A living, breathing, cultural companion brought to you by Karee.
Films, visual artists, and the work that shapes how we see.
Rockers (1978, dir. Theodoros Bafaloukos) — A Jamaican Robin Hood story set in the late ’70s Kingston music scene. The cast is half the reggae canon: Leroy “Horsemouth” Wallace, Burning Spear, Gregory Isaacs, Big Youth. It’s a heist film, a music film, and a document of a moment that doesn’t exist anymore. If you’ve never seen it, fix that.
Get Millie Black (HBO/Channel 4) — Jamaica on screen without the tourist gaze. A detective story, but the real subject is Kingston itself: class, queerness, disappearance, and who gets looked for.
Rashleigh Morris · @scribe.rm — My nephew. A visual artist building his own language. Follow the work.
Everald Brown (1917–2002) — Intuitive painter, sculptor, and mystic. His work is rooted in vision and spiritual practice, not art school. The National Gallery of Jamaica holds major pieces, but Brown’s real gallery was his yard in the hills of St. Ann.
Mazola Wa Mwashighadi (1987–2025) — Painter, muralist, devoted son of Kenya, last at home in Treasure Beach. His work with Found Objects carried the colors and spirit of the diaspora. We lost him too soon. Read: “In Loving Memory of Mazola Wa Mwashighadi”
Music and conversations worth your time.
Radiolab — “No Special Duty” — After the Uvalde massacre, the question was why police waited outside instead of protecting the children. This episode traces a 2005 Supreme Court case that answered a more fundamental question: what are police actually obligated to do? The answer will reframe everything you think you know about protection and accountability.
Chronixx — Chronology — Modern roots at full maturity. Chronixx came up fast but this album is the one where he slowed down and built something. “I Can” into “Selassie Children” is a perfect two-song run.
Bob Marley & The Wailers — Confrontation — The posthumous album that doesn’t get enough respect. “Buffalo Soldier” gets all the attention, but “Rastaman Live Up!” and “Jump Nyabinghi” hit harder. Released in 1983, assembled from session recordings. It sounds unfinished in places, which is part of why it sounds honest.
Thievery Corporation — Temple of I & I — Recorded in Port Antonio, Jamaica. Thievery Corporation took their DC electronic sound to the Blue Mountains and came back with something slower, heavier, and more rooted than anything else in their catalog. Reggae filtered through dub, trip-hop, and genuine reverence.
Burning Spear — Garvey’s Ghost — The dub version of Marcus Garvey, and arguably the better album. Every song stripped to its bones and rebuilt in echo and space. This is what Pan-African consciousness sounds like when the words fall away and only the feeling is left.
New Books Network — Winston James on Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik — Winston James, born in Jamaica and raised between the island and Britain, traces McKay’s political evolution from Clarendon to Harlem to London. Not an outsider’s reading but a Caribbean intellectual mapping another Caribbean intellectual’s radicalization. From Fabian socialism to Bolshevism, from the poetry of rebellion to the Fourth Congress of the Communist International. Essential listening for anyone interested in where Black radical thought and island identity intersect.
Books and documentaries that did real work on me.
Pearnel Charles — Detained: 283 Days in Jamaica’s Detention Camp (1977) — In 1976, under a state of emergency declared by the Manley government, JLP politician Pearnel Charles was picked up by armed forces and held at Up Park Camp for nine months. No communication, no books, no radio. This memoir, written the year after his release, is a firsthand account of political detention in a democratic Jamaica. It’s hard to find, which is part of the problem. The story it tells should not be obscure.
Audre Lorde — Your Silence Will Not Protect You — Lorde’s essays and speeches collected into a single volume that reads like a manual for speaking when it costs you something. She wrote about race, gender, cancer, and silence with a precision that makes most political writing look decorative. The title alone is an argument.
Rachel Moseley-Wood — Show Us as We Are: Place, Nation and Identity in Jamaican Film (2019) — The first scholarly book dedicated to Jamaican cinema. Moseley-Wood, a film studies lecturer at UWI Mona, does close readings of films most people dismiss as crime dramas and reveals what they’re actually saying about place, class, and who gets to define the island’s image. The title comes from a 1913 Gleaner editorial protesting a British film crew’s portrayal of Jamaica. Over a century later, the demand hasn’t changed.
