“Binta” Breeze's Re-Presentation of “Afrasporic” Women's Sexuality

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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 celebration 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 rhythmically 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 artist 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. 5 Rich defines re-vision as “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.” For women, she maintains, “it is an act of survival” because “[u]ntil we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.” Feminist re-visioning entails “tak[ing] the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name—and therefore live—afresh” (35).

82 | Gingell and Chambers and Beenie Man texts6 as much like the dee-jays’ chanting of lyrics over the B-side instrumentals of hit reggae records from which most if not all of the original lyrics had been dubbed out. In Breeze’s poems, though, the poet is herself the “sound engineer,” doing the dubbing out and the dubbing in. She thus creates a situation analogous to that produced in the dancehall, where, as Paul Gilroy explains, the two sides or versions of a reggae hit “would be played as a pair, the Dub following the un-Dubbed version and forcing the listeners into a critical position by its dismantling of the former piece” (“Steppin’ ” 300). The retention of bits of the original lyrics in the dub version enables the deejay to use these fragments as a springboard to improvise comments on the A-side’s theme, so that “new meanings are created and the initial meanings are modified in a process of selection and transformation which becomes a key source of pleasure for the dancing crowd” (300). To understand Breeze’s political and artistic practice in this way is to conceptualize it much as Gilroy conceives of dub, “not [as] a style of music as such, [but as] … a process of enrichment in which music is deconstructed and the meaning of its lyrics transformed and expanded” (300). Like Gilroy, Robert Beckford understands dub as a process of transformation, but in Jesus Dub: Theology, Music, and Social Change, he further notes that the resulting song bears the dubber’s unique stylistic and political imprint. Moreover, Beckford argues that the product is itself an interpretation of the world: dub, the instrumental version of reggae dance-hall music so central to the sound system performance … is more than sound: it is the product of sophisticated signification and the raw material for a dynamic interplay between word, sound and power. The musical form of dub is the product of studio engineers who transform the original version of a record into an instrumental by remixing its key elements.… In so doing, a new version or dub version is produced that carries the style and ideological signature of the engineer or studio. Dub is therefore a hermeneutical act involving deconstructive/recon- structive activity. (1–2) Explaining that dub poets apply “the hermeneutical focus of the studio engineer to orality, developing new ways of producing and hearing words and language within the highly charged political environments of Jamaica

6 We use texts to mean the technological mediation of live performance whether or not that mediation be in written, print, audio, or digital form.

Dubbing Chaucer | 83 and inner city Britain” (2),7 Beckford remarks that the process results in “dub becom[ing] word-sounds, a transformation of words so as to alter and adjust meaning.” He adds that “Word-sounds are not passive, but assertive statements that engage with social realities and power relationships” (2). If both Breeze’s Brixton Wife poem and “Slam Poem” dub their pre- texts, Breeze’s rejoinder to “Who Am I,” might further be thought of as her entering into a kind of poetic sound clash—an “onstage competition between rival dee-jays and sound systems contending for mastery before a discriminating audience” (Cooper, Sound 35), with Beenie Man, the self-proclaimed but wildly popular, Grammy-award-winning King of the Dancehall, whose stage name ironically means Shorty. In a published conversation with Sharpe, Breeze explains how this performer, “who sings completely sexually about women, [plays to audiences] full of women that love him and think that he’s the greatest thing that ever happened.” Therefore, she argues, it is “critical for Caribbean women poets to explore their sexuality a lot more rather than allowing the men to define women’s sexuality without the women” (Sharpe, “Dub” 613). Breeze challenges Beenie Man’s self-aggrandizing, instrumentalist view of women by trans- formatively “booking” the live performance of the clash yet preserves something of its sound dimension through her simulation of Jamaican nation language on the page. She also tones down typical clash aggres- sion while having her persona remain unwavering in her assertion of her precondition for sex, “put awn yuh rubbers an hush” (8, 24, 40, 56, 72, 88, 104; variants appear at 124 and 141), despite her would-be partner’s repeated refusal to do so.

Historical Backgrounds to Breeze’s Representation of Afra- sporic Women’s Sexuality By historicizing contemporary Jamaican gender relations, Donna C. Hope makes clear that the prejudicial construction of Afrasporic women’s sexuality has deep historical roots. She points out that “In Jamaica, gender hierarchies operate within a contemporary version of the racialized class system that developed out of slavery and colonialism” (39). Those systems “collapsed identities into sexed bodies, sexualizing Caribbean populations in racial terms and racializing them in sexual terms” (38). European attri- butions to women of African descent of an inherent sexual immorality, contentedness with the role of breeder, sexual insatiability and unnatu- ralness in their urges, and animal-like strength that suited them to “work 7 Like many British commentators on dub poetry, Beckford ignores the lively Canadian scene centred in Toronto.

84 | Gingell and Chambers in the fields all day and then work in bed all night” (38) are key parts of oppressive discourses that historically shaped and contemporaneously inform the lived experience of Afra-Caribbean women. Even the lighter skinned among them are fixed by the highly sexualized stereotypes, so that Male physical the woman in Breeze’s “Red Rebel Song,” testifies to years spent detaching herself “from de fabric of lust / dat have I / in a pin-up glare” (12–14). That control of Black glare is the product of both black and white male gazes, however, so that the rebel woman declares she will “tek no abuse fram eida direction” (106). women’s Sexual and gender dominance is, Hope maintains, one of the miniscule number of forms of power available to the majority of dark-skinned, lower- bodies, class Afro-Caribbean males and central to their sense of their manhood (47). Thus, the self-centred appropriation of female sexuality and reproduc- including their tive ability that the slave master exercised has now become a patriarchally naturalized prerogative claimed by some Afro-Caribbean men as well as sexuality, has remaining a white male practice.8 Male physical control of Black women’s bodies, including their sexu- long been ality, has long been supported by male discursive power, even in Aboli- tionist contexts, as Sharpe argues in Ghosts of Slavery when discussing supported by The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave. Prince’s violation as a human being is explicit, Sharpe notes, in the description of Prince being male discursive wrenched from her family, marketed, and brutally punished for the least perceived misdemeanour, but the sexual aspects of her violation, including power. the absence of any reference to her master raping her, are muted in the nar- rative. The white Abolitionists who enabled the transcription of Prince’s oral testimony and its subsequent publication were acutely aware that a slave woman publically speaking of sexuality, even when reporting sexual violence against her, would constitute the kind of “sexual impropriety [that] could have destroyed [her] credibility” (121). That contemporary Jamaican women are still not entirely free from such discursive restraint is suggested by Breeze’s response to Sharpe’s remarking in the interview “Dub and Dif- ference” on the sexual explicitness of The Arrival of Brighteye and Other

