Water, My Love

In this trying time, I’ve been missing water. According to my astrological chart, I am mostly water influenced, predominated by the subaltern intensity of Scorpio (by element and modality) and peppered with air (found in both my sun and rising), two earth and two fire elements. My moon, too, lies in Cancer with all its putative intuitive, watery resonances. For a long time pre-COVID-19, I’d foregone driving to the beach and sinking into the warm Gulf Coast waters because I couldn’t trust that the water wouldn’t infect somehow, wouldn’t meld into a small, open nick somewhere, festering and ultimately eating me alive. Too many horror stories of flesh-eating bacteria abounded in the news. Oh, to submerge myself in some saltwater now.

People’s perceptions of someone “from the islands” not knowing how to swim, are fascinating and strange. I’m countering stereotypes on two fronts: blackness and Caribbean; not that others’ assumptions should matter that much, but peeling away stereotype shows how systemic racism in the U.S. (including redlining and environmental racism) is one contributing factor, but also not every island is pocket-handkerchief-sized with the ocean mere footsteps away, as I’ve had to inform people — even another Caribbean (coughs: Bahamanian) person. The easy geographic access that so many folk presume is a given for a person from the Caribbean, isn’t always there.

In Trinidad, non-coastal living meant we drove well over 45 minutes to get to a beach which you needed a car or other vehicle for, and the mythos of being thrown into the ocean to learn the ways of water was unheard of to me. My father who grew up in landlocked Tunapuna can swim but my mother from Georgetown, Guyana, cannot swim. Mummy says we went to the beach loads and down de islands when my siblings and I were small, but I have no recollection and I grew into an adult unsure and unsavvy in the ocean. Schoolmates and I hiked from Lopinot to Blanchisseuse in primary school, and I of course, doused myself in the river which in hindsight was quite dangerous because I could hardly save myself if a strong pull came for me.

I knew, like one person with a swimming pool who was a family friend, then one other that I met at camp during July-August vacation. Her father was a doctor and being invited to her birthday pool lime as a teenager was one of the coolest events I’d experienced at that time. I couldn’t swim but still I went in, splashing about, drenching my plaits and playing Marco Polo with the others. I did attend a few swimming classes at the Y in Port of Spain when I was small, but I never continued, never acquired skills. During the hosting of an exchange student from Martinique, we frequently went with the program to a hotel pool around the Savannah and she tried to teach me to float, assuring me it was easy, but I was unable to master it, sinking anytime she removed her guiding palms.

One could also say that access to professional swimming lessons in many parts of the West Indies has an element of class privilege as well, honestly. But that doesn’t preclude West Indians from being water-people and enjoying river baths and sea excursions replete with food, music and drinks. West Indians being in and around water are never actual indicators of their swimming capabilities.

To counteract some of the aforementioned, plus realising that I need to be in water, added to the fact that I definitely miss out on stuff when I can’t get in (such as a friend’s birthday party sailing from Chaguaramas when nearly everyone jumps in the ocean, but not one to place trust in life jackets out in the deep, I remained, waving sheepishly from the bow) — consequently, I’ve been learning to swim for a few years now. Nowadays, I desperately miss the heated pool, the challenge of coordinating (sometimes with flailing) my body’s movements in weekly lessons. Life sometimes gets me anxious and harried and water helps to soothe that.

Without Context

During December 2018, this blog registered a few pingbacks from the University of Chicago Press Journal HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. “Without Impunity,” which links one of my blog posts as a citation, is an examination of the #MeToo movement and staunchly in the vein of won’t-someone-please-think-of-the-men in its scope. The article is concerned with the “anarchic” aspects of outing reputed sexual harassers and abusers, “ruthless simplifications and magnifications” which unfairly malign men, false accusations, and ultimately decides that “norms have been destabilized,” and “the scales tip toward mob rule.” In an essay concerned with wrestling with context: of kissing and hugging, compliments and erotic situations — it is irksome that my writing is then decontexualised by Thomas Hylland Eriksen in this very piece.

The quote “I love West Indian men’s carriage and swagger, their walk and heteropatriarchal expressions of protection and care. I love how they hail up one another and embrace, give each other bounces and touch thumbs. I love some of the many things they share all up and down the archipelago” from “Why I love to Love and Hate to Love West Indian Men,” is very specific to this particular essay’s unpacking of some aspects of West Indian masculinity, lovingly.

In that very same essay, I also wrote “there is plenty that I don’t love about West Indian masculinity too, by the way. But right now, for the time being, I just want to sit on the verandah and watch them gallery deyself.” It is me giving some West Indian men a bligh and bigging them up. This does not give carte blanche to run and reframe that quote with a lead-in of “some even see complementary gender roles as natural and good.” I actually don’t see gender roles that simplistically at all, and I make no estimations of that kind in that essay or in any other writing on my blog. I have struggled with “traditional” expectations of West Indian womanhood, which I also indicated in that essay. West Indian masculinity is socially constructed in ways that are absolutely detrimental to women, other men and gender nonconforming folks. I am not a nameless “some”; I am one black West Indian feminist writing a blog, and I have a name.

