Lawrence Jasud'swords, sounds and power

Abstract

Abstract Lawrence Jasud's book, Words, Sounds and Power, is a startling transcription of the verbal meditations of a group of Rastafarian brethren. In this ‘evocation of the heart and mind of Rastafari’ the art of the finely-printed book and the politics of Rastafarian theology coincide in the form of a sacred text. The primary object of Rastafarian worship is the image of Haile Selassie as Christ returned. Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia (1892–1975) during his forty-four year reign made Addis Ababa a focus for African unity. Marcus Garvey, whose efforts on behalf of racial equality for Africans in the New World marked him as a type of John the Baptist in the black movement, proclaimed: ‘Look to Africa, where a Black King shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is near’. As if in direct answer to this prophecy, in 1930 Ras Tafari Makonnen ascended the throne of Ethiopia and took the name Haile Selassie, meaning ‘Might of the Trinity’. He claimed descent from the Biblical King Solomon of Jerusalem and Queen Makeda of Sabo (Sheba), the southern lands of Ethiopia, with the inherited titles of ‘King of Kings, Lord of Lords, and Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah’. By the 1960s, when the hopes of the earlier Back to Africa movement had failed to materialize, black Jamaicans leaned towards either political militancy or a religious mysticism based on the Old Testament, which came to be called Rastafari, after the ‘Ras Tafari’, the princely pre-coronation name of Haile Selassie, in whom Rastafarians recognized the Second Coming of God.