That controversial Marley statue

REGGAE ICON Robert Nesta Marley’s face, voice and songs are easily recognised the world over. His iconic, larger-than-life persona is captured in a biopic, Bob Marley: One Love, now in cinemas around the globe.

This Paramount production is getting rave reviews, but when Christopher Gonzalez’s artistic impression of him by way of a sculpture was mounted in the early 1980s, the Jamaican people were not ready for that semi-abstract piece, open to much interpretation. And they rejected it wholesale.

Fast forward to February 6, 2024, Marley’s birthday, when a Facebook post says, “As we celebrate Bob’s 79th Earthstrong I have a confession and an apology (please don’t judge). I was only a child either 11 or 12 years old attending Mountain View Primary when this statue of Bob Marley done by Christopher Gonzalez was erected across from the National Stadium.

“The mob, mostly adults, was not pleased with the interpretation and proceeded to throw stones at it. My friends and I got caught up in the hysteria. Today, I want to publicly apologise for my behaviour back then, and wish the great cultural icon Bob Marley, happy Earthstrong.”

Misunderstanding

Much of the backlash came from a place of misunderstanding and ignorance, perhaps, and the attempts to explain away the ire fell upon deaf ears. The people believe it was a poor representation of the Jamaican idol, who was not as old and ugly as the artist made him out to be. And why is he rising from what appears to be tree roots, and his sinuous locks?

“Christopher Gonzalez’s sculpture of Bob Marley is an archetypal Rasta image of the 1980s, but its negative reception due to its assertive blackness and lack of resemblance to Bob jarred with the viewing public’s complex racial aesthetic, even in that period of heightened cultural consciousness.

“In the hierarchy of racial memory, the singer’s handsome mixed-race features, the subject of popular media myth and racial longing, proved difficult to recreate so soon after his death. In the public mind’s eye this monument was doomed to failure even before it was unveiled,” Petrine Archer writes in The Marley Monument, published August 2009 in Jamaica Journal Vol. 32 Nos 1-2.

Apart from the misinterpretation of the symbolism in which it was sculpted, the people thought it was too black and ugly, in essence. Archer writes that the statue, cast in the darkest bronze, “was half-man, half-tree with locks like branches, flowing down to its roots”. She also mentions “the characteristically pointed finger, the phallic microphone, and its beard of prolific nuts and berries, oversized head bulging with locks”. “It is not an easy sculpture to engage with,” she believes.

Full of contradiction

The rejection, she also intimates strongly, could be because the work is full of contradiction: “It is rigid, yet bulbous, at once phallic and feminine, naked but clothed in symbolism … Its conflicting forms made it inelegant and difficult to embrace.” It’s all about symbolism, aesthetic and the politics of colour, it seems.

“On the eve of its unveiling, as soldiers attempted to heave it on to its pedestal, by hauling it with chains, and with a red rug irreverently thrown over its face, the effigy nearly provoked a riot. Amidst calls from the gathering crowd that shouted, ‘But that no look like Bob’ and ‘Den why it look suh black?’, a crisis ensued, and many began to pelt the figure with stones.

“Prime Minister Seaga, fearing the civil disturbance that had been simmering for almost a decade, wisely ordered its removal. The next day, the army hastily dispatched it to the National Gallery of Jamaica,” Archer recalls.

It was Edward Seaga who commissioned the monument in 1981 after the recent death of Marley. Carey Robinson contacted David Boxer on behalf of Seaga. Boxer suggested two sculptors for the job, Christopher Gonzalez and Osmond Watson. He contacted Watson first without letting him know that Gonzalez was also under consideration. But Watson told him Gonzalez was “the perfect sculptor for the job”.

“With that recommendation, Gonzalez became the only possible choice,” Boxer writes in his article, The Marley Monument, Gonzalez and I, published in the aforementioned Jamaica Journal. “In this way, I was thus involved in the selection of Gonzalez as the sculptor to get the Bob Marley commission.”

Yet, he writes, “I was, however, not placed on the committee established to commission and erect the sculpture and knew nothing of the discussion that had taken place between the artist and the committee.”

Spiritualised figure

The article then goes on to tell what happened from that point to Boxer’s next association with the monument. Embedded within that narrative he says, “I remember being tremendously impressed by the work, but I was worried over the concept and whether the committee would accept such a singular vision. I was worried, too, that this was not a physical lightness of the man, Bob Marley, until Christopher said that the committee wanted this spiritualised figure.”

Boxer says his next association with the monument was the morning of the scheduled unveiling when he got a call from Seaga who told him there would be no unveiling. “We had a discussion about the piece and I remember Prime Minister Seaga’s comment well. The ‘people’ would have accepted anything – the roots, the symbolism, everything – if only the face had looked more like Marley. I hadn’t seen the finished face so I could not comment,” Boxer writes.

The controversial piece was moved to the National Gallery of Jamaican in Kingston where it sojourned for about 18 years before it was removed to Island Village Shopping Centre in Ocho Rios, St Ann where there was a branch of the National Gallery. It has been back at the National Gallery of Jamaica, situated 12 Ocean Boulevard, downtown Kingston, since 2022, and is part of the national collection, it being owned by the Government of Jamaica.