Politics of having a mister

Dr Gabrielle Jamela Hosein

BUT, of course, Lady Lava is in the gayelle with the Mighty Shadow.

The key message in her 2025 sensation, Ring Finger, appears to be that real partnerships are married ones. “You don’t have a ring, then you don’t have a mister,” she delivers.

Lava’s salvo is straight out of the traditions of calypso – and now chutney, zess and steam – where women and men equally fling warnings about the untrustworthiness of the opposite sex. As Mighty Duke sang in Trust Yuh Wife, “The worse thing any man could do/Is go back home when your wife not expecting you.”

For her part, Lady Lava chides women: “Don’t let him chain up yuh head, you know, sister. If he love, is ring on the finger.” Otherwise, expect men to be in multiple partnerships with child mothers, neighbours, and already-partnered women. Lava herself admits to being repeatedly horned with Jan, Jane, Susan from in the lane, and Kim from Tinder.

“Speech,” Lady Lava introduces, rephrasing the classic line with “Show me your man and I will tell you who you are.” In other words, everyone knows when you are fooled and foolish, talking about “yuh man” as if an imaginary respectability demands his permission or your refrain from bending over. No, is you self who is free to bend.

Lava’s provocative, though conservative message flies in the face of Caribbean history. Afro-Caribbean families have long practised informal cohabitational or visiting unions, delaying marriage or remaining in separate houses while women and children live together. This has many explanations related to the impact of African enslavement on family life or, alternatively, matrilineal African traditions (although today these are multi-ethnic practices).

There has also long been rejection of Victorian, religious and middle-class norms of women’s confinement to domesticity, economic dependence and marital monogamy and, instead, preference for free unions with greater economic and sexual autonomy, including to leave unsatisfactory men or have multiple partnerships.

More recently, a small, qualitative 2007 study conducted in Sea Lots and Point Fortin found that relationships were transactional, meaning women sought a “personal” man, but also kept others near enough to meet potential economic, status, beauty, or sexual needs or to replace the “personal” man if he elevated another woman to his “main” or could not sufficiently protect or provide.

Indeed, marriage – associated with religious expectations that men be the head and woman the neck – has typically clashed with more gender-egalitarian folk practices. It can be a “chain up” in which men “tie you down,” also accomplished through impregnating a woman, while they continue to be a co--sman. At any rate, after initial bacchanal, married men in the Caribbean with outside women and children are well accepted, so a ring is no inoculation against horn. The sexual politics of having “a mister” are therefore hardly resolved by wedlock.

To perhaps explain men’s low investment in marriage, one must turn to the Mighty Shadow. In Yuh Looking For Horn, a young man asks Shadow for his opinion about “a lady he want to marry.”

Wise griot, Shadow comments: You working? You joking? You stealing? You dealing? The young man answers "no" to all, punctuated by the song’s horns. Shadow reasons, “Why you want to marry?/You don’t have no money/You ent working nowhere/You don’t have a payday/You think is so the thing does work?”

He concludes that, in his old shoe and without employment, trade, hustle or magic, the deluded young man will be unable to pay for hairdo, callaloo, perfume, good things to consume, hot rice or fried chicken, and will inevitably get horn.

Writing of the impact of neoliberal economics on the Caribbean since the 1980s, Rhoda Reddock points to reduction of mainstream economic opportunities, public and private sector retrenchment, the growth of short-term occupations without stability or social protection, and the impact on masculinities and gender relations.

The myth of the male breadwinner remains an ideal. Thus, men with the most limited social, educational and employment skills and options find gangs and crime more legit than remaining “broken.”

If the men in Lady Lava’s soundscape are Mighty Shadow’s “young fella,” then it makes sense why their women have no ring to show on their finger. Indeed, in Lava’s video, the cars, boat and pool all symbolise the aspirational wealth such access (to women) requires.

The hit kaiso highlights how both the traditional and contemporary inform popular intimacy and sexuality. Amidst worsening economic contraction, Shadow lyrics portend that out here will have plenty women who to bend.

Diary of a mothering worker

Entry 549

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