Читать книгу Island People - Joshua Jelly-Schapiro - Страница 13

CHAPTER 1

BRANDING

ON TV, IT LOOKED LIKE the others were jogging.

Halfway through the Olympic 100-meter final, Usain Bolt—Jamaican hero, fastest man in the world, performing in London before eighty thousand flashbulb-popping fans—pulled away. At six-foot-five, hurtling down the tile-red track, Bolt stretched his stride in a way none of his rivals—compact, muscular men all—could match. One moment, eight Lycra-clad figures were sprinting in a pack. Then there was one: long legs churning, face calm. In Beijing four years before, he’d turned this race, as one oft-quoted account had it, into “a palette on which an emerging and transcendent talent could splash his greatness.”¹ Slapping his chest before the line, exulting as he crossed—Bolt charmed the world with his brash joie de vivre. Now, as he pulled away, TV replays caught him glancing at the stadium clock: in Beijing, he’d entered history; here, he wanted to make it. And so he did. The clock showed the time—a new Olympic record. And Jamaica’s pride, his nation’s black, yellow, and green flag draped over his broad back, grinned and danced as he circled the stadium, soaking up its warm lights’ love.

For most of the few hundred million around the globe watching on TV, the scene showed what the Olympic Games, Visa-sponsored corporate dross aside, could still be. Here was a beautiful human, from a little nation, moving with supernal grace on the world stage. But to Jamaicans, this win meant much more. In Kingston that night, they’d ignored tropical storm warnings to gather in their thousands, by one of the city’s main crossroads, at Half Way Tree, before a big screen to watch him run. Dressed in yellow or green, blaring plastic horns, they could be seen, on videos posted to YouTube, hopping in place as the race began—and then, when Bolt won (and as his young Jamaican teammate Yohan Blake took silver for good measure), leaping higher. They raised their fingers to the sky, hands held like pistols, yelling out Jamaicans’ favored expression for affirming joy, in this city as well known for gunplay as for Bob Marley. Brap, brap, brap! The sound mimicked the sound of shots fired in the air. Behind them, on a big screen, was Usain Bolt in London performing dance moves that may have looked, to the world, like so much wiggling; people here knew, though, that they were moves born at street parties nearby.

In Jamaica, at any time, Bolt’s win would have been a big deal. In this athletics-mad nation of two and a half million souls, sprinting—the source of fifty-two of the fifty-five Olympic medals Jamaica has ever won—matters. But what made the resonance of this triumph, at these London Olympics, extra deep, was its timing. August 5, 2012, fell on the eve of Jamaica’s Golden Jubilee. The very next night, in Kingston’s National Stadium, the island would celebrate its fiftieth birthday as a sovereign state. At midnight on this date in 1962, Princess Margaret lowered the Union Jack, which flew over this island for 307 years, and watched Alexander Bustamante, independent Jamaica’s first prime minister, raise a bright new standard in its place. As Jamaica’s sprinters, in London, raised that standard in the old empire’s capital—Bolt and Blake followed up their 100-meter sweep with one at 200 meters, and then helped Jamaica’s 4 x 100 relay team win gold, too—Jamaica’s anniversary celebrations, which had been building for months, were reaching a peak.

This, as one government official later put it to me, was a “cosmological convergence,” impossible to ignore. And Jamaica’s leaders, that August, didn’t. Hailing Bolt’s glory, they sought to dovetail Jamaicans’ pride in their athletes with the prideful celebration they hoped “Jamaica 50” might represent for its people. (Naturally, they also sought, in ways subtle and less so, whether or not they belonged to the party of Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller, to leverage this all for political gain.) None of this was surprising. What I found striking, as I read Jamaica’s papers online that month, and tuned in to watch the Jamaica 50 Grand Gala, was their language.

“Brand Jamaica,” said an official from the Olympic committee praising Bolt’s win, “has benefited tremendously from the exposure of our athletes in London.”² The government’s minister of youth and culture agreed. “Jamaica’s Golden Jubilee,” she proclaimed, “presents a glorious context in which to present the value proposition of Brand Jamaica.”³ The prime minister, in an interview with Time magazine, praised “the brand the world recognizes so well.”⁴ During her speech at the Jamaica 50 gala, the subtext of her remarks, about how “in the area of sport and music, we are the toast of the world,” was plain.⁵ The leader every Jamaican calls “Portia” spent her first months in office urging, as her inaugural speech put it, that “Jamaica must remain ‘a quality brand.’”⁶

I’d heard the term—“Brand Jamaica”—before. Mostly from tourism officials, during recent trips to the island, who sometimes invoked it when interviewed on Jamaican TV about their industry. Members of the film board, too, were fond of it: Brand Jamaica featured prominently on the website of their parent outfit, JAMPRO, the Jamaican Promotions Company, the agency charged with attracting foreign investment here. Since the government’s release of a much-publicized report on the theme—its findings: Jamaica was “sitting on a treasure-house of natural brand equity”⁷—Brand Jamaica had become a popular subject. At dinner parties with island intellectuals, it was ridiculed. It was a much more intriguing curio, though, than a ubiquitous slogan.

But now, as Jamaica toasted its fiftieth, Brand Jamaica was everywhere.

