The Caribbean islands are often stereotyped in mainstream Western media as places where drug trafficking and abuse as well as political and gang violence are the order of the day. To what extent and in what ways do the films "The Harder They Come" and "Co

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal

Volume 3 | Issue 1 Article 2

June 2005

Representations of the Body of the New Nation in The Harder They Come and Rockers Ifeona Fulani [email protected]

Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium

This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarly Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal by an authorized editor of Scholarly Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected].

Recommended Citation Fulani, Ifeona (2005) "Representations of the Body of the New Nation in The Harder They Come and Rockers," Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal: Vol. 3 : Iss. 1 , Article 2. Available at: http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol3/iss1/2

From the moment of its declaration of independence from Britain in 1962, the

government of Jamaica assumed the challenge that confronted all post-slavery, postcolonial

societies in the Americas, that of forging a nation from a population stratified and divided by

race and color. At that time, Jamaica’s population was 95% of African descent, 3% of Indian

descent, 2% European and 1% Chinese. The state’s chosen motto “out of many one people,” far

from representing the state of the new nation, encapsulated both a narrative of the state’s colonial

origins and the challenge of forging a nation from a racially diverse and unequal population.

Anti-colonial nationalist movements asserted the right to self-determination and

sovereignty and demanded eradication of imposed colonial structures of racial inequality. It was

assumed that the stages of modernization and development that the postcolonial state would

implement, would also bring about equality within the nation, while raising the newly

independent state to a position of equal status within the international community of sovereign

states. This role, represented by the social elite as their responsibility, was one that justified their

privilege. However, as Percy Hinzen explains, “If we accept the Marxist notion of the state as the

institutional form in which the social power of the bourgeois class is constituted and excercised...

then the sheer impossibility of a democratic postcolonial transformation becomes evident” (106).

In Jamaica, the initial effort at “imagining” the new nation was led by nationalist activists

and intellectuals, influenced by Frantz Fanon’s writings on the role of the intellectual and of

culture in building national identity and national consciousness. 1 Academics, writers and

filmmakers responded to Fanon’s argument that source material for the cultural reconstruction of

postcolonial nations was to be found in the struggles of the people and in their newest forms of

creative and political expression. This translated into a renewed interest in the social conditions

of the peasantry, the working class, and the urban poor and urban popular culture. This interest is

evident in two films that were released in Jamaica in the post-independence period, The Harder

They Come (1972) and Rockers (1977).

With the release of The Harder They Come in 1971, the Jamaican cinema was born.

Directed and produced by Perry Henzell, a white Jamaican with a background in advertising, The

Harder They Come is a realistic evocation of the grim struggle for survival in Kingston’s ghettos.

The making of the film was a conscious attempt to produce a commercially successful,

authentically Jamaican film that represented working class Jamaican life. 2 The film targeted

international audiences with what Henzell called a “tropical syllabus” (Marshall 101), 3

but with

the potential to “crossover” in its appeal to white, western audiences. A significant aspect of the

film’s appeal was the star status of its protagonist, reggae singer Jimmy Cliff, and the sound

track of reggae songs, many of which have become classics.

Released six years after The Harder They Come, Rockers follows the adventures of a

ghetto Rastaman. Written and directed by a New York based Greek filmmaker, Theodorus

Bafaloukis, and financed by capital raised in the USA, the film’s purpose was primarily to bring

Rastafarian culture and music to an international audience, the same audience which The Harder

1

Fulani: Representations of the Body of the New Nation in The Harder...

Published by Scholarly Repository, 2005

They Come targeted. 4 However, aesthetically and discursively the two films differ so radically as

to compel comparison. The highly polished cinematography The Harder They Come contrasts

sharply with Rockers, which has the naturalistic look of a low budget documentary. The

picaresque plot of Rockers is loosely constructed and semi-comedic, and its Rastafarian

protagonist wholly lacking in glamor, in contrast with the stylized, star-driven, tense dramatic

narrative of the earlier film.

The Harder They Come depicts the transformation of its protagonist Ivan from a naïve

country boy, who comes to “town” to pursue his dream of wealth and stardom, to a gun toting

ruud bwai, who at the close of the film is hunted down and shot by the police. David Scott notes

that, “[i]n the late 1960s and early 1970s the ruud bwai was a paradigmatic Fanonian figure, the

embodiment of an internalized colonial violence and the practitioner of alienated rituals of

resistance” (195). In The Harder They Come the trajectory of Ivan’s story charts the stages of

the ruuddie’s formation, from naïve ambition to disillusionment with the status quo and violent

rebellion.

