The most compelling truth about human being is that its all about the story. All we are, were and ever will be are stories. Living, breathing stories. Hence narrative is everything. Who tells, and how is told the stories we perpetuate create the foundation of our experienced reality and understood truth.
Certainly for me, at the heart of my existence is the narrative received from my father, whose life thesis is embodied in the national motto of Jamaica. Out of Many One. Whether Jamaicans are aware of the depth and breadth of the historical narrative encoded in this terse epithet, the search for a United State of Mankind is a long tale that began once upon a time very long ago. That such a state might be created in the Americas is simply the latest chapter in the book.
One might not need a prophet, whether a Jeremiah or a Jonathan Cahn to realize that now the spotlight has shifted from the US and is now on the Caribbean and in particular on the pearls of the Antilles, my Jamaica land we love.
The USA, the other nation in the hemisphere to echo the dream, E plurubus unum (their failure to anglicize it being perhaps a prognostication of the failed experiment the society would become due to ingrained elitism in the culture of governance that would never truly allow an authentic Demos Kratia to emerge) appears to have failed completely and on the verge of implosion, whoever wins the upcoming elections. Neither party nor leader seems to have the credentials to reignite the vanquished flame in Lady Liberty’s torch.
The spotlight is now on Canada and the Caribbean and the endemic defects in Canadian multiculturalism, where enclaves of cultural strands meet but never mix places the bettings odds at Jamaica’s doorstep, and the larger Caribbean, to authenticate our prophetic one love culture and become the New Jerusalem hoped for but not yet founded….or grounded.
At the heart of the question is identity. And addressing this creatively is the critical factor. The hope that the various old world cultural legacies brought into the Jamaican space might be commonly diffused in the general population or at least co-opted for the common good, which neither US nor Canada has much promise left in ever leading the way in demonstrating possible, and in which Latin America is so far behind….. from Simon Bolivar to Martin Luther King, Jamaica was always sanctuary, perhaps because of this star of destiny it holds.
And at the crux of that identity question is the smothered spirit of Africa. How can a tree grow which curses its roots? These are the issues addressed in my early essays available at The Half not yet told. Black History without the whitewash. Most of the information presented there is yet to receive the critique it deserves perhaps because it is so far out of the familiar boxes of thought current in the culture, and yet for that very reason, may also increase its import and value to a people who, for all intents and purposes, might now represent mankind’s best shot at realizing its best self.
- Imhotep.
- Queens of Courage 1,
- Queens of Courage 2
- Who were the ancient Egyptians?,
- The Racial, Religious and National Heritage of the Jamaican people,
- From Rape to Reparation,
- The New Jerusalem,
Maybe the missing ingredient in the pie of cultural legacies giving birth to new visions of human society in the Caribbean where Chinese, Jews, Europeans and Indians, combine to form a clanless, casteless, classless, tribeless, multi ethnic democracy in the Americas, is a restored African consciousness.
YeKengalé 