Image from Disney.com

One hundred years ago you would probably have been chased out of your hometown by cousins brandishing pitchforks if you proclaimed that a century later we would have tiny boxes that tell us where to turn as we drive around in larger boxes shaped something like a carriage, but without a horse.

Imagine what those cousins would have done to you if you said there would be a small, flat contraption—a mirror of sorts—that lights up and allows you to not only see but speak to someone on the other side of the planet!

At my college’s end-of-year meeting last week, my dean gave all his faculty members such a mirror—brand new iPads! While I knew about the various functions provided by iPads as I’d come close to buying one a few months back (thank goodness I didn’t), the next day when I got my first Face Time call from a very good friend, I was thrilled to be able to see his face while I shuffled around my bedroom with my personal magic mirror in hand.

While most of you in our tech savvy generation are probably rolling your eyes over my amusement, think about what this means for our future and the exciting and useful ways technology can move us forward in upcoming decades. Imagine what our grandchildren will take for granted that will have us gripping our walking sticks in shock.

Also intriguing is the way that technology can inform and energize our spirituality.

I’ve always taken Jesus’ words with a grain of salt when he says in the Book of John that we will do “greater works” than him. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m still not anywhere close to walking on water. And while I do believe that without the benefit of one byte of technology we can accomplish things we can’t even conceive, it seems that in another manner we are fulfilling Jesus’ promise every day through the amazing gadgets we’ve created for ourselves.

So after all this talk about Jesus, magic and miracles, my latest venture has been trying to figure out if I should get Angry Birds (not, I’m sure, what my dean had in mind when he gave us the iPads). Any thoughts? Is it really addictive?

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Whitney in 1983 Issue of Seventeen

While growing up in Jamaica I was painfully sure that my life was not the real deal. My father’s ancient Austin Cambridge sputtering along Red Hills Road; my unruly hair that began escaping from its plaits the moment my mother put down the brush; and mosquitoes that sounded like helicopters hovering over my ears while I slept were never part of the lives of the authentic girls who peopled my favorite books (like Nancy Drew) and TV shows (like Scooby Doo).

 As a teenager, I wanted this fictional life more than ever. I wanted to somehow make what I had, mosquitoes and all, into a remotely acceptable version of what it was supposed to be, and my chubby, black body became the site for this phenomenal transformation I longed after.

 Meadowbrook Pharmacy was just a short walk down the street from my house, and the pharmacy became my arsenal of supplies defining what a “real” teenaged girl’s life should be like. A small magazine rack huddled in a corner near bars of Cadbury chocolate and bottles of Limacol, and each time new issues of Seventeen appeared on the rack, I was first in line. I’d eagerly rush home and inhale all those images of beautiful (white) girls whom I must have imagined that I could one day look like: shiny long hair, a svelte body, perfectly applied makeup.

 Seventeen and its army of fair maidens, their images embedded in a web of ads for tanning lotions and articles on how to select the right shade of pink lipstick, did little more than aggravate me, but year after year I kept on reading. Then one day my heart sputtered when I came across a picture of a gorgeous girl with short hair and dark skin! She was in a swimsuit posed on the sand next to a foamy ocean, and her skin glowed as if she’d been coated in pixie dust.

 In the weeks after I got the magazine, I’d flip through the pages each day and marvel at the photos of this girl. I guess I kept checking to make sure she was still there, a girl as real as me and not some river mumma causing mischief. It was not until years later when I’d gone off to college and Whitney Houston became a household name that I realized she was the girl who had magically emerged from the depths of the oceans; and now she’s gone back there just as suddenly as she came.

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So, my son, Dean Jr., returned home from college a few months ago. He’s at that early twenty-something stage when everyone expects that you should have your life together and be zooming ahead in a straight line towards professional success. But like his mother when she was that age, he’s still figuring out precisely what to do with himself.

He could go to grad school, but isn’t in the mood at the moment. When I mention the GRE and possible graduate programs (which I have mentioned many, many, many times) he looks like I suggested that he should eat a poisonous caterpillar for lunch, so I’ve stopped (I think). He’s considering changing his career focus from film, radio, and television production to the visual arts, but isn’t sure. And though we love and support any career choice he makes, I’m haunted by visions of him still living at home at 58 while trying to market his first animation project  (a fear I’m very ashamed to admit given that I’m a creative soul myself).

From time to time he’s mentioned starting a business with his friend Mitch—I think he said something about video production services—but alas, about this he doesn’t seem quite sure either. So to solve his dilemma he’s gotten a job at Starbucks, where he spends his days serving lattes while he contemplates his future.