8 Violence against women, sexual and otherwise, remains high in Jamaica, and Hope makes the point that violence is part of “dancehall world view” (87), remarking on the “close relationship between lyrical and real violence” (88). In “King of Di Dancehall,” for example, Beenie Man expresses the belief that sexually excited women “Waan mi fi ram it to stick it to jam it in” (16) and the expectation that “when mi stab it” (29), women will moan in pleasure (azlyrics. com). “Who Am I” refers to the penis as an axe (9) and a pick axe (10), and uses the verbs chop (10), dig (11), and crash (13) to name sexual acts. Beenie Man boasts, “she a beg yuh and a bawl seh fi stop it / bad man plug in, an a move a ga electric / is like a basket ball, she tek time out fi vomit” (15–17, our transcription).

Dubbing Chaucer | 85 Poems, the book in which “The Wife of Bath Speaks in Brixton Market” and “Slam Poem” were originally print published. Breeze explains, “This is one of those things that the distance from home and time away from home allows, because I don’t think I would have written about women’s sexuality so explicitly if I had been living in Jamaica, where you don’t get explicit about that kind of thing” (612).

Breeze’s Dubbing of Two Male Pre-Texts Breeze’s sexually frank poems “The Wife of Bath Speaks in Brixton Mar- ket” and “Slam Poem” are womanist dubbings of male-authored texts that represent women’s sexuality. The Brixton Market poem re-voices one of the most celebrated texts in the English literary canon, “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” from The Canterbury Tales. This highly popular collection of stories, written in Middle English in the late fourteenth century, offers a humorous and ironic portrait of society in the late medieval period. “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” ventriloquizes a woman’s voice but presents a lusty white Englishwoman who both negotiates within medieval English patriarchy to establish and maintain power over the five husbands she has had and anticipates doing so again with a sixth. Breeze’s poem responds from the perspective of a Black British woman of Jamaican origin similarly five-times married and hoping to have a sixth husband, but she is more interested in directing her own sexual life than with exercising power over her husbands. “Slam Poem” re-visions a Jamaican dancehall and international reggae gold hit of 1997, “Who Am I,” that mutes female voices altogether and that positions women as mono-dimensional creatures whose chief, if not only, value lies in being vehicles for male sexual pleasure and accessories to the display of manhood. The song further represents women as threat- ening to male sexual power and sanity and therefore in need of tutoring about who is properly in control. Breeze’s “Slam Poem” directly challenges Beenie Man’s representation of Afra-Jamaican women by presenting a persona newly but firmly self-determining in her sexuality and thoughtful and mature in her concern for her health and her children’s well-being. Creating a persona who pursues sexual pleasure but is broadly responsible in her behaviour, Breeze avoids the common discursive reduction of Afrasporic women to the singular dimension of sex, amending the crip- plingly distorted view of them that has dominated European discourses for centuries, was transmitted to Afro-Jamaican men, and is latterly repro- duced in dancehall lyrics and the body language of live and video-recorded performances.

86 | Gingell and Chambers Breeze’s womanist dubbing entails relocating the scene of performance to environments more conducive to her Afrasporic female speakers’ self- determination. She moves the Wife of Bath’s dramatic monologue from the Canterbury pilgrimage route out of London to a London market with a strong Caribbean flavour. As Sidney Mintz points out, slave-era Carib- bean markets, which initially were sites of extreme dehumanization of the enslaved, became over time a place where relationships among the slaves and owners were ameliorated, and slave women in particular benefited from pursuing economic opportunities there. When slaves were ordered to grow their own food but then allowed to sell excess produce and retain their earnings, women’s traditional work in food preparation naturalized their role as vendors of foodstuffs (Mintz 112), and they prospered. Breeze situated her Wife in Brixton Market at least in part because Chaucer’s rowdy, raucous Wife seemed to her “really like all the women [she] kn[e]w in Lucea market” back in Jamaica (Third World Girl dvd, October 2010 reading), but Brixton Market is also as important a site for fostering a sense of Caribbean community as Canterbury was for nurturing the Christian community during the Middle Ages. Providing many West Indian special- ties to the Londoners of African and Caribbean origin who travel from other parts of the city in order to do their shopping and to socialize, it is a social and commercial hub for this group. Breeze’s “Slam Poem” also relocates action to a more woman-friendly space, consolidating the three sites of Beenie Man’s video of “Who Am I”—a room where a blindfolded woman gropes to orient herself and where the male performer controls their interaction; an expensive sports car outside, which is driven by the woman so he can concentrate on chanting his lyrics to the camera; and a nightclub where he is surrounded by fawn- ing young women—to a single space of intimate encounter that is quite possibly the persona’s own home. Breeze thus dramatically frames the sex-centred dispute between partners as a private matter, not the occasion for a public display of power as the sexualized interaction of the Beenie Man video is. To support the empowerment of Afra-Jamaican women and to address ordinary Jamaicans at home or in diaspora, Breeze retains for both poems dub poetry’s characteristic idiom, Jamaican nation language. Just as Chau- cer chose to dismiss French and Latin, the languages of the aristocracy and the church, in favour of writing in an English vernacular, Breeze sets aside the Middle English of Chaucer’s poem, and contemporary standard British and Jamaican Englishes, the first being the ancestral tongue of the enslavers and colonizers, the second a contemporary neocolonial lect,

