By Danielle Toppin
In her work with Sistren Theatre Collective of Jamaica, Danielle Toppin focuses on mainstreaming gender into the composition of the grassroots organizations’ work, as well as on designing and facilitating workshops on gender, culture and identity. Toppin has worked on issues such as sexuality and reproductive health, and has a special interest in community and youth development.
On March 10, 2011, scores of students and non-students alike flocked to take in a public lecture being hosted by the University of the West Indies’ Department of Literatures in English and the Institute of Gender and Development Studies, in Kingston, Jamaica. The lecture was being given by popular dancehall artiste Vybz Kartel, and with a title like ‘Pretty as a Colouring Book: My Life and My Art’, it seemed that there would be some value in a lecture delivered by someone so controversial, and that it would, at the very least, bring a new level of understanding of the personal politics that drive this public phenomenon.
Vybz Kartel has become a defining force in the Caribbean landscape of dancehall music. With often sexually explicit and violent lyrics, he has remained a controversial figurehead within the local music industry, a trend that has intensified with his defence of skin bleach; evidenced by his steadily lightening skin. So strong has the association been, that Kartel himself launched not only a hugely successful song about cake soap (reportedly used as a skin lightener), but a ‘cake soap’ skin product. Because of this heightened controversiality, it seemed to me that a public lecture of this nature would be a well-matched engagement between students and Kartel because, having listened to him, I know that the man is a brilliant wordsmith, and fully capable of engaging in critical discussion. At the end of the night though, I realised the flaw in my assumption: I assumed that the university and its student body would have been able to do the same.
Let me start by saying that I offer neither condemnation nor support of Kartel. Kartel’s personal politics are just that; his own, the construction of an identity and worldview based on his interpretation and expression of his realities. The artiste confirmed a suspicion I had, namely that everything he does is carefully orchestrated, underlining the fact that Kartel is creating his own heaven on earth, whether we like it or not.
His lecture was filled with the expected deflection of social responsibility, as well as a tempered delivery of controversial statements. With comparisons made between himself and Bob Marley; discussions about the nature of Black identity; indictment of parents and the ‘system’; and comparisons between skin lightening and hair straightening, Kartel gave just enough to rile up his audience, and not enough to compromise his public image. He neither toed the line, nor did he cross it; but masterfully stirred up the right balance of animosity and admiration that should keep us talking about him for a little while to come. His love of controversy, and affinity for creating it was aptly put in one of the opening lines of his lecture: “I bask in the controversy, with my cake soap as my suntan lotion”.
The truth is, I was neither offended nor riled up by Vybz Kartel, as there were absolutely no surprises there. He was as intelligent and well-read as I would have expected. He deflected responsibility as I would have expected. He engaged in as little personal critical analysis as I would have expected. Public lectures really only allow lecturers the space to express viewpoints that they have already spent large amounts of time constructing. It would have been a phenomenal shift for Vybz to take this public moment to condemn himself or his choices.
What left me feeling somewhat despondent was the university itself.
I should first contextualise that statement. I am a graduate of the University of the West Indies (UWI), and while I was not on campus in the exciting times like the 1960’s when individuals such as Walter Rodney played pivotal roles in university life and beyond, I was a part of a student body that locked down the Jamaica campus and blocked the gates in protest against the sudden hikes of school fees. I still have (possibly) romanticised, but very definitive memories of UWI as a space that was actively seeking to create thinkers, and a student body that cared about issues other than “Integration Thursdays”, a weekly fete held at the campus’s Student Union.
Maybe this is my official transition into being old, but it occurs to me that this public event clearly highlighted many of the challenges that the university itself, and the wider Caribbean are facing: The virtual absence of social responsibility and leadership.
On its website, UWI’s Public Relations Office described the lecture as “an opportunity for the UWI to demonstrate its leadership role in engaging public debate on issues of colour, class and gender as manifested in Jamaican popular music.” I would definitely have to say that in my eyes, if this was the objective of the event, it was a resounding failure. Had the blurb used words like ‘sensationalisation’ and ‘provocative’, then I think the two organising institutions could walk away with their heads held high that their objectives had been met, and that the event had been a smashing success. It really is important to honestly think out one’s mission, and to not only be true to it, but to actively create ways to enforce it.
There was absolutely no engagement on the promised issues. A lecture was delivered, and a stream of university students came and posed one morally-driven, ill-thought out question after another. Questions posed by members of the university teaching faculty were not significantly more engaging. I cannot see that at the end of the ‘debate,’ Vybz Kartel could do anything else but go home and congratulate himself on showing up the ‘best and the brightest’ of our society. Repeatedly he was asked to comment on his statement that he is ‘not a social leader’. He made serious statements about the failure of society to create a network for the children it so vehemently appears to defend, commenting that ‘Society wants Vybz Kartel and other entertainers to carry the weight of the social problems on [our] shoulders. [I am] an entertainer…if you want Vybz Kartel to play the role of a role model, then you have already lost as a parent’. Well said.
Why should Vybz Kartel step into the role of social leader? Why is he any more accountable to society than we are? Indeed, he has a wider audience, but each of us affects a network of individuals, communities and societies, both in the things that we say and do, and the things that we don’t. How many of us are actively speaking out and working to create change? Why are we persistently asking Kartel to be something that we ourselves are not willing to be?
Admittedly, Kartel is an easy target for judgmental and morally driven ire. This is as he intends it. The life and work of Adijah Palmer (Vybz Kartel) would go a lot further to build us – both individually and as a society – if we were to adopt and apply some of his methods of self-reliance, creative visualisation and manifestation. Like he said, Vybz is an entertainer; if he were called to entertain an informed and socially aware audience, he would rise to the occasion just as successfully as he has done to meet the demands of society where it stands now. In 2004, when US- rapper Nelly was slated to perform at Spelman, the oldest historically Black college for women in the United States, the student body successfully used the event to forge a protest which gained international attention, making a statement that at least one body of women (and some men) found his work to be unacceptable. Whether we accept it or not, an opportunity was missed last month. Kartel also relished the chance to speak to a ‘new’ audience; evidenced by his well-thought out and prepared speech. This was an opportunity for him to engage and excite hundreds of people in a new setting, and he fulfilled that objective. Where were the activists, where was the movement and where was the student body? Where was the social leadership?
At the end of the event, one of my friends went back to her car to find both her side window and her laptop missing from her car. We are collectively creating a world in which even universities with seemingly high levels of security are unsafe. And across our Caribbean, there is growing unemployment, poverty, failed education systems and violence on levels never before seen. Now more than ever, social leadership is required…and it is not going to come in the form of your favourite DJ, movie actor or politician. The social leaders need to look, sound and act surprisingly like you, and we can continue to shift responsibility to those outside our Self, or we can learn from artistes such as Vybz Kartel, and recognise the power of our own words and actions, and make them count!
