Customer Reviews

John Crow Speaks: Earth Teachings of the Jamaican Elders

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Chet Alexander's book combines a sensuous attention to detail of the Jamaican natural flora, colour, and local language, with an impressive self-disciplined approach (in the personified form of the strong "Bredda" man) to the training and mysticism of finding oneself (in the story, a youth who he befriends)- the work of their encounters being to align in harmony with the surrounding nature and so become one with universal laws.
In particular, the letting go of wrong habits, including for a young man, his hero worship of the older, wiser man, is seen as a holy process of return to the soul's knowledge. Stones, plants, animals and humans are able to interact with respect for life, and in honour of a higher knowledge which guides, if allowed to. The local herbs which are used hark back to ancestral/indigenous abilities, and do not belong to the better known "rasta" variety.
The book should continue! Another volume, expanding on the Jamaican cultural moments of marketing, street and conversations, and giving more examples of the training. It would also lend itself nicely to a film, with self-discovery happening as a theme in the younger generation, not in rebellion, but in the return to personal strength experienced with one's identity with nature, rather than in power over it.