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

To Be Someone, To BelongThe Black Womyns Experience in Rastafari mental institutionUpon seeing various Jamaican films and listening to various reggae artists, a never-ending question 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(prenominal) role in everyday smell. 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 bag from Jamaica and expressed the same kinds of concerns. She said that during the a few(prenominal) weeks she spent there she had seen perhaps 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 language in both the religious tenets and music lyrics was. As a western womyn, this was peculiar(a) to me. As you can notice, I dont even write the wordwomynwith the patchin it. I find it insulting that my identity should be skip up in that of the opposite sex. I am entrenched in the world of political correctness and gender deaf(p)ity. 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 enclose in a male or masculinist language. This implanted a few suspicions within me about the possibility of Rastafarianism being somewhat patriarchal, but, I was at first unwilling to accept the idea. I felt that this was impossible payable to the fact that Rastafarianism was such a socially conscious movement dealings with the horrors of oppression and exploitation of blacks.However, it seems as th ough the impossible is possible, or at least mostly possible, and traditional Rastafarianism enforces rules and cultural norms that keep womyn in the subordinate, domestic realm of everyday life. Yet, in the last thirty years or so, those rules and norms take over been slowly challenged by a new generation of Rastafarian womyn who no longer accept their inferior position and are demanding great equality. These womyn, some of whom turn to reggae to promote their own socially conscious ideas, represent the growing consciousness of womyn in Jamaica and other majority world countries who have experienced centuries of oppression.