Rihanna and the Legacy of Liberated Caribbean Women

When I went to college in the mid-aughts, sexy female pop stars in crop tops and elaborate belly button rings—think Britney Spears and Beyoncé in their early twenties—were in vogue. I had nothing in common with these women. They sang about their sex appeal, something I didn’t have or understand. I wouldn’t have been caught dead in a crop top or with a belly button ring. When everyone else was swiveling their hips to Spears’s “I’m a Slave 4 U” or Beyoncé’s “Naughty Girl” at parties, I was holed up in my dorm room in silence, studying for the next day’s pop quiz. The few times my friends cajoled me into partying, I hid behind the wall farthest from the dance floor. I couldn’t summon the confidence required to sing “Don’t you wanna dance up on me?” or “I know you want my body” in front of my classmates.

So, when Rihanna showed up to perform at my college in 2006 with her midriff covered in a baggy navy-blue T-shirt from the Gap, I was relieved that she didn’t ooze sex. But I was also underwhelmed. Rihanna’s performance didn’t ooze much of anything. She dutifully performed a few hits between two lifeless dancers and exited the stage almost as quickly as she had entered it.

Rihanna had arrived on the scene a couple of years before with music I found tepid at best. Her debut single, “Pon de Replay,” did not appeal to me. While none of my US-born friends knew what Rihanna meant when she sang “Come Mista DJ, song pon de replay,” her Bajan Creole wasn’t far off from the Belizean Kriol I heard growing up in my household. I could discern it meant “put the song on replay.” Still, other than the choice of song title, nothing about Rihanna exuded Caribbean to me, whether in dress, speech, or musical style. I expected more from the pop star whose Caribbean heritage seemed to be a significant part of her marketing. With Music of the Sun, her debut album, Rihanna promised music that represented her culture, but most of the songs sounded like the dance pop from her American contemporaries.

When she performed at my school, she sang standard-issue US pop songs in perfectly accented English. While her dancing was stiffer and more controlled than Spears or Beyoncé, it was just as typical of the time. She didn’t seem the least bit comfortable in her clothes or her skin.

On some level, I understood Rihanna’s discomfort. I left my Caribbean family bubble on the West Coast for an Ivy League college with a tiny Black population and a minuscule immigrant Black population. Before I left for school, my family warned me not to be a Caribbean stereotype. “You know what they think of us,” my mother would say. When I looked puzzled, she divulged, “We are crazy, do voodoo, smoke reefer all day, and want sex all night.” She warned that if I became what people thought I was, they would take advantage of me.

Before I left for school, my family warned me not to be a Caribbean stereotype.

Not wanting to actualize my family’s fears, I became just as stiff and bottled up as Rihanna at her performance. I never went anywhere near cannabis, alcohol, or anything that would jeopardize my tight control. I always appeared composed, and I had no sexual identity whatsoever. At the time, being this way felt like it would keep me safe. Looking back now, I felt constricted and resented being hypervigilant.

Though my distaste for US female pop stars was because I couldn’t relate to them, my dislike of Rihanna was for the opposite reason. I hated watching her hold back and stay within the confines of an “acceptable immigrant” because it was like looking in a mirror.

A year after that Rihanna concert, while on campus for winter break, I was sexually assaulted by a male classmate. Afterward, he gossiped about me, telling other students he assumed I’d “wanted it.” “You know how Caribbean girls are,” a friend told me he had said, using words eerily familiar to my mother’s warnings. Despite my best efforts, I realized that some stereotypes would follow me and cause violence against me, regardless of how I carried myself.

I remained distressed for months after the assault. I was furious that being a good girl still got me in trouble. I didn’t feel safe around my friends or classmates or even alone in my dorm. My despair followed me home that summer, but I didn’t tell my family because I feared their disappointment.

The thought of going back to school sickened me. I wanted to get away from my assaulter, but being off campus or even out of the state wasn’t far enough. I signed up online to spend my junior year in Latin America.

