“Taak op,wats yu (s)touri?”: Dancehall storytelling and Tanya Stephens’ grassroots feminism

Abstract

In (re)considering the viability of Jamaican dancehall and reggae artist Tanya Stephens’s rejection of the label ‘feminist’, this paper uses her song, Wats Yu (S)touri, from her 2004 Gangster Blues album to trace several critical grassroots performativities which address popular forms of Jamaican grassroots women’s activism. These modes of activism are regarded as reflective of traditional feminist practices which carry over to dancehall. The paper is primarily concerned with the context of Stephens’s music, specifically regarding whether some of her storytelling practices conform with the vernacular tradition of taakin op (a strident retort). It offers a reading of feminism against Stephens’s claim, suggesting that dancehall practices like taakin op are also linked to longer histories of Jamaican grassroots performativities which extend beyond the dancehall itself. The aim is to understand how Stephens’s feminism, albeit disavowed, enlarges ideas about dancehall as a subversive hi/story of post/colonial Blackness in Jamaica. Accordingly, specific attention is paid to themes of romantic love, work and ‘gyangsta feminism’, a coinage following the title of a track on the same album.

Keywords

activism dancehall feminist grassroots Jamaica performativity Tanya Stephens

Introduction

. . . I hope in 2018 feminism will have a little pride and at least pretend to be about the protection and empowerment of disenfranchised females, EVEN WHEN the aggressors are ALSO FEMALE. Hopefully feminist activism – especially local activism – will be unbridled by the saleswomen of misogynistic values and traditions. May every remaining forced silence be broken in 2018! Traditions which aren’t conducive to the physical and psychological well-being of ALL citizens have no right being enforced, either formally or informally, on a national level. Let’s be honest: in 2017 there was national failure when it came to embracing and mending the broken. There was wholesale resistance to the introduction of consequence as a deterrent to future actions…Tanya Stephens is a Jamaican singer and songwriter [who insists on wasting her writing on Facebook — editor].

- Stephens, 2018, [https://preelit.com/2018/04/09/breaking-the-silences/]

As one of Jamaica’s most prolific popular musicians and songwriters, Tanya Stephens’s (Figure 1) oeuvre spans a critical range of topics, among them, rape culture, climate change and queer politics. Stephens, who performs in both reggae and dancehall, two of seven popular music genres created in Jamaica during the twentieth century - the others being ska, mento, sound system, rocksteady and dub – is also never without a similar passion for more quotidian aspects of culture and society. While some of these might be dismissed as simply a predilection for sex (Cooper, 2004; Noble, 2000, 2008) and other insubstantial matters, her preoccupation with the urban dynamics of Jamaica's gendered and sexual politics are much more complex than might be initially considered. This essay (re)considers one of the lesser scrutinised areas of Stephens’s work – the politics of storytelling as a praxis which roots/routes her within the broader habitus of an ‘unlikely’ grassroots feminism (Cooper, 2004; Perkins, unpublished). How does Jamaican ‘ghetto culture’ (Pinnock, 2007) influence the production of what theorist, Carolyn Cooper (2004), calls a logic of emancipation in dancehall and the wider society, which routinely clashes with dominant notions of respectability¹ (Cooper, 2004, 1993; Thomas, 2004; Tafari-Ama, 2006; Hope, 2006; Tate, 2013)? Within this context, my attention is focused less on a genealogy of feminism but rather on understanding how these ideas are made visible in and through Stephens’s musical performances.

Figure 1.

Reggae and dancehall recording artiste, Tanya Stephens (Image courtesy of Tanya Stephens).

Blackness in the nation: Ghetto versus respectability

Acknowledging the role of ‘respect’ in Jamaican society at once calls into question ideas of a racialised nationalism. It aligns with what, Thame (2023, 2017), sees as efforts to depoliticise and disempower Blackness in post-independence Jamaica. Discussions of Jamaican Blackness are, thus incomplete without a similar interrogation of how it was deliberately supplanted by state machinations at independence, on Monday, 6 August 1962 (Thame, 2017). State politics, effectively, rewrote and reoriented the national hi/story away from its ‘true’ African roots, especially regarding critical assessments and documentation of racial slavery and the pre-capitalist and mercantilist ethics and structures motivating its supposed ‘need’ (Fanon, 1963; Wynter, 2003, 2015). Indeed, if race – regardless of its meanings – is denied and ultimately, expunged from the nation, including several associated imaginaries within which the claim of ‘oneness’ (Thomas, 2004; Puri, 2004) are routinely promoted as national identity, what then does Stephens’s work in these areas say about this reality? How might an understanding of her storytelling about man an ooman bizniz (male-female relationships) help to unravel not just a feminist practice of ‘the everyday’ but also as a broader critique of the nation, itself?

In citing the above epigraph, I purposely sidestep the more volatile events of the years mentioned by Stephens. Roper and Wint (2020) have previously discussed these in their analysis of the Tambourine Army’s² feminist evolution and context during that period. As such, I restrict my focus to Stephens’ critique of feminism to understand how these issues play out in some of her earlier work, specifically, from the Gangster Blues (2004) album. Notably, the bulk of the songs in which I raise these questions focus on heterosexual unions. However, these are not exclusive concerns in Stephens’s treatment of gender and sexuality. She most famously tackles gay rights in other parts of her repertoire, specifically, in Do You Still Care, the fifteenth song on her sixth album, Rebelution (2006). Stephens’ navigation of a Jamaican feminism interpellated by dancehall’s ghetto geographies and the, historically, more laidback experiences of bucolic life in which male-female relationships proliferate, retrieves a broader racial politics of ‘badness’ (Pinnock, 2020) embedded within her storytelling. This last part of my interests in Stephens’s work is key. Two concessions are noteworthy, as a result.