Dubbing Chaucer | 87 and the third, a variety spoken by her birthplace’s elite. The significance of Breeze’s choice is suggested by the observation of Jamaican cultural critic Carolyn Cooper that prejudice against the Jamaican language persists to this day, or as she explains in literary patwa, “It come een like English a di A side a di record, an Jamaican a di dub version.… some a wi feel seh English higher dan Jamaican” (“From Beowulf ” 137–38). By composing, performing, and publishing “The Wife of Bath Speaks in Brixton Market” in the language of the Jamaican people, Breeze enhances the prestige of the mother tongue of Jamaican women like her personae. While depreciation of Jamaican Creole speakers for their speaking (and later writing) allegedly bad English never was gender specific, pejoration of the mother tongue of most Jamaicans is one more way in which ordinary Jamaican women experienced devaluation in colonial times and continue to experience it in neocolonial contexts.

Dubbing “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” If Breeze’s language in “The Wife of Bath Speaks at Brixton Market” evi- dences that the persona is speaking first and foremost to Jamaicans in the West Indies and Britain, the video of the poem has her relating her story to a video camera while she travels down the narrow passages of Brixton Market, and via video that story is transmitted to a much wider audience. In the YouTube video interview related to the poem, Breeze insists that the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” was not difficult to translate because Chaucer’s Middle English fits the Jamaican language perfectly, “like putting a well fitted pair of gloves on.” Breeze is also acutely aware of how well The Can- terbury Tales suits the oral nature of dub performance. Chaucer’s poetry is meant to be read aloud, and, although the tales have been written down, the premise of the Tales is Chaucer’s documentation of an oral storytelling competition among the pilgrims, which, like Breeze’s poem, introduces a storyteller through an oral performance that is meant to delight and instruct the audience. In live performances of her explicitly sexual work like the Brixton Wife poem, Breeze’s body functions semiotically to reinforce the re-visioning that is evident in her words, as she exhibits a confident demeanour and claims her performative space in order to assert an Afrasporic woman’s bodily autonomy. As is particularly clear in the YouTube video of “The Wife of Bath Speaks in Brixton Market,” that autonomy includes her joy- ful embrace of female sexuality. For example, as she follows the camera through the market, Breeze flings her arms wide and closes her eyes to

88 | Gingell and Chambers dwell in the unalloyed pleasure of knowing for a certainty that God “order we to sex and multiply” (28). She presses her hands to her breasts as she rehearses the command to men that they should leave their mother and father “an cling to me” (62) and then smiles delightedly, and she gleefully states her intention to “mek de bes of all my years / fah dat is de joy and fruit of marriage” (97–98). Before she breaks into laughter and a sustained grin, Breeze brings her hands to the vicinity of her pelvis and asks, otherwise “why we have dese private parts so sweet” (99) and exults “but wat pleasures dese instruments brings” (108) as she throws her arms up and out over her head. In choosing to re-voice, re-situate, and select from “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” Breeze overdubs the soundtrack of an English literary canonical text that itself gives voice to an empowered woman unapologetically advancing female sexual autonomy—no doubt one of the reasons that the young Breeze fell in love with the character (“Jean … An Interview”) and that the adult Breeze drew so freely on her while aiming to empower the women of her own community and time. Yet for all that Chaucer’s Wife resonated with Breeze, in dubbing “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” and, in performance, embodying the lively and fearless public declaration and display of female sexual autonomy that are features of the medieval poem, Breeze cannot escape reinforcing the power of the canon. Moreover, the place of “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” within the sixth-form English literary curriculum in Breeze’s Jamaican high school should not be ignored. That curriculum was fundamentally colonizing, as the testimony in “Colo- nial Girls School” by fellow Jamaican poet Olive Senior makes clear. Senior writes of the Jamaican curriculum, “There was nothing about us at all” (13), adding that it reinforced the idea that only things English were of any real value. Senior also calls attention to the deforming language politics of colonial schools, lamenting that while students had to spend “months, years, a childhood memorising / Latin declensions” (35–36), for the speaking of their own Jamaican language, characterized as “bad-talking” (38), the school allotted “detentions” (39). Moreover, the burgeoning sexuality of the girls was similarly regulated by school rules that dictated uniforms’ hems be “let out” (5) while the girls’ sex was denied by “gym tunics and bloomers” (7). Nevertheless, Breeze’s dubbing of Chaucer’s text is transformative in a number of ways as it works to empower Afra-Jamaican women. In rewrit- ing Chaucer’s best-known prologue from The Canterbury Tales, Breeze contributes to the “reloading” of the once mono-cultural English-language

Dubbing Chaucer | 89 can(n)on,9 that corpus of texts that, from the perspective of the (neo) colonized and patriarchially subjugated, have served as ideological weapons of mass destruction. Breeze’s work functions instead like those dub poems that Klyde Broox calls “weapons of mass liberation” (“Reloading” 17), transforming public discourse about the subjectivity, bodies, and sexuality of women of African descent and about male-female relations within their communities. In the face of the overwhelmingly disempowering and shame-inducing representations of Afra-Jamaican women and their sexuality on the one hand, and the hyper-sexualization of those women in dance-hall culture on the other, Breeze’s poem summons the power of an English canonical text to model a strong Afra-Jamaican identity and sexual subjectivity. It does so by having an Afrasporic woman speak publically about female desire and claim the right to pursue sexual pleasure even in middle age. Moreover, in turning Chaucer’s widely beloved character into a representative of a nation and a gender that have been grievously harmed historically by the English, firmly grounding her monologue in a Jamaican diasporic context, and creating a stylistically distinctive work voiced in Jamaican language, Breeze shifts the location of discursive power. That she does so while entertaining readers and audiences, obviously having a great deal of fun, and affording herself the opportunity to show herself in full control of a key work of the slave master’s, colonizer’s, and neo- colonizer’s literature, models empowered female Afrasporic subjectivity. Breeze’s dubbing of “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” also notably de- instrumentalizes sex, a significant shift given the disempowering effect being rendered a sexual commodity has had on Afrasporic women. A comparison of the 846 lines of Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” with the 107 lines of Breeze’s loose translation of the first 133 of Chaucer’s text makes apparent that for all their shared declaration of women’s right to pursue sexual pleasures, the lusty wives interpret the world of sexual relations and view power within marriage quite differently. In “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” Alisoun explains how she uses marriage and sex exclusively for her own ends by ransacking the genital as well as the economic “purs” and the treasure “cheste” of her husbands. She reveals, “I shal seye sooth, tho housbondes that I hadde, / As three of hem were gode and two were bade / The three men were gode, and rich and old” (195–97). Alisoun clearly associates “good” with “rich and old,” and this association becomes more apparent when she explains that the deaths of the old husbands left her

