The Chairman Mao phrasing was striking. But it wasn’t new. She’d used it before. “Cultural revolution” had also been the takeaway phrase from a speech she’d delivered in the heady days of Jamaica 50, in which she’d outlined her ministry’s new cultural policy, high in the mountains of the cockpit country, where the Maroons won self-rule from the British. The larger aspect and resonance of the venue for that speech, the Maroons’ old capital of Accompong, suggested much about its contents. This village was described by the American choreographer Katherine Dunham in her 1946 book, Journey to Accompong,3 based on Dunham’s research as a grad student in anthropology, as home to a kind of “Africanity” unknown in North America. Dunham’s ideas helped inspire a postwar folk revival whose builders included Louise “Miss Lou” Bennett in Jamaica and, in New York, a folk singer—Harry Belafonte—who married one of Dunham’s dancers. That generation’s art was premised on performing a kind of “authenticity” that may be regarded, by sophisticated kids now, as imbued with the same artifice all performing is. But Accompong’s resonance, in the Dunham-Bennett-Belafonte vision of folk culture’s political uses, certainly allied with the vision of cultural revolution Lisa Hanna proclaimed in a place whose ties to its past I’d glimpsed when, after driving up to Accompong myself, I met the curator-cum-foreman of its town museum. That thin man with a wily air told me he was descended in a direct line from Queen Nanny and insisted on posing, with her abeng horn, for a picture. And then he showed me around a tidy mountain town whose access to public funds, and the sympathy of international NGOs, was plain in its gleaming new school and the good, drivable road I’d arrived on—built by the PNP, he said, for their loyal supporters here. “Di only green me deal with,” he volunteered, “is di vegetation and grass deh.”
That avowed Maroon’s reasons for enacting a past that was also his livelihood, and for rejecting the JLP’s colors, were plain. Could it really be, though, that his party’s new leaders, invoking their cultural revolution and Brand Jamaica in the same breath, saw the same pastward-looking thrust as Jamaica’s path ahead? As I stood in Emancipation Park, listening to Lisa Hanna try to instill in the youths the spirits of the elders, it certainly seemed so. And when I went to see her ministry’s chief consigliere and speechwriter, he confirmed it. Resplendent in his silk Rasta-colored tie and braces, he shrugged off the phrase’s Beijing ring. “What we mean by ‘cultural revolution,’” he explained, “is activity awakening the memory of Bogle, and Nanny, and Sam Sharpe and the Maroons.” The efflorescence of those figures’ images, on hotel walls and in airports, had found their source. “That culture of resistance is Brand Jamaica,” he concluded. “And we are a uniquely cultural people.” I didn’t have the heart to ask, as I’d planned to, why this government so committed to Jamaica’s “uniquely cultural people” was actively engaged in constricting the main space—street dances—within which their culture now grows.
The answer was implicit. The only ways that Jamaica’s leaders, so aware of their peoples’ visibility and keen to tout it, had been able to work out how to do so were stuck, if not in the seventeenth century, then certainly in the 1970s. What the policymakers didn’t see, or couldn’t, was that what makes Jamaica cool was not it “activating the past.” It was about young people from Tokyo to New York looking here, as they have been learning to do for some decades now, to see what will be cool next week, or next year. Jamaica’s brand had juice precisely for the bits of culture that governments are traditionally good not at supporting but suppressing. And it had juice because of how its most gifted exponents don’t “activate” the past so much as play with it. In the manner, say, of the martyred street dancer Bogle, whose name did just that, and whose funeral march, featuring a glass casket adorned with the Sesame Street characters he loved, brought thousands of decked-out mourners to “jiggy jiggy” wakes, in the garrisons where he was a hero. (“A lie!” they yelled as his hearse passed.)4 Or in the manner of, say, Lady Saw, whose reign as the Queen of the Dancehall has lasted better than twenty years, and who told me, when I met her one night at TGI Friday’s in Kingston, about how she saw her work as building on the best folk tradition of Louise Bennett.
“How did Miss Lou put it, about ‘Jamaican ’oman’?” asked Lady Saw in our corner booth. “Look how long dem liberated and de man dem never know!” Wearing white sneakers, and dark sunglasses perched atop an auburn wig, Lady Saw laughed. We sat across Hope Road from the Marley museum, in this chain restaurant full of Jamaicans who, perhaps getting a jump on their dream to one day dwell in a Florida suburb, were downing iridescent drinks from big plastic cups. Their island’s queen of raunch, sipping a daiquiri and eating fries, told me of being born to a large family in a small country town, and of how her father went to America, and though he never got papers to bring his family, did send home country records she loved. (“You know Loretta Lynn’s ‘Woman Enough to Take My Man’—that’s gangster!”) She told me of coming to Kingston to work as a sweatshop seamstress in the Free Zone, where she met the lover-producer who “put her on.” (“First hit was ‘Half-and-Half Love Affair’—it was about having an affair with a man when he’s someone else’s man.”) She explained the over-sexed “slack” persona she performs onstage—“The guys were doing it, why couldn’t a woman do it?”—and she recounted how the American pop-punk band No Doubt came to Jamaica to record their Grammy-winning hit “Underneath It All,” and called her to lend them a verse. (“It was done in a minute, and then: Boom! It was a hit. I loved that.”) She chatted graciously with fans who walked over to pay respects, and told me about how much she loved Louise Bennett—but how she’d also felt compelled, in a remake of Miss Lou’s “Under the Sycamore Tree,” to tweak her hero. (“It’s about getting her first kiss under that tree. But you know she got laid under there!”) She told me about how lots of young pretenders had come at her crown but that she “spits harder than any of these young chicks coming up; I don’t have competition” (it was true); and also about how, when she’s placed in social set-tos with Jamaica’s “uppity uppitys” among whom she now lives in a big house uptown, they are often shocked to find that Marion Hall, the lovely, bright woman Lady Saw is when she’s not singing tunes they abjure, “actually wasn’t a rude person at all.”5
Here, in short, was a real, live exemplar of what makes Jamaica cool as hell. But here, also, was a remarkable person whose appeal to officialdom, and to a minister of culture who closed her Youth Awards for Excellence with the hope that “God continue to bless this country, as we move forward, to bless the world with who we are,” was beyond nil. That spring, Lady Saw, after an extended raunch sabbatical during which she’d performed only gospel and country tunes, had just returned to heavy radio play and cultural relevance, with a tune Miss World wouldn’t touch with a bamboo pole.
The title of her latest hit was this: “Fuck Me with My Heels On.”
* * *
THE BIRTHLAND OF the great Lady Saw, of course, is hardly the sole country whose uppity uppitys struggle to commandeer the songs and styles of their lowers, for the ends of an establishment that fucks them. One is tempted, as a general rule, to echo the dictum of a great island culture maven about what happens when officialdom butts in. “Anytime you get government involved,” says Chris Blackwell, “it’s a fuckup.” Which, with the exception of building schools to train art makers, or create spaces for them to play—and then getting out of the way—may obtain everywhere. So may the gap between culture as it happens on the street and “cultural policy” as decreed from on high. That Jamaica’s powers that be should turn Marley’s “Redemption Song,” a tune as subtly aware of art’s limits as music’s power, into a gravely unsubtle monument in stone isn’t surprising. But part of what’s striking about these gaps’ breadth, in this country whose brand’s boosters speak of “our uniquely cultural people,” and whose Miss World minister of culture believes she lives in “the best cultural capital, and country, in the world,” is that even on their discourse’s own terms, Brand Jamaica’s strength is middling to poor.
Not