Kamala Harris’ Jamaica

Kamala’s real Caribbean Heritage via Jamaican Artworks

Copyright 2024 by Michael Auld (Yamaye Taíno)

Much will be written about her because of her many firsts. But what about a different angle to Vice President, Kamala Harris’ Jamaican heritage? 

This article is by a Jamaican expat-artist and a fellow Howard University alumni.

Vice President, Kamala Harris backed by flags of her three heritages.-  Artwork by Jamaican-American artist, Michael Auld.

 

Vice President Kamala Harris, is of paternal Jamaican descent, and will soon become America's first woman multiethnic president. Christened with a Euro-Jamaican surname, she is fittingly, also tri-racial, a descendant of proud Jamaican, Asiatic Indian, and European ancestry. 

She said that she fell in love with Bob Marley early, and knew the lyrics to many of his songs. She was hooked on Jamaican pride. As a Jamaican myself, Africans from many countries burst into Bob’s songs when they find out I’m a “Yardie”, an affectionate term for the island.

Although her birth family is rooted in ancient cultures, as a Jamaican artist with similar genes, I present here aspects of her Jamaican roots, via my researched Yamayeka and African inspired artworks. My genetic background is Scottish, West African, and Indigenous Asiatic Amerindian, a.k.a. the island's Yamaye Taíno ancestors.

What is Kamala’s Jamaica?

 The island is a multicultural society whose name, "Jamaica" is derived from Yamayeka, the indigenous Yamaye Taíno culture whose presence in this Northern Caribbean territory, was via an early colonization by my Amerindian ancestors around 2,124 years ago, around the birth of Jesus the Christ of Palestine. The Taíno were originally an Orinoco Basin's river community who, because of a population explosion, and directed in an ancient mythology by the Supreme Being, Yaya, because of an infraction by his son, Yaya-el to, upon the pain of death, leave the homeland and never return. Following the god’s advise, they left the South American continent to become seafarers, traveling island by island, north up the chain of Caribbean Islands, into Florida, settling in the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic & Haiti, and the western tip of Florida. Along the way to becoming empires, as was true of their Central and South American neighbors, they created cacigazos, or ruling cacike chiefdoms on each territory

They came from an Amerindian Continent familiar with many very ancient and technologically and agriculturally advanced pyramid and empire-building civilizations. For example, how do you turn a poisonous tuber like bitter yuca/cassava/manioc into a nourishing daily bread, or cross-pollinate a grass and invent life-giving majisi/maize/"corn". Via the invading Spanish and Portuguese, they introduced the world to over 60 items, including words like hurricane, sacred cojibi (a.k.a. “tobacco”), hammock, maize, sweet potatoes, aji (capsicum peppers), tapioca, key or cay, and much more words, technologies, and food items now commonly used by Eastern Hemisphere cultures. 

Jamaica's later 1665 arriving British Colonial clergy created our Coat of Arms which honors the Taíno. 

Jamaica’s Coat of Arms whose top was originally designed by a British Colonial cleric, William Sancroft who was then Archbishop of Canterbury. The "Out of Many, One People" epithet was added later for the island's Independence in 1962. It has a Yamaye Taíno couple, a Jamaican crocodile, a British herald’s crown with a St. Andrew cross and shield, with five endemic pineapples.

My proposed Hope Botanical Gardens monument about our Yamaye Taíno indigenous Amerindian heritage (if the Gardens can get the funding). The sculpted couple are standing on a map of the island, surrounded by endemic pineapple plants and a epithet of flowers. The  Taíno intermarried with the earlier Igneri people, who had migrated from the North (Florida) and the west from Central America (probably the Yucatan) during the Caribbean's Pristine Era.

Genetically, Vice President Kamala Harris, soon to become a US President, is half maternal Asiatic Indian with large percentages of paternal African and European admixtures, a fitting combination for the USA, her multiethnic country of birth. However, in the United States of America’s racist “*One Drop Rule” practice, her paternal Jamaican part African ancestry makes her 100% "Black" in America's eyes. So, what racial category does she belong? Via my artworks, here is an artistic breakdown of the Jamaican groups to which she is ethnically connected.