First, I acknowledge the highly contested nature of Black women’s relationship to and experiences with feminism (Noxolo, 2023; Roach, 2020; Wynter, 1990; Lorde, 1984). This is especially regarding its ethnocentric erasures of Black/Caribbean specificities (Barriteau, 2003; Barriteau-Foster, 1992; Cooper, 2004; Mohammed, 2000), as well as the colonisation of theory (Christian, 1987), and racism (Carby, 1997; hooks, 2014). Nevertheless, I use ‘feminism' here, partly because I find it easier to navigate. Feminism is thus understood not just as a mainstream academic discourse, but more as a gendered activism that women engage in, regardless of race, culture or ethnicity. This aligns with my reading of Stephens’s uses of certain female-centred resistance strategies originating in Jamaican grassroots culture, which I have previously argued may be regarded ‘grassroots feminism’ (Pinnock, 2020). Some of these practices also carried over into women’s general activism in Jamaican dancehall culture. Therefore my goal is to understand whether by rejecting the label ‘feminism’, as indicated in the opening epigraph³, Stephens also rejects its politics. To be clear, I am not invested in ascertaining the type(s) of feminism Stephens’s practises, necessarily, or, even if she is, in fact, a feminist. I am thus not interested in whether feminism makes peoples’ lives better. Such a position is not crucial to my larger argument, which is to show that not only are Jamaican feminist practices inherently performative, but that they also create the space(s) in which many popular performances in dancehall are enacted – and not just by women either!

Second, and more importantly, in gauging whether Stephens’s activism aligns with what are ostensibly Caribbean/Jamaican forms of feminism, I am interested in the use of her ‘practice’ - not just songs - to illuminate how acts of singing and performing are intertwined. They are the vectors by which several of these ideas come into being. Consequently, I argue that within Jamaica’s dancehall context, feminist practices are often, made visible through performance (Cooper, 2004; Pinnock, 2020). This is not to say they cannot be observed otherwise; rather, I simply suggest that within a musical performance there is great difficulty in easily distinguishing the song from the overall method(s) of presenting it. While it might be possible to do so, this, is not the essay’s focus. Instead, by tracing certain feminist practices in Stephens’s work, I read a broadly improvisational set of relationalities in which women situate themselves in different ways as agentive beings, using several Jamaican grassroots narratives to do so. Chriesin is one such strategy, which is the one I focus on here, a definition/explanation of which is given below. As such, I argue that Stephens’s activism might be traced to a line of Jamaican grassroots female resistance practices through the act of chriesin.

Grassroots (S)touri-telling: Jamaican word play as decolonial method

The essay’s title (re)centres key elements of a Jamaican storytelling tradition which are essential to dancehall performance. ‘Taak op, wats yu (s)touri?’ (talk-up, what’s your story?) is a grassroots problem-solving rhetorical strategy. It not only (re)imagines the world through dramatic uses of the spoken word but it also engages a type of performative badness which is equivalent to a theatrical re-enactment of badness as a form of entertainment (Pinnock, 2020), which is ideal in such scenarios. This is usually displayed in dancehall culture, shortened here simply as dancehall, as a necessary performance detail in which the speaker/singer openly rejects the attitudes of respectability (Pinnock, 2007; Roper & Wint, 2020). To ‘taak op' is thus more than just a clever turn of phrase, which, in this instance, also invokes the title/lyrics of the eleventh song on Stephens’s 2004 Gangsta Blues album – twelfth, if the Intro(duction) is counted. Instead, the line also recovers a grassroots performativity in which speaking (up) in ones defence is key. This is a vital part of the decolonial ethos which exists organically in dancehall, and also occurs in several spaces, especially within ‘ghetto culture’ (Pinnock, 2007). Note, too, Stephens’s song is part of a classic Jamaican popular music tradition of ‘call and response’, especially in cases of men and women, who often engage in spirited repartees about sexual prowess⁴. Following in this vein, Taak Op Wats Yu (S)Touri is sometimes considered a response to Beres Hammond’s Double Trouble. Importantly, however Hammond does not sing in Stephens’s song. Nevertheless, she still references him in the line,’wid som veri familya lainz yu pik op out a Beres Hammond sang!’ (with some very familiar lines you picked up out of a Beres Hammond song).

While the importance of the Hammond connection is undisputed, my focus on Stephens’s song and her silencing of the male voice specifically attends to the female-centred element of this relationship. By sidestepping discussions of Double Trouble, I wish to observe how Stephens’s strategic deployment of women’s sensibilities in her music discloses a dancehall ethic that aligns with grassroots traditions of chriesin⁵. In essence, chriesin is not just about telling someone off, it is also often accompanied by storytelling. Understood in this way, storytelling entails narrating the events of a specific set of actions causing offence, and is also a way to convey the dramatic nature of these encounters. In the latter case, it incorporates what Jamaicans would call ‘mix-op an’ blenda’ (mix-up and blender)! Chriesin is thus an energetic wordplay in which Jamaican vernacular practices are used to put someone in their proverbial place. Crucially, the versatility of the language and its capacity to convey complex, subversive concepts and emotions are also demonstrated. As a type of duel then, chriesin is a formidable, verbal weapon used mostly, by women – and, usually, with relative success (Roper and Wint, 2020).

Note, however, chriesin is not unique to storytelling. They can either occur separately or together. Still, because of its powers to elicit unique audience responses, including fear and ridicule, sometimes reducing an opponent to silence and, even tears, chriesin is the primary grassroots storytelling strategy discussed here. Importantly, though, it is not the only one used by Stephens. Others include proverbs and reflections/meditations. Consequently, applying the name and lyrics in the essay’s title centres these performative qualities in dancehall, by re-embedding them within their original Jamaican grassroots ethos.

