Yes, it's a pretty vulgar video, all things considered. There are lots of simulated sex acts and vulgar words. But that's nothing new, and while I'm usually in some sort of middle ground between disgusted and disinterested in soca music, I have to say that this one piqued my interest because it IS something new.
Let me preface this by saying that it's not a feminist message that I'm finding here. The song and lyrics celebrate fat women because the male singer happens to find them attractive, not because said women have any worth as anything other as objects of the male gaze. This is not Roll It (which happens to be my all time favorite soca song). BUT, there is something distinctly counter-cultural in the lyrics that I find interesting. Take this bit for example :
God dat make you
So tell dem doh touch yuh size
When you dress yup sexy
Tell dem doh criticize
Tell dem yuh welded,
Yuh smellin nice
Tell dem yuh healthy
Das why yuh round and nice
Here we have several really powerful messages:
Every person is made by God, and is therefore beautiful
Fat people can wear sexy clothes, feel sexy, and be sexy
Fat people can be healthy
That's a lot for a soca song ! Then there's this line that, unfortunately, is sandwiched between a lot of regrettable material : Any ting slim gyal do, tell dem you can do it too. Of course, it's referring specifically to dance moves, but I feel like it's a great statement more generally. And therein lies the problem: it's kind of a sexist song, but it celebrates bigger bodies. Should I like it or not like it?
Tl;dr: I have complicated feelings about a Trinidadian song. THAT IS MY LIFE.
I don’t think I’ve ever posted a picture of myself on DW, but for those of you who don’t know what I look like, here I am.
I chose this picture, despite how awkward it is,because it demonstrates the variations in my natural skin tone very well. My face is fair enough that my freckles are very noticeable, but my shoulders are a very rich brown, and the space between my neck and my breasts falls in between. My hair and eyes are very dark, but between the freckles and the brown skin and my seasonal tan, it’s hard to tell what my ethnic background is.
This is a picture of me and Suzanne at our wedding. Suzanne is unquestionably white. Next to her, I am a very brown person, indeed.
This is me with my dad. I like to joke that he’s a real redneck because the man has a ridiculous farmer’s tan. His face is very, very brown, but the skin under his shirt is a creamy white. His family is from England, Sweden, Venezuela and Palestine. If I had to put him in any ethnic category, I’d say that he’s white.
This is me with my mummy. I look sort of white next to her, but…she’s my mother. How white can I be if I’m related to her? She is partly Native American, and the rest of her family comes from Venezuela and India. I usually think of my mother as Indo-Trini, but her background is more complex than that.
This is a picture from a long-ago family gathering. These people are all related to me. They run the gamut in terms of skin color. If you go to a family gathering at my parents’ house, you’ll be hard-pressed to identify our ethnicity.
This is a picture from my high school yearbook. I’ve given my classmates some privacy by blocking out their eyes, but even so, it’s startling to see the contrast between their skin and mine. Whenever I want to explain to my American friends why I was considered white in Trinidad, this is what I point to.
Why am I posting all of these pictures? Well, I read this post (http://soyluv.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/to-look-inside-west-indian-whiteness-identity/) by a Trinidadian blogger recently and it really captured some of the nebulous feelings I have about my racial and ethnic identity. I’m multiracial—that much is obvious, but I occupy such a strange place in the worlds that I inhabit. Although my skin is brown, I occasionally pass as white in the US. In Trinidad, my skin is fair enough to be white, but my facial features give me away as not-quite white. Around my predominantly Indo-Trinidadian family, it’s clear that I have Indo-Trini roots; around my white family, I look vaguely “Syrian” (Trini code for “rich Middle-Easterners”) or white or something that it’s harder to put my finger on.
