This post was written in conversation with Julie Sze’s Book Evironmental Justice in A Moment of Danger and her 2019 blog post Environmental Justice As a Soundtrack to Freedom which explains some of the key concepts in her text. My post is an attempt to do something similar. Paying attention to the Caribbean context, I incorporate excerpts from Shelly Streeby’s Imagining the Future of Climate Change to explain the significance of the songs included here:
Under ‘normal’ circumstances I wouldn’t point to music - particularly reggae music as shaping how I understand issues of race and space. This is interesting since anyone who is close to me can attest to having to contend with the sounds of Buju Banton threatening to blow out the speakers of my car or having to wait lengthy periods for me to finish my showers because I must do so to the sounds of music- for me, it’s just in my blood, it’s in my veins. In trying to think about how culture moves people toward political consciousness I had a sort of ah-ha moment and so now I am asking myself how has the repetitions characteristic of culture shaped my awareness and ‘desire’ to act? what is the aggregate effect of the circulation of cultural products that challenge the status quo? And I smile as I think about lyrics from Buju Banton Til' I’m Laid to Rest - tho you may think my faith is in vain, ‘til Shiloh we chant Rasta Fari name - recognizing his awareness of the impact of this repetition - the call for us to organize and centralize understanding how the West has simultaneously constructed black people and predominantly black spaces as wasteland and resource-rich - what could a bad so ‘bout the East, everybody want a piece [?]”
Like Julie Sze has argued about indigenous stories of resistance counterposed against fear, deprivation, and chaos, I see Banton’s Album as a challenge to the frames that “bury the subtlety and complexity of the life force in the world that lie within the extractive zone” (80. original emphasis her’s) Banton’s song belongs to a pre-existing Rasta Fari repertoire that functions as a transnational anti-colonial critique of the ‘livity’ - a repertoire that utilizes different makers of the “uncivilized” (pertaining to syntax and grammar, dress, patterns of consumption) to disrupt colonial socialization. This repertoire, although (and not accidentally) paradoxically operating as both popular and counter culture has been especially attentive to how the West and its operatives in the East deny their deliberate and/or complicitous role in sustaining economic and social disenfranchisement of the masses. As Jamaican reggae Artist Midnite remind us in Earth is the Lords :
Critical delineation I can hear them now
Fine-tuning dialectics, discussing the how
But the how without know is a stray out loud
There is a stray out loud high official mout’
Resource is the truth in the root of what it’s all about
In the first place they wouldn’t be able to suppress such a freedom shout
If you hadn’t supplied them the arms to assert dictator clout
Midnite offers a deeply theoretical assessment of the capitalist and imperialist regime and the racializing assemblages that come together to make this system work. The skillfulness in their deployment of language to forward an ideology that justifies their actions- a language the Rasta is conscious is not his own and itself a tool of conquest that frames the relationship as beneficial; the relationship between the East and the West is exploitative it is about our resources, and need for a ‘careful study’- a decolonial education that makes these connections visible before we can wrestle against it. Rasta Fari belongs to that group that Sze tells us lives and voices [are] not meant to matter, indeed those primed to die [they have always been] central protagonists in pitched battles for radical democracy (Sze, 75)
Midnite and countless other roots rock Reggae Artists link politically disenfranchised peoples and communities across time and space (sze, 78) underscoring the need for solidarities. In urt Midnite makes astute observations and draws connections with, for example, the constructions of borders, systems of surveillance, water access, genocide, overpopulation, forest fires, tornados, violent crimes including murder to capital [which] punishes innocently. A similar thread can be followed in Midnite’s Kings Bells where he connects industrialization and advances in technology to ecological harm, contagion, and equally important damaging connections between and among people.
Key to these sounds is their advocacy for a culture of resistance and the consumption of cultural production that can continue to grapple with coloniality. Music a di ting weh ah go glue up everything, Midnite sings. He continues:
And then them ya talent offering unto the King of Kings
These are the warriors the priest and the King of the Kings of Kings…
Riddim wey ago move you like a feel say you want fi sing, Melody-in
Mutual it is the singers and the players of instruments
Baseline booming ina high rise soci and tenement
It’s an event, woah it’s an event
What them would do widout any kind of a sound bashment anywhere you went
Their music pushes that we imagine other vocabularies to talk about injustice -through performance- through art (Sze, 84) because performative disruptions can sway, even if not suddenly (Sze, 97). I see the music presented here as offering what Sze calls principled resistance & life-affirmation (against capital accumulation and economic growth) and encouragement of transnational solidarities. I end with Midnite’s words: Preserve your culture ina your dignity and everything and remember first and second class citizens in every nation - universal human right need consultation.
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