A Biopic Of The Iconic Bob Marley Should Have Included All Facets Of His Life…

Those of you old enough will recall when the Borguise uptown peo­ple looked down on ordi­nary Jamaicans because we spoke the patios dialect? Many still today speak with an accent we poor coun­try folk can­not iden­ti­fy. Many of them attend­ed the intel­lec­tu­al ghet­to, some nev­er set foot in a col­lege, but they inher­it­ed light skin and a lit­tle mon­ey .…. residue of the colo­nial era. Sadly, some of the dark-skinned ones who man­aged to get a col­lege degree have also been fol­low­ing in the foot­steps of the old slave mas­ters. If I laugh, I die. I attend­ed a small par­ty here in New York a few weeks ago where a bunch of them were in atten­dance, and I could hard­ly tell they were Jamaicans. Hahahhha.

Surprisingly, today, the same peo­ple are all over the patios, our dialect; they even want to make it our nation­al lan­guage. I’ve been told they even cre­at­ed a Bible out of it, but qu ya.
Sadly, they still feel priv­i­leged to tell us what is appro­pri­ate or good for us.
But talk­ing about that, many of us are old enough to recall how they treat­ed Bob Marley even when he attempt­ed to move uptown on Hope Road, where his muse­um is today.

Fast for­ward to the Bob Marley movie that every­one is talk­ing about.…(hyperbole), not every­one is talk­ing about it. Nevertheless, a long over­due movie was made about Bob, and truth­ful­ly, this writer has [not] seen the film, and it may be a long time before I see it. Not because I do not respect the body of work the man did in his very brief 36 years but because I fun­da­men­tal­ly believe that (a) Bob Marley belonged to his fam­i­ly, but he was also larg­er than one fam­i­ly. He belonged to the aver­age Jamaican. Now, many argue Bob belonged to the world; I do not quar­rel with that either…

(b) I believe that because of the fore­gone, Bob should have been played by a Jamaican. © Probably most impor­tant­ly, a movie about a man as icon­ic as Bob Marley should include every aspect of his life, good and bad, and no one should be left out of the sto­ry. Whitewashing and san­i­tiz­ing a sub­jec­t’s image dis­torts his­to­ry and is not in any­one’s best interest.

I must con­fess that I was nev­er keen on hero-wor­ship­ing any­one. I admire peo­ple who have con­tributed to human­i­ty, but that’s as far as it goes for me. I also believe that the deci­sion-mak­ers made a mis­take by not includ­ing every aspect of Bob Marley’s life in this biopic. Bob lived a fas­ci­nat­ing life, we are told; the world must under­stand who the man real­ly was. Opportunity missed? I believe so. At the end of the day, leav­ing out huge chunks of his life paints a pic­ture of a per­fect man. There are no per­fect humans. Documenting all aspects of his life would have been a greater ser­vice to Bob and the peo­ple who love him.

Leaving chunks of his life out of the film serves the nar­row inter­ests of deci­sion-mak­ers. It con­tin­ues the mis­guid­ed attempt to make the man a God.….. he was a man. Those who were inte­gral parts of his life, includ­ing the women he loved and any of his off­spring not includ­ed, have every right to be angry. This does noth­ing to final­ly put to rest the dis­qui­et that exist­ed since Bob tran­si­tioned in 81.
It is bad for his lega­cy, It isn’t good for posterity

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.