9 Our phrasing here and in our later reference to weapons of mass destruction is indebted to Klyde Broox’s poem “Reloading the Can(n)on.”

90 | Gingell and Chambers with significant fortunes and discloses to her fellow pilgrims her secret to securing her husbands’ lands and money: As help me God, I laughe whan I thinke How pitously a-night I made hem swinke, And by my fey, I told of it no stoor. They had me yeven hir lond and hir tressor Me neded nat do lenger diligence To winne hir love, or doon hem reverence. (201–06) [So help me God I have to laugh when I remember How hard I made them work at night And by my faith I took pleasure in it. They’d given me their land and their treasure So I had no need of diligence Winning their love or showing reverence.]

These lines reveal that Alisoun is less interested in sexual intercourse with her rich and old husbands than she is in ensuring that they give her wealth and land in return for sexual access, and only after a financial agreement is reached is Alisoun willing to entertain each husband’s sexual desires. Breeze’s close proximity to slave history and its aftermath is apparent in her decision to omit the original poem’s focus on female sexuality as an instrument for gaining power and wealth (207). Her Wife does not refer to herself as “the whippe” (181), nor does she make her husband her “thrall” [slave] (161). Moreover, she never describes her behaviour as cruel whereas Chaucer’s Alisoun claims to scold her husbands “spitously” [cruelly] (224). The Brixton Wife also avoids speaking of sexual relations in Alisoun’s terms of commercial transaction, claiming only that “a man mus give im wife er tings (106). When Alisoun wants sex, she uses her body instrumentally, compelling her husbands to “swinke” [work] (202) to pay their sexual “dette” (130) to her—that is, to please her sexually—until they lament (216) being “bounden unto [her]” (199). However, she with- holds sex when financial gain is what she is after. She admits: “I would no lenger in the bed abyde / If that I felte his arm over my syde / Tel he had maad his raunson unto me” (409–11). Breeze’s not reproducing Alisoun’s preoccupation with the financial worth of her husbands may be more than a response to the commodification of African men’s and women’s bodies as slaves, however, because that decision also realistically reflects the poor economic conditions that many men in post–World War Two Jamaica and in London’s Caribbean community have been forced to endure since the time of the Windrush’s first mass landing of Jamaicans in Britain in 1948.

Dubbing Chaucer | 91 Instead of commodifying sexuality, Breeze’s Brixton Wife stresses the pleasures that spring from it, insisting that “to enjoy good sex / is nat a frailty” (82–83) and, citing the many wives that “de wise King Solomon” (38) took, exclaims, “Ah wish ah did have as much in bed as him!” (40). Furthermore, unlike Alisoun, who has sex with older men because she is governed by her desire for inheriting wealth and judges her husbands as good or bad on the basis of their affluence, the Brixton Wife declares that her five husbands “was wort something / in dem own way” (8–9). By focusing solely on the pleasurable aspects of sex in heterosexual marriage rather than describing marriage as Chaucer’s wife does, that is, as a war to be won through sexual coercion and as a commercial transaction, Breeze models for Afra-Jamaican heterosexual women in particular, but indeed all heterosexual women, female sexual agency and unabashed enjoyment of sex.

Dubbing “Who Am I” Similarly, in “Slam Poem,” Breeze both legitimizes Afrasporic women’s desire and challenges the post–1980s dancehall genre’s often overtly sexist nature by remaining sex positive while parodically appropriating male- dominated dancehall deejaying and pointedly redirecting the self-promotion of the “slackness style” of “Who Am I.” Slackness is a performance of sexual looseness that consciously flouts hegemonic propriety, and it is both “the antithesis of restrictive uppercase Culture” (Cooper, Sound 4) and a deliberate expression of African connections (Cooper, Noises 8), but it also, Hope contends, predominantly views women as sexual objects (75). Thus Breeze dubs and “womanoises”10 the dancehall for(u) m to counter this objectification and simultaneously address matters of particular consequence to Jamaican women outside the dancehall party, matters such as female desire and pleasure, pregnancy, poverty, and sexually transmitted disease. Her critique of Beenie Man’s monofocus on women’s sexual desirability does not mean she negates human sexuality and pleasure or specifically devalues a woman’s sexual nature. In “Can a Dub Poet be a Woman?” Breeze offers a pre-emptive challenge to any would-be detractors on this score by stating, “I dare anyone to say that for a woman to be accepted

10 We modify Klyde Broox’s neologism femininoise (“Gestures” 78) to “woma- noise” to create a stronger sense of connection to both Alice Walker’s term womanist and Afrasporic women’s culturally-coded noising abroad of their interpretation of and resistance to the way things are arranged in the locations in which they live.

