Constructing a dub identity: What it means to be “Back Home” in Jamaica

Writing for the Small Axe digital platform sx salon in 2016, I proposed the use of a “dub aesthetic” as a new methodology for analyzing the literature of the Caribbean and its diaspora. In what I am developing into a book-length project, I adapt the four key production techniques of classic Jamaican dub music—a memory-based, afro-futurist music created in the capital city of Kingston during the 1960s by innovative sound engineers like Osbourne “King Tubby” Ruddock—to be employed as analytical tools that can allow literary scholars to access un- and under-explored themes in Caribbean writing. But, as I reflect upon my own recent migration back home to Jamaica after years of living in the northeastern United States, I find that the words I used to explain a dub aesthetic to a literary audience are curiously useful for me to draw upon in thinking through my return to Jamaica. In its most basic form, dub music is an unfamiliar encounter with the familiar, and what could be more disorienting than a collision of the familiar “Back Home” space that resided in my memory with the unfamiliar “home” that I encountered upon arriving in Kingston in 2016? How would I or home be the same? How could I or home have changed? Using a dub aesthetic, I chart a circular path from home to “Back Home” to home again. The dub aesthetic opens up the aural and scribal space, and in ways that I had not previously explored, it has also become useful for interrogating links between the self and home.

There are four production techniques that mark classic Jamaican dub music as dub: reverberation, mixing, talk-over, and muting. Reverberation describes sound reflection and has a broad home in music production and sonic critique, but mixing, talk-over, and muting have a specific birth-place in Jamaican musical history. In dub music, echo and delay effects are used to enhance the reverberation experience. Mixing is how dub producers term the deconstruction and reconstruction that takes place at the sound engineer’s controls, such that a song can be taken apart and remixed to create a new listening experience from an old one. Talk-over is the addition of another voice or multiple other voices onto a song in either a live or studio space, the effect of which contemporizes the old record. And muting describes the subtraction of a voice or instrument from the original record. Adapting these terms for the literary analyst poised to use the aesthetics of dub as tools, I defer to my words in sx salon: “To analyze literature via the dub aesthetic is to read ‘reverberation’ in how the past haunts memory and in the way intertextuality teases memory. It is to honor both the harmonious and discordant ‘mixing’ of cultures, religions, races, and languages that shape Caribbean and diasporic identities. It is to hear ‘talk-over’ in an author’s use of multivocality and the choice to privilege orality, voice, and perspective. It is to recognize the link between ‘muting’ and mutation—what I term ‘mut(e)ation’—in the rising voices of previously silenced minority populations of white Jamaicans, queer Caribbeans, and Haitian refugees, to name but a few groups who have suffered under the figurative mute switch” (Semaj-Hall, 2016: para. 8). Honoring history while creating a future, I find that using the aesthetics of dub amplifies my artistic relationship to identity and politics.

No matter how it is mixed, talked-over, reverberated, or muted, identity, like dub, is defined by its relationship to history; therefore, it is impossible to continue without outlining the history upon which dub music is built. The development of music in Jamaica can be charted along its political, social, and cultural history of resistance and influence. Each musical genre can be read as an extension of the previous or, as ethnomusicologist and dub music specialist Michael Veal suggests, we may read the music as a “soundscape” projecting a “continuum of Jamaican music” (Veal, 2007: 26). Starting with the African drum that survived the torturous journey across the Atlantic, Jamaica’s tambu and kumina music emerged during the early years of slavery. Those African forms became infused with European religions and revival music pushed through the 1800s. Mento followed with a further fusion of cultural presences. This folk form developed near the turn of the 20th century and reflected the musicians’ migration from rural to urban spaces. By the 1930s, the West African drums that survived now produced distinctly Jamaican rhythms like the Rastafarian nyabinghi beat. Ska follows mento and was, in many ways, both a response to American jazz in the 1950s as well as a reflection of Jamaican distaste for white American rock and roll music. In the 1960s, ska transformed into rocksteady, a new sound that was influenced by the Kingston rudeboy counter-culture of the day. Reggae, the predominant and reigning sonic symbol of Jamaica, was born from rocksteady, and it developed partially in response to the black American R&B of the 1960s and, in part, as a way for Jamaican musicians to create a uniquely Jamaican sound. Dub developed alongside reggae music and alongside Jamaica’s transition to political independence, and dub’s innovative production techniques reflected the ways in which Jamaican consciousness was beginning to widen. The Jamaican musical evolution did not end with dub. From dub emerged dancehall. Still a highly popular form today (publicly for the younger, economically disadvantaged listeners, and privately for that minority of the Jamaican population that is financially secure), dancehall music began in the 1980s as an offshoot of dub’s electronic production techniques. From this brief gloss of the history of Jamaican music—from Africa to colonial independence in 1962 to today—one also finds the development of Caribbean identity: a distinct dub identity born of an indigenous home, an African home, an Asian home, a European home, and an American home. But none of these many historical homes is “Back Home.”