Relatedly, the ‘Cassidy’ writing system is used to spell Jamaican Creole words throughout. Drawn from the Jamaican Language Unit’s (JLU), (The Jamaican Language Unit, n.d.) orthographic method, this strategy⁶ is specifically intended to recover and (re)centre the Jamaican voices/accents and actors in Stephens’s (s)touri dem. Linguists, David Cassidy and Frederick LePage⁷, developed ‘Cassidy’ to encode the everyday dynamics of Jamaican speech. Here, it links language, music and the theatricality of dancehall in Stephens’s repertoire, underlining their performative antecedents. Utilising ‘Cassidy’ to re-present the musical texts privileges the sounds of the voice(s) and personalities of the Jamaican actors discussed as part of dancehall’s organic narrative context. More importantly, deploying this approach effectively contextualises the key song-text used to clarify my insights about Stephens’s work; ultimately, placing the Jamaican vernacular register in dialogue with the paper’s overall English-language usage, while also gesturing to my bilingual heritage.

Dancehall origins: Geographies; histories; performance

Dancehall is rooted in several traditional Jamaican performance practices. These include the famous Jonkanu (John Canoe) (Figure 2) masquerade, a ritual linked to the Yoruban Egugun Festival (Patterson, 1969; Wynter, 1970) (Figure 3), and the Yam Festival (Figure 4) of the Mmo secret society of the Igbo before they were kidnapped and deported to the Caribbean (Patterson, 1969; Wynter, 1970). Dancehall draws very closely on these traditions of music, masquerade and performance. It is networked into a ‘performance geography’ (Stanley-Niaa, 2008) of idioms, cultural practices and ways of being which are uniquely Jamaican. Performance geographies refers to:

…a mapping of the material and spatial conditions of performance: entertainment and ritual in specific sites/venues, types and systems of use, politics of their location in relation to other sites and other practices, the character of events/rituals in particular locations, and the manner in which different performances/performers relate to each other within and across different cultures… (Stanley-Niaa, 2008: 344)

Figure 2.

Jonkanu (John Canoe) masqueraders in Jamaica; 2014 (Image courtesy of Paul Williams, Gleaner Company Jamaica Limited).

Figure 3.

An Egungun Festival costume; September 21, 2019 (CC BY: ABORISADEADETONA).

Figure 4.

“Yam festival celebrations” by Jeff Haskins used under Creative Commons 2.0 (CC BY: Jeff Haskins).

Though widely praised as a radical celebration of the everyday, dancehall’s characteristically direct and unapologetic adult language and style, often provokes disgust amongst local elites. These tensions are usually manifested within its various performance geographies which also embody Jamaica’s ambivalent attitudes towards sexuality. Not unlike the plantations’s prejudicial attitudes towards enslaved peoples’ merrymaking⁸, Jamaica’s middle classes often, bear a very strong anti-dancehall animus (Cooper, 2004; Hope, 2006; Pinnock, 2007; Tafari-Ama, 2006), which sometimes also overlaps with some ‘outsider [...]’ (Cooper, 2004:86) responses. The culture is notoriously regarded as the ultimate embodiment of slaknis (see Endnote 1). Dancehall’s ghetto roots fuel much of this deep suspicion (Hope, 2006; Hutton, 2010). Indeed, its resistance to easy understanding must be read as part of a broader anti-colonial ethos rooted in working class and grassroots culture, which, according to Cooper (2004), is Jamaican culture ‘at large’. Mostly experienced through performance, dancehall’s extra-legal status is rightly then, a vector of ‘real’ Jamaican identity. Real here refers to the often, slippery, undetectable ways in which culture exists. Note, this is neither an exclusivist nor essentialist view of dancehall or Jamaican identity. As the grounds from which Stephens’s storytelling takes its cues, dancehall is not only Jamaican (Creole) culture put to entertainment, it also maps the linguistic geographies unique to Jamaica and its diasporas. Crucially, this does not to imply that dancehall is diasporic in its origins; rather, it is a simple acknowledgement of Jamaica’s relatively dispersed linguistic mobilities. The aim of which is to further highlight that dancehall is more than just music.

Taakin op; Taakin Bak: Women’s liberation as grassroots theatre

Some examples of the storytelling strategies identified earlier are especially obvious in Taak op, wats yu (s)touri (Talk up, what’s your story?). The song, which describes the experiences of a harried female persona who used the evening to prepare for a romantic anniversary only to have it ruined by an argument with the other half of the planned celebration, is filled with classic Jamaican grassroots humour and irony. Stephens’s persona says:

Jamaican:	English:
A jos so man tan,	That’s just how men are;
Lisn, ye. A so di uol a dem tan	Listen, yes, that’s how the whole of them are;
Beta wi lou dem	Better we leave them,
An mek dem galang	And make them go (their ways!).
Satideh nait waz our aniversri (So, I made something special for my man and me)	Saturday night was our anniversary.
Go out a mi wie du evriting rait	Went out of my way, did everything right,
Fram di shampien chilin tu di dim lait	From the champagne chilling to the dimmed light.
(Put on some music, turned it way down low)⁹
Lovi-dovi saafiz fi get di rait flou	Lovey-dovey softies to get the right flow
Put aan mi neglijie we av di red glou	Put on my negligee that has the red glow
An afta aal a dat di retch neva shou	And, after all of that the wretch never showed (up).
Ten a ’klak mi seh it a get liet	Ten o’clock, I said it’s getting late
An’ ilevn a ’klak mi a kantampliet	And eleven o’clock, I was contemplating
An se mi naa go get vex, mi stil a wiet	And said, I wasn’t going to get vex; I still waited.
An’ no watch di lietnis,	And, don’t watch the lateness,
kaaz wi a Jumiekan	because we’re Jamaicans.
Twelv a’klak mi no si im	Twelve o'clock when I didn't see him

