Augustown

Kei Miller

3 ideas

1. A Rasta boy's shorn dreadlocks, 1982

   In Augustown, a poor community in the hills above Kingston, a schoolteacher cuts off the dreadlocks of a small Rastafarian boy, Kaia, whose family holds that his hair must never be cut. His blind great-aunt, Ma Taffy, senses that this humiliation will set off violence in the community. While they wait, she tells him about Alexander Bedward, a real Revivalist preacher in August Town who drew thousands of followers and promised to ascend to heaven around 1920, and who was arrested and confined to an asylum by the colonial authorities.

2. Rising up and being pulled down

   The novel reads Black Jamaican history as repeated attempts to rise, in flight, faith, and self-assertion, each followed by an institution dragging the person back to earth. Seen this way, Bedward's failed ascension is not a delusion to mock. It stands for a pattern in which authorities treat any collective spiritual or political uplift among the poor as a danger to be contained, and history then remembers the person as a fool or a madman.

3. Respectability enforced through the colonized body

   Cutting Kaia's locks shows that colonial hierarchy survives after independence through ordinary institutions like schools. There, authority figures who come from the same society carry out 'civilizing' standards directly on the bodies of the poor. The harm lands on a child's appearance and identity. Because it is done in the name of discipline and order, the violence can be denied.

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