When he lived at home (oh, but he lives at home now)—when he was kid and lived at home, we had him enrolled in all kinds of stuff, including Taekwondo. He did it for several years and eventually earned his black belt. He was good: broke boards and all that super hero business. So recently he and his friend Mitch (the one with whom he hasn’t started a business—but might) decided to begin doing Mixed Martial Arts. They considered taking classes but could not find a school that was affordable, so they were going to begin by practicing at home. Dean Jr. planned to order the equipment they needed online, but he says that out of nowhere he had the thought that he should go to an actual store (what a novel idea). He did, and had the sense that the guy at the counter seemed familiar. The guy at the counter thought my son seemed familiar too and that maybe they went to high school together. Turns out they didn’t.

During my son’s next visit to this martial arts supply store, he thought that the familiar guy perhaps used to teach at his Taekwondo school way back when, but he decided not to bother mentioning this as he could be wrong and the young man may think he’s crazy. But last minute he decided to ask him, and lo and behold the young fellow did teach at Dean Jr.’s old school. They chatted for a little then this guy told my son that one of his past teachers just opened a school nearby. My son went to visit this school and saw his teacher who’d been in business for all of two weeks. The rates were affordable, plus he gave my son a free two-week pass to attend classes! On top of this the teacher mentioned that just a couple weeks ago he was chatting to his wife about our family and wondering how we were doing. So there you have it: voila, Dean Jr. is about to begin his second life as a martial arts champ and he got a little help finding a school.

In the scheme of things I’m sure this is not the most dazzling coincidence you’ve heard about, but I still find it fascinating how things muddled together for my son, and my guess is that he’s been led to the precise place where he should begin stage two of his martial arts journey. I’m also reminded that when our own mini-miracles occur, we have to take some time out to think about why the Universe might want to grab us by the shoulders and give us a shake at that particular moment and how we can use the nudge we’ve gotten to make the best decisions for ourselves.

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GPS photo credit Digital Trends http://www.digitaltrends.com/

Or you’re relaxing on your couch, unwinding from a busy day, when you see David Smith (of Olint Investment fame) or Bernie Madoff (no explanation needed) in handcuffs, and you realize your life’s savings are not only down the toilet but flushed all the way to the Arctic Ocean—in other words, gone forever unless you can befriend a polar bear to help you find them.

Who would have thought that the DUI you got when you were nineteen could actually prevent you from being admitted to the bar years later when you realized all you want in life is to practice law? And how would you ever have known that the love of your life, who helped wreck your credit before running off to Brazil with your best friend, would demolish (along with your heart) all your hopes for home ownership for at least another decade? These are the sobering moments that happen upon most of us at some point in our lives, moments when what appeared to be a fairly sane choice at the time changes the landscape of our existence. Forever.  

As we grope our way through the consequences of our choices, how easy it is for us to feel as if the opportunity to have a happy and fulfilling life has slipped from our hands, like a glass ball in heavily greased palms. How apparent it may seem that the life we thought we were scurrying towards, before we agreed to cosign for a car for that deserter in Brazil, has disappeared forever, and we’ll never be able to recoup this lost life because it’s melting fast, like ice in hot oil.

I’ve certainly had my share of these moments that involve an obsessive rethinking of my life and how much better it could have been. I go through every possible permutation of how glorious things could have been if I’d made different choices. A lot of this obsessing took place while as thirty-something year old with a family and bills I was hauling myself through graduate school. I can’t tell you how often I had torturous dreams about the wonderful existence I would have/could have had if I’d just launched right into a master’s program when I was twenty-three and graduating with my bachelor’s. If I were smarter, if I were more ambitious, if I’d not gotten pregnant with my beautiful son, and if I’d known just what I wanted to do with myself (cause who needs more than twenty-two years to figure that out?), life would have/could have been soooooo much better.

This lost life I’d dream of was always glorious and filled with personal and professional success: fancy cars, designer suits, a fantastic job, and brilliant children (which as it turns out I happen to have in my real life). And very importantly, in this lost life I was always slender (which as it turns out I am NOT in my real life). This lost life that haunted me was sort of like the perfect setting that you see in a snow globe—aside from the occasional flutter of falling snow, everything stays intact, superbly neat and orderly.  

But I’ve now come to think differently about this elusive snow globe life that I imagine to be as perfect as a snowflake because it’s not real, and I don’t think the happiness I’ve come to associate with this fantasy life is all that elusive after all.  I’ve come to believe that our lives work sort of like a GPS. We have a destination (hopefully) that we’re trying to reach, but at times we ignore our guidance system that’s yelling “Stop!” or “Turn right in fifty yards!” Next thing we know we’ve missed a turn and we’re heading for The Florida Keys. So just when we think we’re going to have to set up house in Key Largo because we can’t get  back to Miami, we hear those comforting words from the GPS, “Recalculating,” and seconds later we have a whole new route mapped out for us!