* * *

THE PHRASE SOUNDED NEW, though Brand Jamaica dated from the 1960s, when the new country’s Tourist Board was launched to help Jamacia make its mark on the world. Hiring a fancy New York marketing firm to help attract the world’s tourists to its shores, the Tourist Board registered Jamaica’s name, and brand identity (as “the most complete, diverse, and unique warm weather destination in the world”⁸), and aired ads everywhere. But then, in the 1970s, Jamaica’s shores had become as well known for shootings as for sun. The island’s rival political parties—Edward Seaga’s Jamaican Labor Party, or JLP, backed by the CIA, and the People’s National Party, or PNP, led by charismatic, Cuba-loving Michael Manley—enjoined a hot local variant of the Cold War. The parties armed their supporters and built them housing-projects-cum-patronage-communities, called “garrisons.” No one talked much about Brand Jamaica. The garrisons’ criminal lords, called “dons,” became flush with drug money and grew to dominate the politicians to whom they’d once answered. And two years before Jamaica 50, that dynamic exploded, as it had before. State police stormed Tivoli Gardens, a historic community built by Seaga’s JLP. The ensuing debacle saw seventy-odd Jamaican citizens die, underscoring in red the corruption that had killed Brand Jamaica in the ’70s. It also furnished the lingering backdrop, amid a tanking economy, for Jamaica’s fiftieth anniversary. But none of this stopped Jamaica’s powers that be from resurrecting the term to tout the island’s achievements at venues ranging from Kingston’s National Stadium to the Clive Davis School of Recorded Music, at New York University, where old Edward Seaga turned up, one day that fall, to tout the release of a CD box set of Jamaica’s “100 most significant songs.”

Those “significant songs,” as Seaga’s presence at NYU signaled, have been significant far beyond Jamaica: their sounds sowed seeds for hip-hop; they permanently altered the texture of rock and pop and R&B. Jamaica’s wiliest politician of its modern era, a white-maned hipster statesman in a dark suit, affirmed these truths to the Manhattan music mavens who came to see him. Seaga explained that before entering politics, he had worked as an ethnographer in Kingston’s ghettos; that he’d helped launch Jamaica’s record industry. Back in the 1950s, he had released not a few songs now included on the CDs he was here to hawk. Seaga’s biography—Harvard-trained anthropologist; record producer and label owner; thrice-elected Caribbean head of state—was hardly imaginable anywhere but Jamaica. But here, he spoke most of using this box set, and birthday, to “rebuild Brand Jamaica.” His island’s brand had many facets. These included swift sprinters and shining sands. But “our music has been the greatest,” he intoned at NYU, “because it has made us a brand name.”

And so, “brand” language aside, it did. No Jamaican, apart from Bolt, because of his recent quadrennial bursts, has ever approached the fame of the reggae king whose “One Love” has long been the Tourist Board’s anthem, and whose dreadlocked visage, thirty years after his death, still adorns dorm rooms everywhere. Bob Marley, who in 1973 recalled the Middle Passage like it was yesterday, became the “first Third World Superstar” by making historical links with no right to resound as pop hits. He hailed the prospect, on singles from “Slave Driver” to “Get Up, Stand Up,” of redeeming our bloody histories. And then, in the tune that’s endured as his epitaph, he distilled his art’s thrust. “Redemption songs,” he sang at his life’s end, “are all I ever have.” Those lines carried more than one meaning from this artist far cannier than the saintly stoner image projected onto his sharp-featured face, who came of age just as freedom’s hopes were being dashed by poverty’s violence. What Marley had, like the larger Third World, was less freedom’s benefits than its promise. Songs of redemption, rather than the thing itself. These were the great product of a poor society where “development” has seemed an ever-receding dream. But none of this has stopped Jamaica’s boosters from seeing the island’s very history as a redemption song—or from hailing how “this little island,” as Seaga recited at NYU, “changed the world.”

A couple of months later, I booked a flight to Kingston. Boarding the plane at JFK with Jamaicans doffing puffy coats to do the same, I intended to spend some weeks on their island as its leaders tried, a half century into Jamaica’s struggle to enjoy freedom’s benefits, to turn their culture’s riches into a “brand” for the world to consume.

Those weeks, this being Jamaica, turned into months.

* * *

“LADIES AND GENTLEPERSONS.” The flight attendant’s tuneful voice shook the canned air. “Is’ yard we reach!” Four hours out of New York, the plane banked over Kingston’s glinting lights. A pair of women in my row sporting magenta-hued hair and six-inch heels tittered at our steward’s invoking their slang name for Jamaica, resonant of the grim “government yards” where many of our cabinmates—“yardies,” in the parlance—grew up. We would not have heard that patois on a flight to Montego Bay. That’s the purpose-built entrepôt, on Jamaica’s north shore, that receives nearly all the million-plus tourists who still come here each year to rent time on chaise longues nearby. But we were flying to Kingston. I was the sole passenger without brown skin, apart from a couple of well-fed businessmen in first class, and this cabin full of returning migrants—teachers or cabbies, doctors or dealers—laughed along as another man’s voice rang out from a back row, as we bumped aground, to keep the “yardie” riff going.

Brap, brap, brap!

In Jamaica, the language people speak, even more than many aspects of their culture, has tricky implications for its brand. Jamaican patois—now often simply called “Jamaican” here—has in recent years won increased acceptance: in schools, educators understand patois as a language in its own right, with English vocabulary but African syntax, and treat it as their pupils’ first tongue; the nation’s main newspapers, each day, run “patwa” columns; its star sprinters speak it. (As the bronze medalist Warren Weir put it to the BBC, after Jamaica’s 200-meter sweep: “Nuh English, straight patwa!”) It is the Queen’s English, though, that remains the language of Jamaica’s ruling classes—of the people both most keen to tout Jamaica’s charms—its exuberance and rebel allure—and most conscious of the fact that in places like the UK (where Jamaicans remain among the few Commonwealth citizens requiring a visa to visit), “yardie” is as synonymous with “gangster” as it is with “Jamaican.” Rising to open the luggage racks overhead, I helped my row mates lower tied-together parcels, to their murmured “T’anks,” and I recalled hearing after the Olympics how, when the nation’s Ministry of Youth, Sports, and Culture had grown concerned with the image their young patwa-speaking athletes might project abroad, they instituted a strict training program in media English, to go with their wind sprints, so their Bolts and Blakes and Weirs would be ready when the foreign cameras shone.