Unlike home, “Back Home” is not on any map. It is only accessible via nostalgia, therefore every day for the last year I have found myself disoriented at the crossroads of “Back Home” and home, the intersection of Kingston of memory and Kingston of today. This is because into the contemporary era, many of us who are tethered to multiple countries find ourselves straddling multiple worlds, as we live in one home and remember “Back Home.” Over time spent in the diaspora, many migrants transform the prior space from a living breathing country, changing and evolving on a real-time basis into a new, old space known as “Back Home,” a fixed space that will always exist as it was when last the migrant was there. Despite political upheavals, despite economic regression or technological progress, the now capitalized “Back Home” becomes sentimentally static. Like nostalgia, “Back Home” becomes a dangerous preoccupation of the mind. As Stuart Hall (1995) suggests, the home-space, the source of lasting culture, can only be nostalgiaized in its memorial because the actual place, the real source of the culture, has evolved (p. 14). Juxtaposing my own return to Jamaica against the fictionalized homes and “Back Homes” of contemporary Caribbean authors and characters, this article is a reflective journey meant to define a dub identity.

Having moved from Jamaica to the United States and back to Jamaica, I recognize my dub identity as being harmoniously but unequally American, black, Jamaican, and woman. And when I consider how my body or voice is perceived by others here in Jamaica, “Back Home” becomes a Caribbean remix of Du Bois’ (1903) double consciousness. I turn to the fictionalized nostalgia presented in the writing of Caribbean authors and employ the dub aesthetic to make sense of the connections. I begin this dub journey to “Back Home” in an airport scene written by Junot Diaz (2007), as this is where the contemporary Caribbean migrant’s identity begins its dub process of multiplicity. Dialect and language are opened up as spaces where voice and identity find a home. The adapted mixing technique provides a space to reflect on the oscillating feelings of pride and shame that are associated with belonging wholly to no one nation, and this I evidence using the work of Ramabai Espinet (2003). I move to Anthony Winkler’s (2006) writing and update the politics of his return to Jamaica in the 1970s with my own talk-over. And, finally, via Claudia Rankine (2014), I consider muting or mut(e)ation to further query how different aspects of my dub identity fade in and out based on time and place.

Among critiques of Caribbean masculinity and Hispanophone notions of machismo, Junot Diaz’s 2007 novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a mélange of voices and perspectives all wrestling with diaspora and the reality of transnational identity. As “ground zero” of the New World, Hispaniola and its Taino inhabitants received unanticipated migrants from Europe and Africa, and as a result of this, the Western hemisphere became a home for diasporic identities. For nearly 600 years, the Caribbean has been a space of circular migration: whether physically (as it was for the European explorers who claimed, captured, colonized, then left), spiritually (as was the case for the enslaved Africans who were denied the opportunity to return to Guinea except through systems of belief), or culturally (as it has been for all, like me, who have entered, left, and reentered the space again). Writing Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz (2007) inserts himself within this circular pattern of migration, with one foot planted in the Dominican Republic and the other in the United States.

