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11 Jamaican Diasporic Identity The Metaphor of Yaad BARRY CHEVANNES To name is to summarize. It is to plot as onto a single point all the references of an identity. He, or she, who is without name is without summary, and therefore without reference, lost and confused, like Kamau Brathwaite, who describes his catastrophic experience of Hurricane Gilbert: “as if I have been blinded in my metaphors; cosmology totally disordered, my personal contribution to the culture . . . is almost irrevocably eradicated and destroyed, my name no longer Kamau —but almost back to little naked Eddie on the unverberating hillside” (1997: 62). Or, I would imagine, like Ben Johnson, one of whose very critical references the morning after that infamous dash changed from Canadian to Jamaican-born Canadian, and the day after that to simply Jamaican. If Donovan Bailey may have restored the tarnished glory of Canada at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, Jamaicans did not watch this Olympian with dispassion, since they know him as Jamaican-born, as if to remind the Canadians to whom they, the Canadians, owe their present fortune, even though we did not quite take blame for, and tried not to share in, that earlier shame. Being and defining Jamaican, being and defining Canadian, being and defining anything is a necessary and urgent task. The more we are subjected to globalization , the more that necessity. The relationship between the necessity for self-definition and globalization need not, indeed should not, be construed as oppositional or dialectical. As Stuart Hall states, the London-based global ethnic traverses the world, or does not think it out of his or her stride, on his or her mobile telephone, but is more self-conscious about being Jamaican than his or her own parents who, unlike the global ethnic, were born and grew up in Jamaica (1997: 28). Being Jamaican for Hall’s global ethnic means language and idioms and style and the creation/invention of a memory of loss. For to be Jamaican a farin1 is to have a diasporic memory, that is to say, the memory of a particular reference point, a land, with which there are primordial ties of sentiment but to which there may be no real or enduring return. It is the memory of Yaad,2 and it is on this that I focus. Among the young people in the Jamaican diaspora, Yaad has become metaphor for home. The yard, as Sidney Mintz (1974: 233–47) more than any other Caribbean anthropologist, or Erna Brodber (1975; 1980: 1–3) more than any other Caribbean intellectual/ artist, understands, is a central reference point of self-definition among the 130 Barry Chevannes African-Caribbean peoples. Long before the dream of freedom became the act of emancipation, the yard was personalized space, set apart from the nakedness of the plantation, as Waddell, the nineteenth-century English missionary to Jamaica , found. With a characteristic Manicheanism that viewed sex as belonging to the baser instincts, if not downright sinful, and the dance of the Africans, with its characteristic pelvic thrust and stirring, as sexual debauchery, the missionaries were very watchful over their congregations on the eve of the coming emancipation . On the pretext that “a company of loose and disorderly people” were disturbing the neighborhood with their “singing, and drumming, and dancing” in celebration, Waddell, with a confident air of pastoral (and probably racial) superiority, boldly barged without permission into the yard of the host and began remonstrating with him. This is what he reported this “wild fellow” told him in reply: I had no right to come into his yard; for he might do what he liked in his own place, and have what company he pleased. Because he had a black face and I a white one made me do so, but when the first of August arrived, he would see who would meddle with him or his dance. He would be as good as me then, and would split my head if I came into his yard that way again. (Waddell 1970: 147) That a man’s home is his castle was clearly not meant only for the Englishman. It applied equally well to those transported from continental Africa with the intention of stripping them naked, baptizing and clothing them with a new and non-threatening identity.3 But the Africans in plotting their identity restored the most basic element in their graph of references, the personal space, the yard.4 The development of the peasant communities across...

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