Some months had passed since the main celebration of Jamaica 50. The blandishments of that time—including the “Nation on a Mission” theme song its leaders had commissioned to go with it, with its patriotic verses mouthed by reggae stars and sprinters—were starting to fade. I’d timed my visit, though, to coincide with the island’s annual celebration of Black History Month. In the United States, we’ve grown used to our cafeterias breaking out paper place mats each February depicting Sojourner Truth and Martin Luther King. In Jamaica, Black History Month also congrues with a yearly salute to the local music that’s made Black History its great theme: in 2008, the government proclaimed that every February, forevermore, would officially be “Reggae Month,” too. That week in Kingston, the University of the West Indies was to host a conference on “Global Reggae, a’ [at] yard and abroad,’” which promised to attract a devoted tribe of scholars and obsessives outlining Jamaica’s nation-branding efforts, and the culture behind them, in panel discussion form.

Jamaica is hardly the sole world nation in the early twenty-first century to have embraced a branding agenda. England has its “Cool Britannia” ad campaign; Korea, its “K-Pop.” In an era when the public sphere can feel like a marketing consultancy, even artists and grade schoolers know that it’s not the product, it’s the brand. But the branding concept’s uses and abuses, in a society whose forebears’ flesh was once singed like cattle’s, was striking. Striking, for that history. Striking, for how Jamaica’s attempts to forge a Pavlovian link, in the world’s mind, between the island’s flag and its charms, involved a process of at once touting and quieting its foremost pathologies—for sex and sun, frenetic energy and violence. Brand Jamaica was striking for how all its facets, from sports to music to frolicking tourists, were implicated within the garrison complex that came during the 1970s and ’80s to rule and ruin island life. And it was striking, too, because of what Brand Jamaica’s story could maybe reveal about the larger fortunes of the old Third World.

Since the Cold War’s end, many members of that fraternity of less have seen their economies, devalued and debt-ridden, advance little. When Marley sang, “Today they say are we free / only to be chained in poverty,” in 1973, Jamaica had a dollar whose value still equaled that of a U.S. greenback. Now a single American dollar bought one hundred Jamaican ones. Yet Jamaica had demonstrated a remarkable gift, like many of its Third World peers, for exporting its people to First World cities. And those cities’ cultures, if not their civil politics, have thrived on the toothsome frisson, “ethnic” or “exotic” (choose your queasy word), of those migrants’ pepper and sounds. In this complex of fresh spring rolls and green tofu curries and cumbia-for-white-folks, Jamaican reggae’s image and sounds held a prideful place. This is a fact, to Brand Jamaica’s touters, that was extremely crucial. How and whether it mattered at all, or could be made to matter, to the Jamaicans with whom I filed off that flight in Kingston, not one of them a dreadlocked singer or a world-class sprinter, was another question.

* * *

WE STEPPED THROUGH the balmy night air to enter an arrivals hall bedecked with yellow, green, and black bunting. A large banner hung on a back wall. It was affixed with the hummingbird-adorned Jamaica 50 logo and a prosaic message—“WELCOME HOME”—that echoed our flight attendant’s protocol breach and evinced how its hangers hoped Jamaica’s birthday might resonate for this émigré nation. The line at immigration for JAMAICA/CARICOM entrants was, as usual in Kingston, much longer than the one for foreigners. At the customs desk, a uniformed agent stamped my passport with a perfunctory nod. His approach toward my magenta-haired friends was more dilatory. The women hoisted their bags onto the agent’s steel table and glared daggers at his colleague, whose dog sniffed at parcels perhaps full of new Nikes for their cousins, or bras and cell phones to sell. With hustlers’ mores and the outsized manner of a people about whom the song “Everybody Is a Star” might have been written, the members of Jamaica’s émigré nation are certainly on a mission—if not, most times, the patriotic one their government had hailed in its Jamaica 50 theme song, and that the island’s largest cell phone company, by the baggage claim, touted on another wall-sized mural. “NATION ON A MISSION,” it yelled in 1,000-point type, above where the phone company Digicel’s logo was affixed to a photomontage of Bolt spreading his seven-foot wingspan to the world, as Shelly Ann Frazer-Price, “di pocket rocket,” who also won London gold, sprinted from the ghetto where she grew. Stepping beneath another banner hailing the nation’s fiftieth, I paused after customs. There, by the money changers’ booths, a more homely pantheon entombed its elder heroes in papier-mâché.

A man-sized figure in antique cottons, first in line, had “Sam Sharpe” inked on a plate at his feet: Sharpe led a rebellion of Jamaica’s slaves, in 1831, that helped force its owners to abolish slavery throughout their empire. By Sharpe’s side was Paul Bogle, the Baptist preacher who led another uprising, a few decades later, of ex-slaves now freed from bondage but still chained in poverty. Marcus Mosiah Garvey, next up, was unmistakable in his Horatio Nelson hat: he founded the United Negro Improvement Association in 1917 after emigrating from Jamaica to Harlem, and helped the world’s black masses see themselves as a diaspora like the Jewish one. The two men here whose papier-mâché skin was painted lighter than the others had led Jamaica’s drive to independence in 1962, and founded the two parties that define its politics still: Alexander Bustamente, the populist demagogue who formed the JLP (and Jamaica’s first government), and his first cousin Norman Manley, the high-minded barrister (and father of the country’s fourth prime minister, Michael Manley), who birthed the PNP. The last figure in this lineup was its sole woman. Recognizable for her gender and her head scarf, Queen Nanny of the Maroons was the eighteenth-century matriarch of the island’s runaway slaves. She led the Maroons’ fight for freedom—but she’s a figure perhaps most recalled by school kids now, on this island of women-led households whose culture’s mores can feel matriarchal and misogynist all at once, for her alleged ability, when faced with the redcoats’ muskets, to catch their bullets in her cunny and fling them back.

Such are the nobler ghosts of Jamaica’s past. Its popular heroes of now derive their fame from the rather different sources cited by my taxi driver when I asked him, as we pulled out of the airport, about the current “runnings” in town, and he eased us onto the road running down the sandy spit of land, jutting out and around Kingston Harbour, on which the airport sits. The Palisadoes, as this piece of land is called, has been a center of Jamaican civilization since the pirate Blackbeard beached his ships here and, in one of the taverns out by its tip, befriended a wisecracking parrot called Jefferson, who clutched his shoulder till the end.