The novel’s protagonist, Oscar “Wao” de Léon, is born to a Dominican immigrant mother in New Jersey, USA, where they live 10 months out of the year. During those 2 months that are summer vacation from school, Oscar and his sister Lola go to that never-changing place that we migrants of the circular kind call “Back Home.” “Every summer,” the narrator tells us, “Santo Domingo slaps the Diaspora engine into reverse, yanks back as many of its expelled children as it can; airports choke with the overdressed; necks and luggage carousels groan under the accumulated weight of that year’s cadenas and paquetes [chains and packages], and pilots fear for their planes—overburdened beyond belief—and for themselves.” According to the novel’s narrator, by July first, every inch of the Dominican capital “swarm[s] with quisqueyanos [the Taino name for Hispaniola and its people] from the world over. Like someone had sounded a general reverse evacuation order: Back home, everyone! Back home!” (p. 271). Oscar Wao opens up an unfamiliar reader’s limited understanding of a “Caribbean summer vacation.” For “Domo” children of the diaspora returning to their mother’s and father’s land, the Caribbean is not a tourist destination, it is a site of remittance distribution and cultural reorientation. Having evacuated Santo Domingo for economic opportunities in the States, the summer’s migrants bring their comparative wealth home to share. Suitcases are “overburdened” with gifts of basic necessities purchased at fair and affordable prices in the United States. In a Robin Hood–like response to the high import taxes, duty charges, and local embargoes, the Caribbean’s returnees transform into underwear, socks, and electronics smugglers. Coming “Back Home” has many challenges but clearing customs is only the first leg of the journey of return. Once free of the international airport space, cultural identity becomes the next concern.

In 2003, the Indo-Trinidadian-Canadian author Ramabai Espinet published The Swinging Bridge, a lyrical novel about a young woman who unearths her family’s buried history after journeying from her chosen home in Canada to the abandoned home of her Trinidadian childhood to the deliberately forgotten home of her Indian foremothers. Like Oscar and Lola in Diaz’s (2007) novel, when Mona Singh, the protagonist of The Swinging Bridge, returns to Trinidad after many years of being away, she expects to encounter a familiar space ripe with sensory recognition. She, in a sense, believes that nostalgia and her rooted umbilical cord will allow her to seamlessly reenter Trinidad as if she had never stepped off the island in the first place. Mona narrates, “I jump out of the car—I hold on to the vanity that I am exactly like them [those who have never left Trinidad], nothing has changed, even if Pierre Street has turned itself inside out in the middle of the night and now sits flat and dull, even if a little red and green café […] stands directly opposite to where the celamen tree once was” (p.120, my emphasis). Eagerly emerging from the car, Mona expects to insert herself into a memorialized Pierre Street, but she is disoriented by the presence of a new café that stands where a remembered tree “once was.” Still, though, Mona “hold[s] on” to the hope that she has not changed and that the Port-of-Spain that she once knew has not changed. Mona drifts along the road seeking a particular address that she cannot find. She asks for directions and is startled by the reply. Rather than directions, the person she asks to help her replies with questions: “Where you from? You from away?” marking the Trinidadian-born Mona as an outsider (p. 120). For Mona, this return trip is at times painful because the “Back Home” she expects to encounter is not the one she finds; the self she is confronted with is not the Trinidadian girl she was when she left. She is initially overwhelmed and believes that because the land has changed she will not be able to locate her identity.

Mona arrives in Trinidad in search of her father’s land but recollects the silenced story of her maternal grandmother’s arrival from India. Mona is ultimately able to recover this buried matrilineal history and reconnect with the land that was once hers. Most importantly, however, she discovers that it will always be hers, no matter the additional lands she may inhabit or identify with. Carrying her grandmother’s story, her mother’s story, and her own story, Mona walks around her family’s land and she “imagines that something of [her], and of all [her family] lives here, lies buried in it” then she “lay face down on the earth, [her] first earth, breathing it,” in a gesture meant to emphasize her reconnection and reclamation of Trinidad (p. 270). The Swinging Bridge rings with the dub techniques of mixing and mut(e)ation as experiences of India, Trinidad, and Canada are woven together over time. Mona’s dub identity, what she calls a “Caroni dub” are realized, as some parts that were once silenced are amplified in the present, and some parts that were once amplified are muted in the present. The novel closes when having gained her grandmother’s story and having found her father’s land, Mona returns to Montreal, Canada. In a moment of reflection, she thinks to herself:

Like any other migrant […] I bring my own beat to the land around me. The beat I sensed early, but where it started exactly and when I cannot now say. It must have been one day when I was very young, living in that small island at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea, that I first heard that beat, never to lose it. It was made of itself, a sound not yet in its present form because even as I spoke the beat was just coming into existence. Any new beat is like that: parts of it at war with itself until the separate parts recognize the point of fusion and merge seamlessly. […] A dub rhythm, the Caroni Dub. (p. 305)

In this section, the lyricism of Espinet’s writing takes over. As narrator, Mona employs the word “dub” to negotiate her understanding of her diasporic reality—her dub identity—as a Caribbean woman living in Canada with both Trinidadian and Indian origins. Just as each of my multiple migrations has done, each layer of Mona’s acculturation functions aesthetically as dub “talk over” to inform the perspective that is brought to the new space.

