Time For A Change

“Too many so-called leaders of the movement have been made into celebrities and their revolutionary fervour destroyed by mass media. The task is to transform society; only the people can do that – not heroes, not celebrities, not stars. A star’s place is in Hollywood; the revolutionary’s place is in the community with the people.”
Huey P. Newton

“We don't need another hero”
Tina Turner

“As it's been said already, now let it be done, I tell you who we are under the sun”
Bob Marley

These days it seems the popular literary and rhetorical devices for writers and columnists is a combo of epiphany and personal testimony through which the writers seem to take you on a personal journey of insight and realization, its triumphs and tribulations. I guess what readers have come to expect is vicarious insight, momentary wonder, a sliver of hope and small inner tingle and feeling that maybe it's all going to work out after all. Like the Bob Marley song "Every little thing is gonna be alright!" A semi social spiritual buzz or high of sorts!

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I must regretfully inform you dear reader, my long time friend, that this gimmick, the DIY feel good high... it fails to meet the challenges that confront us today. These are complicated and difficult times and are not the days of tidy ready done solutions. The beasts that confront us now, the monkeys on our backs and the Elephant in our rooms don't care about anyone's experience of optimism or your personal gains. Given what is at stake, our great future... then letting our best and brightest waste their time – and the reader's time – cooking up more Chicken Soup for the Soul food crowd than Iyanla Vantz on a Sunday with a living room full of friend with heart break and spiritual influenza. It is repetitive regurgitation of pop psychology and expounding on FaceBook memes. I contend it doesn't fix a soul, the system doesn't change and in general that formula now just doesn't work.

Black authors, writers and leadership today have few or little successes and victories to boast of since the late seventies, the eighties, the nineties or the new century, apart from their own illustrious careers. What of social or activist achievement and outreach? How far has it reached? All this is taking place because black leaders, TV personalities, politicians, musicians, journalists and writers are now into placebo politics and placebo innovation. They recycle on stale ideas and peddle them for more than they are really worth.

What I am getting at is this... those who tell us to “think different,” or it's "time for change" in other words, almost never do so themselves. Year after year, new installments in this unchanging genre are produced and consumed, till re-runs become our history. Who doesn't watching 80's sitcom and cartoons on Youtube? I go to use new technology like the Internet and Project Gutenberg to read"old books." Who hasn't heard politicians recycle old policies and re-branded old documents? Everyone knows that guy in another community that reminds you of someone in your own community. Everyone knows the same jokes, we all hear those nowadays songs that you say but I know that song from somewhere before. We all chit chat on the ends and race each other to the puns and quips we see on TV and rehearsed.

I have an Uncle Bunny from England who is a lofty but inebriated philosopher... he calls it "the procession of the simulacrum" which is to say we are a species and generation of copycats. So it seems the system is suggesting and we are all conforming to the ideas that creativity, is too important to be left to the creative. Our prosperity depends on hustling and idea and inspiration and milking it for what it is worth. This is a system and generation hell bent on cracking the code of creativity and unleash its moneymaking power. Hence everybody peddles their new creative brand of whatever in their particular field. All the P's: JLP, PNP, politicians, pastors, performers, publishers. It' what I call a VistaPrint Paradox... people want to project the image of being unique and creative, but end up at a place that offers designs ready-made via a formula of templates.

We invest our energy in futuristic information technologies, including our cars, but drive them home to rustic charmed homes copied from the 18th century. The future on offer is one in which everything changes, so long as everything stays the same. This timidity is our path to the future and it cannot work. In the words of His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie I "we must look into ourselves, into the depth of our souls. We must become something we have never been and for which our education and experience and environment have ill-prepared us. We must become bigger than we have been: more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community."

Today more than ever there is a need for bold imagining and designing, different systems of valuation, exchange, accounting of transaction externalities, financing of coordinated planning, etc. Because states plus markets, states versus markets, these are insufficient models, and our conversation is stuck in Cold War gear.

The most recent centuries have seen extraordinary accomplishments in technology and science have improved quality of life. The paradox is that the system we have now – is in the short term what makes the amazing new technologies possible, but in the long run it is also what suppresses their full flowering. The potential for these technologies are both wonderful and horrifying at the same time, FaceBook for all its connectivity and social good, is still an agency which the U.. Government uses to spy on us. A new socio-economic architecture is needed.

However black thinkers and the intelligentsia at home and abroad are utterly self-interested. It cannot begin to mobilize black communities to come up with creative solutions to our current problems. It seems our egotistical black intelligentsia can't begin to make these things happen because foisting itself and its own advancement off as “representing” the black oppressed masses is the beginning and the end of who they are and what they do. They are not truly about the black diaspora and its plight, they do not truly care to ease the existential condition of his brothers, neighbors and friends.

