Margaret D. Kawamuinyo Gill reviews

Blood, Bullets and Bodies: Sexual Politics Below Jamaica’s Poverty Line, by Imani Tafari-Ama

This is an academic text, but people are really dying in Blood, Bullets and Bodies: Sexual Politics Below Jamaica’s Poverty Line. Therefore I silently marvel at the courage and heart of the sister in doing the work. I marvel more at the heart and courage of the persons who live, struggle, die but also overcome in the very hard circumstances they do not choose.

Because poverty is a focus of the analysis, the economic pie is a major concern of Tafari-Ama’. She is concerned too with configurations of political power and use and misuse of state force in the production of poverty. However, she goes beyond the expected analysis of the effects on communities like South Side, the fictional name of the community under study, of political party politics in Jamaica. She explores the notion that violence below the poverty line is subordinated to violence above that line, and fingers violence within the accepted socio-political institution of the political party. The violence inside here, she argues, generally escapes visibility or criticism, while that without, in communities distorted by contests generated by party violence, is trumpeted afar.

Tafari-Ama points to the cynical manipulation by political parties and the election campaign process of the spirituo-cultural strategies of South Siders and people like them. These spirituo-cultural strategies are so called because they are the music, festivities, religious forms and visions of the body that people have designed to bring them comfort and pleasure, as well as help them do the philosophical work of formulating world views. However, Tafari-Ama records how political parties have appropriated these strategies for election campaigning and party recruitment purposes. In this explanation Tafari-Ama refuses to leave people’s support of political parties in Jamaica as the blind senseless urge often portrayed, but shows it to be the result of processes of appropriation and manipulation.

Importantly, since she is trying to understand how the people themselves respond to their array of circumstances, Tafari-Ama looks to where they share responsibility for the expressions their lives take. She searches out their responsibilities for the creation and use of resources, or their weaknesses in respect of this, for their battles against dehumanization or their capitulation to it. Above all, she grants them their affective life, a human quality that is often not acknowledged or celebrated in considerations of communities in challenged circumstances.

It is to that affective life that I turn first, hopefully to invite exploration and engagement beyond Tafari-Ama’s keen insights about it.

We should note that when the people of South Side generate their spirituo-cultural resources which I call affective support, they call it “getting a help”. One woman, speaking at the level of the individual and the body argues

The type of help that men want is your body…what is a woman going to give their body in exchange for? (322)

A respondent then turns the question back on Tafari-Ama herself, as to what was her aim in sex. Tafari-Ama, the official interlocutor but now respondent says “Love”. The unofficial interlocutor (official respondent in the research) answering her own question says, “It starts with help” she chuckles. “It grows up to like, and then it grows up to love.” Another says,

For working you, men should pay for education, water to wash your vagina after sex, food, biscuits, deodorant. (322)

It is interesting that she puts education in there and first. It is also interesting that these visions of the body perceive it as a resource. Of course it is, but this perception is usually denied those at the bottom. Consideration of the body’s productive capacity is usually alienated from the underdog in service of its production for others and elsewhere. And in this unequal contest for the exploitation of the body’s pleasures and forces, any such claim the one on the bottom makes on her own behalf is usually perceived and described in pejorative terms. I reference here the narratives of the “unreasonable” striking worker or the “evil whore”. Both always take the brunt of denouncements while the recipient of their labour power or bodily pleasures gets little if any disapprobation. The mechanism that effects this up-turning of the world’s reason is a manipulation of silencing and voicing. What gets silenced and what gets voiced is the key to what is at stake, and in Southside, these women make sharp word.

Tafari-Ama must have some such notion about voicing and silencing in mind when she quotes Jabulani Tafari’s no less explosive though more socially acceptable words in speaking of the oppression of the developing nation. He is quoted as exclaiming in a local text called Rootz Reggae and Kulcha Magazine

After seeing the stark reality of “Life & Debt [video], no one can claim to be ignorant of the facts. Although never referred to specifically, the real problem faced by nations like Jamaica is the inherent disparities in terms of world trade and the stalling of long overdue reforms to the international economic order. (376) (emphasis added).