This comical retelling of the distressing events of the failed romantic plans is a common Jamaican tale of women going in search of ‘missing’ men at odd hours of the night. The hilarious countdown from 11 o’clock to when he eventually gets home ‘at a kwaata tu chrii’, unperturbed and, likely, also, inebriated from partying without her, signifies more than just a dysfunctional relationship, it also narrates a classic Jamaican folk tale about male domestic delinquency. Indeed, it is not uncommon for grassroots women to tell stories of various ‘gud fi notn’ man (dem)’ - usually, husbands and boyfriends who routinely conduct themselves in this way. Ironically, however, the narrative remains unclear whether they are married. Thus, at her wits end, the exasperated female persona articulates a story of psychological abuse. Entrapped by the national stereotype of the ‘strong, Black’ (and long-suffering) woman – a trope existent since the plantation, which has remained largely unchanged with independence - her (s)touri theatricalises her failed attempts to meet the ‘good woman’ brief. Unable to suffer further, she explodes in the frustrated, comedic exchange in which the man is purposely silenced; only the woman’s tribulations are narrated. Stephens’s silencing of the man’s voice in the narrative thus leaves no room for his redemption.

Consequently, the rest of the song, which I return to below, entails the persona taakin bak by taakin op to the patriarchal authority that empowers the man’s actions. Effectively, this (s)touri is a chriesin aaf (cursing out!), in which the neighbourhood is awakened to the woman’s verbal – and, indeed, though less likely, physical - assault of the man. Thus invited to play audience to the woman’s needed catharsis, it is reasonable to assume that, despite the disruption of their nocturnal activities, some of the neighbours also stand in solidarity with her plight. Notwithstanding the evident humour, the song is really a female-centred, role-reversal narrative in which women ‘taak op’ di tingz dem. It re-enacts the urgent realities of invisibilised women who suffer myriad abuses in their domestic relationships, often in silence.

Dancehall performativity: ‘Taak op’ as embodied resistance

Dancehall feminism is decidedly complex. Often observed in several spheres, its affective registers comprise the broad range of ideas underpinning what might, more accurately, be understood as ‘Caribbean Feminisms’. Noting their pluralities, histories/trajectories and core ideas, Patricia Mohammed (2000) argues that:

…feminism in the Caribbean into the twenty-first century depends on the extent to which young women and men feel the weight of gender inequality; are compelled to change the forms it takes; and are allowed the democratic rights to struggle for transformation. There is a long way to go and this is a long and insidious revolution challenging subterranean practices and ideology. Even when it appears dormant, the seeds of feminism once sewn will surface overground, with variations we are unable to predict. In the final analysis, however, the future of feminism depends on whether we have tilled this soil well and created fertile ground for a healthy crop of ideas and practices to emerge with a new generation… (Mohammed, 2000: 118)

Despite the complexities of race, class, and, more recently, identity¹⁰, Mohammed’s insights are instructive to a reading of Stephens’s feminist agenda. Galvanised by narratives of women’s liberation rooted in the global political foment of the 1970s ‘second wave’ feminism (Mohammed, 2000), Stephens clearly announces her politics in the I Am a Woman remake of the Australian-American, Grammy Award-winning artiste, Helen Reddy’s anthemic hit. However, Stephens’s version adds the indefinite article ‘a’ before the countable noun ‘woman’ in the original, to modify its specificity as a direct reference to herself as an activist. According to her:

¹¹I am woman. hear me roar!

And I'm much too big to ignore;

And I know too much to go back every day,

Cause I heard it all before

And I’ve been down there on the floor.

No one’s ever gonna keep me down again (oh oh)!

Yes, I am wise

But it is wisdom for the pain.

Yes, I paid the price

But look, how much I gained.

If I have to,

I can do anything.

I am strong!

I am invincible!

I am woman!

Stephens’s feminism is embodied. It is performed via concrete actions which are also lived. Articulating a range of subversive feminist ideas through their enactment of gender, Stephens’s aggregated personae are reminiscent of Judith Butler’s (1988) ideas of gender as a performance. According to Butler, this ‘requir[es] a conception of a constituted social temporality’ (Butler, 1988: 520) in which ‘the body is understood as an active process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities, [as] a complicated process of appropriations’ (p. 521). Stephens’s feminism is bound up with her performance of a Jamaican grassroots women’s liberation politics. Her rejection of a named feminist identity must therefore be read as part of a shape shifting persona recovered in her use of certain grassroots storytelling practices, some of which are also grounded in various dancehall temporalities. These include the ‘emotional geographies’ (Anderson and Smith, 2001) of ‘invincib [ility], ‘strength’ and ‘pain’. Emotional geographies map the complex entanglements of emotions humans experience which also aligns with the overall focus of the Gangster Blues album.

In reflecting on her personal ethos, Stephens underlines the importance of demonstrated actions. According to her, we must:

[u]nderstand that our speech reflects our passion and is nuanced to impact those at whom our communication is aimed. Communication is about getting your point across. And, effective communication means getting your point aligned with your intention… (Stephens, 2020: ix)

‘We’ functions here as a collective call to action as well as code for Jamaican feminism. In this, Stephens’s activism is one seamless marriage of words, actions and ideology. Onoura et al. (2020) argues that this is part of her oeuvre as an ‘organic intellectual’ (p. 25). Reading Stephens’s politics through the lens of ‘critical cultural workers’ Ajamu Nangwaya (Onoura et al., 2020) uses Edward Said’s notion of an intellectual’s vocation as a one of ‘total rebelliousness’ (Said in Nangwaya, 2020), to locate her practice. According to him, Stephens ‘is a potential threat to the ruling class[es]…’. She organically embodies certain feminist ideals which are ‘committed…to the cause of the socially dominated’ (p. 25). Nangwaya’s view of Stephens as ‘the certified gravedigger of the racist, patriarchal and capitalist social order’ and ‘the midwife at the birth of the good and just society’ (p. 25) aligns with my consideration of her feminism as shaped by the practical demands of navigating space in what are otherwise challenging circumstances. This also includes the very patriarchal spaces of the dancehall. Like the female persona in Wats Yu (S)touri, Stephens rubs-up against similar types of resistance in her own lived experiences, which can only be meaningfully unsettled by taakin di tingz dem. Her strident critique of feminism in the opening epigraph is one such example.

