Trench Town Rock
Faced with the inexorable advance of Cromwell’s forces, which invaded Jamaica in 1655, the Spanish colonists freed their fifteen hundred slaves, who disappeared into the wild. In the turbulent centuries to come, they would reappear under the name Maroons (derived from the term cimarrón, meaning fugitive slave) and enveloped in an aura of indomitability. From this fierce lineage Marcus Garvey was born in 1887, apostle of negritude and the African-American diaspora. Without Garvey, the cult of Rastafarianism would never have transcended its Jamaican borders; without Garvey’s teachings, Bob Marley as we know him would never have existed.
It is to Garvey that the prophetic warning is attributed (though historians dispute it): “Look to Africa for the crowning of a Black king; he shall be the redeemer.” Years later, in 1930, Ras Tafari Makonnen was named emperor of Ethiopia and proclaimed negus (king of kings). In Jamaica, on the trees and roofs of villages and on the walls of ghettos, devout reproductions of Haile Selassie’s face and the green, red, and gold of the Ethiopian flag began to appear. The faithful of the new religion were of humble origin, and their doctrine was simple: Jab (apocope of Jehovah) would lead his people back to Ethiopia at a secret hour, bringing them out of Babylon (the world dominated by white men, vice, and cruelty). That moment was drawing near, because Jah had been incarnated in the monarch of Addis Ababa. The Rastas spurned alcohol, tobacco, meat, seafood, and salt and obeyed the Levitical injunction (25:5) not to cut their hair, beards, or nails. Their rite of communion and basic ceremony was the smoking of ganja (marijuana), the sacred plant ennobled by King Solomon, from whose tomb it sprang.
The first time that Robert Nesta Marley saw a Rasta was in Nine Miles, a hamlet in the parish of St. Ann, where he was born in 1945. Son of a black woman and a white man, who married her but abandoned her immediately afterward, the mulatto boy listened raptly to the medieval stories of Prester John with which the village wise man, an inspired teller of tales, entertained his listeners. The appearance one day of a man with a nest of snakes on his head and a stormy look in his eye, a man who seemed to float rather than walk, frightened the child, who dreamed of him that night. Marley’s conversion to Rastafarianism would come much later.
Nine Miles must not have changed much since then. It is still a very poor village at the summit of a steep mountain range, which one reaches by following an extremely long, winding, and precipitous path. The wooden shack where Bob Marley was born doesn’t exist anymore. The faithful are rebuilding it in cement, and they’ve planted a clump of ganja at the threshold. His tomb is higher up, on another peak that must be scaled on foot and from which, I’m told, on the black day of the burial one could see a winding column of mourners many miles long. Here is the stone where he would sit to meditate and compose, and here, his guitar. A tapestry embroidered by Ethiopians adorns the shrine, which must be entered barefoot and from which hang, like votive offerings, photographs, newspaper clippings, little flags, and even the hood ornament of Marley’s car, a BMW, his favorite because its initials united those of his name and that of the Wailers, the musical group with which he rose to fame.
The Rasta acting as our guide is taking communion, and a North American couple who hitched a ride in our van are partaking as well. The visit includes a walk through a large field of sacred plants. Since marijuana is in theory prohibited in Jamaica, I ask the communion-taker whether he has ever had problems with the police. He shrugs his shoulders: “Sometimes they come and pull the plants up. So what? They grow back again. They’re natural, right?” The prohibition is a formality. A few days before, at a Reggae Bash, or open-air concert in Ocho Rios, ganja was sold loose or rolled in spliffs in plain sight and vendors hawked it like soda or beer. And I don’t think I’ve ever been in a public place in Jamaica without being offered some or seeing someone—and not just the Rastas—smoking it.
But it’s not at Nine Miles, or at the mansion on Hope Road in Kingston, which his producer bought for him at the height of his career and now houses a museum dedicated to his memory, where clues to Bob Marley must be sought. The place to look is the slum neighborhood of Trench Town on the western edge of the Jamaican capital, since it was on its violent and spiritual streets that he spent his childhood and youth, where he became a Rasta and an artist, and where even now the social ferment of his philosophy and music can be breathed. The flies and the mounds of garbage, the motley collection of odds and ends with which the poor have built their tumbledown homes, are the same as those of any Third World slum. The difference is that here, besides seeing filth, hunger, and violence, one catches whiffs everywhere one turns of that “religiosity in a primal state” that Claudel glimpsed in Rimbaud’s poetry. It emanates from the bearded face of the Lion of Judaea and from the Abyssinian colors that crop up on planks, gates, and corrugated metal and on the Merovingian caps in which the Rastas gather up their dreadlocks when they play soccer. When he was a boy, before the guru Mortimer Planner converted him and sent him down the mystical path that he would follow to the end, the Bob Marley who made himself known on these streets as a gang member, soccer player, and idler must have been a kind of Rimbaud: angel and demon, charming and coarse, brilliant and crude.
