Caribbean Beat — November/December 2018 (#154)

Her album covers were
studies in and of themselves.
They made you stop and
think, and you never forgot
them
In the film, she returns home for a family
reunion which includes her brother, a well-known
pastor in Los Angeles. We discover the source of
much of her angst — a childhood peppered with
licks and repression, exposure to a fundamentalist
religiosity by her grandmother’s partner that
she would later channel on stage, mimicking his
mannerisms and way of speaking — exorcising her
demons, as it were.
After the screening of Bloodlight and Bami in
Kingston last year, Jones took part in a questionand-answer
session with the literary and cultural scholar Carolyn Cooper,
founder of the Reggae Studies Unit at the University of the West Indies. It was
Cooper who proposed that Jones be conferred with an honorary doctorate at
this year’s graduation ceremony. It’s more than fitting that UWI should honour
Jones. Both born as British colonial subjects, they came of age in the early 60s
with the independence movement, entering a phase of radicalism in the 70s
that changed the way the people of these islands saw themselves, and gave
them a newfound sense of identity and confidence.
“The film is inspiring,” says Cooper, “because it shows her as this diva, the
Grace Jones persona, but also as an ordinary Jamaican girl, who had a sense
of style from she was young, who had to fight against the religious conservatism
of the family and just say, Hell no! I’m not going to be limited by people’s
definition of who I should be — and she just buss out!”
Born on 19 May, 1948, in Spanish Town, the first capital of Jamaica (and
also the birthplace of roots revival artiste Chronixx and sprinter Yohan
Blake), the seemingly ordinary girl who was brought up in a strict and
extremely religious household would channel all her repressed emotions and
traumatic experiences into performances and videos that pushed all kinds of
boundaries — of thought, beauty, expression, art, fashion, music, you name it,
Grace Jones challenged it all.
A succession of album
covers in the 1980s helped
establish the image of
Jones as a personality
defying boundaries
CBW/Alamy Stock Photo EyeBrowz/Alamy Stock Photo
CBW/Alamy Stock Photo
EyeBrowz/Alamy Stock Photo
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