Although my first name (and email) can be found clearly on my blog’s about page, and my full name on the home page, two posts down, nowhere am I named in Eriksen’s essay. I am “a female Trinidadian blogger” whose words are used to bolster hand-wringing about the #MeToo movement, a positionality I am diametrically opposed to. My writing dispossessed from its context and reconstituted by someone who couldn’t even bother to muster the effort to cite me by name, or does not cite me by name but cites everyone else by name, intentionally. Writing cultural criticism outside of academia means reckoning with notions of hierarchical knowledge; it also means seeing how the rigor and attention with respect to context and naming that Eriksen employs to the work of others, compared to mine, is telling. Most of all, black feminist women’s intellectual labour is not just there for the cherry-picking, to link to and quote anonymously whether we have institutional affiliation or not.

In fact, why find a West Indian feminist writer to quote in such an essay? Why not quote a woman whose politics are actually engaged in disseminating #MeToo backlash because those women do exist. I find it hard to believe that an academic, a winner of a research prize, would read one blog entry, never look around to get a sense of my other writing then trot off deciding on a citation. If the takeaway from any encounter with the gender, culture, music, sexuality and lived life that I have written about for years is gender roles are “natural and good”: you are not reading me correctly, you have missed so many points and all the nuances, and you should probably not quote my work without a grasp of this.

Brilliant cultural commentary, gender and sexual analysis, and content curation is consistently being done by black women online; women like Amanda T. McIntyre, Aysha Bee, La Tosha Hart, Ro-Ann Mohammed, Takeallah Rivera, and Riya Jama to name a few. These include Facebook statuses, images, vlogs, other commentary eventually expanded into longer pieces, or cross posted as Tweets or on Tumblr, and the value of their necessary, relevant clapbacks, resistance and truth-telling should not be underestimated.

There have been multiple instances of content created by Aysha and Riya going viral via other people, but first the content is decontextualised from the original creator who is pro-black woman and very intentional about that, then they are unnamed as source, so their work multiplies into the stratosphere of the interweb, “sparking conversations” they should be “grateful” for, but the work is pointedly lifted with no attribution. When they speak up about it, there are many people who still don’t grasp that black women are entitled to and have every right to be properly credited for their writing, particularly when their names, usernames and blogs can be easily found. Naming is important; and saying, well, that’s how it is with the internet is not an excuse. If you can find writing to directly quote from and repost — you can find the original with the same energy.

Eriksen’s decision to use the Caribbean as a touchstone for the global reach of #MeToo loops from a couple whose business is out on the road, to a misconstrued quote from myself, but the region, en masse, has not engaged in #MeToo on a wide scale. Some West Indian women undoubtedly have joined the call-outs of predatory behaviour, but it has not been a concerted undertaking. While Tarana Burke‘s movement is the originator and predates the hashtag of the same name, the Caribbean has its own sexual violence and harassment activism preceding the onslaught of the second incarnation of #MeToo.

The Caribbean’s homegrown reckoning came with #LifeInLeggings, an on-going movement and hashtag created by Ronelle King from Barbados. Localized movements, actions and marches created by women living in the Caribbean wracked islands with an unflinching pronouncement that women had had enough: of the sexual harassment, street harassment, sexual violence and abuse. West Indian women studying away or living in the diaspora also joined the rise-up on Facebook and on Twitter. We shared posts, commented and messaged one another. So much came pouring out. And yes, men were also publicly named and shamed and even hit with a tambourine. A livestream of a Life in Leggings public discussion from Port of Spain, Trinidad, unmasked a local man as a serial sexual harasser to an audible gasp of persons in attendance. Consequently, since then, said man, his social status, and business venture seem to be doing just fine.

Meanwhile, Eriksen presents the region in contrast to the bloodthirst of #MeToo of the Global North, a space where public arguments are lo-fi #MeToo ensuring “witnesses are present,” “full context is known,” and this Trini feminist blogger thinks all is fine and wonderful with gender roles. Yeah, no. The boldface erasure of my entire worldview to use as support for permutations over #MeToo is upsetting. It’s not a project I would have ever wanted my words to be entwined with. Between the anonymous in-text citation and the fact that my words are even in there, I don’t know which is more aggravating. Though honestly, probably both, to varying degrees.

Eriksen is adamant that #MeToo is “murky terrain” because the movement doesn’t just focus on rape, “a punishable crime in most societies,” “but also on harassment and unwanted sexual attention” as though the three are widely disparate acts. From lived experiences, many women know how easily a man can move from small talk to harassment to sexual violence, from unsolicited comments to subtle or direct sexual coercion, and the shape-shifting dance of cultural negotiations and dangers means that one is never far from the next. You give some men an inch, they will take a mile and then some. Trust and believe that.

Even in parts of North America, men are barely being held accountable for acts of rape, allegedly, a punishable crime. Brock Turner and heaps of unprocessed rape kits both occur after all. What that means for women and girls of the Global South is much, much worse, and that’s not because the men are all brutes, but the existence of rape laws does not serve to address sexual crimes or bring justice for most women — anywhere. Mentioning such laws cannot be done without acknowledging systemic barriers in place and overarching patriarchal power structures, all of which necessitate movements like #LifeInLeggings and #MeToo to reframe narratives, call ish out, force systemic overhauls and empower survivors. Who else is going to do that? Societies that often blame and shame women? Police? Law enforcement in the U.S. has an issue with rape of its own.