Like the Rastafarian cult, reggae is forged of the sweat and blood of Trench Town: mixed up in it are the atavistic rhythms of the tribes from which the Rastas’ ancestors were snatched (the wall around the neighborhood is a reminder of the slave market to which they were brought), the accumulated suffering and rage of centuries of servitude and oppression, a messianic hope born out of a naïve reading of the Bible, nostalgia for a mythical Africa cloaked in sumptuous fantasies of Eden, and a desperate, narcissistic eagerness to find and lose oneself in music.
Bob Marley didn’t invent reggae. At the time the Waiters recorded their first albums in the sixties in Kingston’s rustic Studio One, it was already being promoted by the Skatalites and other Jamaican bands and had been established as the country’s most popular music, despite the resistance of the authorities, who saw in the songs’ lyrics an incitement to rebellion and crime. But Marley lent it his unmistakable personal stamp and gave it the dignity of religious rite and political gospel. The poetry with which he infused it moved his compatriots because in it they recognized their torments, the thousand and one injustices of life in Babylon, while also finding in it positive and persuasive reasons to struggle against adversity, to see themselves as Jah’s chosen ones, a people about to pass the long test and enter the promised land, a people for whom redemption was imminent.
The music intoxicated them because it was their own traditional music, enriched with modern rhythms from America: rock, jazz, calypso, and hymns. The language Bob Marley spoke to them was the Jamaican patois, indecipherable to unseasoned ears, and his subjects were their quarrels, passions, and feuds, wrapped up in tenderness, mysticism, and pity. The word “authentic” has a dangerous ring when applied to the work of an artist: Is there such a thing as authenticity? Isn’t it just a simple technical problem for any creator who knows his craft? For Bob Marley it never was, at least not after 1968, when as a result of his talks with Mortimer Planner he converted definitively to the Rastafarian religion, pouring his vast faith and his mystical canaille, his messianic dream and his musical knowledge, his passionate religious zeal and the dense jungle lament of his voice into the songs he composed.
This is why he, out of all the talented composers and artists of the sixties and seventies, was the only one who was not just inspired and original but also entirely authentic. He resisted all temptations, even life, the most beguiling, preferring to die at the age of thirty-six rather than allow the amputation of a cancerous toe, because his religion forbade it. True, he died a very wealthy man—he left thirty million dollars—but he enjoyed very little of his fortune. When one visits the house on Hope Road, the only luxury he permitted himself when his sudden fame made him rich, one notes how meager its luxury is compared with what any half-successful singer can afford today.
In the glory of his last years as well as in the poverty of his early years, his only joy was the dust and debris of Trench Town: kicking a soccer ball around; immersing himself in a mysterious introspection, from which he would return to the world either euphoric or in tears; scrawling a song in a school notebook; exploring a melody as he strummed his guitar; or swallowing the bittersweet smoke of his ganja cigar. He was generous and even prodigal with his friends and enemies, and the happiest day of his life was the day he was able to use his money to help the relatives of the ousted Haile Selassie, the despot he believed was God. When he visited Africa, he discovered that the continent was far from being the land of salvation for blacks that he had exalted in his credo and his songs, and from then on he became less concerned with negritude and more ecumenical, and his pacifist preaching and calls for spirituality were more intense.
One doesn’t have to be religious to realize that without religion life would be infinitely emptier and grimmer for the poor and downtrodden and that societies have the religions they require. When I discovered that a son of mine and a group of his friends from school had become practitioners of the faith, I hated the Rastas’ picturesque theological syncretisms, their marijuana communions, their horrible dietary laws, and their matted locks. But on the sad streets of Trench Town, or amid the poverty and neglect of the villages of St. Ann, the faith that for my son and his friends was doubtless a passing fad, a fickle extravagance of privileged youth, seemed to me a moving bid for a spiritual life, a bid against moral disintegration and human injustice. I ask forgiveness of the Rastas for what I once thought and wrote about them, and, along with my admiration for his music, I proclaim my respect for the ideas and beliefs of Bob Marley.