Power, Violence and the Jamaican "Shotta Don"""

...You naw mek you enemy live...

...It is a song that marks the complete transition of a postcolonial rebel figure into a commanding figure of vengeance...

...Politicians had failed...

...For the Rude Bwoy, violence was often a means of creating and safeguarding zones of black masculinity that were at odds with the hegemonic conceptions of the Jamaican nation-state...

...It is the latter that concerns this discussion...

...In such circumstances, death is not a rupture but a norm to be deployed, with arbitrary violence foreclosing all possibilities...

...for many of the young males involved in violence, death becomes a substitute for life...

...For us to grasp the complexities of the crisis, it helps to explore how the battle for power operates in the different terrains outside formal institutional political authority in Jamaica...

...Central to these confrontations was the emergence of what anthropologist Diane Austin-Broos has called a “logic of affliction,” which over time became an integral part of subaltern humanizing narratives about the meanings of “Black suffering” in the New World...

...There is a commonplace understanding of violence and its separation from power...

...Instead they spoke about party, community, self-defense and warriorhood...

...6. Interview in Cascade Gardens...

...A resident in one of these communities casually recounted: Yu have time when every Sunday, every Saturday, you have funeral inside ya...

...A few individuals independently developed their own ideology of urban warfare, attacking banks, the island’s racetrack and police officers known to consistently brutalize the communities of the urban poor...

...When Creole nationalism culminated in the island’s political and constitutional independence in 1962, and constructed a hegemonic ideology about Jamaicaness, Afro-Jamaican subalterns found an alternative in the politico-religious doctrines and practices of Rastafari—in which Afro-religious practices merged with an African diasporic strain of Ethiopianism...

...They don’t see nobody to look up to, because as far as it go dem no cater for nobody everything drop, every man fe himself, everybody fe dem food...

...The contemporary nature of violence in Jamaican society is the mark of a profound crisis in the Jamaican postcolony...

...The first is political party violence, which reached its peak in the 1980 general election in which over 800 persons died.4 The second form of violence is the one of riot and revolt [See “The Jamaican Moment,” p. 11...

...3. Ibid...

...Violence was an integral part of the Rude Bwoy’s repertoire of rebellion...

...Indeed, this form of sovereignty need not be on a large scale...

...It seems that three episodes were central to the formation of this figure of the “shotta don,” episodes that run counter to the conventional story (which locates this figure solely within the realm of a vibrant drug economy): the collapse of two peace processes that sought to end political warfare, the defeat and then collapse of left and reformist projects after the 1980 elections and the global and national consolidation of neoliberalism as the only ideological framework for organizing human society...

...indeed, alongside it emerged the figure of the Rude Bwoy...

...The situation must remedy...

...There are many possible answers, one of which resides in the ways the two-party system was able not only to construct clientelistic relationships alongside a politics of “scarce benefits,” but also a politics of difference based upon one of the oldest political stratagems—the division between friends and enemies...

...This week Tom going bury, next week is John, so we making preparation for that funeral...

...In one community this process allowed for the emergence of classes in black radical history and the development of a literacy program...

...Murals of Marcus Garvey, Bob Marley and Malcolm X adorn the walls...

...Politics based upon a dichotomy between friend and foe that then organizes itself into difference is required for contexts where violence is a necessary feature of political life...

...The second was the emergence of a generation of young male “shottas” who did not buy into either of the two central ideological forces of radical subaltern Afro-Jamaica: Rastafari or Black nationalism...

...In this situation the Jamaican Creole nation-state was never able to fully establish its hegemony.7 This in turn meant that instead of a national narrative of citizenship and its rituals of belongings, such practices were enacted through community linkages within politically controlled parameters...

...The anticolonial movement’s political claim of nation and history was a claim to sovereignty...

...The two major figures in this peace effort were Claude Massop, from Tivoli Gardens—the main Jamaica Labor Party (JLP) stronghold in the western end of Kingston—and Aston “Bucky” Thompson from the People’s National Party (PNP...

...Thinking through the current Jamaican crisis requires coming to grips with new forms of power and their expression in the current postcolonial moment...

...Both are rebellious, but the terms of their rebellion are different...

...There is only one way out: accumulate enough capital through extortion, government contracts or the haulage business, then use these resources to influence the formal two-party system...

...Bounty killer’s song “petty thief” is a remarkable commentary on contemporary urban life in Jamaica...

...We cannot allow politicians to come into West Kingston and divide the youths anymore...

