Ode to Tanya Stephens

Thank You, Tanya Stephens: The Sunday a Song Under the Tree Forced Me to Look Again

As I write this I passed a sign this morning enroute to the beach showing Tanya Stephens will be at Sunday Soul at Harbour City tonight. Serendipitous I thought as this article has been stewing in my psyche for a few days. You know music is the soundtrack of our lives. For me it is kind of like reading the news or maybe the tea leaves, it's a way to keep abreast of the public psyche and general consciousness of the nation. So granted am not a fan of girly songs and girly music, I have many female artists I think were monumental, Melanie Safka, Nina Simone, Tracy Chapman, Randy Crawford, Alanis Morrisette, Janis Joplin, Joni Mitchel, Tina Turner... you have some women that moved as they seemed to speaking deeply to social circumstances or to personal issues of womanhood that demanded an ear. Tanya Stephens I find has been Jamaica's most intellectually challenging female artist for me. I know she doesn't like comparison or particular artistes but I found Lady Saw to be an intimidating challenge to male sexuality and sexual energy, Tanya was an intimidating challenge to the male psyche, locally.

We treat music like background noise most days. It drifts while we smoke, while we sit under trees pretending we already know everything about women, about fucking, about what makes a body answer. Then one lyric walks straight into the middle of your chest and refuses to leave until it has rearranged the furniture.

That is what Tanya Stephens did to me one Sunday noon at UWI.

I was under a tree, smoke curling, mind half-gone. From a flat called Belgique the music floated across the yard like it owned the place. Then her voice cut through clean:

Have you ever stop to think a wah make a gal cum?

I answered in my head right away.

No.

Not because I was inexperienced. I had stacked the answers high. Christian puberty books that talked around the thing. My mother’s Cosmo with its twelve sex secrets every month. Penthouse spreads and elaborate if not exaggerated literature. And the real curriculum — dancehall. She want it hard. Me wuk ar mek she moan and groan. Agony a wah the young gal want. That was the gospel I took in full. We have a motto or moniker I learned in my community, "Give gal backaz and so so crackers!" and "Hammer, hammer, hammer, constant knocking!" Now I know to some degree those were funny exaggerations but it had a the kernel of truth about Jamaican sexual reality.

My first real tutor at eighteen sealed it. Hard backshot. Deep, driving, no-mercy strokes that pulled bomboklaat straight out of her throat. She used to beg for it. Request it. Love the way it slammed the air out of her and left her shaking. I learned that language fluently — the pounding, the force, the wet slap of skin, the way a woman’s body could be made to curse and open at the same time. I thought that was the full map. It would be years later before Bounty Killer would instruct us that "Sex is like art so mi have nuff pattern!" Then I had only one pattern. The school of "one cent, five cent, ten cent dollar dollar dollar!" that continues to this day as the School of Daggering!

By the time I reached university and women started telling me I wasn’t sensual enough, I heard code. I translated it as eat the pumpum. I never heard the actual plea underneath: slow down, feel me, stay present, stop treating my body like a drum to be beaten until it screams. I had been trained in impact. I knew how to make her say bomboklaat. I did not yet know how to make her melt without the pure force.

Until that Sunday. On Preston Hall. Sitting under a tree. Between Amsterdam and Belgique. A little up from Porto Santo.

The lyric did not scold. It simply asked the question I had never asked myself while I was busy performing hardness. All the books, the magazines, the dancehall anthems, the early nights of requested backshot — they had taught me how to make a woman react. Almost none of it had taught me how to make her feel. The difference is not small. One is performance. The other is presence. One is force. The other is attention that does not flinch from softness.

Tanya Stephens specialises in that kind of interruption. She walks into the room where the men are loudest and asks the thing they have trained themselves not to examine. She does not remove the heat. She just refuses to let the heat stay stupid.

I did not become a different man under that tree in one afternoon. Real change is slower and more stubborn. But the song drove a permanent crack into the certainty I carried. It forced me to notice the gap between making a woman curse from the impact and making her open because she feels held, wanted, studied. It made every earlier complaint from women land differently in memory. What I had dismissed as coded requests for tongue had often been something far more demanding: be here with me. Feel what I feel. Stop guessing.

Music that only entertains is easy. Music that corrects you while the bass is still rolling is rarer. Tanya Stephens gave me that correction on an ordinary Sunday while I sat under a tree thinking I already knew the full shape of pleasure. She would later give all my sidekicks ammunition when I was in the party and some selector would drop "It's a pity". Man I tell you it can be creepy you in a dance with your woman and that song drop and three pairs of eyes jook you one time, and everybody a sing the song with meaning and put in an extra wine, for your viewing pleasure or sorrow. She even armed wives and women with "these streets don't love you like I do!" A song that I am sure seduced many a man to stay in, and who knows maybe save their lives. I just know it could be a nuisance when you a hunt money for the tribe and your woman a bludgeon you with that song. Anyway she has been a true intellectual combatant, not one I necessarily agree with all the time but one I respect her lyrical craft and how she infuses clever lyrics with deep philosophical enquiry, that still carries deep sexual tension and energy.

So here is to "have you ever stop to think was make a gal cum"... For the question that still echoes every time assumption tries to replace attention, for the way it made me look again at the hard backshot my girl used to beg for and ask what else might live beside it — I remain grateful.

Thank you, Tanya.  

You did not soften the truth.  

You just made sure I finally felt it.