In a semi-autobiographical novel set in 1975 at the height of Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley’s democratic socialism, which was Jamaica’s bold attempt at rectifying colonialism’s legacy of class inequality and unequal distribution of access, white Jamaican author Anthony Winkler writes an awkward exchange between two diaspora Jamaicans. Going Home to Teach (2006) vividly captures the 1970s disgust that middle-class Jamaicans of varying shades of brown had for their increasingly socialist homeland. Winkler had left Jamaica for educational opportunities, but was returning to Jamaica from the United States to teach English. During a visit to Miami, Florida, Winkler’s compatriot, a dark brown Jamaican man, warns him that going “Back Home” will not be what it once was. Winkler (2006) sets the bleak scene of an island nation gripped by violence and fear:

They came bearing grim news. Things were not the same in Jamaica as they used to be; things were bad, very bad. There was crime in the streets, senseless violence against white people; rape was commonplace; one dared not venture out after dark. You couldn’t find a dog bad enough to protect you from the burglars, thieves, murderers. You slept with a gun under your pillow; you drive with your windows and doors locked; you did not pause at stop signs. The island was haemorrhaging its middle class. (p. 33)

Middle-class Jamaicans feared that they would lose everything they possessed, including their lives, under Manley’s socialist plan for the country. To the brown (mixed race) and white middle class, freedom from poverty signaled death to the wealthy. Unwilling to sacrifice life or property to the state or gunmen, thousands of middle-class professional Jamaicans fled the country during the 1970s and the impact that this exile left on the local business sector can still be felt today. Dub music gained traction during this decade. Music producers applied a dub process to the socio-political music of reggae singers like Burning Spear, Bob Marley, and Jacob Miller, and in doing so, they took the music into another soundscape that allowed listeners to imagine limitless possibilities. Dub music, therefore, had the power to motivate listeners to consider new breadth and new depth for the new nation and its people, despite the loss of jobs and the bloodshed in the streets.

It is not by the accident of birth that dub music begins at the end of British colonial rule and at the height of new-nation optimism. The palpable hope for a strong future by a Jamaican people who recognized a strong cultural past is what one hears on the dub record. Today, having returned to Jamaica at a critical social and political time, I recognize a usefulness in adapting this aesthetic once again. Like Anthony Winkler, I returned to Jamaica flying against the migration current. Just as Winkler’s novel portrays, I too came back to teach, and I, like him, received many a concerned warning about Jamaica’s violence. Like Mona Singh, I returned with hopes of taking-up where I left off, with hopes of reclaiming lost parts of myself, with hopes of encountering an identity affirming sign that would confirm my own perception of myself as a born-Jamaican, rather than a diaspora Jamaican or, worse, the label connoting the greatest distance from home: a foreigner. Like Oscar Wao, I had overweight suitcases as I boarded that familiar flight of circular migration. But now that I have returned, I face the dub-like experience of the familiar–unfamiliar reality of having to navigate being simultaneously “Back Home,” at home, and not at home. In the United States, I was seen as a black woman, but I saw myself as a black Jamaican woman. In 2016, having not touched ground in Jamaica for 5 years, having not lived permanently in Jamaica since 1988, having spent only summer school vacations in Jamaica during the 1990s, I returned with my own family to teach literature and give back to my birth-land whatever I could.

In my diaspora home of the United States, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were competing for the office of the President. Police brutality against black bodies was seeking to once again become the “great American way” and in protest of this, the voice of the Black Lives Matter movement was screaming out in anguish. With America’s first black president Barack Obama scheduled to depart the White House in January of 2017, it seemed that both on a national and on a personal level, there was a drastic dwindling of hope and a deep need for change. As Diaz (2007) suggested in Oscar Wao, a metaphoric “reverse evacuation order” sounded in my mind and I longed to be “Back Home” in Jamaica, welcomed and sheltered from the reality that surrounded me in the United States.