...In other words, to remove sovereignty from the domain of nation-state rule and apply it to the local, to the way a community constructs itself, particularly in circumstances where hegemony has collapsed...

...This is not a situation of dual power and a prelude to revolution, because what has also collapsed is the radical subaltern self-fashioning that drew extensively from Rastafari and a politics of radical black nationalism...

...But it should be noted that there was no easy slide from rebellion to accommodation, incorporation and eventual transformation of the Rude Bwoy...

...Integration into the Jamaican two-party system was accomplished at two levels...

...Its advocates demanded a program of public works for the unemployed male youths of urban Kingston...

...It is not a crisis that can be named by recourse to discourses about a lack of values and attitudes, or by nostalgic musings about better times past...

...I want to complicate this conventional understanding by shifting away from justifiably fierce claims for national and cultural sovereignties—particularly important in the current period of globalization—and suggest a meaning in which individual self-fashioning becomes critical to local and micro forms of rule...

...Moreover, we need to begin to grapple with violence and its relationships to power...

...People just dead, and some of we just take it like joke, and we dress up and go a de funeral...

...In a seminal essay, Jamaican writer Garth White explains, “Rude Bwoy is that person, native, who is totally disenchanted with the ruling system...

...The posters and iconography that typically decorated many of their small dwellings ranged from pictures of Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro to icons of the U.S...

...At first, the Rude Bwoy became a protective force for communities that waged political war against each other...

...Death is both a form of destruction and an irreversible sacrifice...

...The emergence of the “modern” political moment in Jamaica silenced the practices and narratives of black nationalism...

...But it is also a spectacle that haunts life itself...

...It would therefore seem that any radical transformation of Jamaica has to begin with the recognition that not only has Creole state hegemony collapsed, but that there is also a new form of politics in which organized communities operate outside the constitutional and juridical norms of the nation-state...

...The Jamaican postcolony therefore faces a unique situation...

...It is within this space that the Rude Bwoy reemerges as another figure: the area leader also called a “don” in the popular vernacular...

...Looking back at the nature of jamaican political violence, many perplexed commentators and radical activists in Jamaican politics often wonder: How was it possible for urban and rural oppressed groups to be so divided that they ended up engaging in violence against each other...

...For Ivan, rebellion is captured in the song “You Can Get It If You Really Want,” while the Rastafari’s rebellion is captured by the stoicism of the plaintive “Many Rivers to Cross...

...9 Individuals close to the process have pointed out that many of the discussions at the Ambassador Theatre centered on the possibility of a new political party of Rastafari that would be funded with Marley’s money...

...Indeed, this was the great political claim of the anticolonial movement and of subsequent demands for other forms of decolonization...

...The peace process had been organized and managed by a council that met regularly at the Ambassador Theatre in West Kingston...

...Rule, therefore, is about the absolute power of death...

...In one community in 1999, during interviews with individuals who themselves had been part of the earlier warfare or had supported it, one man told me, “Anybody who dem catch … have to dead...

...The “shotta don” becomes the area leader and establishes rule in communities often by the force of death...

...With the collapse of traditional authority from above, a shift in the grounds of belonging can be seen in many urban communities in Jamaica...

...He is also a visiting professor at the Center for Caribbean Thought and an associate editor of the journal Small Axe...

...In much of political thought we have become accustomed to speaking about sovereignty as a form of rule, a power that is the final “arbitral agent,” independent of external influences...

...This collapse is reflected in the fact that the area leader is rapidly losing his dominance and is being replaced by the “shotta don,” so-named for his reliance on the gunshot...

...4. Political party violence was central to Jamaican mainstream politics, however 1980 was a special year since the violence was not only internally generated but was influenced by the politics of the Cold War and activities external to Jamaican politics at the time...

...Wherever peace was declared because of the exhaustion of a community, criminal activity declined—including rape and what was called “petty thieving.10 In such spaces, forums of community justice emerged...

...The rule of the area leader functions through a set of community codes that are enforced primarily by male individuals...

...In the jamaican postcolony after the late 1960s, active subaltern currents did not engage in huge rebellions or outright revolution, but mainly practiced a form of cultural guerrilla warfare, seeking to challenge the norms of citizenship and its values...

...The second effort at peace collapsed for two reasons...

...However, this is precisely one of the main features of the present crisis: the erosion and aggressive rejection of the “logic of affliction” in its various forms by many young males...

...And why was class solidarity so lacking and seemingly impossible to construct...

