Caribbean Voices

“Bob Marley, One Love suggests, is a savior,” writes Colin Grant in his review of Reinaldo Marcus Green’s recent biopic of Marley from our Summer Issue. But, Grant argues, despite Kingsley Ben-Adir’s “philosophical” and “down-to-earth” portrayal of Marley, “in continuing his beatification, the film ultimately loses sight of the complex character of this inspiring and flawed man.”

Grant, a British author and historian, was born to parents who had emigrated from Jamaica, and has written extensively about Caribbeans and the Caribbean diaspora. His first two books, Negro with a Hat (2008) and I & I: The Natural Mystics (2011) were about, respectively, Marcus Garvey and the Wailers, while for the Review, he has written about the “Windrush generation” of Caribbean immigrants to the UK and Marcia Douglas’s novel The Marvellous Equations of the Dread, in which Marley is reincarnated as a homeless Rasta street preacher named Fall-down. Grant also writes for The Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other publications, about subjects ranging from Nikki Giovanni and James Baldwin to the history of the Guinness brewery. He is the author of six books, the latest of which is a memoir, I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be (2023).

Last week I e-mailed Grant to ask him about the tradition of Caribbean literature, his fascination with Marley, and how he discovered his voice as a writer. 

Priya Thakur: What interests you about Bob Marley, and what made you a fan in the first place?

Colin Grant: Robert Nesta Marley was an honest broker. He was a great artist and an honest man. He sang with purpose, composing socially conscious lyrics with astonishing acuity and ingenuity. He was raw and direct, and his extraordinary appeal stemmed from his humility. Marley often said he was a commonsense man. This was reflected in his songs and his performances, which spoke to everyone, children and adults. At heart, he was a country boy with a simple sensibility.

What especially intrigued me about Marley was his dual heritage. Unusually for Jamaica in the 1940s, he was the child of a black woman and a white man. After his father abandoned the family and his mother farmed him out to various friends and relations, he grew up a brown-skinned boy in the Trenchtown ghetto in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when brown people were part of the elite in the British colony. They still are, of course. Jamaica is a pigmentocracy, with the white and brown people at the top of the social pyramid and the very dark people, the black people, who are the majority of the population, at the bottom.

As an unusual, brown middle-class child in Trenchtown, Marley had to reckon with an ascendent Rastafarian community. Rasta “groundation” ceremonies at the time began with the chant “Death to the white man and his brown allies.” So Marley had to navigate a world in which he would have been despised. He compensated for that by becoming blacker than black: there’s a story that when he was a teenager, he’d get his girlfriend Rita to rub black shoe polish in his hair to make it coarser and blacker. And though he identified totally with black people in Trenchtown, it wasn’t straightforward. Marley was once asked which side he was on racially, and he answered that he was on neither the black nor the white side—he was “deh ’pon God’s side.”

Marley was very shrewd, and he knew how to placate. He was a man of the common people, and he turned his songs into biography. In “Talkin’ Blues,” one of my favorite songs, he sings, “Cold ground was my bed last night/And rock was my pillow too”—that’s a true story he’s telling. He was relatable because his songs were heartfelt and he sang about things that people, especially people in Jamaica, were very familiar with.

Growing up in England, did you struggle to stay in touch with Jamaican music, politics, and the culture in general?

I grew up in a Jamaican household in Luton, a small industrial town thirty miles north of London, in the 1970s, a time when black people were a tiny part of the population, so we confined ourselves mostly to the company of other West Indians. In a sense, West Indians only became West Indians in England. Back in the Caribbean—which everyone then called the West Indies—the islanders didn’t island hop, and they didn’t know one another. They forged inter-island relationships when they came here, after making three-week-long boat journeys or shorter journeys by plane. But they also got to know one another in adversity. Ultimately, because black people, Caribbean people, were despised by the majority white British population when I was growing up, we cleaved together and held on to our culture.