I’m sure that my close family would think that I put a very un-Trinidadian emphasis on understanding racial politics and my own ethnic heritage, but it’s something that I have to figure out, largely because there’s no readymade space for me. I was ostracized in high school because I was clearly an outsider. Some of my Afro-Trini classmates, especially those from urban working poor backgrounds, were suspicious of me. I don’t fault them for this—their suspicions were born of several generations of race wars—but it made the question of racial identity very important to me. Around the age of ten or eleven, I was introduced to white guilt, but it was a lonely sort of guilt, because I didn’t know that there was a name for it, and I experienced it as a member of a minority group, rather than as part of a protected majority.
In the US, I’ve fully embraced an identity as a queer woman of color, but in Trinidad, two of those modifiers (queer and of color) are erased. Although I am multiracial, I am wary of assuming the identity of a POC in a country where the fairness of my skin and the straightness of my hair, and above all, those damning freckles on my face that give so many people pause, are prized. As a queer woman, I am invisible—sexuality only counts once a penis is involved. I’m part of a silent minority in the background of the country, but unlike the others that Soy posted about, I don’t have a community around me. My father’s family is not rich, and we’re not related to the big French- and English Creole families that dominated the country’s social scene for centuries.
And it’s really obvious that I wasn’t raised around white people. I don’t really speak TSE—it sounds artificial and stilted to my ears. I don’t have any white friends, and I didn’t go to a predominantly white school. My parents don’t live in Westmoorings, and when I go to The Falls at West Mall, I get the same creepy feeling that the author describes. During Mardi Gras, when high school bands march by, I am always swept up in the emotion when the kids playing are predominantly black or brown (because it reminds me of my high school friends), but when the white private-school kids march by, I’m always creeped out because the only mental image that I have to compare them with is Hitler Youth.
I don’t really have any conclusions to this ramble. I guess that I’m used to occupying this particular liminal space, and I don’t give it much thought anymore. But the post by Soy Luv just made all of these emotions rush by, and I just had to give it some thought.
I’ve been in an (understandably) strange headspace lately. There are all of these thoughts that tumble through my head, and all of these feelings mixing around in my heart, and I can’t even come close to expressing them all. This post is an attempt at exorcising some of them—hopefully by getting them all out in virtual paper, it will clear my head a little.
-I’ve been thinking lately about my relationship with the sister nearest in age to me. She has autism (or something like it) and is largely nonverbal. My relationship with her is the strangest of those I have with my siblings (which is not to say that any of them are simple or uncomplicated! For instance, I’m still closest with my brother, even though we’ve had more than our share of fights over the past few years, and while I lived with my oldest sister for a year and spent lots of time with her, we’re not close at all.) With middle sister, however, there’s this weird sort of void, and although the reason why should be obvious, I’ve only really now come to terms with it. It is the sheer lack of a common language. Written and spoken language is so critical to me that I can’t conceptualize the world without it. Part of the reason that I love teaching so much is that I teach a language and get to share something that is so important to me with other people. When I teach a French class, I teach my students more than just verb conjugations, but I teach them how Francophone people see the world. And by and large, they get it. Halfway through the semester, my students encountered the word “ronronement” (purring) in one of their readings, and one of them said something that made me so happy as a student. She said, “It’s so funny that that’s how they hear purring!” She got it!
But my sister doesn’t process language the same way that I do, even though her communication is just as clear to her as mine is to me. And it hit me the other day that when we butt heads as we so often do, she’s thinking the very same thing that I am: “Why don’t you understand what I’m saying?”
-Lily-peeg has really slowed down a lot since her brush with intestinal parasites, and I fear that these really are her last few days/weeks/months. She’s regained a bit of the weight that she lost, her appetite is fine, and she’s still very vocal in demanding treats, but she’s just not the guinea pig that she used to be. I’ve been spending time lately sitting and watching the two of them, and it’s hard not to think about Diana’s last few months.
I also remember the only time that we’ve ever heard Lily chirp. Guinea pigs are quite chatty creatures (especially Daisy, who may be partially deaf and is thus very loud) but chirping is not one of their usual sounds. (If you want to hear what chirps sound like, click the link, and then listen to the example that Wikipedia has: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_pig#Behavior) One night, soon after Diana left us, Suzanne and I heard a strange sound coming from the guinea pig cage, and we looked in to see Lily chirping away. Since then, we’ve read that some piggies chirp after the loss of their cage mate.
