1977: Bob Marley And The Wailers, Exodus

By Amanda Choo Quan

In 1977, Bob Marley was in the London of IRA bombings, extraordinary inflation, and the release of an album called Never Mind the Bollocks. He held court in a Georgian four-story in Chelsea—the white columns and precise brickwork rendering it a spiritual cousin of his Kingston house, a two-story colonial bought from Chris Blackwell. 

Chris Blackwell was the founder of Bob’s record label—Island Records—and the son of the kind of white colonial elite who, well, fathered Marley himself. Perhaps choosing a big house was a way to reclaim a birthright. Certainly, after the success of Natty Dread (’74), and Rastaman Vibration (’76), the house became a symbol of an immutable truth. 

Bob’s star was rising, and internationally now. It could go nowhere else but up.

In the 70s, both homes were bustling hubs, the one in Kingston and the one in London. There were the downstairs floors, where people broke into jam sessions or came to ask for money for their child, where everyone from the band to girlfriends of the band to journalists to members of the Twelve Tribes of Israel came to visit and reason and smoke. There was the community. And there was an upstairs room where Bob could spare a little time to himself.

It didn't seem it, but in the London home, Bob was in exile. He had just survived a shooting in the Kingston home at a critical time in Jamaican politics—an election year smack in the middle of economic downturn. He’d planned to headline a concert he hoped would simmer things down. But the Government, the incumbent PNP, moved the date of the election closer to the concert, making it seem as though Bob had picked a side. What follows next is Jamaican lore and the chief concern of A Brief History of Seven Killings. 

Two nights before the concert, gunmen entered a full practice session and shot Bob’s manager, members of his entourage, Rita Marley, and Bob himself. No-one died.

Whether it was the JLP and its suspected CIA ties or the incumbent, socialist PNP seeking a martyr—we’ll probably never know. 

Bob was a man to receive people freely in his Kingston house, and perhaps he did so too, in London. But according to tape op Dick Cuthell, as reported by journalist, Vivien Goldman, when he was holed up in the Fallout Shelter, the name of the small, scrappy studio in the basement of Island Records’ offices, listening to what would become the new album with the bullet still lodged in his arm, he was doing so in a part of the studio near a big window, but hidden by a mixing desk—where you could survey everyone, but where they couldn’t see you. 

London was exile. Exodus was something else entirely.

—

During the 70s, many Jamaicans were on the move. Inevitably, Michael Manley’s socialist PNP—the same who tried to convince the public that the concert meant an endorsement from Bob—was re-elected, driving Jamaica’s upper classes to leave for the United States. On the cusp of this decade, in ’69, my family would leave Jamaica too, but for love. My grandfather, lithe, ambitious, and Trinidadian, had been a manager at Alcan Jamaica, a subsidiary of a U.S. company founded by the inventor of aluminium extraction from bauxite, of which Jamaica had lots. 

His office was near Old Harbour, a bustling, slightly rural town west of Kingston. Old Harbour was where his secretary was from—a sharp-tongued country girl who initially rebuffed his advances; she had a child and plenty suitors of her own, thank you very much. As things go, they would marry anyway. And that child, with her curly hair stretched into a small, neat bun on top of her head, her buckle shoes gleaming, her socks frilly and her sobbing present in every photo, was—is—my mother. 

My mother had been an only child. Her mother was her everything. Until, suddenly she wasn’t. My mother was left behind with a family she barely knew while her mother and new father honeymooned and moved to Trinidad to set up new lives for the family. Years later, insists my mother, they sent for her — though my grandmother disagrees. It’s a point of dispute in our family that tends to bubble over into something more sinister, should the feelings be hot enough that day.

That my mother was left in Jamaica, separated from her mother, is something she still has not forgotten. So whatever she encountered when she eventually arrived in Trinidad, fourteen and betrayed, exchanging one exile for a different kind, was simply a lesser disappointment.

—

The first side of what would become Time’s album of the century is bitter. 

It opens with the slinky “Natural Mystic,” with Junior Marvin’s swirling strums fading out of thin air as though conjured, not played, undercut by Aston “Family Man” Barrett’s grim, almost sardonic bass, and is cooled even further by Bob’s aloof lyrics with their elusive rhymes:

“This could be the first trumpet

Might as well be the last

Many more will have to suffer

Many more will have to die

Don’t tell me why…”

Elsewhere, on “The Heathen”, a track that seems as much hard rock as it is reggae, Bob and the I-Threes seem to push the heathen’s back “pon the wall” with the sheer might of their voices. 

This side of the album swaggers. It’s Bob responding directly to those responsible for the shooting, calling for  spiritual retribution in the afterlife and karmic retribution in the present. It’s not different, in feeling, from the way you can both swivel your hips and point your fingers in a gun salute to more modern dancehall. On Side 1 of Exodus, we are dancing partly to the myth-making of a martyr, partly to the acerbic words of a people’s man nearly killed by his people. 