Ivan’s experience of urban life is punctuated by social and personal violence, but whereas

the more nebulous violence of social, economic and political oppression shapes the backstory

of Rockers, there is a significant absence of weapons and bloodshed as the protagonist mobilizes

his community in collective forms of cultural resistance. The loose narrative of Rockers begins

with the quest of the Rasta/trickster character Horsemouth for a self-sustaining livelihood.

However, when a syndicate of lower middle class racketeers steals his motorbike, Horsemouth

tirelessly organizes the Rastamen in his community to seek justice in the form of retrieving his

bike and punishing the wrongdoers, Robin-Hood style. At the close of the film Horsemouth

enjoys the reward of the righteous—a good night’s sleep.

My aim in this paper is to examine contrasting representations of “the people” offered in

the two films. My critical analysis will be confined to representations of the emancipatory

desires of working class and poor men. Looking first at The Harder They Come and secondly

at Rockers, I will examine the emblematic figure of the ruud bwai, the challenge posed to his

cultural and political significance by the figure of the Rastaman, and the changing political

environment that enabled this challenge.

The Harder They Fall: Independence and the Dream of Freedom

Considered in the context of a national cultural initiative, Perry Henzell’s privileged

socio-economic background and his career as maker of TV advertisements invites questions of

cultural identity, questions of representation, or, what Stuart Hall calls “positions of enunciation”

(220). Critic Paul Willemen has identified the potential for opportunism afforded by post-

independence cultural movements, noting that, “the call for cinema rooted in national cultures

has been repeated in a variety of ways, perhaps most vocally by national bourgeoisies invoking

‘national culture’ in order to get the state to help them monopolise the domestic market” (17).

2

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Vol. 3, Iss. 1 [2005], Art. 2

http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol3/iss1/2

Even though it was far beyond the scope of Jamaica’s nascent film industry to attempt to

compete in a domestic market dominated by Hollywood, the overt commercialism of The Harder

They Come is a clear indication of its director’s bid for at least a share of the domestic and

international market.

The popularity of the cinema in Jamaica had been fed from the 1950s onwards by a

steady inflow of Hollywood films that generated an enthusiastic local audience with tastes

shaped by the western, a favored genre with this audience. The “outlaw” cowboy, the gun, the

gunfight or shoot-out became iconic across the Caribbean, and reverberated throughout Jamaican

popular music culture of 1969 and the 70s in song lyrics and in the names of singers and disc

jockeys. Bob Marley’s song, “I Shot The Sheriff,” and the once popular DJ, Clint Eastwood, are

only two of a host of examples.

Ivan, the protagonist of The Harder They Come, becomes fixated on the cinema,

captivated by the bravado of the cowboy whose outsider status and refusal to surrender to the

injustices of the social system provide a narrative for his days on the run as man wanted for

murder. The closing scenes of the film present Ivan, gun in hand and cornered by a group of

soldiers. The barrel of his gun is empty, but Ivan desperately feigns bravado, challenging “the

fastest gun” to a gunfight. He draws his weapons and is shot down in a shower of bullets. He

meets his death mimicking a mythic hero of the North American frontier.

Henzell’s adaptation of the tropes of the western to his film project is profoundly ironic;

as Robert Stam and Ella Shohat explain, the narrative embedded in the western is one of

conquest, genocide and imperialism:

The myth of the frontier has its ideological roots in . . . the competitive laws of

Social Darwinism, the hierarchy of the races and the sexes, the idea of progress. It

gave exceptionalist form to the . . . general thrust of European expansion into

Asia, Africa and the Americas . . . westerns usually place us at a historical

moment . . . when the characters’ point of origin is no longer Europe but Euro-

America. (115)

While Ivan and an audience of poor Jamaicans watch a western in a Kingston cinema, the

western enacts its metonymic significance as the means by which American products, cultural

forms and consumer desires are absorbed into their imaginations and into their lives. The song

with which The Harder They Come opens, “You can get it if you really want it,” plays while

Ivan stares out of the window of the bus which brings him from country to town, gazing

longingly at a white convertible driven by a light-skinned youth. Later in the film, while Ivan is

on the run, he car-jacks a similar white convertible and careens around a golf course in it,

laughing euphorically to the now ironic strains of “You can get it.” As Ivan pursues his dream of

freedom via stardom, he becomes both a fantasy consumer and a consumable object, as do his

songs, both within the film and in the international market for music and films. The international

3

Fulani: Representations of the Body of the New Nation in The Harder...

