- Translation or Transformation: Gender in Hispanic Reggae

Joseph Pereira
University of the West Indies
Mona Campus
-
Translation or Transformation: Gender in Hispanic Reggae"
Rejecting notions of territorial protectiveness and
divisiveness, the leading reggae singer in Spanish, the
Panamanian, El General, sings of his facility in crossing the
border (linguistic as well as geographic and cultural) that so
many Dancehall D.J.s have established in the originating Jamaican
ghetto context:
I General come wid a new musical ordah
in which there is no bordah;
mi determined to cross dis bordah
an mi no matta which a di bordah
because Spanish mi cross dat bordah,
can be seh English mi cross dat bordah
("Cross di bordah")
In doing so, El General is continuing an age-old Caribbean
pattern of trans-border cultural cross-fertilizing. And in that
process he is adapting the social culture expressed in the
Jamaican reggae idiom to the values and perspectives of its new
Spanish Caribbean contexts.
The popularity of reggae music world-wide has grown on the
foundations laid by creators of the calibre of Bob Marley, so it
is not surprising that, within the Caribbean; its attraction
should have influenced particularly those societies where
Jamaican migration has impacted on the demography and culture,
9
notably Panama and Costa Rica, although other Latin American
societies have also taken to reggae. Another significant factor
in this spread of reggae in the region has been the clearing
house role of Miami and New York, where Caribbean musicians and
promoters have , met and interacted in a way that the island
isolations within the region have not facilitated. The financial
prospects of a responsive Hispanic Caribbean market is an
underpinning inducement to this border-crossing.
Out of this has developed a number of good reggae artistes,
male and female, particularly (but not exclusively) among those
who are bilingual in Spanish and English, such as descendants of
English Caribbean migrants in Panama or Costa Rica or Puerto
Ricans. This crossing over of language is reflected in many of
the songs switching between Spanish and English (or more
accurately, Jamaican Creole). Some of these songs translate
the original fairly closely, others borrow the popular tunes to
back their own lyrics. As with the original creole, the lyrics
reveal attitudes to gender relationships whose study indicates
the ways in which a straight translating/transferral of cultural
patterns is improbable if not impossible in reality. Instead,
these patterns undergo varying degrees of adjustment and accom
modation from the originating to the new society.
3
A basic accommodation is the recontextualizing of the
personae evoked in the lyrics from the geo-culture of Jamaican
reggae to that of the Hispanic Caribbean. So songs, instead of
singing of women (and occassionally men) from Jamaica, Canada,
UK, USA or Japan - indicative of the orientation of Jamaican
reggae clientele - now figure women from Panama, Costa Rica,
Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico. This new focus is very much
restricted to the Caribbean, reflecting the far less global reach
of Hispanic reggae.
There is also a tendency to alter the imagery used in
presenting the qualities of the women, where the more imaginative
and indigenous imagery found in Jamaican reggae (eg. "skin
smooth like baby inna crib") give way to more conventional and
eurocentric images: "labios dulces como melocoton / cuerpo suave
como algodon" rail's as sweet as peaches / body as soft as
cotton') (Gringo ; "Trailer lieno"), or "mas suave que la seda de
China" ["softer than Chinese silk") (Poch Pan: "Pantalon
caliente"). When Shabba Ranks images "Coca-cola bottle shape",
Gringo in his imitation of "Trailer Load" sings of "pura figura
de sirena", even though other Hispanic artistes appropriate
Shabba's imagery in direct translation. Within the traditional
convention of woman-as-fruit, and echoing the biblical Eden,
Maleante in "Cuida to cuerpo" falls back on this non-Caribbean
apple as a signifier: "te pareces una fruta que me encanta comer
4
fruit I love to eat / if you were an apple I would slice yu in
three") These examples reflect the eurocentricity of the
traditions and sensibilities of the Hispanic Caribbean.
