Nights transformed her. The cold cream smell as she slathered it on her face would draw me to her bedroom. Perched on her bed, I became not a future wife, but a treasured consigliere. She whispered obeah spells, taught me to commune with the dead and to sense evildoers’ vibrations. I learned to brew ancestor-calling potions and plant money-summoning shrubs.
From a young age, I learnt that strength was the absence of need. Being independent, untouchable, and unbothered meant that I was doing something right. It felt like a kind of pride. And living in the Caribbean, pride was an important tool to have in your belt.
In this meditation Garth White’s framing of rudie has been edited, revised and expanded in order to apply it to different eras of the music over time and location. His approach remains the initial touchstone for how we can understand rudie culture.
In this re-imagining rudie can only be multi-dimensional and multi-gender.
The goal was to create visual symmetry. Post-mastectomy, post-reconstruction, post-reduction surgery, my breasts would achieve a perkiness and symmetry that they had never had before.
Like the process from sugarcane to sugar, you are broken, put through the mill, squeezed, pressed, until the juice comes out. Then boiled, over and over, and what’s left, if you’re good, if you stay true to the process, are the crystals of what you hope to become.
Whether intentionally or not, Born Ya transcends a straightforward telling of her life story; it is also the staking of a claim to a place that more and more doesn’t want her. It. Embedded within the narrative, by my read, is MacMillan’s attempt to assert her Jamaican identity while also considering, both overtly and implicitly, the challenges of being a white person in a predominantly black country, where racial dynamics are in constant flux.
I think about my upbringing and how I was not raised in the part of Kingston where the legendary aspects of Jamaican culture were born and built. If we are being geographically specific, I am really not from Kingston at all. I can trace my upbringing to the 5-kilometre bubble in St. Andrew where language is policed, appearances are judged…
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