For black women, black queer or lesbian women, queer women of colour, trans women, poor women, women with no immigration status, wherever they are, the potential for legal redress is even worse. A woman in a coma under residential facility care was not even safe. The amount of sexual violence that women and girls face around the world, precisely for being who they are is tremendous. #MeToo is not “murky,” it is a clear signifier of the kinds of interconnected and multiplicities of dangers women face.

Another important aspect of Life in Leggings was showing West Indian men just how much rape and sexual assault proliferated among people they knew. One Barbadian man, Corey Sandiford, noted on Facebook:

I used to think rape was mostly about a mentally disturbed man hiding in dark clothes at night, waiting to ambush a woman walking alone. Just like the movies.

Only to get older and be appalled at the number of women who have casually mentioned to me – personally and professionally – that they were sexually violated by someone they knew when they were younger. A family member. A friend who took advantage of a situation. A school teacher. Someone from church. Not “casual” because they have a lax attitude to what happened mind you – but casual because they managed to make peace with it. . . .

Anger, I’m not sure yet at whom or what, or how to direct it. I don’t know what the ideal intervention point is, or how I can help protect. But #Barbados and the #Caribbean are rife with rape stories.

The vast majority of men are not, in fact, being chased by a hashtag wielding mob with scant evidence. Many continue to face no consequences for their actions whatsoever. And if it seems that sketchy, sexually-tinged encounters trail behind so many men wherever they go, perhaps you are grossly underestimating many men’s entitlement to accessing women, and the tacit, toxic messages they’ve received from society for years — from childhood.

That this is being undone is good. I support women, abhor sexual violence and I stand with survivors. My blog quote being used by Thomas Hylland Eriksen does not change any of this. I remain committed to feminist engagement, creative work and unlearning nonsense that no longer serves me. I am rooted in a community who has shown me more than once how we are the ones we have been waiting for. I will continue to take up space, here on a blog post, or elsewhere, demanding clarity and decrying blatant disrespect.

I will not be erased.

Don’t Tell Women to Wine on Other Men to Make an Abusive Man Jealous

These were some thoughts below that I shared on Facebook about the “X” song after I first saw the video on there, and I’ve been seeing the video trending around the place again which reminded me that the song still low-key (re: high-key) bothers me despite everyone being amused by the animation. And while the animation waist throwing is mildly entertaining, the song’s directive makes me want to scream. Please, do not wine on other men to bun’ your abusive and violent man. Please don’t. The lived realities of rampant gender-based violence across the region and in the West Indian diaspora abroad means the song cannot and does not exist outside of that context. Walking Into Walls horrifically aggregates much of it (women choppings, stabbings, killed by gun, burnings, sexual violence — you name it) and these happen weekly, sometimes daily in communities all throughout the Caribbean.

Considering the levels of IPV across the region and femicide, this song had me reeling. I mean. Where to start, yes.

1. Is how a woman man cuff her in the eye in song…like?

2. I don’t know how else to explain to some people that healthy relationships and love are NOT about control, possession and ownership — even if it’s seemingly mutual. That’s not love and the many ways wining gets overlaid with ownership and possession culturally can be dangerous, actually literally dangerous in situations like this. Given how much fights, beatings and buss-head have or nearly will break out all over for reasons exactly like this.

Now, granted, two grown people can have a mutual wining contract of sorts related to boundaries, respect and other factors, but it’s really unhealthy when it’s primarily rooted in (dis)possession and notions of ownership and it only functions from that space. Culturally, that’s not the message or socialisation we often get and that kind of thinking has to be unlearnt for many people and it takes work (speaking from experience).

3. This song sets up a false dichotomy whereby the man described in this song is sufficiently “burnt” by a wine. He’s actually boxing someone in the eye (and cheating, textbook abuser stuff nah), but somehow a wine reinscribes controlling power differentials, so the woman can gi’ him as bad as he gives her by wining on other men — except that is not what’s needed at all.

4. Men like the man in this song do exist and all wining on other men does to a man like the one in this song is to piss them off MORE. It’s not cute or a path to be taken lightly despite the stick man raging amusingly. Men like the man in this song are already wont to attribute blame on the woman for all manner of perceived transgressions and “disrespect”, and many times the rationalisation is shoddy or even non-existent, ever-changing and its sole purpose is to feed the man’s bouts of rage and reframe accountability so she is incessantly at fault for his violence and rage.

5. I wish this song had a different arc altogether because even with the domestic violence message at the end, and the supposed wining as a liberatory path, it feels really painfully off too. Why is the woman “liberated” from violence by wining on other men but only for the benefit of smiting the abusive ex? Why is the abusive boyfriend crying at the end because she is blissfully wining? What does that imply? Like, whyyyyy to all of it?

“Poem for a Gunman” – Soyini Ayanna Forde — Novel Niche: A Place for Books

I was quite thrilled to see my poem among those featured on #PuncheonandVetiver last month over at Novel Niche because “absolutely unmixed attention is prayer” and having someone dress the altar of your work so carefully is rare and it’s quite enjoyable to experience and also low-key strange but in a good way (talk about feeling writerly, oui). Being a writer also means being subject to criticism and I know not all of it would feel like this: ensconced in the celebratory month-long reflections of contemporary Caribbean writing.  

