How was that going? A buzzard flew overhead. “Tough road.” Butch Stewart, the package-tourism magnate, had invited Junior onto his yacht to express support for his aims of leveraging Trench Town’s brand. He couldn’t get anyone in government, though, to back his plans. But Junior, who’d been key to spreading the music born here to its old ruler’s heart, wasn’t terribly surprised.
“You saw what a mess they made of the Olympics? Jamaica 50, in London—all the culture England has comes from us! And you saw what they did?”
I had not seen it.
“That’s right! Because they had some little ting in a theater, two thousand people. It should have been the party of the year. All the stars; Hyde Park. But it was a higgler’s shop! A bloody higgler’s shop.”
This, Junior thought, was a huge opportunity lost for Brand Jamaica. But part of why the government hadn’t been able to get it together was familiar. After Bruce Golding’s catastrophic campaign to bring Dudus to justice, new elections were called. Months before the Olympics, the JLP was swept from power and a new government installed. The transition’s timing couldn’t have been worse. Any chance for an effective large-scale touting of Brand Jamaica in London was lost.
Junior Lincoln stepped into the sunlit scrubland around the ’Bas and the 7th Street frontier. “Perhaps,” he sighed, as he replaced the roofless theater’s lock, “we can do better here.”
* * *
JAMAICA’S POWERS THAT BE were not enthused about ferrying tourists to the ghetto districts that supply both their power and their shame. This wasn’t shocking. But if their idea wasn’t to help Junior Lincoln bring tourists to Trench Town, what did they mean, after all, by Brand Jamaica, and what might they do with it? A couple of weeks after visiting the ’Bas and Boys’ Town with Junior Lincoln, I went to another event that promised some answers at Emancipation Park in New Kingston.
Emancipation Park lies about as far from the ’Bas as one can get in Kingston’s geography of power. Since opening in 2002, it has become Jamaica’s chosen venue for official showcases of “national culture” and attendant conflicts. This was the place, for example, where the gala Jamaican premier of Kevin Macdonald’s Marley was almost canceled after Bunny Wailer, arriving to the film with a delegation of Rasta elders, saw the red, gold, and green carpet laid out at the park entrance, protested that no one should trod on the holy colors, and demanded its removal. (A plain red one was found instead.) This is also the bit of Jamaican public space that boasts the piece of statuary that’s supplanted Edna Manley’s Negro Aroused as Jamaica’s most famed. Unmistakable for its location and size, the piece guards the park’s entrance, where it’s set in a low circular pool. It is comprised of two nude figures, twelve feet tall and with their thighs emerging from the water, their eyes gazing up from bondage. Sculpted by another white female artist from Kingston’s upper classes, it was called, predictably enough, Redemption Song. But the statue’s local notoriety derives less from artistic merits than from a feature that is impossible to miss. Walking by and casting your eyes at these obsidian figures, you are met, right at eye level, with the figures’ colossal genitals. Big Bamboo, indeed.
On the day of the prime minister’s Youth Awards for Excellence, hundreds of uniformed school kids streamed into the park, pointing at Mr. Jamaica’s Brobdingnagian bits, and giggled loudly. I joined the throng of well-dressed parents and kin who’d come straight from church; it was a Sunday afternoon. I’d spent some weeks speaking with people from the Tourist Board, the Film Board, and the Institute of Jamaica; it was clear that none of them, no matter the ways they all spoke of Brand Jamaica, could talk about what comprised best brand practice. This event was put on by the prime minister and had the official motto “Youth on a Mission . . . Project 2062.” It was presided over by then minister of youth and culture Lisa Hanna and promised to distill, in one grand tableau of live-action propaganda, how Portia’s administration saw the brand and its uses. Loitering inside the park, I looked for the new friend who had told me about it.
Seretse Small was a veteran of Jamaica’s culture industries with a secondary role in their official staging. He was a noted jazz guitarist and arranger whose career had taken him from studying music theory and composition at Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, just up the road, to touring the world with reggae’s biggest stars. He had told me, the evening we’d met through a mutual friend, about backing up Shaggy on Saturday Night Live, and about how, when he’d gone on tour to Kenya with someone else, the people there had told him how it was Jamaican music men like him who “showed them how to be both modern and black.” Now Seretse had mostly retired from performing. But he was still in the music game, managing a band of young men from his alma mater whose reggae-tinged guitar pop seemed aimed at appealing to the boy-band fan base of One Direction. His group, Da Blueprint, had bested a few thousand rivals in a “World Battle of the Band Contest” in the UK earlier that year, and thus garnered a spot on the bill at the Youth View Awards back home. A couple of nights before, I’d stopped by Edna Manley College to watch them rehearse. The school’s ’70s-idealist architecture placed domes and trees amid little amphitheaters and shaded groves. It seemed almost a carbon copy of the analogous school Fidel Castro built in Havana in the ’60s on the grounds of an old country club to train the youth who would build Caribbean socialism. This made sense: Michael Manley’s PNP took its cues from Cuba in the ’70s. To judge by the official who stopped by that night to look in on Da Blueprint’s rehearsal, today’s PNP still takes them from there. The official was an affable if unctuous fat man in a tie, backed up by two aides, similarly attired. He pronounced the band’s two covers of classic reggae songs “okay.” He was less sure about a bubble-gum ballad, “Your Love,” on which the skinny guitar player harmonized with his bassist brother. Was it too risqué to include in their nine-minute set? He’d let Seretse know.
At Emancipation Park, one party who had needed no pre-show vetting was the woman who gazed into the crane-mounted camera sweeping over the crowd, to welcome us to the show. Lisa Hanna was no stranger to TV. She first passed before the public eye hosting local programs as a teen before ascending, after she became Miss World in 1993, to the status of Brand Jamaica icon. When flying out for that pageant in South Africa, Lisa’s mother told me, the nineteen-year-old budding politician made a point of showing local news cameras how, at the nape of her neck, she had grown a single little dreadlock, wrapped in Rasta-colored string, that she would hide beneath flowing tresses abroad but that people back home, secure in her Jamaican-ness, would know was there. Twenty years on, Shirley Hanna’s daughter had traded her tiara for a prim suit. Now she lent her poise and perfect grooming to this PNP government as its minister of youth and culture. It was her job, baring pearly teeth below high cheekbones, to launch this pageant put on by her boss. She said we were there to honor young Jamaicans who, “like the stars up above,” had a “brilliance [that’s] allowed Jamaica to shine and provide light for the rest of the world.” And then those young stars—a young man who’d won London bronze at 200 meters; a young woman who won the same colored medal, in “Fashion Technology,” at something called the WorldSkills Competition, in São Paulo—mounted the stage. They took their plaudits from the prime minister, who smiled serenely from the front row, doting on her children. One of them, a proud pigtailed schoolgirl in this society where twice as many girls as boys finish high school, delivered the day’s “vote of thanks.” She described how the honorees gathered onstage weren’t merely proud to be honored, and proud of Jamaica’s great leaders; they felt that “Portia” wasn’t just a leader, she was “our mother too, the mother of our people. And for her love, which we can feel so dear, we are so grateful.” Amen.
Seretse’s boy band was allowed to do their song; another young singer, I learned, drew harsh reprimand for wiggling his hips overmuch. I’d seen his act. His moves might have been risqué on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1954; in this city where kids’ dominant dance was called “daggering” for a reason, they seemed gentility’s height. But such wiggling wasn’t in accord with the aims of what was, at bottom, a political rally whose producers left nothing to chance. This was unshocking. So were the leagues of remove from actual youth culture its youth culture