Being Jafakean: who gets to decide what you are?
Fuck five years of living there, family barbeques, Christmas dinners with the rum-laden sorrel my grandma slaved over. I’m not Jamaican, but who draws that line?
BY: TREVON SMITH
Photo by Trevon Smith (circa 2015) // THE UNDERGROUND
I was 22 when I found out I wasn’t Jamaican. My dad told me as much, but he wasn’t wrong. I was born in Canada and I’ve lived here most of my life. I speak patois poorly but most non-Jamaicans would think my dialect is passable enough. I enjoy ackee and saltfish and callaloo just as much poutine and maple syrup—separately, of course. Heck, I lived on the island for five years.
But I’m not Jamaican, which is a harder pill to swallow than I thought at the time.
When you don’t look like the average hockey player, living in a city where everyone is from somewhere, you’ll inevitably be asked by your fellow bus mates, work mates, or classmates: “where are you from?”
For me, the answer always changes.
When an older woman in colourfully tattered clothes starts ranting about the inevitable Black uprising in a dialect similar to patois while the bus lurches through slick December snow, and she eventually pulls the yellow stop string and hurries through backdoors wailing her premonitions, and my bus mate across the aisle shoots me a look as if to say “could you believe that lady,” I’ll shoot a look back saying, “no idea, I’m Canadian.”
Or when an older coworker who is also from the Caribbean tells me a story of their youth back on the island, I share my own island adventures, like losing a shoe while sailing in Montego Bay or taking weekend trips along winding gravel roads to the countryside to visit family members I’ve never met and will likely never meet again, as if to reassure them that “yes, I am also Jamaican.”
Photo by Trevon Smith (circa 2015) // THE UNDERGROUND
When I think of hyphenated identities, I ask where one identity begins and the other ends. Where does my Caribbean half start, and where does the Canadian half begin, and vice versa?
In their TedX Talk “Living in flux: Navigating Hyphenated identities,” Ore Ogunbiyi and Chelsea Kwakye, Nigerian-British and Ghanaian-British respectively, argue that living with a hyphenated identity means navigating a “precarious in between, in a world that is becoming more hostile.”
However, Ogunbiyi and Kwakye believe that the goal for the hyphenated individual should be to blend both sides of their identities and not negate one for the other, as to do that one would be denying the history of both identities.
Ogunbiyi and Kwakye speak happily about embracing the music, art, and history of their own identities, and I wonder for myself if I can say the same. Have I embraced enough of Jamaican music, when there are so few Jamaican musicians on my Spotify playlists? Have I embraced enough Jamaican art, when the walls of my bedroom are lined with posters from Bladerunner and Serenity and not a single facade of the sunny island?
In this sense, my dad was right in saying I’m not Jamaican. I think back to my time on the island. I was, wary of really engaging with the culture as much as I could, wanting instead to play video games like Super Smash Bros. with the few friends I made who also happened to be either hyphenated or non-native Jamaican.
This act of cultural gatekeeping is not without its reasoning. Jamaican stereotypes are littered throughout western media, whether it be the episode of 7th Heaven where the father assumes the kids are smoking weed partly because they listen to reggae music, or from movies like Shark Tale (2004) that depict Rastafarian stereotypes.
These misrepresentations of Jamaican culture in media are not unlike the mockeries of Black identity as a whole through the long history of Blackface and minstrel shows, originating from the southern United States in the early 1800s for the enjoyment of white audiences.
Through this lens, cultural gatekeeping is more about protecting the integrity of a culture rather than excluding those who co-opt aspects of it and, in doing that, water it down into a parody of itself. Google “stoner” and see how long you have to scroll before finding Bob Marley.
However, according to the Jamaican government, so long as my parents are Jamaican citizens, I can claim Jamaican citizenship. It begs the question of whether citizenship is a marker of identity, especially to be a citizen of a country that has few distinguishable cultural markers like Canada.
When we look south of the border, our American neighbours are distinctly that—; American. We see their boisterous Fourth of July fireworks and the rough and tumble, concussion-inducing American Football. We see the glimmer-glamour of Hollywood and the insomniatic streets of the big apple and the boom-clang of band Jazz roots in New Orleans.
East of the pond is worse; we see the Queen in Buckingham Palace and the furry-hatted guards and the scones and crumpets and storied stone-streets chock full of colonial era ghosts, and no I haven’t been to Britain.
When you don’t particularly care to get up at some ungodly morning hour to watch a royal wedding, nor care to play hockey, street or ice, and aren’t too fond of Celine Dion or Michael Bublé; are you even Canadian?
Beyond stereotypes, what does it actually mean to be Canadian when the culture is as amorphous as a baby's first snowman? Srini Varadarajan wrote about his own identity crisis when immigrating to Canada from India, describing it as being plopped at a crossroads between “a known devil and an unknown angel.”
Varadarjan’s choice to come to Canada was not made easily. The prospect of leaving behind your own support systems, friends and family, can be a difficult one and could sway anyone from taking the leap. The people, language and values might differ.
But it was his choice.
In that choice, he engaged with people across Canada, learning of their own backgrounds and “appreciating their stories, [and] their choice or compulsion to come to Canada.”
In looking back into my own life, I find some truth to what my dad said. I didn’t have the choice to leave Canada. To be taken from your own support systems and plopped into a different country with different people, living on a different street in a different home, where the things that bump in the night are just as different; I look back and see how I escaped into my own core self.
I see the weekends spent indoors, the class sessions at the back of the room, the gym classes spent either field-side or in the principal’s office for not engaging with the rest of the class.
In that sense, my dad was right; I’m not Jamaican. No matter where we hyphenated folks fall on the identity spectrum, either left or right or somewhere in the hyphenated middle. The choice of what we identify as is ours to make.
The cultural gatekeepers and the government bodies and the judgemental bus-mates don’t get to decide what we, the hyphenated brats, identify as.
Only we do, and I choose to be Jafakean.
Photo by Trevon Smith (circa 2015) // Taken while sitting field-side during gym class. // THE UNDERGROUND
