Ganja

GANJA and other social drugs

In the bud of sensi, a spliff, a chalice of the best lambs’ bread colly, ganja has been an emblem of a cultural war at the heart of Caribbean societies. Rastafarian sacrament, serio-comic symbol of bohemian dissidence or, before cocaine and crack became the preferred commodity of trade, a substance of criminal exchange and state repression: Caribbean writing has explored each of these conflicting images of cannabis sativa.

Brought to the region by Indian indentured labourers as bhang (eaten or drunk) or ganja (smoked), cannabis was the social relaxant of choice for Indian labourers before they became enmeshed in the cycle of growing sugar and consuming rum, with much more harmful consequences. (It is worth noting, though, that Olive Senior’s entry in her Encyclopaedia of Jamaican Heritage suggests that cannabis might also have reached the Caribbean through Africans from the Congo, since cannabis is also known as Congo tobacco.)

The evidence is that for much of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth century, the use of ganja amongst the Indians was as much medicinal as recreational, though missionaries such as the Presbyterians John and Sarah Morton, with a strong emphasis on the need for temperance amongst converts to Christianity in Trinidad, whilst they admitted that cannabis was much less harmful than alcohol, were nevertheless sure that it was a distraction from the severe requirements of Presbyterian faith. The Mortons write that ganja was more “commonly used by Hindoos of caste than either rum or opium. It is said to carry a man above his sorrows, to transport him into a paradise where sweetest strains of music and warblings of birds ravish his ears, where scenes of splendour and objects of beauty meet his enraptured gaze, and his soul is filled with indescribable ecstasy. The reaction from ganja does not seem so bad as that from alcohol or opium, yet if followed up its effects are very injurious” – not least, one suspects, because users would less susceptible to the Christian message. Elsewhere Morton estimates that rumshops contribute “ten-fold more to the degradation of our rural population than the use of ganja does.” Eron Ackerman’s, “Altered States: Globalization, Governmentality, and Ganja in the British Caribbean, 1880-1913", which can be found on-line (though the article badly misrepresents the Mortons’ view), claims that plantation managers complained that ganja use led to idleness. It is possible, too, that the smoking of opium passed from indentured Chinese labourers to the Indians. Certainly, one of the first fictional references to drug use comes in Edward Jenkins’ novel Lutchmee and Dilloo (1877). 

One of the most balanced 19th century accounts of the use of ganja (or ganje as he spells it) is found in Robert Grieve’s Asylum Journal (1881), written when Grieve was Medical Superintendent of the Public Lunatic Asylum in British Guiana. Grieve is in no doubt about the prevalence of ganja use, writing that many Indians “indulge in it to an extent only limited by their power of purchase”. Grieve is also in no doubt that some of the patients he treats (he was evidently a pioneer of humane treatment and genuinely scientific in his methodology) are sufferers from what he terms “cannibism”, distinguishing between the temporary effects of what he calls “over-indulgence” and progressive stages of over-use to the point until a patient is in a state of “[he] passes a purely organic existence”, which he admits is not an unhappy one. Clearly Grieve only saw inmates (and he notes that his observations are based on “an uneducated and unrefined class of Hindoos”) and not the use of ganja in the wider Indian community, though he claims that Indian men tended to use ganja as a form of Dutch courage when they had to nerve themselves up to some form of violence. Grieve says nothing about the use of ganja in group settings or as an aid to meditation (as it was used by sadhus in India), but that does not mean that such uses did not take place, and though they reference no sources, the smoking of ganja by Indians at such group events as musical gatherings in Jamaica is referred to in Chevannes’ and Chamberlin’s essay discussed below. What Grieve is entirely clear about is that the use of ganja both in the short term and the long term is incalculably less dangerous than the effects of alcohol. He gently regrets the effects of cannabis on the brain, but nothing in his account suggests that he wanted to see it banned. It is interesting that there is no evidence that ganja use passed from Indians to the African Guyanese community; it had indeed ceased to be mind-altering substance of choice amongst Indians by the early 20th century. Ganja has a history of 20th and 21st century use in Guyana, but probably of a mainly “bohemian” kind amongst musicians and the like. Pressure for legalisation began in the 1970s with the spread of Rastafarianism to Guyana.