“Badness!” my cabbie cackled as he sped down the drive, shooting a knowing grin in his rearview mirror. “Badness and bad men! Dat’s wha gwaan deh.”

His tone was winking: a play both on the expectations visitors bring to his island and Jamaicans’ mordant image of it. But his words’ sense that Jamaica’s great product, never mind its rum or reggae, was “bad men” and their doings is hardly rare on an island long dominated by pirates. Jamaica is located some ninety miles to Cuba’s south and a similar-length sail west of Hispaniola and was first settled by Taino Indians, from the Yucatán; the island’s indigenous paddled dugout canoes onto these croton-covered shores a couple of millennia before Columbus’s men, lowering dinghies from his Pinta and Santa Maria, did the same. It is by a variant of the Taino’s name for this lush land (Xamayca: Land of Woods and Water) that Jamaica is still known. Claimed for Spain by Columbus in 1494, the island remained in Spanish hands until it was wrested from their grip by the British in 1655, from which time the island’s sheltered proximity to the sea-lanes by which Castile’s ships ferried silver from mines in Mexico and Peru, across the Caribbean’s aqueous heart, toward Havana and then Seville, meant that Jamaica’s first notoriety on the world stage was as a haven for crooks.

So notorious was Port Royal, the privateers’ rest where Blackbeard’s men came to spend stolen coins on prostitutes and pints, that it became known, as Jamaica’s Tourist Board now fondly cites, as the “wickedest city on earth.” During one summer month here in 1661, the place’s pirate governor, Henry Morgan, granted no fewer than forty new licenses for taverns in a town where the parrots, reported a scandalized Dutchman passing through, “drank from the large stocks of ale with as much alacrity as the drunks.”⁹ When Morgan’s men returned from another raid on Spain’s galleons with thousands of coins, in another niblet historians like citing, a group of them “gave a strumpet 500 to see her naked, and . . . [sic] other impieties.”¹⁰ Such tales of rakish glamour, if not tawdry gangbangs, survived the centuries to inspire Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean—and served, long before that, as the setting for a passion play from which the New World’s men of cloth won great mileage. At just past 11 a.m. on June 7, 1692, a massive earthquake struck Jamaica’s southern shore. The act of God rudely woke Port Royal’s rowdies from their hangovers, and liquefied the loose sand on which their town sat. A massive tsunami overswept the Palisadoes’ spit. By noon, nearly all the buildings of the New World’s Sodom, and some thousands of the inhabitants, lay under the waves.

Today, Port Royal is a forlorn cluster of seaside shacks from whose owners you can buy delicious roast fish best eaten, while gazing at Kingston across the harbor’s chop, with local pepper sauce and fry bread called “festival.” Back in the 1990s, the government announced a redevelopment scheme, in partnership with the Walt Disney Corporation and aimed at boosting tourism, that would turn the Palisadoes’ tip into a site-specific theme park. Two decades later, there’s nary a replica saloon or plastic parrot souvenir shop here. And absent those mooted tourist traps, and the deepwater berths Disney wanted for its cruise ships, the Palisadoes is still best known for the key bit of infrastructure—Kingston International Airport—to which Jamaica’s émigrés return from their exploits abroad, and that welcomes its non-tourist foreigners: businessmen like those from my flight, whether from Milwaukee or Montreal, who fly down to check on their investments in bauxite or gas, and perhaps to see the island whores still patronized, three centuries after Port Royal’s fall, by men from many lands.

Badness. Certainly, that was part of the story. Especially in the aftermath of the saga that saw Tivoli Gardens’ notorious don, Dudus, deposed. My cabbie, who said his name was Delroy, related that the government’s long-promised report on the massacre had been delayed again. No one, in any case, imagined that the report would establish the truth of what had happened. This is a country where asking too many questions about such things, as Delroy said and journalists often repeat, “is a good way to get dead.”

“How is downtown these days?” I asked. How was Kingston’s inner-city zone of dons and gunplay faring with its kingpin gone?

“Is worse!” he yelled. “Use’ to be you could park a car deh—now? No mon. Who know who in charge, wit di presi him gone?”

“Di presi”? The president: that’s what they called the don of dons. Jamaica’s FIRST President: Dudus—that’s the title of a book I picked up, a few days later, at a shop in town.¹¹ Hard to imagine a better indicator than that, in this city with its ghetto districts named for war-ripped places like Angola and Gaza, that Jamaica is a “failed state” whose top gangster’s path to power, and to winning his countrymen’s esteem, corresponded precisely with their leader’s dwindling ability to do the same. Not only had the gangster won a monopoly on socially sanctioned violence; none of Jamaica’s actual heads of state, as that book on Dudus detailed, had been able to replicate it. They’d also proved considerably less good than the gangsters they’d helped create, in many areas, at attracting revenue and tending the common good. Now a new set of leaders, from the PNP, was facing a familiar problem on an island whose descent into violence, in the 1970s, commenced when it took on unpayable debts from the International Monetary Fund, that world institution set up after the war to shore up the Third World’s listing little states and keep global capitalism humming along—but that then ended up, as those little economies came to grief, playing far larger roles in their citizens’ lives than their elected leaders did.

Delroy passed me a copy of the day’s Gleaner, Jamaica’s main daily. Its headline could have been from 2001, or ’93, or ’76: “IMF Visit Raises Concerns.”

The IMF was in town to “evaluate a new loan program . . . to help Jamaica meet its obligations.” Since Jamaica accepted its first IMF loan in 1973, it has borrowed some US$19 billion. During that time, it has paid back over $20 billion—and still owes $8 billion more. Most countries carry public debt; the richer ones’ deficits make a little Caribbean island’s look Lilliputian. They haven’t had to borrow, though, at rates that have forced Jamaica’s budget makers, for years, to spend some 45 percent of their internal revenue paying interest. This math, to a grad-student freelancer with a wallet full of maxed-out plastic from Visa and Discover, was familiar. It is also familiar to any member of Jamaica’s political classes born in the past half century. Their government’s rising debt payments, long ago outstripping what it spent on such trifles as health care and schools, increase by larger degrees each year. (Later that spring, the government would accept a new “rescue loan” of US$1 billion to help it “meet its obligations.” Its creditors were surely chuffed. Jamaicans, less so: the loan came with familiar conditions mandating further cuts in already-gutted social spending.)

