I come from a culture, it is said, somewhere between where the Ganges meets the Nile, converging with European colonialists, Chinese, Syrians and indigenous people. Where girls slicked their hair back with petroleum jelly and water — cinching cinnamon buns wound close and pulled tight with woogies. Where box-plaits were common and traditionally, you got braids for carnival, even my East-Indian, white and black mixed friend whose hair I’d done, tightly winding the ends with tiny rubber-bands. Her father hated them, she told me — hated how it looked when she plaited up her hair. And my curly haired primary school friend: a Trini ‘Spanish’ — every swivel of her head echoing with the clack of snap fasteners and aluminum foil on the ends down her back.

In secondary school, rebellious girls shaved half the underside of the heads — it was a way to be definitively edgy then. And more than one East-Indian girl came into her own by loping off the long, dark strands she’d been waiting to remove. Many of them, never looked back. Some girls permed their hair straight; some were life long naturals like me. Some of those naturals permed then when natural again — some stayed natural, adding length in locks, in nattys: coiling, clumping, unbridled, twisting, spiraling across shoulders, down lower backs.

Our heads once smelled like Luster’s pink oil, Let’s Jam! pudding and African Pride products. We pulled brushes from school book-bags and dipped them under the tap before dragging them across our scalps and flaked black gel buildup from our tresses.  We leaked jheri-curl juice onto the top of our blouse collars and maintained dry-curls and glittered finger waves.  We learnt about “weave-ons” and sat still with our selves, quietly dancing fingers around and around to put our hair in corkscrew twists.

We traded in banana clips, barrettes, the sharp teeth of tortoise shell hair combs and baubles; and sported bandeaus, bandanas wrapped around buns and metal hair clips made famous by those girls tumbling through the air at the Olympics on TV, instead. Once upon a time, our mothers slow-rubbed Dax grease into our roots, coated strands with coconut oil and wove colored woolies into plaits and styled them to match uniforms. They burnt and sewed the edges of our hair bows so they wouldn’t unravel — and when they did, we ran the length of school yards in vain, searching for them like lost dreams in the breeze.

I went to  a lady in Tunapuna to get epic canerows — the first time I smelled that unique alchemy of relaxer on someone else — how it filled the room and nostrils, how you don’t ever really forget it. Or the rhythmic pat-pat-pat of my friends’ fingers on scalps that will soon be permed.  I dyed my hair with kool-aid, more than once.  Back then, we knew who to call “picky-head,” understood why “greng grengs” needed taming and grew to warp beauty with hair, hair with beauty. We knew a natural blonde could turn heads walking through Port of Spain — they were as rare as winged unicorns. There was a particular stylist all the Indian and other silky haired friends in the East went to — and only that kind of hair. Got my first press out in Tunapuna too and watched my hair recoil afterwards, engorged like a stomach after Sunday lunch, with the moisture laden island air.

In Guyana, they used to say, cut your hair on a full moon, preferably, but don’t ever throw it away. Bury it in some earth. These are the things my mother told me. These are the things I forgot. When I cut my hair up to my ears as an undergrad in Miami, on a whim, with paper scissors, I tossed the pieces in the trash. Somewhere in a landfill, my hair became one with the maggots and the topsoil.

We lost ourselves. We found ourselves along the way. Some never strayed from what they knew — whatever that was.  If it eh broke, you don’t need to fix it. If you thought you did and didn’t like it, you could always wheel and come again. We are a nation with few hair secrets, they say. None of it is sacred. Ask an Indian about canerow, find a white girl who is not familiar enough to know about relaxers and straightening.  Who doesn’t know a janx from a full-on ras?

This is the hair culture from whence I’ve come.

The natural hair culture is different and nuanced in the states in many different ways. Some aspects of it, I can connect to and value very much. The whole notion of a self (hair) that has to be validated is a fascinating evolution to see unfold, because in my hair culture, I wasn’t so much a voyeur, as a part of the machine — a cog, and I just moved — not knowing it had to be a thing because that’s all I ever knew.

