Lady Saw Cuts Loose: Female Fertility Rituals
in Jamaican Dancehall Culture

by Carolyn Cooper
Published in the Proceedings of the Dancing in the Millennium Conference,
Washington, DC, July 2000, compiled by Juliette Crone Willis

Jamaican dancehall culture is commonly disparaged as a homophobic, homicidal, misogynist discourse that reduces both men and women to bare essentials: skeletal remains. In this dehumanizing caricature women are misrepresented as mindless bodies, (un)dressed and on display exclusively for male sexual pleasure. And men are stereotyped as dog-hearted predators stalking potential victims. It is the animal nature of both genders that is foregrounded. It is true that sex and violence - basic instincts - are recurring themes in the lyrics of both male and female deejays. Understandably so. The dancehall is, essentially, a heterosexual space (some would say heterosexist) in which men and women play out eroticised gender roles in ritual dramas that can become violent.

But sex and violence, however primal, are not the only preoccupations of Jamaican dancehall culture. There is a powerful current of explicitly political lyrics that speak to the struggle of the celebrants in the dance to reclaim their humanity in circumstances of grave economic hardship that force the animal out of its lair. Indeed, Jamaican dancehall culture privileges dance as a mode of theatrical self-articulation in which the body speaks eloquently of its capacity to endure and transcend material deprivation. And the politics of the dancehall is decidedly gendered: it is the body of the woman that is invested with absolute authority as men pay homage to the female principle.

Arguing transgressively for the freedom of women to claim a self-pleasuring sexual identity that may even be explicitly homoerotic, I propose that Jamaican dancehall culture at home and in the diaspora is best understood as an erogenous zone in which the celebration of female sexuality and fertility is ritualized. Survival of the fittest and the loosest is the name of the game. Approvingly gyrating to sexually explicit lyrics (usually performed by men), the female dancehall fan, as both spectacle and spectator, revels in the DJ's 'bigging up' of her person as desired and desiring subject - not mere sex object. The dancehall, thus conceived, is a liberating space in which working-class women and their more timid middle-class sisters play out eroticized roles that may not ordinarily be available to them in the rigid social conventions of the everyday.

In less subtle readings of the gender politics of the dancehall, this self-conscious female assertion of control over the representation of identity is misunderstood. The therapeutic potential of the dancing body is repressed. Indeed, the joyous display of the female body in the dance is misperceived as a pornographic devaluation of female sexuality. But the fantastic un/dress code of the dancehall (in the original Greek sense of the word 'fantastic,' meaning 'to make visible,' 'to show') is the visualization of a distinctive cultural style that allows women the liberty to demonstrate the seductive appeal of the imaginary - and their own bodies. Transparent bedroom undergarments become street-wear, somewhat like the emperor's new clothes. And who dares say that the body is naked? Only the naive. In the dancehall world of make-believe new identities can be assumed. Indeed, the elaborate styling of the body is a permissive expression of the pleasures of disguise.

Complicated sexual fantasies can be fulfilled in the putting on of hairpieces in various hues. Kinky-haired women go to all lengths to claim for themselves the sex appeal that is perceived to reside naturally in 'tall hair' women - as evidenced in the dominant images of pin-up female sexiness in the mainstream media in Jamaica and in international 'high fashion' magazines. As they flash their store-bought Rapunzel tresses, these dancehall divas, appropriating the border-crossing potential of disguise, simultaneously reinscribe and subvert the racial ideology that devalues the beauty of African-Jamaican women and undermines their self-esteem. The wigs do for some women what dreadlocks, and the even more fashionable 'sisterlocks,' do for others. Indeed, this hair-extension aesthetic must be related to traditional patterns of body adornment in continental Africa which have re-emerged in the diaspora.

In the patriarchal discourse of most societies women are required to be beautiful, unlike men who only have to be men. In the derisory words of the self-important male character, Ubana, in the novel The Joys of Motherhood, written by the Nigerian novelist, Buchi Emecheta: "[a] woman may be ugly and grow old, but a man is never ugly and never old. He matures with age and is dignified." For many African diasporan women, the politics of beauty is complicated by racism. Unlike their African sisters, for whom beauty was traditionally defined in indigenous terms, many African women in the diaspora are judged by standards of beauty based on non-African phenotypes. Faced with these marks of erasure, many black women have had to settle for being sexy, instead of beautiful. There is an old Guyanese joke about an African-Guyanese entrant in a national beauty contest in the mid-sixties. The unsuccessful beauty contestant is alleged to have responded thus to a malicious question about how she fared in the competition:

For figure and face
I ain't mek no place
But for bubby an ass
Ah bus deh rass.

Not all African diasporan women share the confidence of this contestant. There is a disturbing trend in the Caribbean today for black women to bleach their skin in an attempt to approximate the standards of euro-american ideal beauty. This bleaching of the skin - usually only of the face and neck - is an obvious attempt to partially disguise the racial identity of the subject and 'play mas.' The mask of 'lightness,' however dangerous in medical terms, becomes a therapeutic signifier of status in a racist society that still privileges melanin deficiency as a sign of beauty. Jamaican dancehall culture, mirroring the racial politics of the society, constitutes a paradoxical social space in which race as a marker of identity is contested and sexuality, especially that of the woman, is celebrated with abandon. The permissive aesthetics of the dancehall allow the black majority the freedom to enjoy the dubious pleasures of release from the prison of identity that limits the definition of the person to one's colour and social class. There are, it is all too true, profound psycho-sociological underpinnings of this desire to be/play the other that cannot be simply written off as mere entertainment. Role play both conceals and reveals deep-seated anxieties about the body which has been incised with the scarifications of history.

