Dubbing Chaucer and Beenie Man:
Jean “Binta” Breeze’s Re-Presentation of
“Afrasporic” Women’s Sexuality
Susan Gingell
Tara Chambers
University of Saskatchewan
I
n an early lyric, “Dreamer,” Afra-Jamaican and Black British poet Jean
“Binta” Breeze introduces readers to a woman who can be found recurrently 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 leftmargined lines respectively, the chief goal of her cultural production and
ESC 40.4 (December 2014): 79–106
Susan Gingell is
Professor Emerita,
Department of
English, University
of Saskatchewan. In
her “refirement,” she
is working on a book
tentatively titled “Talk
That Walks on Paper:
Canadian Poets Writing
the Oral,” working with
community-based
groups on the issue of
missing and murdered
Indigenous women in
Canada, and teaching
more yoga than was
previously possible.
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,
reggae-born for(u)m of dub poetry,1 Breeze has been passionately and
enduringly engaged in addressing the physical violence, poverty, racism,
and sexism that scar and constrict the lives of Afrasporic females. She has,
however, been equally concerned to speak to their resiliencies, strengths,
joys, and pleasures. As she asserts in “Can a Dub Poet Be a Woman?” the
closest interests she shares are “obviously with women” (499), and her
politics are also shaped by personal experiences “and those of the people
round [her] in their day-to-day concerns” (499).
Through and in her art, then, Breeze models the need for and routes
to Afrasporic female empowerment, and nowhere is her Jamaican womanism more evident than in her late career poems “The Wife of Bath
Speaks in Brixton Market” and “Slam Poem.” The latter makes clear the
contemporary but historically rooted understanding and representation
of Afrasporic women’s sexuality so potently prejudicial to those women’s
well-being, but both poems script performances of an energetically counter-discursive kind. While appropriating from male control two distinctly
different genres—literary dramatic monologue with a female persona and
live and recorded performance in the popular culture for(u)m of Jamaican 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 manifestations 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.
Breeze as Dub Poet and the Jamaican Arts of Dubbing and
Sound-Clashing
As fellow practitioner d’bi.young recounts, the highly political performance poetry known as dub “emerged from the psyche/life experience
of conscious ghetto youth in jamaica and england in the late 1970s, early
1980s” (4). In a 1990 article “Can a Dub Poet Be a Woman?” Breeze declared
herself “quite at home in the arena of dub poetry” because it “satisfied [her]
personal political concerns about whom [she] was talking with” (498).
That sense of fit springs from dub’s being “primarily oral” (young 5) and
from its use of the Jamaican vernacular, also known as patwa, Creole, and
nation language. Dub thus enables Breeze to speak in a public forum with—
not just to—economically disadvantaged Jamaicans, who are typically
more comfortable with embodied oral communication than with writing.
However, as a person as richly literate as iterate,3 Breeze, like most other
contemporary dub poets, publishes her poems in print as well as audio
and audiovisual forms. Her skill at working in this variety of media allows
her to have a powerful impact on diverse and widely dispersed audiences.
She is thus an effective voice, particularly for Afrasporic Jamaican women,
whose own words are typically little attended to because of the sexism that
consigns them as a group to a socio-economic location at the bottom of
Jamaican society (Hope 39) and because of being additionally marginalized
in the Jamaican diaspora by their perceived foreignness.
Breeze first found her own voice in the dub for(u)m, gaining a hearing
at the national level in Jamaica with backing from dub poet and reggae
performer Mutabaruka (Sharpe, “Dub” 608) and coming to international
attention when championed by fellow Jamaican-born Black British poet
Linton Kwesi Johnson (607), himself a foundational figure in the dub scene.
Yet in the late 1980s, Breeze declared herself “dubbed out” in a poem of
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
After giving up a
career as a disc jockey
and emcee, Tara
Chambers graduated
with a ba in English
(with a minor in
Philosophy) from
Thompson Rivers
University in Kamloops,
British Columbia. She
is a doctoral student
at the University of
Saskatchewan where
she also received
her ma in English
Literature for her work
on Edmund Spenser’s
The Shepherdes
Calender. Her doctoral
work focuses on early
modern England before,
during, and after the
Interregnum and on
John Milton’s political
philosophy as it is
presented in Paradise
Lost. She is also the
poetry editor for the
Fieldstone Review.
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/reconstructive 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 pretexts, 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 transformatively “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 aggression 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 Afrasporic 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 attributions to women of African descent of an inherent sexual immorality,
contentedness with the role of breeder, sexual insatiability and unnaturalness 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
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
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).
Sexual and gender dominance is, Hope maintains, one of the miniscule
number of forms of power available to the majority of dark-skinned, lowerclass Afro-Caribbean males and central to their sense of their manhood
(47). Thus, the self-centred appropriation of female sexuality and reproductive ability that the slave master exercised has now become a patriarchally
naturalized prerogative claimed by some Afro-Caribbean men as well as
remaining a white male practice.8
Male physical control of Black women’s bodies, including their sexuality, has long been supported by male discursive power, even in Abolitionist contexts, as Sharpe argues in Ghosts of Slavery when discussing
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
wrenched from her family, marketed, and brutally punished for the least
perceived misdemeanour, but the sexual aspects of her violation, including
the absence of any reference to her master raping her, are muted in the narrative. 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 Difference” 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
Male physical
control of Black
women’s
bodies,
including their
sexuality, has
long been
supported by
male discursive
power.
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 Market” 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 threatening 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 cripplingly distorted view of them that has dominated European discourses
for centuries, was transmitted to Afro-Jamaican men, and is latterly reproduced 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’ selfdetermination. 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 Caribbean 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 specialties 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 fawning 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 Chaucer 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” evidences 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 Canterbury 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 joyful 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 “Colonial 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 rewriting 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 neocolonizer’s literature, models empowered female Afrasporic subjectivity.
Breeze’s dubbing of “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” also notably deinstrumentalizes 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 withholds 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 maledominated 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 Yellowman, 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, “Cartographies” 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 unfaithful (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 predicate 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 socioeconomic 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 impoverishing 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 unemployment 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 cheering 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 becoming 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 characteristic oral formulae (Noises 138) to enable fluent oral composition and
performance (Lord 22).
The dancehall tradition of male sexual self-aggrandizement in significant part through the sexual objectification of women has a particularly
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
partners, yet his belief in his own sexual prowess means he simply cannot
believe that his favourite would leave because of his promiscuity:
I cyaan’ believe de day mi friend dem tell me
Dat she flee. I don’ believe is angry,
An I don’ believe is grief;
I don’ believe is Susan
Or the other girls I breed. (adapted from Lyricstime.com)
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
socially sanctioned and sexual route” to manhood in Jamaica (Hope 52).
Hope explains, “A babyfather is a man who fathers an illegitimate child or
several children. Each child serves as undisputed proof of his conquest of
the punaany [female genitals] and the accompanying subjugation of the
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). Furthermore, 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
The dancehall
tradition of
male sexual selfaggrandizement
in significant
part through the
sexual
objectification
of women has a
particularly
troubling
dimension.
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 Slackness, 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 button” (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
Thus Breeze
makes apparent
that women’s
concerns are
much broader
than the ones
expressed in
Beenie Man’s
song.
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
piece—“Slam Poem” is a polyvalent title but its meanings certainly include
“poem about sex”—and second because her persona endorses the man who
is responsible in his approach to “slam time” (32).
Breeze’s persona in “Slam Poem” counters her lover’s androcentric
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
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
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”
(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
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
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
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 warning 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 promiscuous. 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
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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.
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