Jamaica criminalised ganja in 1913 and thereafter the alarms over recreational use in North America pushed all colonial governments in the West Indies into pursuing users in ever more draconian ways. This may well have had something to do with the association between ganja and the growth of Rastafarianism in the 1930s, though in those earlier years there is little evidence that ganja had become the sacred herb at the heart of Rastafarian identity and the group’s head-on war with the Jamaican state, as it had become by the 1960s and 70s. However, as Barry Chevannes has documented in Rastafari: Roots and Ideology (1994), whatever the type of use, for all the repression, the draconian terms of imprisonment, successive Jamaican governments have been singularly unsuccessful in reducing ganja use, a fact that by the turn of the 21st century the Jamaican state finally recognised.

Whilst the use of ganja in Jamaica was far wider than the ritual, sacralised use within Rastafarianism, it has been that connection that drew international attention and, in the end, made it difficult to justify state repression. Joseph Owens’ Dread: The Rastafarians of Jamaica (1976) is still valuable as a source, not only because Owens allowed Rastafarians to speak for themselves, but because his interviews in 1971-2 were held at a point before ganja use had spread beyond the true faithful to those for whom it was just a matter of commerce and style – the kind of “false rasta” that Jacob Miller lambasted in his 1976 song, “Too Much Imitator”. Owen’s informants also attested to the fact that use of ganja was by no means obligatory, that “You have a whole heap of Rasta who don’t smoke”.

Owens logs the range of terms used to describe the weed such as Kali, wisdom weed, healing of the nations, I-shence, I-ley, and the terms for smoking such as lick the chalice, sip or take a draw. He records palliative use for taking the edge off hunger and feelings of oppression; medicinal, curative use, which users held to be responsible for their healthfulness; social use that brought brethren to one-heart; mind-enhancing use that aided the concentration of craftsmen in their work; symbolic use that defined the user as a black person who had seen through the corruptions of Babylon, but above all sacred use that was a means towards union with God and a true understanding (reasoning) of man’s place in the universe. Justification for use was found in the Bible, since God had “given you every herb bearing seed…; to you it shall be for meat” (Genesis 1: 29), and in Revelations the reference to the “leaves of the tree … for the healing of the nations” was widely quoted.

In this context, ganja use was also overwhelmingly masculine. Indeed, some male Rastafarians believed that women’s brains were not strong enough to take the smoking of ganja, and that women should stay with herbal decoctions for medicinal purposes. Clearly, women ignored this advice, particularly those who became known as “roots daughters”, respected because they were able to smoke and reason as well as men! The gendered us of ganja is addressed in an interesting article by Pete Brady, “Ganja Mothers, Ganja Babies", which draws largely on the research of a respected American academic Dr Melanie Dreher (Dean of the University of Iowa’s College of Nursing) whose work on pre-natal rural women who were regular users of ganja and its effects on their new-born babies came up with results that demolished the established wisdom that use was harmful, and in some respects showed the reverse.

In the “normalising” and popularising of ganja use, reggae has had a powerful role. The many reggae songs that celebrate the hustling herbsman attest to the centrality of ganja in Jamaican popular culture. Keith Hudson’s production Keith Hudson and Friends, Studio Kinda Cloudy says it all. Dave Katz has an excellent short essay called “Marijuana in My Brain” drawing attention to such early tracks as Tommy McCook’s “Good Collie Bud”, through to internationally known hits such as King Stitt’s “Herbsman’s Hustle”, Bob Marley’s “Kaya”, Peter Tosh’s “Legalize It”, U Roy’s “Chalice in the Palace” and Black Uhuru’s “Sensimilla”. There are hundreds more. My favourite track is Sylford Walker’s “Lamb’s Bread” on a cd of that name, but the best lyric has to be Barrington Levy’s witty “Under Mi Sensi”:

