Reflections on Resilience
- Holly G
- Nov 24
- 6 min read
Contents
Introduction
On Friday night I participated in an online fundraiser organized by Kaia Allen-Bevan (@kaia.ab), an activist, organizer, and founder and director of Youth the Gap. The goal of this event was to raise relief funds for the damage in Jamaica caused by Hurricane Melissa through sharing art, poetry, and stories about resilience and pride of this small island nation.
All the funds collected will be donated to Diaspora Action (@diaspora.action), "Mi Soon Come Dec, The Books Dem, Home Radio, shewritestooloud, The Umoja Projects and individual community advocates who care."
It was such a wonderful experience. It was an intimate knowledge exchange experience, and I felt like we were truly able to discuss and share our thoughts regarding the effects of this crisis.
Pablo (@poetically_pabz) offered some beautiful poetry and performed live painting during the event. This painting will be auctioned and the funds will be donated to the organizations mentioned above. Kweku (@k_kweks) offered a history of the Maroon War and the legacy of Queen Nanny through historical storytelling.
I shared a piece, part poem, part storytelling, part research, on some reflections I had while observing the fallout of the hurricane.
After the piece, we engaged in a discussion on some of the feelings the piece elevated in people, and the connections they had made with some of their own work. I had some questions prepared, which I'll include below, but the conversation flowed so naturally that facilitation was barely necessary. I'm so glad that people felt able to come forward with their responses. The conversation engaged the importance of environmental justice, frustration with social media as a tool of organizing and activism, and the creative ways in which we have to participate in mutual aid.
I'm so grateful for being invited into this space and given the opportunity to participate in sharing work with these amazing and creative people! I hope to continue to build on this work and allow the inspiring energy to carry me through future projects.
You can find the organizations we donated too in the Sources section of this post, or in the resources page of the Tools for Resistance website.
Reflections on Resilience
I see people liking those Instagram reels coming from Hurricane Melissa, those memes and joke videos of Jamaicans showing comic indifference – or even laughter in the face of this environmental disaster.
“Jamaicans are so unserious.”
“Jamaicans are jokes.”
“Jamaicans are less bothered about this hurricane than everyone else is.”
And there’s a grain of truth to this, but I feel like that grain overshadows the field that we need to see in order to properly understand the whole picture.
Now, I know it’s not in bad faith,
So many are doing the same,
So why does it feel like such a slap in the face?
It shows the resilience of our people, isn’t that the aim?
Most definitely. I mean, of course we’d rather share how our people adapt and thrive and dance in the rain,
Than the ruined infrastructure and combined pain,
The casualties, the rise in shame
When all you get is silence in response to requests for aid.
It’s a contradiction you have to sit still in,
It’s a state our population is skilled in,
When it comes to crisis the attention deficit is building,
Luckily we have constant entertainment built in.
Author Nova Reid writes in her essay Jamaicans Are Resilient:
“I was raised in this narrative, I was raised to be strong,
As if being anything other than resilient – even under the most horrific circumstances – makes you flawed.”
She unpacks the contradiction that islanders have become trapped in.
Where to be resilient means to not need help at all.
But when a small island that produces less than 0.02% of the global greenhouse gasses,
is on the front lines of the world’s climate disasters,
They’re going to need more than aid.
They need environmental justice,
An intersectional justice,
Where race, geography, gender, accessibility,
All identities and issues are addressed so we can all live a just life.
Because Melissa is not the first nor the last hint
Of more danger to come in the foreseeable future.
And Jamaica has been actively underdeveloped,
By economic powers larger than the earth was ever meant to hold.
“The drive for mastery over men is not merely a by-product of a faulty political economy but also of a worldview which believes in the absolute superiority of the human over the non-human and the sub-human, the masculine over the feminine… and the modern or progressive over the traditional or the savage.”
– Majid Rahnema, Post Development Reader (2008)
This gives us insight into the ideology that perpetuated this colonial invasion in the first place, that forced Jamaica and the neighboring islands to this exploitative dynamic.
Jamaica produced most of the British Empire’s sugar but they received none of that wealth.
Jamaica's fruit is exported for the US economy but they received none of that compensation.
They are receiving £2.5 billion from the UK for aid and rebuilding efforts. That is a drop compared to the hurricane that is the centuries of dispossession and expropriation.
(For comparison, the military defense budget of the UK for 2025/26 is £62.2 billion.)
Our resilience gets eaten up by the system
That manufactures our suffering and twists it,
Into a narrative people will see but not really listen:
A panopticon, a voyeuristic prism,
To get our message out is a mission.
But Jamaica also has a history of a rebellious spirit.
Bra Anansi stories passed down for centuries from our ancestors in West Africa instilled within us the knowledge that to have wit was better than to have power, to use wisdom rather than force, and to trust the web we weave than to be crushed by those larger than us.
The spirit of Anansi was with us in the first slave revolts,
In the first rebellions,
In the first marches for independence.
He took the form of those who managed to free themselves and escape their chains.
He took the form of those aiding each other as the money they earned was sent abroad.
He took the form of those who would not follow orders because they knew the power was lying in hands covered in blood and grasping at stolen gold.
Dr. Luther Brown, a Critical Race Theory academic and educator wrote in his essay, The Rebuild: A Tangled Web:
“In the weeks following the storm, journalists dubbed this self-mobilised network 'the people’s government.' Jamaica’s Tallawah resilience is not defiance for its own sake; it is a creative insistence that love, loyalty, and labour are not waiting rooms of democracy but its living architecture. Our national story is tangled, like Bra Nancy’s web—spun for survival, sticky with patronage, yet glistening with genius.”
The spirit of Anansi remains with us as we rebuild, as we heal, as we weave a web of interdependence, mutual aid, and find reasons for joy in the intersections where the strings cross.
He takes the form of fathers and uncles who manage to build energy systems from generators when the grid fails.
He takes the form of mothers and aunties who share food when the government can’t cope.
He takes the form of the youth who communicate through new channels to bring awareness and aid where there otherwise would have only been silence.
If people sent a pound for every post they liked,
Or donated a dollar for every soundbite,
Then we can keep the spirit of the island alive.
Alone there is no doubt Jamaica will thrive.
But with help there’s a chance we might
Overcome the forces that try
To distract us, catch us, divide us,
Stifle our attempts to decry
The obvious injustice that has led to this crisis.
It will take more than a storm to defeat our people,
But make no mistake to ignore these warnings is lethal,
Because when the time comes best believe
All of us,
Will need all we can,
To weather this hurricane,
And the ones that come after.
The spirit of rebellion, of reverence, is ever present, pervasive, perpetual.
Questions
How can social media be both beneficial and detrimental to activism/ movement work?
How can we learn from the spirit of Anansi in our own organizational practices?
What do the contemporary texts from Dr. Brown and Nova Reid reveal about Jamaican resilience? How do they inform modern aid practices and infrastructure?
How does Hurricane Melissa offer an example of how the Diaspora and the island can collaborate to counter the negative impacts of the climate crisis and neocolonialism?
Sources
Sources from "Sugar Production in Jamaica" by Holly Gregory, 2021
Nandy, A. (2008). The post-development reader. In 1365105304 998464412 M. Rahnema (Author), The post-development reader (pp. 168-178). London u.a.: Zed Books u.a.
Tompson, Ralph. “The Role of Capitalism in Jamaica's Development.” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 2, 1966, pp. 22–28. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40652963
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