92 | Gingell and Chambers as a radical voice she cannot celebrate her own sensuality” (499). She also carefully situates herself in relation to aspects of dancehall style in the poem “Get Back,” arraigning the slackness of deejays such as Yellow- man, who chant lyrics that are demeaning to women. She announces, “we tired of degradation” (Woman Talk); yet as she told interviewer Jah Rebel, she recognized “at the same time … that it was important for women to display their sexuality” (“Jean”). Women participating in dancehall culture certainly achieve this goal by flouting what Cooper calls “airy-fairy Judaeo-Christian definitions of appropriate female behaviour” (Sound 100). Indeed, Cooper interprets dancehall as “erotic maroonage” (Noises 161) and more specifically as a space of female liberation: Jamaican dancehall culture celebrates the dance as a mode of theatrical self-disclosure in which the body speaks eloquently of its capacity to endure and transcend material deprivation.… I propose that Jamaican dancehall culture at home and in the diaspora is best understood as a potentially liberating space in which working class women and their more timid middle-class sisters assert the freedom to play out eroticized roles that may not ordinarily be available to them in the rigid social conventions of the everyday. (Sound 17)

In the video Bad Language: The Delights of Improper Language, Breeze confirms Cooper’s point about dancehall as having some liberating effect in affronting middle-class values that reinforced double standards for men and women: “The djs were saying jump and spread out, jump and chuck out, and women broke out in the dancehall” (quoted in Sharpe, “Cartog- raphies” 448). However, as counter-identifications with higher class standards of propriety, dancehall’s vulgarly sexual displays are still tied to those other standards and thus are compromised in their libratory potential. While Cooper does not assert dancehall as having achieved female liberation, she tellingly does not consider if women’s hypersexual role-playing ultimately reinforces patriarchal male tendencies to see female dancehall participants—whether deejays, dancehall queens, or ordinary dancers—as beings defined by and valued mostly, if not only, for their sexuality. Indeed, we might ask if the vaunted rebelliousness of the dancehall is simply an opportunity to enact a freedom that continues to be elsewhere denied to Afra-Jamaican women. The sociological research both of Nicole Cruz, as reported in “Dutty Wine: Ooman Big Up or Dis,” and of Hope confirms that for those women living in the ghettos and participating in dancehall culture, life outside of

Dubbing Chaucer | 93 the party is usually very different than what is promoted during the dance. Cruz writes that instead of exhibiting gender, sexual, and economic equality, Jamaican society is often characterized by male infidelity, spousal abuse, and dismal employment opportunities. Men find ample social sanction for having multiple sexual partners, while women are usually excoriated as skettels (loose women), beaten, or abandoned if they are ever unfaith- ful (Hope 54). Cruz cites the admission of one of her female interviewees that she is forced to accept her partner’s infidelity and physical abuse because “she is financially dependent on him” (33). Thus, Cruz suggests, while women may be afforded equal rights to express their sexuality in the dancehall, and encouraged to approach men and symbolically express that equality, this expression is purely symbolic and extremely circumscribed. Attendees admit that the “sexual dress and behaviour of women in dancehall is not acceptable in other public places” (36). These admissions suggest the limitations of seeing the for(u)m as a site and way of reclaiming the Black female body. Instead, dancehall as fantasy may be a kind of female safety valve that preserves the patriarchal status quo. We might equally question whether in “womanoising” the dance-hall genre as Breeze does in “Slam Poem,” frankly thematizing there and elsewhere female sexual desire, and “wining up her waist” in performances, Breeze is not herself merely “playing” at sexual empowerment. By way of response we might turn first to James Baldwin’s argument that language allows people “to describe and thus control their circumstances, [so as] … not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate” (np). With this insight in mind, we can see that Breeze’s creation of empowered personae is a survival tactic in the face of concerted and sustained attempts to drown women as autonomous sexual subjects. Audre Lorde’s defence of poetry as a crucial space in which women can envision alternative realities as the first step toward changing presently oppressive ones also provides an eloquent rejoinder to any expression of doubt about Breeze’s playacting empowerment: “For women … poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predi- cate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (36). Breeze’s persona in “Slam Poem” is represented as having to struggle against the sexist attitudes of her lover, attitudes Breeze’s dubbing of Beenie Man’s lyrics suggests are sanctioned in the dancehall for(u)m. Nonetheless, the tension that Breeze notes between the demeaning of women by some aspects of dance-hall culture on the one hand, and dancehall as a for(u)m in which women throw off external governors of female sexuality on the

94 | Gingell and Chambers other, would make unwise a reading of her parody of Beenie Man’s lyrics in “Who Am I” as a categorical rejection of dance-hall slackness. If as readers of “Slam Poem” we are not to overgeneralize her rejections in that text, we need to understand Breeze’s refusal of what, in Sharpe’s conversation with Breeze, the poet refers to as Jamaica’s “schizophrenic” sexual mores, which pit “one of the most sensual, sexual set of people” against antiquated sexual standards (613). Moreover, we must take into account the socio- economic and political contexts of dancehall’s emergence and the larger contexts of Afra/Afrosporic people’s exercising freedom of movement, as well as how dancehall functions in the lives of those who participate in it. The genre known as dancehall came out of a context of impoverish- ing and socially destabilizing transformations in Jamaican society during the 1980s (Hope 1–5). As Cruz explains, the election of Edward Seaga in 1980 and the subsequent loss of Jamaica’s “socialist trajectory” (12) under Michael Manley in favour of an increasingly capitalist-style economy ultimately resulted in the advancement of international interests at the expense of the Jamaican people. Under structural adjustment programs mandated by the International Monetary Fund, wages fell and unem- ployment increased dramatically, while the devaluation of the Jamaican currency further exacerbated the poverty in the downtown ghettos of Kingston and the poorer communities in the adjacent parishes of St Andrew and St Catherine (Hope 3–5). Hope argues that flashy dancehall culture provided a necessary catharsis for the mounting social pressures that these forces created (8), especially among darker-skinned Jamaicans, who are grossly disproportionately represented among the lowest classes (7). Women from these classes see dancehall as a space where they can command the attention of male dancehall participants by exhibiting their sexual desirability in revealing clothes and through highly suggestive dancing. In this forum, they can also attract the admiration both of cheer- ing crowds by skilfully performing difficult dance moves and of the “mic” men by displaying various aspects of their appearance, including slimness, roundness, hair, nails, and expensive clothes and accessories that indicate their financial independence (Cruz 23). Men, more broadly denied upward social mobility than women (Hope 46) and devoid of other routes to strong masculine identity and status under the constrained economic circumstances of post–1980s Jamaica, sometimes negotiated their identity and sought to improve their status by “travers[ing] the more easily available and patriarchally sanctioned routes over, above, and through the female body and feminine sexuality” (Hope 48). Hope remarks that male dance-