“You see dat?” Delroy glared in his rearview mirror. “We all mash’ up! Politician’ mash up the country.”

He asked my business in Jamaica; I told him.

“I’ll tell you something to write about.” He proffered his suggestion by saying that listening to the BBC World Service, on his cab’s radio, was one of the few bright bits of a job he didn’t relish. “You saw what happened in the Falklands?”

I wasn’t sure. What of world-newsworthy note had occurred, of late, on those semi-British rocks in the South Atlantic? “You mean when Thatcher invaded?”

“No man! Dem just had a vote! Dey say: We wan’ the queen back again.”

It was clear from how he said it: his countrymen, he thought, should follow suit.

“You think Jamaicans want to rejoin the empire?” I asked.

“Guarantee!” he shouted in the rearview mirror. “You hold a vote tomorrow, we bring back di queen! Guarantee.”

This seemed a stretch. Could the views of the Falklands’ shepherds, vis-à-vis their British parents’ home, ever match those of a nation founded by Britain’s slaves? But here was one Jamaican, anyway, whose vision for Jamaica’s good clashed with its leaders’ rhetoric about a country where, he told me when I changed the subject, he’d grown up the son of farmer parents who still lived in “a lickle village way past Mandeville.” The village was called Good Intent. His surname was Hibbert. Was he related to Toots Hibbert, the reggae singer of Toots & the Maytals fame? “Him me cousin!” Of course he was.

Delroy Hibbert dropped me at my hotel, and, nodding at the bored man in starched shirt and black pants whose job it was to open and close the carpark’s creaking gate for guests, bumped away into the night.

* * *

KINGSTON IS SPREAD ACROSS a deep valley wedged between the harbor and the Blue Mountains, to whose slopes its better-off cling. The social geography of Jamaica’s capital, like its social order, is divided strictly in two: where “downtown” is comprised of the city’s blighted old business district and newer ghettos, “uptown” is defined by its denizens’ loftier class position and their condescension. My hotel, if hardly posh digs, was squarely uptown. Hidden up behind the big clapboard house where Bob Marley lived, once he escaped downtown’s streets, it sat amid ranch-style homes guarded by barred windows and barking dogs. Its hopeful name—the Prestige—was painted, in badly fading paint, on a cement wall by the gate.

The Prestige’s dimly lit lobby was adorned with another version of that airport pantheon. This one featured green construction-paper cutouts of Garvey, Bogle, and Queen Nanny in her kerchief. It looked like it had been crafted by someone’s school-age kid for the Jamaica 50 celebration. Such homey touches, along with a big mango tree–shaded patio out back and rates for “fan-only rooms” far cheaper than the cheapest Motel 6 back home, were part of why I remained a loyal patron of a place whose customer base seemed largely comprised, apart from wandering scribes, of Jamaican school kids in town for track meets, defecting Cubans passing through, and the only species of foreign tourist regularly spotted in Kingston: Japanese reggae nuts. A few of these, dreadlocked and murmuring in Japanese, sat huddled under the mango tree out back, perhaps plotting a visit to Marley’s old house nearby (it’s now a museum to his memory) or having just returned. They were sipping Red Stripes around plates of Mideastern kibbe served up here by reassuringly thickset Jamaican women who staff the Prestige and blare gospel in the lobby from a boom box that they turn up even louder when the place’s surly Syrian owners aren’t on-site. (The Prestige, like much property here that’s not owned by Jamaica’s whites or Chinese, is owned by descendants of a Semitic merchant class who arrived from Lebanon and Palestine and Syria and elsewhere, but who are all called “Syrian” now.) I dropped my bag in my fan-cooled room in front of a xeroxed sign, taped to the wall, that said “No Foot on Wall Surface” and headed out to dinner.

The Global Reggae Conference had wrapped for the day. Some friends in attendance, though, were debriefing over Chinese food up the road. I arrived at the restaurant to find Herbie Miller, the director of the Jamaican Music Museum, surrounded by a tableful of northern visitors. Herbie was an accomplished music scholar and music-biz vet; he had the savoir faire of many in that world, and the dark skin and beautiful bone structure of many of his countrymen. He began his career managing the affairs of a few reggae greats and then, during a decade’s stint in New York, those of jazz heavies like Max Roach. Now his workdays were spent inveigling his bosses in government for nonexistent funds, to build his museum, and liaising, by night, with people like his companions here: foreign “collectors” and untenured researchers whose obsessions with Jamaica’s music, and with its records, have made them the main chroniclers of its history in books and films. Herbie greeted me warmly, and I said hello to a reggae deejay and filmmaker from Minnesota, né Brad but who went by “Moses” here, whom I’d met years before under the mango tree at the Prestige. Herbie introduced a shaggy-haired white man with deep smile lines around his eyes, with whom he was engaged, when I arrived, in a sotto voce chat (their subject, I gleaned, was a high-profile collector and “reggae archivist” in LA). Herbie’s interlocutor told us, over beef and broccoli, how he’d had two guiding passions over the past couple of decades. The first was helping Bob Marley’s mum win her fair share of Bob’s estate. The second, which was occupying all his time now, was working to “free up the herb” about whose benefits Bob sang. He handed me a business card. It listed an address in Omaha, and cited his head counsel position with a group advocating the medical uses of marijuana, called Patients Out of Time—POT.