After mi stand up 'round volcano sound
and a bun mi ganja pipe,
Babylon come and tell mi dat nuh right,
Mi sey mi bun it and pass it on the right,
Mi sey dem come in and dem look pan Danny Dread,
Dem sey: “Ey Natty Dreadlocks a wey yu come from?
Yu muss have two stick a sensi unda yu tam.”
Mi sey: “No officer, yu muss be mad,
Me only smoke cigarette and strictly shag.”

In recent years in Jamaica, the possession of cannabis as opposed to dealing has been treated relatively leniently, though elsewhere, as in Guyana, both possession and dealing have been treated severely. However, almost all Caribbean governments (and the churches) have begun to discuss decriminalisation. The unnecessary criminalisation of youth, the fact that cannabis is by no means a pathway drug to cocaine, the acknowledgement of the Rastafarian argument that cannabis is a natural substance with a long history as a folk remedy have been advanced as reasons to decriminalise – and the possibility that growing cannabis for export might become a major dollar earner. When leading Caribbean stars such as Rihanna have their own cannabis brands, the possibilities are attractive.

There is an excellent article, “Ganja in Jamaica”, in Smoke: A Global History of Smoking (2004) by Barry Chevannes and J. Edward Chamberlin, that connects a wider cultural history to the first references to ganja in Caribbean poetry. The article locates ganja at “the centre of both redemption and resistance… defiance to the conventions of civil society”, but it also notes the entirely secular use of ganja by small farmers and urban labourers as a means of taking the edge off hard physical work. It references Anthony McNeill’s “Ode to Brother Joe”, from Reel from “The Life Movie” (1972) for whom “the room fills with power/ and beauty of blackness, a furnace of optimism”, but shows that McNeill also questions the escapism of herb when Brother Joe is arrested. For the brothers he becomes a religious martyr, “only his woman/ who appreciates his humanness more/ will deny herself the weed tonight/ to hire a lawyer/ and put up a true fight.” Kamau Brathwaite’s “Wings of a Dove” from Rights of Passage (1967), whose Brother Man “reached for his peace/ and the pipe of his ganja”, for whom the eyes of the mice in his room “hot pumice/ pieces, glowed into his room/ like ruby, like rhinestone/ and suddenly startled like/diamond” similarly contrasts the moment of spiritual upliftment with the reality of unchanging circumstance. A similar realism is integral to Kendel Hippolyte’s poem “Zoo Story – Ja ‘76” in Birthright (1997) in which “dis man a-look a swif’ way into Zion,// spliff use to take him dere/before—/ but wha?/ spliff turn a white bone in him hand/ rainbow faith bleach down,/ city dry him roots to straw, him still sight, but no lightning.”

What follows in this essay builds on Chevannes’ and Chamberlin’s pioneer survey by taking in fiction and more recent writing.

