1. “What the Rastafarians have done is to make up a story – and I say this in high tribute – that will bring them back homewhile they wait for reality to catch up to their imaginations” (italics mine).  (77).  Chamberlin often points to Rastafari myth and song as exemplary of the power of stories to connect and reconnect peoples, as places to begin to find the common ground. Indeed, he thinks, “Rastafarianism may be the only genuine myth to have emerged from the settlement and slavery in the New World” (187).  Why does Chamberlin think this? Please be sure to include some discussion about language, in particular “Dread Talk.”

Rastarianism seems almost custom built for Chamberlin’s approach as it is the real life manifestation of “finding common ground” through story. It is a faith spawned from a grand metaphor, though the suffering experienced by those who practice it is certainly not metaphorical.  The entirety of Chamberlin’s text concerns the use of story as a means of “overstanding the stories and songs of others with whom we may be in conflict” (188), and by grafting the Old Testament narrative of wandering exiles onto their own cultural situation, they have heartily accepted “the challenge to believe in strangeness” (188). Rastafarians identify with the story of the Israelites with – literally- religious fervor.

Of course it is not without adaptation that the story is transposed onto their own heritage, but it is stamped with their own subjectivity and this is done through language, which “reflects their own imaginings and recovers their own realities” (Chamberlin 187). Native languages and names were taken from these people by their oppressors, and so in turn they modify this unnatural tongue of the colonizer as a way of acculturating it. This renaming is a way of exercising power in a subtle, yet resonant way. More than this, Chamberlin notes that “dread talk” is crafted to “represent a return to wonder, and perhaps to the surprise of the original metaphor” (188). So “dread talk” is language that prioritizes the experiential representation (using words like “overstand” and downpression”), it attempts to close the gap between the thing signified and its signifier in order to transport the reader’s consciousness more effectively.  Perhaps it is this aspect of their culture that allows for the acceptance of “strangeness” of the Old Testament and facilitates the inhabitance of metaphor.

Though not written down, reggae music provides an oral document, as permanent as anything in the bible, that exists beyond the death of its author, telling and retelling the stories of the Rastafarian faith. It is important to know that a primary conduit for propagation of this belief system is the musical recording: as Courtney MacNeil notes, the audio recording provides a challenge to Walter Ong’s assertion that oral expression is inherently “evanescent.” Although Chamberlin does point out that Ras Kumi set down the history of Rastafari in the 1980s, it is written exactly as it is spoken, without florid metaphorical obfuscation, and the oral precedes the textual. Oral expression is “a means through which an interior drive towards communication is accessed” (MacNeil) so the “dread talk” is a privileged point of entry into the individual and collective Rastafarian consciousness.

By buying into this narrative of Jewish exile the Rastafarians have “forged a connection among these… stories of horror” (Chamberlin 76), united themselves with disenfranchised populations the world over, yet done so in a way that maintains their distinctive cultural features.

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2003. Print.

MacNeil, Courtney. “Orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory. 2007, Web. May 16, 2015.

Trojan Records. “Desmond Dekker and the Aces- ‘Israelites’ (Official Audio).” Online video clip. Youtube. Youtube, 9 May, 2014. Web. 21 May, 2015.