cohort. 2023-24

project. Balanced Livity: A Commentary

location. Jamaica, Africa

medium. visual arts

The Rastafari movement has become one of the most recognizable Black social movements in the world, but it is often one of the most misunderstood. Emerging from the ideas and organizing strategies of Black people living under British colonial rule in 1930s Jamaica, Rastafari is a Pan-African socio-spiritual movement, a lived philosophy, spirituality, and way of life committed to repatriation to Africa, freedom for all oppressed people, reparations, and planetary sustainability.

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While Rastafari women’s activism, organizing, and intellectual contributions are excluded from much of the literature in Rastafari Studies and Africana Religious Studies, Balanced Livity centers their intersectional Pan-African socio-spiritual politics. Listening to the ways sistren create repertoires of healing and divine embodiment, Balanced Livity explores Rastafari women’s repatriation narratives and their intellectual activism and organizing in Africa. Historically, Rastafari women have been critical to the internationalization of the Rastafari movement, establishing Rastafari women’s organizations, and helping to establish the first Emancipation Day in Africa. Balanced Livity foregrounds sistren’s critical engagement with African and African Diasporan relations and the challenges and triumphs of repatriation. 

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In Rastafari the term “balance” normally refers to the balance between masculine and feminine energies. The Rastafari term “livity” is the lived philosophy of the movement. By putting ‘balance’ next to ‘livity’ I am emphasizing the need for Rastafari women to be treated as partners in the formation and sustenance of the movement. Rastafari is a patriarchal movement, but this reality did not foreclose the agency, reflection, activism and organizing capacities of sistren. As witnessed, when Mama Ijahnya Christian implores brethren to recognize not only Empress Menen Asfaw as divine alongside Emperor Haile Selassie, but also to treat the mothers, aunties, sisters, and daughters in their lives with the same reverence and respect. 

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While the film meditates in part on the gendered realities of the movement, it also reflects on the repatriation process of Rastafari women, especially through the testimonies of Empress Imara Solwasi, Dr. Desta Meghoo and Empress Yaa Kwabea. These women discuss the important relearning processes that can only come through living and working on the continent and the challenges and opportunities that a perpetual process of repatriations presents. Much of the scholarship on repatriation thinks through the itinerant journeys of moving from one socio-geopolitical space to the other, but as Dr. Tafari-Ama’s reasoning reveals, a nuanced approach to thinking about repatriation is necessary for a holistic understanding of the physical and metaphysical realities of repatriating. While Rastafari itself provides a framework for embodying Pan-African politics, repatriation reveals the ways Rastafari must continue to disarticulate from prevailing Western frameworks of living and reorient to continental lifeways. In essence, Balanced Livity offers Rastafari women’s repatriation narratives as a form of sacred embodiment that travels across the Black Atlantic in a mutually constituting African and African Diasporan discourse. While this reasoning was filmed in 2014 and 2017 in Ghana, Jamaica, and Ethiopia, the critical lens sistren provide continues to be relevant for Rastafari and others interested in women’s repatriation and African and African Diasporan relations.