Published by Scholarly Repository, 2005

audience for reggae music was itself a consequence of what Dick Hebdidge terms

“Americanisation,” as the worldwide popularity and availability of African American music

from the late 1950s onwards opened up new possibilities and access to international markets for

Caribbean musicians. 5 Thus the very possibility of the film The Harder They Come reaching an

international audience was a consequence of the “Americanisation” of the film and music

industries.

Kenneth Harris’ commentary in “Sex, Race Commodity, and Film Fetishism in The

Harder They Come,” elaborates a reading of the film as a fetishized commodity that also

fetishizes the black body of Ivan/Jimmy Cliff in order to sell itself to white audiences (212). The

scene in which Ivan is tried and punished for cutting his tormentor Langa with a shard of broken

glass, culminates with Ivan bound hand and foot and face down over a barrel while a policeman

beats his bare buttocks with a tamarind switch, watched by a circle of spectators. Harris

describes this scene as “little less than sadomasochistic, homosexual pornography” (214), and

designates it the point of convergence of Marxian commodity fetishism and Freudian sexual

fetishism. I would add that this is also a moment of historical convergence, that the beating of

Ivan invokes the colonial disciplinary regime and the brutalities of the plantation system on

which that regime was based; the abject body of Ivan recalls the abjection of the slave body. The

black body that was the fetishized commodity in the slave market is similarly fetishized and

commodified as cultural capital.

From another perspective, this scene reflects middle-class anxiety about a threat to the

established social order posed by the “indiscipline” of the black masses, personified here in

the ruud bwai Ivan. If, as David Scott has argued, freedom and citizenship were assured only to

those whose readiness could be measured by a “norm of civilization” (86), the delinquency of

Ivan and those like him excludes them from the ranks and rights of citizenship. This scene, and

the film in its entirety, is a graphic reminder of the continuing subjugation of the poor black man

in a nation that, even as it celebrates its independence from one colonial/imperial power—Great

Britain—has become a site for cultural and economic conquest by another—the USA.

Immediately following the scene of Ivan’s subjection, he is seen recording the film’s title

song “The Harder They Come” in the studio of Hilton, the record mogul who pays him $20

dollars for the rights to the song. The song articulates Ivan’s disillusionment with “the pie up in

the sky,” with dreams of “making it,” and the promises made by politicians of a better economic

future for the nation. At this moment he resolves to get whatever “goods” he can by whatever

means. As he sings the lyrics, “I’m going to get my share, what’s mine,” his body movements

express tension, his facial muscles are taut, and his skin is glazed with perspiration; all of this is

indicative of a rage barely contained. In this Fanonian instant, Ivan’s transformation into a ruud

bwai, who acknowledges neither rule nor law, is complete. To quote David Scott, his body

communicates “the sense of menace, threat, and imminent possibility of explosive violence”

(212), a bodily communiqué that will call down upon him the full powers of the state’s

disciplinary machinery. In a sense, Ivan’s body determines his fate.

4

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Vol. 3, Iss. 1 [2005], Art. 2

http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol3/iss1/2

Eventually, he is inducted into the protection arm of the ganga export trade by his

neighbor José, but Ivan quickly realizes that he will never share in the profits of the ganga export

trade. He realizes that, like the music industry, control and profits lie in the hands of petty

bourgeois criminals. When his plan to take control of the protection racket that operates within

the community in which he lives is betrayed by José, Ivan goes on the run, eluding capture by the

police for long enough to achieve notoriety. Hilton, the record producer, exploits news reports of

Ivan’s escapades to make his record a hit. Locals fascinated by the glamor of the ruudie rush to

buy his record, and the fetishization and the commodification of the ruud bwai figure take hold.

Ultimately, the exploitation by capital of a sensationalized narrative of Ivan’s defiance of the

law, of the postcolonial order, and of capital itself, serves to feed the collective fetishization of

the ruud bwai and to drain Ivan’s rebellion of political significance.

