WORDS, SOUNDS, AND POWER IN JAMAICAN RASTAFARI
Kasey Qynn Dolin
Virginia Commonwealth University
Rastafari is a religious movement that grew out of Jamaica during the 1930s. The Rastafarian movement “has been described [by social scientists] as a ‘political cult,’ a ‘messianic movement,’ a ‘politico-religious cult’ among other labels. But as the researchers move into the details of their descriptions, all present in one form or another the content of ‘Protest’ in the belief system of the movement” (Pollard 1982:19).
This element of protest acknowledged by Pollard as so central to Rastafari provides the key to understanding this belief system which has “been dismissed as the irrational prophesies of a Third-World millennial cult” (Pulis 1993:286). This paper, after briefly outlining the history of Jamaica in order to provide a context in which to view the Rastafari movement, then shifts its focus to the Rastafari dialect, known as Dread Talk.[1]
An examination of Dread Talk is significant because, in the words of Rex Nettleford[2] (quoted in Pollard 1982:19), “Social protest manifests itself in language change. For defiance of a society includes defiance of its language.” Since, as I have stated, protest and defiance are so central to the Rastafari movement, this in and of itself makes the dialect significant.
But beyond that, the purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of Dread Talk itself. When John W. Pulis asked a Jamaican Rastafarian what the world-view of his belief system was all about, he was told “‘jus words-sounds-paawa, bradda, dat wha I-n-I (Rastafari) a-deal wit, jus words-sounds-paawa’” (1993:285). Neil J. Savishinsky defines Dread Talk as a modification of Jamaican Creole “created by Rastas to express their heightened consciousness and profound awareness of the true nature and power of the spoken word” (1994:21).
From these statements it is clear that Dread Talk is more than just a mechanism for distinguishing Rastafari Brethren from non-believers. The intent of this paper is to explore the elements of Dread Talk that further reflect, emphasize, and build the Rastafari identity, thereby exploring the role of dialect as power in the Jamaican context.
Rastafari Beliefs
Today’s Rastafari are a diverse group, located in different nations and embracing various doctrines, but there are a few accepted tenets that serve to define Rastafari. The first and most central is that Jah, the one God, is black, and that Ras Tafari (Hailie Selassie I), the former emperor of Ethiopia, is divine, Jah incarnate, a messiah and prophet (Knipe 1995:163; Lake 1998, Savishinsky 1994:20).
Also central to the Rastafari ideology is that the ways of the white man, “the existing social order…the oppressive State, the formal social and political institutions of Anglo/American imperialism” which are “metaphorically expressed in Rastafarian/New Testament iconography as Babylon, the whore, the fallen woman of St. John’s Revelation” (Cooper 1993:121), are evil and must be rejected by the black man. All evils in the world are a result of the influences of Babylon, and the only path to redemption is repatriation to Africa, specifically Ethiopia (Knipe 1995:163; Lake 1998; Savishinsky 1994:20).
A fourth fundamental belief is that Rastafarians are descendents of the Israelites[3] of the Old Testament. Daily reading of the Bible is seen by many Rastas as the path to receiving the wisdom of Rastafari, and the dietary and behavioral restrictions Rastas practice are taken from it. The Bible also provides much of the imagery Rastas use to describe their situation. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that the Bible is used as justification of Rastafarian beliefs; Rastas take their beliefs from the Bible, mediated by and interpreted through the lens of their own experience (Lake 1998:63; Savishinsky 1994:21).
Western Christianity is seen as a corruption of the true message of the Bible. Some Rastas claim that the white man intentionally mistranslated the Bible into English to obscure its true meaning. The Ethiopian Coptic Church is seen as the source of the purest of Judeo-Christian traditions, never having been contaminated by contact with Babylon (Lake 1998:63; Savishinsky 1994:20).
History of Jamaica
As I have stated before, Rastafari must be viewed in context. Rastafari is fundamentally a protest against Babylon – this dictates that we must examine the history of Jamaica in order to make sense of the movement. To understand the actions of the protesters, one must look at what it is that is being protested.
Jamaica became a British colony in 1655, when it was captured from the Spanish. Sugar plantations fueled by slave labor dominated the economy. Though slavery was abolished in all British colonies in 1834, the plantation remained the dominant production structure in Jamaica at the beginning of the twentieth century. Freed slaves had no means of access to the means of production, and even those who owned and cultivated small plots of land could not earn enough to support a decent standard of living. Planters charged high rent to those freed slaves who did not own land and paid them low wages, forcing freed blacks to live in conditions that differed very little from those they experienced while still slaves (Ferguson 1994:58; Lake 1998:26; Phillips 1988:102).
