Lera Cindy Mckenzie

Force Ripe Lera Cindy Mckenzie

Set on a West Indian island, Force Ripe portrays the story of Lee, a little girl growing up in a northern village in the 1970s, when it was normal for children to be left with grandparents while parents went abroad to work and send money home. It was the time of revolution, during which Lee's father joined a growing Rastafarian movement.

Force Ripe tells, in Lee's voice, the story of her life in the ghetto with her brother and father, when the siblings were taken out of school and left on their own to roam the bushes and smoke ganja. It describes how she was taken by a Rastaman when she was just ten, and how she survived - with no one to turn to - during a time of women's liberation, free education and youth movements. She is subsequently rescued when the Rastafarian commune is disbanded by the People's Revolutionary Army-(PRA), thereafter begins her struggles to bury her past.