Rastafari and the Healing of the Nation

In the eight years between the release of The Harder They Come and Rockers, the

Jamaican state’s efforts to establish and maintain political and economic independence gradually

collapsed. With the signing of the IMF Agreement by Prime Minister Michael Manley in 1978,

the gateway was opened for the inflow of global and US multinational capital with disastrous

consequences for Jamaica’s agricultural and small-scale manufacturing economies. Thousands of

skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers were unemployed and fed the stream of migrants to

the USA and Canada. Arguably, the pressures of unemployment and poverty and the failure of

the state to implement remedial measures fed individual rebelliousness. In the country and in the

towns, poor people preyed upon one another and minor crimes such as petty theft and praedial

larceny proliferated. Okpiko Grey defines these behaviors as “small, persistent and cumulative

acts of individual and group empowerment” (221). However, he argues that the gradual effect of

these small acts of rebellion was, on the one hand, to alter power relations between classes and,

on the other hand, to refashion the social identity of the urban lower classes (“Rethinking Power”

221-22). The figure of the ruud bwai is emblematic of this form of agency. The deteriorated

moral culture engendered by such self-seeking and individualist behaviors bred aggression and

violence as a means of securing advantages, and fostered consumer materialism and a pre-

occupation with social status. Grey associates this period with an orientation to short-run

advantage in preference to sustained effort towards social or political change, and with a

profound ambivalence towards discourses of black consciousness and black liberation

(“Rethinking Power” 211).

Grey attributes the proliferation and persistence of lower class rebelliousness to the

fluctuating morality of the state itself and to the erosion of democracy in Jamaica: “Evidence

from the past thirty years confirms an erosion of democratic practices in Jamaica as the state has

increasingly resorted to political victimization, violence and illegality as methods of political

rule” (“Rethinking Power” 215). Grey describes this erosion of democracy as parasitism:

“Parasitic rule in Jamaica is the form that state power takes as dominant classes attempt to extend

their political power, control a fragmented society, manage dependence in the world system, and

5

Fulani: Representations of the Body of the New Nation in The Harder...

Published by Scholarly Repository, 2005

expunge rebellious challenges from below” (“Rethinking Power” 217). The cumulative effect of

“parasitic rule” is a breakdown of civility and the collapse the already fragile structures of social

cohesion, resulting in a yawning gulf that separates lower class blacks from the black, mulatto

and white bourgeoisie.

Fanon has argued that culture functions as a site of resistance against colonial oppression

and as a site from which oppressed peoples have struggled for freedom. In the midst of the

social, economic and political crises of the 1970s, a revitalized African cultural nationalist

discourse among sections of the lower classes influenced by Rastafarian ideology and the radical

intelligentsia, a revitalized African cultural nationalist discourse restated the call for the

emancipation of black people from racist domination. For Jamaica’s lower classes, the promise

of independence had been the promise of both freedom from colonial rule and racial equality;

however, equality as conceptualized in the Jamaican nationalism of the racially diverse ruling

elite was measured in terms of access to the rights and privileges of the former colonial ruling

class, and not in terms of equal rights and justice for the marginalized and exploited black

majority. In fact, the quest for racial equality served to conceal the actual constitution of social

power and to leave structures of exploitation and repression unchallenged.

The Rastafarian movement had consistently challenged the hegemony of Europeans and

European culture from the late 1930s onwards, calling for greater racial consciousness among

poor and black Jamaicans. Leonard Howell, an early leader of the movement, advocated greater

attention to affairs on the African continent, and rallied support for the Ethiopian King who was

battling against fascist Italian forces of invasion. It was the support—and later reverence—for

the Ethiopian Monarch, Ras Tafari Selassi I, that the earned the movement its name. When the

anti-colonial struggle exploded in Kenya, Howell’s followers began to wear their hair long and

matted in identification with the Mau Mau, the “dread locks” which have ever since been

associated with Rastafarians. 6

The Rastafarians envisioned freedom as the absence of all forms of state oppression, the

absence of “isms and schisms.” 7 Although repatriation to a decolonized Africa later became an

ideological objective, Rastafarians worked to create a community bound by race pride and an

Afro-Jamaican culture founded on principles of co-operation and self-reliance. I argue that the

movement was apolitical in that it remained detached from the power mongering of the two main

political parties and from electoral politics in general. It was understood that a separation of the

nation from the parasitism of the state was essential for the survival of black people who were

understood to be the “true” Jamaican nation. As Horace Campbell explains in Rasta and

