sara Blue, Simone Browne, Nicole Burrows, Craig Campbell, Charles Carnegie, Tshepo Chéry, Colleen Cohen, Kevin Foster, Juliet Hooker, Omi Jones, Minkah Makalani, Jemima Pierre, Eric Tang, and Rebecca Torres. A heartfelt thank you also to my friends, colleagues, and peers without whom this journey would have been untenable. Thank you to Sade Anderson,

Maya Berry, Kate Bedecarre, Melissa Burch, Haile Eshe Cole, Beth Colon, Shanya Cordis, Natassja Gunasena, Eva Hodgson, Charles Holm, Mitchell Faust, Daniela Gomes, Sarah Ihmoud, Nedra Lee, Nicole Smythe-Johnson, Nicole Martin, Courtney Morris, Will Mosley, Caitlin O’Neil, Monique Ribiero, Danielle Roper, Danielle Savoury, Emily Dixon, Julian Dixon, Elizabeth Velasquez Estrada and Miriam Varghese. A special thanks to Pablo Lopez Oro for always being available by phone, text, or coffee shop, to flesh out an idea, figure out a theory or just have a good laugh. I am grateful for the community of parents – and their wonderful, amazing, spectacular small people - who have loved me and Tyrone and our small people through this process. I cannot say thank you enough to Chelsi Ohueri, J. Michael Ohueri, Mónica Jimenez, Roger Reeves, Pavithra Vasudevan, Snehal Patel, Liz Lewis, Austin Kaplan, Elizabeth Harvey, Adam Gabbert, Sara Diamond, Shani Roper, Le Tran, Andrew Ozor, Jennifer Stob, Martin Haettasch, Yadira Izquierdo and Gabino Iglesias. A very special thanks to Shani and Chelsi for talking through ideas over pizza or over the phone, on the playground, or in the backyard always over the noise of laughing/screaming kids. To Sara for sitting with me and writing with me and never making me apologize for the fevers and runny noses that so often interrupted our scholarly pursuits, and to Le for the constant encouragement (and caffeine) and understanding that mothering never stops - not even for writing retreats. Taking time to write has meant entrusting the care of my two small people into some very capable hands. Thank you so much to Semente, Donna Cammock and Carly Walker. To my mother whose constant refrain is “how can I help?”, “what do you need?”, Thank you for always knowing when I need you and for always showing up. To Auntie

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Ces, thank you for your eagle eye, and your patience and diligence in going through the document line by line, helping me to clarify and edit – all across the waters and over the phone. Thank you to all of my large and loud family for your love, kindness and unwavering support. Children stretch you in ways you never thought possible. Thank you to Naima and Zora for giving me everything I was looking for and more. And, last but most certainly not least thank you to Tyrone Hayles for being my rock, for holding my hand through this, for making sure that I eat and sleep and not just write, for allowing me to drag you along during fieldwork and listening to me ramble on about half-formed ideas as I tried to make sense of things while writing. I would you choose you over and over again. The hard part of writing acknowledgements is that as with all lists, there are gaps, important names get forgotten. If I have failed to mention you – please nuh tek it nuh way – know that though my brain may slip, my heart is grateful – so, so very grateful for all you are and all you have done. Thank you.

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Abstract

After Paradise: Jamaican Tourism and Nationalism in the Wake of Colonialism

Traci-Ann Simone Patrice Wint, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2019

Supervisor: Edmund T. Gordon

Abstract: In the tourist’s popular imagination Jamaica is red, green and gold; reggae music played on pristine beaches, a dreadlocked man selling artwork, weed, coconuts and the big bamboo. Jamaica is tourism. Jamaica is Reggae. Jamaica is Rasta. My dissertation explores the intricacies of race, gender, and class in post-colonial Jamaica to investigate the complex relationship between tourism and national identity in places that and among people who simultaneously embrace and resist Caribbean tourism’s paradise narrative.

Considering Kingston and Rastafari as a place and a movement both central and peripheral to Jamaica’s tourism product and the national imaginary, this project explores the creation and articulation of Jamaica as paradise, questions what is at stake in this presentation of Jamaica and Jamaicans as commodity and asks for whom paradise exists. More specifically, I examine the employment of a Black - specifically Rasta and urban

aesthetic in the processes of tourism and national identity to ask how and why an abject form of Blackness has become central to the Jamaican economy and national identity. This project is interdisciplinary in its approach as it makes use of ethnographic, historical, cultural, and literary analysis, and engages creative arts both as site of analysis and as a means of expression. I make use of the historical archive to discuss the relationship between slavery and tourism, and colonialism and national identity in Jamaica and to lay the groundwork for the complicated articulation of Jamaica as paradise. Through analysis of tourism marketing paraphernalia advertisements, websites and brochures, I examine the story of Jamaica presented to possible consumers throughout the world. And through newspaper articles, participant observation, interviews and ethnography, I discuss the relationship between this presentation and Jamaicans’ daily life. Acknowledging that public commentary is an important part of the Jamaican landscape, I engage the work of newspaper and radio commentators, as well as the work of musicians, poets and cultural icons as I would academic texts. At its core, my project interrogates the perpetuity of the commodification of Blackness and the sanctification and subsumption of the formerly abject, and markedly radical into the capitalist mainstream.

Table of Contents

LIST OF FIGURES ...... XV

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

“What’s your accent?”: Perceptions of Jamaica from the Outside or Notes on Being Exotic in a liberal US city ...... 1

Tourist Trap ...... 1

I am very good at music...... 4

Jamaica Farewell ...... 6

Looking for a Real Rasta Man...... 7

Expectations ...... 7

Tourism and Nation, Imagination and Authenticity: Laying out the Core Conundrums ...... 8

Jamaica Bleeds: The Postcolony’s Conundrums in Practice ...... 19

Theory and Praxis: Theoretical Frameworks and Methodology in the Wake of the Plantation ...... 23

Dissertation outline ...... 28

INTERLUDE 1...... 32

CHAPTER 1: CONSTRUCTING PARADISE: A HISTORY OF JAMAICAN TOURISM ...... 33

The Pleasures of an Island ...... 33

Writing Their Way out of Malaise ...... 39

Post-Emancipation Racial Politics: Illness and Morality ...... 43 xi

Labour Rebellions, Banana and the Birth of Tourism ...... 46

Formalizing Tourism: The Great Exhibition and the Institute of Jamaica Handbook for Intending Settlers and Visitors ...... 49

The Tourism Marketing Machine ...... 59

Come to Jamaica ...... 62

Birth of a New Nation ...... 65

Come Back to Gentility ...... 72

Discover Jamaica, One Love ...... 78

Do we Matter to the Tourist Industry? ...... 80

INTERLUDE 2...... 83

CHAPTER 2: JOINING TEAM JAMAICA ...... 85

Training Notebook: Introduction to the Team ...... 85

Attitudes towards tourism: Resistance to Ambivalence ...... 93

Tourism Matters to Everyone ...... 95

Teaching Tourism to the Youth ...... 98

#treatourvisitorsright Let them feel safe...... 100

Training Notebook: Safety and Security ...... 103

Training Notebook: Friendliness is Next to Godliness: Customer Service ...... 108

Training Notebook: Religion and Rain ...... 110

Training Notebook: History of Tourism ...... 112

CHAPTER 3: ONE LOVE: REASONINGS ON RASTA AND FOLKLORIZATION ...... 116

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Selling a Smiling Ras ...... 118

Reggae and Tourism ...... 128

Pan-Africanism or One Love? ...... 133

Who is Rastafari? A visit to Ras Makonnen ...... 148

Rasta, Race, Tourism, and “Rastitution” ...... 151

INTERLUDE 3...... 160

CHAPTER 4: EMBODYING JAMAICANNESS ...... 162

Sometimes Coffee, Sometimes Tea ...... 164

Skin : Thinking Through the Epidermal Register ...... 172

Skyline Drive ...... 174

Black Baby ...... 175

Andrew ...... 176

Hair: Don’t haffi dread to be Rasta? ...... 177

My Hair ...... 177

Sister Locs ...... 178

Empress Aisha ...... 179

Overrated ...... 182

My Hair part 2 ...... 183

The Headless Tam? : Bodily Technologies and Becoming Bob Marley ...... 184

the Big Bamboo: Race, Tourism and Desire ...... 190

INTERLUDE 4...... 196 xiii

CHAPTER 5: SPACE AND PLACE: CARTOGRAPHIES OF BELONGING ...... 198

The Limits of Belonging or Why Can’t we go to the Beach? ...... 199

Rude Bwoy Town: Kingston, Tourism and A Reggae Revival ...... 202

Space, Class, and The Reggae Revival ...... 215

INTERLUDE 5...... 225

CONCLUSION: AFTER PARADISE ...... 226

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 230

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List of Figures

Figure 1 Jamaica the Gem of the Tropics: Tourism Advertisement, 1910 ...... 53

Figure 2 Advertisement for Myrtle Bank Hotel, 1905 ...... 54

Figure 3 Advertisements for the Metropolitan House and The Beehive Stores, 1912 ...... 56

Figure 4 Advertisement for the Information Bureau ...... 57

Figure 5 Advertisement for Myers's Old Rum, 1912 ...... 58

Figure 6 Faux Locs and other hair for sale in a Chinese owned wholesale shop in Halfway Tree, Kingston & St. Andrew Jamaica ...... 183

Figure 7 Bob Marley Snapchat filter in use 4.20.2016 ...... 184

Figure 8 'Rasta' tams with attached faux dreadlocs. Ocho Rios, Jamaica ...... 189

Figure 9 Souvenirs for sale. Ocho Rios, Jamaica ...... 191

Figure 10 Souvenirs for sale. Ocho Rios, Jamaica ...... 192

Figure 11 Souvenir for sale. Ocho Rios, Jamaica ...... 193

Introduction

“WHAT’S YOUR ACCENT?”: PERCEPTIONS OF JAMAICA FROM THE OUTSIDE OR NOTES ON BEING EXOTIC IN A LIBERAL US CITY

Tourist Trap

In some kind of ill-conceived attempt to achieve work life balance I decided to start working on the jogging trail. The idea was brilliant in my head. Jog for 30 minutes. Pause. Work for 2 hours. Jog home. Get ready. Head to campus. Simple enough … right? I learnt the hard way that this does not work. My laptop’s too heavy to make any kind of quick movement feasible. The sun’s too bright for me to see the screen, and after jogging (read hobbling) along the stony trail for half an hour, I was too hungry and thirsty to concentrate for two. New plan. Pack a very light bag – a single book, a pencil, my water bottle, a handful of grapes and almonds. Head out early while it is still cool. Walk along the jogging trail until I find a nice shady spot, preferably by the water – always by the water. Sit and read while the sun climbs high in the sky. Pack up, jog home. Still feel accomplished before noon. I find a metal bench tucked into a not too sunny spot on a semi-circular landing a little off the trail and settle in with M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing:

Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred. The bench kinda1 tough – but, ‘first world problems’, for the moment I’m living the privileges of empire2.

1 My fieldnotes – and some of the interview transcriptions featured in the dissertation - are peppered with colloquialisms such as these. I have done this to maintain my and my interlocuters speaking voice in the text and to give the reader a feel for the texture of Jamaican creole, which operates along a spectrum from the acrolectal Standard British English to the basilect Jamaican Patois. Jamaican patois is an English based creole with influences from African and European languages. 2 This is the title of the introduction to Alexander’s 2005 book. 1

A tall, slender, white man walks his bike over to the landing, leans against the short railing, and looks out at the water. I turn the page. “What’s that you’re reading?” he says, pointing his head in my direction as he adjusts the strap of his helmet. I want to say that I’m reading about imperialism and empire and the vestiges of colonialism and the persistence of the plantation and about crossing the middle passage and the crossing of ideas and the crossing of bodies and the crossing of space and crossing transgressing historical, political, and ideological boundaries. I want to talk about false binaries - citizen/immigrant, us/them, then/now, global/local, personal/political, remembering/forgetting, secular/sacred – and what we lose when we invest in concrete. I want to talk about neocolonialism, and heteropatriarchy, and racism, and exploitation, and grief – so much grief. I want to talk about potential, and resistance, and disrupting, and displacing, and assembling, and building something old – and new. But I also just want to read my book, so I say, “I’m reading about tourism in the Bahamas.” “Ugh! The Bahamas” he responds, “such a tourist trap!” He pauses, still fiddling with the helmet. “Is that where you’re from?”

“No.” I respond simply. I want to get out of this conversation and back to Jacqui Alexander. “Hmmm. Then what’s your accent?” He asks, looking at me quizzically, trying to figure out where I fit in his world. I have barely managed to fully get out “Jamaica” when he nods knowingly and says “ooooh just as bad!”

I’m really not sure how I’m expected to respond. “I’ve been there a few times, but I won’t go back” he scoffs. “Why?” I ask. “It used to be nice and simple and quiet” he says, “now it’s just overdeveloped. Too many cars, too much fast food. Too many big hotels, and too many tourists. Too fake. It’s terrible.” Now the anthropologist in me is curious, so against my better judgement I ask, “where do you prefer to go instead?” Clearly happy to oblige he says “Asia.” He’s finally gotten the helmet off and holds it in one hand and runs the other through his hair. “I’m actually heading there in two weeks. That’s what I’m preparing for now.” He says patting the seat of his bike. “I’m cycling through South-East Asia.” “Just you?” I ask. “Yeah” he says. “I might meet up with people there, but I need to reconnect with myself.” “How long are you going for?” “Maybe a month, maybe two. I have to be open to all the possibilities, you know?”

I nod, although I don’t know. “I’m not doing Vietnam” he says. “I can’t stand it there. It’s too, ummm, developed! Too much traffic, and there are all these big buildings everywhere now. And everybody goes there. It’s too touristy. I’m going to spend some time in Laos instead. It’s so much better. The people live in these little houses on stilts with thatch roofs and really

3 have an appreciation for life, you know? That’s what the Caribbean has lost. That’s what I’m looking for. You know?” I nod again. I don’t know. “One of the habits of privilege is that it spawns superiority, beckoning its owners to don a veil of false protection so that they never see themselves, the devastation they wreak or their accountability to it” (Alexander 2005).

I am very good at music.

Every time I read Pedagogies of Crossing by the water life throws me illustrations of the themes of the book. This morning I'm sitting by the pond, reading, listening to the birds and the artificial fountain when I see two elderly men walking along the dirt path, they are very light skinned but not quite American White (though they'd probably be read as White in Jamaica). As they approach me, one all but shouts in my direction “I just bet my friend here that you are African, real African, not African American”. I respond, “I'm neither from the continent nor am I African American, I'm Jamaican”. He says, “Well that makes you African”. Never one to shut down a conversation with elders regardless of how random, and curious about where this is going, I ask, “What do you mean by that?” He says, “It makes you more African than African Americans”. I respond, “Well I'm not entirely sure I'd say that. We do have very similar histories of forced removal and enslavement”. Then he says, “But you're very good at music!” I resist the urge to slap my palm to my forehead and somehow manage to hold on to my stupid polite smile.

The friend who has been quiet all this time repeats “Yes, good music! Good rhythm!” Then gaining some confidence says, "I'm from Africa....but I'm not Black". The more talkative one jumps in again. “Yes, people think Africa means Black but not all the people are Black. Some are very light. He's from Algeria, I'm from Lebanon". Realizing that this is about to dissolve rapidly into a discussion of who gets to be African and what it means to be African and how that differs from Blackness that I don't have time or energy for - I was reading after all - I respond simply “well, it's a large continent” and turn my eyes back towards my book. Having completely missed my timid hint, he settles himself in for a long conversation, asking what I'm doing here (as in why I'm in the US), what I study and why, and suggesting I talk to his friend, presumably because he's African, maybe because our fields are ever so loosely connected. By this point the friend, clearly embarrassed and uncomfortable, begs him to leave me to study, thanks me for my time, and leads him away, leaving me to wonder how exactly one looks continental African from halfway down the dirt path when there's also such a clear investment declaring that African need not be black. Why does my Jamaicanness make me magically musical, and why is this musicality inherently African? And why is there this underlying assumption that my

Jamaicanness makes me more African and thus closer to Algerians than it does to African Americans with whom I have shared roots and routes? “…sentience soaks all things. Caresses all things. Enlivens all things. Water overflows with memory. Emotional Memory. Bodily Memory. Sacred Memory. Crossings are never undertaken all at once, and never once and for all” (Alexander 2005).

Jamaica Farewell3

You know what? I’ll sing it for you” He says. And before I can muster up an awkward “No thank you” or an uneasy “No, that’s ok” or even a desperate “Please, please don’t do that”, something, anything, that would sit comfortably in the space between firm and polite, he is already lost in the first stanza. Head back, eyes half closed, fingers snapping, feet tapping in time to that old calypso beat. “Down the way where the nights are gay and the sun shines daily on the mountain top, I took a trip on a sailing ship and when I reached Jamaica, I made a stop”4 “Please stop.” I chant over and over again in my head. “But I’m sad to say I’m on my way, won’t be back for many a day.” I check my watch for the umpteenth time and walk a few steps towards the curb to peer down street, searching for the orange glow of the bus amidst the red, yellow, and white blur of cityscape and street lights. Cars, bikes, trucks - no bus. I turn ever so slightly to glance back at the bus stop and there he is, standing right under my nose. He’d closed the gap I had tried to create between us. Whether or not I like it, I am going to hear this song. This song that he insists on singing as though his life depends on it. “My heart is down my head is turning around I had to leave my little girl in

Kingston town” I really do need to stop saying ‘good evening’ to strangers at the bus stop. This accent of mine seems to trigger something in them that neither of us can escape. It’s as though merely by the lilt of my voice, I give permission - permission for storytelling and

3 Excerpt from Wint, Traci-Ann Simone Patrice. 2012. ‘Once You Go You Know : Tourism, Colonial Nostalgia and National Lies in Jamaica’. Thesis. 4 All of the lyrics in italics are from Harry Belafonte’s Jamaica Farewell. (Belafonte 1957) 6 reminiscence, dreams of cottages, and coconuts, beaches and trees, luxury and simplicity. Permission to live out some out deep-rooted fantasy of something quaint, something quiet, something simpler than America; less complicated than now. “Sounds of laughter everywhere, and the dancing girls swaying to and fro. I must declare my heart is there, though I’ve been from Maine to Mexico.” Paradise. Nostalgia.

Looking for a Real Rasta Man.

She asks me to remove my sweater, extend my arm along the length of the chair, sit back, and relax. She ties my upper arm with a long, stretchy piece of rubber and gives me a stress ball to squeeze. “You know, I was planning to go to Jamaica last year” she says. Still squeezing, I respond “Oh really? What changed your mind?” “We were gonna go on a cruise for vacation but my family wanted to do something else” She says as she inserts the needle. “I was real upset about it too. I was going to find me a real Rasta man!” She laughs and winks. I watch the blood leave my veins. “Maybe some other time, I’m definitely still gonna go!” She says excitedly, hands me a ball of cotton and tells me to put pressure on the wound.

Expectations

He’s a colleague of a colleague seeking some professional advice about doing business in Jamaica. After his first reconnaissance trip he calls me to say thanks for the

7 tips I gave about navigating Kingston. “It’s not at all like I expected” he chuckles through the phone. “I think I expected everyone to have locs, everyone to be Rasta.”

TOURISM AND NATION, IMAGINATION AND AUTHENTICITY: LAYING OUT THE CORE

CONUNDRUMS

Jamaica is a small place. Spanning 235km (146mi) from tip to tip – east to west, Morant Point to Negril - and about 80km (50mi) at its widest point, – the top of St. Ann to the very bottom of Clarendon – the area of the entire island is only 10,991sq km (4, 224 sq mi). That means Jamaica could fit into Texas 62 times, into the United States of America almost 900 times, and into the continent of Africa well over 2,000 times. Despite its diminutive size, Jamaica has had a large impact on the world. From Marcus Garvey to Bob Marley to Usain Bolt, we, as Jamaicans like to say “jaminate”, which is simply Jamaicans’ own way of saying we dominate. Jamaican national pride is an interesting thing, built largely on the idea that ‘wi likkle but wi tallawah’ – we are small but mighty. For many Jamaicans, the epitome of Jamaicanness lies in strength and resilience, a sense of overcoming despite the odds. In the world’s popular imagination Jamaica is red, green and gold; Reggae music played on pristine beaches; a dreadlocked man selling artwork, weed, coconuts and the big bamboo. Jamaica is tourism. Jamaica is Reggae. Jamaica is Rasta. This dissertation investigates the complex relationship between tourism and nationalism in places that, and among people who simultaneously embrace and resist Caribbean tourism’s paradise narrative. In so doing it explores the intricacies of race, gender, class, and space in post- plantation and post-colonial Jamaica and centres Kingston and Rastafari as a place and a

8 movement, concomitantly central and peripheral to both Jamaican tourism and national representation. Through ethnography grounded by a history of tourism in Jamaica and bolstered by cultural analysis, I argue that there has been a logical progression from the plantation to tourism dependence in the Caribbean and assert that tourism has been a major driving force in the shaping of the post-plantation and postcolonial Jamaican nation. The dissertation thus closely considers the contradictions that arise as Jamaica and Jamaicans assert their political and cultural sovereignty as an independent majority Black nation, while remaining economically dependent on a neo-colonial tourism structure that serves the needs and desires of a largely White global north. Further, it highlights the quotidian complications of grappling with a societal structure haunted by the logic of the plantation. The Jamaica Tourist Board’s information publishing website (TIPS) begins its narrative of the history of tourism in Jamaica by saying “long before the first tourism marketing plan was written, Christopher Columbus was struck by the island’s beauty. These natural attributes proved to be invaluable assets when in 1891 the government sought to explore the “economic potential of the colony” (‘Tourism in Jamaica – jtbonline.org’). In jumping from Columbus’ 1494 landing in Jamaica to the formalization of a tourism industry in 1891, the Jamaica Tourist Board’s narrative grounds the nation’s tourism product in fantasies of conquest, mastery, and discovery, while skipping past the discomfort of the island’s history of chattel slavery. The jump allows the reader and the Tourist Board to, as Bahamian scholar Ian Gregory Strachan says, picture the islands as Columbus saw them (Strachan 2002). In so doing those who seek to consume the Caribbean can ignore the lasting impact of Columbus and the colonizers who followed him on the island. Further, the Jamaica Tourist Board’s visitor facing promotional

9 website, visitjamaica.com, absolves Columbus and his counterparts for the decimation of the island’s native people as it describes the native Tainos as a “gentle American Indian people” and blames their death on a “combination of forced labour and European infections like the common cold, to which they had no immunity” The brief history then goes on to speak of slavery in a cursory fashion, placing the Spaniard enslavement of Africans on the island in the same paragraph as an endearing story about a British misunderstanding of the Spanish word “Las Chorreras” resulting in the naming of the now popular resort area Ocho Rios. The mention of African enslavement comes only at the end of the paragraph, stating “in their century and a half of rule, the Spaniards brought sugar cane, and later, slaves from Africa to cultivate the cane.” The truncated history then chronicles the 1655 English capture of the island from the Spanish with an acknowledgement of the immense wealth that sugar plantations afforded the English planters. There is talk of rebellion by the Maroons, who this history labels as “Spanish slaves who escaped into the mountains and formed their own independent group” (‘Visit Jamaica | Island Culture, Things to Do, Hotels & More’) but no discussion of resistance by people enslaved on English plantations. The abolition of slavery in the island is presented in a throwaway sentence that merely states the year as 1834. The paragraph continues with a brief account of the “economic chaos” that followed Emancipation and connects it to the Morant Bay Rebellion, identifying the executed Paul Bogle and George William Gordon as modern-day national heroes in Jamaica without explaining the harsh labour and living conditions that led to the rebellion and the struggle that led to Bogle and Gordon’s execution. The passage continues “migrants from India and China came as indentured workers for sugar estates and rapidly moved to other occupations. Soon Jewish settlers

10 came to Jamaica, followed by migrant traders from the Middle East. All together these groups created the diverse people of Jamaica today, to which we owe the national motto “Out of Many, One People” This framing of the racial make-up of Jamaica is in line with a project of creole nationalism (Thame 2017; Thomas 2004) that sought to present Jamaica as harmoniously multicultural and multiracial. This dissertation brings into sharp focus what the Tourist Board’s narrative glosses over. Jamaica as a colony - first of the Spanish and then of the British - was cultivated as a plantation slavery based political economy, the intention being to make the land and labour work for the benefit of the colonizer. This is clearly articulated by William Wood who in 1716 writes in the preface to The Laws of Jamaica, “It is wholly in the Power of the People to make Jamaica the greatest and most flourishing Plantation in the Indies, as well as the most beneficial and advantageous one to Great Britain” (Wood 1716 in Cundall 1924). That Wood refers to Jamaica as a plantation elucidates the singular purpose colonists held for the island. That his quotation appears as the epigraph to the Institute of Jamaica’s 1924 early tour guide, the Handbook for Intending Settlers with Notes for Visitors (Cundall 1924) is testament to the connections between tourism and the plantation. Several scholars have written about the relationship of Caribbean tourism to sugar and slavery. Polly Pattullo’s Last Resorts connects Caribbean countries’ common past of slavery and colonialism to a present of social, political, and economic instability. The result is economic dependence on tourism with politicians and international bodies labelling the tourism industry the necessary “engine of growth” (Pattullo 2005, 5). These politicians and international entities rely on a strategy that equates tourism with jobs, whether or not this ends up being the reality. Pattullo’s text further draws connections

11 between peasant economies and service sectors and what it refers to as the conversion of “cane cutters and fishermen into watersport officers.” Acknowledging the ways that Caribbean tourism marketing sells the people as well as the space as attractions, and racially marginalizes Caribbean people within their own countries while insisting that locals be nice to tourists despite the global economic inequality the industry makes ever more stark, Pattullo asks is tourism “the new slavery?” (Pattullo 2005, 81). Ian Gregory Strachan, for his part, argues that “tourism makes paradise and uses the hotel – [which he questioningly frames as the new plantation] to provide this product for visitors” (Strachan 2002, 3). Still he resists the limited claim that because many former plantations are now the sites of hotels, the hotel is literally a plantation, choosing instead to make what he deems a more useful assertion which is that “tourism is an indispensable part of the plantation economy” (Strachan 2002, 7). It is upon this claim that I build my argument for tourism’s role in structuring the nation as I contend that the emergence of tourism after emancipation has had as great an impact on the shaping of the nation as its 1962 independence from Britain. When William Wood wrote in 1716, Jamaica was at the height of her success as a plantation (Mintz 1986; Sherlock and Bennett 1998). The early 1800s termination of the transatlantic slave trade, the 1830s emancipation of enslaved Africans in British territories, and trade agreements that resulted in the collapse of sugar as a central source of wealth in the British West Indies, threw this system into crisis. Faced with potential economic catastrophe or the collapse of the life of opulence they had become accustomed to, the plantocracy sought new economic ventures and landed at tourism thereby cultivating a tourism industry whose structure followed the logic of the familiar plantation system. As Saidiya Hartman writes emancipation was “less the grand event of

12 liberation than a point of transition between modes of servitude and racial subjection” (Hartman 1997). In quoting Hartman here, I do not intend to diminish the struggles that led to the end of slavery in Jamaica, but rather to draw attention to the fact that these shifts were not as drastic as our own sense of independent Jamaican national pride would often have us think. Rather, considering that Jamaica was constructed with the sole purpose of being a profitable plantation for the colonizer, the logic of the plantation maintained in the structuring of space, politics, and economics long beyond the ending of slavery. Jamaica Kincaid, muses on the impact of viewing Emancipation – and I would argue – Independence as grand events for people for whom the event itself has had little tangible impact. A Small Place, Kincaid’s essay on tourism in Antigua, aside from a few particularities could easily be applied to Jamaica. It is not so much that the issues the two small places face are identical, but rather that their shared histories of exploitation and British colonialism, have resulted in similar presents. The parallels are thus more about the post-colonial condition, than they are about the Caribbean specifically. Indeed, Stephanie Black utilized the text of Kincaid’s essay as the narration for her 2001 documentary Life and Debt (Black 2001) which focused on the impact of International Monetary Fund and World Bank Policies on Jamaica. According to Kincaid,

In Antigua [Jamaica], people speak of slavery as if it had been a pageant full of large ships sailing on blue water, the large ships filled up with human cargo – their ancestors; they got off, they were forced to work under conditions that were cruel and inhuman, they were beaten, they were murdered, they were sold, their children were taken from them and these separations lasted forever, there were many other bad things, and then suddenly the whole thing came to an end in something called emancipation. Then they speak of emancipation as if it happened just the other day, not over one hundred and fifty years ago. The word “emancipation” is used so frequently, it is as if it, emancipation, were a 13

contemporary occurrence, something everybody is familiar with….In Antigua [Jamaica], people cannot see a relationship between their obsession with slavery and emancipation and their celebration of the Hotel Training School […], people cannot see a relationship between their obsession with slavery and emancipation and the fact that they are governed by corrupt men, or that these corrupt men have given their country away to corrupt foreigners (Kincaid 2000, 55).

Such a relationship to emancipation makes emancipation a confined event then separated from its meaning because its meaning is yet to be fully actualized. The same could be said for Jamaica’s 1962 independence. I address these ideas further in chapter two through a discussion of how the history of Jamaica and the history of tourism are presented by the Jamaican government’s tourism organizations. Fanon argues that the “work of the colonist is to make dreams of liberty impossible for the colonized” (Fanon 1963). The focus on both emancipation and independence as events cloud liberation. In celebrating these events the colonized is led to believe that they have been granted freedom and so no longer need to struggle for it. We lose sight of the fact that as Fanon says, freedom is never given, it must be taken. Further, in focusing on large scale events we lose sight of the power of small, quotidian resistance to make major change and instead become enraptured in neo-colonial structures because they look grand enough to be freedom. By the time Jamaica achieved independence in the 1960s, a tourism product predicated upon the colonial ideal was already entrenched in the structure of the nation, its representation, interpellation, and its self-identification. As a result, the Jamaican nationalism that emerged upon independence from Britain in the 1960s was birthed out of a number of conflicting influences. These included the racial hierarchy of the plantation; the Pan-Africanist movement which emphasized unity and collectivity amongst African peoples worldwide and spurred the struggle for independence in British colonies across

Africa and the Caribbean; the Fabian socialism5 of the acknowledged father of the Jamaican nation Norman Manley; the respectability politic of the British colonial power; and the vehement anti-colonialism and pro-Blackness of the emergent Rastafarians. As the decades have passed the nation has wrestled with these multiple allegiances and the emergent nationalism has been modified and adapted by the prevailing logic, political economy, and ideology of tourism. For Black radical movements such as Rastafari in Jamaica, the nation’s struggle for legible identity has meant a push and pull between Africanist, anti-colonial, independence and the foregrounding of a palatable and thus saleable tourism identity in which movements, spaces, ideologies, and bodies which threaten the status quo are sanitized and subsumed, though not entirely squelched or silenced as resistance is necessary for hegemony to take hold. In order for a postcolonial national identity to emerge there had to be a clear break with the colonial lineage. Jamaica had to declare itself the holder of distinctive traditions, culture, and language. Benedict Anderson defines nation as an imagined community, a grouping whose boundaries are socially constructed by those who think of themselves as members of the group. The nation is thus “an imagined political community [which is] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (B. Anderson 2006). According to Benedict the community is imagined because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (1983, 6). The image of this community, or the affect of affinity comes through the expression and knowledge of commonality and belonging and what Anderson calls a “deep horizontal comradeship”. This comradeship for the new nation-state is based in a differentiation from the colonizer,

5 Fabian socialist philosophy privileges democracy and gradual change over revolutionary overthrow. 15 in the articulation of separate cultural traditions. In order for Jamaica to preserve the economic benefit of the tourist trade and to situate the new nation as a respectable global citizen, all these traditions had to be non-threatening. Adherent to colonial racial hierarchy and so invested in a multicultural, multiracial ideal that it holds ‘Out of Many,

One People’6 as its motto, Jamaica’s national ideal and the vision it sought to present for consumption by the world, found itself at odds with the reality of the Blackness of its masses. The ideology of national belonging that dominated upon Jamaica’s 1962 independence was thus an ideal of creole multiracial nationalism that as Deborah Thomas points out “ultimately emphasized self-help through moderate middle-class leadership and the transformation of (lower-class) people’s cultural practices, without substantial reform of the larger political and economic context” (Thomas 2004, 30). In practice this looked like the sanctifying and folklorizing of Black Jamaican cultural forms in order to reconcile their oppositionality to the colonial standard with their preponderance in the majority Black nation. And the ability to consume these forms thus became a marker of appropriate middle-class identity. Achille Mbembe addresses this shift pointing out that under colonial rule the labourers were forced to use their bodies for “public works”. In what he refers to as the postcolony, “bodies have been used to entertain the powerful in ceremonies and official parades”(Mbembé 2001, 122). Thus, in the moment after the end of official colonisation, the Black body continues to labour for the elite, though there is a shift in the shape of the drudgery.

6 According to the Jamaica Information Service, the national motto ‘Out of Many One People’ has its basis in the population’s multiracial roots. (‘The Jamaican Coat of Arms - Jamaican National Symbol’ .) 16

I interrogate the ways that Jamaica’s tourism product relies upon a neocolonial7 framework that is simultaneously in commune with and contravention to the nation’s anticolonial imaginings of itself upon independence. Considering the development of Rastafari as an oppositional form to the national identities emerging in the 1950s -1960s, and Kingston, the birthplace of Reggae music, as simultaneously the centre and antithesis of Jamaicanness, I explore the processes of reconciling oppositional or radical Blackness with the creole multiracial nationalism privileged during the nation’s emergence and the desired independent nationalism with a dependence on neocolonial tourism. Kingston has long held a reputation of insurrection, squalor and criminality, making it simultaneously the centre of the nation – as its capital – and its shame (as far as tourism marketing has been concerned). The Jamaican tourism industry’s investment in the recent UNESCO addition of Reggae to its protected intangible cultural heritage list and the previous designation of Kingston as a creative city of music have formed the basis upon which a new, commodifiable image of Kingston is being framed. As the nation seeks to diversify its tourism product to attract a cadre of visitors now more interested in culture, adventure, and experiences picturesque and exotic enough to be worthy of being shared through social media, the urban spaces outside the scope of the popular all-inclusive resorts on the north coast have now been positioned as the ‘real Jamaica’. Such marketing is geared towards visitors increasingly interested in consuming authenticity and adventure over leisure and luxury.

7 Neocolonialism, neo-colonialism, or neo-imperialism is the practice of using capitalism, globalization and cultural imperialism to influence a developing country instead of the previous colonial methods of direct military control or indirect political control.

That tourism arose in Jamaica in a moment when Black Jamaicans were actively rebuffing the colonial standard and actively asserting a liberation politics is a signifier of what Achille Mbembe refers to as to colonial sovereignty’s circular nature (Mbembé 2001). Mbembe and Cesaire both speak to the thingification of the colonial process and the ways that colonialism transforms the colonized into a fungible object (Césaire 2001 [1972]). I seek here to discuss the ways Black Jamaicans have always resisted this idea as well as how this resistance gets pulled into the tourism project which is synonymous with the national project and to argue that the fact of these forms of resistance being actively co-opted is a sign of their power, brilliance, and potential for change. In line with Mbeme’s framing of the Postcolony as temporal shift – nonlinear – I examine the ways we reside within colonialism and beyond it and I argue that rather than being a break with the colonial standard the official national independence project was rather a shift that was necessary to contain the moments of actual break (the rise of Rastafari and other socio- religious forms). It is because I think of the Postcolony as temporal that I am less interested in the actual moment of independence than I am in the moment of the beginning of tourism. Or rather, I argue that the shift from the plantation to tourism is of as great significance to Jamaican nationalism as the actual August 6, 1962 declaration of independence from

Britain. I do not argue that independence is worthless, but rather that political independence from Britain had little bearing on hegemonic ideals of race and servitude already present and that the project of liberation preceded this political independence and has been ongoing. Ultimately, I examine the ways the creation and re-articulation of Jamaica as paradise has shaped Jamaica as nation and I analyse how Jamaicans manoeuvre identity in the wake of colonialism.

JAMAICA BLEEDS: THE POSTCOLONY’S CONUNDRUMS IN PRACTICE

In June 2017 Jamaica’s Minister of Tourism Edmund Bartlett chastised local newspapers for what he deemed overly graphic coverage of violent crime on the island.

According to the Jamaica Gleaner8, Minister Bartlett told delegates attending the 56th Annual General Meeting of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association “No one wants to wake up and see a front-page story in our newspapers stating, ‘Jamaica bleeds’” (‘Take Crime off Front Pages, Bartlett Urges - Minister Says Media Coverage of Murders Could Hurt Booming Tourism Sector | Lead Stories | Jamaica Gleaner’) Arguing for a partnership between the media and the tourism industry, Bartlett placed the responsibility of creating content and controlling the national narrative on the media. He further suggested that reports of crime be removed from the front page of the newspapers. His recommendation was ill timed at best as the charge came in the face of a firm and noticeable spike in brutal crime across the island. 639 people had been murdered so far in Jamaica that year, a number that represented a 20% hike in homicides putting the country’s murder toll on track to surpass the 1350 murders committed in 2016. In the beginning weeks of June 2017 alone, those killed included an elderly woman, two preteens and an infant. While many Jamaicans tried to conduct daily life in a state of fear and mourning, Bartlett’s expressed concern was not for those affected but rather for the country’s image and the potential impact of information about this frightening reality on the tourism industry. He and his peers appeared more perturbed about the threat of crime reportage to the tourism industry than the impact of crime itself on the nation and its people. They worried about the ability of the news to erode or derail ‘destination Jamaica’ more than they worried about the reality’s impact on Jamaica as home. The

8 Jamaica’s oldest national newspaper 19 subtext being that the blatant reality of Jamaica’s crime rate disturbed the myth of tropical paradise that the nation and its tourism industry are so heavily invested in. Bartlett’s stance on the matter not only dismissed the concerns of Jamaican citizens and privileged the maintenance of the tourist fantasy over the need to address Jamaican reality, it also played into the very fear mongering it purported to criticize. It presented an idea that the acts of violence plastered on the front page of the newspaper were arbitrary and as such made it appear that all were at equal risk for being victims of crime. This point of view failed to consider the ways that socioeconomic class and positioning work to increase particular people’s exposure to or risk for violence and does not at all acknowledge the ways that segregation, hyper-security of tourist space, and the inculcation of Jamaicans into the belief that Jamaica is a tourism-dependent economy result in the tourist being shielded. That the government cares more about reputation and the dollar it stands to earn from outsiders than it does about its own people is a grouse commonly expressed by Jamaicans on radio talk programs, in newspaper columns, and in every day conversation. Even while readily accepting the narrative that tourism is necessary for the nation’s economic survival, Jamaicans hold profound contempt for the idea that the preservation of the tourists’ fantasy should come at the expense of the people. The Gleaner’s editorial took Bartlett to task for his ‘jaundiced perspectives’ of the press. The newspaper’s editor was clear in the assertion that crime is Jamaica’s biggest problem and that keeping these facts off the front page of newspapers “won't change their reality and is only likely, at best, to give the country a false sense of security. In a way, it would be lying by omission on the part of the media” (Gleaner June 20, 2017). In a scathing article in the same newspaper also in response to Bartlett’s remarks, public affairs commentator Brian-Paul

Welsh connected Jamaica’s tourism industry to the nation’s history of colonialism. In acknowledging that “the fear that an honest portrayal of the brutish life of Jamaicans will frighten visitors and their precious foreign currency away from these shores is not at all new,” Welsh positioned Jamaica’s current tourism project as one “rooted in the idea that our economy can be built by sustaining a relic of colonial frolic” (B.-P. Welsh 2017). According to Welsh, what Jamaican tourism aims to sell is colonial fantasy. What is marketed is the idea of a paradisiacal place of disciplined people. What is bought and resold is not merely relaxation and leisure, but an idea of these weighted with the history of slavery and colonialism. Welsh’s critique is in line with Ian Gregory Strachan’s assessment of the role of the history of the plantation in modern tourism. Tourism as exists in the Caribbean follows the plantation’s logic and serves to maintain its hierarchies and relations of power. The process of Jamaica becoming a viable tourism destination was one orchestrated through a series of images and propaganda. This process, tropicalization, as articulated by Krista Thompson refers to “the complex visual systems through which Caribbean islands were imaged for tourist consumption and the social and political implications of these representations on actual physical space on the islands and their inhabitants. More specifically, tropicalization delineates how certain ideals and expectations of the tropics informed the creation of place-images in some Anglophone Caribbean islands” (K. A. Thompson 2006). In an examination of tourism propaganda and of the advertisements and images used to sell the Caribbean as a desirable destination for leisure, Thompson lays out the literal manipulation of landscape and image orchestrated in the creation of a consumable, ‘tropical’ Caribbean.