Probably the very first fictive description of smoking ganja comes in Roger Mais’s The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953). In that novel there is a massive and often desperate amount of cigarette smoking (because poverty makes the source of the next packet uncertain), but not a great deal of ganja smoking, except the scene when Ras offers the apprehensive Shag a spliff, with the promise that, “ You got troubles, nothin’ in the world God made for them like this.” Shag at first feels nothing, but “suddenly it seemed to him that Ras was a great way off and talking down to him from a high place, and he wanted to laugh./ He laughed too, happily. And Ras said, like God talking to him out of a cloud that was like the stone they were sitting on, ‘That’s better. You feelin’ good already.’” Such happiness and transcendence is very rare in the novel, and it disappears wholly from Mais’s next novel, Brother Man (1954). Here Mais focuses almost wholly on the illegality of cannabis, the war of the state on users and on cannabis psychosis. References begin when Corporal Jennings challenges the little boy, Joe, about whether he is working as a runner, one of the youths who “tek around de stuff an’ peddle it fo’ de biggar fellas”. The reason for this is revealed in the next episode when Jesmina is comforting Cordelia, in distress that her man, Jonas, has been “taken up” for peddling ganja, and is serving six years for the offence. The next scene has Jesmina entering Cordy’s house and finding a dirty, unkempt, half-naked man in her room, the irises around his eyes red, armed with a knife, demanding to know where Jonas keeps his stash – the image of the desperate addict very different from the image in The Hills Were Joyful Together. Another scene features a group of policeman chasing a man who is probably the same psychotic man, though the policemen do distinguish between Rastafarians and the man they are pursuing: “One of the bearded ones?” one asks. “Naw. Just scum off the street.” It may well be the same wild man, “a black man, wild, unkempt./ He was wearing a beard” who murders a young couple and rapes the girl. By contrast in Brother Man, the religious Rastafarian John Power is never shown smoking cannabis. Indeed his visions come unaided, as when he sits and watches the waves in the bay. Fasting is Bra’ Man’s way and it is difficult not to see that Mais’s view of ganja has become altogether more negative.

The other early fictive representation of ganja use comes in H.G. De Lisser’s The Cup and the Lip, published in 1957, but of a style that suggests it was written decades earlier. It offers a colonial, demonising image of ganja use. In this novel of estate life in the 1930s, the already morose and jealous Ramsingh becomes a “furious maniac” under the effects of smoking, the drug a “whip to his wrath”. “[M]addened by ganga [sic], the terrible drug whose effect is too often to drive even peaceful men to the committing of dreadful crimes”, Ramsingh hacks off the head of his former lover (in 19th century accounts of Indian wife-murder, ganja is quite frequently alleged as a stimulant to such outrages) and meets his comeuppance on the horns of the estate’s prize bull when he attacks the beast.

Orlando Patterson’s The Children of Sisyphus (1964), by contrast, offers a respectful and culturally and linguistically exact portrayal of the group of Rastafarians clustered around the tragic Brother Solomon, including their use of the sacred herb. It is, though, ultimately sceptical portrayal, seeing in the dream of a return to Africa and faith in God’s protecting hand, a system of beliefs that is escapist. Some of Patterson’s ambivalence is caught in the language of the episode quoted below, where his exactness in catching the Biblical quality of Rastafarian diction just shades into showing a rather pious tone of self-congratulation. The passage suggests that the holy herb is harmless but part of the escapist dream.

Then he went to the table on which the three candles stood and took from behind the little jar a long chillum pipe. He stuffed in the dried leaves and lit it. With a trancelike gaze he puffed the holy herb. After a few puffs he handed it to Cyrus.

‘Peace an’ love,’ he said gravely. ‘Peace an’ love, me Brother, puff ye the holy herb of God and obey the holy scriptures, for, as it is written, “the dove came in to him in the evening; and lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf plucked off”.’

‘Of a truth!’ Cyrus exclaimed with soft ecstasy, ‘of a truth, “the sorrows of hell compass me, in my distress I call upon the Lord, there went smoke up out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth devoured: and it was the holy herb of wisdom”.’

‘Peace an’ love, me Brother. We do not beg, we do not steal, we depend upon the grace of Rastafari for livelihood, we know that he will look after His own, and, most of all, that the holy weed which we smoke guards us from all sickness and gives us wisdom, love and understanding.’

