Once again, thank-you to WordPress for this fun synopsis and a rollicking 2012 to you all!
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 8,200 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Or do some string instruments sound like soul tears expelling themselves in notes? Either way, loving this version below.
There are few things I love more than men wining in wanton abandonment. Maybe good food and a select range of other things excite me more. I love men wining because of the ways in which it disturbs the mask of heterosexual masculinity. It flexes, disrupts and discombobulates with a swivel of the bamsee — most of all, it makes a lot of people, men and women, uncomfortable. I’ve contemplated before how masculinity is sometimes performed inside soca and the ways in which wining is coded inside the performativity of the stage persona (or perceived actual persona) of some male soca artists.
As a Trinbagonian from a wide ranging Caribbean & West Indian background reaching into Guyana and even further up the archipelago, seeing men dance completely unhinged is nothing new to me. Luckily, among some of the young men I know, seeing men wine down the place and bend over in front of a woman is also nothing scandalous to me and though I love to see it myself personally, I understand that it’s still a revolutionary upending of masculinity in some ways. Consider for instance, this video of Congolese singer (and newly crowned wining-god by me) Fally Ipupa’s stage performance rehearsal with his band and dancers:
Predictably, under the video comments, there is one lamenting “why will a guy dance like a women [sic]” in addition to “this shit is SO gay…omg!!” The sexism and homophobia of these two comments underscore the power and meaning of the hetero (and/or assumed hetero) men who dance employing their hips, refusing to be constrained by context and widespread socio-cultural policing of acceptable vs. non-acceptable expressions of hegemonic masculinity.
What I really appreciate in this performance is the way in which the men’s gyrations seem to be performed fully, unapologetically with gusto by men, almost as a means to its own end — there are no women backup dancers bouncing around with them, and there are no women even seen in the audience within the camera’s range and this centers the men’s sexually suggestive hip movements in a uniquely singular way that I rarely see some black men do anymore.
Across the diaspora, men are allowed to be sexually suggestive in dance within reason and are even allowed to make people uncomfortable, within reason — so “daggering” might make some people uncomfortable but it’s an acceptable form of male sexually suggestive dance. R&B singers can slow wine at certain select moments, usually involving a lap dance on stage and a woman pulled from the audience or something of that nature. Wining, and men wining without women as props — not quite as acceptable.
Gay Caribbean Men! Please have your say in the CARIMIS (The Caribbean Men’s Internet Survey) below:
Learn more about the survey’s aim here.
Please share, reblog on various platforms and forward as you wish! Thank-you!
We wanted to start a conversation about Caribbean people, about West Indian people, about our contemporary experiences; about the variegation and the connections that “thread archipelagos”, ranging through race & identity to culture, mental health to constructs of beauty and more. There’s no one, easy answer to what it means to be a West Indian, a Caribbean person — or any one way in which that identity shapes the person holding it dear to them.
These posts are a sampling from across that spectrum:
Black Power’s Inheritance, by Mariamma Kambon
Brown Gurl Envy, by Linisa aka Awkward Adult
Continental, Colonial or Creole, by David
Milk in its coffee, by derevolushunwidin
Untitled, by Kim
Being the Fat Friend, by Linisa aka Awkward Adult
Call me crazy, by pieces2peace
Darkies, Brownings and Red Woman: Female Desirability and Skin Color in the Caribbean, by soyluv
Artwork, by Tanya Marie Williams
Thanks for the interwebs link love from:
The hosts at Lati-Negros
This blog carnival will be continuously updated for the rest of the year so please check back to see what’s new. If you’d like to join in the conversation: email creativecommess [at] gmail [dot] com with a blog link, submission/s or questions. Otherwise, do support the participating bloggers and their links: read, comment, share!
The title of this blog carnival comes from George Lamming’s seminal novel, In the Castle of my Skin.
By: Tanya Marie Williams
By: soyluv
The proliferation of “darkie” to describe women of a dark skin tone in Trinidad and Tobago is a fascinating and complicated space within which to explore. Though “darkie” and its popular conflation with “sweet” may exist as catcalls alongside a sout [1], frequently proclaimed by men to dark-skinned women out in the street or elsewhere, this term is not solely reserved for females. Men can and are categorically defined as “sweet darkies” too. Most importantly, darkie is understood to be reserved for those of a specific skin shade and ethnic group simultaneously.
In Trinidad, where “darkie” takes root and flourishes in the local parlance, replete with t-shirts available by a local designer proclaiming “I love my Trini darkie”, (as well as “my Trini reds” and “my Trini browning”), the term functions as an important reaffirmation of Afro-descendant beauty, by calling attention to a certain skin tone in all its chocolate splendor. Its contemporary usage in Trinbagonian society is also markedly different from the American term “darky” (or other cultural uses, with or without a “y”) which is an old termed racial slur, rooted in the era of blackface, epitomizing the negative stereotypes of all dark-skinned people.
This is a country where “madras” refers to a dark-skinned East Indian person and a “dougla” (any person of mixed African and East Indian descent), may fall within a range of skin tones from fair to dark. Darkie functions in a slightly different way, where it serves to singularly encompass an Afro-Trinidadian aesthetic of perceived attractiveness. It certainly can be used as purely descriptive, along the lines of a general physical trait, but darkie is usually understood to be nuanced in a way that makes it different from the terms mentioned above. Darkie is flexible, in that it may solely be attributed to implied attractiveness or one’s skin tone and usually, the context involves an understood interconnection of the two. Far from simply objectifying the individual, darkie is a celebratory, verbal sound-kiss against ebony skin and represents a re-imagining of who can be declared attractive.
By: Tanya Marie Williams
by Kim
Everyone called him Massa, my father says nonchalantly to me with eyes narrowing on the tight turn ahead of us,
he is talking about his father, my grandfather
the white plantation owner who raped my grandmother, a strong-jawed woman from Dominica.
This is how my history is transmitted to me, in fragments that ambush me every time I return to the land I call home,
mi abuela es de Venezuela, taken as a child by her father to become the property of his new family. My grandfather, son of indentured workers, a proud man, with a penchant for stoic silences.
I am from a stock that wields irons like hand grenades
mouths that unleash and inflict, leaving rings of fire that keep love away,
but make lovers stay. Yielding forgiveness, needing to nurture, heavy from field, house, hard, heartwork.
Scotch bonnet peppered speech, rich smells of island flowers reach and tug
and swing so gently from your heartstrings. We can see it now, you are falling in lust with us.
I am from a stock of full-bodied women, hips wise, eyes deep, young smiles
that belie the centuries that we live in each everlasting moment. Young smiles, playful and wild that belie the effortlessness with which we lie.
Lies that come far too easily, rolling off tongues, slipping into ears, coming hot
and hard, weightless, rocking like fucking on swings, like fingers intertwining.
Truth remaining only as whispers humming, as feelings lingering fading memories, like walking, waking, dreaming.
It is heartbreaking, that granny, my aunty, my mama, my women, heart first lept in, and then left him, heart withdrawn after time too long of hoping that tragedy don’t win, that penises stuffed in don’t just end up producing girl after girl destined to love unrequited.
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