Who I Am!

“De pain and the fight, the hate and the lies… Pain and heartbreak, supm inna it weh mi love, all a mi life experiences build me up as thug.”
Alkaline (Juggernaut)

When the valley couldn't hold me, they throw me in the river, Thinking I would drown, but man, ah, good swimmer, whoa, When the river didn't drown me, they throw me in the fire, But the fire just cool, I could never burn, oh
Major Lazer (Believer)

As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.
Proverbs 27:17 (Bible)

My journey to me starts in 1919… why because it is where my mind has a definitive anchor in history. That is the day Dorothy M. Thompson was born, my mother’s mother, I would spend 33 years of my life imbibing her life and that of her children and grandchildren. When I say imbibe her life experiences, imagine what it was like for me as a child in a pitch black room at nights with your granny’s voice recanting her life experiences, in the pitch black when you can’t see your own hand so you feel disconnected from your body. The black room become your own mindscape and that voice and those experiences become stitched in and meld with your own, when it is as though that voice inhabits your psyche now till this present moment… then my life can seem at times to start 1919… in the midst of history and milestones.

Understand I was with Dorothy in Rock River Clarendon, when she went to vestry, when John took her to the UNIA, when she ate Milly mango in Diamond, when she met her husband Allan Thompson, when they came to Montego Bay, from Gravel Lane to Tate Street… when she met Howard Cooke, when she became the PNP matriarch, when she worked at WoolWorth, till she got her tuck shop up at Cornwall Regional Hospital, when she became the pillar of the community in Paradise Acres. Through all her pains and heartbreak, joys and suffering… what I didn’t glean in the dark room I would live to see in action myself.

I am my parents… I am my father, when you see me being an entrepreneur… no matter how I may fail or flounder, it is an instinct that comes from having imbibed his life and am still imbibing it. Everytime, I draw I am my father, for the gift came from him, and everytime my daughter or her classmates, or children in the community look at things I draw or paint, when they look at me as some hero, it's because my father drew me out of a thousand school projects and was my hero. And even though I haven’t become a millionaire just yet, every dollar earned from that talent, is what he gave me in a manner of speaking. Plus so much more. For I was with him when he grew up in Four Paths in Clarendon, catching water in the early mornings before dawn, with his brother. I was with him going to Glenmuir, I was with him when he came to Montego Bay, when he met my mother, when he wooed her, when he married her, when he sold insurance, when he became an entrepreneur, when he made his life and forged his own path.

I am my mother… who I inherited social activism from. I am her quiet nature, I am her silent strength… the fortitude it takes to go through long suffering and go the distance. Yannick is a hebrew name that means, the grace of God, and if there is any grace in me I am sure it came through her. She taught me children and family over career… not through speech but her choices and actions, and I have seen much value in it. When I write poetry it is the amalgamation of my parents… their love affair with the English language, her social sensitivities and keen sense of emotional observation, his concubines… a green websters dictionary with a tree on it, Reader’s Digest, Time Magazine and National Geographic.

I am my community which manage to teach me in the 80’s that it takes a village to raise a child. For it was as simple as this, “all wah mi do and don’t do, dem tell mi granny.” So now I will forever fight to return the community to that type of communal love. For I am also the community’s victims of that lost love… I am Gully, I am Delano, I am Little Dread, I am Goosey, I am Sticky Bean, I am Baboo, I am Warface, I am Marley, I am Andrew Bailey, I am Joab, I am Zuggy, I am Jooky, I am Stumpy, I am Sweaty, I am Stubba, I am Goodfy Jeffrey, I am Umpa, I am Jigs, I am Wiz/Alkaline, I am Delly, I am Kerris, I am Shorty, I am Hulk, I am Jevaughn James, I am Danny, I am Warrick, I am so many more fallen soldiers. I am the best of my community, I am E. T. Webster, I am Tappa, I am Jimmy Cliff, I am Cecil Donaldson, I am the Youth, I am the Senior Citizen, I am the community heroes like Venise and Tash… I am I-crus, I am the elder, the mechanic, the shoe repair man, the upholster, the shopkeeper, the selector, the Juta Driver, the artisan, the labourer, the mason, the carpenter.

I am my teachers, I am Mr. Mcpherson, I am Co-Hall, I am Ms. Gordon, I am Ms. Nelson, I am Mr. Barnes at Cornwall, I am Mr. Miller, Rev. Myers, Mr. Maddans, Mr. Haughton, Mr. Taylor, Mr. Clarke, Ms Daze/Wilson and Reverton Bailey. I am Aggrey Brown, I am Roxanne Burton, I am Earl McKenzie, I am Tunde Bewaji, I am Dr. Bamikole, I am Jalaani Niaah...