Initially, sugar and rum remained the main exports. By the 1870s, however, the scene shifted as the United States began to increase economic activity in Jamaica, most significantly in the form of the fruit industry. The sugar industry suffered, steadily declining into insignificance, and by 1890 bananas became the island’s single largest export.
The introduction of the United Fruit Company and other large capitalist entities connected to the banana industry perpetuated the economic exploitation of freed blacks. The companies pushed peasant blacks off of their small plots of land, creating “an impoverished rural proletariat” (Lake 1998:27) and “an urban, wage-laboring proletariat which found work in the railways and docks in the nascent manufacturing and service industries of the capital city” (Phillips 1988:103-104).
Around 1895, two movements which would play significant roles in the social and political climate of Jamaica began to emerge: labor unions and nationalist organizations. Working conditions for blacks in post-emancipation Jamaica were little better than during slavery. There were no minimum wage laws or regulations concerning the number of hours worked. According to one colonizer’s records cited by Obiagele Lake, “it would take a worker six days to be able to afford a loaf of bread” (1998:37).
There were several nationalist movements that emerged during this time. All of the varied nationalist organizations shared the same tenets of opposition to British rule and demand for an independent, Jamaican government. There was a division, however, between those focused exclusively on Jamaica and those also concerned with the situation of blacks suffering under colonial rule everywhere. An example of one such Pan-African organization, the Jamaican Co-operative Association, was founded in 1897 by Dr. Robert Love, who was a mentor to one of the most famous influences and heroes of Rastafari, Marcus Garvey[4] (Phillips 1988:107).
Both the labor unions and the nationalist movements were firmly institutionalized by 1938,[5] when Jamaica experienced a national revolt against the colonial order. This violent revolt began with sugar estate laborers and spread to factory, sanitation, and dock workers. What began as a strike became a general riot, involving looting of stores, blocking of roads, cutting of telephone wires, burning of plantations, and stoning of police. Police and British troops were ordered to put down the protest, and several protesters were shot and killed. The end result was that sugar companies increased wages and banana companies distributed small plots of land among the workers, but other than some minor adjustments allowing for more political representation within the colonial state, the conditions of working-class Jamaicans improved little (Lake 1998:37-38; Phillips 1988:109).
A second phase of Jamaica’s economic and social history began in 1945, when “…under the guiding hand of United States diplomacy, the United Nations and its concomitant trade and financial institutions, constituted by the Bratton Woods agreement, were formed and set the basis for the reconstitution of the world market through the progressive elimination of the neo-mercantilist barriers to world trade which had been erected in the previous period of hegemonic rivalry among the core states. The net result of this global restructuring, fueled in large degree by official military and ‘aid’ expenditures by a reorganized and assertive US ‘imperial state,’ was twenty years of sustained and rapid expansion of world trade and investments, the major beneficiaries of which were the increasingly expansive trans-national corporations (Phillips 1988:109). While the trans-national corporations, mostly North American ones, benefited, the average working-class Jamaican did not. By the late 1950s Jamaica was the largest producer of bauxite ore, most of which went to the United States.
While this was a stage of massive economic growth for Jamaica, the overall effects were disastrous. Bauxite miners made over twice the wage of other Jamaican workers (which was still considerably less than that earned by bauxite workers in the U.S.), pushing up the price of basic commodities. Not only this, but mining companies owned 14% of Jamaica, including a large percentage of arable land. This pushed more Jamaicans off rural holdings and into cities. Land prices increased, and considerable environmental damage was done. Foreign capital led to increased mechanization, decreasing the demand for agricultural laborers. Working class unemployment rates were extremely high. Yet again, a foreign, capitalist power controlled the means of production in Jamaica while workers suffered (Lake 1998:46).
By 1973, this trend of foreign investment had declined, including the U.S. owned bauxite industry. As national production decreased, import prices experienced rapid inflation. The foreign debt, which in 1968 had stood at J$ 82 million, was by 1982 J$ 2495.8 million. Unemployment rates went from below 15% in the sixties to over 25% of the labor force in the seventies and eighties (Phillips 1988:115).
