“Ah My Brownin' Dat!”: A Visual Discourse Analysis of the Performance of Vybz Kartel's Masculinity in the Cartoons of the Jamaica Observer

Abstract

Jamaican deejay vybz KARTEL, Adijah Palmer, can be considered the biggest provocateur and enfant terrible in contemporary Jamaican dancehall. Enjoying the media attention, he is never too shy to confront Jamaican taboo topics in the dancehall. The entertainer is known for crossing the traditional borders of dancehall in categories like space, race, body, genre of music and gender. Apart from this, he is famous for the adaptation of hip-hop codes and styles in his songs. In October 2011, Vybz Kartel's provocative and transgressive lifestyle reached a new scandalous dimension, when he was arrested by the Jamaican police and charged for murder.In this essay I look at the changing images of Vybz Kartei in the cartoons of the Jamaica Observer during 2010-2011. The Jamaica Observer is a daily newspaper in Jamaica with circulation second only to the Jamaica Gleaner. I would like to demonstrate how the deejay's heterosexual masculinity disappears in visual depictions found in the cartoons of the Observer. Through these editorial cartoons, we see the borders between the image of the 'badman' and the homosexual man becoming blurred.In March 2011 Kartei was invited by Professor Carolyn Cooper to give a speech at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, where he admitted that he bleaches his skin.1 There and elsewhere the artiste has spoken about using his body and his tattoos as a medium for communication. Kartei talks about his body as a colouring book.2 His tattoos mention his children, and friends he has lost during his life, as well as drawing a transcultural line between American hip-hop culture and dancehall by using the term 'thug life', an expression which became famous through the late Californian rapper Tupac Shakur, who used the term to describe the circumstances of his life and his work.3 Tupac had a tattoo with this phrase emblazoned on his belly. Kartei, who has mentioned the rapper as a source of his inspiration, has a copy of the tattoo on his forearm.4 Another tattoo on Kartel's fingers visualises his function as the leader of his crew called Gaza. The name Gaza refers to Kartel's community in Portmore.5 Inner-city communities in Kingston often have informal names, which are chosen to underline the violence and the 'badness' of the place and its artistes. The name Gaza is a reference to the Gaza Strip in Israel, a region known for the bloody warfare between rebellious Palestinians and the Israel Defence Forces. Carolyn Cooper describes badmanism as a theatrical pose and relates it to the influence of movie heroes on the Jamaican young men.6 The glorification of aggression and gun violence ensures also patriarchal and hegemonic spaces within which marginalised men in Jamaica can negotiate higher status and more powerful masculine identities.7Kartei further functions as the spearhead of a phenomenon which dancehall scholar Donna P. Hope describes as fashion ova style.8 The term describes what might be called metrosexual clothing and behaviour among males in dancehall mixed with a strong emphasis on heterosexual masculinity. Dancehall masculinity glorifies violence and polygamy and rejects homosexuality. In his performances and songs like Straight Jeans and Fitted, Cake Soap or Freaky Gyal, Kartei promotes feminine or even homosexual-connoted styles and behaviour, such as tight jeans, bleached skin and oral sex:Freaky gyal ah dem gyal deh me luvfreaky woman ah dem gyal deh me luvneva eva see somethin weh me luv suheverytime me f- my c - get suck . . .9Hope suggests that this transgression made it necessary to emphasise in the songs his rejection of male homosexuality.10 Nadia Ellis looks at these statements from a queer positionality. In her essay Out and Bad: Toward a Queer Performance Hermeneu tic in Jamaican Dancehall, she notes that the deejay opens ironically a space for queer masculine free expression through homophobic lyrics.11After Vybz Kartei publicly confessed that he bleaches his skin, his detractors started questioning his sexual orientation. …