by DAVID CUPPLES
Them belly full but we hungry
With Jamaica having recently celebrated its Big 5-0 — fifty years of independence from Mother England — it’s natural to think of those things for which the tiny Caribbean island is famous. Fast sprinters and Olympic bobsledders. Patch-eyed pirates raiding the Spanish Main. Winter getaways to tropical beaches. A lyrical way of speaking, often imitated. Ganja and rum. For many it’s impossible to think of Jamaica without Bob Marley coming to mind.
A worldwide cult of followers worships Marley almost as a god-like figure, but in mainstream Western culture the man tends to be dismissed as a freaky pot-smoking dread who had some cool songs, and that’s about it. Certainly not someone to emulate. Not a man to be held up as a hero. No Mandela or Martin Luther King by any stretch of the imagination.
Well, hold on. On both a mythical and human level Bob Marley qualifies as a hero. Not a mere celebrity, but a true hero in the noblest sense of the word.
In the archetypal motif described by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, the hero typically comes from humble beginnings. Like Jesus, Mandela and King, Marley qualifies on that score. Born in a tiny shack in the back hills of Jamaica, Bob Marley grew up first as a barefoot country boy and later as a teenager on the mean streets of Kingston, ratchet knife in pocket and fists ready to fly. He never finished high school.
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So much for mythology — what about in real-life terms? Much of the world outside the West readily accepts Marley as a heroic figure. Ask Africans old enough to remember life under minority rule how the Jamaican’s songs gave inspiration to freedom fighters risking their lives to overthrow the tyrants. Ask South Africans who could not buy uncensored Marley records because the apartheid government feared the lyrics would incite rebellion. Ask Zimbabweans who were there in 1980 on Independence Day, when the Union Jack was taken down for the last time and the flag of the new nation raised—who was there to sing but Bob Marley and the Wailers?
Marley saw injustice all around and put it to music. He wisely perceived that the cruelest tyranny was hunger:
‘Them belly full but we hungry
A hungry mob is an angry mob (Them Belly Full)’
He heard and reported the cries of the sufferahs:
‘Woman hold her head and cry
‘cuz her son had been shot down in the street and died
just because of the system (Johnny Was)’
He warned of the repercussions that social and economic inequality would bring:
‘We’re gonna be burning and a-looting tonight (Burnin’ and Lootin’)’
Marley was an astute observer and social critic who let nothing pass. A favourite theme was the shit-stem (system) that made a hell of everyday existence:
‘Today they say that we are free
only to be chained in poverty
good god I think it’s illiteracy
it’s only a machine to make money’ (Slave Driver)
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Carl Jung wrote of a corollary principle to the hero’s sacrifice — the archetypal impulse of underlings to kill the hero (much like the bloodlust of the sons of the primal horde to slay the clan patriarch, in Freud). Heroes have always been silenced by various methods, the most obvious being their death. One thinks of John Lennon, Malcolm X, Biko, Lumumba, Fred Hampton, Chris Hani, Che Guevara, Chico Mendes, Archbishop Romero and on and on and of course King himself.
When such figures aren’t murdered or imprisoned, they may be reviled, impugned, dismissed. Muhammad Ali was not widely revered in America until age and illness rendered him less threatening to white society. Similarly, King did not become a culture-wide icon until after his death, when the immense power of his presence was removed and only the brilliance of his words remained, rendering him palatable to the mainstream.
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