The night tends to go awry when you hang out with Staceyann Chin. The night or the day — take your pick. She prefers the day. She told me so.
Night and day define how she divides up her busy life. At night she is usually performing her out-there poetry somewhere or other — New York, Copenhagen, Aarhus, Reykjavik, Oslo, Stockholm, Detroit, San Francisco, and most recently (and quite by surprise) Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town. It’s hard to grasp how she keeps up with all of this, but she does.
By day she observes the world and participates in its pleasures when she can. And she creates her poems, keeps a diary that goes out online through her website and squeezes in some lovemaking here, there and everywhere, when it’s around.
But it was at night-time that she told me about her lover who plays four guitars. And about how she prefers to define their relationship.
‘The deal is, we have to be faithful to each other,” she said, ‘as long as we’re in the same city.”
The next night she was up on stage declaring publicly in her hip-hop voice that she had just broken up with her lover (long distance, of course, over the phone or via the Internet) and was looking for another one — out there in the audience, who knows?
It’s all part of her act, and her act is all part of going public, day in and day out, about her private life. And, of course, about what she feels about the world.
So you can see how things can go rapidly awry when you’re in her company. She makes you think scary thoughts that you were never taught to think.
And you can also see why she has become an icon in her own right at the tender age of 30. She goes where few would dare to tread, and the audiences love her for it. And where she treads is all about this thing called love, and its uncertain boundaries.
She exiled herself to New York five years ago because of the restrictive boundaries thrown around her search for love in her native Jamaica. She loves to make love to women (especially in the afternoon, she says). In Jamaica this is not just illegal, it can be downright dangerous. It has been known to be cause for vicious personal and physical attacks.
‘I feel I was ousted from Jamaica because I was queer,” she says, expressing a sense of regret as well as relief at her predicament. Relief because she has made something of herself in the outside world. Regret because her home island is filled with so much physical beauty and potential for love and redemption.
The hip-hop she has adopted is all a cover for poetry of exquisite power and sensuality. To hear her speak it on stage is a trip. To read it on the page is something else — a journey deep into a beautiful, brilliant and troubled mind. (And how can you be brilliant without being troubled?)
Her poem My Jamaica is subtitled with the comment: ‘My love affair with Jamaica has always been double edged.” And then she takes you down into it:
‘Jamaica / has always loved me from a place of random beauty / women with wide cassava hips / and full star-apple lips / women with strong hands / reaching beyond their own fears—”
Much of what she says is about the pain of growing up with neither of her parents — her father of Chinese descent, her mother of African. There must have been some kind of love between them at some stage, because they produced Staceyann. But, reaching back in to that metaphor of the women with strong hands, she writes: ‘My father has never loved women / with soft hands — my mother will show you the scars / wrapped around her solid middle—” A violent relationship. A reason to distrust what men can do to women in the name of love.
In another poem called Marley and Me she talks about what being thrust into the world of clashing cultures on the island of Jamaica has meant to her:
‘I have never been sturdy in the hips / only breast tips sweetened with molasses / never black enough until I come to America / never dark enough to call myself artist.”
While black Jamaica rejected her because she was too light, too Chinese, America sees her as nothing more nor less than a black woman. And so within that upside down milieu she finds a black identity and plays it to the hilt.
But America also gives her a political identity — both the freedom to love whoever she wants to and the freedom to see her own identity in relation to the all-powerful, world dominating culture of the United States in which she lives:
‘I will never really be American / I whisper, nor Afghanistan / but this fight will have to be mine when it begins, long / after it ends.” She seems to be whispering into the ear of an American lover who can and at the same time cannot understand her immigrant personality.
So, in order to try to explain herself to this invisible lover, she swings back to those harsh years of her childhood:
‘I envy those of you / who had the idle years of childhood / I will never be an adult because of lack of them / I always need someone to make the dark go away—”
They sound like the words of a little girl lost. And yet she is and she isn’t. In spite of all the matters of race, gender and Third World antagonism that have held her back, Staceyann Chin is on the crest of a wave, with the world her oyster, a plaything sitting in the palm of her hand.
But she refuses to take her success for granted, to shake off the ironic responsibility of being who she is and where she comes from, always returning to the theme of her mother island, tossed on the fickle seas of the Caribbean:
‘Jamaica has always been able to find me / a thorn among bloody hibiscus blooms / my Jamaica has always been / the hardest poem to write.”
John Matshikiza is a fellow of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research
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