In other words, the type of help the industrialized world needs is to lodge other unequally located countries in debt traps and then extract from them significant capital outflows. But Jabulani Tafari voices the inequities and proclaims what is actually necessary to right reason: For working you as a developing country in terms of debt repayments, the least that should be given is a new more equitable economic world order. Both his analysis and the women’s, sponsored by Tafari-Ama in her book, are flawless. If you look to the reasons why she self publishes this book in 2006 you recognize that Tafari-Ama herself is given to voicing the unvoiced: publishers may give you a help in sponsoring your desire to be heard. They extract a significant help for themselves in so doing.

However, there is a danger for the women who have spoken: Sexual relations skate near a mere materiality in getting and giving a kind of help. There is possibility that one can alienate one’s own body. Just as in the case of the nation, debt can be substitute for a people’s creativity. However, if the need for the help is below the line of poverty who am I to talk?

Perhaps I stand on better ground if I offer tafari-Ama and South Siders another way to view the economic pie and the resources their affective activities create that link them to their influence on political and economic decision-making. I know the people know that they are meeting needs when they get the politician and his party to fix roads just before elections, or to give their children places in certain schools, or to share out cash, or talk a certain anti-IMF anti-existing international economic order language. However, are they aware they are thereby affecting decision-making through their impact on power and authority at the national level?

While Tafari-Ama offers the manipulation of spirituo-cultural resources as an example of the people’s victim status, we can see this otherwise. Might we not perceive the use of this strategy by Manley’s party in elections and others since him up and down the Caribbean as the people’s influence on the political party to adopt a specific campaign strategy that could lead to their greater participation in economics? Manley and the party could after all, have chosen otherwise, with less success, perhaps, but is that not the point? He chose this spirituo-cultural move for its perceived capacity to bring his party success, and with that success some get some of the pie. It is hardly enough, but it is more than yesterday’s. People’s spirituo-cultural resources also get validated in grand style.

One could argue that this puts the people in the position of begging the state for things the state should by right provide them, and that is a valid criticism. It also raises the bar on the issue of corrupt uses of state funds for political party campaigning. However, negotiation is ninety percent of the art of political gunnery, I am told, and political parties are being put in the position of having to negotiate some things. This has a new feel in Caribbean politics, as are the stirrings that are bringing forward female party leaders. Can we actually separate dance-hall queens from rough wuk political party women? That is what I mean by affecting party and hence state decision-making. I do not believe it is a false sense of power. It is a perception of the people of themselves that perhaps they can take further than their victim characterization allows. But in this strategy lies also a danger of which Tafari-Ama warns while pursuing another point.

Tafari-Ama tells us that Gayatri Spivak warns: when the state purports to represent the interests of the people, the disadvantaged give up/end their attempts to realize equal rights and justice, and their efforts become subsumed in the production of hegemonic interests (231). My reading, taking off from Tafari-Ama’s, puts Portia Simpson’s “Mama” image when she and her party won the 2007 election in Jamaica under a new light. People have to be very careful of the narratives they use in assessing the help that politicians can give. The mama image, like the image of the father of the nation, is perhaps not as useful as it sounds. After all, the only role it leaves for us the people is then that of the child: this is not a useful image that one adult could take in relating to another.

All I want to do next is to take Tafari-Ama to task when she makes a conclusion with Stanford University linguist John Baugh. He argues that though manipulating language can “certainly shape perceptions”, whether the usage of changed meanings of words will be permanent or not “depends on whether it is in the interest of the mainstream culture to accept the change” (365). I suspect that this conclusion is less revolutionary than Tafari-Ama herself would on reflection accept. I offer this based on her own choices in respect of the methodology and philosophy of her research.

Tafari-Ama immersed herself bodily and ethically into the research environment and the proposals for improvement, and has allowed herself to be changed by it. She has chosen to use multimedia technology and cultural communications techniques to offer her findings in order to “motivate readers to actual action” (418). Even in her choosing to ask me from Jamaica via a woman literally running me down on campus in Barbados to write the review, and then graciously showing the willingness to understand and make space when my own life intervened in my writing of it, she shows that mainstream culture is as powerful as we give it effect sometimes – or that it is we who also create it.

I do not feel to go further in recommending this book though that is not what I was asked to do. I have not even actually said what I like about it. Who can talk of liking things about a book when people are dying in it? Furthermore, I took over two years to recommend it and no doubt more people have died. Read it yourself, I recommend, and if it takes you as long as me, still make your intervention. I hope it takes you far shorter. Jah guide.

2009-09-27