Dubbing Chaucer | 95 hall artists’ “slack, vulgar and sexual narratives encode these often empty forms of identity negotiation” (48). Gilroy similarly interprets dancehall as amplifying and exaggerating masculinity in a “culture of compensation that self-consciously salves the misery of the disempowered and subordinated” (Black 172), while Cooper adds that male slackness can be seen as “a ‘small man’ revolt against the institutionalisation of working-class female domestic rule and middle/ upper-class male dominance in Jamaican society” (Noises 164). Such comments can help readers understand the slackness of both the importunate male of Breeze’s “Slam Poem” and of Beenie Man in the lyrics for and performance of “Who Am I.” The unabashed sexuality of dancehall women can be viewed as a far more public but politically limited manifestation of the sex-positivity of Breeze’s poetic persona in “Slam Poem.” In “Slam Poem,” Breeze constructs a woman who understands the sexual politics at work in both the dancehall and more intimate spaces and who verbally asserts her determination to be in control of her sexuality and bodily well-being. As Sharpe notes, “Breeze turns slackness inside out by making it into a source of female self-empowerment” (“Cartographies” 448). Using the popular “Who Am I” as her A-side pre-text, Breeze reworks Beenie Man’s song and performance so as to confront both its patriarchal and sometimes misogynistic lyrics and the sexist physical display of male power over the female in his related video. “Slam Poem” thus becomes a response and a rebuff to those elements of slackness style that depreciate women’s sexuality even as the poem addresses sexuality on a woman’s explicit pro-sex terms. “Who Am I” opens with the singer asking questions, and “bigging up,” or praising, his own sexual desirability: Zim Zimma, Who got de keys to my bimma? Who am I? De girls’ dem sugar. How can I mek luv to ah fella in ah rush? Pass meh de keys to my truck. Who am I? de girls dem luck. (adapted from transcription at Lyricstime.com)

In referring to his “bimma,” or his bmw, Beenie Man may be creating a type of metonym for his sexual drive. Beenie Man’s “bimma” could also be any woman who engages in sexual intercourse with him, thereby becom- ing the vehicle for his sexual pleasure even if in hope of securing her own. When this vehicle unexpectedly goes missing, his question “Who got de

96 | Gingell and Chambers keys to my bimma?” becomes a question about who is “driving” her now. Such metonymic substitution is a recurrent feature of slackness lyrics, the common comparison of women to cars constituting an example of a live performance artist drawing on what Cooper identifies as its charac- The dancehall teristic oral formulae (Noises 138) to enable fluent oral composition and performance (Lord 22). tradition of The dancehall tradition of male sexual self-aggrandizement in significant part through the sexual objectification of women has a particularly male sexual self- troubling dimension in the attitudes of males who sire babies with multiple women. The slack persona in “Who Am I” admits he has many sexual aggrandizement partners, yet his belief in his own sexual prowess means he simply cannot believe that his favourite would leave because of his promiscuity: in significant I cyaan’ believe de day mi friend dem tell me part through the Dat she flee. I don’ believe is angry, An I don’ believe is grief; I don’ believe is Susan sexual Or the other girls I breed. (adapted from Lyricstime.com) objectification Beenie Man’s persona’s seemingly incidental boast about other girls he has impregnated is, in fact, part of playing the role of “babyfather,” “a of women has a socially sanctioned and sexual route” to manhood in Jamaica (Hope 52). Hope explains, “A babyfather is a man who fathers an illegitimate child or particularly several children. Each child serves as undisputed proof of his conquest of the punaany [female genitals] and the accompanying subjugation of the troubling woman. The man who becomes a babyfather many times over lays claim to high levels of masculine identity as a potent and virile man” (52). Fur- dimension. thermore, Hope asserts, men who repeatedly become babyfathers with different women achieve the status of legend (52). Thus another recurrent feature of slackness culture reflected from the outset of “Who Am I” is a complete lack of concern for the impact of the male’s actions on female sexual partners. Breeze’s “Slam Poem” slams (or emphatically puts down) the version of male-female relations in Beenie Man’s “Who Am I,” but her offering of a competing version also activates another meaning of slam as a competition of performance poetry. Breeze’s opening stanza, thereafter repeated eight times as a chorus, is the only part of her poem that actually samples from Beenie Man’s song. Her chorus reiterates his phonological play with the street call “zim,” which is used to attract the attention of a person without calling their name (Reynolds), but in the dancehall hit the word is made into a kind of identifier for the unknown person who has made off with

Dubbing Chaucer | 97 Beenie Man’s “car” keys. Breeze’s poem also initially reproduces Beenie Man’s rhythm and phrasing, even “bigging up” her sexual desirability. The boast designed to shift the male-female power imbalance evident in the pre-text is, however, dramatically framed, not as public display but as strategy of persuasion to get her partner to use a condom: Zim Zimmer Who’s got the packet wid de slammer who am I de man dem sugar (1–4)