Similar cultural accommodation is seen in the imaging of
girls at the beach and in bikini: "vas para la playa y te ves
bien buena / pones el bikini y te ves bien buena" (yu go to the
beach and yu look good / yu put on yu bikini and yu look good]
(El General: "Te ves buena"). It is true that in Jamaica, beaches
have been a popular location for reggae concerts, but the lyrics
do not reflect a beach culture. Rather, the dancehall is the
location usually evoked, with batty-riders instead of bikinis.
Profiling at the beach is a habit of a class other than that
supporting dancehall - uptown, not ghetto - perhaps because it
is associated with sun-tanning and white tourists, and more
appropriate to "brownings", or to Hispanics for that matter,
rather than black girls. Indeed, there is a consciousness of race
in some Hispanic reggae, where black and white become reference
points: "todas las negras les gustan bailar / todas las blancas
les gustan bailar" [all the black girls dem like to dance / all
the white girls dem like to dance] (Profeta: "Todas las chicas").
In these lyrics, the intention is to include in a common identity
elements of these societies that have been differentiated by
race. In contrast, Jamaican reggae is sensitive not to race but
to shade: 'browning" vs. black, with some degree of antagonism.
5
In both cultures, the female that is used to validate the
race/shade judgements.
There is also an adjustment to the tone of violence that
often marks the dancehall tendency in reggae, even where the
music is copied or the lyrics transposed into Spanish. Perhaps
this is because some of the receiving societies have not reached
the levels of 'everyday violence to be found in the originating
society. El General, for example uses violence only as a metaphor
for his sexual prowess, but privileges and advocates peace in his
songs. There is no enhancement of the "Don Gorgon" male subvert
of state authority which one gets in the rudie/ragamuffin
tradition in Jamaican reggae. Also excised is physical violence
involving women. Where Stitchie in "Old time teaching" advises
"no badda brutalize nobody gyal-pickney / because police will
hol' an beat yu badly", Rigo omits this in his otherwise fairly
close translation in "Algo que nunca podre olvidar". When Negro
Jetro in "Coca-cola" translates Simpleton's "Coca-cola shape",
one of only two sections omitted is the following image of the
violent effect of women:
dem a fling big stone an buss up man face,
a
dem have de shape cause war inna de place;
she a fling big stone an buss up my face.
6
There is a willingness to depict the older generation in
other than a value-transmitting role. Hence a girl's beauty can
be ascribed to inheritance from her mother: "con toda la belleza
de to mama" [with all your mother's beauty) (Pocho Pan: "Pantalon
caliente"). In the originating culture, the female is decidedly a
creation of herself (or at best of God). Antecendent generations
are invoked mainly as a reference for values, usually a male DJ
ascribing positive values to lessons learned from his mother. The
mother is here a figure of moral authority and responsible for
the training of the child in "proper" values. El General responds
to this pattern in "No mas guerra", where he praises his mother
as value teacher:
A mi mama yo quiero saludar
por las cosas que me pudo ensenar:
a ninguno yo lo voy a robar,
a ninguno yo lo voy a matar,
a ninguno yo lo voy a punalar,
por eso, mi mama es una buena mama.
[I want to hail my mother
for the things that she taught me:
I not goin' to rob nobody,
I not goin' to kill nobody,
I not goin' to stab nobody,
that's why my mom is a good mamma.
7
Indeed, as a term of endearment for one's female partner,
"mami" is common in the Hispanic reggae lyrics, just as among the
female singers, "papi" is used for the male partner. Jamaican
reggae is willing to style the male as "Daddy", especially in the
labels DJs give themselves (eg. Daddy Screw) or concepts such as
"sugar daddy". It is instructive that these labels are male selfimpositions, which lend associations of paternal authority and
control over the female, implicitly a child-like recipient of
male talent. Conversely, the term "mamma" is not current in
Jamaican lyrics to signify the female partner, since it may
confuse the authority heirarchy between the genders from the male
point of view. Instead, it is "gyal-pickney" that is used by some
DJs, reinforcing their ideology of female subordination and
malleability.