Sometimes, love takes you by the mouth. Both of them. Soyini Ayanna Forde‘s “Poem for a Gunman” tugs your underpinnings aside, curls urgency and sincerity upwards into your heart in slow, molasses-drugged strokes. The address of the poem is intimate, revelatory, confessional: we learn of a lover with “slow walk solid calf muscles nutmeg flesh […]

via “Poem for a Gunman” – Soyini Ayanna Forde — Novel Niche: A Place for Books

Queer Dancing at CWSDC (Revelations of a Sort)

This year’s 2017 Caribbean Women and Sexual Diversity Conference (CWSDC) found me in Saint Lucia aboard the Black Pearl boat lulled by rum, dancing and working up a sweat despite the cool ocean breeze, and I have thinking a lot about it and in particular, about queering spaces and what that means and feels like. Before I launch into these observations, a few things: these are just a few thoughts I have mulling around; nothing claims to be empirical. Different people will have varying thoughts about these experiences from that night and that’s okay. And lastly, not all of these thoughts have been well wrung out. Some are still soaking and marinating.

This experience was really important for me because even though I reside in the states, the opportunity for experiencing queer Caribbean spaces in my city is non-existent. Collectives throwing queer dance parties specifically for people of colour like New York’s Papi Juice and Fake Accent or Toronto’s Yes Yes Y’all don’t occur in here. There are gay clubs, then there are Caribbean spots, and there isn’t overlap between the two. While I have enjoyed gay clubs, I really can’t take house music in my head all night long (not even trap all night, sorry), but I deal with it when I have to, whereas the West Indian parties, I can hear all my soca, old kaiso, Afrobeats, dancehall etc. but the space is not queer.

Most of my Caribbean local partying in Florida (and I have done a lot) has been inside heteronormative places (shout-out to Élysse for unpacking the term “heteronormative” at the conference). Like compulsory heterosexuality, social spaces can and are heteronormative because that’s the presumption and expectation: that men will only dance with women, that everyone who looks like a man is and everyone who looks like a woman is. Plus, people can be homophobic assholes and get angry when they feel “visibly” gay people are “pushing their lifestyle” in their faces when they are simply doing the exact same thing as straight people: going out, getting turnt and having a good time with each other.

Queerness as verb: people can and do identify as queer as in the noun and queer can also refer to a verb, the action of queering a space. Is that possible? Yes, I would say so. What does it take to actively queer a space?

Safety is a must. The Black Pearl was a safe space because it felt like a space where you could be safely queer in. I have no idea what the boat is like for other events, but for this party on this night, that’s what it felt like. This is supported by the interaction of other gay, trans and queer individuals. Secondly, queer people of colour simply being in a space doesn’t make it queered though. The space is queered when the queer people inside are actively engaged with each other and using and interacting with the physical space: so yuh wining, can approach someone to dance, can navigate the space and not shirk who you are; you claim and take up space and and are unapologetic for it. If you are in a party and queer and you cannot freely take up space or wine on your preferred dance partner, and you have to stand up whole night for example, the space is not queered. You are just there existing. However, that’s understandable and happens. Sometimes we attend events because we really want to go, but the space is not safe to be queer in.

Ideally, a queered experience is interactive. So there was a Florida soca party I used to attend all the time and there was this one lesbian couple who would show up: a girl with a ras and her girlfriend.  I did not know either of them personally, but I knew through mutual connections that one of them was a Trini; the other girl may have been too. Anyway, so when they showed (which they did often), wining up on each other, being affectionate, very unambiguous about what was taking place and freely moving inside and participating in the party space, even dancing with other people: the space is queered a bit.

Having company in numbers helps with queering any space, and you really can’t do it alone. The other example that comes to mind is during last year’s CWSDC conference in St. Croix in the karaoke bar. That space was likely not normally a queer space by any stretch of the imagination but once we saturated the area with our presence, dancing and interactions — even shout-outs from the resident local lesbian DJ, we were actively queering the space; we also rolled deep. Of course, it is not always safe to do so, and it’s possible also that some people there did not like it either.

Likewise, at the street party in Gros Islet, wherever we were and engaging with the energy of the event and each other, that space was queered. At one point during the night as we walked by, a St. Lucian man addressed me and said, “You’re pretty.” He was polite enough and made no attempt to touch me or move closer, and I graciously told him thank-you. He then said to me, “If yuh was a flower, I woulda pick yuh” or something to that effect, and it is at the point that another woman at the conference who was walking in front of me, interjects, takes my hand and leads me away. With no semblance of possession, she strategically shuts the conversation down.

There were other similar occurrences; effectively, times when we queered a space for ourselves within the open street and the loud music, then men attempted to insert themselves to disrupt what we had created. Some men felt because they wanted to engage us, they were entitled to and they did. When our queerness bucks up against the presumed heteronormativity of a particular space, tension can be created. When men’s access is flagrantly denied by other femme and femme-presenting people, assumptions are challenged. This can also be dangerous in certain instances.

