Come, We Go Burn Down Babylon: A Report on the Cathedral Murders and the Force of Rastafari in the Eastern Caribbean

On 30 December 2000, two Rastamen, twenty-two-year-old Kim John and thirty-three-year-old Francis Phillip, slept together on the ground in Pavee, the notorious ghetto above Castries where St. Lucia’s Nobel poet, Derek Walcott, was born. (Rock-stone was their pillow.¹) At about six o’clock in the morning, they made their way into the city through the square once used for public hangings, now spruced up with busts of famous St. Lucians and renamed Walcott Square. In his poem about his boyhood in this place, Walcott declared that he would contain himself against the suffering here, saying nothing of it, “Until I have learnt to suffer / In accurate iambics.”² He never allowed his poems to become “homemade bombs,” like those of Franz Fanon or the “already ripe and bitter Cesaire.” He determined to avoid the pitfalls of the “historically hung-over” West Indian mind that prefers to take revenge in nostalgia and roots itself in a shallow racial despair or the bitter flaunting of race. Instead, Walcott chose “awe” and the “precious resignation to fate” afforded those born in the colonial backwater, St. Omar’s Blue.

On Old Year’s Day, Kim and Francis walked directly under the billboard-sized picture of Walcott, which points his thoughtful gaze beneath the giant Saman tree into the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception. They entered the back of the cathedral and doused the threshold with the gasoline they had purchased the day before. They set the door aflame and then began to make their way up the central aisle, soaking and igniting horrified parishioners in the pews left and right. By the time their ten-minute siege of the holy building was over, thirteen people were scorched, Father Charles Gaillard was dying, and Sister Teresa Egan was dead.

Together, these two Rastafarians committed what have come to be recognized as the worst (and most significant) murders in the postcolonial history of St. Lucia. Murder, we know, “prowls the confines of the law, it establishes the ambiguity of the lawful and the unlawful … it posits the relation between power and the people stripped down to the essentials.”³ These killings, ambiguously described as the “Rasta killings” or the “Cathedral Murders,” attacked directly the symbols of an equivocal postcoloniality, and then reignited the awareness of Rastafari as a forceful resistance ideology and the problematic hope of West Indian militancy. Despite the vilification, police brutality, shearing of locks, Dominica’s “shoot on sight” law, and a general persecution that surprises those who think of these as Reggae Islands, Rastafari has become the foremost Pan-Afro-Caribbean movement since the United Negro Improvement Association. It has already disseminated and supplied a culture of resistance in Anguila, Barbados, Antigua, Dominica, and all the craggy hills of the Eastern Caribbean. Now it confronts its limits.

Come, We Go Burn Down Babylon

The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception is an uncommonly beautiful, imposing, and durable structure. Its centrality and traffic create the city’s heart. People stream in for forgiveness and renewal and flow back out into uncertain times. It is the only building that has survived the numerous fires that have plagued Castries, including the great fire of 1948, “that hot gospeller [which] had leveled all but the churched sky.”⁴ The Cathedral’s weathered stone-gray exterior opens to a grand airy space with high arched windows and a vaulted dark wood ceiling. The walls are frescoed with dramatic portraits of black saints painted by Dunstan St. Omar. These images, which St. Omar painted in advance of a visit by Pope John Paul II in 1985, are arresting. They are slung together with pained, dramatically emphasized eyes which seem to recount an incomplete redemption. The style of the images breaks with Italian fresco and reflects the radical artistic sensibilities of the man who also designed the nation’s flag in 1967, when St. Lucia became independent from Great Britain. He and others like him pursued what he calls an “intellectual revolution...