...In the aftermath of the Green Bay massacre of 1978, in which members of the Jamaica Defense Force gunned down five gang members, political enforcers from both political parties organized a peace treaty...

...And since notions of belonging are integral to rule, the enactment of belonging can also operate at a micro level...

...In the initial stages of this courting by the political parties, many Rude Bwoys expressed ideas that drew from both Rastafari doctrine and from the Cuban Revolution...

...As a practice, violence is also about spectacle...

...One young man explained to me that, over time, as he became more involved in the violence he had “no feelings at all” and “had to turn to God to seek answer due to vibes and tension...

...In 1999, some of these figures made a second attempt to secure peace in many poor urban communities...

...Rastafari was to play an important role in the radicalization of the early postcolonial moment, as it became the central force for radical popular cultural forms...

...As they emerged, many area leaders mixed Rastafari symbols with black nationalism...

...For the “shotta don” the Jamaican postcolony is itself a predatory state, and contestations rooted in subaltern rebellious cultures have all failed...

...One of the striking features of young men who engage in violence is their queries to each other, asking, “how many duppies [ghosts] you mek...

...Racial slavery was thus a form of domination in which power deployed technologies of rule that targeted the slave body, its objective being not to turn human beings into subjects but into objects and things...

...This vengeance of the “shotta don” is one that seeks both to destroy and enter mainstream Jamaican society...

...Racial slavery under British colonialism combined different kinds of violence: the violence of founding colonial conquest...

...As militant reggae star Peter Tosh foretold at a concert in 1978, without justice there would be no peace...

...One of these confrontations was with Christianity and the vigorous attempt to turn the ex-slave into a wage laborer and a “Christian Black...

...This logic re-emerged in the political language of the Jamaican subaltern in various periods as “sufferers” (both noun and adjective...

...Once this process was complete, the Rude Bwoys were transformed from postcolonial rebellious figures into political enforcers...

...However, if we rethink power by understanding its capacity to designate a relationship—rooted in a social context—then violence is not a means-end instrument but a logic that accompanies power.5 How does this function in the Jamaican postcolony, and what is the relationship between violence, death and sovereignty...

...Nobody I interviewed admitted that they were fighting for a job, a house or for any scarce benefit...

...Although some underwent a general drift into political parties, many others kept their distance or worked through ambiguous relationships to the political parties while trying to keep alive a radical masculinity hostile to neocolonialism...

...Dances are frequently held at this spot and persons from neighboring and opposite (even hostile) communities are often welcomed...

...Within this context violence operates through the enforcement of the code and once war breaks out between communities, warriors take up their guns and engage in firefights—often to the death...

...It should be noted that this is not a general view of the community or even of those who have engaged in violence...

...It is the emergence of this latest avenging figure that is a revealing sign of the crisis—a figure who does not seek to explain and understand his social location by references to any logic of “black suffering...

...However, this was not simply the violence of a “lumpenproletariat” preying upon itself and its community, but rather a strategic instrument of self-fashioning...

...The split between friend and foe was often unequivocal and a matter of life and death...

...In Jamaican nation-language, death is “tek life,” a spectacle that affirms their life in the absence of positive alternatives...

...In the words of another resident, “We now become instead of natural African people, Laborites [Jamaican Labor Party] and PNP [People’s National Party].3 There are three forms of violence in the Jamaican context...

...There are two types of area leaders in many communities: one type is deeply connected to the two-party political system, while the other is a semi-independent figure...

...However, if the first peace treaty was driven by a desire for unity in the face of certain death by the state forces, the second was driven by other elements: the economic activities of individuals who had used their position as political enforcers to garner state resources, and a growing feeling in many urban communities that violence had taken its toll...

...What the contemporary crisis may tell us about the relationship of power to violence is related to a few critical elements in the historical construction of power in Jamaican society...

...The song identifies the “petty thief” rather than the Rude Bwoy as the predatory figure upon the urban community...

...And the latest fashion go a funeral...

...The peace treaty was warmly welcomed by many of the political enforcers and had the backing of prominent individuals, notably Bob Marley...

...Black Power movement—as well as hammer-and-sickle symbolism...

...Some also made links with radical urban youth groups, while others sought out relationships with members of the radical middle-class intelligentsia...

...I shared the same sentiment.2 In these contexts, difference was rearticulated into reasons for war...

...Notes 1.Cited in Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 191...

...These forums were sometimes organized to include individuals who were seen either as elders or as commanding some amount of respect...

...There was no central advisory council, although various attempts were made to pull the leadership of communities together into a combined peace movement...

