Rip it up and start again.
Now I’m back at home after being back at home, and the clarity comes and goes as the fatigue goes and comes. I didn’t realise how much I needed to go until I was there, and now I am so glad I went for it. Having a different space and perspective was exactly what I needed, and its effects have stayed with me. As always happens when I spend time back home, I came away with many ideas, but now I’m glad to be back home. And now things are moving quickly: I’m getting rid of my old dreams and making space for new ones. In the very minute I arrived at my house, I had an offer on my camper van, and it was sold a few hours later. I’m going to take down all of the artwork on the walls, with all of its old memories, and store it. And I’m going to replace them with new faces. I’m going to give away the materials I’ve hoarded but know I can’t use any time soon. I like traveling light. There’s going to be a lot of starting over again this year, and a lot less baggage.
I did come back with a new model to add to the four I’d secured before leaving in December, so that was a helpful development. I need to sort out my interviews for the professional practice unit and get my head around preparing a presentation on my work and a portfolio. And of course there’s the ongoing work with the sculpture awaiting me, and the dissertation. But there’s no way I’ll be as stressed as I was before; I’ve rinsed it out of me now. I have a feeling now that I’ve reconciled two very different parts of myself, and that’s made it easier for everything to roll straight off my back.
Having this focus on gender studies and masculinities in my mind whilst out there led to some interesting observations on how firmly fixed the roles are in some cultures, and how these are promulgated. Of course I’ve noticed them in Britain and America, but in the West Indies the male is resolutely unreconstructed and the lines are more strongly defined. It’s clear in the song lyrics where predominantly male singers call instructions for the female dancers to obey, and female singers do the same. It appears in the tag lines for two brands of beer and stout I hadn’t seen before: “A Man’s Beer”, and, “Men Drink This”. It popped out of the screen one evening on a CBC tv call-in program on paternity and child support issues. I know I could go much further into an analysis of misogyny in Caribbean music and dancehall culture… but that’ll have to wait a while.
So while I will admit that Skinny Fabulous’s song is incredibly catchy, I’ll refrain from doing the “6:30” on the principal. I’m no kill-joy though – I love Lil Rick’s “Go Down” I still take note of the inherent power structures while I bus’ a wine. It has the instructor pattern but is fortunately more on the philogynist side of the soca spectrum. So much material in the music alone and so little time… but that can be a side-project after the final show, maybe a chapter in the extended version of my dissertation.
Oh, and I realised that in my last post I forgot to include a mention of ARC magazine, which I found whilst out there – I’m going to have to try to get hold of it in the UK. Have a look – http://arcthemagazine.com/arc/
