Dick Hebdige, ‘Distillations of Reality’, Volume 44, Issue 39, September 26th, 1980, Volume 44, Issue 39, p. 16.

Hebdige’s review of The Harder They Come by Michael Thelwell and Dread: the Rastafarians of Jamaica by Joseph Owens, connects both works to Baldwin’s comments on the importance of “bearing witness’'. Hebdige write in the final paragraph of the review:

‘James Baldwin, when questioned recently about his relationship to writing, used a phrase taken quite self-consciously from his strict Baptist up-bringing when he explained that he merely felt compelled to “bear witness”. That sense of an experience simultaneously so powerful and so powerfully repressed that it can no longer be silenced, that it demands articulation, informs both Owen’s painstaking account of Rasta theology and Michael Thelwell’s fictional celebration of Jamaican street life and gives them both their peculiar intensity and authenticity’.