The Jamaica Cultural Development Commission has been able to shortlist only three suitable entries for the Festival Song Competition finals.
June 14, 2022
How can we sing songs of festivity in a ‘strange’ land?
Dear Editor,
Patriotism is said to be “the quality of being patriotic; devotion to and vigorous support for one’s country”.
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Since attaining Independence almost six decades ago, Jamaicans have seen and experienced the constant deterioration of their well-being facilitated by an uncaring State represented by elected officials who most often place their political parties’ and individual gain above the interest of both people and nation-building.
In my article ‘The stench of the 80s and 90s is thwarting our development’ (Jamaica Observer, June 7, 2022) I referred to the Rt Rev Neville D’Souza who, in responding to the rise in gun violence and antisocial behaviour, observed that, “This society so greatly frustrates the organisms which are human, and because they are powerless to change the environmental realities in which they live, then they take upon themselves the only power left to them, that is, the morbid destructiveness which gives them a sense of living.” (125th Synod Charge,1995)
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For many of our people, Jamaica is experienced as an oppressive structure that is a modern-day Babylon that “frustrates the human organisms which are human”.
When the exiled Israelites were asked by their captors to sing their songs of Zion in Babylon, their response was, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” (Psalm 137:3-4)
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Psalm 137 arises out of the experience of a community in exile in Babylon following the destruction of their temple in Jerusalem, and is a lament about the exile that the people of God now experienced apart from the temple, apart from Zion, the city of David.
The lockdown due to the novel coronavirus pandemic removed the artificial anaesthetics — night noises — that once numbed the reality of our oppressions and the things that negate our humanity. Perhaps the rejected lyrics entered for the Jamaica 60 Independence celebrations should be viewed as laments from a people who have been in exile for decades.
But who is listening to the cries of the people? Walter Brueggemann, American Protestant Old Testament scholar and theologian, said that, “It is clear that a church [nation] that goes on singing happy songs in the face of raw reality is doing something very different from what the Bible itself does.”
Perhaps it’s not too late to open our ears and eyes; if it is, an upheaval will overtake us while drowning in happy songs.
Dudley C McLean II
Mandeville, Manchester
dm15094@gmail.com