I am more than a slim natty in a 5’11 frame. I am Pan Africanism, I am Rastafari, I am Socialism, I am African Spirituality, I am Afrofuturism, I am tomorrow, I am that which makes you uncomfortable, I am science, I am arts, I am metaphysics, I am human, I am supernatural, I am God, I am man, I am community, I am football, I am basketball, I am cricket, I am mistakes, I am failures, I am success, I am unstoppable, I am unbreakable, I am indomitable and my name is Yannick Nesta Pessoa.

Comics, E-books, Audio Books and the New Literary Era! - PART 1

The Literary World I Entered

I don't know but I have to do this post... as an avid comic reader in Jamaica since the 80's, when my mother first introduced me to Archie comics... I quickly became disillusioned for it seemed perpetual that Archie would forever pursue Veronica whom I disdain rather than Betty who I preferred... Jughead would never get fat, and Reggie would forever be a bad-mind fr-enemy! Then a friend of mine or a co-worker of my mother Woodrowe Brown and my sister Tanya, introduced me and my brother to Asterix, so for awhile I had the Gaul to defy Caesar with Asterix and Obelix while sip on a brew from Getafix... then the summers became filed with those big Garfield comic magazines, some how a lazy conniving feline craving lasagna never charmed me long, then my cousin Camara brought forth Calvin and Hobbes, I fell in love with that comic... Calvin's perception of the world mirrored my own!

My adventures with Superheroes started before reading however, and the earliest parts of the eighties were spent reaching home by 3 o' clock and changing off the signature uniforms of St. James Prep. and Mt. Alvernia Prep, then waiting in front of the T.V. watching the rainbow thingy, with the black bar at the bottom, yep keenly watching the little rainbow square pixels of the cathode ray tube till JBC signed on and it was time for the evening cartoons.

Enter Transformers, Thunder Cats, G.I. Joe (for some reason I hated it) Mask (this too I hated) He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Silver Hawks, Jase and the Wheel Warriors, Galaxy Ranger, Spider-man & his Amazing Friends, Superman in many many many incarnations... yep the corridors of many a school I attended would be filled with booming chants like Mumra's 'Ancient spirits if evil, transform this decayed form to Mum-RAAAAAH, the ever living' and 'Moon Star of Limbo... give me the mighty, the menace, the muscle... of... MONSTAAAAR.' I remember one day at Cornwall in Bio Class, 9 grade... I'm probably 14, and we all full of testosterone and pretending to be little men, fascinated with the words Vagina or the vulgar vernaculars... days spent imaging female teachers in lurid fantasies...

So it surprises me one day in Bio class, we are doing an ecological study, at a time an age when eco means simply recycle and don't litter... so the teacher asks some questions but we on top of it more than usual so she was from Nigeria and asked in her African accent how come we had all the answers for a change, and for some reason either myself or someone beside me started singing "Captain Planet he my hero..." and the whole class breaks out into chorus... "GONNA bring pollution down to zero..." all the way through to "Earth... Fire... Wind... Water... Heart... GOOO PLANET!!!" So for all the testosterone and bravado and force-riped-ness... we were still boys watching cartoons and thinking about Super Heroes. But for the most part it never ceased to amaze me that every boy in class instead comics were for kids, worse a girl my age's opinion of comics was that it was for immature dolts.

 

I was never a literary connoisseur, the books I read were all for school... Except for a summer where I was bribed into reading Enid Blyton's "The Greedy Goblin and other stories" blaaaaah... Boring but I waded and ploughed through it. 

Those days English books and cartoons seemed dull and dreary... Grays and dark blues and boredom. Stuff like Curious George and Little Blue... The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe television series. Lots of scary claymation! But back to the books. I never read much literature... Give me the Astronomy books, Daddy's old National Geographic and Time Magazines, he and I spent of my early life watching Leonard Nimoy's "In Search Of" documentary series... he had some Conan but I never got the joy of Savages and naked women at that stage of life, as girl loving as I was... I'd rather have looked at the lingerie models in the back of Mommy's Cosmopolitan and read about the 6 to 12 new sex tips the editorial team had discovered each month. Dad also had Reader's Digests and Louis L'Amour... But those never got me either, so like I said my journey with books was more about reading Astronomy books and grasping the next Monday night episode of Star Trek the Next Generation on JBC. I also had a thing with a series of books called Tell Me Why...

I remember bookshelves like this, especially my cousin Camara's... full of Enid Blyton!