 Life works this way as well! Each time we miss a turn, life provides a new set of directions. These may take us on a longer more convoluted path to our destination, but if we follow carefully, we’ll get there. Another thing is that sometimes we change our destination, and we’re nothing short of blessed that we never got where we were originally going (getting stuck in Key Largo is not the worst thing that can happen).

This, I believe, is the beauty of our lives. Just like that clunky GPS that annoys us constantly but that we’d trade our partner to keep, life knows when we’re not heading in the right direction. But our life GPS, what some people know as intuition, is trying to help us live our best life, and it keeps mapping new paths for us with every exit we miss. Our job is to remain hopeful about the possibility of overcoming these wrong turns and, quite frankly, to simply smash those darn snow-globe lives each time they float into our thoughts. Obsessing about how your journey might have been if you didn’t get lost 4 miles back is never helpful with getting you back on track.  

 Unfortunately, we may not always make use of the new opportunities life presents us, and we may repeat the same mistakes, but like that wretched and persistent GPS, life just keeps on recalculating, even if our new journey has to take us to the North Pole and back just to get us down the street.

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Clifton Brown--photo credit TVJ

Several weeks ago, parts of Jamaica experienced extensive flooding after days of heavy rains that rivaled the deluge which set Noah’s ark afloat some millennia past. Bridges, roads, homes and businesses were washed away, leaving residents in various parts of the island stranded, unable to navigate flooded streets, swollen gullies, and overflowing rivers.

Jamaican television station TVJ covered the floods in the Mavis Bank area of Jamaica in the parish of St. Andrew, and reporter Dara Smith’s interview with a bystander and resident of the area, Clifton Brown, is now perhaps the most famous TV interview in Jamaica. In the interview Brown offers an earnest, thoughtful, and passionate explanation of the challenges being faced by residents of Mavis Bank and the surrounding communities, including Robertsfield and Davis Hill, and he elaborates on the dangers posed by the flooded Yallahs River. Brown’s colorful and animated conversation is further characterized by his attempt to speak with a foreign accent (in this case American), known in Jamaica as a “twang.” Here is the most comprehensive version of the interview I could find, despite the unexplainably interspersed images of Bounty Killer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWIkX9c23M4 

In his now memorialized commentary on the raging Yallahs River, Brown states, “Nobody canna cross it, only a fishermen and a fisherwomen,” (no one can cross the river, only people very familiar with water). Brown’s unique and impassioned description of the difficulties being faced by his community is his effort to illuminate the perils of simply trying to survive and get to work or school in the face of extensive flooding. It is also his plea for help from a government that he perceives as indifferent to his community’s plight.

At another point in the interview Brown utters the second popular phrase associated with his perspective on the flooding when in an effort to explain which types of vehicles are able to navigate the heavy flood waters he says “The bus can swim,” meaning buses can make the treacherous crossing. In fact, the news report revealed that crossing the river had become so hazardous that residents had to pay vehicles and sometimes individuals to ferry them as human cargo from one side to the next.

Next, in the Clifton Brown saga comes Kevin-Sean Hamilton aka “DJ Powa,” a talented young student at Jamaica’s University of Technology who remixed clips of the interview, set these clips to music, and created a catchy music video. DJ Powa’s objectives in all this seem to be primarily commercial and have little to do with Brown or the floods. DJ Powa’s videos expose his talent and create economic opportunities for him. For example, by the time he appeared on television after his video had become super popular, he was wearing a T-shirt (surely available for sale) emblazoned with a line from the video. Watch his original video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hknVoAoyy-k&feature=related.  To date the video has garnered over a million hits on YouTube.

The third installment in this unfolding event, and the focus of this article, is a second interview with Clifton Brown after his sudden rise to fame. This interview took place on the popular Jamaican morning talk show Smile Jamaica, where hosts Simon Crosskill and Neville Bell spoke with both Brown and DJ Powa. Here’s that interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O13UzMTn-0o

Most striking to me about the Smile Jamaica segment is the overwhelming amusement the hosts found in Brown’s use of language during both the initial interview with Dara Smith as well as during their encounter with him on their show. Often doubled over with laughter to the point of near paralysis and tears, the hosts unabashedly laughed at Brown throughout the show despite Brown’s obvious surprise and discomfort that his speech could provoke such a response.