The female DJs show a range of attitudes towards
relationships with men in their songs - most of which do focus on
that relationship. One finds the traditional submission of female
to male in La Diva's "Quiero bailar", where the persona is unable
to go through with an apparently independent move dancing with
a new partner. Instead of being a revolutionary step, it is
revealed as a conservative one to "provoke" her real love. Her
strategies to create jealousy via the love triangle fail because
of her inherent submissiveness to the male, as indicated by the
very strong verb choice, "belong":
No insistes por favor, no puedo
8
al hombre que to yes ya le pertenezco a el,
oh, pertenezco a el;
solo quise saber que iba a hacer
si bailaba contigo una y otra vez.
[Please don't insist, I can't,
the man that you see I already belong to him,
oh, I belong to him;
I only wanted to know what he would do
if I danced with you a few times.]
Contrast this plea with the bold assertiveness of La
Atrevida (Rude Girl), sustained in her various songs and
responding to the abuse of women by men: "no hables mal de la
mujer / porque con nosotras no vas a poder" [don't bad-talk woman
/ because you can't cope with us]. La Atrevida's defiant posture
is more in keeping with the attitudes reflected in the female
Jamaican DJs such as Lady G and Lady Saw. In the arena of gender
politics "la mujer es la que tiene el poder" [woman is the one
who has power]. However, La Atrevida recognizes that this is not
an absolute condition, since she uses a contrastive anecdotal
example of women who are disrespected and subordinated by men:
"Oye a Toni hablar de
8U
mujer / dice que ells lo tiene que .
obedecer" [Listen to Tony talk about his woman / he say she have
to obey him]. She images herself in contrast with that type of
relationship: "mi tiempo no voy a perder / con un hombre que le
gusta joder" [I not goin' waste mi time / with a man who like
9
mess around]. In justifying the respect and power she demands for
women, La Atrevida invokes the mother image, which we have seen
holds a privileged place in male attitudes to women: "Hay una
cosa que tienes que aprender / que estas aqui por una mujer"
[There is one thing yu mus' learn / that yu here because of a
woman].
La Atrevida uses a similar technique in "Si un hombre
quiere", in presenting an anecdotal example of a relationship
with a man in which she is just a sex object while he lavishes
attention and money on other women. Her solution to this type of
relationship is to insist on a material relationship, accepting
that if women are going to be regarded as a commodity, then
they have to be paid for: "Si el hombre quiere pedazo / tiene que
pagar por el" [If a man want piece / him have to pay fi it]. This
may immediately recall Sparrow's calypso, "No money, no love",
but the motivation behind La Atrevida's material emphasis is
not as self-centred as in the calypso, since she depicts the
financial obligations that a woman has in terms of her
responsibilities as a mother and a housewife:
porque hay muchas cosas que tu tienes que comprar,
y a tus hijos tu tienes que cuidar,
para la escuela tu tienes que mandar
sin plata no hay case., ropa, ni nada de comer.
[For there is plenty yu have to buy,
10
an yu have to care yu children,
yu have to sen' them to school,
without money yu no have
no
house, clothes, nor nothing
to eat.)
One notes here that the traditional role of woman as domestic
being (children, house, food) is not contested, but the
conventional tolerance of male promiscuity and neglect
of domestic responsibilities is rejected. Female materialism
here is only a reaction to male abdication of responsibilities.
La Atrevida's assertion of her rights and independence is
not an anti-male position. She only insists that her male respect
women. Indeed, in her bilingual "Lesbiana", she sees the malefemale relationship as divinely instituted
(a
fairly common
explanation of the attraction). She uses this to reject
homosexuality with a rather convenient theological argument:
"God made man and he made de woman, / he never did mek no
battyman, / and I am sure he didn't mek lesbian." She images sex
as procreation and the lesbian is presented in rather capitalist
symbolism as "holding up production". What perturbs La Atrevida
is that they should claim civil rights: "What they want?
Recognition." As with most reggae music that denounces
homosexuality, the DJ reinforces a general position with a very
personal avowal: "hombre meneo, no meneo mujer" [man mi wine, mi
no wine no woman]. In Jamaican reggae it is male homosexuality
11
that is the frequent target of hostility, while in contrast
there is a silence on lesbianism, perhaps because it is not seen
as a threat to the sexual self-image.or confidence of the male.
