“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