Back in the 1970s and 1980s a debate raged in conflicted anti-racist circles as to whether the Irish were, in fact, black. The theory was impeccable. It started from the premise that when it came to race, black was a political colour stemming from a particular experience.
That experience, in the case of Britain, was shared by those who came from former colonies to take up low-paid work and live in areas where they were subjected to both social and institutional discrimination.
And so a definition originally constructed to unite those who came to Britain from places as disparate as Ghana and West Bengal found itself applied to those who hailed from Galway and West Belfast.
This affinity was, in the nationalist communities at least, somewhat mutual. Civil rights protesters in the 1960s, taking a leaf from the song sheets of those fighting segregation in the deep south, sang We Shall Overcome. Murals in Belfast claimed Steve Biko and Bob Marley.
”The Irish are the niggers of Europe,” Jimmy Rabbitte Jnr tells his band in Roddy Doyle’s novel The Commitments. ”An’ Dubliners
are the niggers of Ireland. An’ the northside Dubliners are the niggers o’ Dublin.”
There was only ever one problem with this — reality. The vast majority of Irish people, Rabbitte included, are white and always have been.
At a different time and place the question would never have arisen. It is not a debate that would have taken place in the United States, where those of Irish descent would prove among the most resistant to civil rights. Nor is it a discussion you would hear in the south of Ireland today, where the northside has many black people of its own and the country has a new citizenship law to keep more from coming.
But in an era when the British state was policing Brixton in London with the same intention, if not the same intensity, as it was West Belfast, there was a reason why black Britons and Irish Catholics identified with each other. The logic was flawed, but by no means fantastical.
As any white Rasta or Banghramuffin will tell you, affinities have their limits. Pitch them right and you have the potential for solidarity on the basis of shared experience, ideology or belief.
Like many children of immigrants, I found this out the hard way. Raised in a country that never seemed to have much interest in me as a citizen, I chose self-exile from an early age. Until I was 17, whenever people asked where I was from I would tell them Barbados, the land of my parents, despite the fact that I had made just one visit, at the age of four.
I meant it. Sadly, it had little meaning. It took a trip to Barbados to realise that they had little interest in me as a citizen either.
Over the years I would discover that home was where I felt at home.
As the row over plans to remove Bob Marley’s remains continues, it has become clear that these contradictions do not necessarily die with us.
Marley is buried in his native town of Nine Miles, Jamaica, but recently his widow, Rita Marley, has announced her desire to move him to Ethiopia. ”Bob’s whole life is about Africa, it is not about Jamaica,” she said. ”How can you give up a continent for an island?”
For residents of Nine Miles, who rely on tourism for their income, such talk is tantamount to treason. ”If they try to move him there’ll be war,” says Jonathan Braham, a tour guide at the Marley mausoleum.
Given Marley’s lyrical legacy, the dispute is both logical and paradoxical. Logical because, like many people in the black diaspora, he embodied a tension between where he happened to be (Jamaica) and where he thought he should be (Africa). To Marley, Africa was not just a physical space, it was a spiritual destiny.
Paradoxical because, while in life he called for peace, love and pan-African unity, in death he is at the heart of a dispute that spans, but also splits, the black diaspora. Moreover, to those who love the songs — Trenchtown, Trenchtown Rock, Smile Jamaica or No Woman, No Cry — it was certainly news that Marley’s life was ”not about Jamaica”.
In between the logic and the paradox there is reality. A small number of Rastafarians have made the trek to Ethiopia, where the former emperor Haile Selassie granted them a colony called Shashemene. Meanwhile, successive Ethiopian governments have refused to give Rastafarians citizenship in their adopted country.
The point here is not that the Rastafarians should not have gone to Ethiopia — people should be able to go wherever they want and be treated with dignity when they get there — but that these journeys in search of the authentic and divine inevitably disappoint. As a response to alienation they are inadequate, as a search for home they are ineffective. Given that he has been dead for 24 years, we can presume that Marley is beyond personal disappointment. But those determined to move his remains are likely to feel disillusionment.
Indeed the greatest paradox in this row is that what made Marley an icon was his ability to take all these influences and translate them into themes that were universal. He found a home in common values of political resistance and human compassion. Where and whether they move his bones is symbolic.
How and why his music continues to move people all over the world is substantial. — Â