We find this homophobia transmuted in the Hispanic lyrics, as in
"Trailer lleno", where Gringo presents a milder censure of
homosexuals than Shabba Ranks' forthright
"Wi no cayta fi
homosexual nor gay."
The male DJs also refelct a range of personae in dealing
with the female. At one end of the scale is the romantic
stereotype of forlorn love, for whom a lost love means the
shattering of his world: loss of senses, loss of meaning to
existence, loneliness and grief, as the Puerto Rican Wiso G
croons in "Medley de la calle". This disorientation and
devastation of the male ego spurned by the female is similar to
the state of "tabanca" that is a recurring motif in Trinidad
calypso as the male tries to adjust to rejection and the blow to
his sense of manhood. Negro Jetro, in "Ex-man", whose lyrics
celebrate the woman who has found a new love that treats her
better than her 'ex', carries this tabanca to the destruction of
sanity: "manicomio - donde el fue a quedar / cuando le dijiste
que tenias otro man" [madhouse is where him end up / when yu tell
him seh yu have a next man]. The lyrics of the original Jamaican
song on which it is based, Daddy Screw's "Model pon yu one-time
man" is more pointed as to the reason for this madness: "t'rough
yu fin' a bettah man - a dat drive him crazy." In this male value
12
system, to be bettered sexually is the ultimate devastation.
The DJ implicitly shares the sexual identity of the - better" man
and distances himself from the sexually inept and devalorized.
Another associated but more beguiling gambit is the
representation of love as an illness: several songs sing of
"sending up the pressure", "giving headache" and other forms of
physical ailment as a result of seeing an attractive woman or
loving a woman. In such a scenario, it is logical that the woman
should be imaged as cure, directly or by her ministrations:
-
Amor, eres tu la cura. / Desde mirandolo amor esta herida crece
mas" [Love, you are the cure. / Just from looking, love, this
wound grows more) (Arzu: "Amor"). Deriving from the Jamaican
reggae, "Night Nurse", Nando Boom in "Noche enferma" pleads not
for medicine nor a doctor but a night nurse. The assumption here
is a gender distinction in occupations: doctor=male;
nurse=female. Negro Jetro extends the exaggeration to the woman
as deadly on account of her sexual attractiveness: "La figura que
tu tiene ella mata a los hombres" [Di figure yu have, a it kill
man] (Coca-cola"). While such a death is a physically produced
fatal ailment, the female is also figured as causing death by
having men fight over her: - hombres se matan porque to ves buena"
[men kill each other because yu look good] (El General: "Te ves
buena"). Blame here is subtly shifted to the female for a passive
quality rather than the active violence of the males.
A further extension of this mystique with which the male DJs
13
endow women is their occassional association with witchcraft. El
General in particular uses this motif: "como una bruja los tendra
que castigar" [yu goin' have to punish them like a witch] (Putun-tun"), when he wishes to convey a sexually demanding woman,
the implication being that pejorative associations are necessary
when the female threatens the male self-perception as coping with
and outlasting the sexual appetite of women. By contrast, when he
wishes to present his ideal female in "Buduff-kun-kun", he
negates such associations: "no hace brujeria ni tampoco el vudu"
[she don't practice witchcraft neither voodoo].
The male technique, so well developed in Jamaican dancehall,
of encouraging jealousy and rivalry between women the better to
retain control in gender politics (that we saw La Diva unable to
do in reverse) is translated into Hispanic reggae in various
songs that encourage ridicule of rivals largely on physical
grounds of a departure from a normative male-determined
aesthetics: ugly, fat, thin, shapeless etc., but sometimes on
grounds of an inability to perform gender stereotypes, whether
the sexually associated wining or the domestic functions like
cooking (as in El General's "La queme"). In a lyrical context
where the male DJ privileges the "ideal" physical female body
whose suppleness of movement augurs sexual agility, this is not
surprising. Among the most common verbs in Hispanic reggae
dealing with women are "menea" and "mueve" [swing it; move it],
indicating the pelvic focus of male perception.
