Inward Yearnings

Essay: Rianna Jade Parker retraces the history of the Jamaican intuitives, a group of self-taught artists who ushered in a national form of artmaking mythologizing African traditions through religious divination and esteem-raising cultural work

- Rianna Jade

In 1962, a new Jamaican consciousness and sense of self was reborn in fire through ceremonial state independence from Britain, its former enslaver and colonist. Not since the initiation of the Universal Negro Improvement Association – founded in 1914 by the internationalist political leaders Marcus Garvey and his first wife, Amy Ashwood Garvey – did the country’s Black majority overwhelmingly acknowledge themselves as the sons and daughters of the African diaspora and active participants in the global Black struggle for liberation, in tandem with the political selfhood they wished to attain. Central to these efforts were self-imaging and esteem-raising cultural work. As Jamaica-born historian Colin A. Palmer states in Inward Yearnings: Jamaica’s Journey to Nationhood (2016): ‘The timing of Jamaica’s birth, for good or ill, was essentially an accident of history […] its fate would depend largely on the people’s capacity to imagine, design and build their own passageways to the future.’