Living abroad allowed me to examine my Caribbean identity. Reggaetón music was popular at the time, and it piqued my interest in exploring the reggae roots of the genre. I came to love classic reggae and dancehall, especially songs from its women pioneers like Sister Nancy, Patra, and Nadine Sutherland.

When watching old performances, I was struck by how powerful the women appeared. They were brazen, getting close to the edge of the stage, right in the audience’s faces, and looking wild. Their suggestive and freewheeling dancehall moves spanned the whole stage. Sister Nancy hailed Jamaica and boasted she was “one in three million” on “Bam Bam.” Patra and Sutherland sang about sex without shame: Patra insisted on a sexual partner who could go for ten hours on “Worker Man” while Sutherland demanded, “I need some action, some tender satisfaction.”

I loved to see Caribbean women taking up space. Their liberation spoke to me. I realized I had been missing out by tucking myself away and trying not to be a stereotype. My efforts had failed anyway, so why was I remaining restrained? I wanted to be loud, wild, and sexually liberated like them. I just didn’t know how.

I found an unlikely guide when I returned to campus for my senior year. Rihanna was back on the radio with her new album, Rated R. A few weeks after school started I caught the video for the lead single, “Russian Roulette,” playing in the background of a party.

I did not see the Rihanna who had performed a few years earlier. There were no conventional outfits and saccharine lyrics. This Rihanna was tortured. Instead of ill-fitting mall clothes, Rihanna writhes around a padded cell in a gray cloak that slips off her body to reveal a flesh-colored corset. Her hair, previously long, weaved, and ordinary brown, was now a messy Mohawk dyed honey blonde. She sings about ending an abusive relationship with a game of Russian roulette. Meanwhile, she is run over by a car in the woods, is gassed in a chamber, and drowns while gunshots pierce her body underwater.

The aggression and violence of the video hooked me. I watched Rihanna embody what I felt after being assaulted: turmoil. At home, I downloaded the rest of the album and stayed up all night listening to it on a loop. Gone was the pop, uptempo, and fluff of her prior music. Rated R was filled with foreboding and tense beats, wailing, and morbid bravado. On “G4L,” Rihanna warned “any motherfucker wanna disrespect” that “playing with fire gonna get you wet” and taunted, “I lick the gun when I’m done because revenge is sweet, so sweet.”

In each moody song, violent music video, and audacious lyric, Rihanna tried on a different personality. On “Hard,” she was “tougher than a lion,” and on “Rockstar 101,” she assured, “I never play the victim.” Yet on “Russian Roulette,” she was “terrified” and begged her abuser to “pull the trigger.” And on “Stupid in Love,” she admitted she still loved the man who degraded and lied to her.

Hearing each track, I understood that I, too, could experiment with the conflicting roles associated with the assault. I could be vulnerable in one breath and a victor in another. Recovery from trauma was convoluted—a message I needed to hear.

I couldn’t pick a favorite song on Rated R until I heard the eighth track, “Rude Boy.” The first time I heard it, a dancehall song with elements of reggae and electronica, I had to dance. Though I had previously had no rhythm, the intoxicating music made my waist wind like it was made of wire.

The lyrics were Rihanna’s most braggadocious yet. “Come here rude boy, boy, can you get it up?” she invited. “Come here rude boy, boy, is you big enough?” Before “Rude Boy,” I hadn’t heard contemporary music where the woman was a sexual provocateur. Rihanna was calling back to her musical forebears Sister Nancy, Patra, and Sutherland, making audacious demands for her own pleasure.

Before “Rude Boy,” I hadn’t heard contemporary music where the woman was a sexual provocateur.

Rihanna’s embrace of a good-girl-gone-bad persona (the name of the previous album I had missed while abroad) was reason enough to love “Rude Boy.” But beyond that, she identified as a bad gyal. Not only was the song title undeniably Caribbean—it refers to a Jamaican slang term for lawless males—everything else about the song was too. Unlike “Pon de Replay” or her earlier music, Rihanna’s thick Caribbean lilt was conspicuous when she pronounced rider and fire like raida and faiya or cooed “na-na” in the chorus.