At Gyal; Bad Gyal; Gyangsta Gyal: Dancehall feminism in its different dimensions

Critically, many of the themes from the Gyangsta Blues (2004) album, including others in Stephens’s repertoire which raise questions of romantic love, fall into the above category. They embody the equivalent of ‘gangster feminism’, which is the feminist version of the traditional Jamaican ‘rude boy’, who was immortalised in the pioneering 1973 reggae film, The Harder They Come (Cooper, 1993; Pinnock, 2020). Like their rude-boy/ruudbwai counterpart, who epitomises urban badness, gangster feminists engage in emotional (and physical) resistance. Not only is Stephens’s ‘rude girl’ persona invested in the psychology of ghetto life, regarding its utility as a thematic backdrop to her music, but Stephens’s feminist engagements are also uniquely bound up with that world. Dancehall artiste, Ce’Cile (Figure 5), calls it a ‘bad gyal flex’. For her, the ‘bad gyal’, which I am also suggesting is at the root of Stephens’s ‘gyangsta’ feminism, is perhaps best articulated in CeCile’s 2012 Bad Gyal Medley. The medley, which combines at least four songs, paints a nuanced picture of the ‘bad gyal’. It merges the femme fatale, which in hip hop culture might also be considered a ‘bad b*tch’, with the wiliness of Jamaican ghetto life in which survival is paramount (Pinnock, 2007).

Figure 5.

Dancehall recording artiste, Ce'Cile (Image courtesy of the Ce'Cile).

Ce’Cile revels in her atnis (hotness). Men ‘a stress ova ar badi’ (are stressing over her body), which for her is the ultimate prize, especially given that her ‘bwai fren a istri’ (boyfriend is history!). She is able to ‘tek a gyal man’ (take another woman’s man), which as Ce’Cile says, means that if needed, she can also fight¹² to defend her turf. Flaunting her newfound sense of liberation, Ce'Cile asks: ‘where my ex-boyfriend at?’. She follows-up by reminding, ‘yu no si ou wi phat?’ (don’t you see how we are phat?). Importantly, ‘phat’ has the dual meanings of not being a stick-figured woman as well as the combination of ‘p*ssy, hips, *ss and t*ts’. In conventional Jamaican feminine beauty aesthetics, this translates to a quality that ensures that Ce’Cile will ‘get di man’, as well as allows her the freedom to do as she pleases – within reasonable limits. She ‘no stres ova ex!’ (doesn’t stress over (her) ex) as there is no need to worry whether a man leaves as he must return. Indeed, if he does not – as in the case of the rejected ex – then that too is okay; after all, she is a great lover who taught him several new and, now, highly demanded skills. In Ce’Cile’s words: ‘di man waan mi’ (the man (still) wants me). She asserts female power, simultaneously ridiculing his supposed virility. His renewed interests in and desires for her do not preclude her objectifying him in her ‘bad gyal’ narrative. Therefore, despite being criticised by some ‘outsiders’ (Cooper, 2004: 86) as negative, bad gyal feminists are, ultimately, empowered within and by the dancehall’s sexual emancipatory context. Ce’Cile is unconcerned about men who stray; after all, there are plenty more fish in the proverbial sea.

Embellishing this narrative with an alternate account of badnis, Stephens takes bad gyal feminism even further. She is invested in themes of liberation which are, in turn, routed through her female identity. In partnership with male dancehall artiste, Carlton ‘Spragga Benz’¹³ Grant, she opines:

Jamaican:	English:
Mi a bag op di kronik	I am bagging up the chronic
til mi finga dem stuk tugeda wid all a di gum	Till my fingers stick together with all the gum.
Mi a waip dung di bulit	I am wiping down the bullet
An a luod di klip	And loading the clip.
Wail yu a gwaan ail op di gun	While you are oiling down the gun
Mi a smail an aid di piisiz	I smile and hide the pieces
Evritaim wi a pas di poliis	Every time we are passing the police.
Evri ting a ron smood, bot	Everything is running smooth, but
Ef yu eva get uol bai di biis, trus mi	If you ever get held by the beast, trust me
Yu doa av fi wori uni,	You don’t have to worry, honey!
Mi a kom dung wid di biel moni	I will come down (there) with the bail money
Mi aloun av di kombinieshan tu di sief	I’m the only one who has the combination to thesafe

Stephens’s persona is the classic ‘ride or die’ girlfriend. She is in it till the man ‘go dung iina di kafn’ (goes down into the coffin) – or perhaps, till she does. Her bad gyal feminism is not just sentiment expressed when convenient; rather, it is part of a wider set of performance geographies (Stanley-Niaa, 2008), which sediment into the ghetto politics (Pinnock, 2007; Wynter, 1970) of Jamaican urban life. Fi ar (s)touri dem riil (her stories are real). They are motivated by a complex range of responses borne out of the grind and regularity of the daily rituals in which her desire for self-assertion is paramount.

