Book review: A political gem with religious overtones

Glenville Ashby, Reviewer

Title: What a Friend We Have in Jesus

Author: Mark Jacobs

Publisher: Lulu Publishing

Reviewer: Dr Glenville Ashby

In What a Friend We Have in Jesus, Mark Jacobs cuts to the chase. He slices away the extraneous and delivers a provocative tale that stokes the intellect and probes the conscience. His literary canvas is the economic and political stench that is Haiti. His brush is broad and the outcome reverberates beyond that battered nation.

What a Friend We Have in Jesus is a beguiling title. Jacobs is no Christian apologist. Neither is he your traditional writer. He willfully bends the English language, producing a scintillating poetic-like prose replete with Caribbean argot and unorthodox narration that cement the reader to his every word.

In a sense, Jacobs is the quintessential griot. His message is profound, no doubt. But his strength rests in his cadence. His rhythm is immaculate. His pacing is equally impressive. He is angry but not impetuous. He understands Haiti: the hell, the social cauldron, and the band of scoundrels - those political and economic scavengers - insatiable, duplicitous and inhumane - who comb the land to eat the rotting flesh of living carcasses. He writes: "I found it all obscene and revolting and what I was witnessing here in Haiti was taken to another level ... even the mis-leaders of Guyana have not yet mastered, and not for lack of trying."

Throughout, Jacobs remains measured, almost sanguine. Never is he hoydenish. Maybe, exploitation and suffering are all too familiar. Not that Jacobs is numb. No. He is instructive without being pedantic. And he understands that a raw verbal assault on any system is sometimes met with equal resistance.

So, like a master batsman, he picks his spots with world-class timing, each stroke pulled from the top drawer. Yes, Jacobs puts on a clinic. He rancours at the right moment but is intermittently comedic and jocular. His interplay with his friend Max Romeo injects the right dose of levity at a supposed magic ceremony.

His is a literary cocktail that intoxicates, mesmerising the reader with joy and pain. He barrels through the plight of Haiti post 2010, when a quarter million people perished. He is vivid. Haitians work for a little more than one dollar a day and return home to "a makeshift tent in a sea of filth and rubble... ."

His discourse on Haitian magic is comedic but very telling. Smoke and mirrors! No different to marauding politicians viz., Michelle Martelly and the wannbe self-styled saviour, Wyclef Jean.

He assails political puppets and disingenuous celebrities bent on governing Haiti. His psychoanalysis of jubilant Haitians at election time is dead on. They well know it's a political joyride. It has always been. But, for the moment, Haitians grasp any occasion that offers catharsis. Why not? These are few and far between for a people who are the perennial underlings. Jacobs has lost faith in politics, in society. He has witnessed first-hand the treatment of Haitians at the hands of their neighbours. It is ugly. It's racist. And what a bitter irony. The people of Dominican Republic are, for the most part, black.

Every segment flows in lock-step, complementing each other. The ruthlessness and aleatory nature of law enforcement, the prostitution, the United Nations occupying force, the child abuse, the innocence doomed to repeat history, all form a despairing gestalt.

But Jacobs holds his hand, patient, finally delivering a sheer coup de grce of intellectual brilliance and sarcasm. Christianity, or, in more precise terms, "Jesus" is "crucified' on Jacobs' symbolic cross. No, it's not blasphemy. The twisted hero worship of the likes of John Hawkins and fellow pirates are also chided. They are the progenitors of today's destruction. This is Pan Africanism that makes you cringe.

Jacobs is compellingly sardonic and it becomes harder and harder to rein him in, or better yet, challenge his pronouncements. Try as you may. Here, his canvas morphs into a global billboard. The roots of Haiti's stench are part of a bigger picture. And these roots run deep, twisting the mind of the Negro, distorting his true identity with lies and ethereal promises. And Jacobs cautions, beckons us to his cry. "... Am no historian but I know a few things about the use of Jesus and black people ... black people have been force fed a steady diet of mystical Jesus who loves us but wants us to endure pain."

And he slams capitalism: " It keeps you in survival mode for as long as you can endure the suffering, dangling a carrot and a dream ... and when you begin to waver ... the voice reminds you and Jesus said, suffer the little children to come unto me and you steady up and get back to suffering and the pain returns followed by a friendly, "God never gives you more than you can bear."

He writes of torture and rape in slave pens by the earthly disciples of Jesus and cites the words of an unnamed "brother," "the god of the slaver is not the god of the slave." He repeats it again and again ... and one more time. Movingly irrepressible. At this juncture he goes for the jugular: "So when he's putting the rope around your neck, you call for God and he calls for God and you wonder why the one you call on never answers ...".

And at the centre of history's greatest hoax on black people, according to Jacobs, is that all-too-revered verse - an outright betrayal: "What a friend we have in Jesus."

Rating: Essential

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