| Vol. 3, No. 3 | Fall 2004 |
THE SINGER
a story
by
Arthur Dembling
The fishermen of the island were holding their annual fiesta on the avenue that ran along the harborfront. A portion of the street directly in front of the fishermen's cooperative building had been blocked off from traffic. Tables and chairs had been set up on the asphalt. A large rowboat had been hauled up from the beach and filled with cold water and slabs of ice. Men in boots waded through the water handing out chilled bottles of beer that they fished up from the bottom of the boat. From a makeshift kitchen in the co-op building women emerged with trays piled high with pork sandwiches for the small children who made off with these treats in the wink of an eye. The meeting room in the fishermen's cooperative building had been turned into a dance hall. An amplified band provided the music. The unventilated room was jammed with men posturing in open shirts and women rippling in skin tight skirts. The odors of sweat and perfume, of beery breath and cologne, combined to form in the stifling air a steamy sweet and sour piquancy.
Outside on the street a Mariachi band moved from table to table. It attracted little notice until a thin, young boy of eleven or twelve was hoisted on top of a table. He looked very serious, but shy at the same time. His dark trousers were pressed, his blue shirt with its fancy ruffled sleeves was starched, and his black string tie was fixed into a bow. The boy's hair was slicked back and parted nicely, still wet as though he'd just gotten out of the bath. His skin was clear and well-scrubbed for the occasion.
The boy leaned down and spoke to one of the musicians in the Mariachi band. Both of them nodded agreement. The boy then stood up straight, as tall as his height would allow. Scores of people had by now gathered around the table and behind the band. The boy hooked his thumb into his belt loop, near the buckle, and signaled that he was ready. He looked unsure of himself, coy, slightly reluctant and very charming.
The quick, brassy notes of the trumpet introduced the tune and a distant look appeared in his eyes, a proud look, but a bit staged, also. At the start his voice was shaky but he soon mastered his nerves and his sound gained strength and its natural timbre. His voice was high, nasal, and had about it a quality both passionate and restrained. He kept his thumb anchored in his belt loop and with his free and made stiff but sweeping gestures to accompany his lyrics.
At the song's end everyone burst into applause, bravos, whistles . Arms reach over shoulders and thrust thousand peso notes up to the table. His rewards were considerable. He collected them modestly.
The boy turned and faced a different section of the crowd and the Mariachis struck up another tune, less lively than the first and mournful, a bitter love song. His expression alternated between the crushed visage of a jilted lover and the cruel, stoic scowl of a matador. The teenage girls in the crowd nodded and smiled to one another. Not that they were interested in him, really. After all, he was just a baby. No, they were simply acknowledging a secret hope shared among them: that some day they might have a husband, or if not a husband at least a son, who possessed a voice like that—so full of dignity and understanding , so expressive, so attentive. And didn't the voice and the song and the gestures give a glimpse of the soul?
When this song was done more cheers and more money flowed up to him on the table.
Once more he turned and faced another part of the crowd. Everyone knew this next song well. While the boy sang the verses the people supported him with rhythmic clapping and on the refrain their voices joined his. They were out of tune and unable to sing in unison but it didn't matter. At the conclusion he collected more bravos and more money.
They wanted an encore but there was not to be one. The boy was helped down from the table. Men shook his hand and mussed his hair and women kissed his cheek and left their scarlet prints behind upon his chin. He appeared embarrassed and overwhelmed, but also pleased. He smiled and blushed and did not rush to get away.
At last the people drifted off. Some headed for the rowboat full of beer while others made for the steamy dance hall. Two men fell into an argument and began fighting but were separated before anyone drew blood. The Mariachi band moved on to another table where the people barely took account of it.
The boy wandered across the street. On the sidewalk there he met up with a heavy, rumpled looking man. The boy emptied his pockets of thousand peso notes and handed them over. The man gave him a bottle of coke and then began carefully counting the money.