Stephens’s feminism emanates from a deep reflexive praxis. It is an autoethnographic speculation on the possibilities of freedom from patriarchal, and, indeed, racial oppression. She enacts a performance geography of the personal entangled within the political. Songs like Little White Lie (Stephens, 2004a), It’s a Pity (Stephens, 2004b) and Tek Him Back (Tek Im Bak) (Stephens, 2004c) – all from the Gangsta Blues album – point to different layers of these concerns. In Little White Lie, the persona highlights the inherent dangers of broken trust and its wider, much more damaging implications to romantic love and ideals of family. It is a meditation in which Stephens says:

Once upon a time there was a happy family (a sweet little baby)!

There was a baby girl, a daddy, and a mommy (a sweet little baby)!

Mommy had a secret she told a little white lie (a sweet little baby)!

And when she tucked the baby in at night, she sang her this lullaby.¹⁴

You got your daddy's smile, you got his eyes.

I feel my heart breaking every time you cry.

I’m gonna burn in hell, but it’s no sacrifice.

Your stability is worth a million lies.

I see your daddy, in everything you do.

And if you could talk, I'll bet you'd talk like him too.

But he can't be your daddy, I hope you understand.

The man who thinks he's your father.

Is a much better man.

Resurrecting age-old patriarchal fears of women conning men into fathering other men’s children, the contradictions between declarations of love and the realities of deception are clear. The Jamaican grassroots panic of givin di man a jakit (assigning a child to a man that is not his, thereby making him into a cuckold) is foregrounded in the song. Note, cuckold is an interpretation (not a translation) of the loaded reference to clothes – in this case, the three-piece suit male wardrobe, a mainstay of (colonial) respectability. Effectively, lying about the child's parentage is a way to dress the man in an ill-fitted though highly-prized outfit. Not only has Stephens’s persona lied about the man’s parentage of the child, a practice known as raflin (raffling) in grassroots and contemporary Jamaican cultures, but there is a real risk of seriously humiliating him among his family and peers. A rafl occurs where expectant mothers assign their unborn child(ren) to various unsuspecting men by ‘guesstimating’ their suitability for fatherhood. In a culture where masculinity and children are closely linked (Chevannes, 1998), this practice can have very deadly repercussions when discovered.

Unavoidably trapped between the facts of her deceit and the dangers the truth poses, Stephens’s persona must take her secret to the grave; after all, the man has a tattooed image of the child on his arm, making her more than just his daughter. As noted, children are highly prized masculine currency in Jamaican grassroot culture. The persona’s anxieties realistically suggest that her actions could have fatal outcomes. In this regard Stephens’s (s)touri prefigures, Jamaica’s recent notoriety as a site with some of the highest incidences of domestic partnership murder-suicides (Pottinger et al., 2019), globally. As the only place of repose for this secret, the grave reference evokes the persona’s deep regret about her betrayal, highlighting the true costs associated with her ‘love’ (s)touri. This is poignantly conveyed by Stephens’s storytelling.

The ‘How’ of dancehall feminism

Stephens’s feminism is less identity-based and more ‘doing’ (Ferreira da Silva, 2019). It is a practice reflected in continuous performance. Entangled in what Denise Ferreira da Silva (2018), calls, the ‘how’ of Black women’s creative makings, it is constituted in and by:

…what has and has not already been done, to what takes place at this exact moment and in that other unimagined place, because how recalls infinity, ...another black feminist doing, inspired by the kind of sensibility announced when one attends to doings that are always and simultaneously feats, deeds, burdens, artifacts. When contemplating such sensibility, I have in mind the works of many black female thinkers and artists…More particularly, I am moved by the many presentations of matter that I find in their work. All of them are highly sophisticated and carefully composed texts or objects, whose raw materials (what is used as material content in their composition) refer to the past and present configurations of the global (juridic, economic, and symbolic) context, which they make available to the critical gaze through beautiful visual or written compositions (Ferreira da Silva, 2019: 1¹⁵)

Stephens’s feminism organically manifests as and in performance. Intersecting with a Blackness which is simultaneously recovered and refused within the nation, she is the West African Anansi trickster figure smuggled aboard slave ships to the Caribbean during trans-Atlantic slavery. Stephens is the consummate politician. She satisfies various audiences as needed in this regard. It is this slippery, impermanent and forever becoming sense in which Stephens’s storytelling functions which is of interest here, what David Crouch (2009), in citing Delueze and Gauttari, calls a ‘maelstrom of energies’ (p.134) occurring in the ‘cracks of the everyday’ (p. 134). This is especially so regarding her concerns about race – and, more widely, feminism. How might Stephens’s work be positioned as a result, and what might we learn about her dancehall practice as an act of feminist self-disclosure?

To answer this question, I return to the titular use of ‘taak op, wat’s yu (s)touri?’. As a grassroots narrative in which ideas of race and nation are intertwined, storytelling operates at the level of the intimate/sexual. As earlier noted, it is important to read Stephens as a trickster, speaking of the unreliability of her lover in the song, she says:

Jamaican:	English:
Yu kuda diil, mi a go disterb di piis,	You could deal, I am going to disturb the peace
Taak op, wats yu (s)touri?	Talk up, what’s your story?
Sombadi, pliiz ron go kaal di poliis.	Someone, please run and call the police
Taak op, wats yu (s)touri?	Talk up, what’s your story?
komaan nou, komaan nou!	C’mon now, c’mon now
Wa yu av fi se tu mi?	What do you have to say to me?
kom aan nou, kom aan nou!	C’mon now, c’mon now!

