Redemption Songs at Calabash

Carolyn Cooper, Contributor

Two Fridays ago, as I headed out to the Calabash International Literary Festival in Treasure Beach, St Elizabeth, I remembered one of Rex Nettleford's stinging witticisms: "Whenever you get tired of Jamaica, just leave Kingston." It had been a particularly tiring week for the entire nation, to put it mildly. But those of us living in Kingston felt it most keenly. We were under siege. Even if we were not on the Tivoli battlefield, we were caught in the crossfire. The state of emergency turned Kingston into a ghost town.

I came back home on Labour Day with much trepidation. I'd been in Germany on a little lecture tour and watched in amazement the BBC and CNN coverage of erupting war. Jamaica was a narco-terrorist state providing graphic pictures and searing headline stories for international consumption. I kept wondering how I was going to make it home from the airport.

I spent my adolescent years in Norman Gardens, St Andrew, so I don't have the instinctive fear of Mountain View Avenue that makes travellers to and from the airport automatically detour via South Camp Road or Elletson Road. Like Back o'Wall, which became Tivoli Gardens, the housing development built in the 1960s on the old firing range was dubbed 'Norman Gardens'. But most of the residents still called the community 'Range'.

As a child, I really didn't think about it; but I now wonder about the wisdom of those town planners who named the streets of Norman Gardens in honour of both Norman Manley and the firing range. I lived on the corner of Norman Avenue and Trigger Road. Butts Crescent, Cartridge Road, Range Crescent, Target Street, Practice Road and Rifle Road all evoked an ill-fated garden of ammunition.

The competing legacies of Norman Manley's grand vision of social justice versus the all-pervasive culture of the enforcing gun must have shaped the consciousness of the residents of Range - whether we knew it or not. Furthermore, the association of the Manley name with the firing range evokes the way in which politicians of all stripes were seduced by the power of the gun. After all, the commanders of both the People's National Party and the Jamaica Labour Party camps depended on dubious henchmen to do their bidding.

No justice, no peace

At the British Airways lounge at Gatwick, I was fortunate to run into our EU ambassador who immediately asked how I was getting home. A true knight in shining armour, Marco courteously offered escort service. So we pulled out from the airport in a four-car convoy with armed security! Of course, we bypassed Norman Gardens/Range and Mountain View Avenue. But the armed guards reminded me that I was back home on the firing range.

I kept thinking this is not the Jamaica I left two weeks ago. But, of course, it was. Some of us live in middle-class neighbourhoods where we enjoy the illusion of peace and safety. We are cut off from the traumas that other people have to endure every single day. It takes a national catastrophe to remind us how vulnerable we all are in a society that is fundamentally unjust.

As Peter Tosh put it so militantly:

"Everyone is crying out for peace, yes

None is crying out for justice.

I don't want no peace

I need equal rights and justice."

In this assertive song, Tosh asks a profound question: "Everybody fighting to reach the top/ How far is it from the bottom?"

And, indeed, our failure to recognise when we have reached far enough from 'the bottom' to stop fighting is what makes us keep on clawing away to reach an ever-receding 'top'.

In a week when 'Brand Jamaica' became synonymous with murder and mayhem, the Calabash International Literary Festival projected a decidedly redemptive image of our beleaguered nation: not a 'dead yard' but a celebration ground in honour of creativity and the life of the imagination. Only two of the 30 invited writers made the decision not to risk coming to Jamaica: Feryal Ali Gauhar from Pakistan and Marjorie Agosin from Chile. Understandably, they didn't think it made sense to leave their familiar terrors for the unknown.

Forgiveness without restitution

But the Calabash Festival was certainly not just about escape from the oppressive social and political traumas of Kingston. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian man of letters who suffered as a political prisoner in his homeland, denounced the fraudulent contract of forgiveness without restitution. He was speaking about reparations for trans-Atlantic slavery. But his message is so applicable to our present crisis of no confidence in our two-faced prime minister. If Bruce Golding had come to Calabash, he might have found the courage to resign. It's not too late for him to redeem himself.

For me, the high point of the festival was Myrna Hague's magisterial jazz rendition of Bob Marley's Redemption Song, so beautifully arranged by Seretse Small. This year, Bob Marley's Uprising album was featured in the upful musical session that always takes Calabashers home.

Marcus Garvey's prophecy is even more powerful than the fragment appropriated by Marley: "We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because while others might free the body, none but ourselves can free the mind. Mind is your only ruler, sovereign. The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind."

These days, mental slavery takes many forms. It is the conviction that politics is a dirty game that must be left to politicians; so 'decent citizens' don't even bother to vote. Mental slavery is voting automatically for 'your' party even when the leaders don't represent your best interests. Isn't it high time to emancipate ourselves from all the garrisons of mental slavery?

Carolyn Cooper is a public intellectual, specialising in cultural enterprise management. She is the founder and director of the Global Reggae Studies Centre, a private sector initiative.