The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus happened to be advertising three vacancies in their Department of Literatures in English. I applied for and accepted the fortuitous position of Caribbean Literature and Popular Culture Specialist during a year that seemed to be pushing me out of the United States and pulling me back to Jamaica. It had been a complicated year that demanded that I pay greater attention to my own mortality and my cultural and familial roots. I saw myself in Ramabai Espinet’s character, Mona Singh, and I hoped that by being “Back Home” I would be able to recover some silenced parts of my own family’s history. My paternal grandmother had passed away in 1999 and then my paternal grandfather, though in his mid-80s, died unexpectedly during the last days of 2015. With them, so went their stories of pre-independence Jamaica, of semi-circular migrant life in the States, of happy times, of hard times. Buried were my grandmother’s memories of growing up in a small town called Desire and back to dust went my grandfather’s recollections of his childhood in the village of Ramble. I mourned their physical absence and the stories that would never be told. With Espinet’s novel reverberating in my mind, I still remained hopeful that some long-memoried aunt or uncle in Jamaica would surface as both my time machine and archive and grant me access to a history otherwise unavailable to me. I had to return to Jamaica.

Politically, it seemed to be one of the worst in recent American history and I realized that I had to get out of the United States. The country was breaking, hate was soaring, and concerns were mounting that America was normalizing hostility toward its non-white, non-heteronormative, and non-male citizens. Xenophobic, anti-immigrant, and pro-white discourse was chipping away at the international community’s perception of the United States as the land of liberty or as the home of the free and the brave. I believed that “Back Home” would be different for me and for my family. In particular, I believed that I and my young daughters would be able to thrive as carefree black girls if we lived in a home where the majority of the population was African descendant and a woman was elected Prime Minister not once, but twice. Having been home for over a year now, I realize that the “Back Home” I had nostalgiaized for cultural grounding and sustenance in the diaspora was as much a fiction as Diaz (2007) and Espinet (2003) could have produced. Negotiating between the static Jamaica of my memory and the vivid reality of calling Jamaica home today has been disorienting at times and frustrating at others. And, curiously, this uncomfortable encounter with the unfamiliar–familiar has provided a space for me to reconcile how my more immediate memories of home in the United States have had the acculturating effect of framing my perspectives on race, class, gender, and even the political history of Jamaica.

I navigate Jamaica with an acute and aesthetically dub awareness of myself as being shaped by two nations and by two homes. For example, Jamaican voters democratically elected Portia Simpson-Miller, ON, MP, to the highest seat of Parliament in 2006 and again in 2012. Whether she delivered on her political promises or not is debatable, but what is undeniable is that voters in the United States have been rejecting women candidates for president since Victoria Woodhull in 1872. In its very brief history of independence, Jamaica has done what the United States politically has not. With this in mind, I admit that I naïvely expected a greater degree of respect for women as leaders. With Jamaica’s female athletes receiving gold medals on the world’s stage, I wishfully expected that women would be recognized and treated more equally as physically strong and capable. With Jamaican dancehall music and dancehall fashion influencing popular culture across the globe, I desperately expected to find an increased appreciation of Jamaica’s distinct language and style when I came home. But in each instance of expectation-turned-disappointment, home and “Back Home” collided awkwardly and sometimes left me feeling displaced. I could not locate any palpable, emotional memory as I walked like Mona Singh through the land of my birth; but entering government offices I frequently found angry frustration in Jamaica’s commitment to never forget its colonial heritage of inequity and oppression. Despite the progressive political and popular representations of Jamaican society and culture that were visible on the world market for me in the diaspora, as it related to color and gender, the centuries-old traditions of racism and patriarchy persisted.