As I watched Smile Jamaica, I fully understood why the hosts, as well as many Jamaicans, found Brown’s linguistic faux pas amusing. Admittedly, I found the interview quite funny as well. This is no surprise since we Jamaicans are somewhat programmed to find amusement in our countrymen’s (and countrywomen’s, Brown might want me to add) attempts to reinvent themselves through language. For example, in Jamaican advertisements and theatre productions one of the most reliable ways to generate laughter is to have someone “twang.”

However, during Brown’s appearance on Smile Jamaica, watching Crosskill and Bell collapse into uncontrollable laughter in front of the country and an obviously confused and embarrassed guest was quite disturbing, particularly since many of us often privately engage in similarly mean-spirited laughter at people’s failed attempts to speak using some configuration of what they deem “proper” English. Crosskill and even more so Bell were doing precisely what many of us would do, except they were doing it in front of the entire nation. Subsequently, this Smile Jamaica episode has generated an onslaught of comments, including newspaper articles and editorials, social media feedback, and radio talk show discussions, many critical of Crosskill and Bell for their insensitivity, some to their defense.

But perhaps we can use this moment to venture beyond taking sides on the issue to instead interrogate the widespread national response of laughter to Brown’s interview. Why were his comments so humorous, his speech patterns so worthy of attention that they inspired a music video? What is this commotion over Brown?

What Brown engaged in when he set aside his usual patterns of speech and assumed what he understood to be a foreign/American accent is officially known as code switching, something we all do and which simply refers to our use of multiple variations of a language (or multiple languages) in a conversation. So if I am chatting with one of my Jamaican girlfriends, I may speak fairly standard English as I explain how my day is going, like my trip to the supermarket, blah, blah, blah. When I get to the part about a lizard that crawled into my car (while I was driving),  I may say something like, “When me tell say me did frighten, me mean say me was a go pass out!”  (when I say I was frightened, I mean I felt like I was going to pass out). That’s code switching.

So if this code switching happens all the time and we all engage in it, why are some forms of code switching, like Brown’s, quite hilarious, and other forms, like mine, inconsequential, rarely generating much laughter or notice? Perhaps one reason is because of the anxieties Brown exposes in some of us over our own efforts to successfully traverse class boundaries, which code switching helps us to accomplish.

Brown clearly thought that “twanging” was the appropriate code of choice for the moment. The camera and later the formality of the studio all signaled to Brown that something other than his usual mode of speech was called for, something that made him more understandable to his audience and that favorably situated him in a certain class and social space, perhaps other than the space in which he usually resides.

But from the middle-class eyes of the hosts, these language missteps marked Brown as a failure at faking an accent, an outsider unacquainted with the authentic rhythms of “foreign” evidenced by all of his mispronunciations and awkward cadence. So perhaps Crosskill and Bell’s laughter as well as the chuckles from all of us who found humor in Brown’s interview have less to do with Brown’s missteps but with the opportunity those missteps afford us to separate ourselves from him and what we may see as his lack of sophistication.

In other words, our laughter affirms that we know better than he does and we recognize that his effort to render an authentic foreign accent has failed, suggesting that we know how to avoid such failures and are competent in “proper” speech.  In other words, the laughers (the hosts of Smile Jamaica and those of us who found Brown’s interview comedic) are presumably able to successfully speak either American English or English English, while Brown cannot.

In his book, Leviathan, seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that we laugh at other people’s adversity in order to assert our own superiority. “Sudden Glory,” as Hobbes described this feeling of superiority, emerges from “the apprehension of some deformed thing in another.” This laughter, Hobbes contends, allows people to “keep themselves in their own favour, by observing the imperfections of other men.”

Another theoretical approach to humor advanced by psychologist Sigmund Freud has become known as “Relief Theory,” which suggests that we laugh to release pent-up anxieties and aggression. In other words, laughter allows us to express repressed emotion in a more socially acceptable form. With Freud’s ideas in mind, we may be able to understand the laughter generated by Brown’s interview as contempt towards the working class, their poverty, their struggles, and moreover their efforts to transcend their circumstances through acts like skin bleaching or “twanging,” which suggest that they are able to occupy an alternate (and presumably more privileged) social space. Twanging functions in a similar fashion to bleaching, as an effort to alter a signifier of class rank. See my blog post “Coloring with Cake Soap” all about bleaching and Vybz Kartel: http://blogs.jamaicans.com/ordinarya/2011/03/25/coloring-with-cake-soap/.   I argue that middle-class antagonism towards bleaching has to do with a resentment towards working-class people’s efforts to transcend their social spaces.