Navigating wines was interesting. As someone who has primarily feted in majority heteronormative party spaces, this was actually my first time like, deeply submerged in a whole queer dancing soca session (among other musical genres) with people I did not know well. Not counting a queer dance party in New York a couple years ago where level vintage reggae and some soca was played or being home earlier this year, and my friends taking me to a club around the corner from where my parents live in St. Augustine, but in both instances I only danced with really good friends of mine. On the Black Pearl, I really break away.

I also learnt that it’s different bracing to receive wines and I definitely have to work on that (ha!). I recognize that my understanding of wining dynamics is couched in the heteronormative, and in that context I am usually always “giving” the wine and throwing it back on someone. In a heteronormative dance space, cishet men pretty much receive the wines all the time which is to say, put ah woman in front and ah man behind is the general guideline. The differences are really subtle inside a queer dance space and I know this sounds like some quasi-essentialist ting: men wine this way vs. women — but at least I’m aware that it’s all constructed.

Really, it’s not so much the wining but the mechanisms of it, surrounding it and some of the assumptions that I am making depending on the “role” I am in, which I am not going to go into much detail at this time. Nevertheless, West Indian women (speaking from a lived Trini experience here) have an existing history of women wining up on each other (see blog pic and maybe your own personal experiences too), that is dancing that may have had nothing to do with anyone’s attractions and orientation/s and was sometimes used as a convenient tool to block nearby annoying dance partners and also, I think, simply as an expression of a kind of camaraderie and vibes among you and your crew.  All of this has given me a lot to think about while making me feel all the feels. There aren’t many things more beautiful than the resilience of queer Caribbean women dancing, thriving and living out loud. My life’s goals include experiencing so much more of that.

*I do not personally know the women in the blog pic or how they identify (but it’s a great pic). Photo credit: Demar Watson via Tumblr. Used under a creative commons license.

Saltfish, Pleasure and the Politics of Eating

Hearing Ishawna’s “Equal Rights” for the first time months ago was so very satisfying. I’ve written about Ishawna before and I am a fan, so when I first heard this song, I hollered out one stink jamette cackle. It is the kind of song you nearly don’t know you need until it happens: actively demanding pleasing, riding and owning a “mainstream” dancehall beat and Ishawna coyly demanding “show mi what yu tongue can do.” The song is also gratifying because we haven’t heard female pleasure articulated in that way before while we were so busy being inundated for years with men’s opinions of why it shouldn’t be done.

Lyrically, not all of the metaphors work to the same degree; I’m so here for the delicious physicality inside the verbs “suck” and “nyam”, but “chewing” on my pussy decidedly like French fries of all things — not so much. Still, nearly every line is unapologetic. The weaponising of the pussy and Ishwana’s reinscribing of the dancehall men’s lyrical and phallic gun (for one example, but there are others that approximate the cocky and specifically, penetrative sexual intercourse, with violent imagery) means that what is between her thighs is simultaneously like a cutlass: a tool frequently used throughout the region to enact horrible injuries upon bodies in both public and domestic spaces.

The spectacular horror of a cutlass attack wielded high, with every dull thud of the blade’s crack through flesh and bone is likened to the pussy’s grip and the pussy owner’s potential to extract what’s needed and demanded through its cutting hold. What does the investment in vaginal tightness mean for women and can women elect to do so: elevate their own pussy performance on their own terms for their own damn selves and satisfaction? I am reminded of Red Dragon’s classic chune and how I am further of the belief that the pussy pat is an affirmative and declarative statement when outside of and separate from a man directing you to do so.

Sections of Ishawna’s song’s hook and its title are obviously hyperbolic to some extent, but the estimation of “equal rights and justice” with getting your pum pum eaten, given the specific cultural context, does not happen in a vacuum.  There are reasons behind why women are squealing out hearing this song. Those people expressing indignation that “rights” and “justice” have anything to do with pussy eating were probably not lambasting performers and regional sound systems that have continuously made violent assertions of masculinity against the backdrop of not eating pussy.

Ishawna’s evocation of the pussy as cutlass, rooted in questionable sexual respectability concepts of vaginal tightness versus looseness, is not less problematic just because she said so, but it further complicates our examination of what good pum pum looks, feels and tastes like and where we, as women, get those ideas from. It would have been wonderful to hear yu gon’ eat whatever comes out of these panties and yu will enjoy it, but Ishawna is not about completely subverting the sexual expectations of cishet men; she still chooses to cater and she just reframes their expectations, so the pum pum is well shaved and she drinks her pineapple juice daily.

The other issue with one part of the song’s opening is it uses pum pum eating as a prop for a man to feel good about otherwise failed sexual performance, not because he genuinely loves and wants to go down, and his partner deserves all the orgasms; but the clincher is really the next line where Ishawna caustically observes that the man is “bright enough fi a look gyal fi shine you, but yu no wan’ taste.” The whole double standard is here laid bare and stripped to its center of nonsense.

