Queen Ifrica: Peace in Deed in Kingston
by Michael Kuelker
Photos by Sista Irie
ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT © 2006 Sista Irie's CP Photos - All rights reserved.

The most accomplished artists create a world in their art, complex, self-consistent, wide and deep. When I hear music by Queen Ifrica, I think of the poet who said something about creating an imaginary garden with real toads in them. Except in this case, the songs of the imagination have real peace in them.

Queen Ifrica is one of the small vanguard of artists bridging roots reggae at its most socially aware to contemporary dancehall. Having established a small but consistently strong body of work, she is skilled in composing original lyrics over new riddims and also has some of the finest takes in the latter day revival of Bob Marley's "Time Will Tell," Burning Spear's "Marcus Garvey" and Peter Tosh's "Must Get a Beaten" riddims. Thus far she has used primarily the seven-inch single as the platform to bear her message including recent titles such as "Babylon Blunder," "Love Me Slowly" and "When Will It Cease." An album was released in Europe, Fiyah Muma, and she will tour there with Turbulence and Gyptian beginning in March 2007.

Some of Queen Ifrica's best work has already been accomplished and is still in motion. It is a story of peace activism in Kingston, Jamaica, and a model of community building that one can hope to see replicated elsewhere. Joining Tony Rebel, Luciano and others, she has been part of a remarkable effort to broker peace in some of the most violent areas of Kingston.

The project began in February 2005 with a conclave of rival dons and peace activists. Those initial meetings, said Queen Ifrica in an interview, were fractious but promising, and out of them have come a series of concerts ("Unity Sundays") whose proceeds go into an account that assists development projects across community lines. The efforts have produced a strong dip in though not complete cessation of gun violence in those communities.

In an interview with me on "Positive Vibrations" (Saturday nights on KDHX 88.1 FM in St. Louis, Missouri) in March 2006, Queen Ifrica described the genesis of the project:

There's a lady that works in the community for the past 20 years, Angela Stoltz. She approached Mr. Rebel about coming into the community and trying to bring about some reasoning ability among the youths because they wanted to cut down on the level of crime. Children were being killed on their way to school and things like that. We took all these leaders from the separate, rivaling communities to a place in Kingston where we wouldn't be disturbed. We were there for hours to try to get a sense of reasoning amongst the brethren.

I must tell you that it was quite an experience. Most of these youths have been rivaling for many years with each other, some for 15, some for more, and these youths live just yards away from each other.

She spoke from her home in Kingston. Living in the community where one is doing the activism tends to require holistic thinking, not to mention commitments of time and mental energies and talents beyond that of one-off benefit concerts. And only artists of credibility could hope to help negotiate peaceful alternatives to the status quo. Ifrica added that she and Tony Rebel have taken a number of phone calls requiring them to act as late night consiglieres for nonviolence.

An initiative such as this -- supplanting violence with a livable peace -- stands enormous and hydra-headed. Because it is not only that certain places in Jamaica are dangerous and wracked by gang war. For years Jamaica's per-capita murder rate has ranked among the highest in the world. It's the level of nihilism associated with the killings, and the brutality perpetrated upon the very old and the very young, which shocks. Any contest over resources becomes political, but this record of violence is also associated with Jamaica's two major political parties and has been since the 1970s, when gun violence became more and more a feature of urban life. Certain communities of Kingston are acknowledged without question to be garrisons with political affiliations.

Community based organizations like the one Queen Ifrica is a part of are maintaining efforts on the local level at the same time that nongovernmental organizations including Oxfam, Amnesty International and the International Action Network on Small Arms work in a new alliance for broad reforms, including a global Arms Trade Treaty. Currently, a comprehensive international mechanism on illegal arms does not exist, even though the internationality of the problem is not in question. The guns used by Jamaicans against Jamaicans come from abroad. The NGOs are campaigning for the international community to formalize statements on arms brokering and trafficking and to commit to marking and tracing guns and small arms. All politics being local, in the Caribbean specific economic, political and social factors are at work, the prevalence of gun violence being linked intimately with structures of poverty. When there's chronic underemployment, it does not help that tourism revenue can go up (as it did in 2005, one of the best years for Jamaica on record), but the benefits do not flow horizontally.

Queen Ifrica's music has a directness of connection and relevance to the pressure points in her community. Emphasis shifts from song to song but the whole of the work remains consistent in the commitment to peace consciousness. "As a Woman" allows the singer a chance to speak directly to the wives of powerful men, namely George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Ariel Sharon. In "Randy," she addresses the wives and girlfriends of gunmen, calling on them to recognize their role, assert their power and advocate for an increase of the peace in home and community. Discussing the latter song Ifrica said,

In my little country of Jamaica, we have a lot of situations in our garrison communities, ghetto communities, where our men are being engulfed in gun lives and criminality. They also have girlfriends and mothers and sisters who protect them in this kind of way of living. And at the end of the day they end up dying and the mothers are left alone with the kids, and ... there is no satisfaction, there is no harmony coming from it. So we are saying to these women: speak to your men, tell them to not go out tonight, not to kill anybody tonight.

"As a Woman" shows some of the artist's jiu jitsu-worthy verbal arts, specifically the ability to take a thinkpiece lyric -- "Exemplify yourselves as a resolute spirit to defend morality / Or else you're guilty by omission or commission that's reality" -- and to sing it mellifluously. In a reasoning that moved from peace activism to music back to action items on her agenda, Queen Ifrica said the song

is an opportunity to speak to these women that we would not normally have an opportunity to speak to on a one on one level, using the music as a medium to get the message out there and hoping that these great men who have wives and mothers and sisters. To say to these women: Say something to the head of your house to try to find other ways of dealing with whatever the problem is.