Certainly, we were very familiar with the music of the time, mostly ska and reggae, and I was enthralled by the kind of language the singers used. Both my parents were Jamaican. My father was an amusing speaker, although he wasn’t very amusing toward his children. And my mother was a great storyteller. She had some amazing phrases, spoken mostly in patois, that conjured her time in Jamaica. They conveyed a lot of meaning, and they had a kind of elegance and grace. I especially admired the way she carried herself and carried the culture, carried a sense of Jamaica with her. We benefited from that. Our sense, my siblings and I, of what it was to be Jamaican came from being with our mother.

In your review you write about the “diminished importance” that Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston are given in the film, an oversight that “robs One Love of vital illuminating background.” Can you tell us a little more about some of the important contributions Tosh and Livingston made—to the music, to Jamaica—that were left out of the film?

All three—Livingston, Marley, and Tosh—were skilled harmony singers. I loved that they took turns to lead; they were first among equals. They were like brothers who had lived in one another’s pockets for ten years, from their teens to their mid-twenties. And they evolved, in essence, from a rhythm and blues group to a roots reggae band. When they started, they had Brylcreemed hair and two-tone suits, and within a decade they’d transformed into battle fatigue–wearing dreadlocked Rastas. Their music evolved as they became Rastafarians, and the music carried not just a love of Rastafarian culture but a love of common people. Their first band name was the Teenagers (they were teenagers), then they became the Wailin’ Wailers and, later, simply the Wailers. And that’s a perfect name for them because they sang with wailing, mournful voices about their woes and the trials and tribulations of poor Jamaicans.

Tosh and Livingston’s absence from Bob Marley: One Love is a terrible flaw because without them, you can’t get a well-rounded picture of Marley, of where the music really came from and why it was so heartfelt. In failing to portray him as part of a trio who were initially first among equals, the film egregiously positions him as the genius of the group from an early stage, and that simply wasn’t the case.

Tosh, Livingston, and Marley were all black Jamaicans, and it’s clear to me, having written about them in The Natural Mystics, that they would have been a difficult group to work with, particularly if you were a white manager. And that was the case for Chris Blackwell, or Chris Whiteworst, as Peter Tosh called him. As a manager, Blackwell kind of broke them apart. And it’s a shame because their music was powerful. They were a holy trinity. And in the film you don’t get that, nor do you get a sense of Marley’s evolution. Tosh and Livingston also acted as a counterbalance to some of Marley’s attitudes. The three compadres quarreled a lot, but their rows spurred their creativity, and out of that came some of the most astonishing music ever to emerge from Jamaica.

In a 2022 essay about Roy Heath that you wrote for the Review, you quote a conversation you once had with V.S. Naipaul, when he said: “It’s so hard to write where there has been no writing.” This you contrast with the “more upbeat” Derek Walcott, who reveled “in the uniqueness of writing about a Caribbean island that, before him, had never really been written about.” As the child of Jamaican immigrants, and someone who writes about the Caribbean—and is doing it after those same Caribbean writers both won the Nobel Prize in Literature—how do you think about the tradition of Caribbean writing?

There’s a very rich tradition of Caribbean writing, but the irony is that I knew nothing about it when I was growing up in Luton. There were no Caribbean books in the library. But I know from researching the origins of Caribbean writing in English that it owed a lot to the foresight of the BBC, particularly to Caribbean Voices, a program broadcast in the 1940s and 1950s that encouraged fledgling writers to send in their stories. The successful stories were performed by voice actors and broadcast back to the Caribbean. This writing, then, emerged through the patronage of the BBC.

Many of those early writers saw writing as a vocation. They weren’t representative of anybody other than themselves, but they were nonetheless representing the rich range and qualities of their cultures. And there’s a kind of earnestness, a kind of humor that is very particular to the Caribbean and its tradition of picong—bold, verbal jousting.

And that has continued till today. I think what’s happened is that, while there’s a range of stories across the classes, you don’t get many rarefied middle-class stories. You still get stories of working-class people living on the street, even though the writers have become more middle class, I suppose. What’s happened in Caribbean literature, especially Trinidadian literature, is that writers have benefited from the great diaspora of Caribbean people throughout the world. In metropolitan centers like London or Toronto or New York, you find that they have benefited from the seed of Caribbean literature sown in Caribbean Voices in the 1950s.

