From Judah to Jamaica: the Psalms in Rastafari Reggae

RELIGION and the ARTS Religion and the Arts 16 (2012) 328–356 brill.nl/rart From Judah to Jamaica: The Psalms in Rastafari Reggae Joseph Thompson* University of Alaska, Fairbanks Abstract Rastafari reggae bears a profound but problematic relation to the Judeo-Christian biblical texts, particularly the Psalms. Involving multiple religious and cultural transmissions, orders of intertextuality, the adaptation of Judaic psalms into reggae songs clearly constitutes some form of appropriation, an act of reinterpretation that has religious, political, cultural, and ethnic implications. This analysis aims to reconcile conflicting narratives explicating this relation and reinterpretation, approving the creative adaptation of biblical texts while resisting a trend in some of the prominent Rastafari scholarship to diminish or denigrate the Judaic experience out of which those texts originate. Rather than a form of “hijacking”—a favored metaphor in the recent secondary literature—the appropriation and transformation of the Psalms into Rastafari reggae is better understood as a tribute to the enduring power, relevance, and appeal of the biblical texts. The two forms of religious art enrich and reinforce one another, representing original and ongoing traditions of words and music as revolutionary cultural resistance and spiritual empowerment. Keywords Rastafari culture, Afro-Caribbean, reggae music, Bob Marley, Book of Psalms, Jamaican identity, Babylon and Zion, Nathaniel Samuel Murrell astafari reggae—the intersection of the two distinctly and defĳini- Rtively Jamaican phenomena, the millenarian religious movement and the popular music form—has been the object of extensive sociological, religious, and cultural investigation for decades (Chevannes, Barrett, *) This article has been developed from a conference paper presented in Paris at the 35th World Congress of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations. I appreciate and would like to acknowledge the feedback and numerous comments of col- leagues, panel participants, reviewers, and editors since then. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/156852912X651054 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:20:29PM via free access J. Thompson / Religion and the Arts 16 (2012) 328–356 329 Nettleford) and more recently (Murrell, Spencer, McFarlane, Williams, Daynes).1 It has been well established that Rastafari reggae is and should be regarded primarily as a religious and highly political form of art, at once the expression of revolutionary resistance, spiritual consciousness, and pan- African cultural unity. Of international importance, reggae must be understood as no longer Jamaican alone, but expressive of a whole diaspora culture; the music and lyrics unite millions of people of color in their experience of exile, captivity, alienation, and estrangement. This analysis of Rastafari reggae explores the deep resonances and the- matic connections between Judah and Jamaica, despite a separation of more than twenty-fĳive hundred years of geographic, historical, cultural, religious, ethnic, linguistic, and textual transformations. The growing scholarship has generally recognized how prominently Judaic biblical texts, particularly the Psalms, feature in Rastafari reggae songs and religious discourse. Still, much remains to be analyzed in the secondary literature, con- cerning the profound but problematic relation of Rastafari to the texts from which they borrow so extensively. Rastafari reread and restyle biblical verses as they adapt and appropriate them, a process which has several times been characterized with ironic approval as a kind of “hijacking” (Nettleford; Murrell and Williams). Insofar as this appropriation reflects a textual and spiritual “robbing from the rich and giving to the poor,” to call it “hijacking” is (despite the metaphor) apparently not to suggest or impute any actual wrongdoing. Instead, more fairly and charitably, the transformation of Judaic writings into reggae psalms may be understood as a tribute to the potency, currency, and enduring resonance of the ancient texts, their continuing relevance across time and place. Rather than calling it 1) Since so many diffferent phenomena will be referred to by the same names, and the same thing sometimes called by diffferent names, clarifĳication is required for all primary nomen- clature: groups, movements, and places. Prevailing usage has mainly been followed, but certain conventions not generally established have also been adopted. So, for example, rather than “Rastafarians” or “Rastas,” I prefer the trend in the scholarship toward “Rastafari,” used both nominally for the religious movement and its members, and as an adjectival form (as in “Rastafari belief and practice”). “Rastafarianism” as a designation for the ideology of the movement is seen but not preferred in the secondary literature. Certain periods, events, and other terms are often seen capitalized (“the Exile,” “the Diaspora”), but not to privilege any one set of terms, I have mostly avoided such capitalization (one exception being the Tem- ple, as in “the Second Temple period”). Likewise I have not used traditional capitalized pro- nouns for Jesus (He, Him, etc.), nor for Haile Selassie (as Rastafari would have it). In citing sources, rather than attempting to standardize and make consistent all references, I have preserved variants in usage, capitalization, spelling, and other conventions where possible. Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:20:29PM via free access 330 J. Thompson / Religion and the Arts 16 (2012) 328–356 “hijacking,” I would sooner say, with Nettleford, that “Rastafari has a genea- logical pedigree and is an integral part of a discourse that turns on the age- old resistance to oppression” (314). These conflicting narratives can be navigated more equitably, in a constructive and conciliatory reading that afffĳirms Rastafari appropriation but resists revisionism or denigration. In covering this same subject, some of the prominent Rastafari scholarship (especially Murrell) has made needlessly disparaging comparisons between Judah and Jamaica.2 Elevating the Rastafari reggae transformations of the Psalms and other biblical writings, Murrell appears to diminish or denigrate the Judaic experience out of which those texts originate, and to reduce their Judaic meaning and signifĳicance in comparison with what he takes Rastafari to achieve with some of the same texts. Too little credit is given to Judaic cultural and religious accomplishments in exile: Murrell’s implication is that the original psalms of the Babylonian captivity repre- sent a kind of wallowing in self-pity, lamentation, and capitulation. It is not until Rastafari take up and transform the Psalms that they are supposed to acquire their character as a “revolutionary call for justice, liberation, and protest against Babylonian oppression” (“Psalms” 17). Against such nega- tive comparisons and insinuations, and in place of the “hijacking” model, I argue that the transformation of the Psalms into Rastafari reggae is a tes- timony to the lasting power of the original texts: retaining their distinct identity even in translations of translations, never lost in assimilation, the Psalms and other Judaic writings remain potent revolutionary and anti- colonialist discourse, as well as profound religious, spiritual, and artistic expression. As Homer is to the epic, so the Hebrew Bible is the defĳining literature of exodus, diaspora, exile, captivity, liberation, and return. 2) Probably the foremost contemporary authority doing work on Rastafari reggae, Nathan- iel Samuel Murrell has catalogued the extensive literature on the complex relationship of Rastafari religion to the Judeo-Christian scriptures, and has contributed a good deal himself to the scholarship. He is principal contributor and chief co-editor of Chanting Down Baby- lon: The Rastafari Reader, one of the most important anthologies in the fĳield (I cite his “Introduction” to this anthology, as well as his chapter with Williams on Rastafari hermeneutics). It is particularly Murrell’s 2001 article “Tuning Hebrew Psalms to Reggae Rhythms: Rastas’ Revolutionary Lamentations for Social Change” (cited as “Psalms” in the text) that provides several points of contention for this discussion. For this online article neither pages nor paragraphs are numbered; citations give approximate paragraph numbers. Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 03:20:29PM via free access J. Thompson / Religion and the Arts 16 (2012) 328–356 331 I Judah to Jamaica: “Babylon” and “Zion” Verses, names, symbols, and concepts from ancient Judah can come to fĳig- ure centrally in a religious movement of modern Jamaica only through an unusually varied and extensive series of religious and cultural transmissions. This process of conceptual transformation and confluence has been the object of interest and inquiry in its own right, as scholars have attempted to trace “the twisted path to a Rastafari hermeneutics as the movement ‘hijacked’ Judeo-Christian Scriptures and converted them into vehicles for identity, ‘ideation,’ and libera tion” (Murrell, “Introduction” 15–16). Rasta- fari reggae involves orders of intertextuality, multiple reconfĳigurations of language, meaning, names, and symbols, and the continual development and accrual of layers of additional semantic content and commentary. At one time literally grounded in concrete geopolitical and historical actuali- ties, “Babylon” and “Zion” go on to become abstract concepts

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