As can be seen from this brief overview of Jamaican history, the plight of the poor black in Jamaica has always been one of economic subjugation and exploitation. The vast majority of land has always been owned by white, capitalist groups, first the colonial British with their sugar plantations and then the United States with their fruit and then mining industries. Rural blacks have been pushed off the countryside and into cities, forming a poor, dispossessed sub-proletariat mass. Pollard cites a 1953 study of Rastafari by G. E. Simpson which could apply to non-Rastafari poor Jamaicans as well: “Cult members some of whom have arrived only recently from country districts and many of whom are unemployed or underemployed, live in crowded one or two-room houses. The men who are employed are engaged in low-paid unskilled or semi-skilled work. Women of the area find employment as domestic servants, street merchants and shop-keepers. Those who are not fully employed ‘scuffle’ for a living. This expressive term means: doing odd jobs, running errands, selling firewood, making baskets or other craft products…in short, doing almost anything that enables one to keep alive” (1982:18). This is the context in which Rastafari was born and grew.
Origins of Rastafari
A look at even the grossly abbreviated history of Jamaica outlined above sheds light on the orientation of Rastafari. The fact that, “as a group…[Rastas] were disengaged from the political struggles of the masses of working class people” (Lake 1998:35) is understandable when we look at the fact that the white capitalist powers, colonial and neo-colonial, as represented by Babylon, that have controlled Jamaica since the mid-seventeenth century have institutionalized the exclusion of poor blacks from any means of economic empowerment.
It is little wonder that Rastafari doctrine points to distant Africa and rejection of Babylon as the only paths to redemption. Their situation in Jamaica has not only been one of powerlessness and poverty because of the workings of Babylon, but all promises of salvation from the spokesmen of Babylon have proven empty. As stated in the section above, emancipation from slavery did little to improve the actual conditions of freed blacks. The intervention of the United States in the economic picture of Jamaica, both initially in the form of the United Fruit Company and even more devastatingly in the form of the bauxite mining industry, while superficially boosting the economy of Jamaica and benefiting the upper classes, only worsened the plight of the proletariat.
Even the open revolt of 1938 against the colonial order and its capitalistic manifestations did little to improve the situation of the “downpressed” black Jamaican. These precedents dictate that if redemption were to occur at all, it was not going to come from anything white or material; applying logic to that conclusion yields that redemption would have to stem from focusing on the black and the spiritual.[6]
Any discussion of the origins of the basic tenets of Rastafari must include a look (however brief) at the philosophy of Marcus Garvey. “Garvey was not a Rastafarian, but laid the ideological framework for the formation of this group” (Lake 1998:31). This being the case, this paper will deal exclusively with his ideological teachings, though his political activities were many. Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey began his task of empowering blacks everywhere by forming the United Negro Improvement and Conservation League in 1914[7], which later came to be known as the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Garvey’s teachings include that:
1. The black race constituted one nationality, whose native land was Africa.
2. As the seat of many early civilizations, Africa played a role in the development of world culture.
3. By its survival of European enslavement, where other races have been wiped out, the black race has revealed its inner endowment.
4. The past achievements of the race and its survival are sources of pride and self-confidence. They are also a sign of its present and future possibilities.
5. All races are equal. The present subjugation of blacks is transient; as transient, for example, as the past enslavement of the English by the Romans.
6. Self-reliance is the only way forward to gain the respect of other nations.
Garvey’s teachings were revolutionary, and in the early 1920s his UNIA had an international membership of eleven million. Due to his teachings, many Jamaicans began to pay attention to what was going on in Africa (Chevannes 1990:67).
Garvey also emphasized that “all people worship their own god and that African-descended people should also worship a god in their own image – a Black god…the God of Ethiopia” (Lake 1998:30). Christian Jamaicans had long embraced the concept of Ethiopia as their ancestral land due to the many references to it in the Bible. Ethiopia had also been viewed as the possible site of African redemption since the Abyssinian defeat of the Italians at Adowa in 1896. This dramatic victory of a black king, Emperor Menelik II, over a European power was understandably encouraging to black people throughout the African Diaspora who had been suffering at the hands of European powers.