* That is , before the invention of DNA, in racist America,"One Drop" of strong Sub-Saharan "blood" makes a human being totally Black.

The Trilogy Protectors: As president, Kamala Harris will need my three Guardian Angels styled from Ethiopian angel images (implying Jamaican Ras Tafari's protection).

(L-R).Harriet Tubman (American Protecter holding her iconic gun); Ast or Isis (golden winged Mother of Femininity, holding her staff); and Marcus Garvey (Back-to-Africa proponent from Jamaica, holding a Sword of Justice) -- Welded bicycle rims, inlaid & painted Plexiglass etching, and photographs. 

The Peculiarity of "Race" in the Americas 

Above: An early Mexican painting of Racial divisions in Mexico 

Since VP Kamala Harris' race has become an issue to some Americans, here is one country of the Americas' take on race-mixing. The above painting is Mexican, and represents the Spanish attempt to introduce 16 varieties of racial mixing in this oldest European country in the Americas. Spain was accustomed in its Iberian homeland, to North African Moores (for 700 years), Jews, and white Christians already mixing there. With the added indigenous Amerindian's Anahuac of the Mexica (Me-she-ka) or "Aztec" Tripple Alliance Empire and other local nations, Sub-Saharan Africans, "white" Spanish, and hiding Converso Jews, hiding out from the Spanish Inquisition.

America’s racism has been used in art and now highlighted with Donald Trump in the 2024 Presidential race trying to rewrite a US historical racist agenda. In the past, he attacked Pequots for not being “Indian" enough when they were competitively applying for a casino in Connecticut. Kamala Harris was born enmeshed in American racial history and not in Jamaica's own classification of “Browning”, similar to South African “Colored” designation, as is peculiar to those countries. These are acknowledgments of race mixing. Not so in America, who does not have those racial categories, except "other". 

 

KAMALA's CARIBBEAN PEDIGREE:

 BY ART

She was born in Amerindian America with a bi-racial Jamaican father, and a South Indian mother. She got her light skin color from white British colonial progeny, one named Harris. I will start with my and Kamala's country of Yamayeka a.k.a. Jamaica.

However, to really know Kamala’s deepest island’s mythological background you would also have to see my blog on “Jamaica’s 7+ Storylines”, tales of a fire-snorting Devil-bull apparition called a Rolling Calf, a pirate turned privateer like Captain Henry Morgan, (a Welshman who also owned two slave plantations), a "twice buried" Frenchman, a victim of the Port Royal town-destroying earthquake, a White Witch of the Rose Hall Plantation, next to American Country Singer, Johnny Cash's estate.

Taíno Jamaica (Yamayeka)

My Taíno Creation Storybook. (Click to the YouTube link for my narrated 5-minute story).

My wall sculpture of Guabancex, Angry Woman Goddess, Rider of the Winds, whom the Taíno's Hurakan  (hura=wind,  ca’an = center, i.e. center of the wind) is known in English as a hurricane. To the Caribbean's Taíno she came yearly to blow down houses and trees, with two accomplices, GuatauBa! who is the herald thunder and lightening who announced her pending arrival. His twin brother is Coatrisque, the Deluge, who follows them. with floods of water cascading down the mountains. On the sculpture's hands are Taíno women's pottery image of a hurricane, as it was discovered centuries later by satellite photography, as "S" shaped.

Wood and shell sculpture of Ataberia, the Virgin Mother giving birth to Yucahu, the Taíno
God of the Sea and the life-saving yuca tuber.

Composite photo of Itiba Cahubaba our 5th Earth Mother, giving birth to the 4-Fathers of humankind. This concept implies that there were four Earth destructions. The son, Deminan, is the father of the Taíno, while his three brothers ("twins"), are not named.

A wall hummingbird sculpture of welded metal bicycle parts, etched and colored Plexiglass and an inlaid photo of Jamaica's first Prime Minister, Sir Alexander Bustamante. Jamaica's national bird is its endemic swallowtail hummingbird.

Taíno Epic: A print of "Guahayona's Travel to Matanino", the Island of Women. which enticed the Spanish arrivals in the Americas to search for La California, an island of Amazons, whose only metal was gold weapons. (Incorporated rubber ball-court images of Puerto Rican concept of Atabey, Goddess of Childbirth, and Fresh Waters, virgin mother of Yucahu, God of the Sea and the nourishing yuca/cassava tuber).