I believe there has to be a way first of all to reason it out. It is a relevant message that people are tapping into and saying, yes, these women can help to make a change to the way our leaders as men approach situations.

Since gun violence strains everything from the individual psyche to the treasury of a government, stemming its tide, she says in song and conversation, begins at home. "Randy" could have been written with the enormous obstacles of negotiating the peace in Kingston. She explained,

When people's minds are corrupted, it's very hard to get people to an understanding of saying, look, we can deal with this thing and it can work if we just put a certain amount of belief in it. We need to believe that this thing can work. It's very hard, you know, because at times we have to be up hours in the night on the phone trying to say to these brethren, what is the cause of it, what do we need to do in order not to have a shooting or a bombing? Because they do throw bottle bombs in houses here, you know.

It's as intense as that. We have to put our lives on the line to say look, we are willing to help you make this work. You give people a reason to believe that you are for them and you are not here just to get a gain. What I want to gain from helping you is for you to love yourself and respect yourself.

It is standard for music artists to speak about giving back to their communities and to take part in philanthropic exposures of popular music. Few go as far Queen Ifrica, Tony Rebel, Luciano, Angela Stoltz and the others in this project, for whom it would have been reasonable to reflect to certain scenes of certain films about the mob and ... in Queen Ifrica's case, to consider her children. But in the two extended interviews I have had with Queen Ifrica, it was clear both times how blended she viewed her role as a cultural artist and activist in a city fractured by violence and a music industry awash in slackness. She said, "None of what I am saying is going to be achieved overnight. We have to start somewhere, and I believe that the house is a very good place to start, owing to the fact that that's where you leave from and go into the world and where you come back."

Jamaican dancehall music where it is today, Queen Ifrica could be considered as coming from the margin of her own community with her themes of peace and liberation. But messages for the development of the community have always been part of Jamaican music, a place where the artist comes in a variety of guises, not only as the pop single Everyman or yearning lover but as prophet and trickster and journalist. It has been so from the birth of the Jamaican music industry in the early 1960s, is true today, and no amount of crappy, charmless, overhyped dancehall music and mind-clenchingly dull rhythm albums will ever erase that. At its most directly and candidly connected to audience, ska, rock steady, reggae and dancehall provide an expressive lexicon and detailed contoured map of the cultural geography. (That, and some truly addictive rhythms.) Queen Ifrica is working firmly in this tradition of small axe roots music.

With an assured voice and Rastafarian ethos, Queen Ifrica aims for a "world in peace not pieces." Any for-the-greater-good work keeps the millennium in sight but just out of reach, the engine to get there always as fragile as personal temperment. Privation is something one experiences bodily, situated in a place, isolated from other, more healthy places, and it is also a quality of mind. I think it's all of these that Bob Marley had in mind in his lyric, "A hungry man is an angry man."

A recent murder of one of the dons threatened to unravel the peace effort, said Queen Ifrica in December 2006, but the community seems to be holding steady.

"If you're developing a positive energy, no matter where your house is, you can bring that to the community and to your surroundings, and from there we can see if we can bring about a different kind of change instead of taking up a gun." 

Queen Ifrica has a page on the Web at http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=103727828 .

Michael Kuelker is the editor of Book of Memory: A Rastafari Testimony [CaribSound 2005], the spiritual autobiography composed by Jamaican Rasta elder Prince Elijah Williams. He also works as a volunteer country specialist on Jamaica for Amnesty International USA. See AIUSA's country report on Jamaica at www.amnestyusa.org/countries/jamaica/index.do.

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For Further Inquiry

www.ireggae.com/queenifrica.htm
Interview with Queen Ifrica [July 26, 2005]
30-minute audio file

www.un.org/events/smallarms2006/pdf/arms060626Jam-eng.pdf
"Statement by H.E. Raymond O. Wolfe, Ambassador of Jamaica to the United Nations" [June 26, 2006]
The Jamaican ambassador to the U.N. issued this five-page statement regarding the progress Jamaica has made in implementing a program to prevent, combat and eradicate the illicit trade in small arms.

www.globalaging.org/armedconflict/countryreports/general/guncontrol.htm
"The Necessity for International Control of Guns"
Diane Abbott [Jamaica Observer May 14, 2006]
The author is a member of the British Parliament (in fact, the first black woman elected to the House of Commons) writing on the international efforts to control arms and some of the Caribbean implications.

www.amnestyusa.org/escr/document.do?id=ENGAMR380022006
"Just a little sex: Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls in Jamaica"
Amnesty International [2006]
One of Amnesty International's ongoing major human rights campaigns is called Stop Violence Against Women. The new report on Jamaica is worth reading in its own right, but in this context of gun violence it notes the link between gun violence and human rights violations against Jamaican women. "It would appear that violence against women in Jamaica is not decreasing, but rather that it has taken a more sinister and criminal form, institutionalized in gang culture which uses women and children as part of [its] reprisal system."

www.toronto.upeace.org/diaspora/documents/jamaicahaitidiaspora.pdf
"Jamaica, Haiti, Diasporas and Peace-Building"
by Carlo Dade, Andrew Harrington, Stewart Prest, Per Unheim, David Carment
University of Peace Conference Report [October 2006]
For the reader wanting a longer, scholarly study, this 46-page report widens the focus and emphasizes the roles of the diasporan communities of Jamaica and Haiti in strengthening the two societies. Regarding Jamaica, the paper argues that its "domestic problems have not resulted in the wholesale outbreak of violence/conflict, but rather persistent low-level civil violence and an exceptionally high crime rate, related primarily to inter and intra gang violence."