When, in 1930, Prince Ras Tafari was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I in Addis Adaba, Ethiopia, it was seen by many in Jamaica as the fulfillment of a prophecy allegedly made by Garvey in a speech in 1927. In this speech, “according to popular belief” (Ferguson 1994:60), Garvey prophesied that an African king would be crowned who would lead blacks to redemption. Haile Selassie I himself reinforced this belief by taking several titles with religious significance, including “King of Kings and Lord of Lords,” “Light of the World,” and “Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah” (Chevannes 1990:68; Ferguson 1994:59-60).
Features of Dread Talk and Their Significance
At this point, I believe it is relevant to revisit two points made in the introduction. The first is the response John W. Pulis (1993:285) received when he asked a Jamaican Rastafarian what the world-view of his belief system was all about: “‘jus words-sounds-paawa, bradda, dat wha I-n-I (Rastafari) a-deal wit, jus words-sounds-paawa.’” The second is the definition of Dread Talk given by Neil J. Savishinsky (1994:21) as a modification of Jamaican Creole “created by Rastas to express their heightened consciousness and profound awareness of the true nature and power of the spoken word.”
These statements are crucial to understanding the depth to which Dread Talk is a manifestation of social protest and a reformation of identity. The link Rastas draw between power and the spoken word is a direct inversion of the perception of the vulgar, spoken language from a Western, colonial perspective. Vulgar speech[8] is linked with illiteracy and ignorance. In mainstream Jamaican society, as well as elsewhere (I would definitely say in the United States as well), “the ‘vulgar’ is that which can be traced to Africa; the ‘refined’ is that which can be traced to Europe. In the domain of language and verbal creativity…oral texts are ‘vulgar’; written texts are ‘refined’” (Cooper 1995:8).
The linking of oral word sounds with power is a linking of African-ness with power. This alone is a form of protest, a conscious construction of identity very different from the identity of the “vulgar” Jamaican imposed by mainstream society and an implicit rejection of Babylon. Barry Chevannes also gives another example of how Rastafarians “deliberately and consciously…identified with traditions which were vilified under racist ideology” (1990:69-70).
Jamaican whites had appropriated the term “Bongo,” the name of a Congo tribe and of a Maroon religious cult, to mean “stupid.” The Rastafarians readopted Bongo as a title of respect.[9] Also adopted as a respectful title is the name “Nati,” a reference to the hair quality associated with blacks which was seen as inferior by European standards of beauty. Chevannes refers to this inversion as “symbolic confrontation” and points to manifestations of it in the modes of hair style,[10] dress, and, most relevant to the topic of this paper, language (1990:77).
As I have briefly and incompletely demonstrated above, the protest contained within Dread Talk is built into its orientation, its focus, and its very nature. I will return to this point later, but for now we will move to an examination of the lexicon of Dread Talk and how it differs from Jamaican Creole. Velma Pollard set up three categories of Dread Talk lexical items which I will use (1982:21).
Category I Words
The first grouping is Category I words, “in which known items bear new meanings.” An example of this is the Dread Talk word chalice, the new meaning for which is a chillum, or a type of pipe used for smoking ganja. The logic behind the semantic shift is clearly an inversion and rejection of mainstream identity. The chalice to mainstream Jamaicans is a cup used to administer the Holy Sacrament; to the Rastas, the word retains this function, only the sacrament being administered is the holy weed instead of holy wine; hence the chalice is a chillum, not a cup (Pollard 1984:58).
Another example of a Category I word given by Pollard (1982:32) is the term seen. “Seen” is used in conversation to indicate that something is comprehended. But, as can be seen in an examination of the conversation held by Pulis with the Rasta he calls Bongo, the concept of seeing is integral to the world-view of Rastafari and as such finds its way incorporated into Dread Talk in several additional ways (1993:289-291).
Pulis (1993:290) quotes Bongo as saying, ” ‘Jah seh, ‘Him dat have eyes,…SEE!” ” This basic command is taken to heart by those embracing Rastafari. The Rasta man is ” ‘far seeing’ when compared to the non-Rasta whose sight is at best limited” (Pollard 1984:58) for he looks beyond the lies of Babylon. Often “Rastafari” is punned to “Rasta-far-see.”[11] In her book RastafarI Women, Obiagele Lake (1998) consistently capitalizes the final I of RastafarI to reflect this emphasis.