So I think it’s a very rich tradition. You just have to look at people like Kevin Jared Hosein and Ingrid Persaud from Trinidad, or Roger Robinson. And there’s Jonathan Escoffery, who wrote about the Jamaican diaspora in his debut novel, If I Survive You. Safiya Sinclair is also a very strong writer who wrote about her Rastafarian father and the dominance of Rastafarian men over women and their families in her memoir, How to Say Babylon. I think Caribbean writing is in a good place, and it’s very exciting to be part of that.

Before you were a writer, you went to medical school. You’ve written elsewhere about how you came to believe that “medicine was a wrong turn,” but when did you first feel secure enough in your voice as a writer to pursue that instead?

Well, it didn’t happen overnight. It emerged over many decades. I started writing plays when I was at medical school in the mid-1980s. They were staged in small venues above pubs. And I did that mostly in London, but sometimes I went up to the Edinburgh festival. But when, almost a decade later, I joined the BBC as a radio producer for the World Service, I stopped writing so much because I was, as it were, on the other side of the microphone. I was, though, very lucky to be able to read a lot of literature as a producer for arts programs on the BBC, and I tried to work out what constituted the best writing.

I only became confident about my own writing when I felt brave enough to start sending it out. But I do remember, even twenty years ago, sending a short story—which was subsequently published many years later as part of a memoir called Bageye at the Wheel (2012)—to an eminent agent in Britain whom I admired, and he wrote back very quickly to say that he wasn’t interested in “ethnic writing.” So that was a bit of a blow, but through the support of my darling wife and family and friends, I kept on going.

And I think I got a lucky break with Marcus Garvey, in that I proposed a book about him eighteen years ago. It was only after publishing the Garvey biography, Negro with a Hat (2008), that I really felt secure in my writing and in the belief that I could keep writing. Although it has to be said that that book took a lot out of me and was also a strain on my family. In fact, my partner once said to me that if I wrote another book of that size, she’d leave me. So I haven’t written a book that thick ever since, and I’m still happily in my relationship with Jo.

You’ve written four volumes of memoir, including your latest, from last year, I’m Black So You Don’t Have to Be. What appeals to you about the genre? What do you hope readers can take away from your experiences?

Sometimes there’s a false distinction made between genres. I would say that all good writing is storytelling. And when I write, even though I write nonfiction books, I use the same methods that any fiction writer would draw upon. I think of shade, foreshadowing, tone, and drama. I think of different points of view, different perspectives, how you build tension, how you build suspense. A lot of my writing is based on experience; I’ve been very fortunate to have lots of interesting experiences, I suppose, and to recognize the value of those experiences.

In recent years, I’ve become the director of WritersMosaic, which started out as an initiative of the Royal Literary Fund. The RLF has been in existence since 1790, and what’s truly impressive is that this very old institution is extraordinarily forward-thinking in its desire to support writers both financially and creatively. I’m pleased that we’re focused on writers of the global majority but also that we’re very porous in ways that the agent who rejected me twenty years ago wouldn’t understand. My expanding nonfiction technique, especially my newfound confidence to express my mischievous and humorous side, my writer’s voice as well as my passion for oral history, have been given space on the WritersMosaic website. I hope that readers can trace how my writing has developed and become darker, but is still infused with humor. I think I’ve learned how to more readily give readers license to laugh about some of the dark material as I’ve become more confident about exposing myself.

The best kind of nonfiction is on a par with the best fiction. I yearn to be able to conjure an atmosphere, a moment from the past that is almost beyond my own grasp, but somehow I want to have the confidence, the determination, and the persistence to try to evoke it for the reader. I’m a black man of Jamaican origin, but I have a lot in common with almost everybody, I would say. And I hope that my writing resonates with readers in the way that writing from other cultures resonates with me.