Resistance (1987), a prime objective of the movement was to spread seeds of self-reliance

among the rural poor, and to counteract the widespread pettiness and covetousness that were a

legacy of plantation culture, with a spirit of co-operation. 8 The Rastafarians aimed to supplant

the trickster-style individualism of the ruud bwai with a sense of fraternity and the spirit of peace

and love. In this spirit, Howell and 1600 of his followers established a commune at Pinnacle, a

short distance from Kingston, with the aim of setting up a cooperative, self-sustaining

6

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Vol. 3, Iss. 1 [2005], Art. 2

http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol3/iss1/2

agricultural enterprise. For the Rastas, a reconstructed African-centered cultural realm was the

site of resistance, creativity and the expression of the uniqueness and vitality of the Afro-

Jamaican inheritance.

By the 1950s, the colonial state perceived the spreading influence of Rastafarian beliefs

as a threat to its control of the black masses. As Campbell explains, “what scared the State was

how such a sense of unity and community could persist among the brethren and sistren despite

the lack of central organization and fixed lines of communication” (103). Rastas were routinely

arrested for possession of ganga, or for “vagrancy,” or placed in mental asylums for alleged

insanity. The police raided Howell’s commune in 1954, arrested many of the brethren and

committed Howell to Bellevue, Jamaica’s largest insane asylum.

During the 1970s, the populism of Prime Minister Michael Manley’s People’s National

Party created a space for the emergence of reggae music as a vehicle for Rastafari demands for

equality and social justice. Both Manley and his political opponent Edward Seaga fostered such

culturally based demands for change, harnessing their power for their own political ends. 9 The

profile of the Rastafarians peaked nationally and internationally as a consequence of the

commercialization and export of two important aspects of the culture: ganga and reggae music. It

was widely believed that Jamaica’s multi-million dollar ganga industry was controlled by Rastas,

a misapprehension that diminished Rastafarian culture. Actually, the ganga export industry and

its profits were controlled by members of the bourgeoisie—professionals, officers in the police

force and the military, and government officials—who used their yachts, private planes and

private airstrips to export the product. As illustrated in The Harder They Come, the music

industry was also controlled by the bourgeoisie who were, however, invisible to the audience for

reggae music. The association of Rastafarians with two highly commercialized products—one of

them also illegal, nationally and internationally—undermined public respect for the movement

and its political impact.

Although it was obviously a commercial project, according to Avrom Robin, one of the

objectives of the film Rockers was to inform the international public about Rastafarian culture

and the origins of reggae. 10

Like The Harder They Come the film focuses on reggae music and

musicians in the context of a poor Kingston community. However, Rockers shows reggae as an

outgrowth and an expression of the Rastafarian spirit of collaboration within that community.

Unlike The Harder They Come, where music making is confined to and defined either by the

church or the recording studio, Rockers shows music being made by many groups in many

different corners of the ghetto. Furthermore, the actor/musicians in the film are real-life

musicians playing themselves, which challenges the tragic fiction of The Harder They Come,

specifically the fact that Jimmy Cliff, the singer who plays Ivan, found international fame and

fortune as a reggae singer of the kind that Ivan dreamed of.

Where The Harder They Come shows music as a means to achieve stardom and

wealth, Rockers presents music as a force for healing, for unity and resistance. Several scenes in

7

Fulani: Representations of the Body of the New Nation in The Harder...

Published by Scholarly Repository, 2005

the film show the people of the ghetto coming together to share the pleasure of good music and

to forget their cares temporarily. In one scene, a dancehall gathering is dispersed by police

allegedly searching out ganga smokers, but apparently they are responding to the potential threat

posed by a gathering of Rastafarians and other disaffected blacks. On leaving the dancehall,

Horsemouth, the protagonist, discovers that his precious motorbike has been stolen. Meanwhile,

the soundtrack plays the song “Police and Thieves,” the lyrics of which underscore the

significance of the scene:

Police and thieves in the street

Fighting the nation

With their guns and ammunition . . .

After searching the streets, Horsemouth visits his friend Burning Spear to tell him about the theft

and to share his distress. Burning Spear takes Horsemouth to the riverside, to the ruins of an old

colonial jailhouse, a symbol of the fall of the British Empire and of the mutability of things. Here

the men share a spliff, and Burning Spear comforts Horsemouth with the song, “Jah No Dead.”

The lyrics of the song remind that just as God lives, the possibility of justice also lives; and also

that a just struggle must be rooted in a system of religious and spiritual values.