This emphasis is also illustrated in Bongo’s rendering of the name Haile Selassie I: “‘See-la-see-I.’” Rastas often refer to Selassie as Alpha and Omega, because the sound “see” occurs in the first and last syllables of his name. The “I” following Selassie’s name, read by others as “the first,” is spoken by Rastas as “eye” (Pollard 1982:21). This emphasis on seeing also finds its way into many Category II words and partially forms the basis for Category III.
Two other terms that Pollard (1982:31-32) classifies as Category I words, dawta and structure, reflect another aspect of Rastafari ideology; the dualistic nature of the Rastafari conception of women. “The female is ambivalently perceived as both deceiving and vulnerable to deception” (Cooper 1993:131). Dawta is the term most commonly used to refer to women, any women. This is in keeping with the Rasta viewpoint that women are perpetually childlike and innately lacking in the ability to stay righteous in the face of temptation. For her own sake, “[t]he female must then be guided, instructed, and restricted by males” (Rowe,[12] quoted in Cooper 1993:131).
The term structure, meaning both “the human body” and “woman,” links the female with flesh – and not only its weaknesses, but also its temptations. “[W]oman, in both her literal and symbolic manifestations, is intrinsically evil, a seductive, malevolent force enticing the morally innocent Rastaman from the path of righteousness into slackness” (Cooper 1993:127). It is not my intent to deal with the issue of misogyny or the lack thereof in the ideology of Rastafari; rather, I wish to demonstrate how terms within the dialect serve to reflect this aspect of the Rastafari world-view.
Category II Words
Category II words “bear the weight of their phonological implications” (Pollard 1982:20). “The phonological structure of English words was ‘penetrated,’ that is, sounded out loud and broken apart to expose contradictions between sound and meaning, and then reassembled into new words’ called up-full sounds…According to Bongo, the formation of English words from oppositional or contradictory meanings was not a natural but a political process intended to foment confusion or ‘kon-fuse-I’” (Pulis 1993:292).
One example of this is the rendering of “education,” the process by which Babylon imprints its lies upon children and emphasizes written English over oral Dread Talk, into “head-decay-shun” (Cooper 1993:121). Returning to the emphasis on seeing, another example is the Rasta treatment of the word “cigarette”: “just as sight is positive, so blindness is negative, and replaces the idea of seeing wherever a negative vibration is required. So for example ‘cigarette’ (see-garet) becomes ‘blindgarette’” (Pollard 1984:58). Other examples of Category II words and the logic behind their formation can be found in the following excerpt from one of Bongo’s reasonings with Pulis:
“I-I,” he interjected, “no deal wit no KON-sciousness [pronounced with an emphasis on KON][13], I deal wit trut, rights, WIZ-MON, na KON no one, Jah she, ‘Him dat have ears…HEAR! Him dat have eyes…SEE!’ I-n-I no KON no one, if dem wan see, dem mus jus open dem selves an dem see.”
…”So,” I asked, responding to his criticism and his shift or change in the conversation to language, “you drop out certain words.”
“I nat she I-n-I DROP dem, cause, if dem bust [are spoken], dem mus bust, I na bust sounds dat deal wit down-press-ion or kon-sciousness, cause, how I lif-up, if I reason down, I-n-I deal wit UP-press-I, I-sciousness, dem sounds UP-FULL, deal wit livity [life] no death. I-n-I no KON no one, jus words, sounds, power, bradda, words, sounds, power,” he declared… “I deal wit I-scious words dat over-stand, cause how can I reason [talk] wit da man an under-stand,” he declared, explaining, “dat mean to she da man over I. Dat wishy-washy slave ting, when I-n-I mus humble I-self before dem false gods…” (Pulis 1993:290).
The topic of the reasoning is why “KON-sciousness” becomes “I-sciousness.” While I-sciousness seems to belong to Category III, where the “I” sound replaces the initial syllable in words with positive meaning, it is actually a Category II replacement of a misleading phoneme with a sound more in keeping with the word’s semantic meaning. Bongo associates the initial “KON” sound of “consciousness” with the verb “to con,” meaning to mislead, and possibly also with the negative connotations[14] of “control” and “contain.” Since “consciousness” has nothing at all to do with these things, he alters it to “I-sciousness.” The “I,” as we have seen[15], is associated with “eye,” with true sight, and is also resonant with the personal nature of true consciousness; this replacement brings harmony between the word and its sound, since now both reflect a positive meaning.