My boon in Superhero Comic Books sailed off with an entrance in to a Pharmacy at the bottom of Union Street, named Jamaica Pharmacy or someting to that effect, in their my brother purchased a Superman story arc called "Panic in the Sky" and it was a great intro to the plethora of DC comic superheroes, but I had purchased another hero, it was Spider-man Amazing Tales, which I think printed 70's re-run of old Amazing Spider-man comics. I had hopped into Spidey's world while Ron Frenz illustrated it, and Spider-man had just returned from Secret Wars in central park in an alien costume he didn't comprehend... he was going to college(school) he was working at the Bugle, he had a social life with lots of hiccups... and I was forever stuck in the web of North American re-branding of Anansi as Peter Parker. I also got my hands on Flash, Wally West's run as The Fastest Man Alive, and I jumped on right as they had been looking at his youth origins in a series of Year One stories. I was struck by that comic and it's lightning and Wally West's coming of age story... at the right kinds of time in life...Literature for me really began in High School... prior to that it was "Reading Books" in Prep School.

Those final days of prep school and forays into comics would see my vocabulary expanding, my grasp of science spreading... as I scrambled to the dictionary to understand what "Red Skull meant when he said Captain America as 'UBIQUITOUS'" or to encyclopedia to understand what Spider-man meant when they discovered his suit was a "Symbiote", or to ask science adept people like Woodrowe Brown to explain how Flash vibrated through walls and what atoms and molecules were and there different states etc... Ubiquitous I wouldn't meet until 8th grade Lit at Cornwall, Symbiote I wouldn't meet till 9th grade biology, atoms and molecules came with 9th grade chemistry and physics, but the science behind Wally West and his through wall molecule trick wouldn't be till 10 or 11 grade. Imagine... comics encoding all that science in me prior to high school. Comics contributed to those 80's and 90's averages and grades at the good old CC! Yep those days were some Wonder Years... not unlike the television series of the same name.

My official debut in literature came at the bothersome stage of life called puberty, as I entered first form or as I knew it then... the 7th GRADE... with insecurity and testosterone roiling in combo. It was at this time I met Sprat Morrison... The Young Warriors, Three Finger Jack Treasure. Shane, The Chrysalids, The Pearl, Green Days by the River, The Wooing of Bepo Tate, A Cow called Boy, A Brighter Sun...



A Brighter Sun is the apotheosis of a Caribbean bildungsroman, a quintessential coming of age story. What I loved about this book was that it was about a young couple... trying to forge a life, in what was considered in my time as TWEEN years... yup Tiger and Urmilla were tweens trying to forge a family and the book was littered with all the sexual tensions of teen life and the wonder years of sensual and sexual discovery... granted it was an undertone of sorts. What is so philosophically great about it is the social reality illustrated in the novel and how it lovingly examines sections of working-class life like a microscope to a microcosm, its an empathic and human interest fiction of Trinidadian life, even Caribbean life to an extent.

Tom Sawyers and Huck Finn weren't bad, but I hated Tom Sawyers for his attitude towards Black people, so Sprat Morrison and the adventures of a young boy living in Papine, a suburb of Kingston, was great refrain. It is widely studied in Caribbean schools and deservedly so.

TO BE CONT'D...

Speak Truth to Power!

Created with Kwote!

An Open Letter to the Five Star General- Bounty Killer

Greetings to Jamaica and the Five Star General Rodney Basil Pryce in particular,

 I remember somewhere back in 1993, I had held this notion that Reggae was the God and Dancehall was the bastard demi-god who had inane chatter gibberish and nonsensical if not simply whimsical lyrics and rhyme schemes like "zungy zungy a zunga zeng"! ABC 123... nothing too intellectually challenging or vocabulary expanding... zeen come again, wah di clock inna London name big ben, missa chin money name yen! Shabba and Super Cat weren't so bad but Dancehall as genre lacked definition and umph! Then comes PEEEEEEEEEEEOPLE DEAD! A man who would become the archetype of what a DJ and social commentator in the Dancehall should be.

I remember in 9 grade at the esteemed Cornwall College in 9-1 to be "pre-xact" every session a teacher missed was an opportunity for aspiring musicians. Long before the age of rising star, the class would be a riot of drummers banging desks and chairs as we cued up the main acts, those days the class was divided in two, the school of Beenie-ites, and the House of Bounty. The best representatives from the competing sides the likes of class mates named Clive Lawrence, Romaine McIntosh, Winston Brown... they would represent the factions and vocalize the discographies of Bounty which would be pitted against the catalogue of Beenie ballads. I happened to be in the Bounty camp.

Why some may ask? At the time I was a comic book junkie, whose favourite hero was Spider-man, but in terms of social development and coping with the teen world, and the Jamaican social context... well "with great power comes great responsibility" as a mantra wasn't cutting it all the way. And Spider-man a teen with superpowers and a horrendous social life and the guy that everybody hated wasn't gonna save my psyche through to 10 grade. So when you need a local Superhero, and a most verbose character, fearless, Jamaican, garbed in all black like Blade, Punisher or the Black Panther... A man the people dubbed "the poor people's governor" "the ghetto gladiator"... Titles not unlike "The Uncanny X-men" or "The Spectacular Spiderman." Bounty Killer became to me the very first Jamaican Super Hero, equipped with grand titles, monikers and mantras, secret identity Rodney Pryce, with his Justice League or Avengers, known as The Alliance. "Yeah Yeah Yeah" "Huh!" Bounty was the Jamaican icon from he became one of the local champions of that Patrick Ewing 33 sneaker, Jamaicans at home supporting Jamaicans abroad!

