COMMENTARY: The Ballad of a Winkup

by Dr Lester Simon
1. There are some old, decrepit local people in this country who are religiously jealous of young people. They don’t understand us. One such is that old man who is always walking bout the place. Simple Simon? Yes, that same one; the same one who met the pieman going to the fair. Asked the pieman to taste his ware. When the pieman told him first show his penny, Simple Simon said he had not any. Simpleton! 

2. He wrote about how people winking up at carnival and this and that and hither, thither and yon.  His bones must be as old as Methuselah. He needs calcium, vitamin D, and some omega-3. Who gave him the right to talk about winking up at carnival and how we look vulgar? If he can’t winkup and doesn’t understandAfrican dance and tradition, he should just shut up and stay home and not even watch ABS TV, delayed or no-delayedcarnival program broadcast. Drink some chamomile tea, go to sleep, and leave young people alone. 

3. What exactly he said? He claims winking up is demeaning and reminds us of the sexual exploitation of our people during slavery. I do not see anything wrong with that. Actually, I agree with him. Listen, he fails to understand the allegory of the winkup. The winking up is saying that once upon a time during slavery they forced us to do this in private; now we do it in public to say you can’t touch this, without our permission. 

4. Anything such as winking up at carnival that has existed for so long through generations must have cultural, evolutionaryvalue and resonance. All behavioral scientists know that. It’s in our biology, our DNA. The man is simple-minded. Look at something like twerking. What is twerking? My word, you and Simple Simon are related. Twerk is a portmanteau. What is a portmanteau? A portmanteau is a word made by blending the sounds and meanings of two other words, such as brunch (breakfast + lunch) and smog (smoke + fog). The word portmanteau itself is a portmanteau. Twerk is likely a blend of the words twist and jerk, or a variation of the phrase “to work”.

5. I see. So, when a woman is twerking, that’s why the onlookers shout: work it, work it! But what exactly is she doing? According to Wikipedia, twerking is a popular style of dance characterized by rapid, rhythmic pelvic thrusts, hip isolations, and the shaking of the buttocks, typically performed from a low, squatting stance. Hip isolations? No wonder old man, Simple Simon is bawling out. They are going to damage themselves.

6. No damage done. You have to practice twerking, and you have to understand the tradition. First, you have to be careful when you talk about African dance and African tradition, as if you are looking at one simple thing. This homogenization of African dance and tradition is colonial and dangerous. Yes, there are commonalities, but Africa is made up of 54 sovereign countries, and each country has myriads of dances, languages,and traditions. Twerking, or the “dance of the behind”, is reportedly taught by older women to young women as part of their rites of passage into womanhood. 

7. I remember when we went to carnival in town for the first time. There we were standing on the corner watching the parade. Suddenly, this big, voluptuous, respectable woman from the village, a woman we couldn’t pass without saying howdy to, left the parade, came over to us, and started winking up on this teenaged girl from the village. And her mother stood there smiling! Poor little me didn’t get even a little piece of the winking up; but some people said, not me, that the girl already knew how to winkup good long gaulin time. 

8. Now tell the truth; some of the winking up has gone too far. Not so?  I have to say yes, but with a but (pun intended). You know some Caribbean people. You give them an inch, they take the yard, and next door, and the whole neighbourhood. We have to reconcile the colonial eroticisation of black bodies and the emancipation of our bodies. To deal with the unimaginable stress during slavery, we had to free our bodies as a prelude to the freedom of our minds, which is yet to come for some of us. The freedom of the body we see at carnival reminds us of those rituals we engaged in all by ourselves, trying to remove the physical and psychological shackles. We still have a lot of work to do. Additionally, we have yet to come to terms with our full spectrum of sexuality in all its forms, from heterosexuality to homosexuality, and the alphabet in between. Winking up is complicated, and sophisticated.

9. Simple Simon also wrote about the vile, wanton, and vulgar winking up at carnival in this renaissance age of reparations. Yes, he did, but he made it too simple, and he didn’t finish the story. The business of reparations is very complex. One avenue of this complexity is that the colonizer has to come to terms with the emancipation of the colonial mind. The colonizer has to free himself from mental slavery too. People talk about reparations and money. Slavery started because of economics. It went south (in more ways than one) with the dehumanization, chattelization,and thingification of black people to justify the economics. When the moral argument for reparations and the emancipation of the mind of the colonizer meet in nexus with the imperative of economics, reparations will be.

10. And then the colonized and the colonizer will be winking up and twerking together at carnival? 

11. Carnival done! Long live carnival. 

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