“Wiz-mon” is another example of this. “[T]he suffix ‘dom’ was deleted from the word ‘wisdom’ because of its similarity to the word ‘dumb.’ …How, Bongo reasoned, can a man be both wise and dumb at the same time?” (Pulis 1993:292). This misleading final syllable was replaced with “-mon,” Jamaican Creole for “man,” resolving the confusion.
The next altered word that I underlined is “down-press-ion.” This replaces oppression, since the initial “o-” sounds like “up.” Up is not the direction in which “oppressed” people are generally pressed, as poor black Jamaicans are intimately aware. More in keeping with the word’s meaning is the rendering “down-press-ion.” The creation “up-press-I” makes the idea of “uplifting oneself” show phonetically its relationship in opposition to being “down-pressed” by someone else. In Bongo’s final statement in the excerpt above he explains in his own words how “understand” is more adequately expressed as “over-stand.” It is interesting to note that Pollard gives the Dread Talk version of the word as “higherstand” (1982:33); while this differs from Bongo’s expression, the logic is the same.
Category III Words
Category III words are words that experience the replacement of their initial syllable with “I.” Pollard (1982:20). Pollard also includes in this category the pronominally functioning “I” words, such as “I-man” meaning “me, myself” (or Bongo’s “I-self” for “myself” in the above excerpt) and the term “I-n-I.”
According to Pulis “[t]he noun phrase ‘I-n-I’ is a homophone. When used to signify a plurality [we], the first person ‘I’ replaced the ‘me’ and ‘we’ of Jamaica Talk with ‘I-n[and]-I.’ When used in reference to a person, self or individual, the ‘I’ signified the cornerstone of a renegotiated construction of identity known as ‘I-n[within]-I’” (1993:292). This renegotiated identity is the acknowledgement of two selves within the self, one ‘I’ of the phrase being the person speaking, the other “I” representing the “spirit of divinity and holiness residing in the depths of each” (Forsythe, quoted in Lake 1998:104). This interpretation of selfhood is a definite inversion of the concept of selfhood imposed upon black Jamaicans by their white colonial masters and later manifestations of Babylon, which was one of utter inferiority.
Many examples of Category III words require little explanation in that they are simply words with positive meaning that is reinforced by the replacement of their initial syllable with the positive “I” sound. Pollard’s examples of “I-ditate” for “meditate,” “I-men” for “amen,” “Inite” for “unite,” “I-quality” for “equality,” “I-ration” for “creation,” “I-rits” for “spirits,” and “I-sanna” for “Hosanna,” follow this (1982:33-35). One example that requires a bit more explanation is “Ital.”
Ital is from the word “vital,” but the most common usage refers to food. Ital food is food that is natural, unprocessed, non-alcoholic, and for the most part vegetarian. These dietary restrictions come from the Rastafarian interpretation of the Bible. Some scholars (Knipe 1995:164; Lake 1998:104) also argue that the rejection of non-Ital food is a mechanism by which Rastas distinguish themselves from non-Rasta Jamaicans. The level of distaste in which meat is held by most Rastas is reflected linguistically by the term “dedahs,” for meat, and “dat[that],” for pork, the most despised of meats (Pollard 1982:36).
Conclusion
My intent has been two-fold. First, it has been to demonstrate how Rastafari is a direct response to social conditions in Jamaica. In the history of Jamaica section of this paper I have attempted to outline the historical circumstances that shaped the nature of the form that the protest implicit in Rastafari took. These circumstances include the fact that emancipation from slavery did little to improve the actual conditions in which freed blacks lived; that the organization of labor unions and nationalist movements, while they set the stage for empowerment on a personal level, had little effect on living conditions; that the intervention of the United States in the economic picture of Jamaica only benefited the upper classes (and the foreign investors), worsening the conditions of the poor; and that even open revolt did not relieve the situation of the downpressed black Jamaican. I state that these circumstances are the basis for the utter rejection by Rastas of all things connected with Babylon.
The second half of this paper intends to demonstrate how Dread Talk serves to reflect, emphasize, and build the Rastafari identity within this context of protest. The very existence of Dread Talk, with its association between power and the spoken word, is a rejection of the perception of vulgar, spoken language from a Western, colonial perspective. Its emphasis on the agreement between the phonetic sounds of a word and that word’s semantic content is not only an affirmation of a positive African identity but also a manifestation of the Rasta’s commitment to true sight. This commitment to true sight, the depth of which can be seen in Bongo’s statement that “Jah seh, ‘Him dat have eyes,…SEE!’” in turn finds itself incorporated into the Rasta lexicon, finding representation in all three of the categories outlined by Pollard (1982). This is an example of the identity-building aspect of Rastafari, in that it distinguishes the Rasta-far-see from the short-sighted non-Rasta.