The tourism project thus not only created a singular image of the Caribbean but also physically transformed areas of the land through cleanliness campaigns. There was an established idea of ‘what a tropical island should look like’, and of how the Black human bodies that populated the island should behave. These images and ideas were used to convince primarily White travellers to the majority Black colonies that the “natives” were civilized, and the islands were safe and desirable. Indeed, as Achille Mbembe points out, “colonialism, was to a large extent, a way of disciplining bodies, with the aim of making better use of them, docility and productivity going hand in hand” (Mbembé 2001). Putting Mbeme and Thompson’s arguments about the discipline and manipulation of space and bodies in conversation speaks to the way creation of the Caribbean picturesque as we know it – the palm lined beaches, the overweight market woman or ‘mammy’, or the smiling hardworking banana man - was a ‘disciplining’ technique which extends the disciplinary gaze on colonial societies. Jamaica is no longer a British colony. Yet the rationale of colonialism remains. In Fanonian terms “independence does not bring a change of direction” (Fanon 1969). With tourism as the driver of the national project, the national elite are as invested as ever in disciplining space and people and in controlling image to preserve the desirability of the island as a product to be consumed. As in many other locales there is a sense that government officials, privileged by their class and position of power, remain distant from the plight of the people. Fanon’s critique of the national bourgeoise as apathetic is fitting here. He identifies the group as “increasingly [turning] its back on the interior, on the realities of a country gone to waste, and [looking] toward the former metropolis and the foreign capitalists who secure its services” (Fanon 1963, 111). Within the postcolonial

22 nation, the bourgeoisie and the local government mirror the colonist. With this in mind, in the following section I lay out the theoretical premises that guide this dissertation.

THEORY AND PRAXIS: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS AND METHODOLOGY IN THE WAKE OF THE PLANTATION The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.

- Audre Lorde, Poetry is not a luxury

This ethnography is a structural analysis of the nuances of hegemony, or of how dominance dominates. It explores how neoliberalism and the privileging of ‘the market” and ‘industry’ under the guise of survival impact citizenship. It also explores the multiple performances of Jamaicanness that this necessitates. I interrogate Jamaicaness as embodied and emplaced and explore how these performances change based on space, place and context. Essentially, I ask what does it mean to perform authenticity? Arguing that tourism has sought to extend Black Jamaicans’ ‘product’ or commodity status this dissertation aims to show how a history of exploitation has shaped present global and local dynamics. I want to be clear that while I speak often of the perpetuation of logic of the plantation, I am not comparing modern tourism to the sugar plantations of the 16th through 18th century Jamaica. They are not the same thing. Nor am I arguing that the structure of tourism, or the structure of the modern nation mimics the plantation in terms of its raced, gendered, or classed dynamics. I argue that the

23 construction of Jamaica as a tourist destination, or more specifically as a nation dependent on tourism for economic survival, has shaped national identity such that the needs and desires of the tourist and tourism industry become the determinants for the actions of the state. The tourist thus becomes a ‘super-citizen’ within Jamaica, with greater rights and access to resources than the Jamaican national who in this frame is required to act in allegiance with and in service to the tourism industry. In the post- slavery, and post-colonial Caribbean where tourist is often synonymous with White, the racial implications of tourism abide by the logic of the plantation economy. Under such a structure, vehement or radical Blackness must be continually quieted in order to maintain the status quo. As Ian Gregory Strachan points out, to present Caribbean tourism as a mere extension of the plantation would be overly simplistic (Strachan 2002), and I argue would limit our ability to truly examine the plantation’s effects. Rather, what I explore here is the plantation’s residual impact. To extend Christina Sharpe’s (2016) metaphor of the wake, and considering the wake of the ship as the water that comes behind, that pushes back so hard it blurs vision, I explore how in the pull of the wake of colonialism counter- forms of nationalism force their way to the fore, get co-opted by tourism, (which in the Jamaican sense is literally and figuratively equated with nationalism) and leave space for new counter-forms to emerge. I examine how we deal with a past that as Sharpe says is not yet past (Sharpe 2016, 14), but that I argue is also not the present. Convinced of the comprehensiveness of hegemony yet reluctant to fully subscribe to an ideology of perpetual Black ontological impossibility, I instead position the convergence of tourism and national identity in Jamaica as a sign of our existence in a space of liminality, an

24 uncomfortable positioning somewhere between captive and free. A space that is by no means ideal but still leaves room for the existence of a future. The liminal according to anthropologist Victor Turner is a temporary space embarked upon in a transitionary period in the ritual process (1974). I argue that the space within which tourism and national identity, independent nationalism and neocolonialism converge is one of liminality and explore what is means to experience liminality as stasis or seeming permanence. Jamaican novelist late Michelle Cliff, also calls attention to this liminal existence naming Jamaica a “halfway place between Africa and England” (Cliff 2008). Cliff identifies Jamaicanness, and postcoloniality in general, as defined by an unequal fragmentation in which one culture has historically been esteemed and another denigrated. Cliff speaks of her art as a novelist, as the way she seeks to find wholeness from fragmentation. Unsure that wholeness is fully possible when there is profound inequity, I push past this desire for wholeness and examine the potentiality of the fragmentation. Throughout this dissertation, I think of this fragmentation as what Fred Moten calls the Break (Moten 2003), as the space in which the object resists. Even as I consider the subsumption of the aesthetics of Black radical praxis into tourism and national identity, I follow Moten in arguing that Black aesthetic practice opens space for freedom, and agency, even within the negative space of the

“syncope”. In Jamaica, this happens in the doubleness of language, a diglossic existence which moves between Patois and English, from the basilect to the acrolect, in music that is for fun and fighting, and in our relationship to space, to body, and to thought, language, movement, and in artistic practice. This dissertation is also deeply personal, and my analysis of what it means for Jamaica to be framed by tourism, is coloured by, as Audre Lorde puts it “the quality of

25 the light” which for me is hot, close, bright, a little hazy, speckled with dots of nostalgia, and memory, and laughter, and friendship, and anger, and sadness and things that have no business in objective research, so I do not feign objectivity. Jamaica for me is home, the experiences I write about here are personal and political, my interlocuters are friends or friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends – Jamaica is a small place, the connections are never usually terribly far apart. Grounded in Black Feminist theory and praxis this project is birthed from knowledge gained from lived experience. Even as I discuss relevant events, training sessions, texts, and objects as points of analysis, I privilege the epistemological value of the every day. As such each chapter is centred around multiple vignettes or short accounts of the banal. These, I contend are key points of cultural analysis as it is in the everyday that identity is constructed, representation is navigated, and resistance is generated. I often video or audio recorded conversations and interviews and have tried to remain true to the speaker’s language in reproducing these as text without much alteration or interpretation. I thus leave in place the “ahm’s” and “umm’s” and other fillers, pauses, and repetitions and other nuances of language and discourse. This is also in part a move to investigate, what as Moten puts it, the broken sentence holds as an attempt to represent Jamaican’s diglossia, as many speakers shifted between Jamaican

Patois and standard English depending on content and context. These shifts and pauses are telling as the language used often depends upon the speakers’ intended or perceived audience, or upon the form of Jamaicanness the speaker wishes to embody at any given point. In other words, I place emphasis upon the so called brokenness of creole language, its ‘halfwayness’ and explore what is possible in these breaks.

This project is interdisciplinary in its approach as it makes use of ethnographic, historical, cultural, and literary analysis, and engages the creative arts both as site of analysis and as a means of expression. I delve into historical archives to elucidate the relationship between slavery and tourism, and colonialism and national identity in Jamaica and to lay the groundwork for the complicated articulation of Jamaica as paradise. Through analysis of tourism marketing paraphernalia, advertisements, websites and brochures, I examine the story of Jamaica presented to possible consumers throughout the world. And through newspaper articles, participant observation, interviews and ethnography, I discuss the relationship between this presentation and Jamaicans’ daily life. Acknowledging that public commentary is an important part of the Jamaican landscape, I engage the work of newspaper and radio commentators, as well as the work of musicians, poets and cultural icons as I would academic texts. Finally, some things can only be said with art or with poetry. The dissertation is peppered with images and poems and accompanied by a storymap series. Further, as I am a Jamaican who has lived and worked in Kingston for most of her life, this project is in many ways autoethnographic, as I take a critical race and feminist lens to a discussion of spaces with which I am intimately familiar, and explore the ways violence of colonialism’s after-life dominates daily life and muddles relationships of race, class and gender. I am a dark-skinned, middle-class Jamaican woman. I am marked as such by my place of residence in Jamaica in the hills, by my language pattern – mostly acrolectal – that positionality impacted my research in that there are spaces in which I was a natural insider and others in which I was less welcome than a complete outsider might have been. Space in Jamaica, and Kingston specifically, is sharply demarcated along race, colour and class lines. As a Jamaican who is expected to be aware of these

27 unspoken rules of belonging, my transgression of these boundaries was met differently from that of a foreign researcher or tourist whose unawareness was justifiable or expected.

DISSERTATION OUTLINE

This dissertation is broken into five chapters. The first chapter, Constructing Paradise: A History of Jamaican Tourism explores the relationship of tourism to slavery, colonialism, and struggles for freedom in Jamaica. Through a political economic history of Jamaica’s tourism industry and marketing, I argue that the development of tourism was central to the making of the Jamaican nation. Beginning in the 1840s, the decade directly post emancipation, the chapter positions the emergence of a tourism industry in Jamaica as the planter class’ response to the end of slavery and the subsequent demise of sugar. The chapter then tracks an economic industry transition from sugar, to banana, to tourism and considers the ways that issues of race, labour, illness, and notions of morality became central players in the establishment of Jamaica as a tourist destination. Moving into the 1900s, the chapter then shifts to an examination of the way colonial Jamaica, and later independent Jamaica has been marketed to potential settlers and visitors taking into consideration the local and global, social and political events that those responsible for tourism marketing have been in conversation with as they created their advertising campaigns. Once this historical background has been established, the rest of the dissertation examines the ways this tension between tourism and nationalism plays out in mind, body, and space. Chapter 2: Joining Team Jamaica lays out the state’s campaigns to promote tourism to Jamaicans. First, I engage in ethnographic analysis of the Tourism Product

Development Company’s (TPDCo) training program for all hospitality sector employees and then the chapter moves into an examination of the social media and television programs, largely geared towards instilling a notion of tourism’s importance to the nation’s youth. Chapter 3 One Love: Reasonings on Rasta and Folklorization takes to task the centralization of the Rasta aesthetic in Jamaican tourism and national identity. Through a series of reasonings or conversations it examines different views on Rastafari ideology, the politics of One Love and the inclusion of Rasta in Jamaican tourism. Mapping out Rastafari’s anti-colonial and anti-nationalist origins, I analyse the movement’s founding tenets and explore the tensions between these tenets and the current employment of a folkloric version of Rastafari in neo-colonial Jamaican tourism and global capitalism. Exploring different articulations of the meaning of Rastafari, I examine the implications of all-inclusive ideas of Rasta based upon a ‘One Love’ rhetoric and put these in conversation with movement founder Leonard Howell’s vehement assertion of Black Superiority and Marcus Garvey’s ideas of African repatriation. At its core, the chapter examines how and why, to quote one of my key interlocutors, Jamaica can be “selling a smiling Ras”. I also explore in this chapter, the tensions that exist in a struggle for liberation and in defining what that liberation can or should look like in a Jamaica starkly demarcated by colour and class. Chapter 4: Embodying Jamaicanness explores Jamaican identity as embodied memory and explores what it means for different bodies to represent the nation. Engaging the body as a site of ethnographic analysis, this section examines the way the Jamaican body and the tourists’ body are imagined, interrogated, controlled as well as the ways that it resists. What does it mean to be Jamaican or what does the Jamaican body look like?

What does it mean to perform Jamaicanness? What is an acceptable Jamaican body and how is the logic of the plantation embodied in praxis of race and space relationships? I examine the ways the Black body in Jamaica is simultaneously desirable and abject, the centre of the nation and its shame. I examine here the ways the logic of the plantation plays out in body politics in the island. Engaging the Black body as the tool of the plantation and the tool of tourism, I question the ways Jamaicans make and remake themselves to abide by or reject the expectations of Jamaicanness placed upon them by the outside world. This chapter thus examines the Black Jamaican body in its domestication and its wildness to quote Dionne Brand, and its legibility and its opacity as I draw on the work of Daphne Brooks and Saidiya Hartman. I explore the characteristics ascribed to the Black Jamaican body, the expectations it is required to fulfil and examine the ways that we push to be more than just body and mark consciousness in our hair, skin and sex. The chapter further explores the politics of sex and sexuality in Caribbean tourism and the making of the Jamaican nation. I examine the hypersexualisation of the Black Jamaican man for the purposes of tourism and the required respectability of the Jamaican woman, and grapple with how a nation can see itself or be seen as simultaneously lascivious and pious, lewd and respectable. Here I explore the requirements of Jamaican masculinity and femininity both as presented in the Jamaica for sale to the world, and as Jamaica imagines itself to be as an independent nation. Chapter 5 Space and Place: Cartographies of Belonging, focuses on the politics of space and place, and the body in space or embodiment and emplacement. The first part of the chapter focuses on access to resources and Jamaicans’ lack of access to the beach. The second and more robust part of the chapter is focused on tours of the nation’s capital city Kingston. The chapter explores the growth of a new form of tourism premised on the

30 presentation of Kingston as the authentic Jamaica. The chapter goes on to examine the national language around the redevelopment of Kingston as tourist destination, a project grounded in the city’s recent designation as a UNESCO Creative City of Music in line with a marketable image of Kingston as reggae’s mecca, a cultural hub and the heart of the ‘real Jamaican’ experience. Ironically, this lives alongside Kingston’s undesirable reputation as a nucleus of Jamaican crime. According to the Jamaica Tourist Board’s website visitjamaica.com, ‘our busy cosmopolitan Kingston is a one-of-a-kind; half exotic jungle, bursting with sunshine, and half thriving business. With plenty to see and do, Kingston is a crash course in the island of All Right.” The chapter acknowledges the challenges of the near inevitable flattening of tourism marketing and questions the JTB’s framing of Kingston as a ‘half-exotic jungle’. Melding artistic and academic forms of expression to explore the contradictions that make Kingston such an intriguing place, it analyses guided tours of Kingston, ethnographic accounts of the city’s quotidian and the cultural products at the centre of its sale. Through a mix of vignettes, poetry, visual media and academic prose, it explores the social implications of Kingston’s burgeoning tourism industry and the representation and marketing of the city as simultaneously criminal, contemptible, exotic and 'cool'. In between sections there are interludes. These are consecutive sections A Broken

Sentence, A Resisting Life (Wint-Hayles 2018), a poetry and prose rumination on the work of Fred Moten and Frantz Fanon. Exploring the possibilities of what Moten calls the break, the interludes are a reminder to seek the small moments of resistance within the hegemonic structure of neocolonialism.

Interlude 1.

. . . the broken sentence, holds (everything). (Moten 2003, 43)

If I said this was the beginning I’d be lying. It’s all contemporaneous. It doesn’t matter that some of it happened before/after/during the time we spent trying to be whole, if there ever truly was such a time, before/after/ during the time we spent moving our lips, trying to form words in languages we did not speak lest our incoherence be reason to make a spectacle out of our dying, before/after/during the time (it wasn’t a block of time, it was a landless ocean, immeasurably deep and unbound) we spent emitting guttural noise, unintelligible (not unintelligent) mumbling, rambling, moaning, exploding, sounds and silence more useful than speech – if speech is mere containable words. the commodity speaks.

in more than words9

9 Wint-Hayles, Traci-Ann. 2018. ‘A Broken Sentence, A Resisting Life’. Haunt Journal of Art 5: 49–53.

Chapter 1: Constructing Paradise: A History of Jamaican Tourism

Stones only, the disjecta membra of this Great House, Whose moth-like girls are mixed with candle dust, Remain to file the lizard's dragonish claws. The mouths of those gate cherubs shriek with stain; Axle and coach wheel silted under the muck Of cattle droppings. Three crows flap for the trees And settle, creaking the eucalyptus boughs. A smell of dead limes quickens in the nose The leprosy of empire.

- Derek Walcott, Ruins of a Great House10

THE PLEASURES OF AN ISLAND

In his foreword to Esther Chapman’s 1951 travel book, ‘Pleasure Island: The Book of Jamaica’ Jamaica’s then Tourist Trade Commissioner F.H. Robertson wrote, “Jamaica was created for the very purpose of becoming a Pleasure Island, in reality it is all that.” Intentionally or not, Robertson unveiled the idyllic Jamaica of Chapman’s travel guide as an invention. In identifying Jamaica as a creation with a singular purpose he draws our attention to the island as illusion and leaves us to wonder about the how, when, why, and who of Jamaica’s purposeful construction. Who created this pleasure island and for whom was it created? Why pleasure as purpose and what here does pleasure island mean? When did the idea of Jamaica as a pleasure island emerge, and when did it move from imaginary to reality? The island is a strange concept. Estranged from the world, loner, easily conquerable, without company, witness, or defence. Small. The island sits alone in the vast ocean of imagination as something to be owned. A place without consequence - or

10 (Walcott 1986) 33 consequences. When you envision peace, do you see yourself alone? The island is silent. Without the weight of politics, or history, unencumbered by sociality and her neighbour responsibility, the island floats, untethered. Free. There can only be pleasure in a place such as this – a place without roots, or rock, or past. Sand is always soft, and sun always warm, sea always blue, and there is shade always under arch of a palm. This is paradise. This idyllic place. This pleasure island created for the likes of you. Indulgence is only for the deserving. The Caribbean Sea is dotted with islands. These small places filled with other people’s dreams. Beautiful, indulgent, too lush for their own good. Strung out along the deep blue they corral the ocean and turn her into sea. These are the Antilles. An archipelago of proof that even as islands we are not alone. We are connected by salt, by water, by history, by soul. But the fantasy holds up only if you pick one and forget the others. As Lyndon K. Gill so artfully puts it, “the unfulfilled fantasy (or wet dream?) of the Antilles exists always in precarious relation to the actual materiality of the region” (Gill 2018), and the fantasy is the pleasure of ecstasy and euphoria, enjoyment and entertainment, sexual gratification, desire. The Antillean islands were created to be pleasure islands, but the experience of pleasure is subjective, and the fantasy is the god- trick. The experience of the Antilles shifts based on where you lay, sit, or stand. The pleasure island is pleasurable only for a few. Providing the history that will contextualize the rest of the dissertation this chapter examines the creation of the idea of Jamaica as paradise and as Ian Gregory Strachan lays out, how “despite its absence in their daily lives, Caribbeans have resurrected paradise for those who invented it” (Strachan 2002). This chapter traces tourism’s complicated connection to the plantation through enslavement and exploitative

34 labour. Slavery and Caribbean tourism are fundamentally entwined, the plantation and paradise perennially tied. Strachan asserts that tourism has both grown out of and sustains the plantation economy. He argues that the economic, political, cultural, and social groundwork that enables the effective functioning of tourism in the Caribbean was laid by the plantation, and further that as a colonial institution itself, tourism merely extends the political and economic dependency on metropolitan centres the plantation instituted (Strachan 2002). Strachan is careful however, to point out that the connections between plantation and paradise and slavery and tourism go far beyond the employment of former plantations as tour sites and hotels, and the ever-growing penchant for the use of the words ‘plantation’, and ‘estate’ or other such terms holding similar connotation in the names of hotels and tourist attractions. Some popular examples of these are ‘The Rose Hall Great House ‘– a historic plantation and mansion rumoured to be haunted; ‘Sandals Royal Plantation’ – a premier all-inclusive hotel on the island’s north coast; ‘Prospect Plantation Villas’ - a set of luxury villas in Ocho Rios Jamaica and the ‘Rhodes Resort Jamaica at Rhodes Hall Plantation’ – all-inclusive suites and villas located on the former sugar plantation. Though it cannot be denied that the implications of such blatant resistance to a departure from glorifying the position of slave owner or plantation master in the Caribbean’s troubled history and heritage are great and distressing, the ghost of the plantation haunts the Caribbean in even more profound ways. Like the plantation system before it, tourism in Jamaica and the Caribbean at large, operates within a framework that affords wealth and power to a small, often White or light-skinned minority, at the expense of a poor, often Black, majority. Tourism as it operates currently in Jamaica, allows access to land and resources only to a few, and requires that those who do not own the land must work it for the benefit of those who do.

Staying close to the model of the plantation system that came before, tourism exercises a monopoly on this land. Whereas little more than a century ago it was farm lands that were over-used, dominated and tightly controlled, today it is the island’s coast. In fact, as I will discuss in the final chapter free public beaches which are fully accessible to the general Jamaican public are scarce. The fantasy of Jamaica as paradise is all at once specific and generic. Providing a history of the construction of the idea of Jamaica as paradise, this chapter grounds a fantasy of Jamaica that is often presented as atemporal, aspatial, ahistorical in politics and economics. Strachan identifies nostalgia as a problem in the perpetuation of the fictitious and possibly damaging fantasy of the Caribbean as paradise as region wide. In light of this, in what ways does the history of tourism or Jamaican tourism marketing reiterate and reflect this nostalgia? As such, I include an account of the history of Jamaica and Jamaican tourism as presented by the Jamaica Tourist Board to potential visitors to the island, as well as an account of tourism history presented to potential hospitality and tourism employees during the Tourism Product Development Company’s Team Jamaica training program. I argue that it is important to consider the history of tourism alongside the history of the construction of the nation – thus contemplating tourism as a key factor in the making of the nation.

I am interested in the discursive struggle that occurs in the space of social memory. As such, this chapter does three things – firstly, it grounds this dissertation’s ethnographic study of tourism and national identity in Jamaica in a social, political and historical context to set up space for considering the very production of Jamaicanness as tied to a history of enslavement and resistance. Acknowledging that there are several histories of Jamaica and of Jamaican tourism, I follow the lead of Frank Fonda Taylor

36 and Ian Gregory Strachan in grounding the emergence of tourism in Jamaica in the demise of the sugar trade thus clearly articulating the link between the plantation and tourism. Secondly, I explore the historiography of Jamaica and Jamaican tourism analysing the politics of power in the way history is told and to whom, focusing on the narratives of Jamaica and Jamaican tourism told by two central government entities, The Jamaica Tourist Board and the Tourism Product Development Company. And finally, I explore the ways that the relationship between the plantation and black servitude is continued in the representations of Jamaica in the marketing campaigns of private hotels and the Jamaica Tourist Board. Moving chronologically from the mid-1800s with visitor accounts, to the late 1800s and the building of the first hotels and the launch of the first tourism campaign, and then through the tourism marketing campaigns of the 1900s the chapter takes a broad look at history of tourism and tourism marketing in Jamaica to explore what Krista Thompson calls the ‘tropicalization’ of Jamaica and what Frank Fonda Taylor has termed a movement ‘from hell to paradise’ and questions the ways the paradisiacal constructions remain in tension with or live alongside local reality. While ‘brochure discourse’ does become central to the chapter’s analysis, I explore also the ways that the messages of Jamaica as a paradise for tourists is transmitted not only to the potential tourist but also to the Jamaican as potential host. Chronicling the birth and progression of Jamaica’s tourism industry, it begins a discussion of how tourism has become and remains central to national consciousness. Often the centrality of tourism to the Jamaican economy and by extent national identity is presented as a victory. It is in the space of our recounting of history that remembering, misremembering, reminiscing, and forgetting are born; it is here that the

37 distinction between what happened and what is said to have happened gets muddled. It is not history itself that is misleading, but it is instead our presentist memory of it, skewed not only by us, but also by those who seek to exercise power over us (Connerton 1989; Halbwachs 1992). As Trouillot argues, “we are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be, but if we stop pretending, we may gain in understanding what we lose in false innocence. Naiveté is often an excuse for those who exercise power. For those upon whom that power is exercised, naiveté is always a mistake” (Trouillot 1995). Trouillot points out that any historical narrative is a bundle of silences, and this one is no different. According to Trouillot, “silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives) and the moment of retrospective significance.” (Trouillot 1995). This chapter thus acknowledges the silences and the unwritten, and the ways they impact our understanding of ourselves and our history. I cobble together a history of Jamaica told through a history of tourism pulled from newspaper archives, travelogues, journals and guides, tourism brochures and advertisements, and secondary sources such as Frank Fonda Taylor’s seminal history of Jamaican tourism, and the Jamaica Tourist Board library’s tourism information site geared towards researchers and professionals. I put these works in conversation with the histories of Jamaica and of Jamaican tourism told by the Jamaica Tourist Board on their tourist facing website and by the Tourism Product Development Company in the training materials used to guide current and potential tourism industry employees. In so doing I paint a picture of the way the tourism industry and the nation grew out of the plantation and highlight the political, economic and social forces that guided Jamaica’s transition from a sugar economy to a tourism based one.

WRITING THEIR WAY OUT OF MALAISE

Jamaica in the 1700s was not a desirable place. It was hot, and muggy, and its inhabitants suffered a range of maladies. By the mid-1800s however, the small island had begun to be seen as a sanatorium. This reframing of the island’s image was an impressive feat of marketing and propagandizing led by the plantocracy and inspired by economics, spurred by politics, and launched by misunderstanding of contagious disease. European colonists across the Antilles suffered severe illness and often early death due to a range of environmental and hygiene related diseases. In Jamaica, the mortality rate was particularly high amongst military troops who lived in crowded, unkempt barracks and subsisted on a diet of rancid bread, rotten meat, few vegetables, and rum (Taylor 1993). Citing eighteenth century medical practitioner John Hunter, historian Frank Fonda Taylor writes that Regiments between the 1780s and 1830s lost between 30 and 50 percent of their troops to illness within the first year following their disembarkation in Jamaica. It was this reputation that the planter class had to fight against as they sought to establish a tourism trade or industry in Jamaica ironically focused on the idea of the island as a health resort. In the 1700s the island was renowned as a ‘white man’s graveyard’. Putting it succinctly, Taylor writes “epidemic was endemic” (1993, 14). Common disorders included malaria, yellow fever, dropsy, dysentery, leprosy, mal rouge, cholera, typhoid, and yaws. In addition to the threat of disease carrying insects ever present in the tropics, sanitation and hygiene practices in the island left much to be desired. Worldwide, diseases were easily transmitted as the washing of hands did not become routine until the 1840s (Woods and Woods 2005). In Jamaica, this was exacerbated by contaminated

39 drinking water, unregulated sewage disposal, and roads littered with refuse and decaying animal carcasses. The fevers and malaise that led to this high rate of mortality were accepted as an inevitable part of life in the tropics. Colonists correlated the warm, damp, tropical climate with the illnesses they were beset with. That the Caribbean was simply a place one went to perish was unquestioned. By Taylor’s account, the common opinion of the time was that the fevers were induced by a malignity in the tropical atmosphere. The very etymology of the word malaria, for example speaks directly to this. First used in the mid 18th century malaria is derived from a contracted version of the Italian mala aria which translates literally to ‘bad air’. The term characterized the noxious atmosphere travellers believed was caused by the exhalations of the marshes (Oxford English Dictionary). As a matter of fact, it was not until 1897 that the medical community confirmed that malaria was actually transmitted by mosquitoes (CDC 2019). Acting on the assumption that illness was caused by warm, stagnant, foul air, doctors of the time recommended the infirm be removed to the cooler climes of Jamaica’s mountains. As such, the Newcastle Military Centre was established in Jamaica’s Blue Mountain region in the 1840s. The troops’ death toll declined dramatically and by the 1850s religious ministers, government officials and others familiar with the state of health on the island began to extoll

Jamaica’s salubrious virtues to Americans. Soon “consumptive” travellers “were bound to Jamaica in search of health” (Bigelow 1851). William Wemyss Anderson, a Scottish lawyer residing in Jamaica, dedicated his 1851 text Jamaica and the Americans “to Americans whose state of health renders it desirable to have, during the winter months, a place of residence in a genial climate in the vicinity of their own magnificent country, without involving the painful necessity of

40 wholly abandoning it” (W. W. Anderson 1851). Writers like Anderson became among the first to market Jamaica as a destination to be visited by Americans in search of health or holiday. In addition to highlighting that the length and cost of the voyage to Jamaica had significantly reduced over the previous 30 years, Anderson sought to assuage fear of Jamaica’s foreignness among his audience by pointing out that “the inhabitants speak the same language, have the same customs, and use the same literature as those of America” (6). Anderson used cultural signifiers such as language, customs, and literature to make Jamaica recognizable and safe to a possibly cautious or unaware American public. It is notable that latent in Anderson’s discussion of Jamaica is the characterization of Jamaicans and Americans as white. Anderson’s investment in rewriting Jamaica’s story for an external public had much to do with economics. In the aftermath of emancipation, Jamaica’s planter class struggled to maintain the social and economic standards they had become accustomed to. In his 1851 account of Jamaica 16 years after emancipation, American Abolitionist Bigelow painted a dire picture of commerce in post-emancipation Jamaica stating “shipping has deserted her ports; her magnificent plantations of sugar and coffee are running to weeds; her private dwellings are falling to decay; the comforts and luxuries which belong to industrial prosperity have been cut off one by one from her inhabitants; and the day, I think, is at hand, when there will be none left to represent the wealth, intelligence and hospitality for which the Jamaican planter was so distinguished” (Bigelow 1851). Anderson similarly lamented the “ruin” of Jamaica’s “best inhabitants” and the significant drop in property value due to the “fiscal regulations that depress[ed]

41 the markets for sugar and coffee, below fair remunerating prices11” (1851: 6). Among these regulations was the 1846 Sugar Duties Act which removed preferential tariff protection from British West Indian sugar placing Jamaican sugar producers in competition with cheaper European beet sugar and sugar from Spanish and Portuguese colonial markets still benefiting from the exploitation of free enslaved labour12 (Fryar 2013; Sherlock and Bennett 1998). Anderson pandered to American sensibilities as he sought to convince them to settle in Jamaica, taking their money and expertise along with them. He aimed to establish a sense of collegiality by calling his American readers “neighbours” and “family and friends” and played to their sense of self-importance while presenting Jamaica as a locale full of potential to be harnessed. “Americans” he stated, “[were] more likely than other people, from their proximity and many valuable qualities, to aid us by their energy and agricultural skill, in developing the abounding and varied wealth of our soil” (1851, 6). He answered unasked concerns about the heat’s impact on labour by pointing out that less hours of work would be required than in America to produce the same yield of crop because of the “wealth of [the] soil” and reiterated the benefits of the Jamaican air for those “whose constitutions are unable to endure a severe winter climate”. Although Anderson’s work precedes the official beginning of the tourism industry, it is a notable exercise in reframing using tactics that have become recognizable as characteristics of quality product marketing today. Anderson spoke directly to his

11 The removal of the tariff almost completely decimated the sugar industry. Sugar production fell by more than 50% between 1832 and 1852. And the inbond price of sugar fell from £49 per ton to £23 in the six year period between 1840 and 1846 (Sherlock and Bennett 1998) 12 Planters had been accustomed to plantations that cost very little in terms of expense yet made major profit. The majority of the labour on sugar and coffee plantations prior to 1838 was done by enslaved people, so the only wages planters paid were to the few overseers. Further, in order to minimize food costs, planters had enslaved people grow their own food. 42 target audience, centred them in examples of what made Jamaica an attractive place to be and had a clear call to action in his invitation to Americans to establish lives for themselves in Jamaica. Naming Jamaica “the Italy of the Western world” Anderson further tied his Jamaica to whiteness as he encouraged the White inhabitants of a pre- emancipation America to spend a period of their year in Jamaica. In the midst of malaise and economic depression early tourism propagandists like Anderson sought to make Jamaica appear desirable, feasible, and safe to a new audience.

POST-EMANCIPATION RACIAL POLITICS: ILLNESS AND MORALITY

The irony of, or perhaps a point central to both Anderson and Bigelow’s encouragements to Americans to visit Jamaica is that they occurred in the midst of a deadly outbreak of cholera on the small island. The symptoms of the disease include severe diarrhoea and vomiting, which leads to extreme dehydration resulting in muscle cramps, lethargy, arrhythmia, shock, and finally death, sometimes in a matter of hours. Caused by bacteria and transmitted through contaminated water, cholera was a major worldwide problem in the nineteenth century when sanitation practices left much to be desired. The first major deadly outbreak of the century occurred in India in 1817. The disease rapidly spread throughout Southeast Asia along trade-routes established by Europeans. By 1830 the disease had spread into Europe killing people in Moscow, Finland, Poland, Hungary, and Germany. The pandemic ballooned and waned at various points throughout the 1800s with the third iteration which spanned 1852-1859 and affected Asia, North America, Europe, and Africa, with the outbreak in Africa being the most deadly.

Jamaica recorded its first cholera fatality in October 1850 and by 1852 when the final numbers were recorded 30,590 deaths were listed – a number representing approximately one-tenth of Jamaica’s population of 400,000 (Fryar 2013), with the majority of the fatalities being Black Jamaicans. It has been oft theorized that the disease had been present on the isthmus of Panama and was imported into Jamaica on an American steamer headed for New York. The first cases were found in Port Royal, most often the first port of contact for ships, and the disease quickly spread to other parts of Kingston and then on to Spanish Town and St. Thomas. Over the next fifteen months the disease diffused widely throughout the island affecting every parish except Manchester, a cool, mountainous parish in the island’s centre, and Hanover and Westmoreland, parishes geographically situated at the opposite end of the island from Port Royal. Even though English epidemiologist John Snow had hypothesized as early as 1849 that Cholera was spread through contaminated water, the anti-contagionist and atmospheric theories of the time prevailed and as with malaria, medical authorities asserted that “people caught cholera from the foul atmosphere of their surroundings” (Fryar 2013). Instructions from Britain’s general Board of Health maintained that Cholera was caused by poverty and squalor and living in “damp, filthy, infected environments”. Collapsing race and class with sanitation and morality, the prescriptions of the era linked spread of the disease to the emancipation and what they viewed as the resulting unruliness, laziness, and uncleanliness of Black Jamaicans. The focus on Blackness in the discourse around cholera, had more to do with the racism of post-emancipation Jamaica than it did with the actual causes of the disease. The post-emancipation racial hierarchy followed closely the guide of the plantation with Whiteness at the head, Blackness at the base and Coloured or mixed race (later Brown) somewhere in between.

Situating the 1850-1851 cholera epidemic within debates in Jamaica and Britain about the moral condition and character of Black Jamaicans, the labour and economic crises of the 1840s and 1850s brought about by the emancipation and then death of a large portion of the working population due to illnesses such as cholera, historian Christienna Fryar suggests that medical professionals and colonial administrators viewed the cholera epidemic and the questions about health and sanitation that it raised as a moral issue resulting from a mismanagement of the transition from slavery to emancipation (Fryar 2013: 612). Scottish doctor Charles Milroy who became the leading medical expert of the time on cholera in Jamaica blamed the “wretched in the extreme” homes of Black Jamaicans for the illness. “The negroes, it is well known,” he said, “have a great dislike of cool air, and they therefore most diligently exclude its introduction by shutting both the windows and doors of their sleeping places.’ (Milroy in Fryar 2013). For Milroy, Black Jamaicans, and not just the poor, were the source of this spread because their homes were disgusting and they did not understand the importance of the cool air and ventilation that Anderson, Bigelow and others were now using to market Jamaica as a health resort. The distinction that Milroy makes between Black and poor is important here. During the 1840s, Indian and Chinese indentured labourers were brought to Jamaica in an attempt to replace the labour lost by emancipation. These labourers also lived in extremely poor and often squalid conditions (Shepherd 1994). Milroy’s condemnation of Black Jamaicans for the spread of cholera was thus racialized and due to a prevailing stereotype of Black people as lazy, unclean, and the root of contagion. If cholera was a problem of the squalid, lazy, and incompetent black Jamaican population, then the Americans to whom Anderson wrote were not at risk. The cholera epidemic was viewed largely as a failure of emancipation and the fatalities, majority Black Jamaicans,

45 were described by then Governor Charles Edward Grey not as people, but instead in terms of the lost labour that they represented.

LABOUR REBELLIONS, BANANA AND THE BIRTH OF TOURISM

In the years that followed the cholera epidemic, a major drought and an outbreak of smallpox worsened the living and working conditions of Jamaica’s already impoverished Black population. The Master and Servant’s Act which took effect after Emancipation in 1838 allowed the planter to indiscriminately reduce wages. Further, labourers had no stability regarding work or income as planters could provide or remove employment at will and often fined labourers heftily for minor or fabricated offences (Sherlock and Bennett 1998). Frustrated with these conditions, voting disenfranchisement based in an unattainable land ownership requirement, and extreme exploitation by a White land-owning planter class, popular St. Thomas Baptist minister Paul Bogle led a group of up to 400 protesters in a march to the courthouse in Morant Bay on October 11, 1865 (‘UPRISING: Morant Bay, 1865 and Its Afterlives’, 2018). When approximately 10 of the protestors were killed by a volley fired into the crowd by volunteer militia, the group attacked the courthouse, set fire to the school house and opened the jail. The uprising lasted two days. Magistrates who took refuge in the school house were unceremoniously killed. The group who had marched with Bogle was intercepted by a contingent of Black soldiers from neighbouring Port Antonio. They shot approximately 160 persons and hanged several others. On October 13, 1865 Governor John Eyre declared martial law and with the help of the Moore Town Maroons took brutal and drastic action to regain British control. Even though Bogle had appealed to the Maroons for assistance on behalf of the exploited Black population of St. Thomas, they

46 refused, citing the 1739 peace treaty they had signed with the British, in which they agreed to return runaway slaves and aide in the squelching of revolts. This rebellion, which has since come to be known as the Morant Bay Rebellion13, was however 30 years after emancipation. On October 23, the Maroons handed Bogle over to the authorities. He was hanged the next day. Wealthy Coloured politician and minister, comrade of Paul Bogle, and supporter of the masses, George William Gordon, who apparently was not even present in Morant Bay during the rebellion, was arrested by Governor Eyre himself, tried for treason, and hanged. Several other Black Jamaicans were arrested and killed or publicly whipped. There was widespread support for Eyre among the plantocracy14. He was praised by the Custos and other members of the plantocracy of St. Thomas in the Vale for the “prompt and decisive action” with which he “checked [the] fierce and bloody uprising” (Jamaica: Addresses to His Excellency Edward John Eyre, Esquire, &c., &c., 1865, 1866 1866) Eyre wrote back to the Custos and residents who expressed distress at his having been called out of Jamaica to face a Royal Commission of Enquiry, expressing his thanks for their support of him in his handling of what he referred to as the “wicked and unprovoked rebellion” (Atlay 1902). Meanwhile, in England, several persons chastised Eyre for the brutality and length of his martial law declaration. Despite this, the charges of murder brought by the Royal Commission of Enquiry amounted to nothing (Dutton 1967). The report of the commission printed in the Gleaner of July 7, 1866 stated that “notwithstanding the decision that the inauguration of the new Government here is to be

13 The Morant Bay Rebellion was a major point in Jamaican labour history. Paul Bogle and George William Gordon are now counted amongst Jamaica’s 7 national heroes. 14 Eyre received several letters of support from the elite residents of Jamaica’s eastern parishes in the months following the rebellion. 47 entrusted to new hands not mixed up or influenced by recent occurrences in Jamaica”, the proceedings must have been “exceedingly gratifying” to His Excellency Eyre. (Kingston Gleaner Newspaper Archives | Jul 07, 1866, p. 4). The “new hands” the Government was entrusted to were those of Governor St. John Peter Grant. Grant made several infrastructural and economic changes on the island including the establishment of a ‘modern police force’, the building of the Kingston Public Hospital, and a mental asylum and the introduction of new export crops such as banana. This 1866 introduction of Banana as an export crop had the unintended consequence of being the major catalyst for the growth of Jamaica’s modern tourism industry. A line of mail steamers had been subsidized to run between Jamaica and New York in 1860. This marked the beginning of consistent contact between the British West Indies port and the United States and facilitated the shipment of Jamaican fruits. In 1870, Captain Lorenzo Dow Baker started the private fruit trade between Port Antonio and the US (Marsala 1972). Baker would take his boats full of bananas from Jamaica to the US and return to Jamaica with friends and other passengers interested in holidaying on the island. Captain Baker’s initiative in providing adequate lodging for these visitors resulted in the first hotels in Jamaica built on the north coast of the island in Portland (an area still densely agriculturally dominated by Banana). By the 1870s a more conscious effort to reframe the island as a health spa had been in play for over a decade. Prior to Baker’s arrival there is little record of actual hotels on the island. In 1851 John Bigelow lamented, “There are no first-class hotels in Kingston, and the best accommodations for travellers are to be found at boarding houses, of which there are two or three claiming precedence, which compare with the others as warts compare with corns” (Bigelow 1851). The boarding houses which existed left much to be desired.

Lorenzo Baker’s boating service allowed the new tourists to the island to bypass the already undesirable Kingston and go straight to the cool hills of Port Antonio which was becoming known for its healing properties thus setting the stage for a decades long project in which the harsh realities of life for the majority of Jamaicans are ignored, reframed, rearticulated or avoided in order to present the island as a commodity in the service of an elite few.

