We are Jamaicans, a just so wi dweet.  We have the brand with which everyone wants to be associated, and win, lose or draw, one thing we know how to do is pop style on those who like us and  moreso, on those who we know don’t particularly like us.  If you are on a winning streak,  ‘tingz a gwaan fi yuh’ , you are happy, your family is happy, you are realizing your goals, and sometimes you are the envy of those around you, people can easily understand your  manifestation of JaZwing.  After all … yuh deh pon top of it. 

JaZwing is an attitude, a posture, an energy. It is there in the way you lift your chest when you walk, in the bounce in your stride, in the way you fling back your head and laugh,  in the way your actions force people to look at and want to be like you. It causes some people's eyes to change to green, and the  ‘negativizers’ come out of the closet.  Their relationship with you is the manifestation of the classic love / hate relationship.  They secretly envy you and would give their right arm to have the freedom you have to demonstrate your JaZwing. 

Since they are so enslaved by  their own unhappiness and fear of truly living, their natural recourse  is to attempt to cut you down with comments like ”him / she too nuff”, or “meck dem haffie a gwaanie gwaanie so?”  That is of course if they think you have ‘backative’ for your JaZwing, in other words, a genuine reason to be ‘nuff and boasy’.  If they think you have no reason to be so boasy, then the comments are likely to be more along the lines of “Poor show great”, or ‘ poppy show nuh deh pon nutten.”   

Our JaZwing is something which foreigners fail to understand. Numerous television crews and social scientists have tried to wrap their head around the fact that, a family could live in tenement year with basi c amenities, or a   man or woman could have only one suit of clothing, and perhaps not know the source of the next meal, yet be beside the big sound system dancing like they are in the middle of carnival. 

Nor can they understand the single mother who has three mouths to feed, and needs to, as Miss Lou wrote in her poem Jamaica Ooman “teck water put pot pon fire”, yet on a Sunday morning she turns up the volume of the radio in house and is singing religious songs like she is the happiest millionaire with not a care in the world. That is JaZwing. 

So wherever in the world you are, if you are Jamaican, have Jamaican friends, love Jamaican culture, live and work among Jamaicans, and in your heart, secretly want to be like Jamaicans who can dance barefooted   before 84 thousand when we  break world records,  or sing and dance on the corner and give a six long in domino, when you are jobless, go ahead, show them your JaZwing