“Tuck in Yuh Belly”: Imperatives of Female Slenderness in Jamaican Dancehall Music

Abstract

Reggae songs such as Clancy Eccles's (2010) “Fatty, Fatty” and Buju Banton's (2000) “Di Woman Dem Phat” have traditionally celebrated the fat, black woman's body as an agent of desire. However, some more recent discourses such as Left Side and Esco's (2005) “Tuck in Yuh Belly” suggest an impending reversal of this celebration of fleshiness. The author explores representations of female fatness in masculine discourses from the Jamaican dancehall music arena, specifically those discourses that pathologize fat and suggest the preferred desirability of slenderness.

Keywords:

• Caribbean men
• dancehall music
• fat black women
• Jamaica
• Jamaican culture
• reggae
• plastic surgery
• soca music
• women's bodies

Notes

1. In some songs, as in popular Jamaican parlance, “fat” is sometimes interchanged with the acronym PHAT (pussy hips and tits) to indicate what one could delicately term an appreciation of fatness on certain select locales of the female body. However, in the Caribbean there is an undeniable fluidity between the term “fat” as a signifier of sexual desirability and fat as the term is generally used to indicate a large body.

2. In The Embodiment of Disobedience: Fat Black Women's Unruly Political Bodies (Shaw, 2006), I explore cultural representations of fatness in the African Diaspora.

3. “But look here, baby, you've gotten slim / how come you were so fat the other day and have gotten so slim now.”

4. “I don't want a skinny girl because I'm afraid of having a blue bone / all skinny girls I have to leave them alone.”

5. In the 1960s the Black Panther Party activist Eldridge Cleaver made use of this term in his best-selling book, Soul on Ice, in which he assigned Black women the moniker of “Amazon” due to what he described as their “subfeminine” social status, a result of their association with “domestic” duties (Cleaver, 1999). This use of the term “Amazon” by both the Commodores and Cleaver creates a slippage between sexual dexterity and class (and necessarily race), in some ways echoing the sentiment in Beenie Man's (2005) “Slam,” which suggests that a “real ghetto gal” offers greater sexual satisfaction.

6. Onwyrah's documentary Monday's Girls chronicles the sojourn of a group of West African girls at a fatting house.

7. Dancehall is a subgenre of reggae that became popular in the 1980s.

8. “Caught up in your ass [the shorts], riding up in your butt / Exposing your property men are saying it's fat / Merchandise is always there, you never run out of stock / You're shapely like a Coke bottle without the top / Things are going on for your body, trust me on that.”

9. “I love it when you rub up on me / girl, if you're hot just throw yourself on me.”

10. “If you're slim and trim and don't have to go to the gym, put your hand in the air and turn and sing.”

11. “Everyone who's overweight has been tricked / let a girl try to test you this trip / girls who're overweight must be sick / look at her belly bursting her zip / girl, jump around because you're physically fit.”

12. “Some girl's belly hangs over like a shirt / They have a lot of flab and need some ab work / Big gut and big butt / Girl that is not going to work / And I'm not even smiling or smirking.”

13. “Who is shaped the neatest, I have to take a picture / Kingsley Cooper is in the dance looking for a modeler / to enter Miss World to represent Jamaica / and he picks Miss Figure / just because she's slim and trim and doesn't have to go to the gym / hands in the air and turn and sing.”

14. “Girl, show off your skin, your belly looks clean / And you know that you can fit in in a magazine.”

15. A “bammy” is a round Jamaican flatbread made of cassava.

16. “Show off on the other girls since your belly is flat like bammy / You're cute and sexy / Round like Tami / You win the flat belly Grammy.”

17. “Baby, have you really stopped already / Do you mean to tell me that you've really stopped already / Is the steamed fish in your back done already / How did you tell me you were ready when you're not ready.”

18. “Do you even realize that women have moods / You have to know to handle it when girls are being rude.”

19. “Hot fire is here but the wood is not blazing / God has to work a miracle to make the dead raise.”