Posted January 8th. 2001

Disembarking at Norman Manley International Airport, Kingston in September 1967, I was a student with simple ambitions; first journey away from home; with no idea what kind of world I was stepping into. University students back home on vacation would tell of the island's smoky blue mountains and the poui flower; they played 45rpm records of rock steady music and demonstrated dance steps; they spoke of color prejudice and rude boys and they gave imitations of that languorous Jamaican speech.

Looking back I'm convinced my life might have taken a different shape had I touched down at that airport one year earlier. Or had I left for St Augustine, Trinidad; or Ithaca, NY: a student wanting only to leave home, get a university degree.

The music and the dance steps were there when I arrived, but the beat and the body movements had changed. And there were young women from other islands, beautiful and spirited, who would dance with you all night; and mountains you could stare at for hours. Students were privileged to make excursions to the North Coast, to dine in the city's fine restaurants; at Christmas we got invited to lovely homes in the hills. Ordinary people deferred to you. It was for me a safe place, a high ecstatic time.

After one year I discovered the campus was filled with prodigious talents. As if summoned by fate many brilliant minds had gathered here to work and study; years later some would make their own mark on the world. I met and befriended the poets McNeil and Scott, intense young men, still struggling then to hone their craft. Rex Nettleford's NDTC was in its infancy but its dance explorations swept me away. Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain would receive an astonishing production at the university's creative arts centre. I counted myself lucky to be there at that junction, criss-crossing the lawns, commingling with so many talented folk.

It wasn't long before I discovered the other campus on the island: Martin Carter's University of Hunger. We had heard about it: Trench Town and Tivoli Gardens; other dungles of desperate living. Poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite was speaking and writing about these places with missionary fervor as potent sites of resistance, survival and renewal. In 1968 Walter Rodney arrived and urged us to venture out, make connections. Never mind the risks, there were brothers and sisters out there with burning faith, redemptive truths.

I ventured out; I found these places: they held men, women and children in shacks, gullies and yards with towering mango trees; sugar cane and oranges, The Healing of the Nations; bearded men, drums and wailing horns, handsome portraits of His Imperial Majesty, Count Ossie; black green and gold threads of remembering and forwarding; leanbodied Israelites of uncrushable spirit. All there.

But theirs were rockstone-hard isolate lives, marking time, under constant assault and lockup: Carter's university men, "half sunken in the land". How could I make their world a part of my life?

The price paid for throwing a light on their plight and place was tumultuous. Suddenly one evening Rodney was banned: students took to the streets of Kingston in protest; some intellectuals called for the death of intellectualism, for socialism as the only way forward to economic upliftment. Havana was reaching out to the island asking for connection.

The music in the 70's took on a harder menacing edge. I still danced to Issacs, Cliff, Holt, Toots and Ellis. But now I listened to Bob Marley.

For me Marley is right up there with Miles and Mozart; so much music poured out of them! I play Duppy Conqueror and get goosebumps when touched by its heart-rippling truths: despots and duppies stand ready to despatch you to prisons of poverty, to dungeons of the spirit; with luck friends will greet you when they set you free again; your freedom is always conditional; beneath pounding pleasures and simple ambitions lie masts and riggings of the human spirit deep inside you must hold on to. And this too: ideologies and movements rise and fall; you must make your own way in this world (this last affirmed by V.S. Naipaul after his journey to a different island, commingling with different folk).

These days websites offer places for men and women to click and make fast connections. I was fortunate to have travelled to Jamaica in 1967. O, the connections, the sweet vibrations! Rodney: man of all downpressed peoples. Marley: locksman for all times. Jamaica: gateway to my world!

- Wyck Williams