This video below is currently circulating online and while I think he makes some wonderful assertions:

It’s also heterocentrist and presumes all the natural-haired women who need reassurance need it mainly, if not solely, to appease men. He’s easy on the eyes, it’s a nice sentiment, true — ergo, this video will probably be very popular and do well in sparking and shifting any existing, constructive hair culture discourse to something revolving around what men like and are attracted to. Fuck kudos from a dude — how do you feel about your own natural hair? And do you like it?

Centering men around black women’s hair, (even for women with seemingly legitimate conundrums about the men in their lives hair tastes) hardly seems like the best decentralizing point. Hair culture and black women’s hair culture is complex, everywhere. We’re all dealing with similar and same constructs, fighting against same and similar structural forces at once. The power to resist, to reclaim, to revisit entrenched notions of hair and beauty must, I think, ultimately, come from women themselves. And overall, it must center women as agents and wielders of that power.

I am interested in reworking, reframing and paying careful attention to the various ways in which femininity, the feminine and femmeness has been indoctrinated inside my cultural and lived experiences, (and while not all of it is bad or problematic) and I have come to terms with how femininity and femmeness function as a large part of my being and that includes the lessons and messages about hair. This includes the hair culture that I carry with me, in me and on my head. The kinks from my scalp don’t define me entirely but lest a day came when I forgot, they’d tell more than I’d ever need to know about myself.  My hair is one part of finding my way back to home and love.

Reblogged from Delphinediallo's world:

This is currently my pc screen saver and I’m not sure when it will ever change, to be quite honest. I love all that this image evokes for me: the beauty, Gothic, the blackness and culture-mash-up feel of the whole thing. There is so, so much in Delphine Diallo’s astounding work that constantly stirs my insides and makes me want to get lost inside her art for days on end.

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.

Click here to see the complete report.

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.

The absence of women alone makes the performance suspect and makes some of the viewers squirm. Who are these unabashedly African men to work their waistlines so — just because they want to, just to accompany a song, just because they like to, enjoy it and feel comfortable doing so.  It’s the same reason Machel Montano‘s wining made some folks so darn uncomfortable. Machel, pre-HD, pre traveling dancing troupe used to wine like a ball of twine in a performance, just like Fally and crew — just because  he could. And yes, the women would scream but like Fally and them, wining was an implicit part of performance, whether or not women were visibly titillated or even there.

A woman coming to test him on stage wasn’t a preresquisite; Machel wined just because he was a “winer boy” and “a good winer man,” who planned “tuh wine til de day I die,” even encouraging women that “if yuh man cyah wine / gyal, leave him behind.”

Somewhere between wining as celebrated marker for (default) hetero masculinity, and where we are today, subtle shifts took place. A generation of young men seemed to hardly wine just for so, or just to pelt waist in the throes of musical release: they ‘stab’, they jook, they pose off in a dance, but they hardly wine like that as much anymore.  And what about Lord Nelson, plunging jumpsuit neckline no less, enthusiastically showing a new generation how to get on bad, still (catch Lord Nelson bringing on The Sexy Winery around the 5:51 mark).

When someone I know posted the link to Kes the band’s  “Good Day New York” appearance, some Trini guy I did not know commented about how glad he was that it was Kes and co. representing us to American audiences like this because that other guy “wines too much.” Even though, Kees wines too (though he didn’t really do any on American TV). Presumably, the commenter was referring to Machel, and it was a jab at how Machel’s performance was less appropriate (his caché of music be damned) lest the Americans see a Caribbean man wining, then all hell will break loose. Interestingly, even when women are present, at least in this video:

The men are still wining, primarily on their own, claiming their own wining space independent of dancing on and with women. It’s this beautiful mélange of music, movement and cascading poly rhythms and while the women and men are equally graceful and seamless — it is the men who mesmerize my eyes when I hit the replay button again and again. The way they dip and wine, so slow and painstaking, then fast and frenetic. There is nothing, nothing, striking me as “less masculine” in their sinuousness and sensuality, the way they match the dancing women thrust for thrust and roll for roll, and I for one, am so very glad to see this.

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Please share, reblog on various platforms and forward as you wish! Thank-you!