So what’s next in the Clifton Brown saga? In an interview with Jamaican poet and talk show host Mutabaruka, Brown claims that he now has an agent! I know that here at Jamaicans.com efforts are underway explore raising money to get a bridge built to prevent residents in the area from being marooned when it rains. Neville Bell, one of the hosts of Smile Jamaica, has apologized to Brown and has subsequently resigned from the show, although supposedly not in relation to the Brown commotion.    

If the furor over Brown did in fact prompt Bell’s resignation, I think that was an unfortunate and unnecessary outcome. What this incident presents is an opportunity for us to reflect on our own response to Brown, and to language in general, and perhaps what the Smile Jamaica hosts should have done was a follow-up show that contemplated just why they could not stop laughing about Brown’s commentary.

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Tia Dalma, sorceress from Pirates of the Caribbean series

Tia Dalma is featured in the second and third installments of the series, and she is shrouded in magic and mystery. She lives in the remote interior of a creepy swamp, her home a sinister tree house with a massive snake loitering in a branch at its doorway.  Our initial encounter with her is occasioned by Sparrow’s terrifying but urgent trek to see her and solicit her help with getting information about a certain key. As Sparrow anticipates, Tia Dalma is able to explain the origins and purpose of the key.

Sparrow leaves Tia Dalma satisfied with the outcome of his visit. However, by the close of the movie Sparrow has a new set of troubles: he and his ship have been dragged into the sea by the Kraken, Davy Jones’ sea monster. Dead Man’s Chest closes with Sparrow’s crew and comrades returning to Tia Dalma for refuge. She consoles them and promises to lead them on a journey to rescue Jack from the underworld. At World’s End begins with that rescue mission. Tia Dalma has joined Jack’s crew and repeatedly uses her intuitive powers to help guide the crew to Jack. Before the film is over we come to understand that Tia Dalma is in fact the sea goddess Calypso, bound in human form, a lynchpin in the film’s plot, and the cause for Davy Jones’ monstrous embodiment.

Tia Dalma is a symbolic embodiment of the Caribbean, implied by various components of her persona shaped by a Caribbean identity. Among the most immediately apparent is her speech. Unlike the other characters in the series, most of whom quite curiously do not have Caribbean accents, hers is very pronounced—an 18^th century Miss Cleo, if you will. This is particularly meaningful because the films in some ways erase traces of a black Caribbean presence, which at that time would have consisted primarily of slaves, and instead feature Blacks as part of various pirate crews in what strikes me as disproportionate excess.  This erasure is particularly evident in the opening film of the series, The Curse of the Black Pearl, in which all the servants in the governor’s mansion are quite peculiarly white. Kevin Frank argues that this is a result of Disney’s “utopian ” impulse and its unwillingness to represent the reality of the region’s black and enslaved population (59). Tia Dalma’s Caribbeaness is further inscribed by her hair, which like Sparrow’s is dreadlocked, a hairstyle closely associated with reggae icon Bob Marley and with the Caribbean in general. Additionally, her face is adorned with markings that approximate tribal scarification, linking her to the region’s slave presence.

Both Sparrow and Davy Jones have been seduced by Tia Dalma. However, because she broke Davy Jones’ heart, he caused her to be bound in human form. He also removed his heart, placed it in a chest, and hid it away so he could no longer be hurt, transforming himself into a grotesque monster, his external persona mirroring the anger and heartbreak he felt inside. Before Pirates of the Caribbean part three is over, Calypso is released from bondage in her human form. First she manifests as a giant-sized version of Tia Dalma then explodes into a landslide of  crabs that crawl into the ocean, resuming her identity as goddess of the sea and literally submerging herself in a Caribbean identity.

My  reading of the film is then that Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones’ relationship with Tia Dalma is a metonymy for Europe’s relationship with the region. Using this analytical platform, I’d like to suggest that the Pirates of the Caribbean films invoke magic and mythology to help situate the region as enchanting and seductive, yet foreboding and deadly, and these characteristics co-conspire to render the region feral, primitive, and menacing. To further explain, Tia Dalma/Calypso’s  potent and mythological seductive capacity persists in an ongoing tradition of situating the region as enchanting and bewitching, rendering helpless those outsiders who dare come in contact with it. Like Sparrow and Davy Jones, these outsiders become helpless in their infatuation with the region. The Caribbean as marvelous reality was perpetuated from Western Europe’s initial encounter with it, evident in Columbus’ description of Hispaniola:  “Española is a marvel; the mountains and hills, and plains, and fields, and the soil, so beautiful and rich for planting and sowing …There could be no believing, without seeing.” This “marvelous” identity of the Caribbean is what persists in Tia Dalma’s representation of the Caribbean and reinvigorates a historical effort to portray it (and other colonized areas) as enchanting and seductive.