Not every devotee of reggae studies is a pothead “from foreign”: the inchoate discipline is very much a field forged and embraced by the serious scholars at the University of the West Indies, who had founded its Reggae Studies Centre and were hosting this conference. Their endeavors, moreover, were embraced by Jamaican society at large. That weekend, they launched a companion book to the conference. An anthology of essays on “the globalization of reggae” (its “global dispersal and adaptation,” that is, “in diverse local contexts”), this was the kind of abstruse volume whose launch would struggle to attract a dozen shabby Brie munchers to a bookshop in Berkeley. Here, its publishers’ fete was held at a flashy nightspot run by Jamaica’s hottest modeling agency. The Gleaner dispatched a photographer and ran a full-page spread on the event the next day that reminded me of Vanity Fair’s caption-heavy coverage of its own Oscars party. Local pride informs such fetes: “This lickle island changed the world.” But that pride, and this storyline, comes with an inborn tension between Jamaicans’ determination to shape their culture’s serious study (and its crass exploitation) for themselves, on the one hand, and a deep awareness, on the other, that reggae’s viability, as both pop genre and scholarly field, depends on the abiding love of foreigners. Reggae Studies, and the idea of “authentic culture” on which its subject music is based, is predicated on its rhythms’ capacity for getting people far from reggae’s wellspring, most in countries far richer than Jamaica, to nod along.

Lucky for reggae, then, the music’s sheer ability to do so, decades now after Bob Marley’s end, continues to astonish. For the culture maven given to pondering this music’s persistent grip on everyone from Iowa frat boys to the 100,000 Spaniards who attend the Rototom reggae fest on the Costa Brava each summer, there are many ways to explain how and why, after Jimmy Cliff’s The Harder They Come soundtrack became a UK hit in 1973, reggae went global. This music’s inspired makers were youths impressed by ’60s rock but still in love with ’50s doo-wop. They found a needful way to wed the latter’s sweet harmonies to the former’s bass-and-drums-led edge; they offered a digestible soundtrack, sung in English, to colonial rule’s end across Africa and the Third World. They gave the black people of those lands, as a Kingston guitarist who toured the continent told me they said to him in Kenya, a model for “how to be at once black and modern.” Reggae’s stars evoked the same elixir of electrified primitivity that Jimi Hendrix, with his wild-haired-ethnic-with-a-Stratocaster act, caught at Woodstock. This was the territory they claimed, in the confusing years after the counterculture’s end, in global youth culture’s matrix. And that’s no small reason, along with reggae’s espousing the ’70s’ great narcotic as a sacrament, why their figurehead’s face came to be plastered, alongside Che Guevara’s, in coffee shops everywhere. A latte-complected oval, ringed by regal ropes of hair, that singer’s visage became that of the soul rebel who condoned, from his post on the dorm-room wall, our seasons of don’t-worry-about-a-thing experimentation: the pothead as revolutionary.

Of course, simple Marley worship, for serious reggae fans, is naturally passé: every one of them can tell you, and will, that by the time Bob’s locks grew long enough to take those photos on the posters, his finest work was past. The Marley tunes they love best were made with the two old friends, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, with whom he grew up in Jamaica before becoming a slicked-up Londoner, and were produced by Kingston’s mad Rasta genius of the mixing board, Lee “Scratch” Perry. To roots reggae diehards, “Three Little Birds” is late-period dross. But such Marley tunes, no matter, had likely served as the gateway for people like Minnesota Moses and the Nebraska pot lawyer who we came, that night, to call “Ganja Man.” These characters’ backstories no doubt featured scenes like my own teen ritual of tromping to a big farmer’s field each summer of high school, along with a few thousand reggae nuts and other partyers committing the deep cosmetological sin of wearing dreadlocks while white, to dance along to whichever of Marley’s kids the Vermont Reggae Festival’s promoters could book that year. Such scenes, as one lived them, may have felt endearing or absurd. But replicated around the world, in many times and spots over recent decades, they provided the kernel of entrée into a larger culture whose makers did things with the English of the King James Bible, and the magic of amplified bass, that had a way of blowing earnest teens’ heads clean off. Not only did Marley and his righteous peers set the muse of history to a beguiling beat. (Reggae’s guiding question was posed by the singer Burning Spear: “Do you remember the days of slavery?”) They looked cool doing it. And they vested every mundane speech act, whether describing being in trouble (that was to be “under heavy manners”) or expressing impending arrival (“soon come,” they said) with Old Testament weight. Never mind the confounding tenets of a Rasta faith that held up a vainglorious dictator who died in 1975 as their immortal God. Who could resist a culture that turned talking with your friends into “reasoning with your brethren”?

Roots reggae determined to square two primal passions—for righteous politics and good art—that the grown-up world often doesn’t think can be squared. Its makers ticked a lot of teenage boxes. Many of its more ardent fans, through a hashy haze, are still ticking them. But as those fans devoted enough to come all the way to the source perhaps knew, one reason this world doesn’t merely reward further study, but can bear the weight of academese, is that the story of how Jamaican music emerged on the world’s stage is a history perhaps unexcelled in what it can teach about the larger exigencies of recorded sound, and their power, in the postwar age. That story, as classically told, begins on a sleepy island whose music-scape is made up of hymns sung in clapboard churches and folk ditties strummed by mento men on its docks. Its action commences after World War II, as the island’s countrypeople begin crowding to Kingston’s slums. There, their sonic lives are transformed. Firstly, by the fact that this English-speaking island is in range of the new fifty-thousand-watt signals of AM radio stations in New Orleans and Miami that beam Fats Domino and Louis Jordan out over the Gulf; and second, by the inspired Kingston entrepreneurs who sense an urbanizing people’s thirst for such sounds and invent an institution—the “sound system”—to provide them. The “sound system men,” with their grandiloquent sobriquets like Duke and King, attach turntables to huge speaker towers, which they mount on trucks, from whose beds they spin records and sing-speak, over the beats, of the day’s news and boasts. They grant amplified sound perhaps a larger role, in Kingston’s streets, earlier than anywhere on the planet, in the making of social life—and, if you were unlucky enough to challenge a leading deejay and lose, social death.