Surrender, sometimes

Yesterday evening was the first time I ever did a cycle of very gentle yoga with the express intention of being just that: gentle with myself. It was the sweetest, tenderest unexpected gift. I moved where I felt called to, refrained from judging myself, doing only what felt good to myself; I thanked my body for her existence, for its healing one day at a time, my stomach lining for dutifully absorbing antibiotics. Of course it’s being sick that takes me here: restful and watchful with myself, listening to every bone whirr and creak and settle. After being fever-racked and falling into the body ache and sweat of it — it’s good to be climbing out on the other side. Existence is the frailest of things. I thought about some of my ancestors who didn’t have the luxury of taking time off from work to recover, of resting through their healing and being able to be gentle with themselves in all the ways they would have liked to.

I also found myself momentarily captivated by a photo of me I picked up sometime when I was home. It fell out of a book that slid off a stack. It’s me in Kiddies Carnival on one of the parade routes: St. James or maybe downtown. Not a little kid but not full-fledged young adult, that in-between stage. I look strangely self-possessed, one arm akimbo, a standard clenched strongly, shimmering. I confront the camera, my plaited bang, a long arc of glitter curved up the side of my cheek like warpaint: Who is this girl?

Evenings of cradling yourself are necessary, of listening to new Ishawna: a small wine to open hips (more on that in an upcoming post), of medicine and melancholy and knowing you are trying. That you are a thriving, slowly crumbling being.

Gathering Healing

Several days before embarking for the 4th Caribbean Women and Sexual Diversity Conference in St. Croix, I was perched on my haunches around parts of my apartment sweet-talking to my pum pum; over bedroom carpet and bathroom floor, trying to coax a medium-sized yoni egg down. What would TSA think if their scanners picked up something dark and ominously egg-shaped tucked beyond my vaginal canal? This was more than a small worry. In perfect timing though, my yoni answers my breath and directives. Working with a yoni egg is (among other things) an exercise in patience, in tuning in, surrender and understanding your own fears.

Next thing is I leave and I reach. Two days into arrival, my waist beads break after the return from dipping them by hand into the ocean’s morning warmth. I take this as a sign they have probably completed the work they were meant to do, or I have worn them the hell out. Attempting to pick up small beads of mauve, rose and gunmental gray feel like a kind of penance. Conference agenda beckons, so with no time fuh dat, I abandon the goal. When I return to my hotel room, seeing the floor clear, the Ziploc bag on the bathroom counter top crowded with what I didn’t do — by the women who clean rooms, undoubtedly black or brown and Caribbean; I am grateful for their hands, their deft sweeping, their attentive eyes missing nothing. I miss my beads’ snug embrace above my hips though, the way the stones press into my skin beyond my belly’s jiggle.

Earlier this year, a wise Jamaican woman informed me that healing also happens on an energetic level and because energy flows, you can start small in one area of your life and this will invariably flow into other areas of your life. A crucial aspect of that is being mindful and intentional about what your energetic flow is like. What thoughts am I feeding myself with? Where are those instances where I can pivot from that energetic shift to another one that nourishes me better? Can I treat myself with compassion in these instances?

Meeting new people can test my projections: the things I ricochet internally and outward and back; the endlessly seeping wound. The conference gave me many opportunities to reflect on these. It goes without saying that though wonderful, this was hardly strictly utopia either; we were not all people who think the same way about everything. There were moments of dark antagonism, both real and perceived. But in there too, flashes of necessary illumination. I am still mastering how to take ownership of my projections and handle myself with the same care I allow for others.

What does healing look like to you? To me, it might look like three Caribbean women frankly talking desire and sex and consent, buffeted by sea breeze. It might look like another conversation, ripe with honesty about vulvas and revelation, the mush and the wet want of sex. Sexual conversation is a really good place to lay yourself bare with folks (pun intended). What better place to throw off the shackles of societal conventions around respectability and nuzzle down inside declarations of our own desires, and what better place than a pussy or an anus? Though Caribbean sex talk is plentiful in our societies: kaiso and picong and comedy sketch and dancehall and rum shop and street corner and “gyal, sit down like a lady,” whose sex is acceptable and whose isn’t?

How often do I get to freely indulge in  ribald expression with other women whom I have newly met? Not nearly often enough for me, apparently. I told a friend afterwards, “I have never had a discussion like that with women who aren’t all straight (or mostly straight).” I have never held community with diverse West Indian sexualities before to know how much I needed it. In resisting, or attempting to resist, the cultural narratives so many societies have thrust onto us as black and brown women, transmen, gender non-conforming folx and queer women, you make breathing room possible for someone else who is not there yet.

Of course, people’s lives are also much more than just the “issues” they represent and/or embody. It’s messy and beautiful and resilience and plenty more. Being a West Indian activist of the diaspora and living outside the home region means confronting issues of accessibility and privilege and above all, it means listening to those who live and fight and do the hard work on the ground in the region day in and out as the authority on their own lives. I am reminded that moving forward, I need to remember to ask how and in what ways I can be of service to the friends I’ve built connections with.

What do you need that I can assist with, either through mobilizing or emotional support? What are you crowdfunding, who needs clapback back-up, signal boosting or someone to bounce around some ideas with? I am reminded that the culture that grew me and I lovingly theorise on from afar is consistently growing and thriving (or regressing) in ways and I am not there to intimately know, but I need to make more time to engage with that through the regional people that I know and not just the articles that I read.

