Orange top with purple tights
Green earring and bracelet
Ya lipstick white
Rainbow weave wit blue eye shadow
Red belt and yellow stilettos
Gal go do what ya wanna do
I can' tell ya who to sock it to
Spread ya joy gal if das your ting
But Ine ga be no fool
Jus' gee me back my ring
- Geno D "Jungaless"
In the popular mind, when we say "Looka da Jungaless" (cause let's face it, we enjoy looking at them, can't take our eyes of them) we are talking about a young woman who is dressed and behaving in a fashion middle class respectable folk would consider tacky, brazen, slack or unladylike. And in The Bahamas we are very concerned with female behavior. Male behavior we don't give a damn about.
Poompoom shorts, bright colors, bras as outerwear, bright wigs, same-color eye shadow, nails, bracelets, shoes. Gold, blue, red or yellow contacts maybe. And they're loud. Will cuss you stink. They at every dancehall concert, every sail away; and most of all - they dance. They dance like they workin' in a strip club; they dance like they're in the videos they watch on Tempo. Pull out your cell phone camera an' it's on. YouTube or nuttin'.
Usually, when we say "Look da Jungless" it's because we feel better, smarter, more sensible, more decent than she is. She's not quite the same as the sissy or the 'Highshun', but we definitely feel better than her.
She's a whore after all. Showing her wares, droppin' it like it's hot for all to see. No doubt in exchange for some rum and Red Bull, a conch snack and a ride home in somebody's Maxima. Or on the back of somebody's Kawasaki. But in this country good people don't exchange sex for money or assorted services. We just don't do that. Right?
Hypocrisy?
Are we better than the jungaless, though? How many respectable, professional men wouldn't marry that big boongie girl in the fluorescent green shorts and white stilettos but they'd spend the night (or at least 15 minutes) with her somewhere where no one can see and then go back to the wife and kids?
"Looka da jungaless?" When you look what do you see externalized: what you want, what you fear, what you hate about yourself?
The jungaless is making herself the center of attention. Men stop and stare. And though some might wish she could find another way to gain an edge in this man's world, aren't most young women playing the same game, albeit with less color and a little more cloth? The push-up bras. The tights that look like jeans? The thongs. The too small blouses? So, the hair ain't aqua, but aren't you still investing in that weave down to your back in an effort to attract the same man the jungaless has got mesmerized? And is the business suit wearing woman, with her college degrees, doing her dirt behind closed doors, really better cause she ain't touchin' her toes at a beach bash? What about the church going, working that 9 to 5, sweetheart with two kids for someone else man? Can you always tell character by attire and demeanor?
Being a jungaless in this country means you are crass, loud, you drink and brawl, party hard and have sex with too much people. Well, minus the lace front, isn't that thousands of Bahamian men? What's our name for a man like that? O, right, "man".
Comin' out your house as a jungaless is a performance. It's assuming an identity. Wearing a mask, masquerading as some bolder, more awesome version of yourself. You are being audacious; no less audacious than if you were on Bay Street Boxing Day morning whinin' in a costume for Roots or Saxons or One Family or Da Valley. No less audacious than if you were whinin' in a dusty school yard, 10 years old, singin' "Sauchiss in Dere".
Scholar Carolyn Cooper describes jungaless performance this way (and yes, we borrowed some of this from the Jamaicans, sort of):
"Jamaican dancehall culture at home and in the diaspora is best understood as an erogenous zone in which the celebration of female sexuality and fertility is ritualized... The dancehall is a liberating space in which working class women and their more timid middle class sisters play out eroticized roles that may not ordinarily be available to them in the rigid social conventions of the everyday... This self-conscious female assertion of control over the representation of identity is misunderstood... Indeed, the joyous display of the female body in the dance is misperceived as a pornographic devaluation of female sexuality. But the fantastic un/dress code of the dancehall (in the original Greek sense of the word 'fantastic', meaning 'to make visible', 'to show') is the visualization of a distinctive cultural style that allows women the liberty to demonstrate the seductive appeal of the imaginary - and their own bodies... Indeed, the elaborate styling of the body is a permissive expression of the pleasures of disguise."
It's hard to be a woman in this man's world. Some women pop pills to cope. Some keep sweetheart. Some whine on their head top. Walk a mile in them stilettos before you judge.
Click here to read more at The Nassau Guardian
