by Vanessa Walters
Wi liccle but wi tallawah. Small but mighty.
Bob Marley described Jamaica as “the university of the world,” and it is nearly impossible to overestimate the global impact of this small island of fewer than three million people. Jamaica has been a pivotal part of world history, from the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1494, through the genocide and enslavement of the indigenous population and Africans who followed. The lessons of Jamaica’s history are humanity’s inheritance. Reggae music is part of its distinctive culture that encompasses the political and the existential, influencing protest movements, language evolution, and social transformation worldwide. Within its panoply of forms, the central message remains mental emancipation for the poor, the oppressed, the underestimated.
Sufferah, if they can but recognize their own innate power.
The sufferah takes center stage in many of Alex Wheatle’s stories. From Brenton Brown, the troubled mixed-race youth abandoned in the foster care system, to enslaved Kemosha, who becomes a swashbuckling pirate to liberate her people, Alex aptly illustrates the Jamaican proverb. The small but mighty hero or antihero takes on a hostile environment, often at a terrible personal cost, for a purpose bigger than themself.
Certain parallels might, I suppose, be drawn between the sufferah and standard-issue superheroes. Like Superman, the sufferah is disadvantaged from birth, sometimes lonely in their predicament, often on the outside looking in longingly, and just as Jor-El tasks his disheartened son with giving the same people who reject him “an ideal to strive toward,” the sufferah must also uplift humanity either within the pages or beyond. At least Superman gets to hide who he is behind the socially accepted disguise of Clark Kent. He finds acceptance and safety by cloaking his powers and knowledge with a nonthreatening persona. In contrast, the sufferah, by definition, is seen as antisocial, as unkempt or aggressive, mentally impaired—like the Rastafarians of Jamaica, the original persecuted sufferahs, were judged to be.
At first glance, Alex’s sufferahs might seem to challenge the reader to find any empathy for them. For instance, in East of Acre Lane, Biscuit is a Brixton drug dealer working for a sadistic gang leader. These sufferahs mostly don’t apologize for who they are either—if they even have self-awareness. They kick and scream their way onto the page. Yet we like them immediately, possibly recognizing the part of ourselves that resists conformity, or as one might root for a balloon tossed around in the wind, anxious about where it might end up.
Brenton Brown, Liccle Bit, Moa, Kemosha, Naomi, Biscuit—Alex has found many sufferahs for his award-winning novels. But now he takes us on a very personal sufferah journey: his own.
In the aftermath of slavery in Jamaica, Marcus Garvey is credited with initiating the Black consciousness movement that became central to Jamaican culture. Despite being dismissed by the elite of his time, Garvey was revered by the lower classes as a prophet, giving rise to the Rastafarian movement. The movement rejected the colonial view of Black people as spiritually and physically inferior, instead centering Africa and Black people in conscious thought. Rastafarians survived repeated and often brutal attempts by the Jamaican government to destroy their movement. Eventually, they become known for their dreadlocks, antiestablishment stance, and a heightened sense of self, demonstrated by the unique use of the personal pronoun “I” and other words altered to fit their philosophy.
And then came the reggae: the thunder, lightning, “drum blood story,” electric storms, the rhythm of history setting the pace for violent uprising as explained in “Reggae Sounds,” a poem by the UK-based Jamaican dub poet and activist Linton Kwesi Johnson. Alex’s journey explores how reggae music sustained him through some of the most turbulent moments in his life and how these anthems provided context and companionship in his struggle. It was an unspoken language between others like him, offering a safe space free from hostility. Signposts that gave them a trajectory through the harsh winds of Great Britain. The Windrush immigration era (1948–1971) was sensationalized in Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech. A succession of laws were passed to restrict the flow of nonwhites to the United Kingdom. Ten years after Powell, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher promoted fears that the UK “might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.” At the same time, she positioned the British character as morally superior and implied that xenophobia was justified.
Black people found themselves targeted by the racially applied stop-and-search “SUS” law, under attack from white nationalist groups, and obstructed in their search for employment and accommodation. The suffering was widespread. Films such as Harold Ové’s Pressure (1976) described a generation in crisis, and Babylon (1980) chronicled the rise of the reggae sound systems against the backdrop of endemic racism. Alex’s story is challenging reading at times yet never gets too dark, because we know that our sufferah has made it through. He also finds light even in the darkest of situations and shows us how far a little empathy can take us. How strong the human spirit is.
From Dickensian beginnings, Alex Wheatle has risen to be one of the most lauded writers in Great Britain and beyond, deservedly honored with an MBE for services to literature in 2008. His 2016 book Crongton Knights won the fiftieth Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, while others have been translated into multiple languages and adapted for theater and television. Alex’s remarkable life story is the basis of the fourth film in Small Axe, Steve McQueen’s critically acclaimed anthology series about the Caribbean community in the UK during the 1970s and ’80s.
How on earth did he make it through? It’s a question that confronts us often as young Alec Alphonso Wheatle endures shocking abuse in the Shirley Oaks children’s home, and Wheatle the teenager runs riot (literally) through the streets of South London. We sit in the prison cell with him, smelling the stench of the shit bucket. We watch him flailing in his proverbial sea of troubles, wondering what fresh hell awaits him next.
But the clue is in the lyrics of the tunes he offers us. Rethinking oneself. The cornerstone instead of the castaway. Love instead of hate. Although riven by loneliness, he found joy and empathy among his reggae greats. These were friends and mentors—who understood what a young Black man was going through, who gave purpose to despair, whether plaintive commiseration or a mischievous croon. Pretty incredible to see every aspect of his life covered in the songs listed.
Whether real or imagined, Alex’s stories are a gift to us to never lose hope. His books are loved worldwide for their vivid, relatable characters and heart-pounding scenes. They were inspired by a boy in the UK who knew nothing about himself but found a rich heritage. If Jamaica is the university of the world, Alex Wheatle is its chancellor.
Vanessa Walters, author of The Nigerwife, is a novelist, playwright, and journalist originally from London, now based in New York. She is of Jamaican heritage and has written extensively about the British-Caribbean experience. Her published work includes Smoke! Othello! and the young adult books Rude Girls and The Best Things in Life. Her plays have been staged across the UK.