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Marley memories...a son remembers in Dear Dad

Posted by CaribShout on October 28, 2010 at 8:47pm

“All suffering occurs where love is not occurring. All the world’s problems and all the world’s solutions can be bridged in as short of a distance as the 12 inches between the hemispheres of your brains and the chambers of your heart.” —Excerpt from Dear Dad by Ky-Mani Marley Ky-Mani Marley, son of reggae legend Bob Marley and table tennis champion Anita Belnavis, has released his biography, Dear Dad. In the book he recalls the struggle of growing up in a two bedroom house in Falmouth, Jamaica, and later on the even worse conditions he and his mother endured when they moved to America. He stated in his book, “Located at 26 Cornwall Street was a tiny little concrete and wooden shack we called home back then. The house felt like it was the size of some of the walk-in closets I see in America today. The place only had two real rooms: indoors and outdoors. In truth there were two and a half so-called basic rooms to this shack house, and those were straining to hold the nine human bodies, and nine separate souls that lived under that one shared roof. It was tight. You hearin’ me? Extremely. Hell, we were almost packed in as tight as the ancestors were in that sardine can that brought us here from across the ocean. This tight little shack house wasn’t much, but it was our own little space in the world.” Even though he and his family did not have much, Marley still felt the love that everyone had for each other in the home. He described living in Falmouth as paradise. His grandmother, Thelma Henlon, was the anchor and chief of the home. She made certain that everything was shared. Everybody got something. If someone had nine dollars, then everyone had a dollar. It was a huge shock for him when he moved to the crime prone area of Liberty City, Miami at the age of nine. He stated, “I could walk the streets near home and all the way uptown without worrying about a thing. I didn’t have to worry about anyone harming me. I didn’t even have to worry about car traffic, since there weren’t many cars in Falmouth back then. It wasn’t like nowadays, or like when I moved to America and you had to start being careful of everything. “In America you constantly heard about kidnappings, molesters, street drama, and all kinds of dangers that we just didn’t hear about in Jamaica, at least not in the time I was growing up.” Marley also recalled the day his father died. He was in the middle of a soccer game when someone came up to him and said his mother wanted him to come home right now. It was strange to him because his mother never interrupted him while he was playing a match. When he walked through the door everyone looked frozen, until a young girl said, “Ya fadda dead.” The shock and sadness was nothing compared to having to listen to his father’s funeral on the radio, because they could not get transport to attend. He said, “That devastates me to this day.” Ky-mani Marley will be doing a signing of his book Dear Dad, tomorrow, at the West Mall branch of Nigel R Khan Bookseller, between 1 and 4 pm.
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Tags: dad, dear, bob marley, in, jamaica, kymani, memoriesa, reggae, remembers, son

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