I returned home to Jamaica on the 54th anniversary of Jamaica’s Independence, 6 August 2016. Less than an hour after my family and I arrived in the whirl of Norman Manley International Airport, I remember staring at our five passports and trying to make sense of the inky landing stamps that granted us entry. I remember that day and I can still hear the words that the immigration officer said to me with a cool smile, “Welcome home, daawta.” Like a dub, the words “welcome home, daawta” still reverberate in my mind. The officer received me with the gentle embrace of words reserved for the familiar, but, upon exiting the airport, the Jamaican “Back Home” memorial that I had sheltered and preserved in the safety of my memory’s walls began to crumble under the weight of reality. As familiar as the officer was and as familiar as Jamaica had always been, it was no longer. Like listening to a “B-Side” dub of an “A-Side” familiar reggae song pressed on vinyl, I was taking in Jamaica as an unfamiliar–familiar space. I was still a curious “daawta” of Jamaica, but I was not only a daughter. I had come home as a woman, a wife, and a mother.

Coming “Back Home” to live has challenged my understanding of self and forced me to question how I conceptualize my identity, my citizenship, and my perspective on the world. Coming home to Jamaica meant trading familiar racial discrimination for the disorientation of class and gender prejudice. Arriving in Jamaica meant that I had to negotiate memories of my girlhood with careful awareness of my present womanhood. That carefree black girl that I expected to be able to fully embrace had to be shrouded, and clothing that did not cover at least three quarters of my skin had to be closeted. I had to wear long-sleeved and high-necked shirts, knee-length skirts and shorts, closed-toe shoes, and light perfume and cosmetics to enter government buildings like the Passport, Immigration, and Citizenship Agency because anything else would be taken as a sign of disrespect. My access would be denied on the presumption that I was “indecent” and unworthy of service simply because of how I dressed myself. The politics of class inequity are printed boldly in signs above office entryways and woven into the very fabric of Jamaica—because in a majority working class country, not every Jamaican can afford to have both the “respectable” blazers, pantyhose, and woolen dress slacks of the Englishman as well as clothing that is appropriate and comfortable for life in a tropical climate.

Before coming home to Jamaica, I, as a black woman, thought that my life would matter more in Jamaica. Following the 2016 US presidential election, women and supporters of women’s rights began preparing to protest the misogyny and sexism that Donald Trump and his victory represented. In response to America’s political shift away from protecting women’s rights, Washington, DC and dozens of cities across the country and across the world became Women’s March sites on 21 January 2017. With 5 million people marching globally, it was the largest demonstration of its kind in history. During this same time, in Jamaica, the mortal fears that were causing elevated concern in the United States were a vivid reality. In Jamaica in January 2017, girls and women were being kidnapped, raped, and killed at an alarming rate. One of Jamaica’s national newspapers, The Gleaner, reported over the course of the 2016 calendar year, 134 women and girls were murdered (Duncan-Price, 2017). Jamaican women and supporters of Jamaica’s women and girls began planning a women’s march that would be the first of its kind. Two months later, on 11 March, Jamaica’s capital city saw a public demonstration in support of women’s rights. Led by LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) and human rights activist Latoya Nugent, the Tambourine Army—an organization of women against the shaming of victims of gender-based violence—was formed to give voice to the silenced and abused. I was simultaneously proud and afraid to be in Jamaica during this intense time of violence and voice.

Leaving one home meant coming home to a region with some of the highest rates of sexual abuse globally. In 2015, the United Nations reported that one in three women globally have experienced sexual or physical violence at least once in their lives. In the Caribbean region, the incidence of “intimate partner violence” occurring at least once is higher than in the United States and it is estimated that 14%–38% of women have experienced domestic abuse (United Nations, 2015). While I am no more vulnerable to rape here than in the States, in Jamaica, justice and legislation regarding sexual assault are ineffective deterrents at worst and severely hampered by bureaucracy at best. During one 2-week period of 2016, The Gleaner newspaper reported that 10 women were murdered (Wilson-Harris, 2016). It is, therefore, understandable that I find living as a woman in Jamaica has presented daily challenges, not only for me but for my daughters. I shelter them from harm, but even the most benign experience carries its own level of distress. Even the familiar school playground has become an unfamiliar feminist battleground where at 5 and 8 years they have confidently defended their inalienable rights to play football, to like both Supergirl and Spiderman, and to like the colors blue, red, and black more than pink.

