The Hub For New Jamaicaphiles

If you buy food at your local Caribbean take away

, plan to grab a new Reggae Reggae meal from your favourite fast food joint, love to hear Bob Marley, listen to mento or ska, long to visit or revisit the land of wood and water, or intend to cheer for Usain Bolt: you are a committed Jamaicaphile. If you practice rapping, rhyming, battling or spitting on neighbourhood corners, learn street lingo from your dual heritage mates, seek to emulate the cool, laid back styles of new and past conscious and resistance performers: you will soon become a Jamaicaphile. If you wear dreadlocks, respect Rastafari, attend a roots revival, charismatic or Pentecostal church you associate with Jamaicaphiles. What is a Jamaicaphile? you ask, screwing your face at this unfamiliar combination of words. -Phile like the name Philip means lover. You love Jamaica.

Welcome to the world. There are people like you all over it because, historically, Jamaica is the hub. Long years ago when Ferdinand and Isabella ruled Spain and people believed that the world was flat, Islamic voyagers fleeing from religious persecution muttered secret words that fell into Columbus ear. Believing in these sounds of hope and freedom, he sailed west and found the jewelled islands of the sea. Beyond them other sailors went on to discover the new world continent of America. The pit stop for the next few hundred years of travel became Jamaica. All resources from the old world, human and otherwise, passed along its wharfs. All riches, edible and non-edible passed back through its waters. To this day legal and illegal cargoes are carried through the hub.

More important for us than the cargoes, though, are the people. Answering an appeal made by the Queen at the commencement of her sixty year long reign, Jamaicans came in their thousands to man the public transport systems, staff the hospitals and shore up staggering industries that had lost droves of experienced workers in the recent World War. They got off the boat one day and were in work the next. Before they had houses to live in or suitable clothes to wear, this wave of migrants gave their all to the Mother Land. Similarly, in other countries where labour was scarce, Jamaicans made their contribution. As gregarious, fun loving people they formed no selfish enclaves but mixed and moved beside home workers wherever they were. So we who were children at that time grew with lyrics about the world as a big melting pot and envisaged our children as proud bearers of multiple heritages.

If you attended school in Jamaica as my children did, you would be privileged to read The People Who Came series. If you were an interested young adult you would opt to study history and read Clinton Blacks History of Jamaica. You would visit the great houses of Greenwood and Seville and look at memoirs and artefacts first hand. Now, though, you are the youth of the diaspora of the future. You are the treads of the wheel that spins from the hub. You are the new achievers, the over comers. For you the culture wheel cannot spin off centre. This is a revolution around a hub. The centre pin point of the wheel is still. Rock steady. Know who you are, Jamaicaphile, your countrys chief resource is love inside of you.

by: RoseyThomasPalmer

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