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Iyalode Oshun, Goddess of the River,
Daughter of Promise, Mother of the Sweet Waters.
It is from your throbbing Womb that the rhythm of Music Springs.
It is from your bouncing Breasts that Dance is born.
The flamboyant exhibitionist DJ Lady Saw epitomises the sexual liberation of many African Jamaican working-class women from airy-fairy Judaeo-Christian definitions of appropriate female behaviour.
In a decisive act of feminist emancipation, Lady Saw cuts loose from the burdens of moral guardianship. She embodies the erotic. But one viewer's erotica is another's pornography. So Lady Saw is usually censured for being far too loose or 'slack', in the Jamaican vernacular. Or worse, is dismissed as a mere victim of patriarchy, robbed of all agency.
Marian Hall's spectacular performance of the role of 'Lady Saw' is not often acknowledged as a calculated decision by the actress to make the best of a good opportunity to earn a good living in the theatre of dancehall.
For example, American anthropologist Obiagele Lake indicts Lady Saw in a chapter on 'Misogyny in Caribbean Music' in her book Rastafari Women: Subordination in the Midst of Liberation Theology: "Given Jamaica's patriarchal climate, one would expect sexist lyrics emanating from men.
Unfortunately, women who have internalised sexist norms add to these negative images. Lady Saw is one such songstress who plays herself and by association, all other women.
<span style="font-style: italic">Nuances of language</span>
Stab Up the Meat is the most graphic example. The title of the raunchy song is, in fact, Stab Out the Meat, and in some variants the definite article, 'the', becomes the possessive 'mi'.
I would concede that, in performance, Lady Saw's 'out' sounds like 'up', especially if one is predisposed to hear violent abuse of women in sexist dancehall lyrics."
To some listeners who are insensitive to the nuances of the language, there may be no significant difference between stabbing up and stabbing out.
But the latter is more allusive than the former. Lake's inaccurate transcription reinforces her literal-minded reading of the 'sexist' lyrics of that song and entirely misses the metaphorical elements which highlight the intense pleasure of vigorous, not violent, sex.
The penis here functions as a metaphorical dagger stabbing pleasure into and out of the woman. Conventional associations of orgasm and death in western culture are just as applicable in Jamaican culture.
<span style="font-weight: bold">The startling imagery of stabbing meat, whether out or up, also underscores the traditional association between food and sex in Caribbean culture.</span>
<span style="font-style: italic">Genitalia as meat </span>
<span style="font-weight: bold">The allusion to stabbing is not a sign of Lady Saw's sado-masochism, but rather an accurate image of the way in which meat is seasoned in Caribbean cookery; it is literally pricked and the spices inserted.</span>
<span style="font-weight: bold">The metaphor of the woman's genitalia as meat doubles the pleasure of eating,</span> <span style="font-style: italic">though in this song Lady Saw, like most male DJs, declares that she herself refuses to eat 'fur burger'.</span>
Despite the recurring protestations in the lyrics of the DJs that they do not 'bow' - that is, engage in oral sex - one instinctively knows that they are protesting too much. There is a thin line between pub(l)ic discourse and private pleasure/duty.
<span style="font-style: italic">Abstract from the article 'LADY SAW CUTS LOOSE: Female Fertility Rituals in the Dancehall'</span>
<span style="font-weight: bold">The conclusion of this and other interesting articles can be found in Jamaica Journal.</span>
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