![]() Inspired by Haile Selassie’s reign, the movement hardened around a militant belief in Black independence, a dream that would be realized only by breaking the shackles of colonization.Īs he read, my father became aware of the racist downpression of the Black man happening in America. Howell discovered Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, the only African nation never to be colonized, and declared that God had been reincarnated. In the early nineteen-thirties, the street preacher Leonard Percival Howell heeded what is known as the Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey’s call to “look to Africa for the crowning of a Black king,” who would herald Black liberation. It was there, in the city’s public libraries, that my father first read the speeches of Haile Selassie and learned about the history of the Rastafari movement. He travelled to New York in the winter of 1979 to find his fortune. My father, Djani, had also been seventeen when he took his first trip out of Jamaica. “I and I was born Rasta.” I turned his reply over in my mouth like a coin. ![]() “I and I don’t choose Rasta,” he told me, using the plural “I” because Jah’s spirit is always with a Rasta bredren. Once, when I was feeling brave, I had asked my father why he chose Rastafari for himself, for us. Everywhere I went, I wore his mark, a sign to the bredren in his Rastafari circle that he had his house under control. The road between my father and me was woven in my hair, long spools of dreadlocks tethering me to him, across time, across space.
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