But even still, when I listen to an album that is undeniably profound, I wonder how much the PR machine stepped in lyrically. How Bob’s exile still did not allow him an escape from his usefulness. 

After all, Rastaman Vibration, the band’s previous album, had yielded its first Billboard charting hit. Bob Marley and the Wailers were an investment. There was, guided by Island, the fickle attention of the white college crowd to capture—which, much to the chagrin of Black critics of the time like Linton Kwesi Johnson, meant that Bob was solidly sold as a “King of Rock.”

And so, while Bob and the Wailers were working on the music, the machine that would cement his international celebrity churned around and through him, a symbol and a conduit. 

In a way, it was no less than what he'd wanted, the doe-eyed teenaged dreamer who sang ska in the ‘60s in a jacket and tie, before his hair was locked, his faith was Rastafarian, and his Black critics scowled, calling him a sellout.

—

My grandmother has a lot to say about who my mom became in the crossing. 

That in Jamaica, she was demure, loving—never speaking in company unless spoken to. Manners and comportment were important to my grandmother, who had grown up poor in finances only. Her mother, Aunt Mac, had been a village aggregator, a stocky dynamo who did everything from look after other people’s children to campaign for the PNP, the party of the downtrodden. My grandmother's greatest possession is a jar of susumba, bitter black berries that strangely command whichever corner of whichever fridge they wind up in, a jar sent from Jamaica about as old as myself. 

That she was an astonishing woman is one of the few things my mother and my grandmother, in mutual adulthood, agree upon. The rift between them, the leaving behind, is a trembling wound that may not fully heal. My grandmother is convinced that it was Trinidad that did it, that changed my mother. Made her harder, louder, less controllable, less submissive to my grandfather, who had become controlling, stern, unfeeling. That made her marry whomever she chose, divorce whomever she chose, marry whomever she chose again. 

My mother would be kicked out as a teen. But in later years, whenever I visited my grandmother—and for the lengths of time that my mother and I lived there, after having nowhere else to go—I’d be witness to so many of their arguments. 

My mother would be cooling down from her cussing in another room, perhaps my grandfather’s study, where he spent most of his time in his later years.

“I wish I had a family who loved me,” she’d say to me and the books. But the books and I stayed silent, for fear of her anger, which was volatile and indiscriminate.

“Just know that I will never leave you,” she added, even though I’d left my grandmother in the next room staring at the wall, scanning decades of existence, the early years when she’d scraped by, just the two of them, to see where she and my mother had gone wrong.

My grandfather was long dead by then. Rows and rows of books he’d collected lined the study’s walls. If these books had something to say about the fighting, if they wanted to comment on behalf of their owner, we were none the wiser. 

—

It was only later that my mother would reveal these things to me. The way she always felt like the overlooked child, like the nuisance. The way she felt as soon as she arrived in Trinidad that she was on her own.

My grandmother denies that my mother had need to feel this way. Sometimes, she comes close to crying. She doesn’t know what else she could’ve done.

But when my mother tells me about which Trinidadian told her to go back to her country, about what happened in her house that forced her to leave, about who my grandmother became to his immigrant family, things I have had to reconstruct from memory — from my mother’s anger, from my grandmother’s defense of her husband — I am not sure, either. There is so much I am not saying about the man who was sweetly stern to me, encouraging me to become the writer he was in that same study by typing out my dreams on his MS-DOS. Who changed when my mother revealed who he really was, and what that household became. Some day, I might. 

I will never know the man my grandfather was to his immigrant family. By the time I knew him, his philandering — and more — was mostly in the past. By the time I knew him, he was sweet but stern, encouraging me to write on his MS-DOS. He was a writer too. I was following in his footsteps. I have had to guess at the rage and the violence. Reconstruct it from my mother’s memories, and my grandmother’s defence. There is much I am not saying here. Some day, I might.

There are so many ways a place shows itself to be a stranger to you. There are the pains of heartbreak and the cousins you cannot run to, the great-grandmother you cannot run to. I learned this later, when I moved away to Los Angeles to college, when I tried to explain to a boy I was seeing that it felt like I needed a safety raft in this strange country, and that it wasn't fair that it had to be him, that I didn’t want it to be him, but that I needed somebody. We parted ways shortly after.

My mother would tell me so often that she wished for a big family who was always there for her, whose big voices could fill the cautious, quiet spaces of the house my grandfather built. When I was younger I never understood. My mother sounded as Trinidadian as much as anybody. She moved to Trinidad when she was a teenager. What had lasted long enough for her to miss?

It never occurred to me that my mother’s accent was still Jamaican-inflected until we eventually visited her home country together, and people laughed with her easily, and looked at me suspiciously. 