In contrast to Ivan, who is the naïve victim of Hilton, the record producer and distributor

who robs him of the rights to his record, Horsemouth seeks to undermine the monopoly of the

music industry by a cadre of wealthy men by making distribution deals with a few small-scale

record manufacturers. Horsemouth reads the threat to reggae music sales posed by imported

American records as both a cultural issue and a commercial concern. Acting on this

understanding, with his friend Dirty Harry, Horsemouth stages a “cultural revolution” in a

nightclub where Dirty Harry ousts the resident disc jockey, who has been playing only American

records, and blasts reggae over the sound system to the surprise and eventual pleasure of the

audience. The club manager calls the police the “bredrin,” but the audience protests the police

interference and joins the Rastaman on the dancefloor.

This scene, like the entire film, is an obviously idealized representation of the influence

and power of reggae, yet the spread and popularity of reggae during the 1970s, throughout

Jamaica and the world, attest to the power of the message. As Kwame Dawes has noted, reggae

songs are “songs of defiance that invoke resistance every time they are played” (179). The music

communicates an Africanist rhetoric and Afro-Caribbean cosmology that achieves its effect

through the emotions as much as through intellectual appreciation of the ideas and sentiments

expressed. In this way, reggae music became a primary vehicle for the spread of Rastafarian

ideology.

The main plot of Rockers deals with questions of the abuse of power and justice for the

black man in a racially exploitative society. When Horsemouth discovers that his bike has been

stolen and warehoused by the henchman of an organized criminal gang, he does not go to the

8

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Vol. 3, Iss. 1 [2005], Art. 2

http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol3/iss1/2

police, knowing that the police would not intervene on behalf of a Rastafarian. Instead,

Horsemouth organizes a group of brethren to raid the criminal’s warehouse and retrieve his bike.

The raid is successful; the men load the contents of the warehouse—stolen TVs, washing

machines, furniture, and the like—into a fleet of borrowed vehicles and distribute the goods

amongst people in the ghetto. The heist is accomplished without fighting or bloodshed, thus

offering a representation of black masculine agency uncontaminated by violence.

Even taking into account generic differences between the two films, the absence

from Rockers of weapons and masculinist displays of bravado challenges the representation of

black masculine agency—the figure of the ruud bwai—offered in The Harder They Come. In the

latter film, the Rastaman is stereotypically portrayed by Ivan’s neighbor Pedro, as moral but

passive, a sufferer who barely survives by eking out a living on the fringes of the ganga trade. In

response, Rockers challenges The Harder They Come’s celebration of the individualistic, self-

destructive and ultimately unproductive rebelliousness of the gun-loving ruud bwai with multiple

representations of Rastafarian masculinity. In a long sequence showing the Rastas gathering in

preparation for their heist, the camera follows eight men as they leave their homes and head for

the meeting place, focusing on differences of gait, comportment, expression and style of dress.

None of the men is aggressive in demeanor, but the song “Stepping Razor” that plays during the

sequence offers a warning:

Don’t you watch my style

Don’t you watch my size

I’m dangerous

Like a stepping razor . . .

The razor metaphorically invokes associations of mental sharpness, of skill and dexterity very

different to that of the gunman. The scene emphasizes the plurality of personal identities,

encompassed by the collectivity of Rastamen. It shows the Rastaman as individually non-violent,

but empowered by community and therefore with the potential to act as a force for social justice.

The profound impact of Rastafarian music on the world, epitomized in the international

fame of Bob Marley, virtually ensured the commercialization of both the music and the figure of

the Rastaman by the Jamaican music industry. Marley’s phenomenal success was followed by

droves of pseudo-Rastas pursuing individualistic dreams of wealth and affluence. Not to be

excluded, by the 1990s the state was capitalizing on the popularity of Rastafarian culture,

adopting Bob Marley’s song “One Love” as the signature song for Jamaica Tourist Board

advertisements. That this song, which expresses the Rasta’s message of peace and love, is used

to dupe unsuspecting tourists into believing that the cultural values expressed in the song are

those of present-day Jamaica, confirms David Scott’s assessment of a decline in hegemonic

bourgeois values in Jamaica (193). In the moral void between the middle and lower classes, the

Rastafarians appear to be a community with a coherent and recognizable code of ethics and

values. However, the co-optation and exploitation of Rastafarian culture by the state, and the

9

Fulani: Representations of the Body of the New Nation in The Harder...