14
With sexual intercourse often an implicit and at times
explicit objective in male imaging of the female in many of the
DJ lyrics, the male projects himself in his ritual introductory
salutation with an ego suitably swollen for the occassion, and
the Hispanic follows closely the originating culture in this
regard. Marconey announces: "Pero aqui llego Marconey Star para
arreglar la situacion" [But Marconey Star has arrived to sort out
the situation). Nando Boom dismisses all male competition:
"quitate, quitate, Nando Boom de nuevo llego" [clear off, clear
off, Nando Boom on spot once more), and El General caps it off
with his assertion: "Pero quiero que les digas a tus amigas que
el rey del pum-pum acaba de llegar" [But I want yu tell yu
friends dat di king of pum-pum jus" reach on). Such a persona is
dismissive of all pre-existing social and sexual partnerships of
his female audience, who all are imaged as open targets for his
advances. El General's ego-booster, "El gran Pana", warns: "Que
dile a tu novia, tu querida, tu esposa: / no queda ni una chica
que se reia de la coca" [For tell yu fiance, yu sweetheart, yu
wife: there is no chic that can resist].
Such fictive male ideals of an anarchic defiance of the
social order carry over into the attitude to pregnancy supported
in the lyrics. The sterotypic proof of masculinity, getting the
girl pregnant, is presented in equally conventional way as the
woman's problem, for example in Fermina's "No mama", where a
young girl's pregnancy is seen as the loss of her "future", and
15
blame is centred on her - indeed the male is not mentioned. El
General's persona reflects the irresp[onsible male who abandons
both pregnant girl and his financial obligations to the child in
"El gran Pana". The pregnancy is seen detachedly as part of his
absolute freedom: "me metia y me salia por la ventana: / en cinco
meses ya salio prenada" [I went in and out the window: / in five
months she was pregnant]. The girl's father's demands that he
meet the financial responsibilities are boastfully rejected by
the DJ: "pero como un general, no le pago nada" [but like a
General, I pay him nothing). Implicitly, once responsibilty is
demanded of the male, relationships are terminated and both woman
and child are devalued except as symbols of male conquest. The
DJ's metaphors for himself as an exploding bullet and a machinegun underscores the equation of sex with a violent assault and
destruction of the other (female), not the establishment of a
partnership much less a family.
The strong insistence on freedom of behaviour almost devoid
of a balancing responsibility is a traditional male attitude that
leaves women little scope for re-negotiating power relations
between the genders or sensitivity to female perspectives on the
part of the male.Arzu expresses this male self-centredness well
in "Mi tiempo": "Soy lo que soy y nunca cambiare por ti" [I am
what I am and I will never change to suit you]. El General sings
of a more confrontational stance: "Yo soy bravo, digo malo, y no
me ganan" [Mi wild, mi seh mi bad, an no woman win mi]. The
16
male self-image here is essentially very conservative, reflecting
the old "macho" ideology. Even sex is treated in a conservative
way, as in "Son bow" by El General, following on the original
Jamaican "Dem bow". Here, oral sex is rejected as a "foreign"
practice, not permissible by Caribbean men. Instead, a highly
orthodox frontal position is advocated, with the DJ imaging the
sex-act as "hammering" (martillando), and his organ as the hammer
(martillo), reinforcing not only the sex-as-violence motif but
assumptions that only vigorous/violent movement satisfies the
female.
Recognizing that only a sampling of reggae in Spanish by a
few albeit popular Panamanians, Costa Ricans and Puerto Ricans
has informed this study, nonetheless there is sufficient evidence
to conclude that straight transfers across cultural borders have
not taken place. The receiving culture has adapted the reggae
idiom even in its closer translations. A more Eurocentric
imagery, an avoidance of more violent expressions of social
relations or of confrontation with the state authorities, a
greater openness to family are some of the accommodations.
However, in basic gender relationships, a
strongly
conservative privileging of the male and subordination of the
female is indicated cross-border, with the only challenges to
these conventions coming from a female DJ. It appears that
Caribbean popular music culture, whether English or Hispanic,
continues to be dominated by male-centred ideology and values,
perhaps because it is also dominated by male voices.