irietrini@yahoo.com

Blind injustice

• In Jamaica for Black Power, global reggae conferences.
• Struck by how our institutions still operate against us.
• My frustration with Trinidad and I guess with the Carib-bean is how quick we are to forget.

Shine your light

Shine your light for the world

To see

—Umi Says, Mos Def

It’s been eight years since I was last in Kingston.

And I can’t think of a logical reason why it took me so long to come back. So many friends, so many memories, so much possibility, so much about Jamaica that rings true with me.

I’m here for a Black Power conference, taking place at the same time as a global reggae conference.

Sitting under a tent listening to Mystic Revelations of Rastafari, sitting in a lecture room listening to Raffique Shah talk about the mutiny he led at the Teteron Barracks after a state of emergency was called in April 1970, I am struck by the continued disconnect between the informed and the under-informed.

How, even though we bray on about the value of tertiary education, I wonder how much of us are learning how to really be ourselves.

I am struck by how our institutions still operate against us.

There are students outside not particularly caring that so many great minds are gathered to talk about two of the most significant movements to the region.

Which is not to say that everybody has to care about Black Power or reggae.

But part of my frustration with Trinidad and I guess with the Caribbean is how quick we are to forget. As if the very act of remembering is a kind of defiance that we are still terrified of.

Even as we continue to make the same mistakes. Even as we continue to kill each other and wonder why.

Worse than forgetting what we know, is not ever learning what we didn’t know before. And refusing ourselves access to information because we don’t think that it is relevant.

Jamaica is Trinidad is Guyana. The problems of badmanism, communities turning their leaders’ paranoias into murder, the drugs, the guns, the ghost gangs and the leaders that really couldn’t give a rass about whether we sink or swim, once they can eat steak and drink Johnny Walker Blue or whatever colour is in these days.

I am struck by how the dinginess of Mountain View matches the smoky stink of the Beetham. New buildings in New Kingston but more poor people on the streets.

I’m spending time with aging revolutionaries. Watching them hold on to each other. Watching them carrying all their physical and emotional pain, old war wounds on top of new war wounds. Knowing, although they don’t articulate it, that they must feel something like guilt for the state of the region.

I spend a lot of time listening to them. Listening to the pain in their laughter, the sorrow in their memories. How their voices go soft and wobbly when they mention names like Walter Rodney and Maurice Bishop. How they manage to still be up and fighting. How they have survived jail and death and spies and tapped phones and police brutality.

How they have lives that happen in spite of their political and ideological struggles.

I’m still trying to understand why they chose their lives. I’m still trying to make sense of what keeps them going, into their sixties. Past all the frustrations, past all the death, past the feelings of failure in a failed region in which they once held such hope.

The bizarre thing is that so many people in the Caribbean don’t know their stories. Don’t know all the things that happened to them. So many people think that Black Power is some nancy story, or at least a jokey kind of exercise that had to do with dashikis and afros.

So many people think that Black Power is something we should suppress in a rainbow country where if yuh eh red yuh dead still applies and my brighter than bright nephews can still be told in a classroom that black people children don’t want to learn.

The bizarre thing is that so many people think that reggae is some simplistic dance music, that is no more than passa passa bacchanal.

What an injustice we do to our cultural forms, to our grassroots political movements by giving them these simplistic elitist readings.

What an injustice we do ourselves.