Despite protestations about being feminist - a word/concept, which as noted, is often steeped in the ethnocentric biases of whiteness (hooks, 1997) - Stephens's work nontheless intersects with a very strong awarenes of her rights as a woman. Embodied in the questionable intimacies negotiated between herself and the man is an anecdotal accounting of the myriad ways in which these relationships are performed. Stephen’s narrative articulates the duplicity and contestation characterising classic man an ooman (s)touri, in a uniquely Jamaican grassroots register. She notes:

Jamaican:	English:
Dier iz somting bout man	There’s something about men
we mi kyaa andastan	that I can’t understand
Aalwiez a wej imself iina som tait likl jam	Always wedging themselves into some tight, little jams
Neva tekin di diitielz into kansidarieshan	Never taking the details into consideration
An aalwiez a andaestimiet dem ooman	And, are always underestimating their women
A waak iin a di ous	And, is walking into the house
wid som aaf-biek plan	with some half-baked plans
An som veri familya	And some very familiar
lainz whe yu pik op outa a song	Lines that you picked up out of a song
‘Aahm, oni pliiz, yu figat se a	‘Ahh, honey have you forgotten that it was
mi bie yu di Beris Hammond kalekshan?’	me who bought you the Beres Hammon Collection?’
Yu beta kom out go luk a nex gyal fi kan	You better get out and go and find another girl tocon

Notwithstanding the evident humour in the exchange, there is also a more complex context which must be unpacked here. This requires a return to Cooper’s insights about the mobilities of Black, working-class women in Jamaica. There is a productive tension in her assessments of the labours of regular ‘work’ and the sexual toils characterising women’s overall work (ethic). In this evaluation of feminist self-awareness in dancehall, Cooper links the practicalities of the lives of ordinary, working women (note, not girls as in, ‘working girls’) with the spaces in which they generally mobilise. Work assumes a multi-layered, if not sexual resonance to women’s identities, which is relevant to Stephens’s overall storytelling. According to Cooper:

…women are not merely passive, desired objects. Their active interest in their own sexual satisfaction requires a high degree of physical fitness to do the work. The recurring use of the word “work” for sex clearly denotes the stamina that is required. The skillful, acrobatic dancing that women do is serious foreplay—bending over backward and touching the ground, for example—is not for the physically unfit. The emphasis on the mobility of the woman’s bottom, the seat of pleasure, is particularly pronounced…. (Cooper, 2004: 94-5)

Elsewhere, Cooper (1993) notes, in her analysis of the pioneering nation-language poet, Louise Bennett:

[t]hat cunning Jamaican woman, celebrated and satirised with equal gusto in Louise Bennett’s ample corpus, is a composite character – an aggregation of the multiple personae employed by Bennett, the ventriloquist, to voice the lives of representative Jamaican women of all social classes. The multi-farious heroine-victim of Bennett’s comic/satirical sketches presents us with a diversity of social class values and behaviours of the verisimilitude of [the] detailed portraiture… (Cooper, 1993: 47)

There is a robustness to the idea of Jamaican womanhood and work, which extends to all dimensions of women’s lives. Most notably, this also includes the bedroom, and every other location in which their services are employed or needed. The vagaries of female sexuality are thus key to how ideas of liberation are enacted within these traditions. This refers both to the formal literature of ‘more acceptable’ practices like Bennett’s above, and the ‘less respectable’ insights of dancehall musicians/singers like Stephens.

Recognising the highly nuanced and complex histories of work in Jamaican grassroots feminist canons also acknowledges its dual effects as drudgery and pleasure. Neither is easily separated. It also mirrors the shifting registers in which Stephens peddles her storytelling, embodied in the subtle moves in and by her own traversing of dancehall and reggae. She notes in Boom Wuk (Gangster Blues, 2004) that, if done effectively, work/wuk, as understood in this context, can achieve maximum desired results. According to Stephens, the ‘bum wuk’ (bomb/first-rate sex), ‘av mi a let aaf ivn duo yu bruk!’ (has me giving in even though you do not have any money!). ‘Bruk’ and ‘let aaf’ are instructive in how they position the sex act in dialogue with the capitalist neoliberal politics of working in multiple dimensions, as noted earlier. In Jamaican, ‘bruk’, which also has the twofold meanings of financial impoverishment and the male ejaculate, skilfully modifies the conventional gendered roles of worker and employer, between the man and woman, respectively.

Likewise, ‘let aaf’ conveys the idea of acceding to the man’s sexual appeals and, eventually, his wuk, suggesting that the woman happily undertakes this work for free. In this (s)touri, the workings of the sexual encounter effectively substitute for financial reward. For Stephens’s persona, it is the man’s ‘lang ding dang’ which achieves this overall positive response from her. She says:

Jamaican:	English:
Wa yu se?	What did you say?
Yu waan fi nuo wai di Ai chek fi di Ai?	You want to know why the I check for the I?
A no notn	It’s not anything
Ef it ain’t bruk doan fix it!	If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it!
An yu si fram yu a get wa yu fi get	And, you see, from you are getting what you are
	supposed to
Evriting set	Everything is set
Jos werk wid it, man!	Just work with it, man
Wa mi se? Yu ier mi? Alrait?	What did I say? You heard me? Alright?

It’s not the way you walk

An’ it’s not the way you talk

An’ it’s not your beat-up car

You definitely ain’t no movie star

It’s not the clothes you wear

An’ it’s not your nappy hair

It’s not your gangsta flex

Baby it’s all about de sex

Another important intervention is warranted here. The goal of the above passage is not to imply that Jamaican grassroots feminism is only concerned with sex, nor is it to suggest that this is the bulk of the ‘work’ in and with which it engages, whether in dancehall or reggae (or elsewhere!). Quite the opposite. In pinpointing the tensions between sexual work and the work of freedom, the aim is to highlight how some of the grassroots oral cultural discourses in which dancehall is rooted are also complex concerns in which women’s bodies are directly implicated. As noted in Stephens’s insistence, the man’s value is not linked to financial materiality but in his capacity to please her. Pleasure and pain are equally regarded within this vocabulary. There is a decided sense in which female sex/uality is not removed from the broader, presumably, more noble, political agenda of freedom; they are one and the same. Both work towards similar ends. Stephens’s intelligent storytelling affords us an appreciation of these nuances.