Published by Scholarly Repository, 2005

dilution of the movement by pseudo-Rastas, have weakened both the movement’s political thrust

and public perception of it (Campbell 150). Reggae music and the symbols of the Rastafari such

as dreadlocks and the colors red, green, and gold, have become instruments by which the state

invokes Jamaica and the Jamaican nation, the very nation within which Rastafarians and the poor

black continue to be exploited and repressed.

10

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Vol. 3, Iss. 1 [2005], Art. 2

http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol3/iss1/2

Notes

1 Of course, agitation for independence began long before Fanon’s works widely known. For

example, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, first published in 1952, was published in

translation (Charles Lan Markmann) by Grove Press, New York in 1967; and The Wretched of

the Earth first published in 1961, was published in translation (Constance Farrington) by Grove

in 1968.

2 The Harder They Come was not the first film to be made in Jamaica; the island was a favorite

location for Hollywood directors during the 1940s and 50s. However, neither Kingston nor the

Jamaican people were ever foregrounded in these films.

3 Henzell used this term in preference to the more common “third world” or “underdeveloped.”

See Victoria Marshall, “Filmmaking in Jamaica,” where she explains Henzell’s use of “tropical

syllabus” as “a reference to people who share similar climactic conditions and social outlook”

(101).

4 This is the view of the film’s associate producer Avrom Robin, given in an unpublished

interview with the author, November 4, 2001.

5 See Dick Hebdidge, Hiding In The Light, especially “Towards a Cartography of Taste, 1935-

1962” (45-76).

6 For more detailed commentary on the history of the Rastafari, see: Joseph Owen, Dread: The

Rastafarians of Jamaica, and Dennis Forsythe, Rastafari: for the Healing of the Nation.

7 See Horace Campbell, Rasta and Resistance (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press 1987), for an

extensive discussion on Rastafarian philosophy and ideals.

8 See, for example, Chapter Five: Rasta, Reggae and Cultural Resistance (121-174).

9 See Obika Grey’s discussion of Manley’s and Seaga’s appropriation of the vernacular culture

and the protests of Jamaica’s black poor “Predation Politics and the Political Impasse in

Jamaica.”

10 In an unpublished interview with the author, November 4, 2001.

11

Fulani: Representations of the Body of the New Nation in The Harder...

Published by Scholarly Repository, 2005

Works Cited

Campbell, Horace. Rasta and Resistance. Trenton, NJ: Africa New World Press, 1987.

Dawes, Kwame. Natural Mysticism: Towards a New Reggae Aesthetic in Caribbean Writing.

Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 1999.

Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York; Grove Press, 1963.

Forsythe, Dennis. Rastafari: for the Healing of the Nation. New York: One Drop Books, 1996.

Grey, Obiko. “Rethinking Power: Political Subordination in Jamaica.” New Caribbean Thought:

a Reader. Eds. Meeks, B. and Lindahl, F. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press,

2001. 210-222.

—. “Predation Politics and the Political Impasse in Jamaica.” Small Axe 13. March 2003: 72-94.

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation.” Black British Cultural Studies.

Eds. Houston A. Baker, Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1996. 222-236.

Harris, Kenneth. “Sex, Race Commodity, and Film Fetishism in The Harder They Come.” Ex-

iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema. Ed. Mbaye B. Cham. Trenton, NJ: Africa World

Press, 1992. 211-219.

Hebdidge, Dick. Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Hintzen, Percy C. “Rethinking Democracy in the Postnationalist State.” New Caribbean

Thought: a Reader. Eds. Meeks, B. and Lindahl, F. Kingston: University of the West

Indies Press, 2001. 104-126.

Marshall, Victoria. “Filmmaking in Jamaica: “Likkle but Tallawah.” Ex-iles: Essays on

Caribbean Cinema. Ed. Mbaye B. Cham. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1992. 98-105.

Owen, Joseph. Dread: the Rastafarians. London: Heinemann. 1982.

Scott, David. Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1999.

Shohat, Ella & Stam, Robert. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New

York: Routledge, 1994.

Willemen, Paul. “The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections.” Questions of Third

Cinema. Eds. J. Pines & P. Willeman. London: British Film Institute, 1989. 1-30.

12

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Vol. 3, Iss. 1 [2005], Art. 2

http://scholarlyrepository.miami.edu/anthurium/vol3/iss1/2