Twice at different airports, I became leaky, a certifiable basket case of tearful emotions with all of my raging, sensitive Cancer moon. How am I so moved by this gathering of activists, the photographic art and the poetry, space-making, knowledge sharing, the weirdness of being and feeling? In Puerto-Rico, I spill most of what I am carrying and another conference attendee helps me gather, hold space and honour what I am bumbling through with care and without judgement.

Knowing yuhself only gets messier the further you dig, but that isn’t always such a bad thing after all. Thank-you CWSDC 2016 for being a space to help me unearth more of who I am and who I am working towards being.

For other perspectives on the conference, please check out Freedom House and Arc International.

Big shout-outs to Earth & Alkemy for the body beads and for offering to fix them for me; I’ll be taking you up on that offer soon. Gave her a link if you want any; trust meh, they will change yuh life.

My conference Prezi probably makes way less sense without the talking points but feel free to get into it if anyone’s interested.

How Ishawna Encourages Us to Be Sexy, Brilliant and Free

It’s been a long time since I was last a schoolgirl, rolling up the waist of my dark blue, A-line skirt to make it shorter, scraping my hair into a ridiculously tight bun with the aid of copious amounts of hair grease and water. There were at least a couple desks bearing futile attempts at immorality and infamy through etchings noting that I was here once, and naturally, my form class was the best and baddest. Now, secondary school and its accompanying experiences almost seems like a whirl. The schoolgirl though, forever occupies a significant space within the Caribbean.

She is still ever watched over and lectured to, and her comportment and decorum in the streets — particularly in uniform — are still lamented over. We always hear more about the ills of schoolgirls than the schoolboys. Under a video shared on Facebook of a line of teens, seemingly on the balcony of a school getting wined up on, the caption considered whether this is what young girls are being sent to school for. Nothing is said though to the young men receiving those wines.

Education is one of the pillars of West Indian cultural identity; it’s a social marker in our respective islands and a vehicle for possible socioeconomic class movement and in migration, it’s wielded as a veritable cultural staple of who are as a people: people who utilize the benefits of and understand the need to “beat book.” Many West Indians abroad are beneficiaries of post independence educational offerings like government scholarships which allowed our parents to study and helped some of us to be the second ones in our families to go away for university. We project a lot onto schoolgirls through the ways we revere education and its possibilities, with the hopes and dreams of generations getting stuffed into their book bags and saddled onto their backs. And because they are little women in training, everything expected and demanded about good womanhood is also heaped upon them early as well.

The schoolgirl fighting videos, which are plentiful and nearly endless: a flurry of hair pulling and shouting and cuss-outs and blouses askew and fists and legs flying, feed into the public’s haranguing over them. The fights are problematic for true, but are the boys not fighting as much, or are the girls just showing out more? At times, it seems we’re so captivated by being voyeurs of messy schoolgirl violence that no one stops to enquire what else is behind what’s taking place. No doubt a plethora of factors contribute to the filmed altercations, but the path of decent womanhood means containing anger. Women with broughtupcy aren’t supposed to thrash about and rage.

I can only make assumptions about why it appears as though that girls fight more these days, and they fight for an audience, and they fight to assert themselves and eke out an identity that is against what society, for a long time now, expects school girls to be. Though school-aged boys do occasionally appear in parent shaming videos, school-aged girls are far more prominent. They are shamed and violently berated and hit for twerking and being sexual among other reasons.  A schoolgirl got peed on by R. Kelly once. Some schoolgirls ceremoniously pledge their virginity to their fathers assuring the sanctity of their hymens. This shows the sexual violence, dangers and sexual gate-keeping afflicting all kinds of school girls.

In dancehall and reggae, the schoolgirl intermittently appears and nine out of ten times, she is a kind of cautionary tale and invariably, in need of guidance of some sort. Sometimes, it’s already too late, and although Vybz Kartel gallantly decides to stand by her side, in nearly no way, shape or form is schoolgirl pregnancy considered acceptable by most religiously informed West Indian societies.  When not directly prefaced by “school,” she is a girl, no doubt of school age, who is referenced in song  who will “never stay at home”, and has “been with many men since she was only ten.”

West Indian Race, Colour & Identity: A Reading List

Photo credit: via Tumblr

This is a reading list for West Indians examining race, racism, colourism and identity. Every time racism comes to the forefront in the United States, the black and African descent diaspora shows itself: in good ways and not so great ways. There are West Indians on the #AllLivesMatter bandwagon too, and I am giving you all a stink cut-eye.

One of the things some West Indians cling to is the narratives we tell ourselves about the absence of “real” racism, compared to the U.S., and West Indians in foreign perpetuate this thinking as much as some in the region. When they migrate, they join the ranks of those who are simply exhausted with African Americans whining about race, as they see it. They don’t get it, they claim, because of where they’re from.

The absence of Jim Crow and public lynchings does not mean that we do not and have not had to deal with racism — systemic and otherwise. Furthermore, being from black & brown majority places doesn’t magically mean folks are immune to internalized antiblack racism or that it cannot and doesn’t exist. It doesn’t mean the police are immune there, either. Some of the worst agents of white supremacy are other black & brown people. True talk.