Next is Guahayona as he leaves Matinino and travels to its twin Island of Guanin (14k Gold). The Taíno used the hummingbird's metallic feathers as a symbol of gold. (incorporated woodcut image of Taínos panning for gold. A technique employed by arriving Europeans, called by them, "panning" for gold). 

The Taíno epic used by a 16th Century Spanish novelist who copied the Travels of Guahayona, the First Shaman, to create La California, a story of an island of Amazons. a Spanish tale taken down for Columbus, by Father Ramon Pane on Hispaniola (Ayti Bohio/Kiskeya), whose manuscript was sent to Spain. The ensuing story by 16th century Spanish novelist Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo, was from the Taíno's Guahayona Tale of the Island of Women, and its twin, the Island of Guanin/Gold. 

 Kamala’s African Heritage

Kamala Harris' African heritage in Jamaica, begins with my rendering of this Baga Creation Story sculptural images of a woman, a man and a snake figures. In the myth, the Earth's waters began as a calm item, whose vigorous movements of a primordial snake created movements of rivers and the sea. --Welded handlebars, and etched Plexiglass.

Ghana 

Ghanaian influences in Jamaica are the strongest manifestations of the island's African cultural retentions. This is especially true of the Asanti's Akan Anansi the Spider-Man, whose morality-based stories have been passed down and recorded through the centuries. Jamaicans would automatically dismissively say, "Cho man, yu a tell a Anansi Story!" (Meaning, "You are not telling the truth!"). 

Next comes the Maroons, led by escaped enslaved Asanti (Ashanti) sugarcane plantations escapees. They went to the mountains and formed gurilla bands, twice defeating the British, where they were welcomed by the Yamaye Taíno Cimarrones who had earlier removed themselves from Spanish ranches where they were forced to work and bring in the island's sparse gold reserves. 

Kamala’s childhood photos with her island cousins in Jamaica, reveal that she would have heard AnansiStories or (Anansesem in Ghana’s Twi language,). Anansi, imported from the Akan of Ghana, is a very deeply ingrained moral guide for all Jamaicans. (See my anansistories.com).

My Anansi the Spider (doll) with six of his seven Ghanaian children. Only his wife, Aso, (a.k.a. "Cookie") and his youngest son, Intikuma (Ticky-Ticky in my novel) came to Jamaica with him.

A panel from my Anansesem (AnansiStories) folkloric comic strip, whose stories were published by the Jamaican Gleaner Company's Star tabloid in the 1970s. This last, and unpublished story is about the island/s guerrilla fighter Maroons and the Yamaye Taíno who welcomed them and taught the escapees from plantation slavery, how to survive in the Jamaican forests. 

 

My Anansi and his back-up posse, Me, Myself, and I & I as condoms, all masked for both the Aids and the Corona Virus campaigns.

 

My story illustration of Anansi and the Yam Hills. created at my Howard University class for a children's book illustration assignment.

My Anansesem comic strip panel telling the story of Asantehene, Osei Tutu, and the Golden Stool of Asanti, and how he came to power in the 17th Century in Ghana. Here at a gathering, Anokye, the priest, brought down a golden stool in a clod of white dust. The stool, cementing his power, gently landed on Osei Tutu’s knees, anointing him as the Aantehene or ruler of the Asanti Empire.

My Anansi rag doll, books, and comic strip panels.

The Yoruba gods series in Jamaica 

There are many people of both Yoruba and Ibo descent in the island. Some have retained many aspects of their Nigerian culture.

Olokun, Yoruba God of the Sea. with mudfish for his legs, next to my photo in a Howard University faculty exhibition. An ode to the Caribbean Sea.-Welded steel.

   

My Obatala, the Yoruba's Father God wall sculpture -- Welded and woven metal, etched and painted Plexiglass

(Top): Wall sculpture of  Ogun the Yoruba God of Metallurgy & War; (Middle) Enlargement of his sword with his icon, a dog; (Bottom) His head and a cast bronze bumblebee cap. -- Welded bicycle rims, ans cast bronze.