Stepping Out: Peter Tosh and the Dynamics of Afro-Caribbean Existence

Abstract

GroundingsTHE CONTRADICTORY NATURE OF CARIBBEAN intellectual discourse has been informed by its imperial history and enslaved past. Paget Henry notes in Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy that this intellectual tradition has tended to borrow heavily from other disciplines and theoretical frameworks, particularly from Europe.1 Other scholars have pointed out that there has been a distinct tendency towards socio-historical and political actions with a heavy reliance on philosophical categories from the European Enlightenment spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 The Caribbean intellectual tradition, although negatively impacted by the legacies of colonialism, nevertheless has offered counter-narratives and discourses that consistently have sought to challenge and reconfigure the (post) colonial order.The development of alternative systems of thought that existed outside the gaze of the colonialists operated in one sphere with their spiritual and philosophical roots grounded in African-derived cultural and religious practices. On the other hand, the formal intellectual tradition was separated from its African centre by an imposed and inherited Eurocentric value system. This duality bore witness to an anti-colonial intellectual discourse within the very colonial order, demonstrated in the works of such figures as J.J. Thomas, Robert Love and Marcus Garvey.3 What is also evident is the disavowal of the role of the spirit as an ontological sphere of existence in its own right and likewise a disregard of the diversity of cosmological orientations that inform thought.A tradition of resistance, and clear ideological responses to the negation of African humanity, arose out of the condition of a fragmented existence. In order to create a moral order in a new dispensation, religious and spiritual practices, legends, songs and narratives were revived, revalued and refashioned, and political and economic activities were organised.* Peter Tosh, a Jamaican reggae musician, was one such individual whose role as a musician falls within the tradition of resistance, which has sought to reclaim and rehabilitate the dignity of blackness and to redress societal imbalances.In this essays we examine the works of Peter Tosh, which seem to exhibit a bridging of the duality of Caribbean systems of thought and the fragmented nature of Afro-Caribbean existence. Peter Tosh (1944-1987) emerged out of the immediate post-independence era of Jamaican history (1960S-1970S), a time of great hope and potential, but one not fully realised due to the lack of interest of the ruling elites in transforming the colonial status quo. Tosh, like many of us, is a product of the Afro-Caribbean/neo-African world straddling two distinct spheres of being. To this end, we first examine the role of imperial Christianity6 in shaping the contradictory and ambivalent nature of Afro-Caribbean existence. We later move to an analysis of what we call the wordworks or philosophical teachings embedded within the lyrics of Tosh, and attempt to uncover the spiritual dimensions and expressions of an AfroCaribbean existence and Caribbean personhood that operate outside of the pervasive (neo-colonial) framework. We further reposition the contributions of the Spirit to existence as an alternative moving beyond the Enlightenment paradigm that continues to shape our intellectual discourse and popular movements.Shifting the paradigmThree interlocking concepts - Spirit, wordworks and stepping out - conceptually ground the objectives of this essay. Spirit traverses past, present and future in a cyclical fashion that defies a linear progression of time. Using a European construct of thought, the framework of the Spirit would be considered intangible, in part because it extends beyond the limits of semantics, and is devalued because it does not fit within a framework of logic.7 The very conception of the Spirit thus challenges English linguistic definitions and often gets interpreted as 'intuition', 'magical realism', 'black magic'. …