This rendering of Tia Dalma and hence the Caribbean as magical suggests that those bodies associated with the region, namely slaves and native Amerindians, are also inferior and subhuman given the West’s traditionally logocentric posture and its resistance to embracing or acknowledging non-material or spiritual forces outside the confines of conventional organized religion.  As Edward Said suggests, classifying colonized groups as backward and irrational clears space for Western assumptions of superiority relative to those groups. As such, Tia Dalma’s representation of the Caribbean and her immersion in magic and myth collaborate to recommend that the Caribbean is backward and to alleviate Western responsibility for the savage violence enacted against the region and its people.

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Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow

Below is an excerpt from my paper that I will present tomorrow morning at the Caribbean Studies Association Conference in Curacao.

My paper today is concerned with Hollywood’s representation of the Caribbean in film, specifically films that feature a supernatural or fantastical element. These films include early efforts to render a haunted Caribbean such as White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie, to more recent productions like The Serpent and the Rainbow and the Pirates of the Caribbean series.  In a region where literature, music and its own film production have been significantly influenced by Hollywood, where the eyes of the Caribbean voraciously consume an infinite number of moving images created outside of the region, how do the creators of these images that have in some ways transfixed the region’s gaze, gaze back at us?  This paper is part of a larger project that contemplates representations of the supernatural Caribbean and more precisely part of a book chapter that explores Hollywood’s representation of the Caribbean in films that feature a supernatural or fantastical element. While the completed chapter will probe a range of films, including crime thrillers, like 007 Live and Let Die and Marked for Death, both profusely garnished with Obeah and witchcraft, my paper today focuses on Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean series.

Inspired by the Disney theme park ride after which the films are named, two of the films in this series, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, count among the top ten highest grossing movies of all time.[1] Directed by Gore Verbinski, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and starring Johnny Depp as the iconic Captain Jack Sparrow, this fantasy series catapults audiences into  Sparrow’ s 18^th century world of magical adventure on the high seas of the Caribbean and beyond. The films, especially the second and third installments: Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End, are the focus of this paper and are both steeped in the fantastic and feature, among numerous other mythical elements, a magical compass, a crew of monstrous  pirates, and a sorceress named Tia Dalma.

The series gestures towards its predecessors, early pirate films like The Black Pirate (1926), Captain Blood (1935), and The Buccaneer (1938), but with a wink and dandified nod that announces the series’ self-awareness and its pervasive mockery of the genre from which it derives. Of all the films’ elements, the one most irreverent to the genre and most amusing in its subterfuge is Depp’s portrayal of Sparrow. Both cowardly and brave, villainous and heroic, hyper-masculine and effeminate, Jack sashay’s through the series with heavily-lined eyes and the gait of a fashion model while dexterously wielding his sword and mercilessly dispatching his enemies.  Depp’s complex portrayal of Sparrow is further enunciated by his dreadlocks, which signal Sparrow’s marginalized position as part of a counter-culture but also invoke the racist anxieties spawned by dreadlocks and their association in the Hollywood imaginary with violence and lawessness.[2] Numerous aspects of Depp’s portrayal of Sparrow and indeed other subversive elements of the film were not authorized by Disney. Anne Peterson suggests that the series was “pirated,” its original aesthetic trajectory rerouted by not only Depp but the director and writers, whom she argues, insert “character ambiguity, a troubled story arc, anti-heroes, and off-color humor to the traditionally chaste Disney text” (70).  In an interview with Vanity Fair, Depp commented that the Disney establishment “couldn’t stand” his portrayal of Sparrow and that the then head of Disney, Michael Eisner, accused him of “ruining the movie.”[3]

Sparrow’s unruliness within and without the film bears an uncanny resemblance to the lawlessness associated with historical Caribbean piracy and an even more uncanny connection to the contemporary persona of Caribbean gangsters a.k.a. “rudeboys.”  In a 1978 speech during the famed One Love Peace Concert in Kingston, reggae artist Peter Tosh (formerly of the Wailers)  astutely commented upon the Caribbean’s lineage of violence. The concert was held to observe a peace treaty between warring political factions, and addressing the country’s political leaders, Tosh demystified the roots of the violence plaguing the nation:

[W]hen Columbus, Henry Morgan and Francis Drake come up, dey call dem pirate and put them in a  reading book and give us observation that we must look up and live the life and the principle of pirates. So the youth dem know fe fire dem guns like Henry Morgan same way.

