In this book I have taken you through many subjects, hoping you will see certain connections across history and between nations. I’ve also woven together a proverbial quilt of icons. But this exercise hasn’t been solely about bringing revolutionary figures into your life; I hope to encourage you to pinpoint your own role models based on what you’ve experienced and the kind of guidance you need. What does the quilt you’ve made for yourself look like? We all carry one, whether we realize it or not. What should it look like? Are there devious characters you have subconsciously picked up as guides leading you astray? Are core values holding you back? Are your icons turning into idols you can’t challenge? I continue to ask myself these same questions.
In my view, extreme begets extreme. Far-left-leaning Yippies like Jerry Rubin in the 1960s, for example, beget the alt-right Milo Yiannopoulos in 2016. Rubin ended his career as a right-leaning commentator and I expect Yiannopoulos will complete a similar flip-flop. As the pendulum swings from the leftism of the sixties and seventies, how far right will it go? Think about that as it begins to swing back to the left, after the extremism of the Republican Tea Party has helped usher in the Trump presidency.
How many people are you willing to alienate as you push back against the fascists? Dishonest discourse is a waste of energy. The truth really does matter, and I believe it prevails in the end, no matter how hard some try to cloud it. The way forward is about inclusion, without whitewashing the stains from the past. It’s about the principle of “unity without uniformity,” as Jake Homiak declares in his work chronicling Rastafari history, and also the “principled unity” Dhoruba Bin Wahad so eloquently speaks of.
Venturing to Jamaica and Cuba in 2016, doing co-op work, certainly challenged my truths. Many ideas I had been tossing around in my head for years were finally put to the test. For instance, I found that cultural appropriation wasn’t just about crossing the “race” divide, as I observed Jamaican society exploiting Rasta culture without ever giving Rasta communities their due.
I kept my own level of appropriation in check in my travels. I had recently cut my dreadlocks, which I have had off and on for almost thirty years. My habit has been to grow my locks for seven years at a time, mostly because it makes sense to keep myself fresh. Each time I shed them, I can renew my vow in a way that feels like I am moving forward. Since this is not in keeping with traditional Rasta practices, I have often felt at odds with some who haven’t overstood. No matter; my aim is to live true to those who have taught me, without selling myself out in the process. After all, like you, I am a complex human being, and this leads to the final metaphor I will throw your way—ajiaco soup. This I found in Cuba.
So Much More than a Melting Pot
Since America is often referred to as a melting pot, does this mean the country represents the hot metal around the ingredients that dissolves them into a homogenous sludge? Yikes! The Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz deepened the concept by pointing to the complexities involved. Earlier in Cuban anthropological circles, his key development was to coin the term “Afro-Cuban” and to create a scholarly association devoted to digging into this new field of study. He challenged notions of acculturation by creating the concept of “transculturation.”
The gist was that when two societies meet, rather than looking at appropriation as one group shedding their culture in order to adopt another, as in acculturation, transculturation acknowledges that “the process of cultural contact and change never moves in one direction only. Rather, all cultures in contact transform each other and create a new culture, different from the original ones.”[266] Ortiz felt that this kind of transculturation happened on a wider scale in Cuba than anywhere else, and even though it defines “Cubanness,” it happens “among all peoples,” therefore it’s applicable to any modern society. His description of the Cuban people’s experience of intermixing, perhaps as a model for all nations, is certainly compelling. He said that their “loving embraces” have been “more frequent, more complex, more tolerated, and more prefigured of a universal peace among the bloods.”[267]
João Felipe Goncalves, in his preface to Ortiz’s The Human Factors of Cubanidad, provides context for Ortiz’s thinking about transculturation, so we can better understand why a comparison to ajiaco soup is such a potent analogy to Cuban identity. “The ajiaco metaphor powerfully subverts an image that is found in several nationalistic discourses across the globe: that of ‘roots,’” Goncalves writes. He calls out nationalists for using the term roots by highlighting Ortiz’s statement that “no one can claim roots in Cuba—not even indigenous peoples, who also came from somewhere else.” Goncalves then provides specifics, identifying Spain’s influence as a “cultural trunk.” But like the Africans who were “uprooted and transplanted,” none of these ethnic groups were ever “well-sowed in the island.” Then he quotes Ortiz at length:
