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5. Resurrected Bodies, 1963/2007
- Duke University Press
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“Rastas on Rampage in MoBay—Eight Persons Killed.” So screamed the headline of Jamaica’s daily afternoon paper, the Star, on 11 April 1963. Two days, later the Daily Gleaner led its news coverage with four articles under the heading “8 Killed after Attack on Gas Station. Two policemen, Three Ras Tafarians among the Dead.” And by 10 A.M. on that fateful Holy Thursday morning , RJR (then Radio Jamaica and the Re-Diffusion Network; now Radio Jamaica) reported: “Three people are now known to have died in this morning’s uprising by Rastafarians in Montego Bay.”1 For those who today understand Rastafarians as primarily advocating a philosophy of universalism (the “One Love” Bob Marley sang about), and even for those who prefer to foreground Rastafari ’s ideological roots in black supremacy and pan-Africanism and its more general black nationalist stance,2 news of a “rampage” or an “uprising” by Rastafarians would seem anomalous. But during that immediate post-independence period in Jamaica, fear and disdain were the attitudes most commonly directed toward Rastafarians , not only by those in the middle and upper classes, but also by many working-class Jamaicans. This means that events that were primarily local in scope generated national attention and concern. In this case, the high level of concern was marked by the fact that the prime minister at the time—Sir Alexander Bustamante—flew 5 Resurrected Bodies, 1963/2007 174Chapter 5 to Montego Bay, Jamaica’s second city, accompanied by the commissioner of police, the top command of the Jamaica Defense Force, the security chief, two ministers of government, and several police from the headquarters in Kingston. Once in Montego Bay, Bustamante mobilized police forces from St. James, the parish of which Montego Bay is the capital city, as well as from the neighboring parishes of Hanover, Trelawny, and Westmoreland , to join with civilians in the roundup of Rastafarians.3 Ultimately, because of the actions of five “bearded” individuals whowere motivated by a land dispute, more than 150 Rastafarians were arrested, jailed, beaten, and tortured. In addition to three of the fivewhowere involved in the attacks on the gas station, a nearby motel, and an estate manager’s home, an unknown number of Rastafarians died as a result of the torture, and many more were permanently scarred. Since the 1990s, a group of Rastafarians in western Jamaica has kept a public vigil commemorating “Bad Friday,” and in 2007 the vigil was folded into the yearlong schedule of events designed to commemorate the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. At these commemorations , elder Rastafarians offer testimony about their experiences, asking that the government make a formal apology to the Rastafarian community and that it consider reparations of some sort. Because instances of state violence against members of a population direct our attention to how citizenship is defined at any given moment of time, in this chapter I use the example of this event—now known euphemistically as the Coral Gardens “incident”—to think in a somewhat different way through the questions that animate each chapter of this book: Who has been included in the national body of Jamaica, and how has that changed from the mid-twentieth century to the early twenty-first century? How have threats to the body politic been imagined and eradicated? And how do those who have suffered as a result of their exclusion envision redress ? Asking these kinds of questions can help us to revisit howcitizenship is imagined for today’s world. Moreover, it compels us to think about both the limits and the possibilities of reparations as a framework through which we might seek greater recognition of the historical rootedness of contemporary inequalities, not only in Jamaica, but throughout the black world. I argue that the call for an official apology for and investigation of the events at Coral Gardens is crucial because it directs attention to two important processes that I have been addressing in various ways throughout these pages. First, it acknowledges that citizenship is not a static, universal- [3.238.235.181] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:30 GMT) Resurrected Bodies175 ist notion but is characterized by and rooted within processes of racialization , which are themselves developed transnationally and can change over time (Gilroy 2006; Thomas and Clarke 2006). Second, the call for reparations directs greater attention to the political economy of class formation (Biondi 2003) and its relationship to nationalism and development (Brodkin 2000), thereby destabilizing culturalist notions...