Melanated People

3 년

Rise up this mornin
Smile with the risin sun 🌞

처럼

논평

3 년

처럼

논평

3 년

I need a new mattress badly 😢

처럼

논평

3 년

In Martinique is one of the most beautiful examples of how Carnival in the Caribbean was designed for colonial disruption.

Allow me to explain, what you are looking at is Nèg Gwo Siwo, a Carnival practice performed for almost 2 centuries by enslaved people and their descendants. While Europeans in the Caribbean had pretty masquerade balls before Lent, black people covered themselves in dark molasses to amplify the blackness of their skin. They called them the Molasses Negroes. Using something seen as valuable and expensive for the white man’s profit, to smear across their skin to make themselves the blackest version of their blackness. Look at the irony. They took to the streets playing the drums they were banned from playing, chanting songs ridiculing the European elite, and wining and brukin’ down in ways that made white ladies clutch their pearls and pompous aristocratic men feel so uncomfortable they would do their utmost to stop it by sending the police they had in their pockets. Police brutality and riots were common. Yet, year after year, during the heights of colonialism, black cultural suppression, where language, heritage and life were literally beaten out of them - they still could not kill the Nèg Gwo Siwo. So this video you see today in 2023 is generations upon generations of a legacy of resistance, where whether we know it or not, we have this in our blood. And this is why you must make room for the Nèg Gwo Siwo of Guadeloupe and Martinique. And yes you can find many versions of this in the Caribbean - Jab Jab of Grenada, Lans Kod of Haiti, Jab Molassie of T&T, Los Tiznaos of Dominican Republic, Nèg Marron of French Guiana… the list goes on.
These days most use charcoal or oil motor oil, but the intention is the same - BLACK.

The Legacy of Resistance. Make room!