To Be Someone, To Belong:The Black Womyns Experience in Rastafari :: essays papers

To Be Someone, To BelongThe Black Womyns Experience in RastafariIntroductionUpon comprehend various Jamaican films and listening to various reggae artists, a constant forefront running through my mind was,Where are all the womyn?In all of the films it seemed as though there were virtually no womyn in Jamaica, and those that were there were only on the periphery, not playing a main role in ordinary life. Those films that depicted the Rastafarian way of life seemed to show no womyn in them either. I was somewhat confused about the seeming absence of womyn, and it forced me to question their role in Jamaican and Rastafarian society. My questions regarding this issue were pushed further when a friend of mine returned home from Jamaica and expressed the same kinds of concerns. She said that during the few weeks she fagged there she had seen maybe a dozen or two dozen Jamaican womyn altogether.As I moved further into my studies of Rastafarianism and reggae music, I noticed how gendered the diction in both the religious tenets and music lyrics was. As a western womyn, this was peculiar to me. As you can notice, I dont even write the wordwomynwith the globein it. I find it insulting that my identity element should be bound up in that of the opposite sex. I am entrenched in the terra firma of political correctness and gender neutrality. However, reggae music and other rhetorical pieces of literature from Rastafari do not contain the same element of neutral gender identity as the United States has been moving towards. Rather, much of it is framed in a male or masculinist language. This implanted a few suspicions within me about the initiative of Rastafarianism being somewhat patriarchal, but, I was at first unwilling to accept the idea. I felt that this was impossible due to the fact that Rastafarianism was such a socially conscious movement dealing with the horrors of oppression and exploitation of blacks.However, it seems as though the impossible is possible, o r at least mostly possible, and traditional Rastafarianism enforces rules and cultural norms that contain womyn in the subordinate, domesticated realm of everyday life. Yet, in the last thirty years or so, those rules and norms have been slowly challenged by a new generation of Rastafarian womyn who no longer accept their inferior position and are demanding greater equality. These womyn, some of whom turn to reggae to promote their own socially conscious ideas, mean the growing consciousness of womyn in Jamaica and other majority world countries who have experienced centuries of oppression.