In considering the complexities informing Caribbean women’s activism in various sectors, among them the emergent literatures of the 1970s, Boyce Davies and Fido (1990), critique women’s work accordingly. Though their project is more studiously concerned with ‘real’ literature (memoirs, travel narratives and other similar outputs), there is no escaping the value of women’s contributions to enlarging current understandings of Caribbean societies and their overall struggles for liberation. Boyce Davies notes that, while Caribbean women do not suffer the oppressions observed in other global spaces, their contributions to this project are still valid. According to her:

…when countries are struggling through questions of liberation in general, the issues of women’s emancipation become critical to the understanding of the total liberation. Caribbean societies are not engaging in such struggles. But this does not mean that there is no need for feminist discourses in the Caribbean. Women seem to have great freedom in Caribbean societies, yet we know that they suffer great inequality within them... (Boyce and Fido, 1990: x)

Boyce-Davies’ insights are in reference to publications from the previously acknowledged ‘second wave’ feminist era (Mohammed, 2000). Shuttling between class and race (Mohammed 2000), Caribbean feminism was, effectively, shoehorned between several Euro-American discourses which were in vogue at the time. Little space was thus left for disentangling the pressing riddles of how to accommodate ‘Third World’ and other kinds of feminisms (Mohammed, 2000; Gilroy, 1998). Therefore, Stephens’s earlier noted rejection of the label ‘feminism’ must also be understood as part of a broader anti-colonial struggle, long waged in Caribbean societies since the nineteenth century and before. Though increasingly more muted, by what Doxilly Medwinter and Rozario (2021) argue are rabid US recolonisation impulses, Caribbean women’s commitment to battles against patriarchy remain paramount. Stephens’s work in dancehall and reggae (note, not ‘reggae/dancehall’ or any variations thereof) is instructive in this regard.

Tarrying momentarily with Doxilly Medwinter and Rozario (2021), it is important to consider their use of ‘Caribbean Womanism’ to highlight the need to develop appropriate, feminist frameworks - and possibly names - to analyse Caribbean societies. As US-based Caribbean descendants, they acknowledge the inadequacy of the conceptual landscape informing this productive terrain of scholarship. Located in their individual geographies, they offer a Womanist ethic alongside what they also name an integrative ‘Caribbeanist’ framework as one encompassing the lived experiences of Caribbean migrants/descendants, especially women living in the US, to more sensitively (and justly) understand the region. Their Caribbean Womanism context is rooted/routed in and through Caribbean scholars/hip (p. 2703). According to them, it is informed by:

…decolonial Caribbeanist and womanist perspectives, as an emancipatory theoretical framework for articulating Caribbean women’s oppression, survival, and liberatory resistance…locat[ing] Caribbean women’s subjectivities by drawing on the artistic expressions, experiences, and activism of poor and non-academic Caribbean women…[i]n order to place Caribbean women in proper historical and cultural, and material contexts,…draw[ing] on the work of Caribbean/Caribbean diasporic historians, philosophers, sociologists, and literary writers on Caribbean women… (Doxilly Medwinter and Rozario, 2021: 2704)

Undoubtedly, dancehall/grassroots feminism has evolved since many of the core scholars cited here published their research during the nineties and early-2000s. Though she writes in a long, historical assessment of Jamaica's grassroots and popular cultures, it must also be acknowledged that there is further nuance today (2023) in the development of some of Cooper’s earlier alluded to insights, many of which were documented in, or before 2004. The ongoing groundswell of dancehall is dynamic, which therefore leads me to wonder whether Stephens’s rejection of feminism is purely performative; that is, in keeping with her trickster persona earlier discussed. While I do not pretend to be aware of the full range of changes in dancehall, especially given my current location in the Diaspora, and the facts of my gender (as a man) especially in the context of feminism, it is still important to recognise the fast-moving nature of dancehall scholarship. Jamaica’s own grappling with issues of Blackness also leads me to question which term/concept best describes the links between grassroots culture and dancehall's increasingly urbanising nature. Ultimately, dancehall's dynamism is shaped by the push and pull of forces of life on-the-ground in Jamaica. This includes the rapid evolution of the music and culture over time, which requires more routine, organic updating located within the ‘eye of the storm’.

Conclusion

Consequently, not only does Stephens’s work exemplify a grassroot feminist practice rooted in lived experiences, but it also directs focus to a genre of Blackness in the post/colonial period which is very much rooted in an organic Jamaican performative tradition. Arguing that these ways of navigating and surviving oppression are a spatial means of reclaiming identity, it is reasonable to conclude that grassroots feminist practices of storytelling also enable different ways to understand performance. As a set of histories and geographies in which new meanings are constantly (re)made, Stephens’s declaration that she is not a feminist is different from a view of her work as having those properties. Within the fast-moving world of dancehall, there is often no need to name oneself as being engaged in activism – much of that is taken as a given. Instead, it is much more important to ‘do’ liberation work (as compared to saying it). This fact has, historically, typified grassroots/Black women’s mobilising in Jamaica. Given many of these approaches are largely navigated at grassroots levels, it is also fair to say that like those of her dancehall peers (Ce’Cile and others), Stephens’s feminism is performed. It simultaneously recovers a heritage of resistance through grassroots stories and the people who perform them. By taakin di tingz dem, the aggregate female personae on her Gangsta Blues album offers critical insights into how traditional Jamaican womanhood is (re)imagined in contemporary dancehall.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Agostinho MN Pinnock

Notes

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