Culture

In the weeks preceding my trip to Grenada to celebrate Spicemas 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris – amid her ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket – became the subject of a kind of Birtherism 2.0, in which former President Donald Trump attacked and undermined her Blackness because, in his mind, a person cannot be both Black and South Asian or any combination of races. 

While I am not mixed, I identified with those attacks. I grew up the only son and eldest child of two St. Lucian immigrants in a majority Afro-Caribbean neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. I’m Black. I’m American. Ethnically, I’m Afro-Caribbean. Culturally, I’m a pretty solid mixture of Caribbean and African-American. I’ve always understood myself to be all of these things at the same time. Trump’s attacks on Harris’ Blackness hit so close to home, not because she and I share the exact same racial-ethnic-cultural makeup, but because his disrespectful jabs were an extension of a nefarious movement to strip non-American Black people of their Blackness. All this is to say, how I perceive and define my own Blackness was heavy on my mind as I boarded my flight to Grenada on Aug. 9. 

I should note that I’ve yet to visit St. Lucia – fingers crossed for this winter – so this trip to Grenada was my first visit to the Caribbean, the place in the world where the majority of my roots lie. Upon reviewing the trip’s itinerary, which was painstakingly curated by the Grenada Tourism Authority, Industry 360 and Mel&N Media Group, I noticed that we would be learning the history of the Grenadian tradition of jab jab. Now, I had heard about jab jab here and there growing up, but with descriptors that often landed on some variation of “demonic,” I wasn’t really sure what I was actually getting into. I wasn’t afraid, but I was relentlessly curious. After feeding my musical soul at Soca Monarch and Panorama, I was ready to indulge myself in the rawer parts of my Caribbean heritage – and hear from actual Grenadians about this specific cultural practice. 

On Friday, J’Ouvert morning, about two hours before the sun announced itself, my fellow revelers and I enjoyed a traditional Grenadian breakfast at Friday’s Bar, where we got to hear the true history of jab jab. 

“Black was seen as the devil. Black was seen as bad, substandard, scum of the earth. So, we got even blacker,” explained Ian Charles, one of the founders of Jambalasee Grenada, a group committed to the preservation of Grenada’s culture and history. “You have to understand that jab jab utilizes satire, mockery, [and] ridicule to fight against a system which was designed deliberately to mentally, physically [and] spiritually break us.” 

Dating back to 1834, the jab jab tradition finds its roots in freed Afro-Grenadians celebrating the abolition of British-operated slavery through masquerading. Across the island, Grenadians literally become “blacker” by coating their entire bodies in molasses, black paint, tar, engine oil, or the more recent (and more sustainable) combination of vegetable oil and charcoal powder.

Repurposed helmets adorned with either cow or goat horns crown their heads, while their hands drag loose chains (also black) in recognition of their freedom. Although we hit the road a bit later than anticipated, I was still able to catch a glimpse of the Capitals — individuals who lead different groups of jab jabs in call-and-response chants (also known as spellings) that blended unifying proclamations with historical and sociopolitical commentary. 

As I rubbed the charcoal-oil concoction over my body – and eventually gave into the gravity of the engine oil’s richer pigmentation – everything clicked. Jab felt natural in a way that I wasn’t necessarily anticipating. Everything was so Black. From the dozens to the Black ballroom practice of “reading,” satire, sarcasm and a general finessing and manipulation of language is inherently Black. It shows up across the diaspora in the ways we converse and the ways our intonations shift mid-dialogue. By painting ourselves black, we were tapping into the tradition of “playing the devil.” (“Jab” means “devil” in Patois). If slave masters were going to call us devilish, we were going to take it, flip it and mock them. As we made our way down the road, I thought about the ways I’ve unknowingly “played Jab” in different contexts in my life. 