Just as Tosh does in his commentary, the figure of Captain Jack Sparrow collapses piracy, in its historic context as a counterculture, into its descendant: the contemporary “rudeboy” (implied by Sparrow’s dreadlocks).  Sparrow’s complexity is further heightened because he simultaneously occupies the space of ancestor and offspring.

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http://www.speroforum.com/a/36606/Expert-on-Islam-welcomes-French-ban-on-burqa

This month the so called “burqa  ban” went into effect in France, the first European country to enact such a restriction. Women wearing burqas (or any other garment that veils their faces) are now subject to hefty fines of around US $200; men charged with forcing a woman to wear burquas may face a fine of US $43,000. Yes, forty-three thousand dollars!

Some critics of this law suggest that it has racist underpinnings and little to do with the security concerns or women’s rights offered up by its proponents. While racist or anti-Muslim sentiments may have a role in the ban’s enactment, I have to admit to feeling less unhinged about this trespass on a woman’s right to choose how she dresses than I might under other circumstances. Quite simply, it’s difficult to see the burqa as anything but yet another instance of women being given the age-old responsibility as their brothers’ keepers—keepers that is of men’s sexual choices.

French President, Nicholas Sarkozy described the burqa as “a sign of enslavement.” Extreme? Perhaps, but when I think about driving, going out to eat, or trying to exercise under all those folds of cloth, the term doesn’t strike me as all that inappropriate. How odd it is that the modesty for which the Koran advocates could have ended up being interpreted as a burqa. And for a moment I wondered what it might be about Islam that would manifest in such restrictive, if not bizarre to the Western eye, dress codes. Then I got to thinking about this and the demands made on women by a variety of religious and social dress conventions:

Nun’s habits are among the numerous socio/cultural demonstrations of how religious dictum is used to prescribe “appropriate” female dress. And yes, the above represents dress requirements for only a specific group of Christian women, but these requirements exist nevertheless.

These fashion imperatives that insist women smother certain body parts, and in the case of the burqa every body part, are propelled by unsavory notions about the corruptive quality of women’s sexuality, and if the sole result were interesting habits and veils for me to blog about, then this would be okay. But the inference, embodied by the insistence that women dress “modestly” leads to far more serious consequences, and one is that women do in fact feel responsible for men’s lascivious acts, even when they are acts of assault and violence against those same women. Evidence of this misguided sense of responsibility is reflected by women’s shame about reporting sexual violations.

According to a 2002 report from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, only “36% of rapes, 34% of attempted rapes, and 26% of sexual assaults [in the U.S.] were reported to police” between 1992 and 2000. This is a cruel, and undue burden placed at the feet of women— accountability for men’s sexual behavior—and perhaps this is the “enslavement” most concerning about burqas and other prescribed forms of dress that ask women to bear responsibility for men’s response to them.

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Poui blossoms in my front yard

 I’m not usually a big photography buff, but each spring I fall in love with the fallen poui blossoms in my front yard ; this year I just had to take pictures. I’ve also been thinking about the crisis in Libya and what I want to say about the whole mess that it is. For now, seems all I can feel is plain old sad. “Flight of the Poui Carpet” is how these two subjects of my attention over the last week or so have somehow merged. Special thanks to my great friend and poet extraordinaire, Geoffrey Philp, for his editorial suggestions!   

Flight of the Poui Carpet

Yellow fairy blossoms swirl

giggling as they glide

over rooftops and cars

swoop through branches

and tease birds—

they kiss the grass,

then frolic all morning.

A spring carpet of fairies.

 *

In Benghazi and Misrata, Bin Jawad and Ajdabiya,

bullets pierce the skies,

screaming past a little boy eating bazin,

a girl eating asida,

hailing an Arab spring.

No magic carpet to whisk them away.

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The eye of the Vybz Kartel storm seems to have passed, but late as it is, I have to weigh in. For anyone who has not been following the feverish debates, Vybz is a popular Jamaican dancehall artist who is no stranger to controversy and known for some of his more salacious songs like “Rampin’ Shop,” performed with Spice. However, he has recently been in the news because of the ways in which he’s chosen to modify his body over the last few years through a combo of tattooing and skin bleaching, the latter of which he claims he accomplished through the use of cake soap (a soap usually used in Jamaica as laundry detergent). These images posted on the website Mad News show the dramatic changes in Vybz’s complexion and pretty much tell the tale of what brought the whole brouhaha to a head. 