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

Soy Dulce de Leche

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

]]> http://soyluv.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/in-the-castle-of-our-skins-the-darker-the-candy-the-sweeter-the-syrup/feed/ 0 soyluv The Darker the Candy The Sweeter the Syrup http://soyluv.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/in-the-castle-of-our-skins-darkies-brownings-and-red-woman/ http://soyluv.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/in-the-castle-of-our-skins-darkies-brownings-and-red-woman/#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2011 03:28:28 +0000 soyluv http://soyluv.wordpress.com/?p=2428 ]]>

Darkies, Brownings and Red Woman: Female Desirability and Skin Color in the Caribbean

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.

Against a backdrop of slavery and colonialisation, religious doctrines, heterocentric and patriarchal norms: prescribed gender roles and perceived female desirability become informed by a variety of these institutions. Skin shade, socioeconomic class and perceived attractiveness often become interconnected. One term that comes to mind in correlation to darkie is “browning” and the two terms function differently in distinct ways. Patricia Mohammed describes the usage of “browning” in Jamaica and the rest of the region as connected to “a preference for ‘brown’ as opposed to black women or unmixed women” (22).

On the other hand, in the Caribbean, like many regions within the diaspora, where gradations of color and their categories sometimes abound, there is no such confusion as to who constitutes a darkie in Trinidad. In Jamaica, stereotypes of an economic frame, such as the so-called “brown tax”[2] are directly linked to the assumed socioeconomic status of persons of a particular shade. Browning then, operates in Jamaica as a kind of attributed socioeconomic marker as well. It is class, color and status (and for women especially: desirability) all rolled into one, in a way that darkie is not. Comparatively, the term “darkie” does not confer any particular social or economic status for the ascribed individual, other than, being a dark-skinned person. For women in and of the Caribbean region, brownness is usually directly linked to perceptions of beauty and desirability.

Much like the infamous paper-bag test in America, “browning” embodies the notion that browner is better and lighter is better. Concurrently, the “red-bone”[3] in American culture, especially in hip-hop pop culture, is almost always a desirable female of a particular shade. She is the counterpart of the desirable brown-skinned woman and the similarly lauded mixed raced woman. One of the things that colorism enables is the separation of some people from their trace blackness, as well as systematically serving the role of helping people to distance themselves from blackness as a whole and the legacy of that association. It also allows some people to safely attribute some non-specific racial heritage with just the right amount of select African heritage and/or physical traits.

In Trinidad, Aisha Khan notes that the term “Spanish” functions in that way where  “ ‘Spanish’ is used in part to affirm an ethnic hierarchy where ‘softened’ or ambiguous ‘African’ or ‘black’ convey and confer a higher status that modifies stronger more clear-cut expressions of ‘African’ or ‘black’ attributes” (185). And what of the desirable dark-skinned, phenotypically black looking, African descendant woman one might wonder? The counterpart to the “browning”, “red-bone”, “spanish”, “dougs”[4] and the “red-woman”[5]—except for “darkie,” it’s like she doesn’t exist anywhere in the lexicon.

Darkie then is more than just a kind of vocabulary to describe dark-skinned Trinbagonians; rather it allows a site for asserting unambiguous black beauty that rarely takes place in some spaces. When female desirability becomes stacked inside culturally prevailing Eurocentric ideals, dark-skinned black women are usually relegated to the bottom rung, esteemed occasionally for a redeeming factor like quality or length of hair, or watered down, strategically placed African derived attributes.

In 2008, Orlando Octave Jr.’s hugely popular reggae love-song “Darkie,” rode a wave of popularity on the airwaves in Trinidad and Tobago and throughout the region with its sweet melody, verbal play and recognizable hook of “darkie, whey yuh from?—a long time me a call you but yuh never wah come.” Paying homage to the lovely dark-skinned female who is “a helluva girl” with “de face and de figure,” Octave’s darkie is desirable, beautiful and elusive. Her elusiveness is embodied by Octave’s constant quest to know “whey yuh from” and Octave is careful to distinguish exactly what kind of dark-skinned beauty this is, lest listeners make presumptions. Similarly, he is personally invested in unpacking some of his darkie’s attributes, both internal and external, while being acutely aware of the responsibility behind the creation of this anthem for darkies.