Sometimes I feel a little bit like Lily during those days. I’ve lost someone really important to me(Suzanne and I used to joke all the time that we were a bonded pair, just like Lily and Diana) and it’s hard to express my feelings of sadness and loss through my everyday language. Paul says that the Holy Spirit prays for us with groans too deep for words, and it’s a little like that with me and my feelings.
-Years and years ago, I read an article in a women’s magazine about how to gracefully recover if you accidentally tell a guy that you love him right after sex. I thought at the time that it was a bizarre topic, because how can you have sex with someone that you’re not willing to love. I think now that my inability to understand that article may just be a quirk of my personality. I think that for me, sex is love. It’s not necessarily romantic love, but it’s love nonetheless, and I quite like it that way.
-Right now, I’m in the middle of what I fear is a rebound fling with someone who is far too dear to be a rebound fling. Another quirk of my personality is that I have a very great need to love, and for a long time, the primary recipient of that love has been Suzanne. I’ve spent the past few weeks making gifts for friends, because I want them to feel loved and cared for, but I’ve also spent a fair amount of time loving on a very dear friend of mine, and I am falling very fast and very hard for her. It’s a wonderful feeling (especially since the separation has made me feel unlovely and unattractive) but I’m trying to put the brakes on things a liiiiiittle bit because I want to give myself time to create new, shiny feelings for this wonderful person instead of just giving them leftovers. It seems to be working so far.
At my last therapy appointment, I told my therapist about how I was struggling to deal with all of the change in my life. After about 45 minutes of talking about how there was too much change for me, I looked at her with resignation and piped up with “Well, change is a good thing! This will be good for me!” My therapist looked at me sidelong and said “You’re very good at reframing things. Just make sure that you’re giving yourself time to actually engage with your feelings.”
Well, friends, that’s what I’m going to be doing for a while. There are lots of very heavy emotional things on my plate right now, and I need to be quiet and reflective and prayerful so that I can give myself space to feel things. This isn’t the kind of situation where I need clarity before making a big decision, or anything of that nature—I just need to be quiet with myself for a bit, so I know where I stand right now.
And on that note, I’m going back to bed.
Today’s post is an attempt at recreating my own stream of consciousness. Or something. Really, it’s a list of things that I was thinking about last night as I fell asleep, except not organized as a list.
I’m in the middle of The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood, and holy crap, how did I not know about this book before? It’s about a woman’s mental breakdown, but it’s incredibly well-written and interesting and it’s hard to tell that it was written in the 60s. The text poses questions about mental health and womanhood and mothering and child-bearing in a way that must have been scandalous at the time. I mean, here we are in the 21st century and still laughing nervously over women who choose to be single moms, and there’s a character in this novel who openly makes that choice! Whoa!
Books like this one always make me wonder about early 20th century attitudes towards sex, especially of the extramarital varieties. There’s a bit in The Bell Jar where the protagonist’s boyfriend exposes himself to her, but they never have sex beyond that. In The Edible Woman, it’s implied that the protagonist has sex with her fiancée, and that it’s considered not-too-scandalous. Then, in The Pale Horse, an Agatha Christie novel, there’s a reference to a woman being “virtuous” and thus not the kind of person that you can just have casual sex with. I’m expressing myself poorly, but what I’m trying to get at is that the idea of the morally upright pre-70s people is firmly embedded in our cultural imaginary, so when there’s even the slightest evidence that people before the 70s ever had extramarital sex, it’s downright weird.
The Edible Woman has also made me reflect on how I love novels that take place right at the start of a mental breakdown. I love, love, love The Bell Jar for that, because it’s so intriguing to me to see how the protagonist unravels, and to try to pinpoint where it all starts to go downhill. I don’t know why this appeals to me so much.
This post isn’t very successful. Bum.
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regna