Reggae Wisdom: Proverbs in Jamaican Music

College Literature, Winter 2005 by Manlove, Clifford T

Prahlad, Sw. Anand. 2001. Reggae Wisdom: Proverbs in Jamaican Music. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. $50.00 hc. $22.00 sc. xxiv 302 pp.

Nearly all studies of reggae music and its Rastafarian "roots"-and especially those studies that focus more on Rastafari-emphasize its aesthetic, cultural, and religious contexts, rather than making specific, serious analyses of reggae's radical political critique of modernity. While there has been a fair amount of academic publication on reggae discourse in the United Kingdom and in the Caribbean, there has been little serious academic interest in reggae and Rastafari in the United States, except as a sociological, anthropological, aesthetic, or perhaps syncretic religious phenomenon. Swami Anand Prahlad's Reggae Wisdom: Proverbs in Jamaican Music is a decided turn away from previous reggae scholarship; Reggae Wisdom is among the first studies by a United States critic to take seriously the question of what reggae musicand "roots" reggae in particular-means. However, as Prahlad makes clear from the start of the book, the question of interpretation in reggae is often a multivalent and subjective one: "I love its infectious beat, its spiritual strength and its insistence on telling the truth in as raw and naked a fashion as possible. I love its spiritual militancy: I believe it is the most militant music of the twentieth century. . . . And I love that one of the most fundamental elements in reggae is the use of proverbs" (xviii). By focusing on the use of proverbs in reggae, Prahlad not only foregrounds both personal and social interpretations for reggae discourse, he also provides a highly teachable way of introducing students to the serious study of reggae music as a cultural and ideological expression.

While specifically addressed to folklorists, and those interested in the cultural function of proverbs, Prahlad's book is also an invitation for students and teachers of literature to take reggae seriously as an object/text of research, much as jazz has been embraced by many fields in the humanities, including English (xxiv). Although Prahlad intends to focus on the use roots reggae makes of particular proverbs-to understand better the meaning of particular proverbs within cultures of the African Diaspora-he also seeks to better understand the meaning of specific roots songs and the intentions of their artists/performers. Reggae Wisdom has three main sections. The first two sections comprising the body of Prahlad's book are six chapters that analyze roots reggae by way of individual proverbs. The third section is an especially comprehensive and pedagogically useful set of five appendices cataloging proverbs used in roots reggae, names of artists/performers that use these proverbs, and an interview with Keith Porter (a member of the Itals, a roots group Prahlad singles out as being one of the greatest and most consistent users of proverbs [141]).

In the first three-chapter section of Reggae Wisdom, Prahlad focuses on the broader Rastafarian, ideological and rhetorical, and Jamaican cultural implications for analyses of proverb use in reggae. Emphasizing the ideological influence of Rastafari upon the proverbial elements of roots, Prahlad opens with a chapter on "The Original Man," a discussion of the "contextual frame" that informs and inspires the "roots" subgenre of reggae. That Rastafarians are "straight from creation"-as Andrew Tosh puts it in "The Original Man"-is perhaps the most essential Rasta "knowledge" to imbue the content of roots. Spiritual and ideological, this concept of "anciency" not only means that Rastas are reincarnated souls of Israelites and biblical prophets stretching back to Genesis, but more generally and politically that "anciency [also] implies purity, righteousness, and a natural state in which human beings are in touch with their full intuitive powers and innate intelligence, where they are in harmony with the natural world" (12). All other ideological and living practices of Rastafari extend from anciency, such as valuing "knowledge" over "belief," recognizing African nationalism and "pan-African" identity, acknowledging the divinity of Haile Selassi, decentralizing government and religion, refusing "wage slavery" and commercialism, adhering to a vegetarian diet for a vital life, etc. Debates and manifestos on these practices permeate the content of roots, thus requiring study of proverbs not only for explication but also for translation to other individuals, cultures, and languages as well.

The second chapter, "Jah Message to Preach," focuses on the various rhetorical strategies roots performers and lyricists employ when using proverbs. These strategies, and the meaning of the proverbs employed, change as the "persona(s)" of each particular performer changes from song to song and often even within the span of a single song. While the primary persona of the roots performer is that of a "warrior/priest"-an oppositional yet complementary pairing-this persona also assumes and presents the point of view of several "secondary voices." These secondary voices carry numerous distinct and contradictory characteristics, identities, and knowledge, such as being an "educator," a "rudie" (a rebellious youth, usually male), and having a simultaneously "epic" yet "everyday" nature. Chapter three, "No Cup No Mash," concludes Prahlad's introduction to the use of proverbs in roots with a critical survey of the "social" and "situational" uses of proverbs in Jamaican culture, and previous scholarly attention to this phenomenon. Proverbs have served a number of uses historically to both Jamaican society and individual Jamaicans, they "address injustices and social problems such as hunger and poverty" in a language that is understandable to either individuals or communities (72). Personas adopted by performers-their modes and contexts of address-amplify, legitimize, and transmit political messages focused on healing the effects of oppression.