The Category III “I-n-I” phrase is also a dramatic restructuring of identity. It serves to emphasize the righteousness of the Rasta by demonstrating that within him is an eternal and holy self. As the typical Rasta comes from the most marginalized and despised segment of Jamaican society, this is clearly not only a conscious (I-scious) shift in self-perception, but also a protest against the system that defined the black as inferior. These functions of the dialect indicate that Bongo and his brethren are right, that words, and their sounds, are power.
Notes
[1] Also known as “I-ance” or “I-yaric,” Dread Talk should not be confused with the Jamaican Creole-English known as Jamaica Talk, which is a mixture of the English current at the time of colonization (Frederic Cassidy, in looking at terms still viable in Jamaica at the time of his research, found several for which the latest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary was in the seventeenth century [1961:4]), and the languages of “Arawak and Carib Indians, Africans, Spaniards, Frenchmen, and assorted others” (Cassidy 1961:2).
[2] Nettleford, Rex M. 1978. Caribbean Cultural Identity: The Case of Jamaica. Institute of Jamaica.
[3] The Twelve Tribes is a group of Rastas founded in 1968 whose name makes reference to this belief. It is one of three main Rastafari Houses and should not be confused with Rastas as a whole. The Twelve Tribes of Israel from which the Rastafarians claim descent are the same as identified by those who practice Judaism – Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Dan, Naphtali, Gad, Asher, Issachar, Zebulun, Joseph, Benjamin, and Dinah (Lake 1998:64).
[4]Though Garvey’s teachings were influential to many Jamaicans, not just those who would become Rastafari, a discussion of his teachings appears in the origins of Rastafari section of this paper instead of here. This is because while his political achievements were considerable, for the purposes of this paper his teachings were more significant to the formation of the ideology of Rastafari than his political activities were to the overall history of Jamaica.
[5] The Rastafari movement emerged as much as seven years earlier in 1931; see origins of Rastafari.
[6] My intent in saying this is not to reduce Rastafari from the deeply spiritual faith that it is to the last resort of the economically disenfranchised; just as, in the words of Peter Phillips, “the outcome of the long-term historical conflict between the forces of domination and the forces of resistance cannot be predicted simply in terms of the operations, impersonal structures and processes” (1988:119), neither can a faith based on the above be defined solely as such. My intent is simply to demonstrate why Rastafari has acquired what can be viewed as an escapist nature if one does not take into consideration the fact that all other options had been proven irrational to poor black Jamaicans.
[7] This is the date given by Lake (1998:29). Ferguson gives 1912 as the date of the beginning of the Association’s organization (1994:62).
[8] This term stems from the Latin vulgus, “the common people.” The extent to which the term vulgar has become associated with coarseness and offensiveness is a demonstration of elitism in and of itself.
[9] Incidentally, Bongo is the pseudonym by which Pulis refers to the Rasta who supplied the “words-sound-paawa” quote from which the name of this paper was taken.
[10] In the early decades of Rastafari, the 1930s and 1940s, Rasta brethren began growing head and facial hair long in accordance to the Nazarite vow in the Book of Leviticus (Chevannes 1990:68). Dreadlocks began to emerge as a hairstyle around 1953 according to Ferguson, who attributes them as being a demonstration of support for Kenya’s Mau Mau freedom fighters (1994:62); Lake places their origins to around 1934 at the Pinnacle, the commune established by Leonard Howell, one of the first Jamaicans to begin preaching the divinity of Haile Selassie I, and she indicates that while there is some debate concerning where the group got their idea for dreadlocks, it most likely came from the knowledge of the hairstyle worn by Masai warriors (1998:35).
[11] This technically would be categorized as belonging to Category II; as I mention a bit later, there is often a bit of overlap between the groupings.
[12] Rowe, Maureen, 1980, “The Women in Rastafari,” Caribbean Quarterly 26(4):13-21.
[13] All of the brackets and words appearing in all capital letters are from Pulis; however, the words that are underlined are my own emphasis.
[14] No pun intended.
[15] That one wasn’t intended either.
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