Melville Cooke

After so many years

I guess it is hard to adjust

Even when the front is empty we still move to the back of the bus.

- Tanya Stephens

Yesterday we celebrated a day when Black people in British colonies could no longer be branded with a hot iron, heated to an extreme temperature and plunged into the skin so as to indelibly stamp their owner's initials.

These days, instead of an owner paying for us in order toburn his or her mark of property into our hides so that we cannot hide, we pay for an item with a brand that we can iron to put on our hides to hide deficiencies.

It is not, of course, as simple a matter as black people who could once be branded either continuing to be fascinated with an imprint and a sense of belonging or subconsciously (or consciously) subverting the practice (much like the use of the word 'nigger'').

Emancipated from branding

But in this the 200th year of the end of the transatlantic trade in Africans, I find it fascinating that names like Dolce and Gabbana, FCUK, Luis Vitton and Hilfiger (some may be out of date; I am fully emancipated from branding and hence am not current with the names), as well as others the wearers probably cannot pronounce parade past me with regularity.

And I cannot help but see the names, not only because they are very prominently displayed but also because the wearers often display some prominent behaviour. It is like a Christmas tree that is decorated all year round, with carols blasting from a CD.

It is a bit funny, though, to see a black man or woman decked out in names from head to toe or parts thereof in between, puffed with pride, laughing and talking a bit too loud, every move calculated and executed as if in front of a video camera for maximum theatric effect.

There is a distinct difference between quality and a name brand; the former is determined by texture, finish and durability, among other factors, while the latter is simply a name. There are times when the two coincide, but when a knock-off of a name brand costs more than another low quality item, identical save for a name splattered somewhere, it is clear that it is the name that is the objective.

Of course, the Jamaican fashion industry has progressed to the point where there are names like Cooyah on the relaxed side of things and Carlton Brown for the more eclectic, but when real profiling is the objective then the more 'foreign' the brand the better. Because, ultimately, the purpose is not just to show a brand, but also to demonstrate how far physically and, by extension, up the social ladder from home we or our 'people' have been.

Need our own brand

But if we need a brand to do that (and, of course, that brand may be on a car, it may be glasses frames, it may be an address), then we have not got very far from the plantation, have we? Like a slave hobbled at the ankles by a short length of chain, our aspirations to 'personhood' are shackled by something intangible running from one ear to the next on the inside of our heads.

The connection between the brand in the skin of the slave and the brand on the skin of the slave's descendant, 173 years after Emancipation, is in the pervasive materialism that is, it seems, the final stage of history, not simply capitalism as was bandied about. Black people who were once proud property in a system that was the basis for the prosperity of the regions of the world that now are now dominant economically and culturally are proud to own the symbols of property that they do not own.

I guess, like bleaching, it is better to be an oddity than to be a faceless, nameless member of the crowd. Unlike bleaching, though, branding is more the norm on a wider scale.