Wole Soyinka — The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (1999) — The Nobel laureate’s lectures at Harvard’s Du Bois Institute, asking: after slavery, colonialism, and apartheid, what form of recompense could possibly suffice? Soyinka rejects easy forgiveness and confession as strategies for social healing, and turns to art as the vessel that can hold together memory and the hope of reconciliation. Dense, demanding, and essential reading for anyone engaging with reparations as more than a talking point. (Read: “Bad Bunny, Shaboozey, and the Debt That Crosses Every Border” on Negril Stories)
Che Guevara — Socialism and Man in Cuba (1965) — Guevara’s letter to the editor of a Uruguayan newspaper, written while he was still in government. It’s short, widely available, and more philosophical than people expect. The argument is that revolution requires a new kind of human consciousness, not just new economic structures. Agree or not, it’s the clearest articulation of the idea that political systems are only as good as the people inside them.
Arvilla Payne-Jackson & Mervyn C. Alleyne — Jamaican Folk Medicine: A Source of Healing — A scholarly treatment of bush medicine, obeah, and traditional healing practices in Jamaica, written with respect for the knowledge systems rather than treating them as folklore to be catalogued and shelved. If you’ve ever been handed a cup of cerasee tea and told to drink it without asking questions, this book explains the tradition behind the instruction.
The Upsetter: The Life and Music of Lee “Scratch” Perry (2008, dir. Ethan Higbee & Adam Bhala Lough) — The definitive Lee Perry documentary, narrated by Benicio Del Toro. The filmmakers made a deliberate choice: no white talking heads explaining the man or his music. Perry tells his own story, from the quarry where he first heard rhythm to the burning of Black Ark Studios. It’s revisionist and mythic and probably not entirely accurate, which is exactly what a Scratch Perry documentary should be.
Where to go and how to be there.
Calabash International Literary Festival — Treasure Beach, St. Elizabeth — Three days and nights of readings and live music beside the sea. Free, open to the public, and the closest thing the Caribbean has to a literary pilgrimage. I’ve been coming since 2006. Calabash is where you sit under an acacia tree and hear a Booker Prize winner read, then eat fish at Jack Sprat with the person sitting next to you who turns out to be a poet from Lagos. Treasure Beach itself is Jamaica’s last bohemian outpost. Come for the festival. Stay longer.
Whitney Plantation — Wallace, Louisiana — The only plantation museum in Louisiana that tells the story exclusively from the perspective of the enslaved. No wedding venue. No magnolia fantasy. The tour uses first-person narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project so you hear the voices of the people who were held here. It will rearrange something in you. An hour west of New Orleans on the River Road.
Port Royal — Kingston Harbour, Jamaica — Once called “the wickedest city on Earth,” swallowed by an earthquake in 1692 and never fully rebuilt. What remains is a quiet fishing village sitting on top of a submerged colonial capital. Most of the old city is underwater. The fort still stands. There’s no polished tourism infrastructure here, which is part of why it matters. You’re walking on history that hasn’t been curated for your comfort.
Benta Falls — Westmoreland, Jamaica — A waterfall in the Westmoreland hills that most tourists will never find. The drive in is rough and the path requires intention. But when you arrive, it’s a cascade into a natural pool surrounded by forest, with the kind of quiet that makes you understand why Rastafari elders chose these hills. Worth the journey if someone who knows the road takes you.
Liberty Hall: The Legacy of Marcus Garvey — 76 King Street, Kingston — The first meeting hall in Jamaica fully owned and operated by Black people, purchased by the Kingston division of Garvey’s UNIA in 1923. Now restored as a multimedia museum with a research library, educational programs, and the Garvey Great Hall overlooking downtown Kingston. The museum tells Garvey’s story through interactive exhibits, but the building itself is the story: a physical space where Black self-determination was not a theory but a daily practice. Named after the Liberty Hall in Dublin, because Garvey saw the UNIA struggle and the Irish independence movement as kin.
Pagee Beach — St. Mary, Jamaica — Not on the tourist map. A local beach on the north coast where the water is clear and the crowd is Jamaican. No resort fence, no cover charge. The kind of place where a fisherman’s son sells jelly coconut from a cooler and the vibe is set by whoever brought the boom box. This is what the north coast was before it got branded.
Open-Air Markets — Across the Parishes — Every major town has one. Coronation Market in Kingston, Falmouth Market in Trelawny, Charles Gordon Market in Montego Bay, in May Pen, famously in Linstead, in Savanna-la-Mar. Ground provisions piled on tables, higglers calling prices, the smell of scallion and thyme in the air. Go see and support the economic engines of rural Jamaica, operating the way markets have operated on the island for generations. Go early. Buy something. Talk to the woman selling the pumpum yam.
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Negril Stories 