In the confines of urban Kingston there is really no escape for Brother Solomon and his disciples. In N.D. Williams’ novella, “My Planet of Ras”, half of Prash and Ras (1997), the “herb of the nations” plays a central role in the efforts of the little group of Rastafarian brothers, Selassie, Ikael and Kilmanjaro (and the lost German tourist, Krystal, who is beguiled by their gentleness and one-heartedness into following them) to find a safe refuge from the encroaching threats of Babylon to their purity of spirit. There is, indeed, a passing reference to Patterson’s novel when Krystal comments on Selassie’s “Sisyphean, carefree way of cold shouldering the blind stone of the world.” As Selassie says, before they make their journey into the hills, “Draw away one last time… The herb come like a lifeline, holding you, so the spirit don’t cut away, send you spinning weightless back where you come from.” Herb is also “what will take you away from all this” – this being a squalid group of shacks and the stench of a rotting animal. Elsewhere, Krystal, the narrator, speaks of the “anywhereness of the herb”, a placelessness that she sometimes wants to challenge by making little forays of discovery, which disconcert the Rastafarian brethren’s determination to live only within their safe circle, their planet of Ras. Yet Krystal also delights in the inventiveness of the reasoning sessions of the brethren (which Williams creates in a persuasive and engaging way), knowing that the rivers of discourse flow under “bridges built by The Healing of the Nations.” If Patterson is very clear about the issue of escapism, Williams uses Krystal to ask questions about the necessity of engagement with the world, and after one such discussion with Selassie on this matter, she is doubtful “whether more and deeper inhalations of The Healing of The Nations could restore a sense of order to the turmoil inside our heads.” Even so, when the police come looking for Krystal, she has no hesitation about staying with the brethren.

In Geoffrey Philp’s work there is a marked shift in the treatment of ganja from the earliest collection of short stories, Uncle Obadiah and the Alien (1997), to the novel, Benjamin, My Son (2003) and his most recent stories, Who’s Your Daddy (2009), from which ganja references have disappeared. In Uncle Obadiah, the references are both fantastically comical and realistic. In the title story, Rastafarian Uncle Obadiah is disturbed to find an alien with an uncanny resemblance to the late unlamented British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, trapped in his spacecraft in the middle of his herb field. In “The Day Mrs Ho Sang got Arrested”, the story turns on the war of wits between the herb-smoking youths, the narrator and Bradford Ho Sang and the obsessive desire of Corporal Ramsey to catch them in the act. It is their caution that leads to the arrest of the pious Christian Mrs Ho Sang for the possession of a splendidly growing bush. Whilst the tone of the story is comic, it does touch on the fact that Corporal Ramsey’s son has had a breakdown from smoking too much weed. The final “ganja” story in this collection, “The River”, is altogether more serious, turning on the seeming impossibility of separating the spiritual uses of ganja from its illegality and enmeshment in the consequences of the criminal activities around its urban supply. Glen, the central character is recovering from the consequences of being shot in a deal gone wrong. As an idealistic young man who in his youth has lost the possibilities of a scholarship that could have taken him to university because he becomes a Rastafarian, he is determined never to become involved in that side of commerce. Extreme poverty, having a young child, begins to wear away at his reluctance to engage in a deal with his friend Duffus, though he is alarmed when Duffus tells him he is planning to engage in the “three bag trick”, passing off inferior weed for good bud. Though he doesn’t go with Duffus, who is killed by the men he is trying to double cross, Glen is only saved from his intention of revenging Duffus by his involvement with a troubled up-town young man, Jason/Jahson, who is trying to find himself by hanging out with the Rastas and smoking weed too heavily. It is clear that it is Jason’s heavy use that pushed him over the edge, making it necessary for Glen to rescue him from self harm.

But let’s give Vladmir Lucien’, “The Story of Toutouni” in Sounding Ground (2014) the last word:

Then one dry season, one of them stood up,
with locks of ideas tangled inside his head, broke his meditation
into three pieces, gave it to his disciples and said:
What about feeling we rights like roots firm in this soil?
What about di Equal Rights of tings dat be an’ continue to is?
What about Di Divine Right of Tings? And they held still
at the top of that hill, sitting so lightly on the ground,
scrolled their wisdom around the herb of truth,
and passed the burning bush around.