Seemingly far away from the race-based hatefulness that Trump’s presidency was revealing in America, I realized how naïve my expectations of Jamaica were. On a routine trip to the supermarket where there is both a bag check at the entrance to discourage crime and a trio of plain-clothes anti-theft monitors trailing customers as they shop to guarantee that all produce is paid for, I saw a primary school-aged boy being berated by a security guard. With nothing more than a maternal gut feeling, I held the hands of my own young children and walked toward the boy and the security guard. Approaching them I felt the anger of 10,000 black American mothers whose sons were wrongfully accused and I felt the fear of a 100 black American mothers whose sons were wrongfully killed as a result of an officer not being able to manage his or her fear of black bodies in public. As the security guard maintained a tight grip on the boy’s thin arm, he harangued the child with words that reverberated with a cold history of color prejudice. “Yuh bwoy, mi know seh yuh bad. Mi see yuh come roun’ here before. A mi know dat yuh likkle black bwoy is bad. Now yuh will get di trebble yuh deserve.” Translated from Jamaican nation language as “You boy, I know that you are bad. I’ve seen you here before. And I know that you, you little black boy, you are bad. Now you’ll get the trouble you deserve,” the security guard’s words revealed his own personal and culturally sanctioned bias toward the boy’s dark brown skin. And as fellow shoppers either ignored the scene or prejudged the boy as guilty until proven guilty, it became clear that I had not escaped prejudice or discrimination in my move from white-on-black racism in my US home to the white/brown/black colorism found “Back Home” in Jamaica.

In these public moments, I had an intense awareness of myself not as a Jamaican of African descent, but of myself as a Jamaican dub, of sorts. I was not altered in the sound engineer’s or music producer’s studio, but my perception of self and others was remixed by virtue of having lived in post–Barack Obama America, post–Trayvon Martin America, and post–Michael Brown America. Having undergone the process of social, psychological, and cultural adoption—otherwise known as acculturation—during a time of great racial discrimination and vulnerability in the United States, I stepped toward this dark brown boy. My outward concern for the welfare of a child whose skin color was darker than mine and whose socio-economic standing was not equal to or better than mine marked me, in this instance, as American. I stepped forward and intervened on behalf of all the black American mothers who were at home or at work when their sons were harassed for having a skin color that signaled criminality and guilt in the public’s opinion. Aware of my American acculturation, I spoke with a confident voice and an accent that signaled a New York upbringing. But I also stepped forward for the mothers who have been conditioned to criminalize their own sons, and I intervened on behalf of those mothers who dare not speak out against prejudice because society has proven to them that their dark brown sons are born the color of guilt. With all of this reverberating history and dub identity, I held my daughters’ hands and approached the young boy and asked him whether he was hurt. He was sobbing. With tears streaming down his face, he stammered out a reply, as confidently as he could: “He. Keeps. Saying. I. Hit. Him. But. I. Didn’t. Do. Nothing. He. Just. Took. My. School. Bag. And. Won’t. Give. It. Back.” He did not raise his voice. He did not point. He was sure of himself, but he was even more sure that he had no voice and no power.

I then turned to the security guard, who had by now unhanded the boy and, speaking with a volume loud enough for others to hear, I asked him what right he had to hold the boy. The security guard looked baffled by my question and the passersby began to slow down. He explained that a week before, a boy that looked like and dressed like this boy in a khaki school uniform (which is the color uniform that the overwhelming majority of Jamaican school boys wear) had thrown a stone from the third floor of the mall and that stone struck the security guard as he walked through the atrium located on the ground floor. As I stood with my daughters between a confident but fearful boy and an empowered but threatened man, my home in Kingston, Jamaica, became the B-Side dub of Sanford, Florida, the city where the unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin, was shot and killed in 2012. The steady drum of color-based prejudice and the deep bass of masculine flexing was familiar, at first, but here on the B-Side, the rhythm was troubled by the realization that this incident of discrimination garnered no social concern in the microcosm of this mall. Frustratingly, criminalizing a little black boy is normal in Jamaica. Remembering this moment now, I realize that it was my return to Jamaica and my insertion into this particular scene that troubled the rhythm of prejudice and Jamaica’s own brand of machismo.