How is it that the exact same caricatures of and aversions to blackness have managed to traverse the globe and thrive on our shores too? Strange how that works, eh? In no particular order, here is a sampling of West Indians considering privilege, colour, identity and much more. They are not afraid to share their lived experiences. To say when we need to do better. And when we need to sit and acknowledge the aspects of our societies that we’d rather pretend didn’t exist while pointing a finger at others for doing and thinking the same.

1. Dylan Kerrigan, “Transnational Anti-Black Racism and State Violence in Trinidad,” Cultural Anthroplogy

“Just as it was in colonial times, Trinidad and Tobago’s political elite disseminates an uncomplicated image of crime that links criminality with poor, urban, opportunistic Afro-Trinidadian males who kill each other. Rarely are any other groups in society implicated. This is an irony not lost on many locals, since Trinidad and Tobago is well-known for a never-ending list of white-collar crimes that are rarely punished in the courts.”

2. Eriche S., “Black Feminism in the Caribbean: Examining the Mulatto Effect,” West Indian Critic

“Without a distinct and large white upper class we see anti-black dynamics play out in a way that misleads people to believe we have transcended race. We’ve merely transplanted a racial hierarchy in a way that suits our population. The closest to white occupy the top, whereas the furthest away from whiteness occupy the bottom of the hierarchy. Every aspect of this hierarchy was constructed during colonialism and has not disappeared, even today.”

3. Nicole Dennis-Benn, “Growing Up With Miss Jamaica,” Elle  

“Their lives existed far away from ours in a world beyond Kingston 8—worlds beyond Constant Spring and Hope Road. Their worlds existed on hills that seemed to touch the clouds. At night, the lights on those hills blinked like stars, mocking us for living in the pressure-cooked alleys of Kingston, the ugly trenches. They seemed to have it easy, never once having to think about disguising their blackness or growing their hair. They woke up that way. Went to bed that way. Sometimes we spotted them in public. They stood out among the dark black faces like beautiful red hibiscus flowers among weeds.

The solution first appeared in hushed whispers throughout the school compound. Dark-skinned girls flocked to the restroom on the fifth-form block. “Yuh see how Lola face look clear an’ pretty? Is bleaching cream do it!” The other girls listened reverentially, as though what they heard would somehow answer a lifelong prayer.”

4. Ayana Malaika Crichlow, “Growing up a Black Girl in Trinidad,” Huffington Post

“Although I currently live in the U.S., I grew up in Trinidad in the 80s and 90s as a black girl. To be black in a country that idealizes a mixed ethnicity aesthetic, was rough to say the least. Although I shared the same parental genes as my sister, she was considered mixed, whereas I have dark skin. I also had kinky hair, whereas my sister and all my cousins had curly hair, or “good hair” according to Trinis. It didn’t matter that my heritage also included French, Scottish, East Indian and African; I was black to everyone who saw me. This wouldn’t have bothered me, if I hadn’t been treated as less than my sister for most of our childhood because if it.”

5. “Carlie Ester on the culture of race in Barbados,” Antillean Media Group

“Kadooment, a street parade of rum-fuelled revelry that draws masqueraders from a cross-section of Barbadian society, bares an open secret that is rarely publicly questioned: it has a masquerade band whose members are almost entirely White.

The band, known as Blue Box Cart, is traditionally always the first band to lead the Kadooment parade, and stands in stark contrast to all others that – by and large – reflect the Black ethnic make-up of the 166 sq. mile island. Says Ester, ‘to witness a sea of white faces gathered together is at first glance, surprising…[but] it’s just another way in which the race relations of plantation society curiously manifest themselves in 2014.'”

6. Victoria Brown, “In Solidarity: When Caribbean Immigrants Become Black,” NBC News

“While the majority of my immigrant students could weigh in on why they considered African Americans less successful, Caribbean immigrants in particular were at pains to define themselves as separate from native born African Americans. Most discouraging was their de facto confidence that American blacks made poor decisions, and their lack of criticism of undeserved racist stereotyping.

I taught writing but felt my students needed an historical context to understand how black struggle and resistance had made so many of their immigrant aspirations, including a post-secondary education, possible. Indeed, how they came to have a black, immigrant woman as their professor.”

7. Luis Vasquez La Roche, “Walking While Black,” Luis Vasquez La Roche

“Anahita explains again what we are doing and what the walking seminar is about. While she speaks to him I look over to Miatta and tell her that he stopped me because I am black. She asked me if he really said that and replied to her “ Yes, he just told that to Ramon”.

He keeps asking for our documents, which Anahita explains again to him that everyone’s documents are in the car along with the rest of our things. I looked over to my right and see Michelle and Andreya walking over to where we were, followed by another Police car. The Police car was right behind them. It seemed like they were rounding up prisoners or suspects. A few police officers got out of the car. I cannot recall how many Police officers were there with us. Some of them start directing traffic while others talk to other people in the group.”

8. Eriche S., “White Privilege In The Caribbean,” West Indian Critic

“Whiteness is a funny thing in the Caribbean. Some pretend that it’s nonexistent, but really it is invisible, similar to whiteness in the United States but not quite the same. While our lives are different from those of Black Americans, we suffer oppression along the same lines.”