Sound clash! That’s what the deejays crow over the R&B 45s they fly to America to find in the ’50s, digging in crates in Chicago and Houston to return with discs whose labels they scratch off to hide their names from rivals. Scattering seeds that their emigrant kids, up in New York, will sprout as hip-hop, the sound system men also reach the logical decision, in their drive to best the competition and as their sources dry up, that they should make records themselves. Local musicians, tweaking the boogie-woogie they love, forge a buoyant new music—“ska”—by sounding the upbeats its tempos leave silent. A generation of Kingston kids become singing stars—and find, in ska, a sound to then tweak and slow further. “Rocksteady,” as their next rhythm’s called, is then transformed once more, by savants of four-track recording like Scratch Perry, into the beat that Toots Hibbert names in his hit single “Do the Reggay” in 1968. It’s at this point, with the help of Jamaica’s émigrés in the cultural capitals of London and New York, The Harder They Come, and a sandy-haired Jamaican son of privilege, Chris Blackwell, who has the foresight, when a young Bob Marley strides into his office, to know that this ragged yardie was a star, that reggae goes global.

But the larger saga of “Jamaican music, a’ yard and abroad,” didn’t end in the ’70s. It has moved on, since that rootsy apogee, from the Rastas’ sanctimonies to the stripped-down sex songs of “lover’s rock,” and the rat-a-tat riddims of the producers Sly and Robbie; to the “slack” sex songs of King Yellowman and Lady Saw; to the still-faster, still-rougher, all-in-patois sounds of the modern “dancehall,” to whose pulse Kingston’s youth thrill today. An aggressively local sound, recorded in such poor quality as to never be Grammy-worthy, dancehall’s records are sung in local diction unintelligible to foreigners. But its foremost exponents, from the still-active trickster feminist Lady Saw (her first big hit was a sex ditty called “Stab Out the Meat”) to the enigmatic Vybz Kartel (a gruff-voiced wraith with bleach-whitened skin who was jailed in 2011 after a charred body was found in his yard), still attract the ears of pop and hip-hop producers, and hip kids everywhere, looking for what’s next, and giving Global Reggae’s exegetes here plenty to chew on.

This, in other words, is its own complete world, complex and full. And at the University of the West Indies that weekend, that world’s various aspects and characters, from ska’s greatest horn players to Vybz Kartel’s authored-in-prison book, Voice of the Jamaican Ghetto, were the subjects of panel talks.¹² But if reggae is a world, it is also a world with a king, around whose story and model the whole culture can often still feel arranged. There is one figure, after all, to which this music owes the world knowing it exists: everyone here has a Bob Story. And the conference’s keynote speaker, whom my companions from the Dragon Court, with a hundred-odd others, went to see speak the next day, was a figure whose identity and livelihood had derived, for forty years, from his having been as close to Bob as anyone. Alan “Skill” Cole, who earned his nickname for his prowess as a footballer, addressed us in UWI’s open-air lecture hall. He reminisced about his days living with Marley in that big clapboard home on Hope Road that now houses the Marley museum. “Me and Bob,” Skill said, “lived a life consistent with being a good athlete.” His words were underscored by his healthy white locks and lithe physique. “We would wake up around four-thirty, five, and train,” Skill said. “We’d go to the studio; then go sell records; come back, play some football, and, in the nighttime, write some music.”

It was hard to say how interesting Skill’s crowd found these revelations there at the Global Reggae Conference. Either way, his talk served these prideful experts with a welcome prompt, that afternoon, to spend some ensuing hours discussing what it really meant, being “Bob’s closest spar”—a title, in Skill’s case, tied to his notorious habit of turning up with Marley at radio stations or business meetings where they needed a song played or deal done, with a big baseball bat he rather liked swinging. This tidbit was affirmed by Moses and others, whose knowing looks underscored a larger truth about “Jamdown”: that in the 1970s and today, bad men were the ones with respeck. That famous peace prophet Bob Marley, like all those who succeed in rising from the ghetto here, knew this well. He also knew the bad men themselves. And he too had wielded their world’s stock-in-trade—violence—to make his way out of Kingston’s Trench Town ghetto, and into that big uptown home, once shared with Skill Cole, up behind which Global Reggae’s devotees, returning to the Prestige after Skill’s speech on Marley’s authentic life, went to parse its aftermath.

* * *

HERBIE HADN’T COME ALONG. He had business, pertinent to Brand Jamaica, with the Russian ambassador: at the World Track Championships in Moscow, he hoped to mount an exhibition on Jamaican music. Ganja Man was present, though. And he served the role of wizened elder well. Settling into a chair beneath the mango tree, he opened a plastic tackle box and, murmuring something about the “endocannabinoid system,” pulled out a thick spliff. “I’ve been coming to Jamdown since ’78,” he said, pushing a forelock from his eyes. “I know the runnings here.” He lit his spliff. And then, drawing deeply, he began telling stories of his dealings with the famously turbulent Marley estate. In one such, he recalled how Bob’s estranged wife, Rita—a craven operator, to hear most tell it—forged her dead man’s signature to empty his cash accounts in the Tortugas by writing “Bob Marley” (he only ever signed his name “Robert”) on a dotted line. Another recounted how the only way he’d been able to help Bob’s mum, Cedella Booker, gain anything from Bob’s estate was by helping her become the legal guardian of one of his kids. (This was Rohan, the Marley son who gained notoriety first as a football player at the University of Miami and then for his long relationship with the musician Lauryn Hill.)