—

Perhaps it’s just something about Caribbean people, about Jamaicans, that we are always in motion. My mother and I always had our highs and lows whenever she was driving. Whenever we argued, we couldn’t stop. And whenever we were happy, it felt like stopping the car was criminal. 

On bad days, it felt like she’d shut me down. As though no matter what problem I had at school could not compare to this massive rift that was ever-present in her life, the challenge of settling into a country she’d never asked to belong to. But I feel it too, I wanted to say. Something in her mistrust of people I’d absorbed. As a kid, I felt uncomfortable around people, preferring the company of a good book, but feeling no less anxious. I think I need help, I’d think, the jittery feeling never really going away. But there was my mother, next to me, smoothly parking, needing help from no-one.

On good days, it was good. She’d sing her favourites from Exodus as we glided down a highway, the buoyant, famous songs from the Album’s feel-good second side. She sang to “Jamming,” her voice accompanying Bob’s slid over the beat like a stone skipping across clear water. To “Three Little Birds,” heartily and lustily as though she was a founding member of the I-Three, the band’s backup singers. She pitched her voice low and sang to “Waiting in Vain,” trying unsuccessfully to imitate its slinkiness. I didn’t care for the music, back then. I thought that the songs were the stuff of tourist ads and American car commercials. I thought the simplicity of Bob’s lyrics boring, and I thought my mom embarrassing for sharing memories of Jamaica that might've been shared by any young girl who listened to him at the time. That and her voice was very, very bad. She didn’t care, though.

But those moments meant something more. In those moments, it was as though the grim, damning first half of the album never existed. We did not have to live a life of fear or of discomfort or of warnings or of regret. We were simply Jamaicans in Trinidad, and this was her song. Eventually, as I rediscovered Bob at a much older age, our songs.

—

Bob’s bassist, Aston “Family Man” Barrett, found the inspiration for “Exodus,” the song, in a thrift store bin in Chelsea. 

He picked up the soundtrack for Exodus the movie, a piece of Zionist propaganda made for American audiences starring Paul Newman. But the score is killer, winning its composer an academy award. It sounds a bit, to be honest, like the theme for the Avengers movies. 

But, as the story goes, Bob listened to it, disappeared, and emerged later, strumming the chords and singing the lyrics: “Exodus. Movement of Jah people.”

Exodus moves me even while I’m in the kitchen in whatever I was sleeping in, making sure my hands aren’t caught in the headphone cables as I stir the pasta I make for my mother and myself, as we, together with my stepfather, stay locked down during quarantine. After I cook, I might call my grandmother and tell her how much I love her. So might my mother, who has taken to calling her on her own, without my intervention. “Exodus,” the song, has a way of plodding, of increasing in intensity, of building you up, and of letting you fall back down again. It’s a song that feels like it has no definite climax, and a song that feels like it has no end.

London was just a pitstop. In line with Bob’s Rastafarian faith, the Exodus the song calls for is to Africa, to Ethiopia—to the promised land for Black people. But when I listen to the album, and read all of the interviews that informed this essay, I wonder. Bob had a way of constantly surprising people. The journalist, Vivien Goldman, who spent years in Jamaica and London interviewing Bob, describes this moment when she’d come to see him for her magazine, and she caught him in his bedroom upstairs, not quite asleep. 

There was a moment, she says, a pause, in which he was quickly deciding whether he would be awake for her, or whether he would be asleep for himself. And there are stories too, told by Bob’s publicist, where he would purposely confound non-Jamaican journalists by slipping into a patois that they couldn’t understand.

I’ve never fully felt like a Trinidadian, raised by a mother whose identity never seemed solid. But I don’t know if I want that, either. I’ve learned to love the contradiction of my existence, my multiple identities, to hold them like some precious thing. I’ve learned that a country is a place of my own making, and I feel that place whenever I listen to this album, to “Exodus” the song. I think of Bob pausing before waking, slipping into patois, lost between the world and his music, between London and Kingston, and nowhere anyone could find him.

Amanda Choo Quan is a Trinidadian-Jamaican writer and activist. She won the 2020 Johnson and Amoy Achong Caribbean Writers Prize—the region's most significant for emerging writers. Focusing on race, displacement and the Caribbean, her work's appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Caribbean Beat, Callaloo, Entropy, and WORDPEACE. Choo Quan has been awarded fellowships from Callaloo, the Truman Capote Foundation, Juniper, and the Cropper Foundation. In 2018, after graduating from an MFA in Creative Writing at CalArts, she became a REEF Artist-in-Residence. Working with Los Angeles’ literary community, she staged events prioritising writers of colour.

Currently, Amanda is based in her home country of Trinidad and Tobago, where she worked as head of communications of the UN Refugee Agency’s country office. Now, all she does is write. Or tries to.