FORMALIZING TOURISM: THE GREAT EXHIBITION AND THE INSTITUTE OF JAMAICA HANDBOOK FOR INTENDING SETTLERS AND VISITORS

The Great Exhibition opened on January 27, 1891 in Kingston, Jamaica. Modelled off the London Exhibition of 1851, the event was the idea of Mr AC Sinclair, who incidentally died on the same day the exhibition opened. The idea behind the exhibition was to showcase the products and services Jamaica had to the offer the world as part of an effort to encourage people from outside Jamaica to establish contact and a trade relationship with the island in order to bolster trade activity. Even though the Exhibition was modelled off the English exhibition and the British governor to Jamaica Sir Henry Blake was decidedly interested in the idea, he made it clear that the crown/the British government was only prepared to give £1000. The exhibition thus had to be paid for out of private funds. The stipulation was that money advanced by the government had to be reimbursed. Three men, Louis Verley, George Stiebel (Jamaica’s first Black millionaire) and Colonel Charles Ward guaranteed about half of the necessary funds (Blake 1891; Lumsden 1991). The exhibition was however far less successful than they had hoped. It lost money from ticket sales and the men had to go to court to try to recoup their investment.

It was also very difficult to convince locals to take part. Farmers were convinced that the Exhibition was an indirect way for the government to find out how much they produced so that they could tax them, and Black Jamaicans were warned not to attend as it was a trap to re-enslave them (Lumsden 1991). One of the most important contributions of the exhibition was the building of hotels as accommodation for the visitors. The Hotels Law of 1890 was written with the intention of ensuring accommodation for the Exhibition, and the Constant Spring and Myrtle Bank Hotels were completed just in time for the event. These were much grander that the already standing Streadwick’s Marine and Hill Garden Hotels. The building of these hotels ties the project of the exhibition to the project of tourism. The Exhibition, the construction of the hotels and the establishment of a series of texts about life in Jamaica by the Institute of Jamaica were all part of a project to increase or foster renewed White interest in Jamaica (Poupeye et al. 2011). The Hotels Law was the government’s attempt at formalizing what had been an organically grown tourism industry in the island. Other organisations began to buy into the effort and from the mid-1890s to 1920s the Institute of Jamaica published a series called Handbook of Jamaica for intending settlers with notes for visitors. In his article about the Jamaica Exhibition the then sitting Governor of Jamaica,

Sir Henry Blake begins with a discussion of the exhibition, manufacturing and the politics of race. He asserts that similar exhibitions held in other parts of the world had been funded and guaranteed by government and attended and supported by the “restless and inquiring millions of the Caucasian races” (Blake 1891)That the population of Jamaica at the time was 620,000 “but 14,000 [of which were] white”, there was little to no promised government support, arguably because the exhibition was marketed as a

50 means of enhancement of the Black population. Even though the rhetoric of “intellectual development” of the Black masses was pervasive in the advertising for the Exhibition, Blake’s focus on race and on encouraging settlement in Jamaica, speaks to another motive. Blake said:

While the primary object of the exhibition is the industrial education of the people of Jamaica, the commissioners look far afield and hope that it may be of great service in stimulating the production and foreign trade of the entire West Indies.[…]Beyond this, we want to induce people of education to come and settle in Jamaica, and manufacturers to see for themselves how favourably circumstanced is the island for the investment of capital (Blake 1891).

By 1895 the Institute of Jamaica had taken up this mantle with open attempts to reposition Jamaica as a settler colony. These were arguably part of a drive to whiten and increase the island’s elite population. The preface to the 1928 edition of the Handbook, the tenth in the series compiled by secretary and librarian of the Institute of Jamaica (IoJ) Frank Cundall, outlines that when the first edition was originally compiled and published in 1895, the text’s main target audience was persons wishing to emigrate to Jamaica (Cundall 1928). Though the text does not specify the race of the target group, that the intention was to welcome White European and American travellers can be deduced from the information presented in the text and the social, political and economic racial dynamics of the time. Each iteration of the Handbook included a description of the geography of Jamaica; a history of the colony which focused on the British victory over the Spanish in the battle for the island; sports, pastimes and leisure activities including horse-racing, croquet, golf, photography and yachting; tips and information on professional and social life including medicine, hygiene and education; and notes on commerce and agriculture that in some editions included information about who to get in touch with to establish oneself in industry. 51

The Exhibition and the Handbooks were only briefly successful. In the struggle between encouraging settlement or tourism, tourism eventually won out. A population table printed in the 1928 edition, showed an increase in the White and Coloured populations in the decade between the 1891 Exhibition and 1911 and then a marked decrease in these populations and an increase in the Black population in the decade 1911 to 1921. Though I can only speculate as to the reasons for this population change and the eventual failure of the whitening project, it was likely the result of several factors including the 1907 Kingston Earthquake (which destroyed the city and thus some of the settler’s burgeoning businesses), the labour intensiveness of growing banana and coffee (the major export crops at the time), alongside the challenges in securing cheap and exploitable labour15, and the increased promotion of Jamaica as a health and pleasure resort with the formation of the Jamaica Tourist Association in 1910. Advertisements placed in the early 1900s emphasised Jamaica as “beautiful, healthy and accessible” (Cundall 1905). There had also been a marked increase in the accommodations for visitors to the island, due to the 1904 enactment of the Jamaica Hotels Law which granted any person erecting a hotel of 40 or more bedrooms the freedom to have material shipped into the island duty free and exemption from increased taxation for 10 years from the date of the import license (jtbonline.org).

15 Chinese and Indian indentureship intended to replace enslaved African labour was already fading by the early 1900s and was outlawed in 1917 52

Figure 1: Jamaica the Gem of the Tropics: Tourism Advertisement, 1910

Figure 2 Advertisement for Myrtle Bank Hotel, 1905 54

In the preface to the 1912 edition of The Handbook Frank Cundall noted:

While it is not so very long ago that the climate of Jamaica was considered pestilential, to-day the island is strongly recommended by members of the medical profession as a health resort and during the last few years efforts have been made to attract tourists to its shore. Notes of general interest to such visitors have therefore been included in later editions (Cundall 1912, 5) Indeed, by the 1912 edition of the Handbook, the advertisements book-ending the text had shifted from being mostly for livery, chemists, jewellery, tailors and clothing to including hotels, steamship service, and rum. In 1912 the Metropolitan House identified itself as “Kingston’s Show Store” and the “Headquarters for Tourists’ Requisites” which included men’s lightweight suits, summer underwear, Native made Jippi Jappa and Genuine South American PANAMAS and English, American and Austrian footwear. The “Beehive Stores” also in Kingston invited visitors to have their letters and telegrams addressed to the store and offered a writing room and free use of the telephone, as well as “tropical outfits for ladies and gentlemen at the shortest notice” Sadler’s First Store on King Street, assured readers that there would be no “NO SECOND PRICE” as all goods were marked in plain figures and “Resident, Visitor, or Transient all pay the same”. This edition also included an advertisement for the Information Bureau of the Jamaica Tourist Association where visitors could find a free supply of guide books, time tables, and hotel rates. The 1928 edition of the Handbook featured decidedly fewer advertisements, however, a United Fruit Company advertisement in the first pages promised “weekly sailings between Kingston, Jamaica and New York, Panama and Atlantic Colombian Ports” on ships “especially constructed for service in the tropics” and the inner cover photo of the handbook featured a familiar image trope of the island’s beached north coast

– framed by foliage, foregrounding palm trees leaning over expansive blue sea, and two quiet, non-threatening natives barely noticeable in the background. By the 1920s, Jamaica’s tourism marketing machine was well established and there was likely little place for the Handbook more focused on details of import to potential settlers and publication was ceased at the end of that decade.

Figure 3 Advertisements for the Metropolitan House and The Beehive Stores, 1912

Figure 4 Advertisement for the Information Bureau 57

Figure 5 Advertisement for Myers's Old Rum, 1912 58

THE TOURISM MARKETING MACHINE

In 1922 the government established the Tourist Trade Development Board, and in 1926 the Jamaica Tourist Association and Tourist Trade Development Board were merged. The British colonial government designated funds for the development of tourism as an industry in Jamaica and the majority of this was spent on overseas advertising. By the 1930s the introduction of commercial air travel to the island by way of the Pan American (Pan Am) Clipper service, opened the island to the average vacationer. Between 1926 and 1937 the number of visitors to the island soared from 11,619 to 65,269 (jtblonline.org). Even though the majority of these were cruise passengers, the relative democratization of travel brought about by the airplane, had major impact on Jamaica’s tourism and marketing. By the 1940s, the first all-inclusive concept hotel was introduced at Frenchman’s Cove in Portland and its success set the stage for the enclave format Jamaican tourism would take for decades to come. The opening of the Tower Isle hotel in 1948 was also a major boom for the tourist industry. And by the mid-1950s there were eight international airlines making flights into the island from Europe and North America including Canada. The Tourist Trade Development Board was reorganised and eventually dismantled and The Jamaica Tourist Board was established through the Tourist Board Act of 1955 under the Ministry of Trade and Industry thus securing the role of government in regulating and managing the tourism industry and cementing the marriage of tourism and nation that had begun in the 1800s. The stated purpose of The Jamaica Tourist Board was to “promote tourism with maximum vigour and effectiveness” and to double Jamaica’s tourism business in five years (jtbonline.org). The duties of the Board as laid out by the Act included the responsibility to “develop all aspects of the tourist industry of Jamaica and

59 promote its efficiency” and to “adopt all measures as they may deem fit to advertise and publicize Jamaica as a tourist resort throughout the year” as well as the responsibility for the licensing of attractions and accommodations (Tourist Board Act 1955). The Act also gave the Board an annual grant from the government and borrowing powers from the Ministry of Finance to facilitate actions the Board deemed necessary. The Board was made up of representatives from the hotel industry, airline companies, travel agencies, ground transportation providers and other relevant commercial interests. A 1960 amendment to the act, gave the government even more power over the composition of the Board as it reduced this representative membership from 20 to 15 and changed the decision over who would act as Chairman and Vice- Chairman of the Board from process of election to appointment by the Minister of Trade and Industry (jtbonline). The Board established a main office in Kingston and strategic marketing hubs in New York, Miami, Chicago, and Toronto. It is telling at this point that the focus for marketing Jamaica as a tourist destination was on North America rather than on Britain. A few short years prior to Jamaica’s 1962 independence, Britain had already started to release its hold on and support of the colony. Further, the very beginnings of Jamaican tourism on Lorenzo Baker’s banana boats, established a connection with the geographically closer United States of America.

After experiencing a relatively steady rise in numbers from 1955 to 1960, recorded visitor arrivals dipped from 226,945 stopover visitors in 1960 to 202,329 in 1963 (Jamaica Tourist Board 2007). In explaining this shift, the Tourist Board’s information page states “Despite the JTB’s intensive marketing and promotional programmes, the “unsettled political situation” in Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti which affected travel to the Caribbean in 1961; the slump on the New York Stock

Exchange as well as dock strikes in the USA and Jamaica’s own “Rastafarian troubles” prior to and during the General Elections of 1962, resulted in unfavourable publicity in the United States of America and a subsequent decline in tourist arrivals which continued until the first half of 1963” (jtbonline). What the Tourist Board skirts around here is the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, the assassination of dictator Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and the Jamaican government’s own brutal treatment of Rastafarians whose image ironically later becomes central to Jamaican tourism. In recounting the history, the Tourist Board glosses over the government’s brutality and absolves the Jamaican nation with the phrase “Rastafarian troubles”. In the early 1960s, these “Rastafarian troubles” played out as a battle for the identity of the nation. There was a push and pull between Rastafari anticolonialism and Black nationalism, and the state project of creole multiculturalism and a ‘Brown’ nationalism that adhered to the colonial standard even in the moment of independence (D. A. Thomas 2004; Thame 2017). 1961 saw Jamaica’s departure from the West Indies Federation. A move that was a major catalyst in the Federation’s 1962 demise and many argue a major factor in Jamaica’s subsequent dependence upon foreign aid and external forces for sustenance. On April 10, 1962, the Jamaica Labour Party won the national elections, making

Alexander Bustamante the nation’s first Prime Minister upon receipt of Independence from the British on August 6, 1962. By April 1963 Western Jamaica was in throes of violence with a clash between police and government forces and Rastafari brethren, which has since come to be known as the Coral Gardens Rebellion or Massacre. Rastafarians were seen as a threat to the new Jamaica. Though the stories chronicling the origins of the clash that spurred days of brutality and violence vary, by the end of Easter

1963, eight (8) Rastafarians were dead and several others had been forcibly shaved and imprisoned. By the close of the year, the dust had settled and Jamaica began to rise in prominence once more as a premier tourist destination.

COME TO JAMAICA

Jamaica was not the only place grappling with its Blackness in the 1960s. The US was in the midst of the rise of the Civil Rights Movement. Cementing its allegiance with Whiteness, the elite, and the state, the Tourist Board responded with an aggressive marketing campaign, presenting independent Jamaica as a mere extension of Britain, and encouraging White Americans to visit, promising them that they would find that the Black people in Jamaica were quaint, disciplined, and eager to serve, that they were nothing like home. The Come to Jamaica campaign ran from the Jamaica Tourist Board’s inauguration in 1955 until 1963. In the pre-Independence era of the 1950s, the majority of the Tourist Board’s advertisements featured cartoon-esque drawings. A 1950s advertisement centred a cartoon pirate sipping a glass of champagne and featured the text “Pleasure hunting? Jamaica, British West Indies is the place to go”. A holiday advertisement of the same period featured a cartoon drawing of a slender White man and woman near naked in swimwear on the beach. The woman sits in a chair and looks up at the man who faces the water and sips a drink. A Black waiter with dark skin, an elongated head, and a broad smile, almost skips past them on the face of a smiling, sunglass sporting, cartoon sun. He is dressed in a white jacket and brown pants, a cloth draped over one arm and the other held high above the couple’s head, balancing a tray with a wine bottle and two glasses. The dancing, cursive text scrawled across a Christmas

62 tree and palm tree reads “Holiday mood? Jamaica British West Indies is the place to go!” (‘These Ads Are So Beautiful You’ll Want to Hang Them in Your Home - Outpostings’ n.d.). By the 1960’s, when the Come to Jamaica campaign was in full swing, the advertisements centred photographs rather than caricatures. A 1961 advertisement featuring American radio personality Arthur Godfrey, showed a smiling Godfrey on a beach, dressed for the tropics in a floral shirt and cuffed white pants, leaning against a gently curved coconut tree, playing his ukulele for four little Black boys dressed in nothing but swim trunks, who have gathered at his feet and appear to be listening intently. The caption begins with the slogan “Come to Jamaica, It’s no place like home” and goes on to say ‘No man is an island. If women were islands they’d be jealous of Jamaica. It’s maddeningly beautiful”. The typed text goes on to talk about the golf courses, shopping and food offerings. In red ‘pen’, scribbled throughout the caption is Godfrey’s signature and his own commentary on his Jamaican vacation. “Even my ukulele went native.” he says. Advertisements of this era seemed to thrive on the myth of simplicity, and quaintness, a performed nativism. It was a complex way of experiencing what Renato Rosaldo refers to as imperialist nostalgia. In speaking of anthropological research, Rosaldo addresses the longing and nostalgia of the researcher and imperialist for that which she/he has altered and at times intentionally changed. For Rosaldo, this nostalgia is what occurs when someone “deliberately alters a form of life and then regrets that things have not remained as they were prior to his or her intervention” (Rosaldo 1989). Although Rosaldo’s theorization speaks directly to the researcher, the concept is applicable here. Imperialist nostalgia imagines and longs for a simpler life amongst the natives. It minimizes as it traps the native in a perpetual state of false, imagined history, a

63 memory created out of wishes – nostalgia. In so doing it frees the researcher, or in this case the tourist, to move and to travel and secures for him not only a present and a future in which he can enact his Whiteness and perform his place in the self-imposed hierarchy of ‘civilised and native’, but also a past that he can long for and use as justification for his current positionality. The photograph, the caption and the comments, serve a presentist agenda. They do not reflect the actual past, but instead the White yearning for Black simplicity in the present moment – the 1960s. The Jamaica Tourist Board was openly chastised for this stance and this campaign. In an editorial titled “Panderers” The Gleaner reported having received criticisms of the tourist trade for publicity materials that mislead American tourists into thinking that Jamaica is a “primitive country where they can have super-privileges and take back mementoes of how barbaric people live and exist” (‘Kingston Gleaner Newspaper Archives | Jul 29, 1961, p. 8’). The images criticized in the article seemed to be precisely those used in the advertisement with Arthur Godfrey. The editorial goes on to state that the persons who have complained about the tourist trade’s imaging of Jamaica believe that the American tourists are more interested in “photographing half naked children in a river or woman on donkey back” than they are in capturing the beauty of the island’s landscape, because the idea of primitive and simple people is what is sold to them through the advertising. David Lowenthal argues that ‘the past is a foreign country whose features are shaped by today’s predilections; its strangeness domesticated by our own preservation of its vestiges’ (Lowenthal 2015). For the American tourist of the 1960s, Jamaica was presented as the past. A foreign country where one could experience the indisputable power of Whiteness and dabble in the reckless abandon of native Blackness all at the

64 same time - a dance that arguably could not be performed as effectively on US soil or at ‘home’. Jamaica as seen in its marketing campaigns, and through the eyes of the tourist, could be anywhere - anywhere but Europe, anywhere but America, anywhere but home. Jamaica is merely the embodiment or emplacement of the past as a foreign country, it is the site upon which memory can be enacted. According to French historian Pierre Nora, we ‘construct liuex de memoire, sites of memory, because there are no longer mileux de memoire, environments of memory’. We are unable to live within memory so we crystallize it and construct monuments and memorials in its name (Nora 1989). Jamaica in this sense becomes a monument to colonialism, a memorial of Whiteness, whose pedestal had been shaken by the Civil Rights Movement in America.

BIRTH OF A NEW NATION

On August 5, 1962, the Jamaica Tourist Board ran an advertisement in the form of an article in the New York Times. The advertisement featured symbols of the new Jamaica alongside the old. The Jamaican Coat of Arms, a crocodile topped crest of five pineapples, flanked by a Taino man and woman holding a spear and a basket respectively, and standing on the ribboned motto “Out of Many, One People” is not quite centred but takes up the majority of the space on the top left side of the page. To the right, only slightly smaller in scale than the Coat of Arms, is an oval framed photograph of the Queen of England in her crown and royal blue sash. The caption beneath her photograph reads Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Below the images is the headline, “Jamaica”, written in Old English font, and below it, Birth of a New Nation. The accompanying article begins ‘After 300 years of tutelage in the British way of life and in the development of parliamentary democracy, Jamaica has achieved

65 independence’. The emphasis on tutelage and apprenticeship, presents Jamaica as a childlike state, grateful for her colonizer. The language is in line with the paternalistic language and imagery used by the colonizer to describe Jamaica and Jamaicans in the post-emancipation period, through the great exhibition and the launch of a tourist trade, and into a toothless independence. The period of enslavement and forced servitude is presented as “tutelage” and “apprenticeship” during which Black Jamaicans learned to be civilized. The text continues “long association with Great Britain has given us political maturity and constitutional stability. As we set out on our challenging journey, we face our new era of self-rule with a confidence born of studious apprenticeship in the art of Government.” It becomes apparent that on the eve of its emergence as a new nation, the Jamaica Tourist Board has gone to great pains to present Jamaica as an important part of the same old nation. The idea being to assure potential visitors that despite independence nothing has changed. The advertisement continues by laying out the ways Jamaica is socially, economically, and politically “ready for independence” and nationhood. The highlighted reasons focus on the establishment of traditions and culture and on the multiracial utopia that the nation tried to construct itself as upon independence. The ad, which names the tourist industry as a major factor in ensuring Jamaica’s continued economic development, reads like a promise to potential visitors that independent Jamaica will be no different than colonial Jamaica. Emphasizing the continuation of its connection with Britain the advertisement closes by saying “Jamaica, the newest member of the British Commonwealth of Nations, welcomes you. You will find your visit to our peaceful, progressive and beautiful island a truly memorable experience in vacation pleasure….among a friendly, warm-hearted and hospitable people, justly proud of

66 becoming a sovereign state. Come to Jamaica it’s no place like home!” (The New York Times 1962). The next day, to mark Jamaica’s actual independence the New York Times ran its own article reporting on President John F. Kennedy’s congratulatory message to the new nation of Jamaica and its Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante. Unlike the article advertisement which ran the day before, the August 6th article expressed concern for Jamaica’s economic and political well-being, considering the nation’s dependence on exports of bauxite and sugar, and tourist expenditure. Exposing the dirty laundry the Jamaica Tourist Board’s version of an introduction to the world tried to hide, the New York Times article openly stated that in Jamaica “there is much poverty, much unemployment, a shortage of skilled labour, and a relatively high cost of living”, the article went further to criticize Jamaica’s departure from the West Indies Federation and referred to the nation’s first Prime Minister and independent leader, Alexander Bustamante as shrewd, “flamboyant, opportunistic, and demagogic” (The New York Times 1962) By 1963, the slogan ‘Come to Jamaica, It’s no place like home’ was replaced by ‘Come back to Jamaica.” In the early sixties, American cultural icons featured prominently in magazine advertisements that used images to evoke and pander to a sense of nostalgia amongst White Americans for uncontested Whiteness. By the end of the sixties, there was very little innuendo being used. That what was being sold was Black servitude and the nostalgia for a simpler time or a fantasy life in which that was possible was laid out in plain black and white text for all to see.

On September 14, 1968 a Jamaica Tourist Board advertisement that ran in the New Yorker, showed the indulgence of nostalgia to be far more than a mere suggestion. It was blatantly stated in the advertisement that that’s what tourists were being invited to do.

Jamaica’s rent-a-villas Come with rent-a-cooks, rent-a-maids, rent-a-nannies, rent-a-gardeners and even rent-a-cars.

You can rent a lovely life in Jamaica by the week. It starts with a country house or beach cottage or hilltop hideaway that comes equipped with gentle people named Ivy or Maud or Malcolm who will cook, tend, mend, diaper, and launder for you.

Who will “Mister Peter, please” you all day long, pamper you with homemade coconut pie, admire you when you look “soft” (handsome), giggle at your jokes and weep when you leave.

A kind of Nannyhood for Grownups, actually. They’ll spoil you. But you’ll also spoil yourself. ….

For more about renting the Life You wish You Led, see your local travel agent or Jamaica Tourist Board in New York, Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto or Montreal. (‘The New Yorker : Sep 14, 1968: 17 )

1968 was a monumental year of upheaval, violence, protests, riots and tragedy for the United States of America. It was the year the North Vietnamese launched the Tet offensive at Nha Trang, and the year Andy Warhol was shot. It was the year Women’s liberation groups protested the Miss America Beauty contest in Atlantic City and the year

Robert Kennedy was shot and killed. 1968 was also - probably most importantly for the purposes of this chapter - the year that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The Civil Rights movement’s leader’s assassination resulted in an explosion of discontent. It sparked riots in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Newark, Washington, D.C., and many other areas of the United States. Forty-six deaths across the country would eventually be blamed on the riots. Racial tensions were high to say the least. African Americans had refused to remain silent about racism. It seemed centuries of oppression had come to a head and people were aggressively claiming their due. It is no surprise then, that Jamaica sold passivity (Wint 2012). The 1968 Jamaica Tourist Board advertisements seemed aimed at counteracting all that was happening in the United States. At a time when White Americans feared the dissolution of their racial hierarchy, Jamaica offered a return to a simpler time - a time when Blacks ‘knew their place’ and did not contest it. The Jamaican tourism industry’s target market at the time was more than likely adults in their mid-50s and 60s. Men and women, who had grown up secure in their Whiteness and privilege, holding tight reigns on their Black nannies and maids and gardeners, and who were nostalgic for a time their privilege or audacity went unquestioned. The language of the advertisement is disturbing - ‘rent-a-maids’, ‘rent-a-nannies’,

“rent-a-cars” – Jamaican people are not only confined to the capacity of service but are also lumped in alongside objects. Dehumanised and objectified, they are not considered people but instead they are the ‘equipment’ that comes along with the tourist’s rental of a “country house or beach cottage or hilltop hideaway”. The Jamaican ‘maid’, or ‘nanny’ or “gardener” is no more than a slave, and in this way an object to be used and discarded - a short term rental – a non-human, non-being. Here there is no (there cannot be) Black

69 subjectivity. This absence of value accorded to Blackness, is what creates the symbolic value of Whiteness and enacting the memory of this in Jamaica, the foreign country stuck in the presentist past, the White tourist is able to reaffirm his Whiteness, symbolic and concrete. This notion of a ‘rentable’ Jamaican speaks to the fungibility or interchangeability of the Black body. In this way Blackness is not allowed humanity. As Frank Wilderson states “[Blackness] as a structural position of incommensurability in the face of all other positions; this meaning is noncommunicable because, again, as a position, Blackness is predicated on modalities of accumulation and fungibility, not exploitation and alienation” (Wilderson III 2010, 59) The overwhelming emphasis on colonial nostalgia reinforces the slave position of the Black Jamaican and in so doing also serves to reinforce the place of Whiteness in society at large. According to Maurice Halbwachs it is through memory that people legitimate their own social classes and their position within the class framework. “Classes reproduce their own social positionality, reproducing through memory and action not only their own class position but also that of others. We participate in shaping the ways in which people conceptualize their own notions of self and in so doing we reproduce hierarchy” (Halbwachs 1992, 179). Living out this colonial fantasy in Jamaica allows White Americans to feel more secure in their own Whiteness. As mentioned before

Whiteness is lived or produced in opposition to Blackness. However, in order to achieve this profound, progressive Whiteness a stagnant Blackness is necessary. There is a desire for the simple or ‘primitive’ and for the ‘happy Negro’ who will “Mister Peter, please” you all day long,” whose only source of sadness is in the tourist’s departure. Paradise requires not only perpetual joy but also frivolity and carefreeness. In paradise, no one works. For the tourist there is no need to work as all his needs are taken

70 care of by the ‘rent-a-maid’ or ‘rent-a-gardener’ or ‘rent-a-nanny’; he need not lift a finger as he is catered to by Black Jamaicans who are more than happy to serve him. And for them, serving him is not work. The Black man, according to the White imagination is happy with his lot, and he is characteristically childlike and happy-go-lucky. The ‘work’ he does, therefore, has no strain and takes no toll and as such is not considered work. Such notions of Blackness served to further solidify class and race hierarchy and to justify the marginalisation of the Black man. The Black man was/is thought to be incapable of work, and of complex thought - too childlike to manage freedom, wild and savage, made lazy by nature and by the warm climate, he does not need clothing nor housing or any other such essential. Frank Fonda Taylor discusses this ideal in his book To Hell with Paradise: A History of the Jamaican Tourist Industry (1993) saying,

that Jamaica (the isle of sunshine) knew no care was corroborated, according to reports, by the smiling faces, joyous laughter, and blithe behaviour of blacks. Happy denizens of an island paradise, the black masses of Jamaica, like the lilies of the field, had neither to toil nor to spin to make a living, since little effort was required to maintain human sustenance in this tropical Garden of Eden. To work like a “nigger” was not to work hard but hardly. Here was a retreat where life had passed in slothful ease and folks were on a perpetual holiday (1993, 106-107).

Tourism allowed for the perpetuation of segregation and inequalities in a way that was fast becoming taboo in America. Only through Caribbean tourism could the American have the opportunity to resurrect the ‘mammy’ of his past. Even though the modern tourism advertisements no longer so blatantly invite White Americans to partake in the experience of a ‘nannyhood for grownups’, the overwhelming desire still exists, and the opportunity to enact this kind of segregation remains what has been and is being sold in Jamaica, though it is now more often sold through images than through words.

COME BACK TO GENTILITY

A little over ten years after Jamaica invited visitors to ‘rent the life [they] wish [they] led’16, tourists were summoned to once again ‘come back to Jamaica’. This time the campaigns spearheaded by global advertising agency Young & Rubicam, focused on a perceived nostalgia for respectability, gentility, royalty, luxury and Britishness. The advertising firm’s aim was to develop a campaign that showcased ‘both the visitor and the product (Jamaica Tourist Board, n.d.)17’. The first to include almost solely Black Jamaicans, this campaign appealed to both Black and White Americans in different ways. The advertisement emphasised Jamaica’s world position as a ‘past-tense’ place, where the tourist could ‘come back to the way things used to be’. What were these disparate populations seeking to ‘come back to’? The television advertisement shows strapping young black men, sitting tall atop horses, in the midst of a game of polo encouraging the viewer to “come back to gentility”. A Jamaican woman emerges out of flower shrubs, her hair adorned with hibiscus and her hands holding a bouquet, wistfully staring into the camera she smiles sweetly and invites the viewer to “come back to our beauty”. A jolly looking fisherman, looks up from his work, just long enough to say “come back to our people” and then a dark skinned woman dressed in pastel coloured, flowery afro-centric garb, beams as she extends her arm to showcase an exquisite dining spread and invites the viewer to “come back to hospitality”. Such an advertisement would not be complete without the rotund and joyful market woman, her head wrapped in floral fabric to match her dress, she sits in front of her luscious wares and calls to those salivating behind the camera, “come back to

16 Jamaica Tourist Board, The New Yorker, 14 September 1968. 17 Jamaica Tourist Board, Jamaica Tourist Board: Tourism Information Publishing Site, jtbonline.org (accessed 2012). 72 our bounty”. A svelte dark woman dressed in white, stands with a waterfall as her backdrop and beckons her viewer to “come back to tranquillity”. The camera takes us quickly from outside in the garden to the interior of a ballroom where men and women dressed in ‘traditional’ Caribbean attire – white peasant blouses, brightly coloured flowing skirts and head-wraps for the women, and billowing long sleeved white shirts accented with brightly coloured vests for the men – waltz around gracefully. One woman halts mid-pirouette, turns to the camera and calls us all to “come back to romance”. The final interlocutor of the advertisement is an elderly Black man, quaintly attired in a khaki pants, white shirt, suspenders and hat, surrounded by little girls in frilly dresses with ribbons in their hair who skip circles around him as they begin to scramble up on the roots of a large tree. He walks slowly with the support of his bamboo cane and smiling into the lens of the camera says, “come back to the way things used to be, make it Jamaica again and make it your own”. (Make It Jamaica Again 1981) The song and images speak to a White nostalgia for Black servitude and British royalty and respectability. This is fascinating considering that Jamaica’s main tourism market is middle class White Americans, persons who do not have a concrete history of having experienced such colonial gentility, however, the memory of this racialised relationship of Black deference to White mastery is a collective one. This desire goes beyond Jamaica’s shores. It is a desire for Britishness, and the luxury, royalty and prestige that it is assumed is associated with it. America’s relationship with Britain has been and remains complicated. According to David Lowenthal (1985), American attitudes to the past, and as such their attitudes to Britain, and the history of their colonial relationship with the nation, are sharply polarized. He says, “on the one hand, freedom from the encumbering past was a

73 virtual dogma of the Revolution and the new republic; on the other, Americans deplored their historically meagre landscapes and reverently protected the Founding Fathers’ achievements” (105). Lowenthal also argues that the legacy of British imperial heritage was more burdensome on America than its outgrown colonial beginnings. America thus tried to rid herself of Britain, British political institutions and British modes of thought. Equating the relationship between Britain and America to that between parent and child, Lowenthal speaks at length about the perception of America as a youthful country created by blameless men. Americans were then able to conceive of themselves as ahistorical or uniquely exempt from secular historical processes (109). Europeanness on the other hand was associated with antiquity and decay. Lowenthal said “many Americans conceived of their country as exempt from decay because eternally youthful, newly created by rational and blameless men, America lay outside the historical process; Providence had specifically spared it from history” (109). While Americans may have held contempt for old British practices, the luxury of royalty and the accompanying Victorian respectability practices are attractive fantasies. The call to come back to gentility was also a call to engage in a fetishized idea of European sophistication and refinement without having to deal with the restrictions of respectability. By engaging in this gentility in Jamaica, the American tourist is given the opportunity to be the enforcer of decorum and the recipient of good manners without being required to display these themselves. While at its most blatant in this era of Tourism Board campaigns, this ideology has been and remains pervasive in the advertising of Jamaica as a tourist destination. In 2016, the Jamaican owned multinational all-inclusive luxury hotel group Sandals, opened their Royal Caribbean over-water guest suites. The first guests to the new suites literally

74 had the red carpet rolled out for them. In the photograph taken to commemorate the occasion the White man and woman are dressed casually in shorts, tank top, and sandals. They are welcomed by the Jamaican Brown CEO of Sandals Resorts International Adam Stewart, who wears a deep blue jacket and grey pants, and Sandals Royal Caribbean general manager, also notably light skinned, who wears grey pants and a short sleeved branded turquoise button-down shirt. Standing in either side of the photo behind Stewart on one side and the guests on the other, are two slender dark-skinned women, wearing white long sleeve taffeta Victorian style dresses, complete with wide skirt, puffy sleeves and white gloves and matching wide brimmed hats replete with feathers. In the background of the photograph, standing at the end of the red carpet, are no less than eight butlers and other waitstaff, dressed in black and khaki suits respectively (‘Sandals Royal Caribbean Welcomes First Over-the-Water Suites Guests’ 2016). The core contention of Americanness - of being all at once young and old - seem to play out in these Jamaica Tourist Board advertisements and in the actuality of the tourism product. Lowenthal argues that this desire for simultaneously latching onto and departing from Britain is because while Americans viewed European antiquity with disdain as they sought to establish themselves as a new nation, blameless without the weight of European history. He reasoned that “Europe’s historical depth fulfilled needs that American juvenility could not. The foremost celebrants of the new confessed the pull of the old” (115). Americans who held that the New World could not afford to be corrupted by nostalgia, were nostalgic regardless. America desired a richer history for herself and a connection to the Founding Fathers. According to Lowenthal, yet another cause of post-Revolutionary ambivalence toward the past was that Americans were

75 exhorted to revere the nation’s Founding Fathers and protect their achievements, despite these Founding Fathers’ pastness and connections to Europeanness. They ardently admired their immediate forebears, yet also asserted total independence from the past. The Revolutionary generation had ‘bequeathed to us almost all we have that is worth having’, a precious legacy that must be zealously safeguarded; ‘we inherited it from our fathers, and it is our duty to preserve it for those who come after us.’ In short, while the past in general was to be sloughed off, the immediate past was to be venerated and preserved’ (Lowenthal, 1985, p. 117) I argue that the desire for Britishness extends beyond a sense of longing for historicity and instead lives in a desire for control of racial hierarchy and for the maintenance of a Whiteness birthed out of and strongest under British imperialism. There is a desire, it seems, for the leisure and luxury that British royalty affords itself at the expense of African and African descended peoples and a drive to continuously maintain or live up to the racial hierarchy of the famed Founding Fathers. Jamaica’s call to ‘come back to gentility’ provided for White Americans the opportunity to relive and “zealously safeguard’ the “precious legacy” of Americanness bequeathed to them by the Founding Fathers. Following the uprisings of the 1960s, the multiculturalism of 1970s and 1980s as seen in these JTB advertisements, filled with docile, genteel, disciplined and inviting Black folk provided a place of comfort, luxury and leisure for the White American and allowed the tourist to live a fantasy of British royalty and gentility while still professing a benevolence and multiculturalism, which would allow separation from Britain’s history as a brutal imperial force. By vacationing in Jamaica, this newly independent British

76 colony that now offered its tourists the promise of British civility, Americans could be like British royalty but better. As with previous campaigns that flattened the possibility of what Jamaicanness could be in the service of presenting a palatable image to a foreign market, the Come to Jamaica campaign was also met with criticism. Regular Gleaner columnist Ken Maxwell wrote:

The whole idea seemed to be “come to Jamaica where the quaint black people are still servile and smiling”, and to me, that is disgraceful. In the first place, it does violence to our dignity as a people, and that is a serious crime. Secondly, it is a lie, for we can be disagreeable, we can be violent and we can be dishonest, just like people in every other country in the world, and if we persist in advertising ourselves as quaint and smiling and we turn out, on closer inspection, to be just like human beings, then the tourist is likely to be disappointed….The Lord knows we have plenty to recommend us, let us tell the truth about the island, its people and its beauty, and then invite the tourist to share it with us, on equal terms.” (Maxwell 1985) Maxwell’s point of contention with the Jamaica Tourist Board’s advertising was that the messaging on both accounts – in 1961 and in the 1970s - denied Jamaicans basic humanity. Presenting Jamaicans as full human beings, and as on equal standing with the potential visitors appeared to be an impossibility. Rather, from the beginning of Jamaica’s tourism marketing campaigns, the commodifiable image of Jamaicanness sought to fit into the American stereotypes and controlling images of Blackness. In the pre-independence moment Black Jamaicans could only be Sambo, Golliwog, or Pickannini - childlike, carefree and overly joyous, filled with the frivolity characteristic of paradise18 - or Uncle Tom or Mammy, intent on conforming to the Eurocentric standard and eager to serve.

18 See description from Frank Fonda Taylor above. 77

DISCOVER JAMAICA, ONE LOVE

In the 1970s and early 1980s Jamaica was rife with political violence. The ideological differences between the People’s National Party (PNP) led by Michael Manley, and the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) led by Edward Seaga played out in the streets. The 70s saw the rise of Democratic Socialism under Michael Manley, the intervention of the CIA; the exodus of elite classes; an IMF agreement that created severe economic hardship for the majority of Jamaicans; the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in December of that year two days before he was to stage the 1976 Smile Jamaica concert. With political unrest making the island unattractive to foreign visitors, the Tourist Board turned its attention to locals. The Board’s narrative of the period states that the industry’s focus for the mid-1970s to 1980s was to “create a better climate of understanding among Jamaicans about tourism and to encourage them to vacation in Jamaica” (jtbonline.org). According to the Tourist Board’s info site, 1976 was declared the year to “Discover Jamaica’ and there was a campaign backed to the music of roots reggae artiste Max Romeo. The campaign’s aim was to convince Jamaicans that they could be “visitors” in their own country in the hope of making the industry more “harmonious with Jamaican society”. Over the preceding decades the Jamaican people had launched several criticisms against the Tourist Board and the image of the island they marketed to tourists. Earlier, I mentioned a 1961 Gleaner editorial in which the Tourist Board was accused of pandering to American racial sensibilities which insisted upon casting Black people as uncivilized and barbaric, and Ken Maxwell’s critique of the follow up campaign which painted Black Jamaicans as good British colonial servants rather than as unkempt naked children and simple country folk. Further, by and large the spaces and resources available to tourists in

78 the island were withheld from Jamaicans. This fostered resentment among the Jamaican people towards the tourism industry. In a series of essays written through 1960s to 1970s, Maxwell regularly chastised the Jamaica Tourist Board for its disregard of the Jamaican people. On one occasion he pointed to the government’s plan to ban the importation of whiskey except for hotels and in-bond shops as “driving another wedge of envy and mistrust between tourists and Jamaicans” (Maxwell 1985) and on another occasion blasted the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association which had petitioned the government to ban the air horn for the benefit of tourists, but had made no mention of the needs of locals who Maxwell pointed out, might also be annoyed by the noise of the horn. The issue was not the matter of the noise itself but rather, the Government’s privileging of the needs of tourists over those of Jamaicans. “Has no one ever told the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association that selling Jamaica to tourists is only one part of its job, the other, and the most important, is to sell tourism to us, to persuade us that the people who come here are not just coming for sun, sex and subservience and to watch the quaint natives, but to share, on a basis of equality, the life we live here, air horns and all” Maxwell asked. “Is this our country or is it not, do our taxes pay for roads and hospitals and the life, or do they not? If we are the mainstay of the economy, then surely improvements must primarily be for us to use, and visitors to enjoy along with us, not the other way round? (Maxwell 1985, 84). In the midst of political, economic and social turmoil in the country, the Tourist Board sought to keep the tourism trade afloat with the message “Jamaica is Good News” central to its international marketing. In 1980 in the face of a particularly bloody election and surrounding bad press, tourist arrivals fell significantly. The Jamaica Tourist Board responded by merging the Tourism Product Development Company’s (TPDCo) operations with the JTB in order to

79 focus more intently on local training and refocusing its marketing on student and ‘Black ethnic’ American groups through television advertising. By 1982, tourism had bounced back, and the Tourist Board reported its highest number of visitor arrivals ever. The Tourism Information Portal’s narrative places the responsibility for this growth with the Jamaica Tourist Board and its plan for an “18-month recovery period” following the political turmoil of the previous few years. What the narrative neglects to mention is that 1982 was the year following Bob Marley’s untimely death. During the 1970s Bob Marley skyrocketed to worldwide popularity with Reggae songs that addressed injustice, politics, love and more and spoke to a wide group of people around the world. The Tourist Board’s information website however, does not acknowledge Bob Marley and his death or the worldwide popularity of Reggae music in its explanation for the sudden jump in visitor numbers. By the late 1980s Tourism was solidly the economic driver of the Jamaican economy, to the point that Michael Manley declared that it would be unpatriotic to hold elections during the tourist season. (Treaster and Times 1987) and the flavour of Jamaica Tourist Board ads was defanged or tamed Reggae. Despite the lack of recognition of Reggae, Rastafari or Bob Marley by the Tourist Board in the 1970s and 80s, by the 1990s Bob Marley’s exceedingly popular song One Love had become (and remains) central to Jamaica’s tourism marketing campaigns.