It is no coincidence then that his 1996 album My Xperience impacted fans at home and abroad spending six months on the Billboard reggae chart. Personally that was my favourite album, and I didn't even realize it till one day when a friend of mine Gavin Carey called me at home... yeah back in the land line era... and when he called he said... "my yute a one cd you have, and a one song deh pon di cd, caah everyday mi call you, all mi here is 'dem get gun dung inna miggle of guntown, well mi silent gun will emit no soun'" I then realized I had to rotate my musical diet... not that it wasn't varied... I grew up on Bob Dylan, Melanie Safka, Sam Cooke, Beres Hammond, Simon and Garfunkel... in he 90's I met Alanis Morrisette, Sarah Mclachan, Goo Goo Dolls, Alternative Music from D. Shadow and Rick Dee's Top 40, interspersed with Jungle, Techno World Beat... so my diet wasn't bad but in Jamaica Bounty was my boss. At the same time he also expanded my musical ear... The My Xperience album would introduce me to The Fugees, Busta Rhymes, Wu-Tang and many others... subsequent albums in the 90's would introduce me early to Kardinal Official on "The Bacardi Slang."

Bounty's career too has been as layered and textured and storied just like a comic book series, with arch-nemesis manifesting in Beenie Man and eventually Vybz Kartel, clashes as epic as any Ridley Scott film, feat and accomplishment that echo on in the perpetual street dancehall discourse. I can only imagine the day when teens and adults read a Bounty Killer comic book or graphic novel. Maybe when Ziggy Marley gets time away from Marijuana Man he can bust me on the job fi draw and write a Bounty Killer Comic. Once somewhere in 2005 I had wanted to write a Bounty Killer Biography titled: Badman Bible! Even when close friends debated that Bounty's Tale is not best seller material, I have absolute faith to this day that it would be a mega success, accompanied by like a documentary... the legend of Bounty would be immortalized.

Anyway... this ratings of mine for Bounty Killer progressed as I entered into academia, when while I was in KGN, Bounty was in my backyard in Mobay donating computers to Albion All Age, giving public lectures at Mobay's Civic Centre and generally impacting the youth of Jamaica in a major way. His prolific work would not be forgotten by youth of Norwood, Paradise, Albion, Glendevon even unto this day. I remembered when Carolyn Cooper had held her usual Friday Dancehall Artiste lecture up by UWI, Mona... I will never forget the particular Friday when Bounty Killer lectured... as a Bounty fan since his career started... I would be present at that lecture with my placard and signs BOUNTY FOR PRIME MINISTER! A memorable biographical tale, topped off by a fan request performance, nothing beats that.

Now flash forward to current day Jamaica... 2016... Dancehall ain't what it used to be! Today we watch the acidic career of Alkaline as he spits nasal inflections of mundane lyrics on the hottest dancehall and pop chart rhythms. There is even today an analogy in the dancehall that I think originates with Aidonia... "mi bad like 90's dancehall," which to me Ithink is testament to the current state of dancehall. The only saving grace for Jamaican music is reggae revival as Kartel tries to holler from his cell "Dancehall can't stall, woaheee dancehall can't dead yet"

But there are some critical things I have been waiting to see in the dancehall still... Maybe I am idealistic and a dreamer... but I had imagined Bounty Killer having many more years... I was waiting on Bounty Killer and Linkin Park, an era where Bounty's social commentary taps into global youth angst and pain. Bounty and Eminem, Bounty and P.O.D. (remix Youth of the Nation), Bounty and the Trini version of Bounty... Bunji Garlin, I think they would make a booming earthquake combination that would shake from both sides of the Caribbean and quake the world. The romantic version of Rodney Pryce that was on "It's Ok and It's Alright!" with the like of Emily Sande. Bounty from those 90's Jungle Cd's on rhythms that Major Lazer builds, Bounty with Calvin Harris, Bounty with those European producers... dubstep Bounty, Bounty on some Ancient Tomorrow rhythms like Protoje, as a matter of fact mi a wait pon Bounty-Chronixx, mi await pon Bounty and Kabaka...

I am not from that school that says Bounty's days are over, I believe those that say that have a failure of imagination. I see much more work to be done by Bounty, Beenie, Sizzla, Capleton, Buju and the entire generation that made the 90's great.