Vybz Kartel

 Some commentators, like my friend Annie Paul, have offered what I find a very balanced and thoughtful approach to Vybz. On her blog Active Voice Annie comments on Vybz’s lecture:

We think nothing of purging the kink out of our hair or the Jamaican accent from our speech–both are socially accepted; but  if Black women are free to chemically terrorize their hair into limp straightness why can’t Vybz Kartel lighten his skin if he chooses to?? And why are we only mounting a hue and cry about skin bleaching downtown while deliberately averting our gaze from the many skin lightening creams such as Ambi and Nadinola used in uptown homes? The selective moral outrage is telling–this seems to be yet another case of moralizing the so-called lower classes.

I agree, and to further expand on Annie’s thoughts, I wonder if some of the uptown moral outrage may be rooted in anxieties about the ways in which poor people create unconventional avenues to gain class mobility and “skip the line” so to speak to what they envision as an improved socio-economic status, with which lighter skin is most certainly associated.

 Here’s what I mean: For most of us, a combination of academic effort as well as professional excellence have earned us something in the vicinity of a middle-class profile. We also gain this profile through the inheritance of both skin color and wealth. Achieving or maintaining this profile has taken time and labor, or in the case of inheritance, was our birthright—something to which we had a right. Bleaching, in essence, aims to garner its followers some of the benefits of that middle-class profile without the necessary academic or professional efforts or the privilege of inheritance through a kind of deception, the same deception to which Annie refers when she mentions attempts to erase accents or straighten hair.

 This anxiety about efforts to inhabit an alternate race/class space is nothing new, and similar forms of cultural censorship have been documented throughout the Caribbean. I’ll take the liberty to quote from my own work, The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women’s Unruly Political Bodies, in which I contemplate middle-class disdain for ghetto-fabulousness: The fancy hairstyles, the colorful clothing, and, of course, bling.  

 In E.A. Hastings’ travel narrative, A Glimpse of the Tropics, published in Britain in 1900, he describes his visit to the town of Mandeville in Jamaica and his encounter with black, Jamaican women dressed for church on Sunday morning. Interestingly, his account from over one hundred years ago parallels today’s resistance to ghetto-fabulousness:         

Big hulking negresses were attired in gorgeous silks and satins, and truly wonderful hats with broad brims and feathers, and ribbons of the most elaborate and stylish description. The wooly heads under all this fashionable headgear were pathetically ludicrous. Some had contrived, after years of labour, to gather up a little bunch [of hair] at the back, which gave them an honourable position in negro society. (242)

Hastings’ indignation at this superimposing of white dress codes and hair fashion on black bodies and his perception of this act of racial cross-dressing as “ludicrous” reveals his recognition as well as his fear that racial boundaries are unstable.

 Hastings is upset and nervously laughing “anh ha, anh ha” because he is quite undone by the thought that people so clearly anchored to a particular status by their blackness would even attempt to transgress those borders and approximate whiteness through fashion.

 I’d like to suggest that bleaching among poor (and wealthy) Jamaicans also aims to render race and class boundaries unstable and is informed by the desire to infiltrate more speedy and easily accessible routes to the presumed benefits of lighter skin such as greater sexual mobility, improved job opportunities, and higher class status. Even if Vybz claims bleaching has become primarily a stylistic choice, as a cultural critic I can’t help but argue that those choices find their root in something less visible, less immediately knowable. And while self-hatred may not be the source of Vybz’s penchant for bleaching, bleachers most certainly anticipate the benefits of brown privilege from this costly, unhealthy, and in some instances quite painful endeavor.

 While I find the old Vybz far more attractive, undoubtedly he’s not trying to please me or anyone else and said so as much during his visit to UWI. Annie quotes Vybz from his lecture:

 …I further maintain that bleaching today doesn’t mean the same as bleaching twenty-five years ago…we are a much prouder race who know that we can do what we want as far as style is concerned, we dictate styles and regard them as just that–styles. So as controversial as bleaching might be right now, I bask in my controversy with cake soap as my suntan.

I wonder, would we feel this kind of outrage if Vybz were white and chose to spend his weekends in a tanning salon? Or can we leave Vybz to color in his coloring book any way he pleases?

Watch Vybz’s video “Coloring Book”: Kvbz Kartel Singing \”Coloring Book\”

Annie Paul’s article on her blog Active Voice:

http://anniepaulose.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/i-decided-to-make-my-skin-a-living-breathing-canvas-vybz-kartel-at-uwi/

 Carolyn Cooper’s Gleaner article in which she shares Vybz’s message to her:

 http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20110306/cleisure/cleisure3.html,

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