The boy leaned idly against a wall. He loosened his string tie, undid the top three buttons of his shirt and lit up a cigarette. Two young women passed in front of him on the sidewalk. He looked up and stared after them. Their bodies seemed made of liquid and they seemed to have been poured into their tight jeans. Their high heels clicked along the sidewalk like the hooves of mares. The older man stopped counting just long enough to look up and comment obscenely on the two young women. The boy's eyes narrowed. His cigarette was dangling from his lips and smoke poured in steady streams from his nostrils. He could not take his eyes off them. One of his hands held the Coke bottle by the neck. The thumb of the other hand was hooked through his belt loop near the buckle. This thumb curled and beckoned like live bait.
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by
George Colman
(We are grateful to Africa World Press for permission to use in this edition of “From the Field” a few paragraphs from the text of “Oba's Story”, the description of the book to appear on the jacket, and a photograph of the book's cover.)
Africa World Press will soon publish “ Oba's Story: Rastafari, Purification and Power, ” book about “the life, religious development and work for justice of a Rastafarian on the island of St.Vincent in the Caribbean . He was born Richard Jacobs in 1948, a brown West Indian subject of the British Empire but he became Ras Oba Chatoyer, a black African-in-Exile, a leader in the Rastafarian community and a political radical. Colman's book follows the dramatic changes in Oba's life and thought and places them in the broader context of anti-colonial movements, the emergence and growth of Rastafari in St.Vincent, and the dynamics of social and economic justice in the islands of the Eastern Caribbean .”
Michele and I met Oba and his wife Dafina on the island of St.Vincent in 1999 and quickly discovered friends and interests in common. One example: between 1980 and 1983, we lived in Grenada where Michele worked as a journalist with Don Rojas, the editor of the Free West Indian, the newspaper of the People's Revolutionary Government. Oba and Rojas had not only grown up together in St.Vincent but Rojas had served as an important political influence on Oba during the years in the seventies when both worked in New York City . Acquaintances, experiences and shared commitments multiplied. We became friends.
That spring, Oba and and I traveled together through the Grenadines , the chain of very small, very beautiful islands stretching south of St.Vincent toward Grenada . He had worked on all of them and seemed to know everyone. We visited men and women constructing the new luxurious resort on Canouan. We walked through dry bush on Union island to a ruined house where Oba once lived with a Dread who led a failed military action against the government. We ate steaming bowls of fish broth and dolphin eggs on the coast while listening to workers assure Oba that he was wasting his time trying to change Babylon . On Mayreau, a dot in the sea with neither roads nor police, I sat on a dark hillside and listened as Oba explained his convictions about Haile Selassie, the war on drugs and Vincentian politics to a gathering of skeptical young men.
His story, I thought, threw important light not only on Caribbean dynamics but on the broader history of the social movements, conflicts and possibilities of our times. I suggested that others would be interested. Oba had turned 50 recently and welcomed the opportunity to reflect on the life he had led and the future he might anticipate. We worked together on this book over the next four years. The result is “Oba's Story” as I have come to understand it, supplemented by my own reading and observations.
The second chapter of the book opens with this description of the world into which he was born.
“In 1948, Barney and Elsie Jacobs, British West Indians, gave birth to their first male child, named him Richard and carried him to the Anglican Cathedral Church on the island of St.Vincent to be baptized by a white English priest in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Ras Oba was not yet. Ras Oba was unimaginable in the small British colony and family of his birth. Ras Oba would not be conceived for another 25 years. Rastafari, a new religion, began in Jamaica in the 1930's but did not reach St.Vincent in any important way until the early seventies.
“ Great Britain had emerged as the world's largest empire early in the 19th century with colonies in the West Indies , Canada , South Africa , India , Australia and New Zealand . Toward the end of that century, Britain joined other European powers in parcelling Africa out among themselves and by 1914 Britain ruled over some 400,000,000 people world-wide. All that began to change, however, during the Depression and World War II when anti-colonial movements swept the British Empire into years of weakness and decline.