DO WE MATTER TO THE TOURIST INDUSTRY?

There’s a Jamaican proverb that says, “See mi and come live wid me a two different ting”. The proverb which translates literally to “seeing me and living with me are two different things” reminds us that there is more to the space than can be absorbed through a cursory glance. The experience of living in Jamaica is more complicated than

80 can be or is portrayed through marketing paraphernalia. Jamaica’s relationship to tourism has been contentious. In this chapter I have shown that the construction of Jamaica as a tourist’s paradise was an active process that stemmed from the legacy of the plantation. I have shown the trajectory of Jamaica’s tourism industry and connected the growth of tourism in Jamaica and more importantly the collapsing of Jamaica the nation and Jamaica the tourist destination, as part of a broader political economic history of Jamaica. I argue that the story or the history changes depending on who is telling it and I aim to show how tourism and its predecessors in Jamaica have always been a matter of struggle between the elite and working classes, the plantocracy and White and Brown Jamaicans and the nation’s Black population. In many ways the struggle has been about representation and ownership as the tourism industry has sought to centralize tourism in the Jamaican economy and national identity and cultivate a loyalty to tourism among Jamaicans, without allowing Jamaicans to feel like valued or equal players in their own country. In each iteration of tourism marketing, the powers that be have had to convince Jamaicans to take part in the sale of their own servility. Despite the Tourist Board narrative which presents Jamaicans as quintessentially hospitable people eager to welcome and serve the tourist, history shows us that Jamaicans have long been resistant to this narrative especially because it is predicated upon a kind of servility and abject positioning of Blackness. As Ken Maxwell asked in an essay complaining about the slew of advertisements proselytizing the value of tourism to Jamaicans within, outside of, and adjacent to the industry, “though the tourist industry matters to us, do we matter to the tourist industry?” (Maxwell 1985, 82). As the decades have passed, there has been recognition amongst industry professionals that tourism in Jamaica does not and cannot work without the buy in of the

81 nationals. To present Jamaica as paradise or as desirable to the visitor, the local has to be willing to craft and maintain the illusion. In the next chapter I further explore this push and pull between Jamaicans’ own struggle for autonomy and the tourism industry’s notion of Jamaica and the questions this has raised in what it means to be Jamaican.

Interlude 2.

The objectionable objectives of those who objectify the object defy description in their own language. Besides, there is more we need to speak about. We live beyond the totality of words and dictionaries and meaning accepted and codified. In the space between living and dying, seen and unseen, here and there, then and now, the tangible/intangible, gulf/bridge between the truth and a lie. It is here that the commodity speaks. In broken sentences that hold everything. In breaks and silences that pop the ties that bind with their excess. In organised/chaotic meaningful noise. In this space meaning hangs, in filled suspens/e/ion of time and sound and life. In extended breaths and miniature deaths. Dearly departed, we are gathered here in your presence to bear witness to the wonder of living without having ever lived

the freeing/binding liminality of choosing without choice to be dead because others are alive

Desperate to occupy this space that of its own accord erases and refills we persist Screaming

83 lying breathing staccato into the longest note with reverence to none but you and our own we moan and emerge remembering we believe in life we desire death in small doses always on our own terms

Chapter 2: Joining Team Jamaica

TRAINING NOTEBOOK: INTRODUCTION TO THE TEAM

“You are about to experience the greatest show on earth!” Ms. Campbell19 all but shouts. She is endearingly and overwhelmingly effusive. I find myself wondering where she finds the energy. It’s 9am, I barely made it here on time and she is here well-dressed, hair perfectly coiffed, ready to go. We are seated around an ornate, enormous, wooden table. The chairs are engraved wood, with jewel toned cushions - more suited for your grandmother’s dining table than this board room. There are at least 15 of us around the table, others trickle in and sit in office chairs off to the side. I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s late. Ms. Campbell is not the person I spoke to on the phone. That woman, Janella, is much quieter, much younger. She doesn’t do trainings. She organizes things. She seems like the type who is good at that. She stands at the door with a clipboard ticking off names and handing out welcome packets to the men who trickle in. It is mostly men, it seems who are doing this training session. I had spoken with several persons at the TPDCo (Tourism Product Development Company) before I landed with her. I had left my name and number with a Jennifer, and a Karen, some other person by some other name and she called back with the details – cost $4,500 to be paid by bank draft, program length – 1 week, Team Jamaica Certificate awarded at the end as long as you pass the quiz and attend every day of training. When I got in this morning, I delivered my payment receipt to a receptionist who directed me to this upstairs board room.

19 All names of interlocuters have been changed to protect their identity 85

Ms. Campbell springs to the front of the room, lands in front of the projector screen and commands us all to our feet. There is a slow wave of awkward shuffling. She guides us as we stumble through a stilted rendition of Search Me oh Lord. Our eyes are still darting around the room, summing each other up, when Ms. Campbell announces that someone now must volunteer to lead us in prayer. There is silence. Heads bow, eyes hit the floor, arms get folded, no one takes action. She declares that this - prayer and devotion - is something we will do every morning before training, so we should get used to it. I’m having flashbacks to mandatory devotions in my Catholic high school auditorium. She ‘volunteers’ one of the men and we support his uncertain “Heavenly Father guide us….” with a muttered amen. We settle further into discomfort as we go around the table and then around the room with introductions – name, what you do, and why you came. I’m surprised at the number of men in the room. I realize from my surprise that I hadn’t at all prepared my mind for what to expect. Had I assumed that because it’s service industry training that it would have been mostly women? That the people would have been younger? I’m nervous about what I’ll say when it’s my turn. There’s a young woman who wants to be an entrepreneur, another who’s doing the course because the security company she works for was offering to pay for it and she thought, well, why not? Another is completing a BA in Hospitality and Tourism Management and Team Jamaica certification is a requirement of her degree program. One young man wants to get certified to be able to turn his grandfather’s property into a guest house, and one is a bartender trying to get into the more lucrative hotel business, but by and large the room is full of men, most of them drivers – taxi or bus – seeking the certification so that they can be qualified to drive for JUTA (Jamaica Union of Travellers Association) and get into the more lucrative and

86 stable tourism business. When it’s finally my turn I explain that I’m writing a dissertation project on Jamaican tourism and someone had suggested I experience the training. It’s clear there’s some confusion about what I mean – I add “and I’m really interested in culture and tours” and that seems to settle things but for the rest of the training period a few of the guys tease me mercilessly about my incessant note taking, and tell me to make sure they’re the stars of my book. The TPDCo.’s Team Jamaica training program is the mandatory first step to being employed in or otherwise associated with Jamaica’s tourism and hospitality industry. Initiated in 1997, the program’s main components include customer service, product knowledge, and cultural and environmental awareness. It is offered in-person, traditional classroom style at the TPDCo. offices in Kingston, and sometimes across the island, as well as a video course for those unable to attend. This first morning’s orientation is required for everyone although we won’t see those taking the course virtually again until the last day when we’ll take our quiz. During the week long training we will learn about tourism awareness, customer service, self-development, tourism product history, cultural awareness, Jamaican geography, and local attractions. “Now we are ready for the greatest show on earth!” Ms. Campbell repeats with even greater enthusiasm now that everyone has arrived, and she has the full attention of the room. “Sit back, fasten your seatbelts, we’re ready for take-off!” She leans over the laptop and hits play. Barack Obama’s voice fills the room. “Yes, we can. Yes, we can change. Yes, we can!” On screen the image of a victorious Barack Obama and the US first family, gives way to images of previous Team Jamaica training participants receiving their certificates at an awards ceremony. Obama’s voice fades and R. Kelly’s R&B track, I believe I Can Fly rises up as the accompaniment for the photo slideshow.

There are pictures of iconic Jamaica – white sand beaches, the Blue Mountains, yellow hotels, and green palm trees. There are pictures of groups of trainees hiking, having lunch, studiously sitting in the classroom, and dancing in the middle of the boardroom. The photos of the previous participants are interspersed with pictures of Jamaica’s national heroes. A picture of Marcus Garvey is followed by a stock image of the Jamaican flag and then a picture of a team in black, green, and gold Jamaica branded T- shirts. The photo is captioned “feeling proud”. A picture of Norman Manley20 is followed by an image of a man dressed head to toe in the red and white of traditional bandana. “That was the ‘vibes man’ of the group’ Ms. Campbell gleefully comments. The photo is captioned ‘best presenter’. As the R. Kelly track winds down and the slideshow comes to end and we see Barack Obama again, “…change is coming to America” his voice booms. The video ends with a picture of Ms. Campbell blowing a kiss to the camera, the text caption says “Thank you for watching. Love you all”. “I believe in Jamaica” Ms. Campbell says to the group as she prepares to lay out the rules of engagement for the upcoming week. “If you want to succeed you have to be able to dance, to sing, role play, talk in public. We’ll create team spirit and build confidence, all done in just six days. A total metamorphosis of the self. It’s all about you not about me. I’m just the coordinator” she says pacing the front of the room. “First day – you shy! By day three it goes!” She gives us a general overview of the organizational structure of the Tourism Product Development Company and explains the difference between this organization and the more prominent Jamaica Tourist Board which shares the same office building. We get the official Team Jamaica training booklet, some tourism brochures, and handouts with all we’ll need to know to successfully complete the

20 Jamaican national hero – thought of as the father of Jamaican nationalism 88 program. Then she lays out the ground rules. We must be respectful to each other, even if we don’t agree. All cell phones must be on vibrate and if your cell phone rings in class you’ll be required to stand in front of the room and dance. “Ayy, mi vibesy21 you nuh!” the middle-aged Ms. Campbell shows off her dance moves as an example of what we might be required to do. I check to make sure my phone is on silent. “You know why I played that song?” she asks, “it’s because I believe. I believe in Jamaica. I believe in the program. This is a flagship program and I believe in what we do”. We must be on time, raise our hands when we want to speak and be courteous to all the guest presenters and facilitators. At the end of the week of training we’ll be required to do an individual presentation and a group quiz. We must learn to master public speaking and to work together as a team. We run through the various tourism related government entities, their roles, responsibilities, and key people. This is important because most of us have been lumping the Tourist Product Development Company (TPDCo), the Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB) and the Tourism Enhancement Fund (TEF) all under the same colloquial name – ‘tourist board’. This is how we identify the building that all these entities which fall under the Ministry of Tourism’s umbrella share in New Kingston and this is how we told people about the training we would spending our weekdays doing. The JTB – or the Tourist

Board, is the name we know. Ms. Campbell clarifies that the Tourist Board’s role is to market Jamaica to tourists – the implication being that tourists means foreigners - and for that reason we won’t see advertisements from them on Jamaican television. The TPDCo., on the other hand, develops and enhances the tourism product in the island, and a major way of doing this is through this training program.

21 Full of life and energy 89

“We want you to be good products of tourism” we are told. “Tourism is a high standard industry.” The TPDCo. is structured based on its main goals: product quality and training, product development, visitor safety and experience (which includes security in resort areas), and corporate services. On the other hand, the Tourism Enhancement Fund (TEF), which also shares this building is the entity responsible for the money needed to enhance tourism. Each visitor to the island is charged a ‘land tax’22 and TEF manages that money. If something needs to be done, then the other entities must send a proposal to TEF to make it happen.

“I have to deploy more police in the tourism areas cause Mo-bay23 ‘hot’ right now with crime” she tells us as an example, “So I send a proposal to TEF. Ninety district constables were sent to tourism areas. Trained by TPDCo., funded by TEF.” She makes a point of telling us several of the other entities that collaborate with tourism. The idea here is to ensure that we are able to understand tourism as a central part of Jamaican economy and life, even for those who don’t work for an entity in the ‘Tourist Board’ building. “Tourism is intangible. You can’t touch it, you can only experience it and if the experience is bad, it will be bad publicity.” Ms. Campbell tells us this as part of her explanation of why training has such high priority for the TPDCo. The Team Jamaica program was mandated for all tourism industry workers in 2001. The program’s purpose is manifold– to create a quality tourism team, to build team spirit, to instil pride in self and country, and most importantly to provide certification for all tourism personnel. She

22 The ‘land tax’ Ms. Campbell speaks of was initially implemented as a way of satisfying a debate about who should have responsibility for paying for the growth of Jamaica’s tourism industry and the marketing of the island as a destination. With neither the colonial government nor the private sector wanting to take full responsibility, the tax was implemented. The funds earned from that tax successfully paid for tourism marketing for the island for many years. Today the landing fee and departure tax are usually included in the cost of the tourist’s airline ticket. 23 Montego Bay 90 acknowledges what we all know well, crime is a major problem. In addition to that there is competition – Cuba has opened its doors, so Jamaican tourism “haffi tun up!”24 For this reason the TPDCo. offers skills upgrading, foreign language training in everything from Spanish to Russian, community tourism product development, and resort development amongst other things. Resort development involves the beautification and maintenance of the six resort areas – Ocho Rios, Port Antonio, Montego Bay, Kingston and Port Royal, Mandeville and South West St. Elizabeth, and Negril. Each resort area has a slogan. We talk about different types of tourism and the different reasons people travel. The ingredients for travel are time, money, mobility, and motivation. Tourists can be international, regional or domestic. People travel for trade, religion, education, health, recreation and sports. Someone comments that sporting activities are now a major draw and says that we always see “nuff25 white people at the stadium now!” There are chuckles through the room. “What does the tourist do?” she asks. Her pedagogical style is dependent upon active engagement of the group. “The tourist goes shopping, dines out at restaurants, and engages in culture through the ‘meet the people’ program” are a few of the responses. “What do tourists expect?” Ms. Campbell asks.

A few guys from the group respond jokingly “weed/ganja” and there are more chuckles. She does not find it funny.

24 Jamaican/Patois phrase meaning be excellent or ‘turn up’ 25 plenty 91

“Visitors to Jamaica expect hospitable people, efficient service, a clean and pleasant environment” she sternly corrects, “and Jamaicans who are proud of their culture.” We are reminded that tourists do not want Jamaicans to mimic their accents, or to try to get them to buy drugs and they do not want to be harassed. We are asked to state things that offend the tourist. “When they can’t get weed!” comes a voice from the group – the jokers are persistent. This time the chuckles are swiftly silenced. “Tourists are offended by harassment, our mimicking of their language, and by crime” comes the authoritative reply. After a short break to sip instant coffee with condensed milk, and mint, ginger or Lipton tea with brown sugar, we are split into groups and tasked with creating a poster advertisement for the resort area that we’ve been assigned. We are given cartridge paper, markers, magazines out of which we can cut images, scissors, glue and pencils. My group is assigned Negril “The Capital of Casual”. In addition to the poster, we must be able to verbally express to people why they should visit our resort area. This we are told is to develop our presentation skills. I jot down the things we are told are key about Negril:

• Negril was a fishing village • The road to Negril wasn’t cut until 1959 • It was a famous location for draft dodgers and spring breakers • There are 7 miles of beautiful white sand beach. With the exception of Kingston -urban and outside the scope of what we’ve long sold as Jamaica’s tourism product - all our resort area posters look alike. There’s beach and coconut trees, frozen drinks with brightly coloured umbrellas, white sand and gazebos

92 with thatch roofing. We write our resort area name boldly, with the tagline underneath and then sometimes a quip, a quote, an encouragement to come and enjoy. Negril: Capital of Casual, Ocho Rios: The Centerpiece of Jamaica, The South Coast: Off the Beaten Track, Montego Bay: Complete Resort, and Kingston: The Heartbeat of Jamaica. This is the first day of training, but we already know what to do. We’ve been training for this our whole lives. Regardless of our realities, where we live, or the work we do, regardless of the fact that we have not yet been Team certified, we all know how to construct Jamaica singularly as paradise.

ATTITUDES TOWARDS TOURISM: RESISTANCE TO AMBIVALENCE

It has not always been this way. In the early days of Jamaica’s tourism industry, Jamaicans actively resisted participation. The precursor to the Jamaica Tourist Board, the Jamaica Tourist Association which was established in 1910 had moderate success in attracting visitors to the island. The association however, had a much more difficult time convincing working class Jamaicans to take part in the burgeoning industry as they could see no direct benefit (Stupart and Shipley 2012; Taylor 1993). As early as the mid 1800s there are tourist accounts of Jamaicans having a lackadaisical and maybe even hostile attitude towards tourism and the tourist. Historian Frank Fonda Taylor notes that “facing the universal racism of Whites of that time, [Jamaican Blacks] responded with a general indifference and a perceptible disdain for the occasional foreigner”(Taylor 1993, 8). Black Jamaicans felt that all Americans brought their feelings of “race hatred” with them when they vacationed on or visited the island, and as such responded to them to with a marked contempt and disregard that was universalized to all White foreigners.

In 1851 American abolitionist John Bigelow complained that the “colored people” who “kept and served” the boarding houses which were available for lodging for visitors to Jamaica “enjoy[ed] the princely prerogative which attaches only to indolent people and kings; entire immunity from all the penalties of lapsed time” (Bigelow 1851, 21). He further complained that the waitstaff had little regard for punctuality or efficiency and stated that it was common to have to wait over two hours for a meal as the staff would bring items to the table one at a time in painstakingly slow fashion. What Bigelow read as a lack of forethought, I understand as a form of contextual resistance, a disregard for Bigelow and others who looked and sounded like him, and an indication of Black Jamaicans’ refusal to engage in blind servitude to foreigners, even a mere sixteen years after the end of slavery. Visitors to the island consistently complained about Black Jamaicans’ ignorance and impudence. Novelist Mary Gaunt in her travelogue Reflections in Jamaica (1932) writes of an incident in which the young man charged with serving her blamed an inanimate object for the destruction of the cover of her china trinket box. She mused that she “could never find out the point of view of the people who waited on [her], never could discover why they told [her] the lies they did” (Gaunt 1932, 29). Citing a travelogue from the 1800s, Taylor repeats complaints about the waitstaff at the Constant

Spring Hotel frequently “standing on one leg and gaping at the guests while they ate or spinning around on it several times while an order was being given” (Taylor 1993, 91) These practices of feigned idiocy and calculated incompetence or “playing fool fi ketch wise” as is said in Jamaican parlance were a part of early Black hotel staff’s resistance to the plantation-reminiscent servitude the burgeoning tourism industry required of them in

94 order to create and maintain Jamaica’s image as the White foreigner’s playground or paradise.

TOURISM MATTERS TO EVERYONE

The dismantling of this anti-American sentiment and the restriction of staffers passive resistance to the demands of the industry were essential to the successful construction of a tourist trade on the island. Jamaicans had to be convinced to serve. In the late 1950s and early 1960s cheaper airfares and rising incomes in the global north made leisure travel newly accessible to a broader group of people. By this point tourism joined Bauxite which had been discovered in the island the decade before as a major income earner. Hotelier and chairman of the Jamaica Tourist Board Abe Issa led campaigns to attract tourists to the island’s beaches. Where in the late 1800s and early 1900s Jamaica’s hillsides were touted as a sanatorium, by the mid 1940s to 1950s, doctors started recommending trips to the beach and curative dips in “healing waters”. Between 1950 and 1954 tourism revenue near doubled, rising from £3 million to almost £6 million in the space of four years (Sherlock and Bennett 1998). The result, however, was that beaches which were formerly accessible to local Jamaicans were now populated by wealthy foreign tourists and Jamaicans felt unwelcome on their own beaches. Despite a rise in arrivals in early 1950s, tourist arrival numbers began to dip in 1961 when American travellers started to experience anxieties about travel because of political strife within Jamaica and neighbouring islands. In response the Jamaica Tourist Board intensified its marketing push into North America with a campaign that framed Jamaica as politically and economically stable and her people as pliant, jovial and keen. The Come to Jamaica campaign which ran from 1955-1963 promised visitors an idyllic paradise of

95 simple people ready to serve. Tourism as an industry, however still had not attained the heights the pre-independence government envisioned for it. In an effort to convince Jamaicans of the utility of tourism and encourage them to participate in an industry many did not see as directly beneficial to them, the Jamaica Tourist Board launched the Tourism Matters to You campaign in the 1950s. The campaign featured messages like this one placed as a public service announcement in the January 17, 1961 issue of the Kingston Gleaner:

Almost 10,000 of us – waiters, bellboys, barmen, chefs, chambermaids – are employed by hotels and guest houses throughout the island. Catering to the thousands of tourists who visit Jamaica each year, we are truly involved in giving good service to these visitors. We know that courteous and efficient service, service with a smile in the tradition of Jamaican hospitality is our best contribution to the industry from which we benefit in good wages and gratuities. In turn we share our income with the community in buying local goods and services. So, tourism is not only important to us, but …TOURISM MATTERS TO YOU.

A message in the public interest from The Jamaica Tourist Board. (‘Kingston Gleaner Newspaper Archives | Jan 17, 1961, p. 12’ n.d.)

Written from the point of view of the tourism industry employee and directed to the Jamaican community at large, the announcement sought to unsettle the notion that the tourism industry benefitted only a small group of Jamaican elites. By having the message come from the employee the Tourist Board aimed to engage horizontally, thus dismantling hierarchy’s barriers to relationality. In stating the number of persons directly employed by the tourism industry, the Tourist Board’s message worked to emphasize the significance of the industry as an employer on the island, and to highlight the range of hospitality related positions occupied by and available to Jamaicans. It is telling that the positions singled out here are that of “waiters, bellboys, barmen, chefs, and

96 chambermaids”, all at the level of ‘unskilled’ labour, further making it clear that the “good wages and gratuities” earned from jobs in tourism could be accessible to all Jamaicans regardless of training and inadvertently cementing the position of the Jamaican populace as service staff at the bottom of the industry ladder. Further, by using the discourse of community the message grounded itself in a sense of familiarity. The message also appealed to sense of belonging and framed the service of tourism as an essential part of Jamaicanness by presenting hospitality with a smile as an entrenched Jamaican “tradition”. This was part of the industry’s guileful inculcation of Jamaicanness into a clichéd contentment born out of a Sambo stereotype of black carefreeness which endures today26. Finally, the announcement appealed to the pragmatic by elucidating the economic benefit of tourism to those outside the bounds of the industry. It placed tourism at the centre of the economic structure, implying that through the selling of “local goods and services” to those who earn the “good wages and gratuities” from tourism, the average Jamaican is able to access their share of the tourism dollar. Further, by framing the local expenditure of tourism employees as “shar[ing]” of “income with the community” the message emphasized a sense of benevolence and fraternity with the aim of inspiring mutual responsibility. The sum of the message being that tourism matters to the average Jamaican because not only is hospitality quintessential to Jamaicanness but being hospitable is necessary to the economic survival of the average Jamaican and the growth of the national economy. Other advertisements in the series

26 In 2013 Volkswagen placed a now famous Superbowl advertisement “Come in get happy” featuring the music of Jamaican Reggae artiste Jimmy Cliff and presenting Jamaicanness as quintessentially happy-go- lucky and content. The ad featured a White man who after driving his volkwagen to work so relaxed and content that he spoke with a faux Jamaican accent to his disgruntled coworkers. The advertisement closes with the rise of Jimmy Cliff’s voice singing come on get happy, and the formerly grumpy coworkers now similarly carefree (indicated by their use of stereotypical Jamaican accents) as they sit in the first man’s Volkswagen motor car. The following link will allow you to view the advertisement on youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQi_-hHYO9c 97 featured images of working class Jamaicans engaged in the seemingly unrelated to tourism work of construction, shoe-shining, or cleaning and summed up with the general message “everybody benefits – directly and indirectly – from the Tourist Industry…more tourists mean more hotels, more employment, more money in circulation, greater prosperity for everyone. Whoever you are…wherever you are Tourism Matters to you” (‘Kingston Gleaner Newspaper Archives | Jul 14, 1957, p. 20’ n.d.). The Tourism Matters to You campaign and others like it formed an important part of the project of shaping Jamaican identity to suit tourism. If tourism is to be the mainstay of the nation, its success depends upon the investment of the nationals. In appealing to an audience beyond the percentage of the population directly employed to hotels or other tourist serving businesses the campaign centralized tourism in the framing of hospitality and service as a part of Jamaican tradition, the campaign also managed to present service to tourists as an essential part of Jamaican culture and thus of core Jamaicanness. This project of constructing the nation as a tourist destination can only be successful if the nationals buy into tourism as a culture and anyone who resists the idea can be written out of Jamaican identity.

TEACHING TOURISM TO THE YOUTH

The Tourism Matters to You campaign has resurged in many different forms since its initial implementation in the 1960s. In 1994 the Jamaica Tourist Board launched the “We are Jamaica. Let’s Make it Great” community outreach programme. In 1995 the programme was supplemented by the focused introduction of tourism into schools with the establishment of Tourism Action Clubs for students and the organization of curriculum development workshops geared towards equipping teachers to champion

98 tourism. This initiative grew in 1996 with the introduction of the Infusion of Tourism in Education programme. Most recent in the initiatives aimed at proselytizing tourism to the youth is the TPDCo Tourism Quiz television show. Inaugurated in 2018, the quiz show follows the model of the popular School’s Challenge Quiz programme which has been airing on Jamaican television since the 1960s. The stated aim of the TPDCo Tourism Quiz is to provide an “opportunity for children in the primary level of the education system to familiarize themselves with our tourism product”. In addition to testing students’ knowledge of Jamaican tourism, the quiz also examines course subject areas of math, science, language arts and social studies. Sixteen schools participated in the first year of the programme and in the second year, the number of participating schools doubled to thirty-two. Representing their Primary schools, the 10-year-old participants are grouped in teams of four. Each episode features two teams. In the first section of the quiz, each team is given ten seconds to answer a question posed by the game show host. Students complete tasks ranging from Spanish to English translations of hotel menu items to identifying the parish locations of named tourist attractions. In the second section of the quiz, Tourism in 90 seconds, each team is given 90 seconds to answer as many tourism related questions as they can. Questions in this round included “our hotel tennis pro uses 18 tennis balls per hour, at this rate how many balls will he use in 90 minutes?”, “complete the Jamaican proverb ‘nuh ramp wid mawga cow a coulda…”27 and “the

27 Just in case you’re curious the proverb is “nuh ramp wid mawga cow a coulda bull modda” which literally translates to “don’t play with a skinny cow because she could be a bull’s mother” and means never underestimate someone or something that on the surface seems easily dealt with, there may be unforeseen complications or dangers involved. 99 busiest airport in the world is located in which US city?28” Through the quiz and similar child focused initiatives, Jamaicans learn to accept tourism’s centrality in the nation. That tourism matters to everyone becomes unquestioned and unquestionable fact. There is never a question of whether or not one should serve, only a question of how.

#TREATOURVISITORSRIGHT LET THEM FEEL SAFE.

In conjunction with the Tourism Quiz, the TPDCo has taken to social media to disseminate the message about the importance of tourism to the nation to a wide range of Jamaicans. The TPDCo posted a series of “Tourism tips of the week”. Bathed in the pink of the Jamaica Tourist Board logo, some of the tips seemed to speak to the tourists, encouraging them to people watch (people are our most important resource) and take photos while others seemed to speak to the locals encouraging them to “make eye contact, smile and say hello” (June 14, 2018) or “do our part and put our garbage in the right place” (June 22, 2018). An updated version of the tourism tips posts consists of a graphic of a smiling dark-skinned cartoon figure, dressed in the black, green, and gold of the Jamaican flag giving a thumbs up as he pushes out of a section of “Treat our visitors right” along with the TPDCo. logo. The posts offer instructions and advice such as, “do not try to offer goods and services for sale without the required license or permit” (October 24, 2018) or “don’t “rush” the visitor. Be patient. Allow visitors to be hassle free” (October 10, 2018) or “Respect our visitors personal space” (October 2, 2018) followed by a caption that says “Let them feel safe. Give them some space” and “smile, Say Hello, and ask how is your day?” The caption for the post further drives home the point by saying “Friendliness is next to Godliness.” (October 19, 2018) And below each

28 Atlanta 100 post and caption is the phrase “Jamaicans let’s unite, Embrace Jamaican Hospitality” and #TreatOurVisitorsRight. Hashtags below the posts include #Visitorsafety #JamaicanHospitality and #TeamTourism. The posts also attempt to sensitize Jamaicans to foreign conceptions of racial sensitivity or racial awareness with “sir or madam go down much better than Ms. Chin, Whitey or Indian” (Sept 27, 2018) and a further caption that states “do the right thing, be polite and address our guests right”. This is only the latest in a string of social media and other such campaigns geared towards teaching Jamaicans to be good hosts to tourists and visitors. This current iteration includes these #treatourvisitorsright posts. The emphasis on safety in the messaging implies that visitors must have something to fear. A large part of the tourism messaging geared towards locals is to discourage tourist harassment. Focus group discussions by Dunn and Dunn reveal that “tourist resorts are not always friendly. The social and economic deprivation of local people sometimes makes it difficult for them to both appreciate and participate in tourism. There is too sharp a contrast between the facilities for tourists and those for locals. For example, tourists travel in air-conditioned buses while local transportation is almost non-existent in many resort areas and neighbouring parishes” (Dunn and Dunn 2002). Dunn and Dunn’s assertion no longer holds true in the same way as infrastructural advances have ensured greater access to transportation for locals in these areas. However, there remains inequity in the quality of that transportation as well as in access to other resources such as water, electricity, and security. The chasm between what is available for tourists and to locals is still wide. Further, there is discussion about tourism mattering to local people because of the income it brings into the island but local attempts to sell directly to tourists are often framed as harassment and due to the enclave nature of

101 several Jamaican resorts and a system that separates tourist from locals, the average Jamaican rarely has opportunity to directly gain from the industry. The phrasing “friendliness is next to godliness” is particularly curious considering the legacy of the Courtesy Cops and also harkens back to the moralizing of earlier periods in Jamaican history.29 The Jamaica Tourist Board introduced ‘courtesy police’ into the tourism hubs of Kingston, Montego Bay, Ocho Rios and Port Antonio in the early 1960s. Their primary responsibility was to be tourist guides and generally be of assistance to the visitor (Gleaner February 17, 1962). A March 1962 Jamaica Gleaner article titled “Meet the Courtesy Cop” began “On a stroll down Harbour Street today, I noticed a man clad in a smart khaki uniform and khaki helmet, standing at the corner of King and Harbour Streets. He turned out to be one of the men employed by the TOURIST BOARD to help visitors who know nothing about the geography and ways of our country.” …the writer interviewed a Courtesy Cop who stated his purpose as “to guide and inform tourists and shoo off molesters” … he noted that locals made the most enquires …the cop “explained how many foreigners tend to stray into the east end of Kingston and get lost among the lanes where pilferers lurk. But now Courtesy Cops try to keep them clear of such dangers” (‘Kingston Gleaner Newspaper Archives | Mar 28, 1962, p. 3’). The ‘pilferers’ and molesters in the article were the ordinary Black

Jamaicans. The anxiety about tourist safety that spurred the need for the courtesy police is inextricably connected to the fear of Blackness that necessitated a retelling and reframing of the nation for the purpose of tourism. It is also telling here that the Courtesy Cop in question says that the majority of the queries he received came from Jamaicans. This is telling in the way that Jamaicans continue to push back by making use of things

29 For example in the 1850s and cholera. 102 never intended for us. The Courtesy Cops were certainly not placed for the benefit of Jamaicans, rather were intended to ‘protect’ tourists from the exaggerated sense of danger that Jamaicans posed. However, in practice, the service was utilized mostly by locals, emphasizing the disjuncture between the state’s goals and ideas of Jamaicanness and the people’s.

TRAINING NOTEBOOK: SAFETY AND SECURITY

Today’s training session is all about safety, security, and customer service, and I’m running late. I went to the wrong room. Today we are in a small meeting room downstairs. I’m sure they told us about this change yesterday, but I forgot. By the time I shuffle my way into the room, most of the participants are already seated shoulder to shoulder around the table. I have missed the morning devotions. I have to sit in the seat nobody ever wants, right at the front, under the nose of the instructor. Today the presenter is a young police officer. He is out of uniform (I’m not sure if this is due to rank or because he’s off-duty for the day), instead he’s dressed in plaid button-down shirt and slacks, his cell phone and keys are attached to his belt and his sunglasses are on his head. The group is already in the midst of brief introductions and jokes. Officer Johnson tells us that even though he’s a police officer and most police officers in situations such as this speak about security generally, he thinks it is important to talk about personal safety. “Do not leave your key in the door!” he says. The group erupts in laughter because as far as we are concerned, he is stating the obvious. It takes me some time to wrap my mind around the fact that my regular Jamaican vigilance is sometimes seen as hyper vigilance outside the island. Leaving a key in the front door is something most of us who live in Kingston would never dream of doing. This might not be the case for

103 everyone. “We tell this to tourists too. Do not leave your key. When tourists come, they get a key. Don’t leave it around. In a 3-star hotel and up they will give you a new key, every hotel they will reprogram the key for you. Take it with you!” Now that the key question is settled, Officer Johnson takes a deep breath and leans forward slightly over the table. With a mischievous grin, he says “True or False: The best protection for your home is a gun.” The statement and his performance have the desired effect. The murmuring grows into full on chatter. It is clear the room is split. Fred pipes up “Me have three dogs. Three trained dogs. Dat a di best protection for my home.” Officer Johnson’s smile spreads, “I try to speak facts all the time, police say the best protection for your house is a dog, but not a Rottweiler” He says. “Get a regular Jamaican mongrel dog. Feed a mongrel dog properly - nuh treat dem like we normally treat dem – and they will protect you.” There is nodding and laughing throughout the room. Officer Johnson quiets the side conversations about experiences with dogs and security, and the pros and cons of the ‘mangy mongrel’, with “not everybody can afford a Rottweiler, and sometimes they will attack their owner”. He quickly moves on to the next topic. “We very interested in energy conservation, but not always in safety and security” Officer Johnson says and then lays out what he refers to as common tactics of attackers and thieves. “What do you do if you hear water running outside your house in the middle of the night and you know you never leave on no pipe?” “Leave it” says one person. “After mi can’t afford fi a pay water commission so much money!” says another.

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“Send your husband” comes a voice from the back of the room. “Or call you neighbour” says another. The group cannot come to consensus. Officer Johnson recommends calling the police, because a running pipe you didn’t turn on could be a trap. The group seems unconvinced of the utility of that option. Unconvinced that calling the police will result in anything helpful. Moving on to the next activity, Officer Johnson passes around a bag of assorted items including a bunch of keys, a blue credit card, coins, a white keyring, a yellow stick of glue and more. The only instructions he gives is that we are to look in the bag and pass it on. Once the bag has made it back to the front of the room, we are asked to write down in detail what we saw in the bag. Everyone misses at least one item. Many of us miss several. We failed this exercise in careful observation. This, according to Officer Johnson, is a common problem. Most people cannot accurately describe an attacker to the police because most people are not sufficiently attuned to details. He recounts an experience in which he trailed a woman who was so engrossed in her phone that she didn’t notice him. After following her for a while and realizing that she was completely unaware of her surroundings, he put his hand on her shoulder. The woman was of course petrified. He identified himself as a police officer and warned her that she could have been robbed or worse and unable to give a description because she was so distracted by her phone. With every anecdote Officer Johnson shares there are excited murmurings of approval. He is gregarious and captivating, but we are also generally very security conscious and most persons can relate to the officer’s stories. Despite his chastisements

105 about lack of awareness and ill-advised decisions that put us in danger, personal security is a common topic in daily conversation. As Officer Johnson wraps up his security presentation and we enter the break, the enthusiastic chatter grows. It seems everyone in the room has a story about some kind of attack or violation and some story about being failed in some way by the police. There are stories of calling for help and being told that the police have no vehicle to use to come to assist, stories of police brutality, or police killing innocent people. Each account is worn like a badge of honour. Officer Johnson joins in the banter to defend the force. “Police don’t kill people, we neutralize the threat,” he states, explaining that the gun is a manmade object. The steps the police officer learns in training are to verbalize his intent and use his words to deescalate a situation. There is loud but jovial disagreement. It was particularly telling that Officer Johnson focused his lesson on personal safety rather than solely on the safety and security of the tourist. The tourist never has to think about the running pipe, or whether a dog or a gun is a better method of household protection in Jamaica. By and large the focus of Jamaica’s tourism to this point has placed tourists in an enclave.

Ian Boxhill in examining the relationship between tourism and crime in Jamaica argues that while crime has had a negative impact on the growth of tourism in Jamaica it is the all-inclusive concept which has been more detrimental to the growth of tourism in the non all-inclusive sector. The all-inclusive concept began with the holiday camps in Britain in the 1930s and was developed upon in the 1950s by the Club Mediterranean popularly known as “Club Med”. The Club Med concept required the use of beads to buy

106 food and drink and so was not fully all inclusive in the way the concept is understood today. Today, the all-inclusive hotel in Jamaica is an enclave. Once the tourist arrives on the property, all food, drink, entertainment and accommodations are provided giving the tourist no need or reason to leave the property. This can be extremely problematic for the trickle-down economics that the state touts as a benefit of tourism, as it means that the foreign currency that the tourist represents is spent solely in one location. Still, Boxhill argues that while the all-inclusive sector has been detrimental to the small or community tourism proprietor in terms of competition for consumers of rooms and resources, the all-inclusive has shielded the community tourism sector from some of the negative impact of crime and crime reportage in Jamaica. In other words, because the all-inclusive is a fortress almost separate from the island, tourists who stay in these hotels are sequestered away and are for the most part shielded from the crime that may affect the town in which the hotel is located. The word of mouth review from tourists who stay in all-inclusive hotels might then be that Jamaica is an extraordinarily safe place. The community tourism sector benefits because the tourists’ report is not usually “all- inclusive hotel x is a safe place” but rather that “Jamaica is a safe place”. Boxhill is essentially arguing that the lack of specificity in most tourists self-reporting of their vacations means that smaller entities that do not have the economic means or desire to be enclosed and all-inclusive, are still able in some small way to benefit from the reputation of the all-inclusive hotel. Using Mexico’s Cancun and Playa Del Carmen as examples, Boxhill discusses what he lays out as a fundamental difference between American and European tourists and their desires and argues that the Jamaican tourism developers have not taken advantage of the European tourism market which, unlike the Americans who prefer the comfort and convenience and relative safety of the all-inclusive, seek smaller

107 hotels and more intimate settings. According to Boxhill the psyche of the American and European tourists is different and Jamaica’s challenge lies in an inability or failure to tap into the non-American market. Another challenge Boxhill outlines is the nation’s failure to provide social services for its citizens, opting instead to develop tourism infrastructure. Using New Zealand as an example of success Boxhill highlights the ways that that nation’s strategy to develop South Island first for its citizens and then for tourists has led to the spot’s success as a tourist destination. Jamaica’s focus however, has been more on encouraging Jamaicans to take part in the tourist industry as products rather than as consumers. And even at points when consumption has been widely encouraged, for example during the Experience Jamaica “staycation” campaigns of the early to mid-2000s, a large portion of what is made readily available to tourists remains inaccessible to Jamaicans.

TRAINING NOTEBOOK: FRIENDLINESS IS NEXT TO GODLINESS: CUSTOMER SERVICE

“I’m inviting all of you who are not Christians to come on this side to be baptized. Come wid all of di baggage dem.” Officer Johnson looks around the room and continues “Who in here is a Christian?” I can’t figure out how we landed back at religion as a topic of conversation and I can’t help but wonder if my discomfort with this situation is because I’ve spent so long living in the US. The truth is that religious conversation is the norm in Jamaica; there is an expectation of Christianity. Those who openly admit that they are not Christians, often say so with a disclaimer, comforting people with the claim that they intend to be soon. The answers range from “I’m not Christian because I’m not baptized yet” to “I don’t go to church” and “I don’t done wid parties and woman yet.”

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Mindful that the time allotted for the break is rapidly ending Officer Johnson says “I’m not here to impose my belief on you, but right now, my belief is that we need to go to Customer Service, and my belief is that customer service is taken from the Bible”. I wonder about the police officer teaching customer service, especially after the break discussion of police brutality - though no one explicitly named it as such - and the open accusations that the police take a particularly lackadaisical approach to the work of ‘serving, protecting and reassuring.’ “I’m not here to teach you anything, just to remind you of the things you already know” Office Johnson says to officially begin his lesson on customer service. “If we treat people the way we want to be treated, then we are practicing customer service.” This concept seems simple enough. Jamaicans being awful at customer service is a running joke amongst Jamaicans. Much like the near misses with violence, or the stories about the shortcomings of the people, people brandish their run-ins with poor customer service like badges of honour. It’s almost as though being able to regale someone with a story of poor customer service – or of a bad customer – is part of what makes you properly Jamaican. At several points during the customer service discussion people chime in with stories of their trials with different businesses or government agencies. The consensus seems to be that the best way to get something done at the tax office or any other agency is to “fren up a manager” or “have a link”. “Leave yuh problem at yuh yard” Officer Johnson says. This is to be a reminder that customers are neither interested in hearing about the problems in our lives, or in paying the price for our daily distresses. I can’t help but think of the Morgan Heritage song Nothing to smile about – a long list of all the problems we have, the things it’s hard to smile about. Officer Johnson tells us a lesson he learnt in Bible school last night. They

109 were talking about practical Ministry and saying that Christians turn people away because of a holier than thou attitude, “that makes it sound like you’re preaching” he says and “a nuh preach mi a preach but we are born with goodness, so just find the inner strength and smile with people.” He says we must find the inner strength to smile even when people piss us off. The customer service provider, we are told, must serve the role of host, diplomat, psychologist, sales person, and information source. In other words, be everything to everyone. Officer Johnson reiterates the message from yesterday’s session; the tourists do not want us to ‘twang’ or fake their accents. One person from the table pipes up “but they laugh at the Jamaican language!” Officer Johnson says they laugh not because they think it’s funny, but because they like it. I wonder why it is ok for people to laugh at us. At the end of the session, he offers us all his phone number, out of true concern, because everyone knows you must have a policeman’s phone number – every Jamaican needs one police and one ‘bad man’ friend. Respectability and Reputation – we learn to balance or to live on both sides of the coin.