If Jamaican society can feel like a place drawn in rings around Mother Booker’s son, the family he left behind naturally occupies a prideful, if pitiable, place: three decades into his heirs’ often-tawdry struggle to live off Bob’s memory, unhelped by his having refused to sign a will, his kids have helped sell concerns ranging from Marley brand coffee to Marley brand headphones and Marley’s Mood energy drinks. Much more interesting than Marley’s family to me were figures more peripheral to his life but central to his culture. And on the Prestige’s patio that night, Moses and Ganja Man discussed a few of these, hatching plans that would result that weekend in a series of adventures that turned Kingston into a living museum. The museum’s rooms included a Rotary Club gym where Marley’s close friend Ernie Smith, sporting the round belly and waist-long locks of an aging dread, mouthed the chorus to his classic “We de People” (“Are we building a nation? / Or are we building a hut?”); a shaded front porch, out in the suburb of Portmore, where we met a bespectacled octogenarian, known as Mr. Edwards to his neighbors but whom Minnesota Moses knew as “King” Edwards, owner of one of the “big three” sound systems in the ’50s (and who happily recounted the Greyhound journeys he’d taken to find records in America, posing for photos with some of his old 45s with their labels scratched off); and the famous “locals beach” at Hellshire, out past the entrance to Kingston Harbour, where Jamaicans go to “play domino” or laze on scrapwood lounge chairs by the waves. As Ganja Man rolled his car onto the beach, he concluded what must have been his eighth soliloquy of the weekend, on the delicate workings of the endocannabinoid system. A pair of hustlers, waving a shining fresh parrotfish in Ganja Man’s windshield, absorbed his protests that he was just here to see a friend but still insisted on guiding him, waiving their usual fee, to a parking spot in the sand.

Hellshire is always worth the trip. That day, though, we’d come on a mission: to visit with an old friend of Marley’s and Ganja Man’s with a potent bit role in reggae’s golden era. Countryman had first come to Marley’s attention, our pied piper had recounted on the drive, when a young Bob had heard of a fellow Rasta, out by Hellshire, with a gift for expounding the virtues of what the Rastas called ital livity (pure living), and for exampling its benefits. The first time Marley met Countryman, Ganja Man recalled, Countryman swam so far out from Hellshire that he disappeared. (He showed up again that night in time to drum and smoke with Bob.) Countryman became a kind of resident mystic for Marley’s minders, and his doing so resulted in an eponymous film produced by Chris Blackwell and directed by a fellow Jamaican son of privilege, Dickie Jobson, with similar love for Rasta livity. In Countryman (1982), the star plays himself. The film begins with him fishing under a full moon. He sees a flaming prop plane crash into Hellshire Swamp and, rushing to the scene, finds a pair of pretty white kids in the wreckage. He saves their lives and deposits them by his campfire, before then waging a convoluted struggle against conniving “agents of Babylon,” who are hunting them down. At one point, Countryman runs the twenty miles into town, loping over hill and bush to the one-drop pulse of Marley’s “Natural Mystic.” Such sounds and images, if not the film’s patchy plot, helped Countryman win cult-classic status. But its success, Ganja Man said, also had the less cheery effect for its star of introducing him to cocaine. Countryman spent much of the ’80s wasted on blow; he’d lost the house and the Datsun his film work had won him. Now he’d wound up squatting back by the beach where he’d once impressed Marley with his feats as a swimmer.

“Bredren!” Country called out as we approached, rising to embrace Ganja Man from in front of his zinc-and-wood hovel. “Long time!” He hugged his old friend’s chest. He was tiny. He wore a white undershirt, bright against his copper-dark East Indian skin. Ganja Man looked Countryman over and, apparently satisfied that he wasn’t in a bad way with rum or the white drug most Rastas hate, reminisced about some good times they’d shared, riding Jet Skis in Negril. Country led us to the beach. I negotiated with one of the fish hustlers to see about roasting one of his parrotfish for this summit. “Me live natural,” Country said, pulling out scrap-wood stools for his guests. “No current deh; jus’ livity.” No electricity here, just life. Which consisted, here, of a five-foot-nothing Rasta man who crouched over his sun-blackened feet and had lost little of the wiry charisma that had convinced his fellows to turn him into a film that, with its righteous rebel hero and backdrop of violence, perhaps begot by the henchmen of CIA-ga (as the Rastas dubbed Seaga), distilled much of reggae’s appeal. Countryman accepted his old friend’s offer of a spliff. And then he turned to his guests with a half smile. He fixed us with piercing eyes flecked the same yellow hue as his matted white locks and bid us sit.

The disquisition he delivered, over the next hour and more, would have been impressive even without the smoke. But what made it true theater was Countryman’s lady. She introduced herself as Mama Delsy and stood off to the side, in the Rasta way, with kind eyes and poverty’s gnarled teeth. But from there, she punctuated Countryman’s speech, on life and livity as Country sees it, with the affirmations or annotations of a Greek chorus. “Seen!” she’d exclaim, when she agreed; “Evr’y time!” was another favorite. Country began with a riff on “how all of us, when you think on it, are going twenty-four thousand miles an hour, spinning roun’ the sun.” (“Plenty fas’! Ev’ry time!”) He told us how he pled in court with its judge (“Am I innocent or guilty? That’s what I’m here to find out!”), and delivered a cogent excoriation of the “discomfortable livity” (“Discomfortable!”) to which Bashar Assad in Syria was subjecting his people—while Countryman’s hovel had no current, he kept his battery-powered radio tuned to the BBC. He made no mention of Jamaica 50.

Sitting there with these avid pilgrims and their penniless oracle was tricky. Who, as the song goes, was zooming who? In the story of reggae culture’s wider appeal, the imaginary Noble Savage has always hovered. But the bearing of our host, wholly undiminished by this meeting, abounded with the proud will to perform, and create a public self that one grows so used to encountering here. When Warren Weir won London bronze, Jamaicans’ Twitter feeds echoed with his catchphrase—Nuh English, straight patwa!—and with the suggestion, too, that someone should sell T-shirts touting it. Some awareness of this entrepreneurial spirit, certainly, informed Brand Jamaica’s boosters. Whether their addled plan to fix all this in place, and monetize it, could ever work was unclear. Either way, Jamaicans would continue evincing the words of Country’s old friend from the beach. “We the survivors,” as Marley sang, “the Black survivors.” Countryman continued to listen to the radio as we ate our parrotfish. The news of a meteor crashing into Russia prompted a reflection about how “we create in darkness; we sleep in darkness; and when you dead, you go back to darkness.” His chorus agreed: “Seen!”