Book of Memory

Book of Memory is the "Rastafari testimony" of Jamaican Rasta elder Prince Williams. The book is one of the few of its kind - a book-length work in the words of one Rastafarian about the culture - and is conveyed in patois, the Africanized English spoken by the majority of Jamaicans.

Book of Memory delves deep into the early days of Rasta culture in rural Jamaica, and with a compelling voice Prince reasons on the Bible and Selassie, politics and human rights, ital food and bush medicine. Michael Kuelker, the book's editor, supports the text with more than 100 footnotes, and in the third of the book's three parts, he adds ethnographic narratives of Rasta commemorations of the Coral Gardens Incident, an episode of repression and violence against Rastas in 1963. These annual commemorations feature reasonings on contemporary politics, dub poetry, nyahbinghi music and eyewitness testimony of survivors of the Incident, and the reports of them in Book of Memory help bring the book up to date on Rasta culture in Jamaica today.