PROFILE: Elena Oumanokeeping J’can lifestyle alive in US
When Elena Oumano first set foot on Jamaican soil in 1972, she said she could not make head or tail of the local patois, nor relate to the slow beat of reggae music. After several visits, however, she had the local culture down pat. Twenty-nine years later, Oumano helps keep Jamaican lifestyle alive in the US mainstream as a writer for a number of respected publications.
Oumano has been covering the reggae beat since 1984 when she returned to the United States after living in Negril for one year. She had been teaching yoga on the west end of the island but while doing research for her second book in Los Angeles, she got an opportunity to write about the music scene here for The Beat, Marley archivist Roger Steffens’ reggae and world beat magazine.
“I wanted to keep my relationship with Jamaica in a meaningful way so I started writing for them,” said Oumano, who was recently in Kingston for the International Reggae Day festivities. “Spending all that time in Jamaica was a great education for me and I felt I was participating in a constructive way.”
Since making her debut with Steffens’ non-profit mag, Oumano’s by-line has appeared above (and below) stories on reggae in publications such as the Village Voice, Request, Spin, Sonicnet.com (MTV’s website),
Amazon.com and Billboard for which she writes mainly on new albums and trends coming out of Jamaica.
But Oumano admits, that like radio in the United States, reggae can be a hard sell to editors of leading magazines more inclined to cover the outrageous rock, hip-hop and rap circuit.
“I write for mainstream papers and they’re writing about everything else so I have to convince them that there’s something exciting going on,” she explained. “They weren’t interested in me writing about Luciano because they felt he was from the roots and culture genre they’ve been hearing about for a long time.”
Sometimes, she says, what perks up editors is not necessarily musical.
“They were interested in Buju partly because of the Boom Bye Bye thing; it has to be different, something controversial,” she pointed out.
“The same thing with Lady Saw, the fact that she’s a woman and she’s so feisty, genial and brilliant; a lot of them appreciated that.”
Having seen up-close the Rasta and roots explosion of the 1970s during her visits and participated in the burgeoning dancehall movement while living here in the early 1980s, Oumano admits that contemporary reggae has very little in terms of freshness and excitement to offer.
“This is not the most exciting period, I can say that safely,” she declared. “There’s not enough going on that really captures the imagination. However, (at) International Reggae Day’s Sunday show, I did see some really good artistes like Abijah.”
Born in the “boogie down” borough of the Bronx, Oumano is the eldest of three children born to a father of Russian-Jewish stock and a mother whose roots is North African Jewish. A mother of one child and a grandmother, she holds a PhD in language and communication and has written 16 books, many on the benefits of a healthy lifestyle.
