To White Singers Covering “Work”// From A Child of West Indian Parents
I’m a first generation American Black girl with West Indian roots. My mother came to the states from Barbados and my father, from Dominica. My parents immigrated in the early 80’s. They developed an American Black identity in constant pursuit of patriotism and citizenship, as did much of Black America’s middle class during that decade. So although our holiday dinners featured West Indian dishes every year, the American Dream and everything it claimed to represent, still remained the ultimate prize.
To this day, one of my mother’s biggest regrets is that she and my father didn’t teach me and my older brother patois growing up. Now, at 25 years old, patois is something I’ve learned to understand if the speaker is generous enough to slow down — but I still can’t speak it. Whenever the topic comes up, my mother sighs apologetically; my father looks away. It’s a complicated thing — navigating the aspects of citizenship, language, home, and heritage, in front of and on behalf of your children, in a land that will never quite be home for you, in a country that only recognizes itself more clearly by antagonizing your own non-American features. I don’t resent my parents for their decision, because I get it. I understand the way America steals things and demands so much and generally fucks up familial history and heritage when it comes to black and brown people, whether they were born in the U.S. or not.
For a lot of first-generation kids of multi-lingual immigrant parents, one of our closest connections to our non-western heritage is through music, perhaps second only to food. For many, language is the first sacrifice, and is often a bitter one. I explain all of this to say that I have a particular relationship to Rihanna’s song “Work” specifically because of the patois in it. The lyrics feel like a gift, like a 3-minute offering of my own Bajan roots. West Indian music is the second-widest opening I have into a heritage that is indigenous to my blood, but still remains foreign to me. I have the same reaction when an American DJ introduces one or two dancehall or soca selections into their mix. It’s the smallest kind of sustenance readily available to me, until I can get enough time off work to visit my parents’ house, or travel back to the islands to visit family. It’s temporary and simplistic, but at least it’s something.
So the covers of “Work” done by white people either completely butchering the patois, or “translating” it — inaccurately, I might add — into American English feels particularly invasive and arrogant. They’re careless with their mishandling. They’re self-indulgent and covetous. They’re cavalier in the way they assume space and don’t even pause to consider the question of belonging. They’re also annoyingly predictable. There’s something to be said for the way white Americans habitually disregard, disrespect, and devalue non-Western languages. There’s also something to be said about the way white Americans fetishize Caribbean culture and traditions, while simultaneously devaluing them en masse. To be completely real, the onslaught of “covers” in the days following the release of Rihanna’s music videos mirrors the childish entitlement of colonization — in sentiment, pattern and emotional effect. It matters that these singers are white. It matters that barely days earlier, white music journalists and mainstream America laughingly regarded the song as a jumbled mess of mumbling, unable to decipher the patois as anything other than sonic clutter. It matters that American English becomes synonymous with clarity, in this case and in so many others.
West Indian dialects like patois have their own slang, follow their own traceable grammar rules, and are birthed from their own distinctive histories, which — despite what many Americans may think — do indeed differ from island to island. Patois is as much a result of colonization as it is evidence of a people’s survival and history of creative persistence. Patois is a cultural marker that befuddles the American mainstream because our country has a demonstrated history of abusing the cultural markers of black and brown communities — either by criminalizing them, manipulating them beyond cultural recognition or destroying them completely. The barrage of “covers” represents this exact abuse, perhaps made more salient to me because of my own insecurities around language, home, and belonging, but no less accurate.
And I know what you’re thinking. I know it’s just a song. I mean, it’s not just a song, but I know it’s supposed to be just a song, because, ya know, cultural markers are almost always reduced to a just when the marker is unrelated or unfamiliar to the majority population. It’s just an article of clothing. It’s just a headdress. It’s just a hairstyle. It’s just a dance. It’s just a word.
Right?
//
In any case, this is less about decisively identifying a kind of cultural appropriation, and much, much more about the massive system of power that allows this cultural abuse to occur in the first place. What we forget, often, is that white supremacy is as much a matter of everyday patterns and learned habits as it is some symbolic institution. White supremacy exists just as much in casual, social settings as it does in more public, newsworthy cases. So saying that the re-configuring of Rihanna’s West Indian-inspired, patois-sprinkled single by white American singers committed to a westernized world view is replicative of colonization is not hyperbolic — it’s both contextually descriptive and observationally precise.
As young Black Americans continue reckoning with notions of otherness, reconsidering citizenship and reexamining our own complicated histories, our ability to recognize both white supremacy and its manifestations sharpens by the day. It’s less flashy work than identifying the more blatant forms of racism as they surface, but it’s certainly no less important. Calling out the oppressive relationships and naming the parallels as they reveal themselves allows us to map a larger picture of white supremacy. And of course, the clearer the image, the better chance we have at effectively attacking and eventually dismantling this system of power entirely.