The “Rude Boy” video resolved any doubts about Rihanna’s cultural identity. She wore Jamaica’s national colors as she wined, did The Bogle, and performed other famous dancehall moves in front of shirtless men. She winked at the camera while she sang about liking rough sex and never faking orgasms and mounted a zebra, a lion, and then a motorcycle.

In an interview with The Today Show, Rihanna described the song and the album as “fearless.” She added, “It’s a very honest album and I made it in a very truthful way. I let my guard down . . . telling my story and being a little more vulnerable and expressing myself.” Maybe the American good-girl image that she had begun her career with didn’t suit her anymore. She seemed ready to be crazy, angry, and unabashedly Caribbean because it was who she was.

It was only after I played Rated R nonstop for weeks that I looked into what Rihanna had been up to while I was out of the country. I learned that while I had been in Latin America dealing with the aftermath of being sexually assaulted, Rihanna had been physically assaulted by her then boyfriend. She made Rated R as a response, calling the album “her recovery” and the way she “vented and expressed” herself.

Knowing Rihanna had survived violence made the album, and “Rude Boy” in particular, even more important to me. In “Rude Boy,” she sang about going all night long with her love interest, letting him be the captain, and “giving it to [him] stronger.”

And she went even further—promising her lover in the song that she was going to “get a little crazy baby.” In the gossip blog and social media comments about Rihanna’s assault, I repeatedly saw her described as a “crazy island girl” who must have been asking for it. Rihanna’s admission to “getting a little crazy” after many people had blamed her craziness for her abuse was earth-shattering to me. She taught me it was okay to act crazy, acceptable to be sexual, and permissible to still seek—no, demand—pleasure in the wake of an assault. That she taught me these lessons while speaking in a heavy Bajan drawl only helped the message sink in.

With Rated R as my soundtrack, I spent the rest of college trying to embody the messages Rihanna was sending. I started with something seemingly simple: dancing at college parties. Whenever Rihanna’s Caribbean-tinged songs came on the loudspeaker, I let my body move naturally, trying to emulate the dancehall moves I had seen in those classic reggae performances. I didn’t look like Rihanna in “Rude Boy,” but I felt like her—assertive, sexy, proud to be Caribbean, and free.

As my sense of self continued to evolve, so did Rihanna’s music. With each album after Rated R, she became more Caribbean, sinister, and cocky. On Loud, she sang the ragga and electronic-influenced song “Man Down” about shooting her rapist dead while also commanding her lover on “Only Girl (In the World)” to make her feel like she was the only one who mattered. On Talk That Talk, she instructed to “suck her cockiness and lick her persuasion” on “Cockiness” and promised to make the object of her affection her bitch on “Birthday Cake.” On Unapologetic, she declared that she didn’t care what haters thought on “Pour It Up” while admitting on “Stay” that she still had feelings for her assaulter. And on ANTI, she ditched any attempts to speak English on the heavily accented “Work” while bragging about her sexual prowess on “Sex With Me” and “Yeah, I Said It.” Rihanna balanced being flawed, sexual, scarred, and smug on every album she made.

When I watch her onstage now in tropical Carnival costumes and bright Caribbean colors, she moves with ease. She knows who she is, what she wants, and what she deserves.

And Rihanna’s not the only one who’s followed this trajectory. The same women whose sexual personas used to plague me have taken the reins on their careers and embraced the ways they’ve been stereotyped. Beyoncé went from submissiveness on “Cater 2 U” to bashing in the windows of her cheating husband’s car on Lemonade. A year after Britney Spears had a public mental breakdown, she made Blackout, an album filled with references to her being crazy and a freak. Their music also resonates with me much more than it used to. Rather than hide from the dance floor when I hear their songs, I sing right along with them, empowered by their tales of relationship, self-esteem, and mental health struggles.

When we let women be complicated, messy, and contradictory, we let them be themselves. We also allow them the space to heal from their traumas and make their best art. And, if we’re lucky, as I have been, they can help us recover from our traumas too.

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