If we really want transformation, we have to slog through the tough issues like history, economics, philosophy, art, ambiguities, contradictions. Bracketing it off to the side to focus just on technology, or just on innovation, actually prevents transformation. Playing with new gadgets, trinkets and toys won't make life better and you know it. Instead of dumbing-down the future, we need to raise the level of general understanding to the level of complexity of the systems in which we are embedded and which has been embedded in us. This is not about "personal stories of inspiration and validation", it's about the difficult and uncertain work of demystification and re-imagining our future, as well as change how we think.

Retro fitted!

The Montegonian: Bringing Back that Old School Investigative Journalism!

Behind the music on a very popular Montegonian: Jimmy Cliff

Jimmy Cliff was born James Chambers on April's Fool's Day, 1948 in the Somerton District of St. James near Montego Bay, Jamaica. He reputedly chose the stage name Cliff to reflect the heights he intended to scale in the music business. And while he belatedly became a household name in the 1970s - in the UK thanks mainly to his appearance in The Harder They Come both as an actor and a singer - it became clear to those who followed his career that his name actually came to represent artistic, political and personal struggle, rather than easily attained commercial success. 

When he was 14 years old he moved to Kingston...

Read the full article!

My Daughter and I listen to this song every morn... she even sings it to herself... it's off his latest Grammy winning album! Another good hit is "Took the children's bread and give to the dogs!

I Will Remember You CONT'D

Well ladies and gentle people I have to admit last week's article seems to have struck a chord with many people and to think I almost discarded it. Hmmm, now what artistes mean when they say they never know which song on the album is going to be the hit single. Yeah but I digress we were speaking on memory weren't we? Yah I think so! So... yeah we as a people, Jamaican's and Montegonians have forgotten who we are, and just it has always been my belief that it is part of the charter and mandate of Rastafari to be the axis of cultural resistance to European ideas that have been proven historically to never benefit our people and in essence is what a “Far-I” friend of mine, a certain I-an Harper was saying to me the other night when he said Rasta is the memory of the people, and with all truth that is what we are, we the cultural residue and remnants of what it was to be truly African and we are the last desperate hope fighting to keep the remnants alive and to harken the mind of the people to a time before European dominance and to the fight to achieve a sustainable future of our independent thinking and devising! So we as a people have forgotten, but I do remember you!

And last week I spoke of Tate Street and it seemed to resonate with people too. And it seems coincidentally that as the fate would have it Tate Street has proven to be some kind of axis and focal point of energy and if I were one for serious astrological contemplation and in the world of spirits and omens then I would think it had a meaning. As it represents in my mind the golden age of Montego Bay, maybe because of its old world appearance and dimming glimmer of yesteryear charm or maybe its because my mother lived there and she had a million and one fond stories of playing cross from Jarret Park or going to park or when she went to Girl's School, is that Barracks or Corinaldi, I can never remember, then there was my old teacher Ms. Nelson who though teaching at Mt. Alvernia Prep, always said “When I was at Corinaldi yuh see...” then there was my old Aunt Ellis who lived at Tate Street and My mother's hair dresser Patsy lived around the corner, and I loved Satdays at Tate Street because my Grand Aunt Ellis had and eternal supply of soda, coincidentally my Aunt Ellis' son, my cousin-uncle died just recently, so a whole host of the Tate Street cast was at my door step in Paradise, I can't escape. And just when I thought the fates couldn't cross more at Tate Street, here comes my brand new co-worker a young Ms. Wiggan who happens to live on Tate Street and then there is the fact that now when your on Tate Street you have to look in the Mirror, literally and it seems I am compelled to do so figuratively and mentally as well. Seems Tate Streets is about Mirrors and reflections and reflecting. So it seems Tate Street, I remember you.

But I want to get back to the point about the golden age of Montego Bay, because I believe many of today's Montegonians don't remember a Mobay when it was a young city booming with potential and mellow balance of country and town, I think the youth of today have been saddled with the burden of carrying memories of a Mobay that is one big disorganized shanty town and urban nightmare, a failure in planning and myriad of haphazard malls and plazas chucked up on stilts and residence that are concreted to each other and roads riddled with potholes and a city infested with cocaine, crime, homosexuals, dialer, scammers, vain and trivial material pursuits and pursuants. How many will know Coral Wall and Gi-gi beach, how terrible it is to know that many will only know Aquasol and never remember again, Walter Fletcher. How many will forget the ampitheatre that gave way to highways, how many won't know that before civilization and rampant malignant urban sprawl, before the Central Business District (CBD) started its march out ward that Jarret, Tate, McCathy, Hart Street were prime real estate and proud residential communities, instead of rotting board houses and make shift garages and ad hoc concrete creations. How many have forgotten, how many will remember, I remember.

