Cooper
Martin Henry has forced me back into the bloody daggering debate. In his column last Sunday, 'Culture, Liberation and Fertility Rituals', he vigorously tried to stab to pieces the meat of my argument in an essay on Lady Saw published in Jamaica Journal in 2004. Henry seems not to have read the article he attacks so comprehensively.
Henry wrongly attributes to me a quotation from the work of the American anthropologist Obiagele Lake, who says of Lady Saw, "(u)nfortunately, women who have internalised sexist norms add to these negative images." Unlike Dr Lake, I have a great deal of respect for Lady Saw's intelligence. So, I do not assume that she is simple-minded and has passively "internalised sexist norms".
I'm sure Marion Hall, aka Lady Saw, knows exactly what she's doing. She says of her role as a DJ, "Lady Saw is a act." If she deejays about daggering, it's not because she delights in pain; she's taking pleasure in the word and the act. Like Dr Lake, Henry takes a stab or two at Lady Saw (and me, as her accomplice). He dismisses my reading of dancehall culture as a space for the celebration of the erotic: "Far from being liberating, any mass return to fertility cults and rituals being celebrated by the Jamaica Journal 'scholar' with Lady Saw set up as priestess, perhaps without her consent or understanding, is a return to bondage, particularly for women and other categories of the historically oppressed."
Here's the stab: "perhaps without her consent or understanding". Don't let that "perhaps" fool you. That's just the cautious communications consultant trying to cover his rear. The Oxford English Dictionary defines "perhaps" in this way: "A word qualifying a statement to express possibility with uncertainty". So, since Lady Saw is only a DJ; she certainly could not possibly understand anything as complicated as female fertility rituals, or her own function as an erotic symbol.
A lot of us don't realise just how much skill it takes to be a successful DJ. And even when a DJ composes brilliant lyrics we underestimate the genius of the artiste.
The business of "consent" is a whole other matter. Literary critics know that the meaning of a literary work cannot be limited to its author's intention. Lady Saw does not need to give her "consent" to my argument. As Bob Marley once said about his Kaya album, "You have to play it and get your own inspiration. For every song have a different meaning to a man. Sometimes I sing a song and when people explain it to me I am astonished by their interpretation."
In the middle of his column, Henry indulges in a grand rhetorical flourish: "And this is scholarship?! Help!" What provokes this gesture is the supposedly ludicrous thought that "thousands of African-Jamaican working-class women crowding into Christian churches this Easter Sunday ... and sisters of Rastafarianism" could possibly agree that "this scholar and her 'slack' subject speak for them".
Hard-core fertility cults
I can't speak for these thousands of women, but they may have more in common with Lady Saw and the 'loose' women who frequent dancehalls than Henry would concede. Contrasting the bacchanal slackness of hard-core fertility cults with the propriety of decent Christian women, Henry quotes the biblical exhortation that women "adorn themselves in modest apparel".
All the same, I am astonished by the way in which some fundamentalist Christian women interpret modesty. Women are supposed to cover their heads in church to hide the beauty of their hair, an obvious sex symbol. But in a remarkable subversion of the principle of concealment, church hats these days have become purely decorative objects that flamboyantly enhance the beauty of the wearer.
These ornate hats display the high-flying beauty of haute couture. That spectacular hat Aretha Franklin wore to President Obama's inauguration is a classic example of African-American churchwear. It was concocted by Aretha herself, who instructed Luke Song, a Korean-American milliner based in Detroit, to put the bow of one hat on another. The primary market of Song's millinery is African-American church women and the company has back orders for 5,000 copies of "the hat".
Dancehall divas
These glamorous church hats that you can see all across Jamaica every Sunday and Saturday, too, remind me of the neon wigs, weaves and extensions sported by dancehall divas. Especially for those of us who grew up on the farthing-hair-and-pound-a-ribbon aesthetic, the church hats and the dancehall hair extensions seem to serve the identical purpose of grandly making up for the presumed deficiency of not having been 'blessed' with 'tall' hair. And they share a common origin in the elaborate head ties that continental African women have perfected.
Another point of convergence between women in church and in the dancehall is the ecstatic moment of surrender to sensory stimulation: music and dance, whether sacred or secular. Henry will, perhaps, have a fit at the 'pagan' suggestion that the religious ecstasy of some fundamentalist Christian women, possessed by the spirit, is not always distinguishable from the secular ecstasy of possession in the flesh. And that's the meat of the matter.
Incidentally, the Oxford English Dictionary cautiously suggests that the Old English word, 'mete', from which 'meat' originates, may have come from the root word 'med' - to be fat. Fatness or, more accurately, 'phatness', is certainly a much-celebrated attribute of women in Jamaican culture, whether saved, lost or barely salvageable. Henry's beef seems to be his fear of the flesh. Perhaps he should take Lady Saw seriously.
Carolyn Cooper is professor of literary and cultural studies at the UWI, Mona. She may be contacted at karokupa@gmail.com. Feedback may also be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.