Cultural Conundrums: Gender, Race, Nation, and the Making of Caribbean Cultural Politics

Conclusion: On Violence

174 C O N C L U S I O N On Violence Lawd de oppress an de dispossess cyan get no res What nex? —Michael Smith, “Mi Cyaan Believe It” All the present discontents surrounding the interplay of race, nation, and cultural hero were mobilized in the anglophone Caribbean with the news that Michael “Mickey” Smith, a Jamaican dub poet and raconteur of the bewilderment of the present, was stoned to death outside his Kingston home in 1983. Much was made—socially and poetically—about the meanings of his murder. For commentators both in Jamaica and abroad, the poet’s death was an indictment of the violent society that Jamaica had become. What kind of people, after all, murder their poets, a poet who was no ivorytower parser of words but a genuine man of the folk, a wordsmith of the grammar and rhythms of the Jamaican language. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, a poet in whose tradition Smith worked,1 dedicated his 1984 book History of the Voice to the murdered twenty-eight-year-old poet “[s]toned to death on Stony Hill.”2 Protests were organized to picket the Jamaican High Commission in London; and in the pages of Le Monde, a few in›uential French sympathizers made the young poet’s death the occasion for rumors about insidious Jamaican rightwing “government plots.”3 Taken together, the events reveal not just the global popularity of Mickey Smith’s verbal style—he had made recordings of his poetry with Island Records and performed in Europe on well-received tours with reggae musician Gregory Issacs—but the circulation of well-worn ideologies about the sanctity of the poet-artist. That the late 1970s and early 1980s was a period when countless Jamaicans had ‹rsthand experience with violence seems to be lost among those who wished to interpret Smith’s murder as something socially larger than what it sadly was—a rather ordinary death in the context of the violence and terror that many islanders came close to. The Jamaican Daily Gleaner of August 19, 1983, reported that the poet’s death was the culmination of an argument between Smith and three men, one of whom threw a stone that fatally hit him.4 No one seemed to know what the men were arguing about, but the scene of the poet dying from a missile hurled in a private dispute creates a rather different spectacle from that of being “stoned to death” by the collective fury that has become Jamaica’s contemporary “society.” Of course, put another way, Mickey Smith’s death makes good poetry. It con‹rms the metaphors Jamaicans have lately made of “the people,” as a brutish, backward, and degraded folk whose senselessness makes it murder one of “its own.” Smith was the poet of the dystopia, the voice that bears witness to the failure of the postcolonial promise and its epistemic revisions. In his best-known poem, “It a Come,” Smith wrote: Went to an all black school with an all black name all black principal black teacher graduated with an all black concept with our blackety blackety frustration we did an all black march with high black hopes and an all black song5 But however much his murder con‹rmed the mood of apocrypha that Smith turned into the subject of “It a Come,” the public imagining of Smith’s death as an “assassination” has much to do with its investment in the idea of a black working class degeneracy and interpreting the psychic dimensions of its social expression. There is much to surmise about the way that culture arguments, with their conjoined emphases on community and expressivity, nurtures this linkage and Conclusion 175 176 CULTURAL CONUNDRUMS continues to fuel both utopic and dystopic sentiment about the Caribbean mass. For those who have both championed the oppositional cultures and social practices of the popular and invested these expressions with a certain progressive teleology, there is a profound disappointment and incomprehension when no coherent politics can be discerned from the choices black working class communities make in their expressive culture. If the social passions of dancehall culture constitute one such example of that interpretive failure, nothing taxes local cultural interpretation more than the character and causality of contemporary Caribbean violence. As the confusion over the meanings of Mickey Smith’s murder foretell, this arena is the most troubling of postcolonial conversation. Here, assumptions about popular resistance...