CLR James and Bob Marley
The cinematic renaissance of Bob Marley in the form of the Ziggy Marley-produced biopic, One Love, invites us to reflect on the elder Marley’s legacy again. In an obscure and brief interview in Free Spirits in 1982, CLR James commented on the worldwide reaction, the tremendous outpouring of sentiment at the time of Bob Marley’s death. His brief remarks guide us in what we say here. What did his music or art represent?
James explained it was the first time that a Caribbean personality made a contribution on a world scale that was not based on the intellectual understanding of the formally educated. Whether this is true or not, it is worthy of meditation.
Marley’s music had come from below Jamaican and Caribbean society. His was the music of the tenement yard, the ghetto, the dungle. Clearly shaped by the Rastafarian movement, one cannot understand that movement unless one is intimately in touch with the Caribbean masses or everyday people. The Rastas shared ideas that, even when they appeared absurd, confronted the Caribbean hierarchies of formal education, color caste, and repressive and alien religion. In their groundings, Rastas placed the faith and search for self-government of those who lived in the dungles of Back-O-Wall and Trench Town.
Not welcomed by an official society led by creole nationalist elites, the Rastas projected a profound social motion, imposed the toiling people’s lives, times, and worldviews, their assertion of an African or Black identity, and their experience as dispossessed on those who otherwise maintained the decadent politics of parliament, property, and the police state.
Marley’s music was an astonishing achievement for Caribbean civilization. It showed that the experiences of toilers in the government yards and the bottom houses mattered too. For his art to make a tremendous impression in Britain and Europe was significant. In colonial times, West Indian artists and intellectuals were compelled to seek opportunities in foreign, via migration to imperial centers and pursuit of formal education to make their way among the propertied of their own peripheral territories. Marley forged another path from the dungle to the world.
That Marley’s music, the popularization of the words and music of Caribbean toilers, could be of global significance when the keepers of Jamaica and Caribbean society did not believe ordinary people were human or culturally fit to do anything of substance was remarkable. Further, Caribbean society was not arranged for ordinary people who lived in the slums to distinguish themselves in any arena of the powerful.
Marley’s music received a tremendous reception among the toiling people of Britain and Europe. This revealed that in imperial centers there were not just privileged and arrogant aristocrats but working people whose cultural tastes emerged from their own ghettos. They had no problem identifying with the words that the Rastafari chant and sing. This was most profound. For while white imperialism had suggested the African world had nothing to teach the world about self-government for generations, the rank-and-file whites in imperial Britain and Europe who knew their own poverty and alienation had their anti-fascist spirit affirmed and rearmed by Marley’s music. For CLR James, the intersection of the counter-cultures of anarcho-punk music, which at times inspired throwing rocks against and fighting fascists, and Ska music, the precursor to Rock Steady and Reggae, was probably as alien to him as Rastas believing Haile Selassie was Jah or God, the Almighty.
But James understood that the social motion of both fought the law. If the law won in the short term, if they both clashed with police who tended to look like their color and complexion, the insurgent rebel music revealed, that however much people today are pessimistic about ‘black and white unite and fight,’ the global working class had something in common. And they decided this on their own authority. Cynics talk about cultural appropriation today while revealing it is they who wish to sell their heritage for a mess of pottage. Marley’s faith that wealth was character resonated globally. We know what he meant for the African world. But before pessimists inquire about the racial substance behind more universal claims, we would like to suggest this. Marley’s music began as the voice of the dispossessed in Jamaica and the Caribbean. We take this seriously more than most people.
As a result, whatever international solidarity Marley found on a world scale, we respect that this came far before Jamaican and Caribbean elites decided his music would be useful for tourism marketing. We know the rulers of his homeland, however they have become more diverse in colour and gender. As with the rulers of our Caribbean region, the Jamaican elite remain at war with the social class from which Marley emerged.
Respect to those wherever they may be found who wake up under a police curfew, feel like a prisoner, toil in the hot sun or on the night shift in a factory, and materially must break their post-colonial chains. Not all Jamaican and Caribbean persons, though they may enjoy Marley’s music, want to improve on the revolution he chanted and wailed about. Many seek personal empowerment through the vocation of politics (some even claiming Rastafari themselves!) only to disavow the incipient tradition of working class power that Marley proselytized to the world. It is a revolution that will happen at the expense of, not in unity with, those people of color who maintain coveted positions above society administering servile lives below.