We Cubans have a peculiar relation to our roots: we eat them. What is the ajiaco if not a root roast, a kind of funeral pyrex? You take your favorite aboriginal roots—malanga [yam], yucca, boniato—and you cook them until they are soft and savory. In keeping with your roots’ roots, you might even cook them in a hole in the ground. But then you consume them. You don’t freeze them. You don’t preserve them. You don’t put them in a root museum.[268]
There are important nuances in the way ajiaco soup is made. Ortiz made it clear that the soup is one that never stops being cooked, because additional ingredients are constantly added. In the quoted lecture, Ortiz was speaking at the University of Havana in 1939. As he intoned, race is “nothing but a civil status granted by anthropological authorities,” and he challenged the oversimplified concept of the melting pot by anointing the now immortal ajiaco. He traced the origins of the stew to the Taino Indians, who “carried out the first revolution, that of establishing agriculture.” He then related their stew to ones that all peoples have developed as a basis of survival:
Into the pot went everything edible, the meats without cleaning and sometimes already rotting, the vegetables without peeling and often with worms that gave them more substance. Everything was cooked together and everything was seasoned with strong doses of chili pepper, doses that covered all of the unpleasantness through the supreme stimulant of their sting. From this pot one would take what one wanted to eat at the moment; the remainder would stay there for meals to come.[269]
Adding new water, the cook would resume the process the next day. New ingredients would be added day after day, with the broth thickening with each different substance and flavor. Ortiz compelled his audience to follow the metaphor. He identified the open pot as Cuba, “placed in the fire of the tropics,” and how the “lively fire of the flame and the slow fire of the embers” relate to the island nation’s two seasons. Where one feeds from the pot also has implications. “Cubanidad,” he explained, “has a different flavor and consistency depending on whether it is scooped from the bottom, from the fat belly of the pot, or from its mouth, where the vegetables are still raw and the clear broth bubbles.”[270]
He then went into further detail about the particular ingredients, incorporating all peoples who have added a flavor or texture to the dish, none more valuable than the other. But when it comes to the name itself, Ortiz was explicit—ajiaco is “composed of a linguistic root of Black African origin,” with a “Castilian ending that gives the word a pejorative tone, utterly appropriate for a conquistador facing a colonial stew.” The African root is used to name the indigenous plant of the Tainos, so the term itself profoundly relates to all three cultures.
Ever diligent, Ortiz also pointed out the disparate origins within the individual groups of people who settled, or were taken there, positing that the Tainos were perhaps “the most homogenous in their lineage.” Because the Africans were forced there as slaves, their backgrounds were as varied as the many different climates and topographies of the continent itself. The African contingent, Ortiz held, was composed of “a multitude of origins, races, languages, cultures, classes, sexes, ages . . . like the canes, they were milled and squeezed so as to extract the juice of their labor.”[271]
And what will one say of the Whites, now so vexed with each other over questions of race? . . . What will we say of these German, French, English, or Italian races, which do not exist except in fantasy of those who labor to convert a changeable concept of history into a hereditary and fatal criterion of biology?[272]
Ortiz pointedly argued that people later known as “white” had been “dominated in their land” and then became “dominators in the land of others,”[273] which led to “the oppressed terrified by punishment, and the oppressor terrified by revenge.”[274] He urges us to consider culture, not race, when we look at people—because different cultures exist within each “race.”
Ortiz openly celebrated Afro-Caribbeans when explaining “Cubanidad.” He not only made a nod to their labor—building up Cuba to the point where it could compete in the world’s markets—but he also discussed Africans’ contributions to art and culture. Like Rastafari itself, “Cubania,” he wrote, “did not rain from above, it sprouted from below.”[275]
As Haile Selassie I implored, “Do not fall into the narrowness which looks only to the borders of your nation . . . We must move ahead in concert with all mankind.”[276] With cooperative economics, together we can build an inclusive future truly worth living.