“Binta” Breeze's Re-Presentation of “Afrasporic” Women's Sexuality
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Dubbing Chaucer and Beenie Man: Jean “Binta” Breeze’s Re-Presentation of “Afrasporic” Women’s Sexuality Susan Gingell Tara Chambers University of Saskatchewan n an early lyric, “Dreamer,” Afra-Jamaican and Black British poet Jean “Binta”I Breeze introduces readers to a woman who can be found recur- rently in a setting evocative of her condition and engaged in envisioning a more empowered future: roun a rocky corner by de sea seat up pon a drif wood (1–4) and gazing out across the water, stick in hand tryin to trace a future in de san (9–11) “Dreamer” is certainly more than a prophetic, meta-poetic representation of the “womanist” (Walker xi) project that Breeze would unfold over six books of poems, five albums, and countless performances, but it does capture, in its symbolically suggestive details and evocatively ragged left- margined lines respectively, the chief goal of her cultural production and ESC 40.4 (December 2014): 79–106 the often marginal, rocky situation of “Afrasporic” females—those of the Black diaspora—whom Breeze has from the outset placed at the centre of her work. Through writing and performance in and beyond the activist, Susan Gingell is reggae-born for(u)m of dub poetry,1 Breeze has been passionately and Professor Emerita, enduringly engaged in addressing the physical violence, poverty, racism, Department of and sexism that scar and constrict the lives of Afrasporic females. She has, English, University however, been equally concerned to speak to their resiliencies, strengths, of Saskatchewan. In joys, and pleasures. As she asserts in “Can a Dub Poet Be a Woman?” the her “refirement,” she closest interests she shares are “obviously with women” (499), and her is working on a book politics are also shaped by personal experiences “and those of the people tentatively titled “Talk round [her] in their day-to-day concerns” (499). That Walks on Paper: Through and in her art, then, Breeze models the need for and routes Canadian Poets Writing to Afrasporic female empowerment, and nowhere is her Jamaican wom- the Oral,” working with anism more evident than in her late career poems “The Wife of Bath community-based Speaks in Brixton Market” and “Slam Poem.” The latter makes clear the groups on the issue of contemporary but historically rooted understanding and representation missing and murdered of Afrasporic women’s sexuality so potently prejudicial to those women’s Indigenous women in well-being, but both poems script performances of an energetically coun- Canada, and teaching ter-discursive kind. While appropriating from male control two distinctly more yoga than was different genres—literary dramatic monologue with a female persona and previously possible. live and recorded performance in the popular culture for(u)m of Jamai- can dancehall2—Breeze dubs the representation of women’s sexuality in specific male pre-texts, working toward dispelling the ghosts of slavery that Jenny Sharpe has shown to haunt Afrasporic women’s sexuality. The characteristically Jamaican transformative project of reclamation and cel- ebration in these two poems means that she necessarily attends to both the historically and contemporaneously maligned and physically abused 1 In “Poetry Performances on the Page and Stage: Lessons from Slam,” Helen Gregory refers to slam as “a for(u)m” (81), to convey that it is both genre and event. That description is equally apt for dub poetry, which is both performed and variously textualized. Although reggae-rhythms were foundational to the dub for(u)m, as Oku Onuora, who coined the term dub poetry, early on avowed, “any rhythm from Black music—South African riddim … kumina riddim … nyabinghi riddim … jazz riddim” could be dubbed into a poem in accord with the characteristically Jamaican process of transforming practices from outside the culture (cited and quoted in Habekost 4). 2 Dancehall is an African Jamaican popular music for(u)m that emerged in the early 1980s from the strongly spiritually inflected roots reggae. Dancehall foregrounds sexuality as a form of power, emphasizes consumerism and the external mani- festations of wealth and power, and makes an icon of the gun while valorizing the gangster (Stolzoff 99). 