...Violence itself is a difficult and slippery subject...

...It was the action of power on the flesh...

...But Rastafari was not the only source of subaltern rebellion...

...When somebody ask you a who dead, you ask: A who?8 In such communities young males expect death as an affirmation that they have lived and the ritual of burial is marked not only by the fashion show, but also by graveside gun salutes...

...However, the peace process was buried with the ambush killing by the Jamaican military of Massop in Jamaica and with Thompson’s murder in New York...

...These “shottas” challenged many area leaders, themselves becoming dons and predators...

...Violence, too, must now be especially brutal and rape has become a regular feature of violent attacks...

...For years you don’t have a wedding, because it is like a trend...

...Over time they became the central figures responsible for the distribution of different forms of public works, embracing the patronage system of the two parties...

...Again, elements of black nationalist ideas and Rastafari were used to undergird declarations of unity and peace...

...About the Author Anthony Bogues is professor and chair of Africana Studies, Brown University...

...The “base” (as it is known in popular parlance) of the area leader is typically organized around some economic venture—a small shop, for example...

...326-348...

...Even though it kills or maims, its logic is not about death but about the production of order...

...But this newfound calm was everywhere unstable...

...In this way, the Rude Bwoy was marking out a different set of normative terms for this subaltern group’s self-conception—in particular that of a profound notion of respect...

...The ongoing murders in Jamaica, the 2005 spate of bomb attacks along with the sharp rise in kidnappings in Trinidad, and the growing number of persons violently killed in Guyana speak not of a mundane problem in the postcolonial Caribbean, but of a crisis we have yet to name...

...These differences are then reinforced by notions of belonging that are enacted through political dramaturgy—songs, color, party conferences, dances, popular music and the appropriation of the religious symbols of both Rastafari and other Afro-Jamaican religious practices...

...The funeral is like a fashion show...

...This crisis is also compounded by the visible absence of mass radical political will, political imagination and radical or even progressive agendas...

...Thanks to Tony Harriot, Judith Wedderburn, Veraldo Barnett and Sherine Mckenzie who all played a major role in this project...

...2. Interviews in “Cascade Gardens” (a pseudonym), were conducted in 1999 by myself and graduate students at the University of the West Indies...

...5. Michel Foucault, “Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault, Power (New York: The New Press, 2000), pp...

...To be effective in imposing order it must first create awe, then fear...

...The especially intriguing aspect of the Jamaican case is the ability of the Jamaican two-party system to inscribe friend/foe difference onto localized geographical spaces...

...The film puts together the two male subaltern exemplars of early postcolonial resistance: the Rude Bwoy is embodied by Jimmy Cliff’s character “Ivan,” and the Rastafari in the figure of “Pedro,” played by Ras Daniel Hartman...

...At one of the support rallies, one speaker stated, “Unity wonderful, but we want better housing, better living standard for all people whether JLP or PNP...

...Its primary enactment, in terms of physicality and the infliction of pain, involves assaults on personhood...

...Reflecting on this shift, one resident observes in particularly stark terms: “There was no money, there was no food, there was no hope...

...of legitimation...

...The second peace process was not as centralized as the first...

...Some of the individuals who attended the different peace council meetings recalled to me both its promise and its example...

...Not only is there no hegemony from the rulers, but subaltern radical counter-hegemony itself has also collapsed or has diminished in influence...

...In such a context politics takes on different dimensions...

...who generally descended from the ‘African’ in the lower class and who is now armed with ratchets, other cutting instruments and with increasing frequency nowadays, with guns and explosives.1 Perry Henzell’s 1973 film, The Harder They Come, provides a visual representation of this figure...

...The last is a violence that links itself to the operation of power in small geographical spaces—lanes, streets or other divisions of small communities...

...So everybody pon dem own.6 This is not to suggest Jamaican political parties have lost complete political control over communities, but rather that a different logic may now be at work, one that seeks to break the absolute dominance of the two-party system...

...and, finally, of absolute domination, in which the body of the slave was not only property but a thing, a res, an excluded body...

...Over time, Rude Bwoys developed into gang formations and became attached to the Jamaican two-party political system...

...This violence is not an incipient force of insurgency, but rather a way of constructing rule in local communities, a form of disorder deployed to produce and create order...

...The abolition of racial slavery created new spaces for the ex-slave to begin a series of confrontations with other primary technologies of colonial rule in the post-emancipation period...

...The first was the inability of the peacemakers to provide economic development in the communities...

...Within these micro spaces today, the area leader rules...