Baby Doll

She was obviously loved as could be seen by her pretty dress and natural hairstyle. She seemed to know that she was the centre of attention; undoubtedly she was used to being the star.

Eventually, her mother called her because she was ready to leave.

I looked up. In her mother’s hand was a white doll with blond hair.

The smile fell from my face.

I decided then and there to write a series for emancipation borrowing the title of Franz Fanon’s influential book, Black Skins White Masks. Written in 1952, one review described the book as a “multidisciplinary analysis of the effect of colonialism on racial consciousness.” Fanon was part of an elite group of writers who agitated for the liberation of colonial peoples.

Through fiction, autobiography and other literary genre, they highlighted the damage to the psyche and sociocultural forms of African peoples as a direct consequence of colonialism.

Central to their concern was the internalisation of the world view of white colonisers by peoples of African heritage. So, for instance, those colonised by Great Britain would talk with a British accent, they regarded their own Caribbean people as lazy, they suffered because the weather was far too hot and believed that high tea was certainly better than crab and callaloo.

The subtle danger about internalisation is that one is not even aware that it is happening because these attitudes are normalised by the education system, the media and in the intellectual writings of the time.

This twisting of the mind has been written about enslavement, with the term “Uncle Tom” emerging to describe a black person who demonstrates servile and overly flattering behaviour to win the approval of white people or “uncritical acceptance of white values and goals.” Intensified racial consciousness in the 1960s and 70s took aim at the institutions that served to perpetuate ideas of the inferiority of African intelligence and cultural forms.

Critical thinkers in the movement pointed out, for example, the contradictions inherent in people of African heritage believing in a religion where the gods did not look like them, where they watched television or read books with images and ideas that were alien to their own sociocultural realities.

In this context, the issue of the white doll was seen as perpetuating Western, white perceptions of beauty, desirability and acceptance by the opposite sex based on a specific body type, hair texture and skin colour.

You is the daddy!? In contrast, Baby Doll, our traditional Carnival character, uses the white doll as a cultural weapon.

She accosts unsuspecting men, demanding money and upkeep for her child.

The doll is symbolic of the habitual raping of black women by white slave masters, the violation of their bodies and personhood.

Further, after emancipation, white and mulatto males would frequent the barrack yards in and around Port of Spain, seeking sexual favours from black women.

The masquerade evolved as a form of protest against this practice, and the fact that the laws protected the men who refused to take responsibility for any children who came about because of these liaisons.

Thus, in the hands of a Baby Doll, a white doll is intended to embarrass and harass. In the hands of a beautiful little girl of African heritage, its subtle effect can manifest in skin bleaching, eating disorders and loss of sense of self.

I hope the mother of my little girl reads this and takes the white doll out of her hands while she still sees herself as a star.

D a r a Healy is a performance artist and founder of the NGO, the Indigenous Creative Arts Network – ICAN