These moments play loudly in the recorded memory of my transition from an American home to a Jamaican home and, as I continue along in my circular migration, I recall another diaspora writer. The cover art for Claudia Rankine’s (2014) book Citizen: An American Lyric shows a 1993 photograph by David Hammons. The image is of the well-worn black hood of a sweatshirt, but it reads as a noose due to aggravated race relations surrounding Citizen’s publication date in America. On glossy white pages, Rankine writes with painful acuity about the microaggressions and macroaggressions that black skin provokes in white America. Double-consciously stepping outside of herself and writing in the second-person voice, she gives voice to how these passive and active aggressions feed black self-doubt: “You take in things you don’t want all the time,” writes Rankine. “The second you hear or see some ordinary moment, all its intended targets, all the meaning behind the retreating seconds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition” (Rankine, 2014: 55). With echoes of Ralph Ellison’s (1952) Invisible Man and W.E.B. Du Bois’ (1903) The Souls of Black Folk, Rankine brings readers into a familiar yet unfamiliar reality for black folk in America. But unlike her male predecessors, Rankine is alight with a feminine rage as she reacts and responds to the various sounds and sights one takes in as a black woman in 21st century America. Frequently using the interrogative yet reflective “you,” Rankine (2014) invites readers to empathize with the black woman:

A man knocked over her son in the subway. You feel your own body wince. He’s okay, but the son of a bitch kept walking. She says she grabbed the stranger’s arm and told him to apologize: I told him to look at the boy and apologize. Yes, and you want it to stop, you want the child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet, to be brushed off by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself. (p. 17)

Having lived in New York City where I witnessed firsthand the invisibility that Rankine captures, and living now in Kingston where I witness invisibility of a similar kind, I empathize with Claudia Rankine’s very real characters.

Being Jamaican, American, black, woman, and mother, I walk through Kingston with the multinational feminist ability to detect the troubling sound of an impossible future for Jamaica’s underprivileged and under-represented youth. When I knelt down to look an accused little boy in the eye, I like to believe that I flipped the un-mute button, so to speak. When I questioned what authority a mall security guard had to uphold color and class prejudice, I hope that I flipped the figurative un-mute button. Public dialogue regarding the legacy of colonial oppression has been muted for too long in Jamaica. Public outrage has been muted for too long in Jamaica, but there are signs of hope. As it has been with the Black Lives Matter Movement in the United States and the Tambourine Army in Jamaica, the record will show that hope has surfaced in the actions and sprung from the mouths of Jamaica’s largest oppressed population: women and girls.

My multinational feminist identity, my mixed/reverberated/talk-over/muted-and-mutated identity is a dub identity because it is ever being negotiated and renegotiated. This dub identity that is not mine alone is constructed by the accident of birth, deconstructed by the initial departure from one home and arrival in another, and reconstructed in the circular migrations that follow. Jamaica’s dub music is marked by a particular set of production techniques and effects. And as I consider it all—the Caribbean diaspora’s writers, who I was, who they are, who I am, and who they write—dub mixing, talk-over, mut(e)ation, and reverberation also describe identity. The diaspora engine reversed and my circular migration began mixing with Junot Diaz (2007) and his Dominican-American characters. I came home to teach and my talk-over inserted a black woman’s perspective on to Anthony Winkler’s (2006) record. As metaphoric sound engineer for my return to Jamaica, I am un-muting the instruments of race, class, color, and gender prejudice in Jamaica, just as Claudia Rankine (2014) amplifies the voice of microaggressions in the American context. Born into Jamaica and its culture, but living my adolescent and adult years in the United States, my understanding of self(ves) and nation(s) reverberates with Ramabai Espinet’s (2003) protagonist. Back home in Jamaica, “I bring my own beat to the land around me. The beat I sensed early, but where it started exactly”—maybe Kingston or maybe New York—“and when I cannot now say. It must have been one day when I was very young,” growing up on a big island in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, “that I first heard that beat, never to lose it. It was made of itself, a sound not yet in its present form because even as I spoke the beat was just coming into existence. Any new beat is like that: parts of it at war with itself”—Am I Jamaican, American, or both?—“until the separate parts recognize the point of fusion and merge seamlessly. […] A dub rhythm” (Espinet, 2003: 305). Perhaps it is a dub rhythm for Mona, but for me it is a dub identity. Born from the disruption of departure and the difficult negotiation of nostalgia that follows, dub identity is deconstructed and reconstructed through the unique process of circular migration. From home to “Back Home” to home again, I have produced my very own dub identity.