You can chant down Babylon or join in the fiery debauchery called La Merce on Via Laietana. ©2015 Derek Henry Flood
New York- A quick street story…
Sometimes late at night, I like to talk to people about where they’re from. If I were an economist, statistician, or think tank wonk I suppose I’d refer to them as ‘economic migrants.’ But in an increasingly borderless world they are simply people, people from other places. About a month ago, a rasta from Ghana hit me and my friend up for something at about 4am. I forget whether it was cash, smokes, or whatever. I ended up giving him a piece of pizza I’d just bought that wasn’t as meatless as my eyes had mistakenly led me to believe. Then as I often tend to do, I began what was essentially an interview about how and why he came to Barcelona.
He had gone from Ghana through southern Burkina Faso, then southern Mali and into Mauritania where he’d gotten stuck in the Atlantic port of Nouadhibou on the border of Western Sahara for a about a year when Moroccan security forces who control the disputed territories coastal border caught him trying to enter. Finally he got into Western Sahara where he reached Laayoune and organized the trip to Gran Canaria, EU territory off the coast. After lots of time in limbo in the Sahel and Sahara regions, he finally reached what her termed “Babylon,” a derisive term for the collective West in rastafarian ideology. Babylon embodies godless decadence and innate corruption. It is the opposite of what a utopian Zion embodies.
From Gran Canaria he received what he termed his “Babylon papers” which allowed him to board a flight to Madrid where he then lived in a Ghanian expat scene for nine years before heading for the seaside hustle that is my beloved city of Barcelona. He told me in Barcelona he wandered around the Gothic quarter late at night working with (ie hustling) tourists.
The conversation then took what for me was a bit of strange turn in the rasta claiming the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie who is hailed as a veritable god-king in what is a staple meme in rastafarian music was in fact a white man. I’d never heard this particular line before but digging around a little, I think he was referring to a somewhat infamous quote where the doomed Emperor told a noted Nigerian nationalist that Ethiopians (meaning Amharas perhaps) were in fact a Hamito-Semitic people akin to the inhabitants of ancient Egypt. Hamito-Semitic certainly isn’t a ‘white’ ethno-linguistic identity but the rasta may have meant that anything not explicitly African is therefore white by default. Where the rasta and I parted ways was when I stated that the twin poles of rastafarian culture were Jamaica/the Afro-Caribbean and Ethiopia and he said that his homeland was of much more importance to it than the previous two place names. I digressed. It was 4am after all.