While Beenie Man asks “how can I make love to a fellow,” and answers, “In a rush,” Breeze’s speaker, like the Pointer Sisters, a 1970s and 1980s rhythm and blues group, wants a lover with a slow hand and so answers the same question with “Nat in a rush.” The difference amid the similarities focalizes her own slowly building sexual pleasure rather than privileging the gratifying of a man who is only interested in her as a vehicle for his sexual pleasure. Additionally, Breeze emphasizes the woman’s up-front concerns about the use of a condom, which requires that her lover not be in a hurry. The word slammer in Breeze’s poem is likely a reference to the Slam™ condom line, and that reference means to indicate that her speaker is specifically looking for a man who is sensible enough to ensure that both he and his partner are protected during sexual intercourse. To posit that Breeze’s promotion of safe sex is the antithesis of dancehall lyrics would, however, be a mistake grounded in a homogenization of the for(u)m. As Cooper persuasively argues, the so-called Queen of Slack- ness, Lady Saw, is no “one-dimensional artist who uncritically reproduces sexist norms” (101). Her hit “Condom,” which Cooper quotes at length, in fact actively promotes safe sex as equally beneficial to woman and men, and it makes the same argument about the need to use rubbers for health reasons that Breeze’s poem does. She begs all women and men to “use protection (Safety)” when having sex, admonishing them, “Remember aids will tek you life” (quoted in Cooper, Sound 117). She offers her own sexual practices as a model, asserting, “If my man don’t put on him rubbers / Him nah be able fi tell the Saw thanks” and presenting as evidence of her being serious about her health that she “[t]ake[s her] pap smear, [her] usual check-up” (122). Moreover, she counters the male claim that using a condom spoils all their pleasure with “That nuh true, girls” (123) and cautions young women that, in the face of some males’ trickery, they need to keep their eyes and ears open.

98 | Gingell and Chambers Breeze’s dubbing of “Who Am I” responds to the male complaint about feeling nothing when he wears a condom that Lady Saw addresses, but Breeze unexpectedly turns “yuh seh wen yuh put it awn / yuh nah feel nutten” (10) back on the man by lamenting his failure to provide clitoral stimulation: “lang time me feel de same / fah yuh nah touch mi likkle but- ton” (11–12). Moreover, Breeze’s poem forthrightly addresses the issue of cunnilingus, which in the context of dancehall sexual politics is a highly charged subject, Hope explains. To perform cunnilingus is, in dancehall parlance, to bow, and the naming “signifies the low status assigned to the concept” because to bow is “stoop down low to show deference or respect for a higher authority figure, in effect accepting one’s own subservience and subjugation” (Hope 51). Given the assaults on male pride that slavery, racism, and impoverishment have wrought among men connected with dancehall, contemporary displays of male power often take the form of parading as royalty. Beenie Man’s video for “King of the Dancehall” is a prime example. And in apparent response to dancehall artist Ce’cile’s 2003 song “Do It to Me Baby,” which frankly declares of the men willing to use their tongue in sex, “I love di man dem weh dweet” [I love the men who do it], Beenie Man in his video release of his 2004 “King of the Dancehall” thrusts his face into the camera, pointing with the index fingers of both hands, and declares (This face!) This is nuh sittin place Mi stand up and dweet nuh bow dung and taste Mi nuh run dung naany nuh chicken chase She fi know di sex limits stop at sixty eight (azlyrics)

“Slam Poem” counters by having the persona complain about and explain her objection to such male behaviour: all de beg mi beg yuh sey yuh nah use yuh tongue fah yuh don’t want yuh man pride lie dung a grung but so so penetration cyan bring me come (89–94)

The entry on slam in Jabari Authentic Jamaican Dictionary of the Jamic Language reports that as a verb the word denotes a rough or intense kind of intercourse, so we can understand Breeze’s poem as overdubbing Beenie Man’s valorizing of sex as slam and nothing more because “Slam Poem”

Dubbing Chaucer | 99 protests the failure to satisfy the woman sexually. Yet the complaint in Breeze’s poem clearly does not extend so far as rejecting the use of the word slam to denote intercourse first because of what Breeze calls her Thus Breeze piece—“Slam Poem” is a polyvalent title but its meanings certainly include “poem about sex”—and second because her persona endorses the man who makes apparent is responsible in his approach to “slam time” (32). Breeze’s persona in “Slam Poem” counters her lover’s androcentric that women’s version of sex, his “let[ting] aff / an … feel[ing] sweet” (13–14) without the least regard for the possibility of unwanted pregnancy as the result concerns are of unprotected sex, by voicing her concern that “nine month later” she will “regret seh me did dweet” (16). Breeze’s speaker is well aware of what much broader the economic impact will be on her family if she conceives another child because she reveals, “mi already have a girl / mi already have a bwoy” than the ones (109–10), and although her erstwhile partner Leroy may “bawl out seh / dat abortion is a crime” (25–26) her practical response is “yuh cyan feed expressed in pickney / so so sugar an lime” (27–28). Thus Breeze makes apparent that women’s concerns are much broader than the ones expressed in Beenie Beenie Man’s Man’s song, a difference rhythmically signaled by the shift in beat between the stanzas that parodically echoes the lyrics of “Who Am I” and those song. that only indirectly respond to the dancehall song. While “Slam Poem” addresses the speaker’s mature concerns in relation to sexuality and chastises the male suitor, Leroy, for his sexual puerility, upbraiding, “yuh tink dat ting in yuh trousis is a toy” (107), “Who Am I” never progresses beyond a juvenile conception of sexuality. Beenie Man brags about engaging in sexual intercourse with innumerable women. Asserting that he loves his now departed girlfriend, he makes a claim that is simultaneously boast, justification for unfaithfulness, and warn- ing about the highly valued man that she is about to lose. He reports that the day she left, many lonesome “girls” were in hot pursuit and attacked him “Because I am a drive inna bimma [a BMW]” (our transcription), evidence of wealth and status he claims drives women crazy. Thus “Who Am I” clearly demonstrates how dancehall’s slackness style can privilege men and devalue women, but it also positions the latter as disturbingly powerful in their cupidity, and when he asks, “You ever buck ah gal whey deep like ah bucket / Draw fi yuh needle but yuh needle cyan stitch it,” their insatiable sexuality. Breeze models empowerment in her persona by having her counter male boasting in kind, firmly reject sex without protection and a partner’s multiple infidelities, and refuse to be silent about her desires and concerns. She has her persona brag that she will deflate his oversize ego: “mi wi wine