TRAINING NOTEBOOK: RELIGION AND RAIN

Tropical storm Earl is trying to wash us away. Buckets of rain came pouring out of the sky. It hardly ever rains in downtown Kingston, so I figured if it’s pouring there it’s pouring everywhere. It took some work to leave the apartment – to drag myself out of bed and out into the rain on this petulant morning. It was me one and God battling the water on the road. On the radio there were announcements about stores being closed and businesses operating as normal. No real standard for what to do. On a day like this when I was young, I’d give up morning music to listen to the news, fingers and toes crossed as I

110 waited to hear my school’s name on the list of closures. I hoped for an authority higher than mummy’s to give me permission to swap the blouse and skirt, slip and tie, shine black shoes and fold over socks of my uniform for a t-shirt, and sweatpants, blankets and bed, good book and deep rain sleep. But, mine always held out. Our principal reviled the idea of shutting down for the rain. “Utter rubbish!” he’d say, and then end up having to close anyway because neither teachers nor students could make it to school. When it rains like this here, roads become rivers and things fall apart. Red earth crumbles, trees lose their grip and the land slides – mountains making mole hills in the middle of the street. When it rains like this gullies overflow and drinks box and cheez-trix bag find their way into Kingston harbour and the ocean look like a whole ‘nother galaxy – one where you don’t want to be – garbage stars punctuating an oil slick swirl. When it rains like this handcart man mek a extra money transporting high-heeled women from sidewalk to car, and school children get splashed by conscienceless drivers, and the dogs and goats disappear from the side of the road and everyone and everyting get soak. But it’s summer time, so school’s out and it’s the day after emancipation, so everybody brain still on holiday and di likkle rain – or big rain – is a good excuse to just stay home. So, this morning on the road, it was me one and God, driving along the Kingston waterfront, up South Camp road and all the way into New Kingston and when I got to Tourist Board and parked, breeze nearly blow me weh on the way from the parking lot to the building and mi foot wet up cause I’ve never learnt to appropriately dress for the weather. But I was determined to not miss the session, so rainstorm or not here I am. When I walk in several of my classmates are sitting in the JTB lobby, waiting to hear whether or not we will actually be having a training session for the day. Jamaica shuts down when it rains, or when there is word or warning of a storm – even though they

111 consistently bypass us, we make ritual of preparation. Cornbeef, harddough bread, crackers, bottled water, batteries – we are experts at preparing for the worst. Last night I went supermarket and couldn’t even find one bread to buy. Thirteen of the 20 odd of us somehow made it out in the rain. It makes sense, the majority of the group are taxi drivers. Which means not only do they have access to a vehicle and so didn’t have to be waiting for buses and hoping to not get splashed, they are accustomed to pushing through the unfavourable circumstances. The group has become fast friends. The men start calling the missing group members to figure out who will be able to make it. By the time Ms. Campbell comes in and does a head-count, it’s decided that since most of the participants are either already here or on their way, we’ll go ahead with training. By 10am, we are settled around the desks in the library and Ms. Campbell has called on me to pick two people to lead the morning’s devotion. In an attempt to defuse the awkwardness, I ‘volunteer’ my entire table. We’re three days in and everybody knows the formula. It’s likely similar to what many of us have done in other settings. First a lively song, then a mellow song to lead us into prayer – Into my Heart or Search me oh Lord are favourites, then the prayer followed by words of affirmation. Midway through the prayer, Ms. Campbell taps a tall young man on his shoulder. “Why aren’t you praying?” she asks. “I’m Muslim” he responds.

TRAINING NOTEBOOK: HISTORY OF TOURISM

“Tourism dates as far back as way, way, way, back” the instructor begins before we delve into a lesson about the Phoenicians who visited pyramids and Egyptians who

112 travelled by sea. We learn about the early Olympics and the Greeks who initiated it and then about the Romans who travelled for trade and conquest and sport. We jump from there into the Renaissance period of the 16th to 19th century which we are taught was a moment of learning and exploration during which Italian navigators and men like Christopher Columbus travelled the oceans in search of new lands, the discovery of which would make them valued in the eyes of their King. The lecture settles into the 18th Century with a lesson on the historical development of Tourism in the Caribbean. We learn that the Holidays with Pay Act, the passage of the Triangular Trade, the colonial experience and growth of wealth, climate conditions in Europe and in the Caribbean, Trade Unions that allowed Europeans better paying jobs, the advent of air travel, and the availability and reduction of air fares all contributed to the development of Caribbean tourism. We copy into our notebooks a diagram of the triangular trade with Europe at the top and slaves at the bottom. From the Triangular Trade the lecture moves on to the colonial experience. We are told that plantation owners welcomed visitors, their family and friends, to their great houses and estates. We are encouraged to think of these visitors as Jamaica’s early tourists. I find myself wondering about this valorisation of the great house. They are called plantation owners. Never slave-holders, or slave-owners. The emphasis on the land, not on their actions. We talk about the plantocracy, their wealth, and their desire to make their guests feel welcome and at home. We think about the parties they must have had, the frivolity and the opulence. We are told that Jamaica rose to importance in the British Empire through sugar and then suddenly, sugar was no longer King. And I think about the transition from plantation to paradise. We hear about American sailor Captain Lorenzo

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Baker and his banana boats, framed as the catalyst for tourism as we know it in Jamaica. Baker, we are told, took his friends and the friends of others to Jamaica on these boats that he owned for trading bananas. We learn about Baker’s influence on the Winter and Summer season distinctions of tourist travel and then, because tourism does not occur without transportation, we spend some time on the transportation explosion. More efficient transportation meant more tourists. We draw a line from boats to airplanes to cruise ships in our notes. We begin to build Jamaican tourism in a linear fashion, beginning in the 1700s with plantation owners and their friends and in drawing that line, we tie the plantation to paradise.

• 1700s Plantation owners invite their friends to visit them on the island. • 1890 The Hotel Law is initiated as a part of the government’s intention to invest in tourism

• 1891 Great Exhibition takes place at Quebec Lodge (now Wolmer’s Boys’ School). It aims to showcase Jamaica’s product offering and results in the opening of 5 hotels. The Titchfield cottages are constructed and the 400 room Titchfield Hotel in Portland is the first modern hotel

• 1897 Captain Lorenzo Baker (the man with the banana boats we are reminded) brings friends to Port Antonio (We are reminded as an aside that Portland is the

parish, but Port Antonio is the resort area and as such is the location most important for our purposes)

• 1910 The Jamaica Tourist Association (JTA) is formed to enhance the claims of Jamaica, the colony, as a health and pleasure resort. The Association is also responsible for providing information to visitors.

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• 1940 Errol Flynn establishes Navy Island and Frenchman’s Cove in Portland becomes the island’s first all-inclusive hotel

• 1955 The Jamaica Tourist Board (JTB) is formed with offices in the USA and the UK

• 1980 The Ministry of Tourism is formed as an arm of government • 1982 Tourism becomes the nation’s main foreign exchange earner. It is a short timeline, there is a lot that it leaves out, but we begin at plantation and less than ten stops later arrive at tourism dependency.

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Chapter 3: One Love: Reasonings on Rasta and Folklorization

“A nuh political act, a nuh di coke or di crack, a Reggae put Jamaica pon top” - Tony Rebel It’s not that the trees don’t provide shade, but Kingston’s mid-afternoon sun is never shy. Sweat trickles down my back and she pats her face with a napkin as she readies herself for my camera, an odd position for her to be in as a creative producer of advertisements, events, music videos, and more. Her place of comfort is behind the camera, or better yet, behind the people behind the camera, but these are the things you do for friends and she and I have been friends for a long time. “Look into the camera first, give me your name like I don’t know it.” We are working through the awkwardness of melding friendship and research. Trying to figure out how to force formality out of familiarity. She laughs and I zoom in, centring her in a frame of bamboo stalks and palm fronds. “I am Lesley-Ann Welsh, but people who know me best know me as Laava Royal” she says flashing a wide smile. For this, she told me to stick with Lesley, because this is a formal document and Lesley-Ann Welsh is her “govament”30, and because we’ve known each since the prep school playground, since before we went by other names. “I’m going to keep things really informal” I say - a non sequitur because that phrase is never used when things are truly informal. “I want to talk a bit about Jamaica’s commercial identity, and I know you do advertising and marketing, so could you tell me a little bit about that to start? “So, I’m a part of that whole marketing and advertising community in the capacity of content developer. So, writing, everything from content for brochures,

30 Formal name/name assigned at birth 116 speeches to websites and beyond, video production as well. So, anything that requires story telling by way of moving image, content and copy development for advertising as well as documentary style work, some music videos and then project management for functions within that field of communications at events, and media relations functions and such.” The very name of Lesley’s company, Anubis Communications, reflects the Afro-centric leaning of her thinking – a mindfulness that insists on communal governance and making choices that positively impact the community. She takes to heart an African consciousness, in which the elders talk about wisdom, discernment, awareness of your role in community and how the choices you make impact the community. For that reason, she is careful about the people and products she chooses to represent, because she doesn’t want to be one of those that “sell dem soul”31. Our discussions about general awareness launch a conversation about Jamaica’s marketing and the idea of Brand Jamaica. She responds, “I think, I think twice about saying this as somebody who is a professional in the marketing and communications field, but you know say I'm not sure what brand Jamaica is. I almost feel like it's a catchphrase that did pop up a couple of years ago when the Tourist Board campaign changed and instead of “Feel all Right” they were saying something different “Before you go, you know”, and then all of a sudden this brand Jamaica and then there was talk of expanding it beyond “sun, sand and sea”, but if

I were to say I knew the pillars of Brand Jamaica I would be lying cause I really don't know what that they claim to be. As somebody who is also a very active person, in that cultural space and interact with a lot of visitors, I know what the perceptions are and there are many perceptions of what brand Jamaica mean among different people.”

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She pauses thoughtfully and continues “so I kind of straying from your question. What your question was? What do I understand about the meaning of Brand Jamaica? So, saying that to say I really don't know what it mean. If I were to give an answer based on what I consider popular perception to be - Come to Jamaica, chill on the beach, drink a Red Stripe par32 wid a Rasta man and bun33 some weed. You know that's not what they put in the ads, but essentially like is a lot of white people on seashores so whether or not we want to acknowledge it that is what we're selling. You see a smiling Ras, with some coconuts or some craft and feel alright, everything good man! No problem.” (L.-A. Welsh 2016)

SELLING A SMILING RAS

In the previous two chapters, I dedicated space to examining the parameters and creation of Jamaica as a nation and Jamaica as a commodity, or as a brand. In this chapter, I examine the place of the Rastafari movement and the associated Reggae music in Jamaican tourism and in the nation and the ideological challenges or contradictions that arise from this commodification and selective inclusion. Lesley’s description of the popular perception of Jamaica is not inaccurate. Much of the brochure discourse for Jamaica has focused on the beach and the sale of relaxation for a largely white clientele. In addition, pop culture presentations of Jamaica, and the Caribbean at large, have often centred on a smiling, hyper-sexed, and carefree, dark-skinned, often dreadlocked man34. Adding to scholarly discussions of how symbols and cultural products are co- opted by the nation state for commercial gain (Pattullo 2005; Trouillot 1995) this chapter

32 Hang out 33 Smoke marijuana 34 A few examples of this are the 1993 film Cool Runnings and the 1998 How Stella Got her Groove Back. 118 uses folklorization as a frame to examine how and why a Rasta aesthetic has become central to Jamaican tourism and nationalism. It briefly highlights the movement’s anticolonial and anti-nationalist origins and explores Jamaica’s fraught relationship with Rastafari as politics, religion, and social movement. It works through the contradictions inherent in the world’s identification of Rastafari as quintessentially Jamaican. And further explores the crisis of identity and consciousness that arises as Rastafari adherents and the Jamaican state try to reconcile Rastafari’s centrality to current ideas of Jamaicanness with the movement’s origins. In essence, it asks what it means for Rastafari’s cultural products to be central to Brand Jamaica or what are the complications involved in whittling a Black radical movement into a Brand? Or to reframe Lesley’s statement as a question – what does it mean for Jamaica to be ‘selling a smiling Ras’?” Rastafari arose in Jamaica in the early 1900s as a socio-religious and political response to the vehement anti-blackness present in the post-emancipation landscape. Jamaican anthropologist Barry Chevannes roots Rastafari in the Jamaican peasantry and links the movement’s emergence to what he calls a spirit of resistance (Chevannes 1994). Rastafarianism is centred on an idea of the divinity of Blackness, grounded in the royalty of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, whose 1930 crowning affirmed Marcus Garvey’s earlier proclamation that a King would rise in the East (in Africa) thus cementing

Garvey’s own place as a prophet. Leonard Percival Howell, the commonly accepted father of Rasta or first Rasta, had initially been a follower of Garvey. He eventually however departed from Garvey and began preaching that Emperor Haile Selassie was the Black messiah. In a community desperate for alternatives to colonialism’s pervasive antiblackness he quickly gained believers and followers. Howell’s doctrines were considered anti-Christian, anti-Church and anti-government, and he was arrested and charged with

119 sedition. Upon his release from prison in 1940 he established the first Rastafari village. Over the next few decades the police repeatedly targeted and raided Howell, his followers and their camps. The idea of a people who not only willingly separated themselves from the order of society but also praised a Black King as messiah and advocated for a staunch Afrocentricism was confusing and threatening to a Jamaican elite steeped in the virtues of colonial respectability. And the six precepts of Rastafari stated by Howell were not exactly mild or apologist— and certainly not based on the idea of a ‘smiling Ras’. They were 1. Hatred for the White Race 2. Complete superiority of the Black race 3. Revenge on whites for their wickedness 4. The negation, persecution and humiliation of the Government and legal bodies 5. Prepare to go “Back to Africa” 6. The acknowledgement of Emperor Haile Selassie as the supreme being and only ruler (Lee 2003) Rastafari as Howell and other originators imagined it, is thus grounded in unapologetic Blackness. Anthropologist Charles Price maintains that Rastafari identity has involved the internalizing of affirmative interpretations of Black history and culture (Price 2009). Becoming Rasta, according to Price, is a conversion process that is thus not only religious, but also racial. Becoming Rasta is Becoming Black. This ideology was in direct contradiction to the national identity the Jamaican state was trying to build in the 1960s, an identity directly tied to the standards of the colonizer and the legacy of the plantation. The social and pyscho-racial hierarchies of the plantation persisted beyond emancipation

120 and into the formation of the nation (Thame 2011; D. A. Thomas 2004; Strachan 2002). Access to power and privilege was determined by proximity to Whiteness, resulting in the rise of what Maziki Thame terms Brown nationalism (Thame 2011) in the period directly surrounding the struggle for and achievement of independence. This Brown nationalism privileged British ideals of respectability in culture, politics, and religion and the Black quotidian expressive forms practiced by the majority of the nation were fetishized as folklore, valorised in contexts of on-stage performance while still derided in day to day life. The aim of folklorization in this context was to render these forms non- threatening to the status quo and therefore commodifiable by and profitable to the nation. Folklorization, as I use it here, refers to the distortion or superficial ornamentalizing of cultural practice in order to make it commodifiable by or palatable to the nation-state. Folklorization in this framing makes nostalgic tradition out of resistance, often rendering it toothless. Language provides an interesting example of how this process has played out. As is the case with most Creoles, the Jamaican Creole or Patois, has long been utilized mostly by working class people. In Jamaica in the 1950s and 60s these persons were most likely to be racialized as Black, Chinese, or Indian as opposed to White or Brown. The White and Brown ruling classes most often engaged – and continue to engage - an acrolectal, or the form of the language closest to standard British English.

This form was used for the writing of official documents ranging from policy to the news, for mass communication in speeches, signage or on the radio, for classrooms and churches and any other formal structure of society. The nation was thus constructed and narrated using this form of the language. The basilectal form had no place in the formal expression of the nation except as entertainment, art, or folklore, as seen in the pioneering work of poet Louise Bennett, who studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in the

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1940s and hosted radio programmes and monologues in patois – first in Britain and then in Jamaica. Patois, derided as ‘bad talking’ by the middle classes when used by the working class in daily life, could be integrated as a sign of the nation when performed by Bennett. This is not to say that Louise Bennett’s work in encouraging national pride in Patois was not valuable, but rather, to consider the ways that performances of expressive culture are received and enacted differently on stage than in daily life and the ways that the placing of Black expressive culture on the pedestal of the stage can ‘de-fang’ it as it prepares it for consumption by people on the outside. In her notes on Jamaican language included in the travel guide Pleasure Island: The Book of Jamaica, Esther Chapman alerts the visitor to the usage patterns of the two languages she says Jamaican working- class people have at their command. Although Chapman demarcates the language into two distinct parts in her phrasing, her explanation of the usage highlights the power dynamics at play in how Jamaicans utilize the language form along a spectrum and identifies at least three different forms of language usage. She notes that Jamaican working-class people use one form among themselves (a form that is unlikely to be understood by the tourist), another when speaking to their employers, and yet another in the Calypso songs specifically geared towards tourists (Chapman 1951). This broad linguistic variance, or heteroglossia, highlights how the contradictory space of Black culture is as Stuart Hall notes, always about the shifting of balance in power relations (Hall 1993). In performing three different registers of Patois, including a register inaccessible by both the elite and tourists, the Jamaican working class is able to retain a certain level of autonomy. The register of language for the tourist Chapman notes, shows up mostly in song or in performance. The creation of a folklorized register specifically

122 for the tourist, is an indication of the ways that despite the state’s intent to commodify, the people are still able to push back. Chapman’s text mentions food, language, dance, and particular forms of music as notable folk forms in Jamaica, many of which were birthed out of contextual resistance on the plantation. With the direct object of oppression no longer an ever present or as evident threat, the forms become art open to be infused with meaning by others. In the 1960s - pre-Reggae music - Rastafari’s vehement anticolonial, pro-Black, and anti- nationalist stance presented direct resistance to the colonial project and a true threat to the rising Brown nationalism project, as well as to the quaint, respectable, nostalgic image the tourism industry was aiming to sell to potential visitors. The media presented members of the movement as mentally unstable, deranged, and dangerous. Newspaper articles spoke of ‘insane cultists’ and the typical Rasta was described as ‘drug crazed’. Headlines said things like “Ras Tafari Man sent to mental hospital: Attempted Human sacrifice of Baby boy”; “Riots at Coronation Market; Rastas terrorize Police and Burn their vehicle” and on the milder end “Rastas must be rehabilitated”. In June of 1960, then Premier the Honourable Norman Manley Q.C. appealed for the cooperation of citizens in reporting the movements of Rastafarians to the authorities. In a broadcast given in response to a raid on the main Rastafari village in which a soldier was shot and killed, Manley said, “There is no need for anyone to get alarmed, but at the same time, everyone must come to realize that this wicked and mischievous activity must come to an end. These people – and I am glad it is only a small number of them – are wicked enemies of your country. They are doing your good name great harm, and it is tragic that this sort of thing should be happening just when we are on the verge of becoming an independent people” (Gleaner June 22, 1960). Manley’s

123 concern about the rise of Rastafari at a point when the nation was on the verge of independence speaks to the conflicting and competing ideas of national identity at play during this time. In framing the Rastafari as “wicked enemies of your country”, Manley effectively wrote the Rastafari community out of the national narrative and placed the readers of the newspaper and audience of his speech squarely inside it, thus creating a firm us vs them polarity. In the weeks following Manley’s pronouncement, scholars based at the University College of the West Indies presented a detailed study of Rastafarianism and its contribution to Jamaica, sections of which ran as an insert in the Jamaica Gleaner. Rex Nettleford, Roy Augier, and M.G. Smith prefaced their 1960 Report on the Rastafarian Movement in Kingston, Jamaica with an open letter to Premier Norman Manley which highlighted that the scholars had conducted their two-week study at the request of some prominent members of the Rastafari community with the hope of “making a survey of the movement, its organization and its aspirations.” The letter went further to note that “the movement is large, and in a state of great unrest” with problems that require “priority treatment”. It also noted that despite the movement having “no single leader or group of leaders, it is willing to produce a small group of prominent representatives to discuss with the Government the recommendations contained in [the] report” (Smith, Augier, and

Nettleford 1967). The report covered topics ranging from the history and doctrine of the movement, to the significance of Black Nationalism, Beards and Locks (sic), and Ganja. It ended with a discussion of what Ras Tafari Brethren want and a summary of recommendations and was published in full as a series of instalments in the Kingston Gleaner. There were mixed reviews of the now canonical report. And, more recently,

124 there have been allegations that the origins of the report were deceptive35. Even with its dubious origins the report was, as Annie Paul and Robert Hill note, “a triumph for Rastafari” (ap 2013). The report represented the most detailed study of Rastafari at the time and allowed Jamaicans whose only interaction with the movement might have been through the accusations made in sensational news reports, to be able to access a different source of knowledge or information about the Rastafari brethren and their beliefs. It also provided the Rastafari with concrete information needed to begin conversations about the repatriation of Rastafari to Ethiopia. Despite the report Rastafari remained derided by the state. In 1963, a few months after Jamaica’s August 6, 1962 independence date, Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante ordered that all Rastas be brought in dead or alive. This harsh pronouncement was made in response to the actions of six bearded men who allegedly set fire to a gas station in Coral Gardens, St. James. Jamaica had long pathologized Rasta and with the extreme action taken in blaming all Rastafarians for the actions of six men, Prime Minister Bustamante vilified all Rastas. The excessive response resulted in long term violence against Rastafarians. Police killed at least eight Rastas and detained, forcibly trimmed, and beat several others. By the mid-60s the movement had started to gain wider following through the rising popularity of musicians who identified as Rasta. While the movement was derided by the elite, as a counter culture it was attractive to the youth and one could argue that the same took place on the opposite end of the spectrum, as Rastafari elders were slow to embrace Reggae music. As one interlocuter noted “In the late 60s throughout the 70s, the

35 In a conversation with Annie Paul, historian Robert A. Hill alleges that the report was clandestinely commissioned by Norman Manley and the Jamaican government and as such is an example of academic betrayal (Paul 2013) 125

Rasta man did kinda lick out against Reggae music. Reggae music was not Rasta music. The indigenous Rasta man never like the idea of Reggae music. Reggae music borrowed heavily from that indigenous culture.” (Coffee Conversations 2015). There was a notion that Reggae was too mainstream and too secular for the movement centred in spirituality. In the late 1960s Desmond Dekker’s reggae song Israelites made it to the top 40 list, and by 1968 Bob Marley and the Wailers opened for Johnny Nash, turning the eyes of the world on Rastafari and Reggae music. Still, the music did not truly gain foothold among the young White rock fans in the US until 1972 when Chris Blackwell worked to actively market what he deemed a new and improved Reggae to European youth and American college students. To push back against the reputation of Reggae as monotonous and repetitive, Blackwell cast the young members of the Wailers as “rock stars” playing up their ganja smoking and sexual appeal. According to Steven King, Blackwell used all the tactics that had been successful in promoting rock and roll bands, from novelty album covers to radio interviews on mainstream programs. Further, in order to avoid alienating the young White audiences he was marketing Reggae to, the group’s second international release Burnin’ featured the printed lyrics of the songs on the inside cover (S. A. King 1998). Quoting historian Simon Jones, King notes that “reggae lyrics were now accessible to white consumers in an unprecedented manner” (King 1998, 45). In addition, linguist Joseph Farquharson notes that the lyrics of Reggae songs straddles Jamaican creole and standard English. With the songs’ chorus and bridge sections usually being sung in patios and the bulk of the lyrics in a more widely comprehensible standard or mesolectal English. Farquharson refers to Reggae’s linguistic subversion in this way as “soft revolution” (Farquharson 2017). King asserts that it is this subversion that spurred Reggae’s international popularity. Rather than toning down Reggae’s radical politics,

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Blackwell and his imitators made it the focus of their marketing strategy (Hebdige 2003), universalizing the lyrics to suit broader themes of protest and “celebrating the ganja smoking Rastafarian as a universal symbol of rebellion and protest” (S. A. King 1998). At a point of global political shift, this was a smart business move. Despite Reggae’s international popularity being tied to a Rastafari tradition of protest and struggle for liberation, there remained (and remains), ambivalence about the commercialization of the music and the image of Rasta. The same Rastafari man I quoted above stated

Unfortunately, today we don’t see where the Rastafari community has really benefitted from Reggae music. Maybe that’s why early Rasta man did bun Reggae. You know it makes sense, these were prophets, they could really see. So Rasta grow in a way where the original Rasta man dem never know that Rasta was going to grow in these directions. Especially commercialization of Rasta. Today, White people, Asian people, becoming Rasta but that is also divine. You know things happen this way, changes come organically and through the passage of time and the spread of the word, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and others, people begin to get interested in what was happening in Jamaica and to trod Rasta as well . . . The problem is, Rasta grow out of the control of mecca, which is Jamaica. (Coffee Conversations 2015) King argues that “international Reggae cast the Rastafarians as part of a larger, more “universal”, pan-African movement” (48). Focusing on universal themes of protest such as poverty, resistance and redemption and foregrounding the Rastafarian movement’s “rebellious anti-authority stance and utopian thrust” (Bilby 1983), the music and the movement were able to garner widespread international support by the mid-70s. Within the 1970s Jamaica, however, the reactions to Rastafari were mixed. While much of the elite still viewed Rastafari as sullied trouble makers on the fringes of the society, the masses and the youth had begun to embrace Reggae music and to a certain extent Rastafari. Prime Minister Michael Manley noted that the voice of the Rastafarian 127 is the voice of the people. The Jamaican Tourism marketing machine for their part maintained a focus on colonial nostalgia and respectability in marketing through the 70s but by the late 70s to early 1980s, especially in the period directly following Bob Marley’s 1981 death, the impact of Reggae and Rastafari could not be denied. A large portion of the world had come to know Jamaica through the music and the political movement they associated it with. Reggae, Rastafari and Jamaicanness had become synonymous. The Jamaican music festival Reggae Sunsplash was inaugurated in 1979 and was intensely marketed in the United States. By the early 1980s the marketing of Jamaica was based on two competing images – a quiet, respectability seen in the “come back to gentility” campaigns and an anti-establishment, yet youthful and fun image focused on Reggae music. Within a decade Reggae became central to Jamaica’s tourism marketing as a variation of Bob Marley’s hit song One Love became the Jamaica Tourist Board’s jingle and Reggae the international signifier for Jamaicanness, or as the Tourist Board states “the international music of all right.”

REGGAE AND TOURISM

The Jamaica Tourist Board’s promotional website is organized by tabs and subheadings. Things to do, ‘feel the vibe’, your travel guide, where to stay and more. While the other tabs offer more practical information, ‘feel the vibe’ is where Jamaican culture is put on display. Broken down into major headings of cuisine, culture, music, people and sport, this section of the website aims to give potential visitors a survey of what they need to know about the Jamaica we would like them to visit. The webpage states, “Rhythmic reggae is a part of who we are, and we have shared that legacy beyond Jamaica’s shores. Reggae is simply, the international music of “All Right”

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(visitjamaica.com). The phrasing here is curious on many levels. Firstly, this heralding of reggae references the Tourist Board’s marketing slogan: “Jamaica, home of all right.” With growing debt of just over $2 trillion (145 % of the GDP), the highest debt interest burden in the world as of 2013 at 11% of GDP), an agreement with the International Monetary Fund that has mandated severe austerity measures including wage freezes and cutting of spending which on the ground looks like severe unemployment and rising poverty, a youth unemployment rate of 29.2%; 18.7% of people living below the poverty line, and a homicide rate of 40.9 per 100,000 – or an average of 3.3 murders per day placing it among the top 5 per capita national homicide rates in the world – Jamaica is certainly not ‘all right’. The tagline is taken from the fragmentation of a Bob Marley song ‘One Love,’ which has been used as the soundtrack for Jamaica tourism campaigns for over 20 years. Where the Marley song says, ‘one love, one heart, let’s get together and feel all right” the tourist board’s version has become “one love, one heart, come to Jamaica and feel all right”. A call to tourists has replaced a call for unity. As noted briefly above, Reggae’s music roots lie in Kingston’s ghettos. It was the music of the people. Kevin O’Brien Chang and Wayne Chen’s book quote an interview with Toots Hibbert, the first to make use of the name Reggae, who said “at first reggae sort of mean untidy or scruffy. But then it start to mean like coming from the people. Everyday things. From the ghetto. From the majority. Things people use everyday like food, we just put music to. Reggae mean regular people who are suffering, and don’t have what they want” (Chang and Chen 1998). Reggae was sufferers’ music. And its Rastafarian influence was heard in its biting social and political commentary. Reggae

129 music said, “Slave driver, the table is turn; Catch a fire, so you can get burn” (Marley 1973) and called for ‘equal rights and justice” (Tosh 1977). The Jamaica Tourist Board’s website, however, equates Reggae with Jamaica’s “peaceful nature” inviting visitors to “come and discover the island through our endless amounts of great music”(‘Visit Jamaica | Island Culture, Things to Do, Hotels & More’ ). From rocksteady to reggae and island ‘riddims’, the website says, hear for yourselves why we’re the peaceful and world-changing paradise we are today”36. The reggae that is tied up in Jamaica’s tourism marketing avoids the call for equal rights and justice and the naming of the slave master. The Ras who sings the tourist’s reggae must always be smiling. Reggae’s Rasta roots should have meant that it has no place in Jamaican tourism. In order to fully understand the contradictions here, the roots of reggae music and the problem of its uncritical inclusion in Jamaican tourism, it is important to continue to be cognizant of Jamaica’s fraught relationship with Rastafari and Blackness. The nation’s very motto – Out of Many, One People- calls to mind an investment in multiculturalism yet its marketable national identity is that of folkloric blackness. Jamaican life, like the Jamaican landscape, is made up of great highs and lows, affluence and austerity, pride and despair, violence and respectability, tough and sweet. Rastafari, tourism and Kingston should be incongruous, yet they are closely entwined.

Fast forward half a century and the people who were thought to be a scourge on the nation’s respectable post-colonial image and a threat to decency and respectability now find their cultural products employed heavily in the marketing of Jamaica. By the 1970s with the rise of international popularity of Bob Marley and other Reggae artistes, who identified as Rasta, open sentiment towards Rasta began to change. There was a

36 (Jamaica Tourist Board n.d.). 130 small shift as newspaper articles attempted to help the nation understand these Rastafarian people who were now representing Jamaica on the global stage. The world loved Bob Marley; Jamaica was (and in some respects, still is) unsure of what to do with Rasta. I question whether Marley’s own brownness allowed space for the mainstreaming of reggae music. Brown and handsome, the son of a white naval officer and a coffee black Jamaican woman, Marley’s aesthetic fit the coveted national narrative which holds multiracialness as the ideal for sexual desirability and national belonging. Marley’s Blackness allowed for exotification and folklorization, his lightness or proximity to whiteness allowed him to appear less threatening to a world audience and his mixed-ness made him appear the consummate Jamaican. In an April 2016 Jamaica Gleaner article “Why Jamaica Needs Rastafari,” well known cultural and political commentator Ian Boyne proposes, “As a cultural resistance Rasta is largely a spent force. Or perhaps, one could say that what we are witnessing is not so much its decline as evidence of its success. The things it fought for are now taken for granted. It has been so successful, its influence now so mainstreamed that we are tempted to say it has outlived its usefulness” (Boyne 2016). While I do not agree with Boyne that Rasta has ‘outlived’ its usefulness, I wonder about the diminishing of possibility from the reduction of Rasta and Jamaican blackness and black cultural production to ‘vibe’. Boyne’s article goes on to praise Rastafari for its anti-capitalist message and argues that if we are to be rescued as a nation from the clutches of American imperialism, our youth need to hold to Rasta ideology and seek life beyond the goal of prosperity. Boyne ironically frames his message within a Christian context and speaks at length of what Rasta has accomplished for Christianity. He further asks, “where is the

131 great nationalistic, visionary, idealistic spirit that gripped the youth of the 1960s (‘we are building a new nation’) and the 1970s (socialism, African liberation, community mobilization)? Where are the notions of self-reliance, solidarity with the poor and oppressed of the world, global justice which Rastafari advocated?” (Boyne 2016). In each of these romanticized moments, Rasta remained persecuted. In Ian Boyne’s phrasing Rasta appears as a now deceased ideology - a thing of the past, as it fails to consider the ways the movement has evolved and grown and still remains vibrant. In presenting definitions in stasis, there is danger of romanticizing Rasta as always oppressed or always revolutionary. While I am interested in the ways Rastafari’s subsumption into mainstream Jamaica has resulted in differences from its rural point of origin, I am cognizant of the ways an association of Rasta with parochialism can serve to not only further exoticize but also to assume that class differences do not exist amongst Rastafari people. Yes, the Rasta aesthetic is now produced and consumed by the Jamaican elite, but Rasta is also now the Jamaican elite. In Boyne’s definition Rastafari and capitalism are incompatible. In practice, Rasta are agents in creating images of themselves and several are members of the black bourgeoisie that Boyne refers to as having risen in Jamaica since the Michael Manley era of the 1970s. During the 70s Jamaica’s growth in Black consciousness, Black pride and

Black assertiveness was bolstered by a strong Rastafarian cultural force. That cultural force remains in today’s Jamaica, but it now manifests in myriad ways including as the current Reggae Revival movement which I will discuss later in this chapter. Even as Reggae is being ‘revived’ and the lyrics of this new age of Reggae artistes speak to issues of self-reliance, and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, many of the youth leading

132 this revival are from a socially and economically privileged class and their greatest audience is now arguably the Jamaican middle class. While the recent pseudo-acceptance of Rastafari into Jamaicanness has given Rasta a platform from which to speak, this acceptance has occurred under the guise of neoliberal multiculturalism. Which as Charles Hale points out “holds out the promise of equality and cultural recognition but only grants the latter, and then promotes multicultural exchange anyway” (Hale 2006); it is thus an empty promise. In Jamaica, neoliberal multiculturalism utilizes the aspects of Rasta which are most palatable and marketable and refuses its more oppositional features. Rasta cultural practices thus become separated from their core politics, and the Rasta aesthetic becomes a “cool” consumable commodity for the modern tourist and ‘conscious’ elite. Locs become a fashion statement and Reggae, hinged on Bob Marley’s One Love, is the international music of “all right.”

PAN-AFRICANISM OR ONE LOVE?

The impact of the mainstreaming of Rasta seemed to be a source of anxiety within communities invested in Rastafari and by extension in Reggae music’s radical potential. I encountered several conversations surrounding the contradictory positioning of Rasta as a folklorized symbol of the nation and these conversations often featured questions similar to the one posed earlier by Lesley – what does it mean to be selling a smiling Ras? Discussions about Reggae and Rastafari’s place in Jamaican tourism revealed several other points of contention as people grappled with existential issues ranging from authenticity to belonging and tried to find balance between selling-out and survival.

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These topics were central to the semi-structured discussion that took place at Restaurant Ethiopia on the eve of Bob Marley’s birthday. The event was billed as the first in a month-long series of coffee conversations hosted by this African restaurant in Crossroads, somewhere in between Uptown and Downtown Kingston. The conversations formed part of the celebrations for Black History Month and Reggae Month. The restaurant is family run by David and his wife Precious. Precious is a friend of mine from my days working in media and she had been inviting my husband Tyrone and I to events at the restaurant for a while. She gave me relatively detailed directions to the place, but when we got there the plaza seemed deserted. The few shops in the two-story building had clearly been shuttered for the night and the only sign of life was the dancehall music we could hear blasting in the distance. Surely this had to be the wrong place. We were about to drive out and try the plaza next door when I spotted it tucked away in the corner of the parking lot, the far-side of the plaza building its only concrete wall. Large, brightly coloured metal shipping containers arranged in a square provided kitchen and some indoor seating space and cordoned off a section of the parking lot to create the open-air restaurant. The black, red, gold, and green of the Black star line, the Ethiopian flag, and Rastafari are prominently featured and in the middle of the partial enclosure there is unexpected green – potted plants, a shrub, a tree, almost creating a cove around the tables and chairs. Precious’ toddler son is playing in the open space under a tree, while his mother and father buzz around to make sure the restaurant’s guests have all they need. David is in the kitchen when we arrive. I need to use the restroom. Precious rubs my pregnant belly and guides me through the small group seated around the tables to a bright yellow trailer at the back. By the time I step out, she and David have exchanged places.

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She is in the kitchen pouring glasses of fresh juice and he’s sitting in a metal chair in a slightly elevated spot against the wall under a makeshift awning. On offer is Ethiopian coffee, African food, fresh Jamaican fruit juices, popcorn and good company. The crowd is a mix of UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) members, Rastafari young and old, and interested community members. It is clear this is an intimate group of people who are at least somewhat familiar with each other. The topic for this session is Pan- Africanism vs One Love. By the time I join Tyrone at the table, the group has their attention focused on David. The rule of engagement here is that people leave their tables and head to the mic by the coffee-seat if they have something to share with the group. Even with this formality in place, conversation flows easily and people wrestle openly with difficult questions like who or what is Rasta? What is the meaning of One Love? Does One Love have to mean selling out? And who should stand to profit from the commercialization of Rastafari and Rasta cultural products. David is firm and intense in his speech. Though he poses a question, it is clear that he is making a strong statement about race, Rastafari, religion and deradicalization. David Why then do we embrace now a White man viewing his god as a Black man? Is not what is good for the goose good for the gander? And we need to talk about these things, these questions need to be asked because if there is not a definitive way of how the movement goes forward, then there is a strong possibility of the movement disintegrating or reversed from being a counter culture and a liberating force to something else.

At the core of David’s concern about the disintegration of the movement are questions of race and the boundaries of identity. For David, the central issue is “that people have forgotten what Rasta is” (G 2015) which according to him, is the deification

135 of Blackness. David asserts that the influence of the Twelve Tribes of Israel37 subgroup or mansion of Rastafari in the repatriation movement played a major role in the internationalization of Rastafari and in the inclusion of Europeans as they had chapters in Germany and England and other places. The result, he says is that “di White man dem start come a Ethiopia fi claim Shashamane”. While he does not insist that only Black people can be Rastafari he is clear in his belief that only Black people have a right to repatriate to Africa and that the core requirement for Rastafari identity is the belief in Selassie as the Black messiah. In a discussion he and I had months after the coffee conversations made it clear that he believes racial identity eclipses socio-political and even religious identity when it comes on to the movement towards liberation and Ethiopian resettlement that is at the core of early Rasta philosophy. He went further to say “just because you’re Rasta, don’t make you Black, and the land [Shashamane] don’t leave for Rasta. The land is to be claimed by Black people. Africans returning home”. A staunch Garveyite, David’s perceptions of Rastafari, Blackness, and repatriation to Africa fall more clearly along racial lines that political ones. I think it is these concerns that led him to host these conversations in a month earmarked for simultaneous celebrations of Reggae and Black History. There seems to be a concern about whether or not the two are or should be synonymous.

Another of David’s central pragmatic concerns expressed both in the coffee conversations when he opined that there’s a “strong possibility of the movement disintegrating” and again in our follow up discussions, came out of his impression that the group he referred to as the White Rastas were more organized and efficient than the

37 The mansions of Rastafari is an overarching term for the different groups of the movement. The Twelve Tribes mansion was founded in 1968 136

Black Rastas. He expressed worry that the White Rastas would “overrun” and “control” the movement, simply by virtue of their greater resources and administrative prowess and seemed generally unsettled by the mainstreaming of the movement. His worry about Rasta losing its “counter-culture” status is a common one. The ambivalence about the openness facilitated by One Love was expressed again by the next person to approach the mic. The dreadlocked, presumably Rastafari identifying, dark skinned young man said Joshua I think it’s positive. However, we need to also remember self-reliance - one of Garvey’s principles …. I believe the concept of Black supremacy came out as a reaction to the White Supremacy, because you know His Majesty in his speech say, “until the philosophy that holds one race superior …and you know those things are things we kinda fall behind. However, we in a battle station right now and we can’t leave our rights unguarded. Give Thanks.