80 | Gingell and Chambers yet still vital bodies of Black women and their depreciated but resilient subjectivities. After giving up a Breeze as Dub Poet and the Jamaican Arts of Dubbing and career as a disc jockey Sound-Clashing and emcee, Tara As fellow practitioner d’bi.young recounts, the highly political perfor- Chambers graduated mance poetry known as dub “emerged from the psyche/life experience with a ba in English of conscious ghetto youth in jamaica and england in the late 1970s, early (with a minor in 1980s” (4). In a 1990 article “Can a Dub Poet Be a Woman?” Breeze declared Philosophy) from herself “quite at home in the arena of dub poetry” because it “satisfied [her] Thompson Rivers personal political concerns about whom [she] was talking with” (498). University in Kamloops, That sense of fit springs from dub’s being “primarily oral” (young 5) and British Columbia. She from its use of the Jamaican vernacular, also known as patwa, Creole, and is a doctoral student nation language. Dub thus enables Breeze to speak in a public forum with— at the University of not just to—economically disadvantaged Jamaicans, who are typically Saskatchewan where more comfortable with embodied oral communication than with writing. she also received However, as a person as richly literate as iterate,3 Breeze, like most other her ma in English contemporary dub poets, publishes her poems in print as well as audio Literature for her work and audiovisual forms. Her skill at working in this variety of media allows on Edmund Spenser’s her to have a powerful impact on diverse and widely dispersed audiences. The Shepherdes She is thus an effective voice, particularly for Afrasporic Jamaican women, Calender. Her doctoral whose own words are typically little attended to because of the sexism that work focuses on early consigns them as a group to a socio-economic location at the bottom of modern England before, Jamaican society (Hope 39) and because of being additionally marginalized during, and after the in the Jamaican diaspora by their perceived foreignness. Interregnum and on Breeze first found her own voice in the dub for(u)m, gaining a hearing John Milton’s political at the national level in Jamaica with backing from dub poet and reggae philosophy as it is performer Mutabaruka (Sharpe, “Dub” 608) and coming to international presented in Paradise attention when championed by fellow Jamaican-born Black British poet Lost. She is also the Linton Kwesi Johnson (607), himself a foundational figure in the dub scene. poetry editor for the Yet in the late 1980s, Breeze declared herself “dubbed out” in a poem of Fieldstone Review. that title, chaffing against the constraints of narrowly defined dub rhythms4 and teachy-preachy politics, notably including masculinist prescriptions 3 We adopt the term iterate from stl’atl’imx poet-scholar Peter Cole in Coyote and Raven Go Canoeing (54) to avoid the discourse of deficit that permeates Western discourses about non-Western peoples and to recognize the verbal skills associated with fluent orality/aurality. 4 The one-drop reggae rhythm on which the earliest dub poetry had been borne seemed for a time indissoluble from the form, and Breeze graphically and rhyth- mically recorded in her poem “Dubbed Out,” the feeling her words were Dubbing Chaucer | 81 of a radical’s proper performance style—read not infused with the female sexuality that would have her “wining up her waist [gyrating her hips]” while “dancing across the stage” (“Can” 499). Her own new work at this time had “become a lot more personal” (quoted in Habekost 45), exploring women’s private and daily lives in poems, some of which she would later refer to as “domestic dub” (Sharpe, “Dub” 611). In “one last dub,” a poem of the late 1990s, Breeze acknowledges her message lost “to de constant bubblin / of de riddim below / de waistline” (3–5), and the title suggests a final farewell to dub. However, when its speaker invites, “jus tease / mi wid a riddim / fi fling up wi distress” (10–12), the political message resurfaces and portends that the potent blend of music, sex, and oppression would find continued expression in her work. Indeed, by 2009, Breeze was telling interviewer Jah Rebel, “My whole life is dub-poetry” (“My”). The focus here is mainly on Breeze’s process of dubbing to foreground the transformative quality of her work that is linked to other Jamaican cultural practices. In “The Wife of Bath Speaks in Brixton Market” and “Slam Poem,” Breeze respectively re-voices and re-visions—the latter in the sense Adrienne Rich formulated in her landmark essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”5—the “Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale” by Geoffrey Chaucer and “Who Am I” by leading Jamaican dance-hall art- ist Beenie Man (Anthony Moses Davis). However, to place the relationship between Breeze’s poems and their male pre-texts within the Jamaican cultural context, we might think of Breeze’s transforming of the Chaucer broken by the beat (7–10) Breeze soon discovered, however, that her quest to discover words “moving / in their music” (4–5) found its desired end in her use of the particular rhythms of the Jamaican vernacular in her poems. Voicing her poems in patwa, the default idiom of dub poetry, allowed her to break out of the restrictions of a solely reggae beat while retaining her connections to core elements of dub that had attracted her in the first place.