“Richard Jacobs was therefore born a subject of the British Empire but in its terminal stages, a period of contradictory dynamics and signs. On the one hand, the St.Vincent of Jacobs' youth remained a land of parades in honor of the Queen's birthday and prayers for her well being, Chaucer and Shakespeare in the family bookcase, the autocratic rule of white administrators and white planter cronies, sailing ships on warm seas, cricket games, mountain wanderings, duppies in the darkness, and terrible "warning" stories about a disobedient black man's legs tied to different horses and the horses driven off.
“At the same time, other stories were being told, contrary narratives circulating with entirely different messages. Like the one about fifteen black Vincentian women followed by 200 black men with sledge hammers, cutlasses, and sharpened knives breaking windows in the House of Parliament, turning over cars and freeing prisoners in the island-wide uprising of 1935. In depression time, terrible can't-make-it-time, black people rioted and rebelled in all the islands, raised up new leaders, organized unions, and moved against the white power of the British.”
“Oba's Story” moves on from here through the dramatic personal and social changes that have marked his life: the move to New York City with his mother; his enlistment and disillusionment in the United States Army during the Vietnam war; the influence of Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and the Panthers; failed relationships and a new beginning with the beautiful and talented Dafina; the opening to Rastafari provided by Jamaica soccer players; his return to St.Vincent and his work for justice as an elder in the Rasta community. We'll let you know when the book is available.
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LINE OF SIGHT
by
Michele Gibbs
{the following is exerpted from LINE OF SIGHT, a retrospective collection of poems, essays, and artwork, newly published by WEST END PRESS, POB 27334 / Albuquerque , New Mexico , and available on order directly from the publisher}.
“Those of us who came of age in the states in the 1960s had, among other things, the opportunity to be part of a teaching movement from the ground up in the service of freedom. From voter registration drives and freedom schools in Southern counties to storefronts in city slums, we relearned how to use everything, especially ourselves, in order to turn shit into fertilizer one more time. To release the rich loam our overworked soil still turned up and see new shoots rise; to tap the veins of memory and knowledge lying deep in the hearts of the folk to meet the needs at hand.
“It was a process that meant breaking down barriers, extending boundaries and challenging traditional categories and limitations :seeing a world open up beyond the blind alley at the end of the block, the burnt remains of tree, rope, bones, and hope on the edge of town in the dying day. It meant a commitment to change: ways of seeing as well as being in the world. It meant offering ourselves, however imperfect, unworthy, and only partially formed, as instruments of that change. To be leavened by it....”
“In the twenty-five-odd years since these essays were written, the conditions analysed have only intensified while the necessary work of social transformation remains the same. Yet public discourse has become so flattened and the physical attrition has been so great among those whose work and insights shaped the hopes of that earlier period, that it seems timely to revisit some of these formulations for a new generation thrashing through their own thicket.
“The current thicket is heavily thorned with new growths of child and slave-labor in corporate owned prisons and sweatshops and the hardening of apartheid structures in all aspects of life and thought. These conditions, fueled by the ongoing violent removal of men of color from their communities by the State, and by war, the geographic displacement forced upon ever-growing refugee populations, and world-wide corporate poisoning and destructiion of the ecological balance create a conflict-driven envionment of profound disruption. So profound that the earth, itself, rebels. And, as we know, the earth too, at core, is a black woman. May we heed her rumblings in that form, if no other. ”
“ tu sabes?”
our understanding idiomatic
vivimos en esperanza
we live in hope
waiting
esperando
por cambio
for change
intercambiando
claiming our permeability
speaking
in mutually broken tongues
sharing
mutually broken bread
mending memories
to thread our bare/ness/cessities
planting our selves
igualmente
porque tenemos cosas en comun
where our feet sink
into well-turned earth
soiled gladly in its grip
growing rooted again
by penetrating a commonality
born not of inherited circumstance.
but spirit and intelligence:
an achieved reach
across received divides.
M. Gibbs
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