By insisting upon a memory of self-reliance and referencing ideas of Black supremacy and quoting Haile Selassie’s speech which calls for the dismantling of racial hierarchy he straddles what the coffee conversation has established as a line between the ideals of Garvey and modern Rastafari. The quote is from Haile Selassie’s 1963 presentation to the United Nations where he presented conclusions or lessons from a conference of thirty- two African States he had convened in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia the previous May. Selassie stated that the coming together of these states at the Conference “demonstrated to the world that when the will and the determination exist, nations and peoples of diverse backgrounds can and will work together in unity, to the achievement of common goals and the assurance of that equality and brotherhood which we desire” (Selassie 1963). Haile Selassie’s speech was an appeal to the League of Nations, warning them that as long as individual member-states continued to put their own aims and needs over

137 that of the international community the United Nations would remain “impotent to enforce acceptable solutions.” Before laying out what has become the highlight of his speech, Selassie implored the United Nations member states to support the John F. Kennedy led American government in the push to “eradicate the vestiges of racial discrimination.” The segment of the 1963 speech that Selassie declared lessons learned from the Addis Ababa conference, was later popularized by Bob Marley and the Wailers as the lyrics for the song War in 1976 (Marley 1976). Selassie’s speech and later Marley’s song said “until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned; that until there are no longer first class and second-class citizens of any nation; that until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes …. until that day, the African continent will not know peace. We Africans will fight, if necessary, and we know that we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil (Selassie 1963). Selassie’s charge for racial equality now often gets translated into colourblind rhetoric as a community of Rasta adherents try to reconcile the globalization of the movement with its anti-racist and maybe even Black supremacist origins. The impetus to colourblindness is often described as a resistance to the colonizer’s arbitrary categorizations. This is the One Love idea that the evening’s conversation tried to tease out. By opening space for people of all races, colours, and classes, Rasta subverts the damaging hierarchization of colonialism. The world, however, remains structured based on these categorizations and the legacies of colonialism persist. The opening up of space within a movement once geared towards Black radicalism has resulted in a crisis of ownership and identity, especially since the opening is oft achieved through commercialization. The

138 young man who quoted Selassie’s speech expressed this ambivalence as he closed his comment saying, “we’re in battlefield and can’t afford to leave our rights unguarded.” A second young man approaches the mic and reiterates the question asking if this opening is “somewhat Rastafari’s straying from the ideals of what is was originally set out to be to become something that everybody embraces or is it more of an evolving of seeking something higher.” This is in some ways a reimagination of this central problem. Is the openness of Rastafari an indication of commodification and deradicalization or is it instead a sign of anticolonial transcendence? He hands the mic to a young Rastafari woman. She is a well-known public figure, an activist within the community, and well-respected in Reggae and Rastafari circles. She is full of presence and it is clear that despite her youth, her wisdom and opinions are well highly regarded by young and old alike. Kareece Greetings Brothers and Sisters, nice gathering, great that we’re having conversations so intimate and so dynamic, Pan-Africanism vs One Love. I’ll speak to your question first, are we straying from the ideals of where we were? Sometimes, yes. Because by being commercial we are. It’s, like you can’t be Rasta in Babylon. That’s why the Rasta man stay out in the hills. So, for the Rasta man in foreign to exist in Babylon is a stress.

Babylon here is mainstream, capitalist society and according to Kareece – and several others – Rasta and Babylon are incompatible. Still, she acknowledges the necessity of money in the struggle to achieve one’s dreams. Moving into a discussion of the central topic of the night, she asserts that the origins of Pan-Africanism and One Love were both in the ideologies and philosophies of Marcus Garvey and as such we ought not to be thinking of the two as mutually exclusive. For Kareece, it is the commercialisation of the

139 idea of One Love that is problematic, rather than the idea itself. Quoting Marcus Garvey she continues,

One Love, One Heart, One Aim, One Destiny. One Love, One Blood, One Love. You know, because the Black Man was so broken, and before we can try to achieve our dreams we have to come together as one. So, One Love is Pan Africanism. We as the African race just have to ovastand38 what One Love mean outside of what the commercial ideas have sold us.

Unlike David, who positions One Love and Pan-Africanism as incompatible based on One Love’s openness to non-Africans, Kareece holds that the two are synonymous. As soon as Kareece is done talking the first young man to speak eagerly approaches the mic as though the question is bursting out of him. It takes him a while to fully articulate his thoughts. The issue of commercialization has struck a chord.

Joshua I had a second question though. I had a second question, because I’m wondering if the inclusion, right - commercialism - in a way has brought Rastafarianism to the masses, and a lot of people who wouldn’t have interacted with it before now have opportunity to be a part of a way of life. Is it so much a bad thing that this commercialism has brought them in? You see that the White man can say that “you know my God is Black.” Is it such a bad thing?

Is commercialization acceptable if it spreads a message and opens space for Rasta within the nation? Or does the integration happen at the extent of the message? Is the aim proselytizing or liberation? And for whom should the liberatory force of Rastafari be? The questions – explicit and implicit – are many. Kareece, in responding, latches on to the issue of race, calling the concern about race in Rasta based in “foolishness” and attention to “petty differences” that she would rather not engage in. Kareece

38 understand 140

Two of Majesty’s39 best friends were two White people from England who also documented Majesty, took a lot of pictures, translated a lot of his work so that I and I can read them and know now, so I don’t get into all a dat. When I do my speeches and I ask in the audience, who in here is O+ and I raise my hand, and the Asian man raise him hand … cause is just One blood. What separate us?

Kareece’s formulation of race here is ironically grounded in the very thing once used to argue for a hierarchization of races - biology. The One Blood argument is a common one in colourblindness but fails to take into account the structural aspects of race and racism. In the chapter following this I engage further a discussion of race and colour in Jamaica and examine the ways that other kinds of privilege – class, status and more – impact how people view race in the island. Kareece’s formulation of all people as “one blood” is in line with the ideology that undergirds the Jamaican motto “Out of Many One People”. While both are noble in their intentions, the melting pot rhetoric that they promote leave little space for addressing the structural issues of race, gender, and class that led to the rise of the Rastafari movement and the Reggae music. She continues with a formulation of Africa also based in openness and presents Africa as an idea rather than a merely physical place.

And another thing – Africa! – to I, the whole world is Africa. Africa is a physical place, a landmass. I ovastand, I am a part of that. But what I also ovastand is that it is a state of mind and it must be created and recreated and continue to be created and spread everywhere that I and I are. Africa is in our culture, in our DNA. So, while we are here mek we continue to create Africa inna Babylon so we can go back to Africa and continue to create African safe spaces all over the world, wherever we exist. Because we have to exist in these spaces you know. So mek we just do that. Working towards it, same way and stop fighting so much cause it keeping us in a very stupid place.

39 Emperor Haile Selassie 141

In response to Kareece, a young man takes the microphone and posits that rather than the focus on Blackness within Rasta being part of a racist ideology it is possibly that the harsh racial climate early members of the Rastafari community lived within meant that they could not conceptualize the inclusion of people of other races into the movement. The fervent yet respectful discussions of race, origin, commercialization and authenticity continue as people try to reconcile their own understandings of their personal identity with others’ formulations of them and the way they have been cast by the nation and the world. The questions of what does it mean to be authentically Rasta or Jamaican or Black, are at their core, questions of “who are you?” Precious who has been darting back and forth between the kitchen, the tables, and the small concrete area where her son has been playing, dashes towards the focal point almost out of breath and takes the mic.

Precious I think the question we have to answer before we leave here tonight is “what is Rasta?” What does it mean to be a Rasta? What does Rastafari mean? We talk about twelve-tribe, Bobo, and Nyabinghi40, and we talk about it from a local perspective from African descendants and then as you mentioned the Indians and the Europeans. Why are they embracing Rasta? What is Rasta? Because I’ve heard comments where just because a man who might be illiterate and ignorant and has locs in his hair and say, “yeah man a Rasta! Rasta, you done know, livity is the answer”. I think we need to get past that kind of ignorance and start to educate and speak about what is Rasta before we can talk about Pan Africanism and all these things ..(I have to deal with my baby I soon come) … anybody want to comment on that? …Traci??

Here arises again the concern about defining Rasta, and I as a non-Rasta, non-Garveyite and possibly the least qualified person in the restaurant, have been put on the spot. I

40 All houses/mansions of Rastafari 142 realize that I am not even sure what it might mean to try to define Rasta and that a large part of the movement’s power might be in its resistance to definition. The conversation thus far, however, has made it clear that this malleability and porousness are also a major issue when it comes on to questions of ownership, rights, and belonging. In another conversation David told me “I like to ask yutes all di time when I meet dem and dem say dem a Rasta, what is Rasta? What Rasta mean?” He asks this question anywhere he goes in the world because he believes that the uncertainty of boundaries and definition of Rastafari has stemmed from the commercialization of the movement and its aesthetic. Jamaicans who know Rasta therefore identify with the music, the aesthetic, the language, the food, and the focus on One Love. Foreigners who know Rasta identify with the version of all of these presented by the media and the Jamaica Tourist Board. David scoffed “And then you have man give you answer like “Rasta means love” you know, “Rasta means livity” you know, “Rasta means Jah!” you know.” David is clear that he rebuffs the young people who give these answers not because love, livity, and Jah are not part of the formulation of Rasta, but because these ideas of Rasta are grounded in the commercial and all leave out what he deems the most important aspect of Rastafari identification – the divinity of Haile Selassie. I normally rebuff all of that. Not rebuff it as in to say it doesn’t mean that but there’s one definition I look for, Rasta to me…means the divinity of Haile Selassie. Because I meet some Rastas these days who say dem a Rasta but dem believe say Selassie was God. So why you call him by him name? Which is why I ask people, What is Rasta? Rasta have an origin. Seemingly annoyed with me and the world for focusing on Rasta’s commercial aspects and failing to understand the profound simplicity of the divinity of Selassie, David says “I don’t know why all this ‘what is Rasta?’ Rasta have an origin!”

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But I am not laying out conversations in linear fashion here, and this one in which David so clearly laid out his ideas on the origin and definition of Rasta, didn’t happen until weeks after Precious had already put me on the spot in the crowd, so I was honest about my own lack of certainty.

Me Well, I don’t have an answer to Precious’ question – I just have more questions. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is how we as Jamaican people have continued to sell ourselves or allow ourselves to be sold and one thing that has really stood out to me is how Rasta has moved from being the lowest of the low and the most ostracized in society and stamped down upon and Coral Gardens and all of these things and kill dem and shave off all of di bearded men to all of a sudden the face of Jamaican tourism. And I don’t see where Rasta benefits from it, and I don’t see where Jamaica benefits from it. And I’m just trying to find out how do we do this differently? What is really happening here? What is happening to us as a people when we build our identity on serving people drinks by the poolside in some all-inclusive hotel most of us can’t afford to go to. What happens when you standing up at a hotel bar called the Sugar Mill and dem playing Bob Marley’s One Love. That to me is a contradiction. And I don’t know what we do to remedy that. And what happens when these radical movements, and it happens all over the world, all over the world black radical movements become squashed down into what we’re calling here ‘cultural products’. How do we stop ourselves from being a mere cultural product? And I don’t know if that is, that it means that we need to define what Rasta is, that we need to define what black radical is, that we need to pull people of all shapes and shades and hairstyles and whatever into an idea of black radicalism and stand up and step back. I don’t know?

My rambling is met with nods of approval. Even though I did not answer the question this is an affirming space and my diatribe about commercialization hit a chord and others share their personal experiences with coming face to face with the exploitation of Rasta cultural products and aesthetics by the Jamaican state and by people around the world.

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Jeremiah

That is a good position, I’m one to agree. It’s funny we’ve been talking about the commercialization of Rasta how persons have been basically exploiting what we have as a Jamaican culture, exploiting this movement that was for liberation and turn it into this nice product and it’s interesting I was sharing with Precious earlier that somebody from another country said to me earlier this week that, it was just so ironic where it happened in, ahm, in One Love café and the person said to me “I am here in Jamaica to exploit what Jamaica has” and I’m not paraphrasing. The person said “I’m here to take what is Jamaican and take it to the world because Jamaicans obviously don’t understand what they have and they just don’t understand the rich heritage and the rich culture and the world wants it and if they don’t want to use it and they don’t want to exploit it then I am going to take it.” And I just don’t look at it as a Jamaican thing, I look at it as a thing worldwide when it comes to us as a Black race and I’m not trying to do a just focus on being a little bit racist, but we need to look at where we are as a Black people and a lot of times we don’t understand what we have, we don’t understand the culture that we have, we don’t understand what is within us as a people and how great we are and oftentimes other persons recognize it but we have failed to recognize it and make the best use of it and let me tell you people are out there just coming same how they come and exploit Reggae music, same way how they come and exploit our culture and our beaches, it’s the same way they’re going to continue to exploit us, year after year, day after day and what are we going to do about it? You know, we going to just sit down and say, yow that too big for we or we can’t fight? What are we going to do? That has been the question that has been milling around in my mind. I mean when the person said it to me it hurt, but I just… like the man is speaking the truth, you know? Then I have to say what am I as a Jamaican, what am I as a Black man going to do about something like this?

That the man in question felt comfortable enough to say to Joshua explicitly that he was in Jamaica to exploit what Jamaica has speaks volumes to global power dynamics and Jamaica and the Caribbean or Global South in general as places to be mined for resources by people from the outside. Considering the earlier conversations about race and Rasta, I found David’s clear assertation Rasta and Reggae as Black and his articulation of need to protect Black cultural production interesting. Within the conversations dichotomizing of

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Pan-Africanism and One Love, Joshua’s centralization of Blackness seemed to put him in the “pan-African” camp along with David who responded David

Can we afford to take on this concept of One Love? As in that Rasta is everybody and you know let us embrace the entire world? I don’t think we can and the reason being for some of the things we have listed here. On a philosophical level we say yeah, nothing wrong, everybody come to the truth and it’s a livity, and it’s a lifestyle, and it’s a way of life. But then on the other hand we say, Rasta which was downtrodden and oppressed or which the system reacted to very violently is now the face of tourism and what is Rasta getting out of it and Rasta themselves asking what are they getting out of it.

The reason we not getting anything out it is because we fail to, as the Emperor say, organize and centralize. Let’s be clear about that and because we haven’t done that, it now makes it a tragedy that the One Love concept means that we are going to lose whatever benefits could come from this to others and to other races. Keep in mind the history and the foundation of how Rasta was created and what it was created for. …. Can we afford that and isn’t that tragic that if that is the way it goes again it would seem that our hard work and our creativity and our creations are now being reaped by others, the same way it was when our ancestors were under slavery, and does that not defeat the whole liberating purpose of Rasta?

Did Rasta not come to liberate a people and are those people now liberated?

CROWD No

David

…Or have they sold their liberating force on the market and given up on their own liberation? We cannot, economically I don’t think Rastafari can afford a One Love commercial concept, at this time, and maybe it is our fault that we

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never organize ourselves to benefit from it. But the fact that we’re not ready for it, means we could lose it forever, you understand?

There’s the first silence of the night.

After a long while of silence, the same voices and others pipe up again and the conversation once again runs circles around the definition of Rasta. Can anyone Black, White, or otherwise be Rasta? What does it mean for Rasta to be commercialized? What does it mean for Rasta to be included in tourism or even in the nation. There is talk about the struggles of maintaining the Rastafari trust fund, and people lament that despite Reggae music’s broad popularity and Rasta being so well-known and revered around the world, they still struggle with Jamaica. Others opined that life was difficult for the elders especially, because without the trust fund or some other source of income how would the community care for them? There were suggestions of taxing the government, charging royalties on Rasta paraphernalia or of charging a landing tax to tourists that would go directly to the Rasta community, as part of an acknowledgement of the work Reggae and Rastafari have done in making Jamaica a desirable tourist destination. There was talk about the decriminalization of marijuana, and questions about who would be poised to benefit – many felt it should be Rasta but seemed resigned to a belief that it would not be. And after all the talk about how to support the community, and the commercialization of Rasta, and the difference between One Love and Pan-Africanism, the discussion came back around to questions of the boundaries of Rasta and how these change based on context. Those who approached Rastafari from Reggae – or from One Love, seemed to be more open to fluid borders than those who approached the movement from a UNIA or Garvey standpoint. Further, it appeared that those whose lives or livelihoods were

147 contingent upon or strongly shaped by interactions with non-Jamaicans were more akin to fluidity than those who lives were more Kingston centric.

WHO IS RASTAFARI? A VISIT TO RAS MAKONNEN

Who is Rastafari? Rastafari is I. I stand Rastafari. Every I stand Rastafari Rastafari is I and I and I, a Rastafari I. Haile Selassie I Rastafari is sun, moon and star. Rastafari is everywhere you are. It's snow, wind, rain. Here comes Rastafari again, Again and again and again and again, Absolving your colonial hurt, negating your colonial pain. From Rastafari, we could never refrain. You ask I, "Who is Rastafari?" Rastafari is Black, never once turning back. Rastafari is White. Rastafari is day. Rastafari is night. Rastafari is red, gold and green. Rastafari is everywhere life can be seen. It's pink, purple, yellow, blue. Rastafari is me, even you. Ever faithful and true. Rastafari is brown. Rastafari is a positive sound, stepping higher and higher and higher, never once going down. Rastafari is gray. Rastafari is here to stay. You cannot just simply wish Rastafari away. Rastafari is colourless, North, south, east, west, Purging away your colonial mess. Indeed, Rastafari is the highest. You ask I, "Who is Rastafari?" 148

Rastafari is the mischief of every mystery, the world history, oceans, sea, rivers, stream, a living reality, not an elusive dream. The bird, the bee, the tree. Rastafari is you, even me, liberation, mind set free. The pond, the lagoon, the lake. Rastafari, we could never forsake. It's aqueduct, fountain. Rastafari's the highest mountain. Summer, autumn, winter, spring. Rastafari's all these things. Rastafari is king of kings, wood, stone, iron. Rastafari is the conquering lion. You ask I, "Who is Rastafari?" Rastafari is uncompromising. Rastafari is soul uprising. Rastafari is no disguising. Rastafari is divine love. Well, is this surprising?

I was not expecting the performance. We were talking, and I posed to Ras Makonnen the question that dominated the coffee conversations, who or what is Rastafari? Without missing a beat, he launched into this dub poem. It was clear he has had lots of practice. I figure the “who is Rastafari?” question must get asked a lot. Ras

Makonnen is a central figure in Mount Aksum41, a community in the hills just a few minutes above Kingston, and Ajani who runs a Kingston tour company insisted that I meet him. He runs a small shop out of which he sells tams that he makes himself, herb, pipes and bongs42 and red, green and gold beaded necklaces – some imported from China, and other Rasta oriented paraphernalia, as well as roots drinks, phone cards, snacks and bag juice and CDs featuring the dub poem he recited for me. The tams, he

41 Name changed 42 Ganja/marijuana 149 finds market for through Facebook, and they are often purchased by the Marleys and other Reggae royalty. The herb and pipes are usually bought by local community members, though at one point while I sat in the shop a young man noted that he had taken an hour long drive all the way from St. Thomas to buy herb from Ras Makonnen because of its high quality. The beads and his CDs he sells almost exclusively to tourists. The “Who is Rastafari” song is his biggest hit. When I asked if his hand-made products were purchased by local community members he responded that the community only bought “grabba43 and kisko pop and sweetie and busta44 and bag juice.” He noted that unemployment in the community is high, and as such “most people out here don’t have nuh money” so he doesn’t expect much from the community. Instead he gets support from foreigners - mostly people from Germany, Switzerland, and California. In our conversations he says that the work he does with his hands, making tams and the energy of creativity that goes into the work he does hosting his community radio show are an important part of what makes his Rastafari identity. “Rastafari is not a matter of race, colour, or creed.” Ras Makonnen tells me, rather it is a matter of “acknowledging a fullness of reality that Rastafari, Haile Selassie the first of Ethiopia kingdom, of the house of David and the lineage of King Solomon of

Jerusalem, sat upon the throne of Rafael and David as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, manifestly fulfilling scriptures, that even in the last days Christ would sit upon throne of Rafael and David ….” He reels off the full lineage of Haile Selassie and the biblical

43 A marijuana and tobacco mix 44 Jamaican sweet made from coconut 150 lineage of Christ in the same spontaneous manner he had recited the Who is Rastafari poem.

RASTA, RACE, TOURISM, AND “RASTITUTION”

Living downtown Kingston has its perks. I often walk from the apartment to the various Institute of Jamaica museums, libraries and cultural centres in the surrounding area. Some days I spend hours at the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica (ACIJ) reading the one book I am allowed to have at a time, while eavesdropping on school group tours and reminiscing about my own days of school fieldtrips when being shuffled around a museum behind a guide you couldn’t hear through the thick of your classmates was still more appealing than sitting inside the hot classroom all day. Others, I spend at the National Library, haggling with the librarian in an attempt to convince her to allow me to review more than one file at a time – her answer remains a firm no. And others I spend within the Institute’s main building filling my brain with long names for flora and fauna, and my nose with the cool scent of century old wood. On this day, I wander around the small Music Museum, slowly devouring the stories about the instruments on display. A guide spots me and after some chatting about the exhibition and my interests suggests I speak to his co-worker and some friends of his who happened to be having an informal meeting in the office that afternoon. After settling me into a swivel office chair, he goes back to work leaving me to chat with Mama J, Ras Jah Son, and Elijah. Mama J is a Rastafari and Maroon elder, Ras Jah Son, also an elder is a graphic artist, and Elijah, younger but also influential is a musician. When I arrive, they are already in the middle of a heated discussion – laughter bubbling and voices overlapping. They are planning an event, I think – the purpose of their impromptu meeting was something I never got quite

151 clear – but in the process they are having a good time cracking jokes at and with each other and talking about the things Rasta does or does not do. I present the conversation below trying as best as possible to stay true to the use of language – a mix of Patois, English and Iyaric – in order to show how each of these gets used in different contexts and because so much of the meaning of this vibrant conversation occurs in its rhythm.

Mama J One time, Rasta you couldn’t tek dem picture. All Binghi45? … But now… [Mama J fakes a pose and sets one hand like a camera, using the other to stop her laptop from slipping out of her lap] That was stupidness you know! Ignorancy! You a mek dem pay you? mi nuh want nuttin

There was a time when Rastas would not allow you to take their picture. Especially the Nyahbinghi.. but now…[Mama J fakes a pose and sets one hand like a camera, using the other to stop her laptop from slipping out of her lap]. That was stupidness you know. Ignorance! People ask if I am making them pay me, but I don’t want anything.

Mama J talks about the ways Rastafari’s relationship to the camera and to being photographed has changed. Where once they were reluctant having their pictures taken by tourists, some now are not only willing but also request payment. She on the other hand wants nothing from the tourist. Having just come out of the Music Museum, Reggae is on my mind, and the guide by way of introduction had told them that I was a PhD student wanting to talk to them about Reggae music and tourism and Rasta. When the laughter at Mama J’s statement about the cameras dies down, they look at me expectantly. I am unprepared for an interview. I have no list of questions and had been content to sit in the presence of these elders and maybe join in the conversation now and then. Uncomfortable with

45 An abbreviated way of saying Nyabinghi Mansion of Rastafari 152 awkward silence, I ask about the impact of the popularity of Reggae music on Rastafari. The mood in the room shifts as they think seriously about my question and I feel badly for intruding and for having squashed the fun. As the conversation takes off however, I realize that my worries were unnecessary. Elijah is the first to respond. Elijah

Both positive and negative – I woulda say foremost, as a musician, I’m a Rastaman so I put my spirituality in my music. About Africa, about me. That’s what I express in my music. But you know, in terms of Reggae per se, a lot of ones maybe utilize the image of Rasta, especially when you coming from Jamaica. Cause from the 70s, some company would want to sign you and ask you to put on locs and if you never have no locs yuh not getting nuh sign! And that was part of the contract also, yuh nuh. Suh di image of Rasta, have been and still been exploited by well-wishers and sympathizers. People dem ignorant. Some people ignorant of it too. Some people just put on locs and don’t find the real reason, till you find out that they are musician you know, so dem just put on locs and smoke herb.

Both positive and negative. I would say as a musician, I am first and foremost a Rasta man so I put my spirituality into my music. About Africa, about me. That’s what I express in my music. But you know, in terms of Reggae a lot of people utilize the image of Rasta, especially the Jamaicans. As far back as the 70s, record companies would want to sign you [to their label] but they required that you wear your hair in locs. No locs, no record deal! That was a part of the contract. So the image of Rasta has been and still is being exploited by well- wishes and sympathizers. People are ignorant. Some people wear locs without having real spiritual reason, they are musicians so they wear locs and smoke herb [marijuana]

In a few words Elijah speaks to the commodification of Rasta and the Rasta aesthetic. The aesthetic that Chris Blackwell honed to make Reggae marketable to an international audience in the 70s required that the artistes be representative of an image of Rasta that emphasized anti-establishment, carefree, politicized sex appeal. Locs, Ganja, tight pants and a hyper-masculinity that sat on the line between passion and indifference.

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The producers who sought to imitate Blackwell’s strategy required that the musicians they promoted suit this image, and so as Elijah notes they were required to wear locs, regardless of their actual affinity to or with Rastafari. I argue that this marked the beginning of the synonymity of Rastafari, Reggae and Jamaicanness. This synonymity has meant a crisis of identity as Rasta and Reggae are inhabited by people – including non-Black people around the world. There are concerns that others are capitalizing upon an image and aesthetic created by Rasta and leaving no space for Rasta to benefit. Ras Jah Son leans his chair back slightly and tilts his head to the side of the desktop screen he’s been working at, so that he can more fully join the conversation.

Ras Jah Son Dem say, France now ah di world reggae capital why is this? Because we are mostly just the creators who just perform fi expose and express We work wid expression and expose and the people who do business see that we are doing our thing for the love of it and the business becomes the hype, cause nobody can tek weh reggae music but somebody making money from reggae music more than the reggae artists. And you know what happen? If a man from France say him a come produce wi, we gone yuh nuh.

They say that France is now the Reggae capital of the world. Why is this? It’s because even though we are the creators we perform mostly just to express ourselves. The people who are doing business see that we do the music for the love of it, but the business becomes more important. No can take Reggae music away from us, but someone is making more money from the Reggae music than the Reggae artistes. And the funny part is that if a man from France came and offered to produce our music we would readily go along with him.

The other two burst out laughing. It is the kind of laugh people mean when they say “if I don’t laugh I’ll cry”. There is a clear concern that Reggae is being overtaken by Europeans who have more means and resources to produce than Jamaicans. The statement about foreigners being so integrated in Reggae leads to a discussion of race and 154

Rasta and whether or not Rasta means Black. The themes of the conversation are reminiscent of the One Love vs Pan Africanism coffee conversation. By this point the fullness of conversational style I had walked in on has resumed and their voices overlap as they enthusiastically weigh in. Ras Jah Son initially aims to reconcile Haile Selassie’s statement that there should be “no regard for race” with the Rastafari movements’ origins in Black liberatory praxis. Ras Jah Son Because yuh see his Majesty a di Emperor yuh nuh, suh yuh no really waan contradict a person fi go to di faith but being a White man contradict di whole ting. Him contradict di movement, cause him caah…

Because His Majesty is the Emperor, so you don’t really want to stop a person who is interested in joining the faith but being a White man contradicts the whole thing. He contradicts the movement because he can’t … Mama J: … cause yuh see di movement mix up wid our personal issue … because the movement and our personal issues are mixed up Ras Jah Son As a Rasta man now mi nuh tink wi can really say wi nuh waan nuhbody else inna di movement but yuh have some Rasta people who nuh really too inna it.

As a Rasta man, I don’t think we can really say that we don’t want anyone else to join the movement but there are some Rasta people who don’t like the idea.

Elijah …And becaah …is really Black liberation. When di movement come about yuh nuh, a man did really a talk about black liberation, freeing demself and finding dem self in a place where plenty discrimination and disenfranchment was taking place.

… And because it’s really about Black liberation. When the movement came about you know, they were really talking about Black liberation, freeing

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themselves and finding themselves in a place where there was a lot of discrimination and disenfranchisement taking place.

Mama J: So di white man come on board is like yuh caan even get to di oppression yuh want to get to because is like him right undaneath yuh arm..so it kinda…wi haffi just …

So when the White man comes on, it’s as though you can’t even address the oppression because it’s like he’s right underneath your arm… so it’s kind of . … we have to just….

Elijah: …and becaah wi seh one love too, a di one love part ‘im come een pon

…and because we also say One Love, it’s the One Love idea he comes in on (hangs on to)

Mama J Yeah, a dat him come een pon, a dat him ride pon, One Love Yeah. That’s what he comes in on. That’s what he rides in on. One Love (Laughter) Elijah:

But a really black liberation But really, it’s about Black liberation.

As it so often does, race moves us into a discussion of class. According to Mama J, it’s not just the White people who “run een” on Rasta that pose a problem for the movement, it’s the elite as well. Is a “middle class settings” Elijah says to me and Mama J chimes in, “yes and a whole bunch a intellectuals”. I find this particularly interesting because Rastas are known for their intellectualism. But that is not what she’s talking about here. Instead

156 she is referring to an intellectual and cultural elite for whom the aesthetics of Rastafari provide cultural cache. The co-opting of Rastafari indigenous culture is an issue that according to Elijah, Mama J, and Ras Jah Son, extends beyond the race and class boundary. There is ambivalence about whether or not or how to participate in the tourism industry. All three were clearly resistant to the idea of being seen as ‘props’ or as a tourism product, but had a clear understanding of Rastafari’s place in the marketable image of the nation. Elijah we see the authentic indigenous culture, but we not projecting ourselves as tourism props or tourism product. It’s just natural hospitality that we extend to those people.

We see the authentic indigenous culture, but we are not projecting ourselves as tourism props or as a tourism product. We just extend a natural hospitality to those people.

Mama J And because we are not doing it, and a lot of people know seh is we the tourist come here for they say we stupid, people walk up to you and say “Rasta yuh nah have nuh sense yuh nuh, yuh nuh know how fi mek money” so they themselves start to capitalize on us. I remember one time a group call me in Ocho Rios, I was around a group of drummers from St. Thomas and a man call me to help with a village down by white river, and when we go there all the toilet was paint in red, green and gold, everything was red, green and gold, and the man is a Christian. And the man paint di whole a im likkle village,him call it a village and was going to enter tourism business in Ocho Rios area and was going to use the Rasta culture and he’s a pastor and he had us there and when we were there he said, we can’t smoke any ganja there, no ganja, not even before the show, not even roun a di bush round deh so. Mi seh dis is madness, So, anyway, we were dere and we see touris’ white people come up wid some BIG spliff a smoke nuhbady talk to dem, so mi seh wait, so mi go to im and mi seh “boss…a we a go entertain dem? Wi need fi build up wi energy fi dweet. Wi can bun a spliff? Not even dung a di rivaside dung deh so. Him a seh, no, no, no, no, some law, some ting we im do wid di business people dem. Mi seh “but di tourist dem have some big spliff round a di front round deh so” Him seh “Those are tourists. Can’t do nuttin bout dem” So mi seh, how we a go go pan stage fi entertain dem? Di man need a boost 157 up, a di herb dem use u nuh?” all di tings weh you see Rasta a gwaan wid and it become tourist business, a ganja behind it, ya undastand? You don’t see Bob Marley wid di big spliff inna him finga all tourist board a push it up, because is it mek him gwaan pan stage and gwaan suh, is it weh push di ting, di ting, to move up suh, yuh caan tek it away from us and expect it to be di same, mi haffi leave, mi tell him seh mi a leave, because mi want a draw fi go pan di stage, Me personally, want dat, and if me caan get dat, mi a go lef go a di next river and den go home, cause mi nah go stay ya widout it.

And because we’re not doing it [‘selling out’ for tourism] and a lot of people know that the tourists come to Jamaica to see us [Rastas] they say that we are stupid. People come up to you and say “Rasta you don’t have any sense. You don’t know how to make money” and so they themselves [non-Rasta Jamaicans] capitalize on us.

I remember once I got a call from a group in Ocho Rios. I had been working with a group of drummers from St. Thomas and man called me and asked me to help with a village near White River. When we got there, we saw that everything – including the toilet – had been painted in red, green, and gold. Everything was red, green, gold even though the man is a Christian!

So, the painted all of his little village. – he called a village – and was planning to enter into the tourism business in the Ocho Rios area and his aim was to use the Rasta culture to do it – and he’s a Pastor! We waited and waited and while we were waiting there, he said that we can’t smoke any ganja there – NO ganja! – not even before the show, not even in the bushes. I said, ‘this is ridiculous!’. Anyway, while we were there, we saw some tourists – some White people – come by smoking BIG spliffs and no-one said anything to them.

So I went to him and I said, “Boss, do you expect us to entertain them? If so, we need to build up our energy to be able to do it. Can’t we smoke a spliff? Maybe down by the riverside?” and he just kept saying no, no, no, no and something about the law and some agreement he made with the business people. So I said to him “but the tourists are smoking large spliffs at the front” and he said “those are tourists, we can’t do anything about them” So I said to him “then how do you expect us to go on stage to entertain them? The men need a boost and they use the herb to achieve that”

Ganja is behind all the things that belong to Rasta that have now become a part of the tourism business. The Tourist Board promotes an image of Bob Marley with his big Ganja spliff in his hand because it is the Ganja that allowed him to perform as he did. You can’t take it away from us and expect the performance to 158

be the same. I had to leave. I told him that I’m leaving because I wanted to smoke before going on stage and if I can’t get that then I’m leaving.

Elijah Hypocrasy

Hypocrisy

According to Mama J, participating in tourism was a lose-lose situation. When Rastas choose not to participate, other people say that they are stupid for not capitalizing upon the nation’s flattened presentation of their culture, and if they do then others say that they have “sold out”. Mama J’s experience elucidates the ways that despite the nation’s exploitation of the image and cultural products of Rasta for tourism, Rasta people are only valued so far as they can provide entertainment and abide by the status quo. That the pastor would choose the red, green, and gold colour scheme of Rastafari to decorate his tourist attraction, while still clearly holding even slight disdain for Rastafari people, speaks to the complicated placement of Rasta within Jamaican society. Further, Mama J’s story makes it abundantly clear that tourists and locals are expected to adhere to a different set of rules for the same circumstances, and in all cases, the tourist is the favoured party. Despite its oppositional beginnings, a folkloric presentation of Rasta has been centralized in Jamaican tourism and national identity. The aesthetic and cultural products of the movement have become the commodifiable sign of the Jamaican nation, leaving Rasta adherents ambivalent about their positioning simultaneously within and outside of Jamaicanness.

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Interlude 3.

Words are lies that stand in for sounds. A poem turns language to music. With ink smeared, blurry black lines, seeping through/drizzling off pages bleached white, we go beyond the imagined/unimaginative limits of this foreign tongue. Words are lifted off the page, yanked from Queenly mouths, stretched and compressed, to fit new beats. Screamed and hushed in simultaneity words/noise/silence erupts and splashes outside the lines. Jarring and deliberate. Deceptive frenzy – improvised not unplanned. Doing the undoable. We resist. Speaking the unspeakable we rage against containment. Words surrounded by silence are transcendental, pushing against the boundaries, until there is a snap/crack/break, and we and our words are splayed beyond the places words can go.

Surrender to knowing nothing silence can say so much.

Syncopate. /ˈsiNGkəˌpāt/ Displace the beats or accents in (music or a rhythm) so that strong beats become weak and vice versa: "syncopated dance music". Syncopate. Dance. Music. Poetry. Words. Silence. Little death and pregnant pause. This the sexual cut. Push against the structure. Extend. Explode. Displace and the weak become strong, the strong become weak and they know not what to expect. Challenge reducibility. Rebel against totality. Against the confines of thingness, commodification, non-being. Cut, break, hang in the balance. Carve out a space/time for the silence to be filled with the excess. Linger and -

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Invaginate. /inˈvajəˌnāt/ To infold or become infolded so as to form a hollow space within a previously solid structure. Break the structure with our excess, the internal pocket greater than the whole. Non-linear and infinite. Excess and lack within time and space immeasurable.

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Chapter 4: Embodying Jamaicanness

The body is the place of captivity. The Black body is situated as a sign of particular cultural and political meanings in the Diaspora. All of these meanings return to the Door of No Return – as if those leaping bodies, those prostrate bodies, those bodies made to dance and then to work, those bodies curdling under the singing of whips, those bodies cursed, those bodies valued, those bodies remain curved in these attitudes. they cleave not only to the collective and acquired memories of their descendants but also to the collective and acquired memories of the other. We all enter those bodies. Dionne Brand “A map to the door of No Return”

The Black body in Dionne Brand’s phrasing, is simultaneously domesticated and wild space (Brand 2012). Domesticated in the sense that there are set characteristics ascribed to the Black body with the effect of familiarizing people with it. People have expectations of what the Black body can or should do, think, speak and the spaces it should occupy. These ideas of the Black body, according to Brand, become a kind of irrefutable common sense or knowledge, or the embodiment of the controlling images Patricia Hill Collins speaks of. But this is not all the Black body is. Brand also describes the Black body as wild space. It transgresses its domestication, its very existence and survival are signs of transgression, opposition, resistance and desire. The Black body is a contradiction.

In this chapter, I examine the ways the Black body in Jamaica is simultaneously desirable and abject, the centre of the nation and its shame. I examine here the ways the logic of the plantation plays out in body politics in the island. Engaging the Black body as the tool of the plantation and the tool of tourism, I question the ways Jamaicans make and remake themselves to abide by or reject the expectations of Jamaicanness placed upon them by the outside world. This chapter thus examines the Black Jamaican body in 162 its domestication and its wildness, its legibility and its opacity. I explore the characteristics ascribed to the Black Jamaican body, the expectations it is required to fulfil and examine the ways that we push to be more than just body and mark consciousness in our hair, skin, and sex. Brand speaks of the Black body as a naturalized body in pop culture (36). She also calls the Black body the most regulated body in the Diaspora second only to the female body. I want to explore here the regulations on the Black female body - forced into domesticity while the Black male body is forced into wildness – for this is what a safari is, is it not? The purpose of the safari is to recreate the wild, to observe and to hunt or kill. The black man domesticated into wildness – the transgression, resistance, opposition all folded into desire. I think about the Black body in this chapter in the context of the politics of race, gender and space in Jamaican tourism and national identity. In this chapter, I explore the embodiment of Jamaican national identity and the trials associated with this embodiment. What does it mean to be Jamaican or what does the Jamaican body look like? What is an acceptable Jamaican body and how is the logic of the plantation embodied in praxis of race and space relationships?

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SOMETIMES COFFEE, SOMETIMES TEA46 On a Tuesday morning whim, my cousin Lauren and I have forced my little car to climb the Blue Mountains for a fancy cup of coffee and a pastry in cool Irish Town. This coffee shop lounging and sipping thing we do is relatively new to the island47. Our grandmother, when she still drank coffee, used to brew it on the stovetop in one of those little percolators that make me want to put one hand akimbo and the other in the air and sing about being short and stout. She’d have it strong, sweet, and creamy, high mountain dark roast made near white with Betty condensed milk. Mine is an almond milk latte.

Much of Jamaica doesn’t drink coffee like this, opting instead for the more affordable and accessible powdered Mountain Peak instant coffee, or the milky, sweetness released by Nescafe vending machines. Most often though, we are tea drinkers, partly because it’s more readily available, partly because of Colonialism. Mornings begin with strong cups of Red Rose or Lipton black tea, or Milo, or Horlicks, or bush mint, or fever-grass, or chocolate, or Bizzy, or ginger depending on what you have in your cupboard or your yard. Still, every time I leave Jamaica for the US, I pop in at this cafe or swing by a

46 This Jamaican saying means that some days will bring more fortune than others. Coffee requires the time and labour of picking, and drying, and roasting and as such has long been thought of as something one has when they have the luxury of the time or money to either prepare or buy it, whereas Tea in Jamaica refers to any hot drink and is often brewed from the leaves of commonly found plants (or bushes) such as mint, cerasee, fevergrass etc. I use it here to frame the straddling of class and racial position – sometimes good fortune, sometimes not, all depending on the positionality 47 The particular café we visited opened in the early 2000s. Café culture has blossomed in Jamaica over the past 20 years with a surge among upper class clientele in the last 10 or so. The recent opening of Starbucks franchises on the island are an indication of how much the culture has grown – largely due to the influence of US hegemony. While the coffee served in these cafes is usually Jamaican, the pastries and foodstuff are usually more European or US – for example you’re more likely to find cheesecake, muffins, pecan pie, bagels and paninis on offer than you are patties, coco bread, and callaloo and saltfish. The Jamaican owned and operated Cafes tend to offer artisanal versions of Jamaican desserts alongside the foreign items. For example, rum-glazed bread pudding, callaloo quiche, or miniature gizzadas. 164 supermarket uptown to buy small, exorbitantly priced, burlap wrapped packets of world renown gourmet Blue Mountain Coffee to give as gifts and a large bag of the less expensive High Mountain roasted and ground for me.

Lauren and I perch on the artisanal wood and wrought iron stools overlooking the valley and watch hummingbirds flutter around the red bird feeders. Away from the noise and hustle of the city, this is one of the few places you can actually see them up close.

We’ve been sitting here with our laptops for a while, doing more talking than typing when a tall Brown man, with mid back length locs and a thick, full beard joins us out on the deck. We exchange pleasantries, and in typical Jamaican fashion, ask each other leading questions until we have found our spots along the six degrees of separation that seem to exist between Kingstonians of a certain class and colour. Our connections aren’t intimate, but my cousin has worked in entertainment, me in TV, and him in music.

