Bongo Jerry's &dquo;Mabrak&dquo; is as unequivocally West Indian a poem as one could wish. It could have come from nowhere but the West Indies; indeed, it could hardly have come from anywhere but Jamaica. It is by several criteria a very distinguished workprobably the finest Rastafarian poem, a crucial text for its historical moment, and the centre-piece of one of the fundamental literary controversies in the region, the debate set off by the Savacou anthology (1971) in which it was first published.' Yet there is something peculiar about the poem's status, and the peculiarity can most