In this article, I examine how identity is not being “rediscovered” in reggae music, but rather produced through a re-telling of history that blends trauma and witnessing. Albert Memmi underscores the importance of re-telling history in The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) when he rightly declares that the greatest consequence of colonialism was the exclusion of the colonized from both history and their community (151). Representations of Christopher Columbus, largely through first-person testimony, illustrate a metonym for how reggae music can be useful for the diffusion and endurance of a counter-discursive epistemology to undermine Western knowledge and culture as hegemonic. These musicians re-write themselves into history and forge a community by raising doubts over the problematic encounter between Columbus and indigenous peoples, an encounter often perceived as one of the fundamental moments for the development of modern American civilization. Such a project is not unique to Jamaica. According to Kenyan postcolonial theorist Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, “most national liberation movements start by rejecting the culture of the colonizer, by repudiating the religion of the oppressing nation and class and the entire education system of the colonizer” (27). Although not a liberation movement in and of itself, reggae and Rastafari have sought to revise history since for these musicians, the “truth” surrounding the encounter has been one-sided and misrepresented. Indeed, in Reggae Wisdom (2001), Anand Prahlad discusses how reggae musicians take on the role of teacher in order to “focus on specific areas of history and culture that have been distorted by the texts found in colonial school systems or in other forms of hegemonic propaganda” (33). Reggae musicians, in an act of counter-discursive difference, reduce Columbus, viewed as heroic in the Western world (the United States still celebrates Columbus Day as an official holiday), to a liar, thief, slaver, and pedophile. Central to the alternative epistemology in reggae is the revision of Western historical figures often credited with Western expansion to present him as a villain of the Antilles.

In “The Unwilling Orphan:  Trauma and the Decaying Bourgeoisie in Los soles truncos,” I argue that traumatized orphans participate in their own alienation because they eschew societal transformations that weaken the colonial class status that they covet.  That is, they further fragment society since they elect precisely not to belong. René Marqués’s Los soles truncos (1958) utilizes traumatized orphans of the decaying bourgeoisie to criticize what the author perceives to be an oppressive U.S. regime in Puerto Rico.  Herein I question Valérie Loichot’s notion that orphans create their own narratives because of their lack of genealogical roots.  Because of trauma, the orphan protagonists in Los soles truncos adhere to a master narrative by favoring an outdated colonial mindset.  Afraid to relinquish their privilege, the criollo protagonists cannot promote racial equality and economic betterment for Afro-Puerto Ricans which exposes the folly of “oneness” in Puerto Rico.  In that vein, Marqués’s orphans function as metaphorical bridges between cultural and personal trauma to engage the reader on an empathetic individual level that expands to a societal level in which solely the bourgeoisie is victimized despite their history as aggressors.  By making the trauma exclusive to one class and race, hatred spreads towards other sectors which results in disjointed sectors sharing an island, but in isolation of one another.