Mutual friends are inevitable. This is a part of life in a small place. Before long, our party of two has become three, and we are chatting and laughing over the deep blue mugs of coffee rapidly chilling in the crisp mountain air. We get to talking about Reggae, and

Dub, and Rockers, and Rocksteady and the ways the music has changed over the years.

“We are the sons of the originals”48 Jah V* tells me. He’s talking about the first generation of Dub and Reggae artistes, the ones who struggled, the ones who were ostracized for being Rasta or for being too poor or too Black, the ones who initially made

Reggae and Dub popular. The ones Toots Hibbert talks about when he says Reggae was

48 The ‘Suns of Dub’ …. 165 for the people (Chang and Chen 1998). But being the sons comes with privilege, and in his case, colour and class privilege. He knows this.

Reggae has changed, is the sum of what he tells me, and it’s because the artistes now have different experiences and different motivations. The sons don’t know the struggles of the father. Wasn’t that the point of the father’s struggle? I wonder, still, this experience with struggle or the lack thereof appears to be a source of unease in the ongoing discussions about Reggae, Jamaicanness, and authenticity. Can you sing about struggle if your generator trips in every time JPS49 lock off the light? Are you sufficiently

Jamaican if you spend half your year in New York or England or Miami?

“The interesting thing about it” he says, “is that 85% of the people who are popular artistes now are people who studied abroad or lived abroad and went to America and Europe and realized that foreign people were all about Rasta, and dem likkle Rasta gardener and so on have all di best girls and ting, and dem come home wid a new look on life…they go abroad and realize dat dem Black”

This, I find to be a particularly striking perspective. In one sentence he’s said much about race, gender, class, and globalization, and the impact of foreign notions of

Jamaica on Jamaican identity. “Studied abroad or lived abroad” here is a metonymic device used to mean upper or upper middle class and “dem likkle Rasta gardener” a stand in for working class and most likely dark-skinned black. The artistes who “studied or lived abroad” and the “likkle Rasta gardener” are here presented as on opposite ends of

49 The electricity company - The Jamaica Power Service company 166 the spectrum of class in Jamaica. Undergirding this binary, is an unstated exposition of the politics of travel and mobility within the island. The ‘Rasta gardener’ not only remains tied to the home soil but comes to represent quintessential Jamaicanness, while class allows the modern popular artistes to be able to straddle the position of local and foreigner50. The use of the patois possessive “dem” to describe the relationship to the gardener serves to further underscore the dynamics of racial and class inequity on the island. Not only does the gardener ‘belong’ to the upper-class artiste, his life, aesthetic, and culture provide a toolkit that can be mined and leveraged to increase the artiste’s desirability and marketability. The diminutive ‘likkle’ clearly establishes the hierarchy of class and occupation.

According to Jah V, the realization that ‘foreign people were all about Rasta’ was a major catalyst for the ‘new look on life’ or changed consciousness of the modern popular artistes. In this way the formulation of Jamaicanness is multidirectional and dependent upon ideas of Jamaica born in a globalization that is not benign or apolitical, but is as Deborah Thomas and Kamari Clarke note, “facilitated by the transmission and reproduction of social prejudices rooted in a past characterized by territorial concepts of belonging that both generated and were generated by racial inequalities” (Clarke and

50 It is notoriously difficult for working class Jamaicans to get visas to visit the United States. Applicants are often asked to show proof of income, assets, familial ties etc using documents that are often not readily available to those who work within an informal economy, are paid in cash, or complete transactions using cash. Further, the Jamaican passport has a mobility score of 91 on the global power index meaning that Jamaicans need to apply for a visa upon arrival in or before travel to 143 countries. For context, compare this to the United States’ score of 167. Citizens of the United States can visit 166 countries without needing to obtain a visa. They do not need a visa to enter Jamaica and are allowed to stay in the country for up to 120 days. 167

Thomas 2006). Jamaica is inherently cosmopolitan. Always in conversation with outside forces. That was the very basis of the manipulation of the island first as a plantation then as a nation. From the moment Xaymaca became Jamaica it has been shaped by tug of war between inside and out, and the racial inequalities and social prejudices that structured plantation society are woven into the fabric of modern society.

Our conversation makes it clear that foreign ideas about Jamaicanness impact what Jamaicans themselves seek to perform as appropriate or saleable Jamaicanness.

Jamaica in foreign eyes is Rasta of a particular type – Black, working class, connected to the earth and the struggle. Jamaica is not upper class, English speaking, white, brown, light-skinned or racially ambiguous – despite the national project of the 1960s having tried to cultivate this idea. In order to be legible to the global community of which they seek to be a part, and upon whose capital they depend, the modern Reggae artiste must be legible as Jamaican, and that means embodying and performing prescribed and predetermined notions of Jamaicanness. This Jamaicanness means an identification with

Blackness that might have previously been shunned or shrouded in favour of multiracialism or Brownness. According to Jah V, the self-making as Black that occurs once off the island, comes not only from to the need or desire to be understood as properly Jamaican by people whose idea of Jamaicanness is singular, but also from the fact that the racial categorizations of Jamaica do not translate elsewhere. As such, the

Jamaican who is Brown enough to not be Black in Jamaica, is Black in the US by virtue of the same Brownness. Interpellated as Black (and poor, third world, and foreign) in the

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US and Europe, the Brown Jamaican is confronted with diminished privilege and a crisis of identity. In the absence of legibility through physical characteristics, the Brown

Jamaican or elite Jamaican performs Blackness to claim legible Jamaicanness.

Jah V lays out assumed sexual prowess as an additional motivation for alignment with Blackness. The “likkle Rasta gardener” has all the “best girls and ting” despite – or because of - his abject position. In this phrasing Jah V genders both the artistes and the gardener as masculine, affirms a required heterosexuality, and speaks to a sexualization of Rasta that sees the Black man as hyper-masculine, and hyper-sexed. There is also the unspoken question of who the best girls are in this context and considering the racial dynamics of class, colour, and attractiveness within the nation, the ‘best girls’ are likely the ‘brownings’ or maybe even the foreign white women who come seeking the sexualized Rasta.

For all his critique of these modern ‘uptown’ artistes, Jah V openly acknowledges his own positionality and his privilege saying “…I can’t even fight it because I’m one of them too”. This is an awareness I’ve come to find typical of the artistes of this class and generation. “I’m uptown, I live in Strawberry Hill in a big house, and I’ve lived abroad, and I Brown and all of that.” His phrasing here sheds light on the geography of race and colour in Jamaica and emphasizes who lives in the ‘big house on Strawberry Hill” and who is the ‘likke Rasta Gardener”. “But we try to help” he goes on, “and I don’t turn up my nose at downtown people; our studio is downtown.” This is a sentence that in itself emphasizes the class distinctions. There is the emphasis of the uptown/downtown

169 dichotomy that exists within Jamaica and an assumption that ‘downtown’ people need the

‘help’ of ‘uptown’ people. This kind of framing is inescapable in a place with fraught class dynamics. In Jamaica, these dynamics play out in the handling of community tourism, and the project of revitalizing Kingston. By stating, unprompted, that their studio is downtown, Jah V seeks to prove his legitimacy by associating himself and his music with a space of ‘struggle’ and a claiming of the authenticity and grittiness that this is supposed to afford. It shows an anxiety about the class separation – the making of

‘downtown’ music from an ‘uptown’ perspective.

“But the thing about it is when Reggae is not with the people it supposed to help” he continues thoughtfully. “And it’s not that it’s not a good thing, ‘cause I mean, it’s good when it bring the consciousness to the people, but it not with the people it supposed to be for anymore”. The question of who Reggae is supposed to be for is as rich as the question of consciousness here. Is the aim of Reggae today to bring about a Black consciousness, a class consciousness, or political consciousness or all of the above? I wonder what is the consciousness that Reggae brings to the people and who are the people it is being brought to? If Reggae is not with the people it’s supposed to help and the classed assumption is that the people who need help are the people downtown, - downtown here meaning poor, Black, or working class - is the purpose of Reggae to bring consciousness to the Brown upper or upper middle class Jamaican?

Jah V has to go. He leaves for Ethiopia in a few days and has some business to take care of on the flat. But before he goes, he takes one last jab at what he called

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‘Jamaican people’s hypocrisy’. “All my modda51,” he says with a chuckle, “she find the thing so funny cause dem used to think of her as the nastiest thing ever cause my father is a Rasta, and now she saying - look at all those people who used to scorn her a run down

Rasta.” He had explained earlier that his mother’s elite family and friends had essentially disowned her when she got with his father.

Our hillside interaction provides an ideal frame for thinking about the corporeality of brownness, Rasta, and Jamaicanness in the eyes of Jamaica and of the world. This chapter explores the embodiment of Jamaicanness and the way the body speaks to us, for us, and beyond us. Considering the body as site of knowing and being known – how

Jamaicanness is interpellated and self-made, I examine the ways the somatic norm of

Jamaicanness is impacted by the global.

Further, I think through the somaesthetic – this faculty of bodily perceptions – the somaesthetic sense systems – the skin senses, the kinesthetic, and the vestibular senses.

Somaesthesis here involves our sense of touch – the exteroceptive senses that detect changes that occur at the body surface, touch pressure and temperature – here I want to talk about skin, what it means to be Jamaican, and how we achieve a sense of what it is to belong. In this chapter I consider the body as a site of knowing and of being known – the embodied knowledge that becomes part of what it means to be Jamaican – the way the nation state disciplines the body and what it means for us to belong as part of that body.

51 Mother 171

Considering the themes that come to my conversation with Jah V, this chapter addresses three registers – skin, hair, and sex.

SKIN : THINKING THROUGH THE EPIDERMAL REGISTER In a Jamaica obsessed with an overstated multiracialism, conversations about race are never straightforward. Most often they are silenced with reference to the nation’s motto “Out of Many, One People” as people dismiss any discussion of race as an

“American or foreign” thing. I have heard it said time and time again, that Jamaica’s problem is with class, not race, an argument which fails to take into consideration the way Jamaica’s history of racial subordination/discrimination means that the two are often linked. It is true that racism manifests differently in Jamaica than it does in the United

States of America or in any other such place that has experienced settler colonialism and apartheid, but the markers of race prejudice, discrimination and still exist. If you allow people time to move beyond the knee jerk loyalty to the motto, many will give you a story about a comment or remark, a time when they were made to feel less than or like they didn’t belong – all because of the colour of their skin.

Skin in Jamaica is complicated.

As Jay Prosser says “Skin’s memory is burdened with the unconscious” (Prosser),

Thinking through skin and the body, I want to discuss how Fanon defines racism as the epidermalization of inferiority rather than its internalization. Thinking through skin and the body, I seek to do as Sara Ahmed suggests and think through the skin. Thinking through rather than merely about the skin, allows us to consider the ways that racial

172 categories in Jamaica are permeable unlike in the US structured upon the rule of hypodescent. It also allows us to consider the ways that the fact and fiction of Out of

Many, One People operate in the nation’s self-presentation and its interpellation. What is the skin of Jamaicanness?

Maziki Thame speaks to an idea of Brown nationalism, identifying the ways the very structure of the Jamaican nation was built upon a privileging of multiracialism that translated really to a privileging of a white supremacist ideal of whiteness and a white aesthetic. This ideal epitomized by the colour of the nation’s founding fathers – Norman

Manley a near white man and the nation’s first Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante described as a man who passed for white in the US. The complication here is that their colour did not automatically translate to a hatred for or disdain of blackness but most certainly afforded a kind of privilege that allowed for their positions of power within the nation. In a Jamaica seeking to separate itself from the colonist, Whiteness was undesirable but then neither was Blackness. Whiteness was the mark of the colonizer and

Blackness the mark of the slave, thus Brownness became the most desirable. Brownness occupies a space of liminality within Jamaica – able to swing between Blackness and

Whiteness depending on context and need.

In the 1970s the Jamaica Tourist Board published an ad in the New York Times.

The black and white advertisement featured a woman with short, straight, dark hair. The text read “her ancestors were African, German, Welsh, Indian, French and Costa Rican.

She’s pure Jamaican.” The advertisement sought to epitomize the Jamaican. It is easy

173 now to present this as an old ideal of Jamaicanness, considering the rise of elite blackness during the 1990s with the PJ Patterson52 era – “black man time now” but the racial hierarchy of the plantation maintains. However, unlike the US structured on the rule of hypodescent, racial categories in Jamaica are permeable and sometimes wealth, career position, and importance can buy you Brownness or Whiteness – but not always.

A note to the reader: In this section I struggle with how to code skin, with how to describe colours without falling into cliché tropes “They always use food to talk about us”, a friend said to me flipping through my young daughter’s story book talking about skin. We are the colour of caramel, or coffee, or chocolate, peanut butter, or butterscotch.

Sweet things, and bitter things, and sticky things. All consumable things. This too is a part of the thingness of Blackness. How else can we talk about skin?

Skyline Drive “Then is where so much Brown people come from?” she scoffs and then laughs holding on to her friend’s arm for support as they deep bend their knees to make it down the steep hill without the embarrassment of a fall. We’re at the Chronixx53 concert on

Skyline Drive. This is a Reggae Revival hub and the crowd is a wide mix of ages, but is definitely largely Brown and middle class.

52 Jamaica’s first dark skinned Prime Minister 53 Chronixx is a Reggae Revival artiste 174

Black Baby The shiny new tiles in the lobby are slippery. I hold the car-seat in the crux of my arm, balance its weight on my right hip and walk slowly, dragging my feet like I’ve always been told not to. When we make it to the perpetually open front doors, I step over the threshold confidently onto non-skid tile and rest the car-seat on the concrete bench to my right. Nai is sleeping. I bend over her and fuss with the yellow hat and white socks that slipped off somewhere between the 12th floor and here. It’s summer in Jamaica, a balmy

90 degrees, the child is likely overdressed but I’m still a new mother and heat and life leave through the head and the feet. A throat clears behind me. I turn for the source of the sound and find an elderly woman, a neighbour of mine, sitting across from me on the other bench. I have been bent with my bottom in her face. I see her often but do not know her name. She is always impeccably dressed. Today she is wearing a gray skirt suit, stockings, and her usual sensible black shoes. “Good Ahhhhfternoon” she says in that stern way of old school teachers who’d cane you for neglecting to speak the Queen’s

English. Long rounded ‘A’, soft ‘R’, every syllable emphasized, tilde on the first ‘N’, no consonants lost. “Good Afternoon” I respond. I feel upbraided. I am working my nerve back from the diminutive to small talk when a white Toyota Caldina hatchback swings out of the parking garage, speeds halfway around the round-about, and stops – braps - right in front of us. In one fluid motion the elegant thin woman lifts herself and her black handbag up off the peeling green bench and steps towards me on her way to the stairs.

“Lawd Gad! What a way yuh mek di pickney get BLACK!” she says contorting her

175 strong coffee face to show her disgust. She holds up her head, straightens her skirt, and continues down the steps to her waiting taxi.

Andrew Backyard pools are not a common thing here, but we are seated in front

Andrew’s. Pepper lights reflect off its surface and illuminate Andrew’s blue-black skin.

Waitstaff move deftly through the standing crowd, handing out hors d'oeuvres, taking empty glasses, pouring drinks – wine, high end rum, sorrel. It’s a holiday party. Andrew is the lead stakeholder in the island’s largest lottery company. This is the elite of the elite.

Not celebrity. Under the stars that Andrew shows me tonight are the people who hold

Jamaica’s purse strings. The ones whose faces are rarely seen but people who command power and influence in Jamaica. This is a holiday party for staff. It is clear he is well liked. Andrew is a man of vast knowledge and experience, with a kind face and genuine smile. We have been talking about astronomy and stars and I think physics – this is what his degree is in. He’s old enough to be my father and has long been a mentor figure to

Tyrone. We don’t see him often but every interaction with him is filled with kind, keep at it – keep focused the world is your oyster advice. Somehow the conversation slips to race, as I guess it often does. Andrew has the floor. As he tells it, he was in the supermarket, shopping going about his regular business, buying tissue or toilet paper – who even knows right? The woman was so much shorter and smaller than him that at first he almost missed the elderly White woman – Jamaican White – important distinction.

“Boy” she says, and he - not even paying attention to her - doesn’t turn around. “Boy!”

176 she repeats, more forceful this time. Finally, he turns to look down at this small hunched woman with the pursed lips. She points a pale finger up to the top shelf and says “take that down for me”. By now, there’s a small crowd gathered to hear the story. Eyes peeled on Brian whose eyes brighten as he tries to contain his laughter. “So, what did you do?” someone asks, maybe expecting the “I told her off” moment. “I took it down and handed it to her” Andrew responded, laughter rumbling under his eastern Caribbean lilt. There is a wave of kissing of teeth and laughter and “but she bright” through the small crowd.

The woman had unknowingly and without care just called one of Jamaica’s wealthiest men “boy” and he, unbothered, had let her. The incident elucidates the complexities of skin and race in a Jamaica where despite years of Independence and

Black nationhood – Blackness is still associated with servitude. The woman’s assumption was that Andrew, by virtue of his skin colour must have been a store employee. And even if that mistake might have been excusable, in her language she attempted to put him in his place. “There was no point in saying anything to her” Andrew said to the group by way of explanation. Andrew’s reaction is his own recognition of the racial landscape but also an indication of the fact that his class privilege allows him to be able to easily dismiss the affront.

HAIR: DON’T HAFFI DREAD TO BE RASTA?

My Hair

“I can’t understand why you don’t just loc your hair”, my friend says while watching me try to figure out how to style the somewhat unruly mass on my head. “It 177 would be so much longer now, and there’s so much more you could do with it, get up and GO”. I keep twisting. She steps forward to help me canerow the front. I can only ever manage to do one right down the middle so I am grateful for the style help. “You never do anything with it anyway” she says. “and it would be so much easier. Wash and go.” And you can style it. She reminds me that I’ve been natural since long before her. That it was my hair that was her own inspiration to go natural herself and as she drags the comb through to make a slanted part in my hair says “lawd gad, if mine did bad like yours mi couldn’t manage.” Her left palm firmly spanning my hairline and forehead, she uses her right to haul the comb through my tresses. We have done this many in times in life, this friend and I, as teenagers with a hot comb, curling iron, setters. “I just cannot understand why you don’t just loc your hair.”

Sister Locs

The women sit side by side on a sofa all facing the camera. They are dark- skinned, lithe, and beautiful. Their hair thick and long in fine sister locs. Each of them sports sister locs – the fine woven interloc style that had begun to be popular among professional women. Each strand so fine that from a distance the mass of hair could be confused for long straight hair instead of loc’d hair. What stands out to me is the comment they made – At first our mother didn’t like it they said and then she realized it gave them the long straight hair she always wanted them to have. There was a recognition in these Afro-centric women that the aesthetic still aimed towards a Eurocentric ideal. The name locs made their hair scary. What made it beautiful was its length and versatility and ability to look straight from afar.

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Empress Aisha

I’m in my usual corner seat in this too cold, coffee shop where the patrons are usually more Café con leche than Blue Mountain Espresso. The drinks are expensive and the menu more foreign than local. It is here I eat salads, Lasagna, and the occasional pecan pie. It’s a hub for Kingston’s who’s who. Next door is a franchise of an American frozen yogurt chain, and beside that a gym that specializes in personal training, a little beyond is a hair salon focused on blow drying. I stepped inside it once but my hair is not the type that blows and stays straight. I imagined the immediate poof after spending half a paycheck and walked back out. Colour and class here is strange and in spaces like this I belong but do not. My Macintosh computer, perfect mastery of the acrolect, appreciation for brewed coffee rather than Mountain Peak instant, ability to hand over my debit card with confidence to pay for coffee more expensive than a meal gives me space here. I wear well the uniform of jeans and a blazer and flats, a loose scarf – prepared for AC in 90 degree heat. That I can spend the day working on my own, without reporting to some higher up. It is a space for creatives …I eavesdrop on interviews for personal assistants, on coffee dates between friends about to head off to the US in different States for college, mid-morning post-workout coffee dates between stay at home moms with heavy Spanish accents. Most say they come here to work, but more often than not the “work” is hanging out, making connections. Today I need to make loose notes for a conference paper, but I also need to be in space with people and conversation. As I walk in, I see a friend sitting in the seat beside my usual seat. She’s a TV co-worker who always has her hand in a million different projects. She’s a TV presenter and small, dark and thin, perfectly coiffed locs framing her face. She is loud about her Afrocentricism, on TV and otherwise, her very name calls to

179 mind Rastafari. We get to talking about my project, the dissertation, and her newest video projects. I’m halfway through my latte with no actual writing done when Aisha walks in. Aisha is stately and striking. Dark shin, thin, with a prominent nose and high cheekbones. Her blue-black hair long, heavy, and thick. Like what we would call Kaya thick. Unalduterated African hair. A patterned fabric scarf holds back the thick free form locs. A few smaller, thinner strands frame her face. Precious calls her over and introduces her. I know who she is, but she doesn’t know me. She’s a fashion designer, her work unapologetically Afro-centric. She wears something of her own design. Shortly after enters Ruth, white Jamaican of Jewish descent, partnered with a dark-skinned Rasta man. The four of us get to talking about our children, their blackness, our concerns over their self-esteem. Ruth worries that the teacher at school is victimizing her child. For her the problem is two-fold, the teacher taught her when she was a child at this same school and thought her to be unruly, brash, and improper and has made the assumption that her 4 year old is the same way, and secondly the child’s father is a Rasta man. Ruth talks about the importance of instilling pride in our children, in a society that wishes to knock them down. And it’s striking to me that we have concerns about our children’s pride in their Blackness in this Black nation. I’m always amazed at the way mothering creates new complex connections and allows me to access stories I wouldn’t otherwise hear or know.

We’re somehow kin, me and these mothers that I know and have just met. We are also all people privileged enough to have one foot in and one out of Jamaica. Precious spent a large part of her growing up in another country and has returned home to Jamaica where she is now a local celebrity. Ruth studied in the US and is an artist, and Empress Aisha has an American accent that I don’t ask about outright but know somehow she’s spent some portion of her life in New York. I find it interesting that of all of us, Ruth, the

180 furthest from Black among us speaks the most outright patois. There are no airs of respectability in her speech and that I figure is a part of why she has such a hard time with her daughter’s teacher. Aisha tells me that she lives in the country and travels in to Kingston and on to the US often for work. She is a present and very involved mother but still worries every time she leaves her sons. She tells me that the last time she was away, her eldest son had a project to complete for school and she was not around to help. Her son is an exceptional student. His work is usually high quality and pristine. This time, with her not around to supervise, it seems he had somehow soiled the cartridge paper for his project – as children are wont to do. The teacher, offended by the work, had brashly told her boy that his work was “dutty like him locs”. His locs that she, the teacher had never actually seen as he went to school daily with them wrapped on his head and covered neatly by a tam. “I’m not letting him go to graduation” she says matter of factly. Like most schools in Jamaica the school is affiliated with/led by a Christian denomination and is insistent that the children must follow Christian values. It’s the best school in the area but with the school having little to no regard for her and her family’s Rastafari faith every day is an uphill battle. Graduation is to be held at the Church and after the treatment they’ve received she thinks it’s best for him to just stay away. I can tell that this is an issue she’s wrestled with. She is clearly invested in her son’s education and recognizes this as a major milestone. “We have talked about it” she says, “I think he agrees.” I give her weak assurances she clearly doesn’t need. She is secure in the knowledge of what is best for her and her family. She tells me her son is on the Junior School’s Challenge Quiz team, and his teammates, peers and teachers have called him the smartest math whiz they have. School’s Challenge Quiz is a big deal and he was understandably very excited, but he

181 was never given the opportunity to represent the school on TV. He travelled from Mandeville to Kingston with the team and it was only when they had arrived at the television station that the teacher informed him that the alternate would be going on screen instead of him. No explanation was given. Empress Aisha didn’t have to say it, but it was clear that she believes it’s because he’s a Rasta boy. A few weeks later, I met Empress Aisha’s pre-teen son. Stoic, quiet, dark and lovely. Thick locs like his mother’s splayed in several directions framing his chubby face. Though he’s big in body, his face is that of a small child. Empress Aisha was selling her designs at the UNIA monthly Saturday market at café Africa. I bought a dress with an image of Marcus Garvey front and center. He sat quietly by his mother’s booth pen and paper in hand. He was to be initiated into manhood that day at the monthly UNIA meeting. I missed the ceremony because my own dark and lovely chubby faced child had had enough of the heat. She had spent the better part of the hot afternoon, chasing after Empress Aisha’s youngest son, a toddler like herself, with his own full head of locs, determined to make him play with her.

Overrated

Mid-afternoon slump. Need coffee and a change of scenery so I walk to the Starbucks near campus. I open my laptop to connect to the internet and a Starbucks home log-in page pops up with a little quiz. Which hairstyle is more overrated? A) dreadlocks B) man-bun

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My Hair part 2 “You really should just loc your hair” she insists again, this is a common suggestion now.

My friend did it with the fake locs and it looked really good. You could do that. Have them put it in and when it’s grown out enough then you can just cut off the fake locs.

Then you wouldn’t go through the awkward messy stage.

Figure 6 Faux Locs and other hair for sale in a Chinese owned wholesale shop in Halfway Tree, Kingston & St. Andrew Jamaica 183

THE HEADLESS TAM? : BODILY TECHNOLOGIES AND BECOMING BOB MARLEY

“420! yaaas bitch! Yaaas” spills out of the mouth of an oddly distorted Bob Marley. There is something strange about the face, but the features are unmistakably Marley - the chiselled cheekbones and bushy eyebrows, the flared nostrils and smile lines, the furrowed brow, faint moustache and hint of a goatee, the brown skin. It is without a doubt Marley’s face. But the head, which moves as though separated from the white, t-shirt clad body it’s attached to, bobs in a bizarre way. A red, army green and golden yellow tam halos Marley’s head, it’s almost perfect roundness belying the texture of the implied locked hair underneath. The locs that jut out of the tam to frame Marley’s face are stiff and cartoonish, like they were haphazardly coloured in with marker, or Microsoft paint. There is awkward space between the locs and the head, the gap emphasized with each animated word. The voice, high pitched, is that of a teenaged girl. The words are out of character for Marley. The lips quiver with the lie.

Figure 7 Bob Marley Snapchat filter in use 4.20.2016 184

Thanks to social application Snapchat, White 18 year old, socialite and reality television personality Kylie Jenner, along with several other Snapchat users, could for a brief moment in time ‘be’ Bob Marley. On April 20, 2016 Snapchat released a filter that employed facial mapping technology to allow users to overlay Bob Marley’s face over their own. They could put on his face, wear his locs, don his tam, move in his dark skin and say and do whatever they pleased. For the 10 seconds or so that it took to take a picture or record a video using the technology, users became ventriloquists and Marley their dummy. Some took the opportunity to become Marley the entertainer, performing their favourite reggae songs over the Snapchat provided beat, others used Marley as a brief respite from corporate reality, taking snaps and becoming Marley against the backdrop of their bland office cubicles. Some, like Kylie Jenner, became Marley, patron saint of marijuana, overflowing with excitement about “420”. The result was that the man famed for musical rebellion and sparking the worldwide growth of Rastafari and Black and Afrocentric consciousness movements with lyrics such as “get up stand up for your rights” and “emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds” spoke “Yaaaas bitch! Yaaas” in celebration of the unofficial marijuana holiday, “420”. While Snapchat never openly acknowledged that the filter was aimed at celebrating marijuana or “420”, it was released on April 20, 2016, a day unofficially reserved for celebration of the herb. And as a Rastafari man, Bob Marley was well known for his open use of the herb as sacrament and for extolling its virtues in action, word and song. The filter’s release was greeted with the wrath of internet. Many called it racist, criticized Snapchat for supporting and enabling blackface, and condemned the application’s most followed user, Kylie Jenner, for cultural appropriation and naivety.

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Some took to Twitter to voice their disdain. @Eli1ah[4] said “The Bob Marley snapchat thing is blackface in 2016. Digital disrespect” and @RespectTheAfro_ said “All the things Bob Marley did, stood/fought for, & accomplished & he’s reduced to just a weed symbol for stoners. Amazing.” Several persons, including self-identified Jamaicans and Jamaican media, were most offended at the timing of the release. They argued that by releasing the filter on 420, Snapchat allowed Marley the legend to be overshadowed by his marijuana usage. An article in one of Jamaica’s major newspapers, The Jamaica Observer, argued that “the real issue, if any, is that Bob Marley's legacy is being reduced to little more than a common cannabis connoisseur.” (Buchanan 2016). The article went on to state that the filter would have been better suited for Bob Marley’s birthday, or Reggae Month. Had Snapchat released it then, then it would have been a celebration of the man or the music rather than of marijuana. The writer took issue then, not with the fact that the filter allowed people to wear Bob Marley’s skin, but rather, that it allowed the world to celebrate the wrong thing about Marley, or to know him for the wrong reasons. The author also gave a nod to the fact that Jamaica as a nation is also often associated with marijuana or ‘weed’ by the wider world. That the article said, “the real issue, if any” (emphasis mine) showed a resistance to acknowledging the potential racial and political implications of the filter. The author of the Jamaica Observer article resisted naming the filter blackface, stating plainly that “it doesn’t do anything ‘face swap’, another snapchat filter, doesn’t allow people to do”, thus refusing to question the implications of facial mapping software that allows for these fluxes in identity and presentation. The April 20, 2016 episode of the online news commentary show ‘The Young Turks, took a similar stance on the filter, arguing that the filter in itself was not ‘digital

186 blackface’ as some of its detractors had called it on social media. As with the Jamaica Observer article they discussed the filter at length in light of similar offerings by a Facebook owned app called MSQRD (pronounced masquerade). Like the embattled Snapchat filter, MSQRD enables users to don the faces of popular figures including Snoop Dogg and Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. Commentator and The Young Turks show creator Cenk Uygur was adamant that while blackface is abysmal, the Bob Marley snapchat filter and those by MSQRD did not qualify as such. This conclusion was arrived at based on an assumption about the intentions of the users of the software. Uygur identified blackface as something put on by White people to make fun of or denigrate Black people. However, with respect to the Snapchat and MSQRD technology said “…it’s not a white guy who goes ‘this will be funny’. This is putting your face on a black person’s face which actually could be considered complimentary. So that picture Brett just showed of the guy, it was a white guy with tats and stuff, he had put Obama on his face and melded the two together like he wants to be Obama” (The Young Turks 2016). For Uygur and The Young Turks commentators, the assuming of identity, the ventriloquism, and the digital wearing of black skin did not pose a problem, in fact from their perspective the imitation inherent should instead be read as a form of flattery. According to their argument the transposing of a black face over a white one, is not inherently problematic and should not be called racist unless accompanied by a racist caption or speech. The controversy surrounding Bob Marley is of particular interest because it also points to the ways in which diasporic symbols of blackness and black liberation are commodified and co-opted within marketplace and in this case, the cyber marketplace. Placing this instance of racial commodification in in the cybersphere in relation to

187 previously discussed tourist economies emphasizes how black political actions are appropriated by the dominant culture in a way that renders them non-threatening. Speaking of African-American music forms as a source for popular music in the West, Cornel West states that the important reason for this phenomenon is that “Afro-American music is first and foremost, though not exclusively or universally, a countercultural practice with deep roots in modes of religious transcendence and political opposition. Therefore, it is seductive to rootless and alienated young people disenchanted with existential meaninglessness, disgusted with flaccid bodies, and dissatisfied with the status quo” (West 1993). Though West speaks specifically to music in the continental USA his analysis can be applied to reggae music and the Rasta aesthetic both in the Jamaican and global contexts. The popular tourist souvenir - the ‘rasta-imposta’ – a tam with attached faux dreadlocks – and the centralization of the Rasta aesthetic in Jamaica’s tourism marketing, is an expression of racial fantasy whether in cyberspace or in tourist sites across the globe.

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Figure 8 'Rasta' tams with attached faux dreadlocs. Ocho Rios, Jamaica

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THE BIG BAMBOO: RACE, TOURISM AND DESIRE Along the old road to Ocho Rios stands the big bamboo. As a child the sight of this iconic oversized dark wood carving of a man with an erect penis the length of his leg was an indication that the journey along these winding roads was almost over and soon we would be emerging from the cool cover of Fern Gully and into the Ocho Rios of

Daiquiris, white people and white sands. Always, the statue was flanked by tourists laughing and taking pictures, wrapping their arms around its enlarged penis, making pseudo sexually suggestive poses in front of a backdrop of lush green ferns speckled with brightly coloured beach towels, dresses, and T-shirts.

Unlike in other Caribbean or distinctly Latinx spaces where the woman is hypersexualized – think the fiery Latina, within Anglo spaces like Jamaica it is often the man who is positioned as the hypersexualized figure. This is evident in tourism in the souvenirs and paraphernalia that positions the Black Rasta man as virile, “well-hung”, insatiable.

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Figure 9 Souvenirs for sale. Ocho Rios, Jamaica

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Figure 10 Souvenirs for sale. Ocho Rios, Jamaica

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Figure 11 Souvenir for sale. Ocho Rios, Jamaica

This chapter section examines the centrality of sex and desire in Jamaican tourism and in the creation and articulation of the national project. As seen from the souvenirs above the Black Jamaican man is perpetually hypersexualized and hypermasculinized in the service of tourism and the nation. Much attention has been given to the social, health and economic impacts of the framing of the Caribbean and Latin America as sexually permissive locales where anything goes. The majority of this work has been conducted in beached or rural spaces traditionally frequented by tourists (Kempadoo 2004; 1999; E. L. Williams 2013; B. C. Williams 2018; Pattullo 2005; Padilla 2008) and with sex workers informally employed in what Padilla calls the Pleasure Industry (Padilla). While I engage with this profound body of research, I am interested in addressing not only the hypersexualization of the Caribbean but also the sexual restrictiveness that becomes a part of Caribbean/ Jamaican national identity in the face of these common ideas of the 193

Caribbean as a primal, sexually permissive place. Throughout this section I draw connections between three main objects of inquiry. Firstly, the historical framing of Jamaica/the Caribbean as feminine conquerable space and of Kingston as masculine. Secondly, the presence and placement of sexually suggestive souvenirs and the creation of the Rastafari male as the ultimate sex symbol/object of desire. And thirdly, restrictions placed on women’s erotic autonomy framed by the state as progressive politics and an attempt to protect women from violence and corruption. I argue that the project of sexual restrictiveness is as important to the tourism product as the maintenance of the ideal of being a hedonistic paradise and that it is impossible to separate these processes from Jamaica’s racialised and sexualised history of colonial exploitation. I further argue that both the hegemonic hypersexualization of the black Jamaican male and the restriction of autonomy of the black Jamaican female work in the service of maintaining dependence. As Angelique Nixon succinctly states “discourses of paradise are inherently racialized, gendered, and sexualized because of and through the histories of slavery and colonialism” (Nixon 2017). This section deals with the impossibility of removing Jamaican tourism and national identity from that particular history and shows that the history both impacts and persists within present day imaginations of the island. I am particularly interested here in the politics of reputation and respectability (Gordon 1997; Wilson 1995; L. B. Thompson 2009; R. S. King 2016) and how the interplay of these archetypical forces create a contentious gendered landscape. The politics of respectability in Jamaica refers to the convergence of constructs of race and gender that are grounded in the island’s colonial past and that have been consolidated through the rise of fundamentalist evangelical discourse in the public

194 sphere. Jamaica was first a colony of Spain and then of England and as in many Anglo post-colonial societies, sexuality is heavily policed. Constructs of sexuality are very much tied to imaginations of the Caribbean itself as a virginal space, ripe for conquest and in need of discipline (Kempadoo 2004; 1999; Sheller 2012; G. Thomas 2007) Jamaica, and the Caribbean at large, existed in the service of the colonial power and the sole purpose of enslaved people was to labor and procreate. Within the colonial and slave economy, sex was at best utilitarian and black women were always available for sex. This alongside pervasive Victorian ideals that place highest value on a femininity grounded in motherhood, sexual restraint, and deference to manhood has created a space in which women’s sexual agency and erotic autonomy are seen as counter to the project of the nationstate. These ideals result in what M. Jacqui Alexander calls a “heteropatriarchial recolonization” (Alexander 2005). According to Alexander, heteropatriachical recolonization “operates through the consolidation of certain psychic economies and racialized hierarchies as well as within various material and ideological processes, initiated by the state both inside and beyond the law” (2005, 26). In Jamaica, that looks like the criminalization of anything outside of heterosexuality; state and elite attempts to repress ‘indisciplined’ (maybe unruly) feminists’ movements like the tambourine army; and the life in leggings campaign, state control of women’s sexuality and sexualized hegemony that sees women and girls as inherently and perpetually accessible to men. This new recolonization continues to construct the ideal woman as being passive, submissive, and quiet.

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Interlude 4.

It happens all at once. This speaking and silence, life and death, that breaks the connection between words and meaning and turns language on its head. Broken phrases, broken sentences hold possibility, hold everything. The full silence/ little death/ held breath is the suspension of time and space, awaiting release into a scream/noise. Death in excess of Western totalitarianism is generative. Oppressive language re-imagined, infused with silence and sound, becomes resistance.

enormous rhythm lie still in a circle of white smoke beat life out of elaborate rain scream

vision clouded with noise shhhh! sleep,

wake, born anew

From pauses pregnant with pain and possibility rise words and sounds filled in each burst with life. Improvised, ordered chaos obscuring meaning and intention. Few see through the blurriness/cloudiness/wondrously complex murkiness and find the riff below.

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Here in the silence, the break, the syncope, the excess, is this life we find or is it preservation? Is preservation the life we need? Is it a place protected from our erasing hypervisibility? A defense against the occularcentrism that objectifies? Making us seen and unseen in the same space and time? Do these breaks move us past the pleasure of/in our suffering? Are we a part of the everything held by this syncopated, invaginated, broken phrase/time/space/note/sentence? Do we live by choosing when to die, speak through masterful invocations of silence? In the ensemble of senses do we learn to be? In broken sentences, silences, noises, explosions, excesses, stopped breaths, words beyond meaning and language beyond words, the commodity speaks, the object resists.

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Chapter 5: Space and Place: Cartographies of Belonging

Black matters are spatial matters. - Katherine McKittrick

What is it to be home yet out of place? To be in place yet have no ownership of space? We easily take place for granted – our place in the world, place in a space. As Clifford Geertz notes in the afterword to Steven Feld and Keith Basso’s Senses of Place, as “something that is a dimension of everyone’s existence”, place or “the intensity of where we are, passes by anonymous and unremarked. It goes without saying.” (Geertz in Basso and Feld 1996). Yet, as Feld and Basso state “as people fashion places, so, too do they fashion themselves” (Basso and Feld 1996). Our very sense of identity is thus entangled with our sense of place as such place must be given full consideration in any discussion of identity and belonging. In this chapter, I explore the nuances of space and place and their relationship to race, nation, tourism, and belonging, considering seriously the interactions of the body with the space it inhabits. Casey implores us to recognize the crucial interaction between body, place, and motion (Casey 1996). As such the second chapter in this section is a chapter in motion – tracking a tour time – a day, and a tour of Kingston. Casey also points out that “lived bodies belong to places and help to constitute them but also that places belong to lived bodies and depend on them” as such the relationship between body and place, embodiment and emplacement is symbiotic. Without bodies, place is merely space. Thinking of place as more than merely physical, Casey goes further to explain that “places also keep such unbodylike entities as thoughts and memories” (1996, 25). The place for Casey is an event, “places not only are, they happen.” I explore Kingston, and

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Jamaica, as places and events and thus put Casey in conversation with Kincaid (Kincaid 2000) asking what happens to a place when it happens?

THE LIMITS OF BELONGING OR WHY CAN’T WE GO TO THE BEACH?

You’ll have to go online or call to make a reservation” The security guard told us, barely stepping out of his booth. “Do you do day-passes? Do you know what the local rate is per night?” I asked, well aware that several of the all-inclusive hotels, especially locally-owned ones, often provide a small discount for locals with ID. This hotel is owned by a Spanish conglomerate which now owns a chain of hotels in Jamaica. There is no local number to call. We pull over onto the curb and call the 800 number I find online. The recording is in Spanish. After selecting a litany of numbers, we are finally able to get some information about cost. Yes, they have a room available for the night. No, they don’t have specials for locals. And the standard price, at almost 800 USD per night (99,000JMD) is way more than we can afford. We head out in search of another beach access point. As we drive along, the water teases us through the bushes as we encounter guard posts, security barriers, and locked gates. We turn into one seemingly open gate only to be greeted by a crowd barrier and a sign saying, “beach full”. We reverse onto the main road and try the next entrance. The uniformed security guard at the post, puts down his Otaheite apple and says ‘private property” – guests only. He’s friendlier than the others we’ve met since day so I tell him that we’ve been weaving in and out of gates trying unsuccessfully to find an entry spot to the beach. He explains that it’s “ship day”. When a cruise ship “come een” or dock, the beaches are all closed to locals to give full access to the tourists from the ship.

