Maladaptive Ways of Being: Rastafari Women on Rewriting Scripts of Oppression
By Shamara Wyllie Alhassan
My forthcoming book, Re-Membering the Maternal Goddess: Rastafari Women’s Intellectual History and Activism in the Pan-African World, draws upon ethnography to engage the ways Rastafari women use their livity to create transnational communities of social justice that dismantle gendered anti-Black racism and religious discrimination from the 1970s to the present in the Caribbean and Africa. Livity is a Rastafari word that denotes a lived philosophy or way of life committed to conscious individual and communal decolonization with regards to language, diet, mind, body, and spirit. Fundamentally, my work seeks to overstand [1] how Rastafari women innovate maladaptive ways of being that are deliberately adversarial to the prevailing racial-colonial order.
Colonialism and racial slavery are often studied through the lens of political and economic control, but the machinations of colonial rationality require a treatise on how racial power affects the psychic dimensions of the self. [2] Even as anticolonial fighters resist political and economic colonialism, psychic colonialism can continue to inform subjectivities and their subservience or resistance to empire. For instance, Charles Price argues that state and social animus fosters a stro7nger sense of group identity amongst Rastafari. [3] This stance not only condemns the structural positionality of Blackness under oppressive political economies, but also fosters the creation of a new subjectivity. In “‘We Know Where We Are From’: The Politics of Black Culture from Myal to Marley,” Sylvia Wynter argues that this condemnation is not a simple inversion of the dominant order, but a set of practices constituting an entire way of being grounded in ontological and epistemological autonomy or what I would call maladaptive ways of being.
Rastafari is a Pan-African socio-spiritual movement that began under British colonialism in 1930s Jamaica. This philosophy centers the epistemologies and ontologies of the Black radical tradition; knowledge of life—especially Black life—as divine; the creation of language; a non-genetically modified food diet and fighting against oppression. Meditating on the significance of the Rastafari movement, Sylvia Wynter argues that a “counter-symbolic order” was created through an “imaginative architecture” rooted in African cultural signifying systems which are themselves comprised of language, Gods, customs, and social norms (18-19). When refashioned, these African cultural signifying systems can be sites of a counter-insurgent self-defense that repudiates hegemonic deployments of racial and colonial power. As such, Rastafari form maladaptive ontologies that actively decolonize prevailing norms of colonial rationality.
Rastafari thus embodies a “critical otherness” which allows practitioners to engage in a “hermeneutic of suspicion” where they are able to see more clearly the politico-religious relationship between capitalism, white supremacy, and racism. As the Religious Studies scholar, Charles Long, states in Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion, that “Critical otherness,” allows marginalized communities to use their alienation “to undertake a radical internal criticism of themselves, their situation and the situation of the majority culture” (xxiii). Thinking through the way sistren [4] constantly criticize the Rastafari movement and try to perfect their radical practice, one can see how this critique is part of the repertoire of self-defense strategies, specifically against the dominant order and its internalized values.
Yet, despite a long history of leadership and activism, women’s roles and influence in the movement continue to be minimized by scholars and male practitioners. My work thus makes three major theoretical interventions: 1) the primary social and political issues driving women to become Rastafari and organize in their communities are liberating Africa, dismantling anti-Black racism, and fighting for justice and reparations; 2) sistren have had to combat the triple marginality of being Rastafari, Black, and women which often leads to ostracism from other Black radical communities and marginalization within their own communities; and 3) Rastafari women’s transgeographic activism place them at the forefront of Pan-African organizing in the 21st century both on and off the continent. While there is often an impetus to study theories and practices of Pan-Africanism through the lens of national policies and from the perspectives of prominent male leaders, Rastafari women’s political and economic organizing should be understood as central to Diasporan and Continental African social activism.
[Elgo, Cover of Blood, Bullets And Bodies, 2019]
Combatting the dismemberment of epistemic erasure, patriarchal violence, and white supremacist racial capitalism are some of the most important ways Rastafari, particularly Rastafari women, seek to dismantle the dominant power structure. Due to Rastafari women’s existence at the apex of multiple interlocking systems of domination—including racism, sexism, classism, and religious discrimination—sistren can see and feel the way power deploys itself in multiple and totalizing ways. Seeing the dissolution of patriarchy as analogous with the dismantling of Western imperialism, and working toward planetary sustainability, Rastafari women strive toward healing and wellness for all forms of life. While not all Rastafari women agree, operationalize, or harness their unique subject position to story themselves in the same way, there is a common sensibility that unites their approach to life, or livity. For instance, the award-winning scholar, Jamaica Gleaner correspondent, and author of Blood, Bullets and Bodies: Sexual Politics Below Jamaica’s Poverty Line (2006), among other books, Dr. Imani Tafari-Ama reflected on how Rastafari helped transform her reality and counter dominant oppressive power in a 2014 interview at the University of the West Indies-Mona. [5] She shared:
Rastafari is the concept that helped me to articulate the way in which we were still internalizing oppressions in spite of being emancipated, in spite of being independent. The notion that you could have a cultural livity, a way of life that could inform not only what you think about spiritually but also could facilitate an everyday experience—so how you eat, how you relate to people, your entire lifestyle could be a statement of alternative discourse—that alternative paradigm in defining who we are and how it is that we are placed in the society… [Rastafari] still provides an anchor for me to be able to assert a point of view that is actually counter-hegemonic because when you look at what is considered mainstream in the society… we have a proverb in Jamaica that still says “anything too Black no good” meaning, that “anything that is too Black is not good.” Parents would tell their children, “Put a little milk in your coffee,” meaning, “you should date someone who is of lighter complexion so that your children are born with a lighter complexion and social advantage.” Well, that’s a travesty to this day because people are thinking I should lighten my hair, lighten my complexion, straighten my hair in order to fit into this norm—this normative construction of beauty, which has the European model… as the pinnacle of that outlook. I am very much counter that kind of oppression. I am very much committed to making a statement in terms of my body politics about the legitimacy of African beauty… the legitimacy of an African body as a space to rewrite these scripts of oppression in a more profoundly self-assertive manner. So, when you ask is Rastafari a part—well it is a whole model for me deploying my reality. It is not something that I take off as this garment and put on… it certainly informs my own thinking, my own self-reverence, my relationship with people and certainly my political view of how it is that we can generate—equal rights and justice in a society that I think is sadly lacking...