I haven’t been on this Earth for too long, but my story is pretty lengthy: lots of twists, and a few turns as well. I’ll spare you all the details here, but there were more than a few instances in my life in which my Blackness was demonized with the hopes that I would try my best to detach myself from it. I doubled down every time. Yes, the scales are vastly different, but, to me, the essence is one and the same. When all is said and done, our Blackness will never be demonized; not by ourselves, and certainly never by those who are wholly unable to see Blackness for what it truly is. 

In conversation with the late Greg Tate, hip-hop artist Djinji Brown said: “Sometimes when I’m rhyming on the [mic], I feel like there’s nothing inside me but blackness – no veins, no organs, just a shell physically, but open and full of universes from my toes to my hair follicles. There are rhymes coming out of me, because there ain’t no stomach, there ain’t no heart, no intestines to get in the way of that s–t.” 

We weren’t rapping on the road – although some of those chants were a not-so-subtle sonic bridge between call-and-response rhythms and hip-hop song structures – but there was indeed nothing but blackness inside of and all around us. In that blackness lay a level of liberation that was hard-fought, and a predisposition for resistance that was inherited – and reinvigorated in the wake of Hurrican Beryl. Like everything else, my Spicemas experience exists in the context of all that came before it, including Hurricane Beryl, which particularly ravaged Grenada’s sister islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique. While stepping into Grenadian culture, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the Global South – and its people, artists and culture – will be the first to feel the cruelest effects of climate change primarily spurred by superpowers in the Global North. It’s not fair and it’s not right. It’s just the latest effect of the incredibly violent and heinous project that is colonialism. But it’s also a stark reminder that we must protect the breadth of our West Indian cultures with every fiber of our beings. 

Whenever my height doesn’t annoy me, it can be quite an advantage. My heart swelled as I took a look at the sea of Blackness in front of me and the waves of Blackness behind me. I was literally and figuratively consumed by Blackness on all sides and it couldn’t have been a more picturesque sight. I’ve always considered Brooklyn to be home, and I still do – those blocks raised me, after all – but the sense of connection I felt to the literal land of Grenada while playing jab forced me to, if only for a few moments, seriously reconsider how I understand the term “home.” As far as I know, I don’t have any family in Grenada, but the air felt familiar, as did the energy that permeated the atmosphere. Almost all of my family hails from another island just over 100 miles away, but I still felt the connection of a deep, shared history that I felt an innate responsibility to help protect. 

From Miami to Notting Hill, the Caribbean carnival experience has evolved into myriad celebrations around the world – many of them inching further away from the history that grounds those practices. As we continue to wade our way through this particular era of globalization and the commercialization and corporatization of carnival celebrations, maintaining and respecting the rich history of its formative traditions will be paramount to protecting the integrity and sanctity of the Caribbean at large. Jab jab is resistance in one of its purest forms, rooted in the soil of Grenada. What’s Blacker than that?  

Seeing how fiercely protective and reverent Charles was in his explanation of jab jab reminded me of something chart-topping Afrobeats superstar Rema said in an Apple Music interview promoting his new Heis album. “Everyone is chasing something that the whole world can enjoy… we’re listening to the voices of the world too much,” he said. “We gotta listen to the voices back home to keep our roots. Our roots [are] very important.”  

But how do we balance prioritizing “the voices back home” while inviting outsiders amid an effort to increase the amount of capital we can squeeze out of centuries-old cultural practices? That’s a question I toyed with a lot. After all, I’m a first-generation St. Lucian-American experiencing Spicemas by way of a press trip — is the call not coming from inside of the house, to some degree? For Jab King, a Grenadian soca powerhouse whose “Jab Did” was inescapable throughout Spicemas, it’s certainly a “bad idea” when cultural practices start bending to the whims of capitalism and corporatization, and we should “let the Carnival evolve on its own and control it along the way.” 

Ideally, that’s the next frontier of this era of musical and cultural globalization: concerted efforts to protect the history of the cultures that so often get pillaged and bastardized for capitalism-blinded, voyeuristic eyes. The pessimist in me says that’s wishful thinking, but there was simply too much hope in that sea of blackness for me to let that voice win.