Yes Rasta.

Yes Rasta. Photographs by Patrick Cariou, text by Perry Henzell. PowerHouse Books, November 2000, $60.00, ISBN 1-57687-073-1

Cariou's pictures of Rastafari living in the Jamaican hills does little to demythologize the devotees of this famous, if little understood, 60-plus year old religion. Yes Rasta seems to build upon the reputation of these worshippers as a hermetic, marijuana smoking, back-to-nature people: the original dropouts. These black-and-white photos of Rastafari are stark; the poverty shown here is close to terrifying; the countryside portrayed is lush and beautiful. But readers will have to stretch to get a glamorous picture of this book's subjects. (If you're interested in more information about Rastafari, see Chanting Down Babylon: A Rastafari Reader, by N. Samuel Murrell, (Temple Univ. Press, 1998, ISBN 1-566-39584-4).

Most of the photos in Yes Rasta are of men. There are too few women, and even fewer families shown. Nowhere in the book-not even in the evocative introduction by Perry Henzell (director of the 1973 film, "The Harder They Come") gives any indication of why this is. Perhaps Henzell and Cariou's too intimate familiarity with the culture gives them too little distance to consider whether the relative absence of women and children creates here an unbalanced, and perhaps unfair, picture of this community.

Geoffrey Jacques is a poet and essayist. His review of the forthcoming PBS documentary, "Scottsboro: An American Tragedy," recently appeared in Cineaste.