“Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?” ~ Desmond Tutu.

One of the great defining features of my life was the fact that my family moved from a city in the UK to the heart of rural Jamaica when I was not yet eight years old.  That resulted for me in an immersion in a culture that was quite different from the one into which I was born, although of course since Jamaica was a member of the Commonwealth (i.e. a former colony of England and its Queen) there were many English features to the society.  But Jamaica had and always will have, its own unique identity. Not least of which is its language.

That was my first challenge.  To not only be able to understand what was said to me, but to learn to respond in kind.  To study the pronunciation, the patois, the syntax, the unique phrases and words.  It helped that I was in the country, attending a country school, far away from the ‘speaky-spokey’ types (I guess a good translation would be ‘posh’ and perhaps ‘snobbish’) in the upper classes of Jamaican society.  So in my formative years I soaked in the lingo, absorbing the nuances, the contexts, and observing the traditions that went along with rural, traditional life.  I was blessed.

One of my early memories is of learning to dance the ‘ska’, local music, a precursor to reggae, which was most decidedly not played much on the airwaves in the early Sixties.  Some of the songs were perhaps too risqué, too crude, and even the Wailers were only played on juke-boxes, sound systems, and in those homes lucky enough to have a ‘record changer’ and a supply of ‘45s’.  I can see myself in the living room of a high school teacher’s home, learning those basic moves to the sounds of the Heptones, the Wailers, and Toots and the Maytals. 

Amazingly, in 1968 one of those early groups, Desmond Dekker and the Aces, crossed the Atlantic with their song ‘Israelites’, a song written in patois, which was the first reggae song to make Number One on the British charts, despite the fact that most of those buying it did not understand the words! For those of the Windrush generation, immigrants from former British colonies who had been enticed to come to Britain to better their opportunities and to help rebuild the country after the war, it must have been ironic.  A song from home could reach the top of the charts, while they were subjected to racism, bigotry, and discrimination.  Not to mention police harassment and brutality.

My perspective on life has been heavily influenced by my early years, but it is based on a common respect for humanity, modeled by my parents.  In more recent years I have read about the philosopher Martin Buber.  He wrote that the human experience is about relationships.  He wrote of ‘I-Thou’ relationships, versus ‘I-It’ experiences.  When we see others as ‘Thou’, even if they are strangers, we see them as human, like ourselves.  By seeing others as ‘Thou’ we are seeing the divine in everyone.  This is an over-simplified representation of his philosophy.  I was reminded of this way of seeing others in a recent conversation with a Jamaican friend who has lived in the US for years.  She told us that she uses a hand over her heart and a slight bowing of her head in interactions with others.  This nonverbal greeting has led to positive encounters even with hostile individuals.  She is treating them as ‘Thou’.

I have been thinking recently about how we communicate.  As a child I had to learn almost a whole new language, in order to be able to fit in with and learn about another culture.  I am sure there were many hilarious miscommunications along the way.  Sometimes, those of us privileged to have spent more time reading academic publications have expanded our vocabulary to the point of becoming opaque, our language too clever by far.  One of the arguments against the Democratic party is that the leaders use language that is off-putting to the average working-class citizen, despite the fact that they are trying to be inclusive.  Our current leader speaks at a fifth-grade level, and has won the hearts and minds of his followers.

The diversity in the society I grew up in shaped me for life.  Unfortunately, there is a portion of the US population that is scared of diversity, and that fear has been amplified by the current administration.  Not only that, but it is being steadily stripped out of policies, of practices, of research, of discourse.  Instead of diversity being celebrated it is being out-lawed and white-washed out of existence.  How can a society which has been enriched by people of many cultures, ideologies and traditions hold only one way to be the ‘American’ way?  As the Native t-shirt reads: ‘No one can be illegal on stolen land’, a reminder that the Europeans that colonized this land were the original illegal immigrants.

Desmond Dekker’s follow up song to the Israelites contained the line: ‘A it mek’, which is an answer to the question ‘Wha mek?’ In other words, why? What makes it that way?  In a recent Jamaican novel, in an exchange explaining to one young girl why she should try never to be alone with a certain older male as she would have no other choice but to let him have his way, the older girl said ‘A so di ting set’, meaning that’s just the way it is.  If, as a society, we accept that wrongs remain uncorrected because that’s just the way it is, we accept the treatment of our fellow human beings as objects, as ‘it’, able to be snatched off the street and sent to prisons in El Salvador with no recourse, no due process. 

We are living in an imperfect society, with recent actions rendering it even more so.  It is time for us to search for the answers to ‘wha mek’ and be willing to dig deep into the inequities and divisions of how it got to be this way, not to accept that this is how di ting set. While holding our leaders accountable, and demanding that they fight for the rights of everyone (equity), we have to see each other as ‘Thou’, even when we disagree.

This Friday morning, may you feel joy in your soul in the encounters with others; may music delight you and waken old memories; may your relationships bring you support and happiness, and if you get a chance, dance to the sound of an old-school reggae song, even if you don’t understand the lyrics! (Just mind you  ‘pop you bitta-gall!’ which means burst your gall bladder!).

Have a wonderful weekend, Family!

One Love!

Namaste.