100 | Gingell and Chambers yuh dung / till yuh fava yuh shadda” [I will wind you down / until you are just like your shadow”] (47–48), but her speaker does not allude to any potential sexual partners waiting in the wings for all her claim to be “de man dem sugar” (4). She is just an ordinary woman, who, despite her sexual needs, will not succumb to any argument for having intercourse without protection. Furthermore, in “Slam Poem,” Breeze’s speaker berates her potential paramour for fathering children with multiple mothers, thus making him like the slack male portrayed in Beenie Man’s song: mi hear seh yuh lef one bwoy pickney in Jamaica an since yuh come a Englan yuh have two baby madda. (41–44)

By informing her lover that she knows how many children he has already fathered with other women, Breeze’s speaker bolsters her argument for not having unprotected sex. Beenie Man’s persona in “Who Am I” may claim that he does not believe the woman who left him is angry or sad because he has made other women pregnant, but Breeze’s speaker tells her former and still would-be lover she will not allow him to make her pregnant again: “yuh jus nah breed mi again Leroy / yuh jus nah breed me again” (105–06). One of the most powerful arguments for using protection that Breeze’s speaker advances as part of dubbing of “Who Am I” is the threat of his passing on incurable, sexually transmitted disease when he is so promiscu- ous. Instead of acceding to her lover’s requests for sex, she firmly rejects his advances and explains why in a language that makes no concession to middle-class proprieties: mi nuh know oomuch crease yuh a dip yuh bat so jus zip up back yuh trousis no badda wheel out dat fah aids cyan cure wid a penicillin shat. (74–80)

By acknowledging, like Lady Saw, that aids is a very real possibility when condoms are not used, Breeze’s speaker makes clear that she is not willing to jeopardize her health or her life for transient pleasure. Moreover, after the fourth time that the female speaker of “Slam Poem” has found it necessary to tell Leroy to put on his rubbers and hush, Breeze, in an assertion arguably paradigmatic of her dubbing of male-authored texts, has the woman say, “No! Yuh nah shut me up” (57).

Dubbing Chaucer | 101 If Breeze dubs the version of sexuality presented in Beenie Man’s lyrics and video in having her speaker in “Slam Poem” list a number of reasons she will not have unprotected sex, she no more condemns sex or sexuality than Breeze’s Brixton Wife does. The speaker in “Slam Poem” instead argues that she deserves as much pleasure as a man and asserts that when the right man with the right attitude (and hence protection) comes into her life she will be more than willing to welcome his advances: “mi wi tek wah likkle pleasure / me can fine” (30–31). Breeze’s description of such a man as conscious suggests that her speaker is seeking someone who demonstrates deliberate and mindful concern for his partner and who is aware not only of his own needs but also those of a woman. Thus her dubbing of “Who Am I” foregrounds and contests the sexist and occasionally misogynistic strains of Beenie Man’s song but also exemplifies the expansion and enrichment of the dubbed song of which Gilroy speaks: the sex envisioned in “Slam Poem” is respectfully relational not subordinating and unsatisfying for the woman.

A Sexual Dub of One’s Own: Breeze’s Tracing of a Brighter Future for Afrasporic Women Men’s discourse about women—albeit not all negative, as Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” suggests—has dominated air space for time out of mind, and the print medium has only exacerbated the problem. Breeze shows herself determined to address that gendered discursive inequity, to “flip a switch / tun mi receiva / to transmitta” as she put the matter in an early poem “Eena Mi Corner” (37–39), but she is especially concerned to redress the negative things that have been said and written about women’s bodies and sexuality and are used to justify maltreatment. This concern relates particularly to those women of African descent who are routinely disparaged as either hypersexual and dangerous (and therefore judged in need of male control) or as having value only in so far as they serve male interests. Such is the context for Breeze’s assertion that Caribbean women poets need to delve increasingly into their sexuality rather than letting men define it in the silences and empty space created when women have little to say on the subject. By dubbing in a pair of poems two male-authored texts in which female sexuality is centrally represented, Breeze responds to that need, claiming the right of Afrasporic women to speak for themselves and simultaneously transforming discourse problematic in context or oppressive in content into a celebration of the Afrasporic female. In “The Wife of Bath Speaks in Brixton Market,” she relocates Chaucer’s prologue to a diasporic Caribbean

102 | Gingell and Chambers space historically associated with female empowerment and re-voices in Jamaican nation language a key work from the colonizer’s literary canon to speak to Afra-Jamaican underclass women in their language. At the same time her skill in multiple media allows her to use highly expressive body language as well as words to communicate broadly her message of female empowerment. Her dub hermeneutic issues in the transformation of Alisoun’s White Englishwoman’s assessment of marriage as a war fought to determine both assets and power over a partner into a Jamaican woman’s insistence that sex in marriage is something to be enjoyed, over and over again—by a woman as well as a man. Similarly, in “Slam Poem,” Breeze relocates sexual interaction to a space far more woman-friendly than the male-dominated settings of Beenie Man’s video of “Who Am I,” and, without losing the opportunity to affirm female sexual pleasure, repudiates as damaging to women the slackness of Beenie Man’s hit. Furthermore, in a poetic sound clash with the King of the Dancehall, she appropriates performance in that for(u)m to facilitate communication with the women she most urgently wishes to reach. What results from Breeze’s dubbings are new works that are illustrative of dub poetry’s dynamic interplay of word, sound, and power (Habekost 1) and that counter patriarchal and racist hegemony. Breeze’s poems reclaim and celebrate the healthy sexual agency that Afrasporic women largely lost through oppressive male practices in the slave, colonial, and neocolonial eras, and in doing so they trace the outlines of a brighter future for those women in particular but for all sexually subordinated and silenced women more generally.

Works Cited

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