ROOTS, BLOODY ROOTS.

5. ME FI WAH GUAN BEK TO JAMAICA MON

When I was 22 I bought a round-the-world plane ticket. I had the option of four stops anywhere in the world that I could travel to.
‘Why don’t you go back to Kalimpong and find your roots?’ Mum asked me.
‘No way man, you can take my roots and shove it.’ I said.
‘I’m a new kind human being, one who’s free from culture, race and heritage, one who’s free to create himself in anyway he wants to dammit.’ I said.
What an idiot.
So instead of going back to my homelands, I decided to go to Jamaica.
Why Jamaica? At the time I was really into the vintage 1970’s roots reggae and dub. Still am. It just had this timeless feeling about it, perhaps exacerbated by the amount of ganja I was smoking. Me and my friend would drive around in his old beaten up Volvo station wagon, listening to vintage reggae on his broken tape deck which played the music one third slower than normal, making the dub reggae- which was already really, really slow to begin with- sound like we were moving in ultra slow motion. Then we’d stop somewhere scenic and smoke up till the cabin of the car was thick as a cumulus cloud, saying ‘Ya mon’ and ‘Jah Rastafari’ and ‘Big up’ and ‘Haille Sellassie, conquering lion of Judah.’ Until we got paranoid that some ‘Crazy baldhead’ policeman would take notice of the noise and try and ‘downpress’ us with his ‘babylon system’ and we’d drive away. It almost got to the point where I was going to get dreadlocks, but when I phoned up the local hair studio, I found out it cost $200. $200 fucking dollars! I thought dreadlocks were all about being a free and easy, low maintenance type character who didn’t really care what he looked like and wished to try very hard to project such an image to the world, but the more I looked into it, the more it seemed it took a lot of care and upkeep, a lot of hassle and vanity, so I dropped the whole matter. ‘I’m going to Jamaica mon, to get me pumpum all wet yunno?’ I said to my conspicuously white friend.
‘Wah guan? Yah ras claat, me fi wada tek care of me no bumba claat.’ He replied. We didn’t really know what we were saying to each other, but it sounded cool, just like the exotic other we heard singing along with the bass heavy, syncopated rhythmic music we loved. Also I think I subconsciously identified with the lyrical content that revolved mostly around exile and cultural dislocation. They were always singing about being taken away from their African homelands to the Caribbean to work for the white man’s ‘Babylon system’ and how badly they just wanted to go back to ‘Zion’, the promised land, which — minus the slavery, brutality, sugar plantations and everything else about it — was similar to my situation as a first generation immigrant. What I never understood though, was that airplanes had been invented several decades prior, so if they really wanted to go back to Zion, it wouldn’t be that difficult. There were several flights a day to Zion and while it might take some time to save up, they could just hop on a plane and fly back to fucking Zion and be done with it and then they wouldn’t have to sing about it all the time. A few years later I saw a documentary on some Rastafarians who were good to their word and flew back back to Zion, Addis Ababa in Ethiopia to be exact, to live where their ancestors had been taken from, but most did not really like it much and in the end, returned to Jamaica, their tropical beachside Babylon in the Sun. It seemed like for them, the reality didn’t match the idea and Zion wasn’t at all like the Zion they had imagined. It was a poverty ridden country with lots of problems, full of people that were not like them, even though they were meant to be. Who would of guessed.

So I flew back to my Zion, Jamaica, to pretend to be Jamaican and to get in touch with my African ancestors, before the evil white mon had come to take me away from Africa on slaveships, bound and shackled and whipped all the way.
It was my first developing country I had ever travelled to and when I arrived at the airport, I was immediately sold a thick wad of pot by the taxi driver who drove me to my hotel.
My hotel was a bamboo shack on Negril beach and I remember going out to sit on the beach at night, all jetlagged and culture shocked and shady Jamaican drug dealers and pimps kept appearing out of the darkness and coming up to me going, ‘You waanna sweeet lady fi de night mon?’ or ‘You waan Cocaine? Pineapple skunk? Heroin?’ and I remember thinking, this wasn’t at all like the sweet reggae music me and my friends had listened to all those many smoky nights back home in fucking Ostraya. Once again the reality was different to the idea. Duh.
I smoked a joint on the beach while fielding these young entrepreneur’s offers and then promptly freaked the fuck out, succumbing to a combination of strong weed and intense cultural dislocation and ran back to my bamboo shack and lay in the dark and cried hysterically, my body shaking with sobs, feeling as far away from home as ever, and burbling, ‘Maria! Maria! Maria!’ over and over again, missing desperately my first girlfriend, a Swedish single mother ten years my senior who had taken my virginity in a broom closet ten years too late, earlier that year. It got a bit better after that and I ended up having an okay time. But like most things in life, it wasn’t what I had expected. Zion was not all that it was cracked up to be. There was a lot of poverty, gang violence and civil unrest. Also all the Jamaicans looked at me as if I was some kind of outsider, as if I was not one of them, even despite me owning a lot of their vintage records and knowing the lyrics to many of their popular songs from the 1970’s. If there was one lesson Jamaica had taught me, it was that I was definitely not Jamaican.
I know, I couldn’t believe it either.
But this reality was driven home every time I was addressed by a Jamaican, who would invariably call me ‘Japan man’ Or ‘Chinaman’ or most curiously ‘White man’, driving home the idea that we were all the same to them, just a bunch people with pale skin from somewhere in the West where there was more money. Currency was more real to them than the idea of race. I guess that was a more progressive way to look at it. The most depressing thing, aside from being labelled the same name as their oppressors, was that every time they called me ‘White mon’ from across the street, I would always respond, turning around and saying, ‘Yes sir?’.