For Tafari-Ama, Rastafari anchors her development of maladaptive ways of being that become the architecture for an alternative reality rooted in equal rights and justice. Rastafari helped her to rewrite the scripts dominant society mapped onto her body and redefine notions of beauty that suited her own image, rather than Eurocentric standards. Most importantly, she was able to develop “self-reverence” in the process. The notion of her own divinity, her own sacredness, helped her develop a maladaptive stance that allows her to advance racial equity, freedom, and social justice, even in a majority Black space like Jamaica.
Despite popular use of Rastafari imagery and symbols to develop the Jamaica tourist brand, Rastafari in Jamaica remains marginalized. In Rastafari, the personal is political and spiritual. This is evidenced in the way Rastafari elevates Black humanity as divine, which is both a political and religious rejection of white divinity and dominance. [6] Embodying resistance places Rastafari in an adversarial relationship with colorism, whiteness-as-religion, and anti-Black societal norms. The Africana Studies scholar, Danielle Boaz astutely notes that in order to combat white supremacy, the synergy between religious intolerance, anti-Black racism, and rhetoric of religious freedom that do not account for African and African Diasporan religions must be diagnosed as being part of the same system of oppression, even in majority Black spaces. [7]
As an ever-evolving livity or way of life, Rastafari deploys purposeful deliberate acts of self-defense, confrontation, illegibility, and deviance to combat the dominant order. Embodying the resistance paradigm of divinity in Black skin, Imani Tafari-Ama and other Rastafari women deploy a counter insurgency that rejects the logics of dominant knowledge production, establishes critical discursive traditions, and purposefully creates adversarial and maladaptive ways of being. Fundamentally, my work centers Rastafari women as co-constitutive parts of the formation and maintenance of the Rastafari movement and critical to the spiritual worldmaking cartographies of the Black radical tradition.
Notes
[1] Overstanding is a Rastafari word that transforms the English term “understanding” so that the sound of the word matches the meaning. Under-standing, sounds like one is under the message being communicated and Rastafari knows that if one is under something, the message cannot be properly received, but if one overstands something, then they are able to receive the message and extend the meaning with their own thoughts or opinions.
[2] See Ashis Nandy. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009.
[3] See Charles Price. Rastafari: The Evolution of A People and Their Identity. New York: NYU Press, 2022.
[4] Sistren is a word that refers to a group of Rastafari women.
[5] Shamara Wyllie Alhassan personal interview with Imani Tafari-Ama at the University of the West Indies-Mona, August of 2014.
[6] M. Jacqui Alexander draws from Audre Lorde to theorize the personal as both spiritual and political. See M. Jacqui. Alexander. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005.
[7] See Danielle Boaz. Banning Black Gods: Law and Religions of the African Diaspora. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021.
References
Long, Charles H. Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. Aurora, Colorado: Davies Group, 1999.
Wynter, Sylvia. “‘We Know Where We Are From’: The Politics of Black Culture from Myal to Marley.” Joint Meeting of the African Studies Association and the Latin American Studies Association. Houston, Texas, November 1977.
Cover Photo Credit: Romare Bearden, “In the Garden” (1974).
Dr. Shamara Wyllie Alhassan is an Africana Studies scholar of religion, philosophy, and gender theory. She is the co-editor of the anthology, Black Women and Da Rona: Community, Consciousness, and Ethics of Care (University of Arizona Press, 2023). Her work on Black women’s radical thought centers the ways Rastafari women use their livity to build Pan-African communities and combat anti-black gendered racism, religious discrimination and racial capitalism in the Caribbean and Africa. Her forthcoming book tentatively titled, Re-Membering the Maternal Goddess: Rastafari Women's Intellectual History and Activism in the Pan-African World is winner of the National Women's Association and University of Illinois Press First Book Prize. She is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies with a focus on the Black Experience in the Americas in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University.