Thus, his darkie “went tuh school and she came out a scholar,” is a “leader of de pack, rest ah girls have tuh follow.” She is “from down South” though she is liming/espied or visiting “on de Beetham”[6]. Similarly, she is fittingly “nuh gold digger / When yuh come to she / Yuh better come to she proper / ‘Cause, say, she got all she need in life / And, she doh need a boyfriend fi survive.” Most significantly, he asserts that “most of all gyul / I’m in love with yuh color.” In an interview in Abstract magazine, Octave explained his intention behind the song noting, “I sang about darkies because darkies don’t have a song,” added to the fact that “red woman always get the ‘rate-up’ ” (“Orlando Octave”). Somewhat ironically, when asked in the same interview about his own preference for women, Octave admits with a “blush” that “actually I go for red-skinned girls but complexion does not really matter” (“Orlando Octave”).

Still, for many dark-skinned women and most significantly, the young girls who tune into new popular music in droves and are especially susceptible to the images within, the message in song was widely appreciated. In a continuously media driven world, where pop cultural images in music and media assault us from every angle, West Indian women of every shade may grapple with self-identity and beauty issues. It is imperative that we all continue to contextualize, challenge and deconstruct these long-held notions of beauty and desirability with regard to skin shade. “Darkie” then, by its mere existence as a construct within the lexicon, as well as through its semantic power of implied endearing meaning, helps us to do so. It does so through its direct simplicity, its self-affirming implication of beauty and desirability and its locale, deep within a dark skin tone.

Artwork, “Forgive and Forget” by Tanya Marie Williams.

Notes

[1] A distinct, non-verbal catcall that is well known in TnT. It is sort of like a suck-teeth sound crossed with a hiss that can be sent across a distance to get someone’s attention that you may or may not know. It can be made and employed by both men and women to one another; may include a verbal accompaniment such as “darkie!” or “family!” for two examples.

[2] I learnt about this phenomenon through reading “The Browning Complex I,”a hilarious and poignant blog entry that decried and explained the “BMS” or “Brown People have Money Syndrome” in Jamaica, which the writer has unfairly suffered and is manifested by the “brown skin tax” (BST) that he invariably has to pay higglers, fridge repair men and other assorted individuals.

[3] From my understanding, a light skinned, black female (usually) on par with the red-skinned woman in Trinidad, who of course, may or may not self-identify as racially mixed. Some variegations can be found in its usage, as well as regional and cultural disagreements over where this skin shade starts and ‘stops’ so to speak. In hip-hop and urban culture, the red-bone is always linked to sexual desirability, being a prize and a “dime piece” (that is to say, the kind of female a man will covet, treasure and be proud to show off) and overall, is cast as the desired.

[4] A colloquial shortening of “dougla.”

[5] A light-skinned female: black or “mixed-up.”

[6] Refers to Beetham Gardens, also called Beetham Estate Gardens. A low-income, purportedly primarily Afro-Trinidadian community outside of Port-Of-Spain. Because of the perceived socio-cultural stigma of being “from” the Beetham (however ill-placed and ill-founded such things are), I interpreted Octave’s line as symbolic and significant of a couple of things. Firstly, of esteeming Beetham: because this gorgeous, highly educated, dark skinned girl, who is not from there but is comfortable with going there for whatever reason. Problematically too, this darkie is “on” the Beetham but not from that place, so this allows her the distinction of not actually being envisioned as one of them, in case anybody dared to place her there inside the song, simply by virtue of being a dark skinned female.

References

ETNT, “Orlando Octave.” eAbstractMag. Abstract Magazine, n.d. Web.

Khan, Aisha. “What is ‘a Spanish’?: Ambiguity and ‘Mixed’ Ethnicity in Trinidad.” Trinidad Ethnicity. Ed. Kevin Yelvington. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. Print.

Mohammed, Patricia. “ ‘But Most of All mi Love me browning’: The Emergence in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Jamaica of the Mulatto woman as the Desired.” Feminist Review. 65 (2000): 22-48. Print.

Octave, Orlando. “Darkie.” Trinidad and Tobago. MP3 file.

Stunner, “The Browning Complex: I call it Discrimination!” Stunner’s Afflictions: My amazing Adventures and Perspective on Life, 09 Mar. 2006. Web.