Memories are important people, they are the marks and the milestones and the landmarks in our lives, minds and history that make us who we are, that carry us to this inevitable point, it is what must be used to propel us into the future, but I fear if you cannot remember, ifyou do not remember, then you shall be lost, if you have left your future to be governed by someone else, if you don't know where you have been coming from, what is you liked and cherished, who it is you are, what you are, then you can never keep it, you can never maintain it and you can never restore it. You have name reference or frame work upon which to draw to map and chart your future, for if you trust it to outsiders, Europeans, Americans, gods, Barracks, or any other would be Messiahs then my friend, remember at least this, you are lost. But I remember.

And to all my friends, soldiers, comrades who are wondering why Yannick is M.I.A. don't worry, to all my friends I haven't seen in eons, to even the people who glimpse and barely touched or passed by in my life, to childhood friends from wonder years ago, like Ms. Tamora Decqarish ( I think I lost on the spelling there but), mans and mans from College weh mi nuh see inna years, Cherry, Lisa Thorpe, to Ms. T. Campbell, to even those who malice me, and who feel like dem a mi enemy, every single souljah... I and I remember YOU!

Ancient Memories come on into my soul...

Yannick Nesta Pessoa
yannickpessoa@yahoo.com
http://yahnyk.blogspot.com

I Will Remember You

I Will Remember You

“Ancient memories come on into my soul...”
~Sizzla Kalonji

“I've never tried to block out the memories of the past, even though some are painful. I don't understand people who hide from their past. Everything you live through helps to make you the person you are now.”
~Sophia Loren

“We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they're called memories. Some take us forward, they're called dreams.”
~Jeremy Irons


Good Evening gentle people one and all, wherever you roam, I wish you the best of Friday evenings or the “mellowest” of Saturday mornings, I assume thats when you will probably be perusing this edition of the Mirror, so I hope you have one of those unhectic Friday evenings, maybe you'll have gotten paid and can find your choice of great escapes, whether it be the bar or the sports lounge, the infamous and ubiquitous “ends” or the more notorious corners or just that particular shop you haunt or hold your palavers and congregations, or maybe its just your baby mother's place or on your verandah, I hope its one of those evening when the informal radio stations we call sound systems are broadcasting Barrington Levy and Jacob Miller and Beres, some “Black Roses” and some “Tired fi...” and some “Putting up resistance” and those other sounds that calm the savage beast and mellow the mind. Hmmm or maybe it's one of those early Saturday mornings when you catch the rooster and walk out to greet a gentle sun peeping on the eastern horizon, and get the opportunity to glimpse and injest the breaking of day the slow stirring of the world around you as it begins to wake, and your getting your tea and seeing about breaking your fast. Yeah one of those easy evenings or morns. Do you remember those? I know it's easy to get caught up in the pace of living and life, but do you remember those, easy at peace and at one with yourself morns or evenings, do you?

So why is it that I am on the issue of memory and remembering this week? Well, actually I don't remember. Joke! Ahm, well it is because I've been remembering a lot of things recently and also I find I tend to be very redolent or in remembering mood at this time of year. I guess in a way this time of year is the evening time of the year or the that end of the day point of the year, when the breadth of 12 months is almost over and that year end new year period is some what like those evenings and early mornings. Well what have I been remembering? Actually I've been thinking about the issue of memory itself, as well as remembering things. Things like Tate Street, Montego Bay the way it was, many Montegonian icons come and gone, people I haven't seen in years, the massive amount of people I knew that died this year (and oh they were many), and of course the endless line of fallen soldiers in the street, long lost loves, school days, Kingston days, days in Sav, days in foreign lands. When do you find those moments to remember? Is it those easy morns or evenings? And who or what do you remember and is it even worth remembering?

Now I want you to churn over this little summation or definition of memory I borrowed from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: ‘Memory’ is a label for a diverse set of cognitive capacities by which humans and perhaps other animals retain information and reconstruct past experiences, usually for present purposes. Our particular abilities to conjure up long-gone episodes of our lives are both familiar and puzzling. We remember experiences and events which are not happening now, so memory seems to differ from perception. We remember events which really happened, so memory is unlike pure imagination. Memory seems to be a source of knowledge, or perhaps just is retained knowledge. Remembering is often suffused with emotion. It is an essential part of much reasoning. It is connected in obscure ways with dreaming. Some memories are shaped by language, others by imagery. Much of our moral life depends on the peculiar ways in which we are embedded in time. Memory goes wrong in mundane and minor, or in dramatic and disastrous ways.

Well it seems this article has begun to run away from the word limit and word count so, it seems it's going to have to be a FEW parter (I tell you I've spot a conspiracy to destroy the english language by genderizing and sexualizing every word, but I digress), and had wanted to talk more about the things I actually remembered like Tate Street and a lot of the people and faces and some more places, but till next week...

Yannick Nesta Pessoa
yahnyk.blogspot.com
yannickpessoa@yahoo.com