All of the disguises of the dancehall - the hair styles, costumes, make-up and body language that are assumed - enhance the illusion of a fairy-tale metamorphosis of the mundane self into desired sex object - as seen, for example, in the film Dancehall Queen. Woman as sexual being claims the right to sexual pleasure as an essential sign of her identity. Both fleshy women and their more sinewy sisters are equally entitled to display themselves in the public sphere as queens of revelry. Exhibitionism conceals ordinary imperfections. Even more implicated in this discourse of 'objectification' is the female DJ who, having upstaged her male counterpart, takes control of the mike and assumes the power to represent herself verbally and dance to her own beat. The self-assertive female DJ does speak back to the male, challenging many of the chauvinist limitations that are imposed on her gender. But, somewhat paradoxically, she often speaks the very same sexually explicit body-language as the male, causing short-sighted detractors to dismiss her as being even more culpable than the male DJs and the women in the audience who take vicarious pleasure in her daring self-exposure on stage.

The flamboyantly exhibitionist DJ Lady Saw epitomizes the sexual liberation of many African-Jamaican working-class women from airy-fairy Judaeo-christian definitions of appropriate female behaviour. She embodies the erotic. But one viewer's erotica is the other's pornography. So Lady Saw is usually censured as being far too loose - or 'slack,' in the Jamaican vernacular. The Dictionary of Jamaican English defines a "slack" as "a woman of loose morals". Fast rewind to the Garden of Eden and Eve seducing 'innocent' Adam. The gender bias is immediately evident. Slackness has to do with the immorality of women, not men. Women are the guardians of public and private morality; men do their own thing. In an act of feminist emancipation Lady Saw cuts loose from the burdens of moral guardianship. In a 1998 radio interview in the "Uncensored" series on Jamaica's Fame FM, Lady Saw counters charges of vulgarity with assurance:

Interviewer: Lady Saw, you do things like, yu grab yu crotch on stage . . .
Lady Saw: Uh huh. Michael Jackson did it and nobody say anything about it.
Interviewer: And you gyrate on the ground. I mean, do you think this is acceptable for a woman?
Lady Saw: Yes, darling. For this woman. And a lot of woman would like to do the same but I guess they are too shy.

Shyness is not one of Lady Saw's attributes. And she is dismissive of critics who naively identify her with her stage persona. In response to the question, "Some people are saying that you are vulgar on stage and your lyrics are indecent. Do you think they are justified?" she asserts: "I think critics are there to do their job and I am here to my job. . . . To entertain and please my fans." And she claims a private space that allows her the freedom to escape her public image: "I'm a nice girl. When I'm working, you know, just love it or excuse it."

But many critics find it difficult to excuse Lady Saw for her transgressions. Listen to the ambiguous tone of enthralled condemnation in the words of Papa Pilgrim, a reggae radio disc jockey in Salt Lake City, Utah in his report on the 1993 Reggae Sunsplash "Dancehall Night" in The Beat magazine:

Then came a performance that was more vulgar than any I have seen from anyone anywhere! Her name was Lady Saw and as a Jamaican friend commented, you cannot put enough Xs in front of her name to adequately describe what she did. To quote from the August 7, 1993 Gleaner "She went to the bottom of the pit and came up with sheer filth and vulgar lyrics which made Yellow Man at his worst seem like a Boy Scout."

Exponentially x-rated Lady Saw was not nominated for a Jamaica Music Award for 1994 on the grounds that she is consistently slack. But this is not at all so. The notorious public image of defiant sensuality and raw slackness masks the true depth of Lady Saw's insights which she reveals, when it suits her, in cutting lyrics that are above reproach. Subverting the conventional understanding of slackness which limits it to the sexual domain, Lady Saw gives a provocative definition in "Nof More Tings" that expands the denotative range of the word:

The hotter the battle, the sweeter the victory. And sanctified Lady Saw knows her bible. You had better take the beam out of your own eye before you start looking for the mote in hers. In a wicked reversal of roles the persecuted DJ sings triumphant praises to God:

When I remember where I'm coming from
Through all the trials and tribulation
Yes, the hardship and the sufferation
I have to go on my knees
And sing praises to God
Glory be to God!
Praises to his name!
Thanks for taking me
Out of the bondage and chains.

Lady Saw proves that she is not consistently slack. She can be as pious as pious can be. And, in any case, she knows that the man from Galilee had a way with all kinds of ladies. Undoubtedly, the vast majority of songs in Lady Saw's repertoire are decidedly raunchy. There's no denying it. That is why she's so popular. She's a woman running neck and neck with the men, giving as good, or even better than, she gets. But exclusive focus on those x-rated lyrics diminishes the range of her contribution. Consider, for example, her "Condom" hit which advocates safe sex. She confidently asserts that this song can't be banned. It is not at all slack - in the usual hard-core sense of the word - though it does name sexual acts/positions which are encoded in metaphor: "banana peel" and "pedal and wheel." The song warns against sexual promiscuity and its fatal consequences. Ironically, Lady Saw is on firm moral ground here:

2001 © Carolyn Cooper.
All Rights Reserved.

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