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Giving up we turn back to drive towards Ochi town. There’s a plaza in town and the beach at the foreign franchise restaurant is small but it’s a beach nonetheless and while the food is Americanized, bland and expensive, patronizing the restaurant should grant us access to the beach. Walking along the boardwalk towards the sand, we see a cruise ship on the water. It’s blocking my view of the horizon. It is the horizon. Surrounded by cruisers and mostly white tourists, we settle into a spot on the beach, find a free chair on which to rest our towels and bag and try to catch the attention of one of the many waiters and waitresses walking from bar, to pool, to beach. No one comes. Eventually, I get up, approach the hostess stand, ask for a menu and order a drink for Tyrone and point to where we are sitting. We wait. I go back to the stand. We wait. Eventually, a waiter brings the menu and the drink. Shortly after, another staff member approaches and informs us that the beach area is for patrons only, anyone not patronizing the restaurant must pay $15USD for the use of the chair and the beach. We explain that we are patrons, we have after all, just ordered meals. It is clear she does not believe us. She tries to insist that we must still pay. When we resist, she walks away, presumably to get a manager. Witnessing what has just happened the young woman in the seat in front of ours walks over to us. She is also evidently Jamaican. “They said the same thing to us just before you got here” she says. “We’ve been here a while and I haven’t seen them approach anyone else.” Then it becomes clear, even if the fee does indeed exist, the requirement that it be paid – or the reproach is reserved for Jamaicans. Tyrone puts down his unfinished drink, I cancel our food order and we leave. Fatigued by our failure to find open accessible ocean in our own land, we get back into the car and head for Kingston where maybe being local isn’t criminal.

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In January 2017 academic and culture and development consultant Carolyn Cooper took up the issue of beach access, or the lack thereof in her newspaper column. Aptly titled No Beach for Local Tourists (Cooper 2017) Cooper’s article recounted her own experience of as she put it, “wast[ing] a lot of beach time looking for a beach”. Cooper and her carload of companions visited no less than five locations in Ocho Rios on New Year’s Day 2017 in an attempt to use the beach and were turned away at each one. The security guards or signs at each stop denied them access stating that the beaches in question were private. In her frustration, Cooper contacted the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), the main government agency responsible for the planning and implementation of urban development and rural modernization projects throughout Jamaica. According to her article, she received no response. The organization’s stated mission is “to improve the quality of life for citizens in designated areas through the planning and implementation of development projects including physical, secondary and social infrastructure and the delivery of quality service to clients” (udcja.com). They are as such responsible for several projects including the Hellshire beach, about which

Cooper rightly expressed serious environmental concerns54 and the Kingston waterfront redevelopment currently at the centre of the government’s city revitalization projects and campaigns.

Cooper said plainly that Jamaica’s beaches “should belong to all Jamaicans. Not just a few hoteliers”. In speaking of the plight of “local tourists who also want to enjoy the beauty of our homeland” Cooper intimated that the issue of beach access in the island boils down to race. She pointed a figurative finger at the Jamaica Tourist Board

54 There have been mounting concerns about the disappearing reef at Hellshire which incidentally is one of very few public beaches easily accessible to people living in the Kingston, St. Andrew and St. Catherine urban area. 201 highlighting that their advertisements for the North American market barely included black tourists and as such, neither local Jamaicans nor Jamaicans in the diaspora who visit the island on holiday can be recognised as tourists. “The issue of beach access may not just be about locals” Cooper states. “Perhaps for the JTB, the ideal tourist is not really black” (Cooper 2017). The issue of race, space and tourism is not new nor is it centralized to Jamaica. As Katherine McKittrick points out “while we all produce, know, and negotiate space – albeit on different terms – geographies in the diaspora are accentuated by racist paradigms of the past and their ongoing hierarchical patterns” (McKittrick 2006).

RUDE BWOY TOWN: KINGSTON, TOURISM AND A REGGAE REVIVAL

Here in the mornings I am greeted by Kingston Harbour. Most often it is impossibly tranquil. A ship or two sits quietly atop the water. Beyond the Palisadoes strip that leads to the airport, shades of blue kiss on the horizon. The water ripples ever so gently. The whole scene looks like a painting. There is life always at its edges – coconut trees stretch up, palms out, grass trying desperately to survive the dirt. If it’s early enough, there are men fishing, a woman praying/chanting/shouting, screaming; the occasional jogger, determined walker. There are cars zipping by, people meandering, chatting, hurrying, lazing; sometimes stopping to buy water, juice, snack, fruit. On the morning of the Friday I am set to meet Ajani55 for his guided tour of downtown Kingston, a few hours after I have looked towards St Thomas to watch the sun rise in the East, there is smoke rising up from West Kingston, a man’s body bobbing gently atop the almost still water to the south and blood and chaos beneath my feet.

55 Name changed 202

Inside the apartment, I am desperately trying to get my one year old ready for her first, possibly – no, definitely - unnecessary trip to the zoo. As I over pack the diaper bag, I hear in the distance shouting, explosions, screaming. Silence. A buzz that rises up again. Commotion is nothing new here. It often goes ignored. I peer over the balcony of my high-rise downtown Kingston apartment in an attempt to find the source of the noise, I see only cars, pedestrians, vendors, a man giving some unwilling driver directions on where or how to park. I see the ocean - still. I see no evidence of trauma, I don’t need to be affected by what I don’t yet know has happened below. There’s something about the ways that high-rise buildings separate you physically and metaphorically from life. The building itself has an interesting story, built in the 1970s as a part of that decade’s Kingston revitalization effort (revitalization is a recurring theme in Kingston), it and the two buildings that flank it – the Office Center building and the now defunct Oceana Hotel - form part of the Kingston ‘skyline’ recognizable as you approach the island by sea or air. The multi-use residential and commercial building now houses the Kingston Mall – the site of the tax office (where the tragedy occurred) and other governmental and private commercial entities on its ground floor and the Ocean Tower apartment complex populated largely by “uptown” aka elite middle-class Jamaicans in a “downtown” Kingston setting, on the floors rising above.

Jamaica’s designations of class are closely tied to colour, language and geography. Charles Carnegie writes that “Kingston is now, even more than in the past, a spatially and ideologically polarized place: sharply divided by class (and colour)” (Carnegie 2014). He goes further to say “these heightened divisions are continually reproduced at once discursively – by way of an elaborated cluster of symbolic representations often summarized in the binary oppositional “Uptown”/”Downtown”

203 trope and by the naming of antagonistic, closely defended zones downtown – and through the lifestyles and physical-spatial orientations of the city’s residents” (Carnegie 2014). Populated largely by Kingston’s elite and heavily manned by security guards, the Ocean Tower apartment complex sits at the cusp and in many ways epitomizes this polarization of Kingston. The morning of intimate yet relatively easily ignorable violence makes this polarization all the more stark. By the time we make it out of the apartment, it has become clear that death has visited the building. I do not yet have the full story, but from accounts from neighbours, friends, building security and others, I have gathered that a man and his common law wife lie in their own blood downstairs. As I walk across the mini bridge that connects the apartment building to the Urban Development Commission parking lot, I am careful to fight the urge to look over the railing for the bodies. I am well aware that I have that choice. I strap the baby into the car and drive out of the Orange Street exit of the building watching employees, staff, visitors and onlookers gathered outside the National Gallery, peering across into the base of Kingston Mall. I don’t start this section with the drama of this one morning to paint downtown Kingston as a sensationally or exceptionally violent place, but rather to showcase the complexities of space, race and class in a Kingston now being poised for tourist consumption and how race, class and citizenship privilege can allow us to choose how we process realities. I had not intended to write about violence. Jamaican by birth, heart, home – I was determined to buck that cliché. I had spent too much of my life defending Kingston to spend a chapter of this dissertation glorifying its violent and base clichés. Having spent the majority of my time living in the US trying to resist being reduced to the Jamaican stereotype or trope, I worked hard in this dissertation to avoid that trope. I

204 worked hard to avoid every trope. I tried to write a dissertation about the Caribbean without focusing on the beach (and have failed in some sense because the beach is a central part of what has made the Caribbean desirable) and I tried to write about Caribbean women without focusing on the tragic mulatta or jezebel, and I have tried to write about Kingston without centring violence. Like Thomas, I write about violence not to centre the murders or gangs or to be sensational, but rather to discuss the particular forms of imperial violence that are “foundational to the development and deployment of ideologies regarding citizenship” (D. A. Thomas 2011). The violence of Kingston is the violence of imperialism, neoliberalism and colonialism. Kingston’s violence and the ways that it manifests and is consistently revised and revitalized and covered as the city aims to control its image is not Kingston’s violence alone. This section aims to deal with ideas of reputation, resistance, expectations and blackness. It centralizes space in a discussion of tourism and national identity or belonging in Jamaica. Considering Kingston as black or contradictory space, it asks what is at stake in the centralization of Kingston for tourism. As such I also consider Kingston as a port of entry, a harbour, an airport, the first point of contact with Jamaica for tourists and returning residents. I examine the space adjacent to across from the airport – the activity that occurs along the airstrip as an essential component in writing any travel narrative. I write this as a travel narrative from a foreign local- someone at home trying to see through foreign eyes – not home enough, not foreign enough, not away enough. There is spiritual revival considering the religious revival form in Jamaica which as Barry Chevannes notes, makes no distinction between this world and the next (Chevannes 2006). It considers what it means for Kingston to collapse time in this way,

205 to move beyond those binaries and extend beyond its stereotypes and expectations. I pull on this as a form also because while living in Kingston the waterfront spot in front of my apartment was often visited by a typical revivalist woman in the mornings as well as a revival type worship group on Wednesday mornings. I wondered what it is about this space that attracted this spiritual resurgence or spiritual grounding and why here. There is also something here about the ways that the revival of Kingston as a tourist destination and as a city is predicated upon this kind of magical negro, spirituality idea of Rastafari. This location is also home to the Edna Manley’s Negro Aroused statue and considering revival as a sort of arousal, I consider also the place of Manley’s work in the creation of Jamaican national identity and more specifically in the framing of Kingston. The section also focuses on the place of art in Kingston’s latest revival considering the public work of Edna Manley – the statue at the waterfront – the place of cultural spaces like the National Gallery, the Institute of Jamaica and Liberty Hall. I section this chapter in the frame of revivals also because the language of change in Kingston has surrounded this rhetoric of revival. The media today speaks of Kingston’s revitalization. The word revival means “an improvement in the condition or strength of something; an instance of something becoming popular, active, or important again; a new production of an old play or similar work; a reawakening of religious fervour, especially be means of a series of evangelistic meetings; a restoration to bodily or mentor vigour, to life or consciousness, or to sporting success. It means improvement, recovery, rallying, picking up, amelioration, upturn, upswing, resurgence. The revival is a comeback, reestablishment, restoration, reappearance, resurrection, regeneration, renaissance, rejuvenation. Revitalize. Revive, boost, resuscitate. The interesting thing about the framing of Kingston’s current change projects as a revitalization or restoration assumes that Kinston once had glory to be

206 returned to. It assumes Kingston as a once beautiful and desirable place now run down, a place in need of being returned to its once greater place – to be revitalized. But Kingston has always somewhat grappled with this reputation of squalor or of undesirability. Kingston has always been in need of vitality but also been vitality in itself. Considering this I wonder what the meaning of the revival of Kingston is, for whom is Kingston being ‘revived’ restored or revitalized? The desirability of Kingston lies in its very resistance to being desired. Tourism in Jamaica has long been centred on the nation’s beached north-coast. However, with a current global push towards experiential travel, and Jamaica seeking ways to diversify its tourism product, there has been renewed interest in the re-development of Kingston as a tourist destination. This push has been accompanied by the city’s recent designation as a UNESCO creative city of music in line with the marketable image of Kingston as reggae’s mecca, the heartbeat of Jamaica’s rich culture, and the clear vantage point from which to have the true or real ‘Jamaican experience’. Ironically, this lives alongside Kingston’s undesirable reputation as a nucleus of violent crime. So, what is this ‘real Jamaican’ experience that Kingston stands to offer and how is it consumed? The Jamaica Tourist Board’s website visitjamaica.com, describes Kingston as ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘one-of-a-kind’ as well as as a ‘half exotic jungle, bursting with sunshine, and half thriving business.’ The description goes further to say, “with plenty to see and do, Kingston is a crash course in the island of All Right.” I am curious about the Jamaica Tourist Board’s framing of nation’s capital in this way. This framing of Kingston as a “half-exotic jungle” along with the safari-esque motifs – white helmet like safari hat, double breasted shirts, lapels, wide belt etc - present in the uniforms of the tourist police officers, placed in areas heavily trafficked by tourists, presumably to protect them from

207 harassment by locals – is in line with an idea of Kingston, and Jamaica at large, as a feral space in need of control, a space to be consumed from a safe distance – close enough for photographs, far enough to ensure safety – from the window of a jeep, or behind the lens of a camera. Kingston, the half-exotic jungle, feels in this framing a step up from the zoo. The idea of Kingston, and Jamaica at large, as a dangerous place, in need of control to allow for consumption is not new. At the burgeoning of the tourism industry in the late 1800s, Jamaica had to deal with a less than stellar image. As Frank Fonda Taylor recounts in his text “to hell with paradise” Jamaica had earned itself the reputation as the “White man’s graveyard”. Taylor examined the idea of Jamaica as a pestilence-ridden place of sure death for colonists and chronicles the development of Jamaica’s tourism industry as a consciously made decision with economic impetus. The creation of Jamaica, the tourist destination involved the alteration of landscape and language surrounding it and heavy promotion of the island as a tourist destination in the wake of the failure of other exploitative industries such as sugar, banana and bauxite. The process of Jamaica becoming a viable tourism destination was one orchestrated through a series of images and propaganda, a process named tropicalization which as articulated by Krista Thompson describes the complex visual systems through which Caribbean islands were imaged for tourist consumption and the social and political implications of these representations on actual physical space on the islands and their inhabitants. Framing Kingston as exotic, the Tourist Board manages to other the nation’s capital. It places the nation’s capital as alien and asks the potential tourist to hold fast to the idea that Jamaica is the idyllic, paradisiacal charm of the all-inclusive hotel advertisement – the white sand beach, the blue water, the smiling waiter, all while inviting them to experience Kingston’s grittiness through tours or a mediated lens.

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Kingston is othered, but not entirely outside, as it is only ‘half-exotic’, still it is a jungle – which according to the dictionary is “a confused or disordered mass of objects, something that baffles or frustrates by its tangled or complex character. Or, a place of ruthless struggle for survival”. The Tourist Board’s Kingston is exotic, only partly Jamaica, and a Jungle not a zoo, making guidance or tours necessary for voyeurism and navigation. The emphasis on ‘half-thriving business’ and ‘bursting sunshine’ prepares the visitor for poverty, despair and struggle, all handled of course with a smile. In so doing, it plays all too easily into the Sambo, or happy, carefree, negro stereotype familiar in the American racial landscape. It prepares the tourist – and maybe also the ‘uptown’ or elite Jamaican - to witness poverty and consume struggle without ever having to question the colonial history and global positionality fraught with raced, gendered and classed power dynamics that have placed people in a position of despair. The insistence on naming Kingston “a crash course in the island of all-right” leaves no space for positive change. If all is already all right, then there is no need to work towards making things better. In March of 2016 the New York Times published an article about what it identified as a shift in Jamaican tourism. The article, Jamaica, Beyond the Beach, chronicled the author’s short Jamaican vacation and search for the Jamaica that exists outside the exclusive, all-inclusive hotels the island has become so well known for. The article’s subheading, “The nation is recasting itself as a glamour and eco-tourism destination, but its African-inflected culture is what lulls you” (Torregrosa 2016) however, in itself seems to speak to a disparity between what Jamaica itself aims or hopes to be seen as, and the way the island is continually perceived by the rest of the world. After a brief foray into Jamaica’s history of British colonialism and exploitation and a quick mention of our economic dependence on tourism, the author uncritically returns to

209 the fantasies of colonialism – which have in many ways become the fantasies of tourism – in the exoticized way in which she speaks of a folkloric, consumable Jamaica. “For all three centuries that Britain ruled Jamaica, though, the island’s deepest influence is not English. It is African. It is folk magic, spiritual and superstitious… Folk magic out of West Africa, not unlike Haiti’s voodoo and Cuba’s Santeria, feeds the Jamaican belief in superstition, witches and ghosts. Magic runs through a pervasive fundamentalist and evangelical Christian society that breeds revivalist cults that speak in tongues and believe in spirit possession. Rastafarians are something else. Born out of poor and black Jamaicans, they worship inner divinity, hold ganja smoking as sacrament and are as essentially Jamaican as reggae.” The problem here lies not in the author’s acknowledgement of Jamaica’s African roots but rather in the ways her framing of Jamaica lends itself to a pervasive and damaging magical negro trope. The term nods to the noble savage character in a film whose sole aim is to come to the aid of the white protagonist. The magical negro exists to serve the White visitor, the White hero, she never uses her powers to aid herself. The character is exceedingly wise, patient, and of course benign. I am interested in the ways that urban Kingston is framed as the site of this kind of rural, exotic, essentially black space. In how both in the Tourist Board and the New

York Times framing, Kingston is wild and untameable, and it seems there is no desire to get it “under control”

Do you think she knew she’d be on the ground? Flat on her back in her t-shirt and shorts? Sticks scraping at her bare legs Blonde hair picking up stones, bottle caps and dirt? Do you think she knew when she stepped off the bus Camera in hand 210

Smile on curious face That spirit would tek her? Open her mouth and Roll her eyes, Send her spinning. Lift her up And drop her down Backwards Sudden Straight like plank?

Do you think she knows she’s fallen?

Do you think he knew when he told them laughing about the praying women in blue and white and red That these people from foreign Who punctuate everything between hello and goodbye wid ‘irie’ and ‘yah man’ and ‘feel alright’ would want to do more than just see What revival feel like in Kingston city On a Wednesday afternoon?

When he parked the hiace likkle bit down from the coconut man And told them to get out, and tek picture, and shake hand Give him a break To wash down a bag of peanut wid a ice cold jelly Chat to a friend and idle likkle bit Do you think he knew Looker would become lookee?

Maybe him forget Dat kingston water heavy wid all kinds of blood And ship did dock here wid black and white some on top And some beneath But spirit see and know dem all And none of dem as pure as they would like to believe

Maybe him forget Dat wi pray to black god wid white face 211

Cause dats di way di story come find wi. Seh wi bawl Jehovah and beat kette drum Light candle, sing sankey, and pour out likkle rum And when we bawl fi holy spirit All who know wi come

Him never remember That we wrestle not against flesh and blood Though spiritual wickedness have human face And is plenty of dat did gwaan in dis place

But plenty joy and laughter too Like gran market when wi dress up inna christmas best And sell and buy Carrot and onion and mulberry And chicken and hog And wood box weh maas george mek And Eunis smile and spin Cause she get a brand new dress

Him never remember That is was the land of blood and tears And sweat and work And laughter and love And ancestors power is still here In the palm In the water In the dirt In the breeze

And is not someting to play wid

And now he’ll have to explain What he forgot he knew and understood Woman you’ve been cursed. Woman you’ve been blessed.

The magical negro or noble savage, has been uncorrupted by modernity and civilization. Uncorrupted by the presence of the other, is innately and inherently good, wild and uncivilized. In the context of film, and of tourism, the magical negro ensures safety. It is

212 a disciplining trope. One which in the context of Kingston, and in the context of Rastafari as written by the New York times author, works to remove any threat of violence, poverty, despair or reality. If the tourist can consume Rastafari as “something else” or the revivalist as “magical” then there is no need to engage with the sociopolitical realities of these movements. This kind of compartmentalization makes possible the tourist’s and the tourist board’s disavowal of Kingston’s historical complexity and current realities. As I shoot up Orange Street through Parade, Crossroads, New Kingston, Liguanea, up to the newly renovated Hope Zoo with my toddler (who like the lion we came to see only wants to sleep) to meet a community of mostly White, mostly expatriate and tourist moms for a baby field-trip, I am exceedingly aware of Kingston’s complexity. By the time I make it Uptown to Hope Zoo, through the idyllic Hope Gardens, I have entered a different world. I mention the shooting in Kingston Mall, the body on the ocean, and the smoke rising from West Kingston to a few of the moms I have met for this expensive zoo play date. They are unaware and somewhat unconcerned. It’s not an overly intentional lack of care. It is more that I am not speaking to them about places their lives will take them, or about people in whose lives they have much reason to be invested. I speak of a different Kingston than the firmly controlled space we stand in at the Zoo. I almost wish Ajani would cancel. Kingston’s dichotomies have exhausted me enough for one day. Being a ‘tourist’ uptown in the hot zoo while thinking about the events of actual life downtown did not make for a good morning. I can’t imagine now being a tourist in downtown Kingston as well. When he does pick me up in his jeep we travel the same route I did earlier in the morning. Orange Street as usual is bustling with people. It’s the middle of the day. People cross the streets without much regard for vehicles. Vehicles move ahead without much regard for people. Colours are bright. Paint

213 is peeling. All the scenes of the half-thriving tropics tourists with enough privilege to seek a step back from luxury seem to desire. At the top of Parade there is a bus loading area. As the men shuffle people onto the bus, shouting, pushing, shoving and grabbing, Ajani explains that the sight usually initially frightens the tourists he takes through this area. More often than not, they think they have stumbled into some kind of major riot or fight. He waits for the moment their faces show that they have started to remember all the forewarnings about ‘Kingston the dangerous’, and maybe have begun to rethink their foolish, foolish decision to seek out the ‘real Jamaica’. Once they have sufficiently built up a sense of fright, he steps in as the knowledgeable guide, to explain that despite the appearance of chaos, all they are really witnessing is people boarding a bus. Playing on people’s expectations, the ploy works every time. Ajani is a wealth of knowledge. As we drive through downtown Kingston he regales me with stories of the city’s rich music history, pointing out recording studios, record shops, former homes and more. He is incredibly aware of my own position as a Kingstonian and researcher and intersperses his prepared tour with stories of why, how and when he chooses a particular style of delivery. The tours he gives are personalized, detailed and intimate – a departure from some of the government sponsored tours that bus tourists through the city and then stop at pre-designated points for food and photos – and his clientele range from the mildly adventurous traditional tourist seeking a day away from the all-inclusive hotel, to the uber wealthy traveller dealing in Kingston as an alternate experience because luxury is the norm. While we eat lunch at Ibo Spice cookshop, up a set of precariously perched stone steps, hidden away behind zinc and a partially crumbling wall, surrounded by clothes

214 drying on the line, he explains that he takes visitors to these locations in an attempt to ‘spread the wealth’. By patronizing these community establishments, he hopes he is ensuring that the almighty tourism dollar reaches the ‘common man’. But he and I both know that there are major barriers to this under the current tourism system. For one, the current tourism policies require that locations licensed by the Board have adequate parking, restrooms, and insurance before they are able to accept visitors. And while it makes perfect sense to have such rules in place to ensure the safety and comfort of visitors, it makes meaningful and profitable engagement in Kingston’s re-emergence as tourism destination near impossible for the communities and people who are the subjects of tours. Ajani’s own position as a middle-class, well-travelled, business-savvy Jamaican makes him poised to benefit from the resurgence of tourism in Kingston in a way that the communities he guides tourists through are not. This is a major challenge of the projects currently centred on a revival or resurgence of Black political action or space. They for the most part arise out of the middle classes and as such adhere to middle class ideals and still limit access for the majority of Jamaicans. Ajani’s tourism product certainly creates more contact between visitor and tourist than the enclave style all-inclusive and also certainly works to aide the community, but these projects – like Ajani’s and Jah V’s fail to bring about structural change.

SPACE, CLASS, AND THE REGGAE REVIVAL

“The name was originally the Jamaica Revival” Dutty Bookman tells me. This is a conversation long overdue. I tell him a bit about the project generally, the spiel I always

215 seem to start with even though I’m not so sure how much it actually means to people, whether or not it resonates – I’m writing about tourism and national identity and radicalism and reggae and some other things I can’t quite remember right now. We had just spent the first ten minutes or so of this talking about our children and their antics and we would end the conversation talking about our mothers. My IRB56 renewal came back with a question asking me how I would identify interviewees – this is how: I have known them all my life. This is the problem of that ‘insider-outsider’ kind of research isn’t it? I want to tell them I’ll send out a Facebook message to my high school graduating class, or maybe to my kindergarten group, or to my cousins, or friends – the whole thing is weird. I ask him something about where the name came from, the movement and then the reactions to the name – it’s a lot of question – but throwing a lot out there somehow feels more conversational, I learnt from my chats with Lesley that trying to keep things formally informal only contributes to awkwardness. “It was an attempt to control the narrative” he says. He had recognized that a movement was already well underway years ago in 2010/2011. There seemed to be a resurgence of what he called ‘Reggae consciousness’ and there was a general interest in it from people within and outside of Jamaica. Realizing that something was afoot he said to the people involved, “we should name it so that people don’t control the narrative.” The deliberateness of this naming is an indication that unlike other movements this one has been carefully crafted and curated from the very beginning. He sees the movement as a Jamaican Revival – a revival of all arts – as something that necessarily extends far beyond Reggae into visual art, literary art and as he put it most importantly activism. At some point - maybe in an interview – Protoje (one of the key early artistes) called it the

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Reggae Revival and he – Dutty – had no objections to the name because it came from within the community and that was his aim – to ensure that the narrative was controlled by community members and artistes rather than by the media and consumers. The movement rose quickly. There was a name but no definition. They had named this movement the Reggae Revival but there had been no time to define what Revival meant. This, Dutty says, is what led to confusion and contention around the name. The artistes and activists would talk about it in different ways in interviews. Despite the intense critique that this lack of definition resulted in, Dutty holds that the malleability was a positive thing, because it meant that the movement was organically developed and defined. It was organic and honest – not confined to the boundaries of thought of any one person. By the time the second generation of Reggae Revival artistes rose to popularity, the name and idea of the movement as a Reggae Revival were concreate. The movement had grown out of the few bounds set by its originators. The new generation of artistes had an understanding of it that was not attached to the definitions of the originators. – it was definitively the Reggae Revival – and the 2nd generation of artists, not having been there for the original conversation spoke about it in a different way – and maybe that is what some of the detractors reacted to. Dutty identified the first generation or the first crop of artists as Nomaddz, Protoje and Jah-9 – all very Kingston centered, and I notice also a part of a particular kind of class trajectory and a particular kind of artistry. The 2nd crop he identifies as Kabaka Pyramid, Chronixx, Jesse Royal, Kelissa and Keznamdi and then says and included those not in the Kingston scene like Iba Mahr out of Linstead et al. That he highlights – Iba Mahr as different because he was not a part of the Kingston scene is telling. The Reggae Revival is decidedly Kingston (and Spanish Town) centric and Kingston is using the

217 movement as the foundation of its revival or revitalization as a space. Dutty tells me there was a conscious effort to be inclusive to push it beyond the space of Kingston alone. That there needed to be effort to expand beyond Kingston is a sign of the city’s centrality to the Reggae Revival. He goes back to talking about the name or the idea and ties it to the Harlem Renaissance – “I was thinking about the Harlem Renaissance he says and how it was an era of arts development and now it’s an era that when you google it you can get a wealth of info about a time and place” he says. “The idea was to keep using one name – to keep controlling the narrative to build something that would be instantly recognizable by name.” He doesn’t say it explicitly, but the Reggae Revival brand, much like Jamaica. A major aim in the codifying of the movement into a named brand was the drive of himself and the artistes to make a conscious effort to make money from their art. All being highly educated or exposed, financially literate and culturally and socially savvy, they knew that controlling an idea or narrative would be the best way to capitalize upon it. And Dutty and other members of the movement say this openly. There is no shying away from the market. This, I think is a part of what makes Reggae Revival so unique, they’re all people with the means and the tools to control the narrative. Dutty continues, “I was also thinking about like the Renaissance in Europe like we learnt in high school” – I can see that this is how his mind works – making connections of disparate things – but he didn’t want to call it Renaissance, didn’t want to be so closely associated with these things (this is not what I expected when he started talking about the Harlem Renaissance – I expected the connection he made to be about Blackness or revolution or arts as change or something instead of about branding, but I digress).

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But Jamaica already had its renaissance he says, in the 60s and into the 70s but we get so fixated on Bob Marley that we forget all of what happened in that era and all the other artistes that rose up. I find myself thinking on the term revolutionary and what that means and what it means to name oneself a revolutionary. He explains the Jamaican Renaissance – that there was an uprising of conscious thought and music and art in the 60s and 70s and then said basically US imperialism destabilized Jamaican culture because they realized that it was the culture that was Jamaica’s biggest strength and it wasn’t about how strong we were politically or economically but rather that the culture was far reaching and penetrating US reality and controlling global media and so there was a moment of derailing the culture or pushing away from conscious things into dancehall – he says but is careful not to demonize dancehall culture, he names Reagan but doesn’t name Jamaican politicians. The Reggae Revival of this period he says, is really a revival of the energy from the 70s. I ask him about the resistance to the movement and the resistance to the idea of revival in the name – the common sentiment from detractors being that by calling it a revival there was an implication that Reggae was dead. He talks a conference panel he sat on with elder Chinna Smith at University of the West Indies in February of 2013. Well known guitarist and musician and elder in the music, Reggae and Rastafari communities, Chinna Smith took great offence to the name and the idea that it implied that Reggae had been dead – Reggae never died Chinna Smith said on that panel. Meanwhile, Dutty held that it wasn’t that Reggae was dead but rather that it was stagnant in mainstream Jamaican society. The movement he said was also in response to the state of dancehall at the time, a moment in which people were literally calling themselves demons (Tommy smith) glorifying violence and murder etc. But the

219 elders were upset and saw it as disrespectful to the work they had been putting in – And Dutty acknowledges that things happened so fast in terms of the naming and the movement that in many conversations they didn’t stop to consider the previous revivals – like Sizzla and Capleton et al in the 90s and the One Drop Riddim period of the early 2000s. He also faced major critique for living outside of Jamaica – the ability to live abroad and remain actively engaged with Jamaica is a sign of privilege. “It was an uptown thing (a upper class thing) – and we’ve never shied away from that” he says, “the uptown thing or it being an upper class thing, maybe it is, but does that mean that we can’t contribute to the culture?” and this is the class analysis I think I’ve been looking for or maybe it’s just a further complication of that. Unlike the Reggae of the 1970s, the safe spaces of this movement are not in the inner city. The movement originated Uptown. I tell him the story of my experience at the Chronixx concert on Skyline Drive where a woman entering the venue shouted to her friend that “she never know suh much Brown people deh a Jamaica”, an open commentary on the class and colour demographics of the audience. After some thought he says, “yes it attracts a certain crowd, a Brown, middle class crowd.” Despite awareness of this Dutty rubbishes the class critique as problematic by stating that people come to Rastafari and to consciousness in different ways. People find Rasta at different points in life and the holier than thou attitude that closes off the movement is troubling is the sum of what he says. “Shouldn’t it be that people are all grateful or happy for the message and that the message is out there that there is the consciousness? Instead of trying to determine or put boundaries on who can own the culture?”

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“And in all this” he continues “the activism part of it gets lost.” People focus on the music and on the class dynamics and miss what he sees as the core of the movement – a youth arts collaboration and later social intervention program called Manifesto JA. He identifies the multiple layers of the movement which engages the visual arts, from music videos to designing covers and graphics, there was a deliberate collaboration with people across art forms – a deliberate intent to bring everyone. A major part of Manifesto Jamaica’s aim has been to show people how they can earn from the arts. He gave nod to other movements taking place in Kingston, such as Paint Jamaica, Plant Jamaica and Kingston Creative and named these as all connected to the Reggae Revival through their own roles in what he calls an artistic awakening. “The idea was that we can do what we want for ourselves – making money from our own creativity and there was resistance to that” he says. Dutty says that the awakening of the Reggae Revival has been artistic as well as spiritual and points to the heavy involvement of the artistes in a rising Yoga movement in uptown Jamaica. I ask again about class dynamics and access and whether or not this would have been possible otherwise. He frames the Reggae Revival as part of a worldwide shift in consciousness and connects it to movements such as the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street saying that this is Jamaica’s own manifestation of this time in human history. “Those were political and economic action” he says, “and in Jamaica, it’s the Reggae Revival, which is creative action, but that is our thing. We’ve always moved through or with the creative” When I ask what’s next, my question is met with confusion. And I suppose it is a strange question to ask when something is in its prime. I want to know about commodification but feel like in this context that is not the right question to ask,

221 especially since it is clear that this movement is already so market conscious. Maybe commodification has been the aim about owning the goods instead of just being the goods. “There’s a new generation” he says “and there’s an openness with them.” “This generation – Us broadly” he continues “has been the first generation actively invested in making things better for the next generation.” When I ask him how that impacts the music he says “The new generation of artistes are more open in singing what they want to sing about. In the beginning – like in Jah9s or Protoje or maybe even Chronixx early songs there was a pushing of Rastafari, they felt they had to start there and then branch out – the artists now are more open and feel more liberated to move straight to a different kind of message they can just be Rasta there’s no need to push it down anyone’s throat. Now we write our own stories with different intent. The expectation of a Rasta message from Reggae singers doesn’t exist so much anymore.” I wonder what this means for the message. “We are influencing the politicians and influencing tourists to see the importance of cultural tourism to Jamaica” he says. “It’s not just about white sand tourism – Reggae Revival is and has been bringing tourists to Kingston, because Kingston is the real culture and what tourists want to see is the real culture!”

Once we package and sell ‘authenticity’ is it still real? In 2014 a vice.com interviewer asked Protoje how he felt about the Jamaican government’s centralizing this new roots reggae movement in their latest tourism push. Protoje’s response was “Yes, it could have a negative effect…but we are not about to let the government come in and control our music and twist it in a way they want. We see tens of thousands of people when we perform at festivals, so, yes, we are already a big

222 part of the tourism industry…but we’re telling it authentically of what is Jamaica right now.” Like previous generations of Reggae artistes the music speaks directly to the sociopolitical issues facing Jamaicans, however these artistes largely have the means or the skill to be able to control their own positioning in the market and through the internet are able to speak broadly and openly. I have found it interesting that several of them directly chastise Jamaica’s tourism marketing machine, even as they receive sponsorship or support from them. Kabaka Pyramid’s ‘Well done’ music video for example opens with the sound of the ocean and a vintage style photo album featuring a picture of a perfectly idyllic beach scene. The water is blue, the sand white, the coconut trees are tall and lanky and the skies perfectly clear with the exception of a rainbow. Nestled in the sand beside a red and white beach umbrella and towel set is a hipster-esque vintage radio. In the corner of the frame is the blurred tip of a hibiscus flower. As the camera zooms in the images come to life. A fluttering hummingbird centers the screen. As the camera follows the hummingbird across the vista it pans across a driftwood sign on which “Welcome to Jamaica” is written in a pink font reminiscent of that used by the Jamaica Tourist Board. Beyond the sign a pink outlined black pyramid sits in the sand. The camera zooms in taking us into the pyramid where we find Kabaka Pyramid dressed in black in an all black room. Directly behind him, lightning occasionally flashes parts of images into vision. The first one is vaguely recognizable as a Jamaica Tourism poster featuring large banana leaves and the word ‘Jamaica’ in bold green letters. The lyrics “inna yuh face dem a smile up, behind yuh back a money dem a pile up, try fi start yuh business and dem quick fi spoil up” pop up at the right corner of the screen. The song’s chorus “well done, well done, Mr. Politician Man” is accompanied by fireworks and the text “Well Done Mr.

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Politician man, you’ve done such a great job selling out our country” as Kabaka sings “you done a wonderful job a tear down wi country demolition man” The sarcasm is palpable. The rest of the video features Jamaican reggae and dancehall musicians and public figures all sarcastically applauding the government for their dangerous and exploitative policies. There is a cartoon drawing of a red devil sitting on a plane and toasting champagne with a woman, presumably Portia Simpson Miller since she was Jamaica’s Prime Minister at the time. A Skull and crossbones drawing on the wall is labelled IMF. Another cartoon shows the island of Jamaica being literally consumed by ships. The green island sits in the middle of a painted blue ocean and Jamaica is written in the lower left corner in the familiar font of the Jamaica Tourist Board’s marketing. As Kabaka sings “Di hotels and the beaches, di Spanish dem go screechie” the island is approached from all angles by several boats featuring shark fins and towers of gold coins. They quickly consume the island, growing their stack of gold coins and leaving nothing of Jamaica in the centre of the sea.

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Interlude 5.

The object has no choice but to resist To break the sentence And fracture the phrase Smash the lens And shatter the frame

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Conclusion: After Paradise

I mindlessly sing along to the chorus of the Tony Rebel song that’s been tacked on to the end of the announcement on loop in the departure lounge of Kingston’s Norman Manley International Airport. After encouraging travellers to shop at the range of airport restaurants and souvenir shops in what it calls the “uniquely Jamaican airport” the voice booming from the loudspeaker is overtaken by the familiar tune and lyrics “Reggae music a play and Reggae artist a chant, A yah so mi born and mi nah transplant, What a nice place fi live, sweet Jamdown….”. The song is missing a line. Where it should be the man’s rich singing voice repeats, “what a nice place fi live.” Watching the mumbling mouths of others waiting for their flights I notice that those of us who know this song as well as we know ourselves, easily add on the missing “the only problem is, dollars nah run.” This is something we know to be true, ‘Jamdown’ is sweet, it’s sometimes a nice place to live, but sometimes money is scarce, and life seems unfair, and there is stress and strain and struggle, and crime and corruption and death all in the midst of life, art, beauty and success. Jamaica is sweet but it’s not paradise – home rarely is. Jamaica is rough, but it’s not hell. The competing and pervasive “hell’ and “paradise” narratives both lack nuance and complexity and create caricatures of a place and people so rich with contradiction. To be Jamaican is to be home in a place that others see only as somewhere to visit. And in many ways, and for many people, that means living in service of the creation and maintenance of an inaccessible and impossible paradise. To be Jamaican is to straddle multiple contradictions. It is to be an independent nation dependent on

226 neocolonial tourism. It is to be interpellated as Black by the world while the nation identifies itself as multiracial and multicultural. The service of Blackness has always been central to modern Jamaica and in the afterlife of slavery and colonialism even though Blackness the majority it is not dominant. While this project has tried to eschew the reductivism of assuming that tourism is a direct continuation of plantation slavery, it is evident that are connections and continuities. The tenor of the plantation remains evident in modern relationships to Blackness, Black art, Black thought, the Black body and Black space. Centuries removed from the plantation, these Black forms are made to labour in the service of White leisure and we struggle to reconcile life in the liminality of the Plantation’s afterlife. To identify or discuss the afterlife of colonialism in Jamaica is not to assert that Jamaica has failed independence nor is it to lessen the struggle for independence or the power of Jamaica as an autonomous nation. Rather, it is an acknowledgement of the ways colonialism has birthed an antiblackness that remains present even in black spaces such as Jamaica and the Caribbean more broadly. That antiblackness remains, is intrinsically linked to Jamaica’s or the Caribbean’s history of colonialism. As Christina Sharpe states, “Antiblackness is as pervasive as climate” (Sharpe 2016) and the tropicalization/reframing of Jamaica was/is indicative of global antiblackness. That

Jamaica as an independent nation, finds itself dependent on tourism for its survival is part of global, hegemonic project of creating and maintaining dependent Black nations. Black spaces globally are lumped into categories of needy or dependent (African nations, Haiti) or exotic, lascivious, and servile (Caribbean, South and Central America) and always these persistent images compete and live simultaneously with ideas of these same nations

227 as dangerous places or places of contagion (Africa, Haiti), and crime and corruption (Africa, Caribbean, South and Central America). In the wake of colonialism these nations unable to reconcile these contradictory images that they/we did not create/originate instead simultaneously embrace and resist them. We play the game – making and singing anti-establishment music at events sponsored by the Jamaica Tourist Board, by ‘harassing’ tourists, by refusing to register small businesses so that we can focus tours to support on small individual vendors/entrepreneurs rather than on large establishments/chains. This stretching within the system/contextual resistance makes only small change but it is necessary for survival. It seems naïve to talk about Black futures in a Jamaica where Black death is so ever present that it’s a part of our bodily and language lexicon, where so many of us live waiting for our turn with ill-fate, where I could say without exaggeration that everyone knows someone who has lost their life to violence, where most struggle to meet daily needs and we face the exploitation of neoliberalism and the perpetuation of the violence of imperialism, where we are drowning in the wake of the plantation and selling other people nostalgia of a time when we were even less free. I know it seems naïve to talk about Black futures when I’ve spent an entire dissertation talking about the presence of the legacies of the past, and our struggles for citizenship and belonging at home. Maybe I am naïve, or overly privileged or protected, to want to talk about future when for so many, the present is so hard. But if the plantation persists, so does revolution, and if hegemony is extensive, so is resistance. And maybe it is constantly co-opted, and mainstreamed, and faux locs get sold in the Chinese wholesale stores, and Reggae music gets played at the hotel bar, but somehow it regenerates, because that is the nature of resistance.

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Fevered and laughing we make flowers out of broken glass.

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Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso Books.

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