BIG STORY
OF WINING:
Cultural Expression or Sexually Explicit?
VERB Magazine talks to teens and music industry players about the evolution of the dance and whether it has become too risqué
By Erline Andrews
T
he seven-minute video starts “innocently” enough: a young woman in
white short shorts and a skimpy red
top is rolling her behind directly in
front of the camera, she bends over
and pats her genital area.
Then the clip – one of countless on YouTube
showing Trini young people cavorting in dark
clubs, at open air fetes and in the streets to soca
or dancehall - goes past the five-minute mark,
and things get real.
A girl in demin shorts and top has her legs
around a young man’s waist and her hands to
the ground.
They’re doing what could only be described
as a simulation of a sexual position - and a
pretty challenging one at that. Around them
other couples are simulating different positions. One pair is actually stretched out on the
ground, the young man on top of the young
woman, both facing down.
You could call it wining 2.0 or wining reloaded, but it seems a short step away from people
actually having sex in public, and - according to
some testimonies - people use the movement
as a cover to do just that.
The influence of the hyper sexual and hyper
violent Jamaican daggering – which the government of that island is attempting to curb because people are actually getting hurt – is only
one sign that it might be time to re-evaluate
this highly popular part of our culture.
The Caribbean has the second highest rate of
adolescent pregnancies in the world. We’re only
topped by the poorest parts of Africa.
And then there’s this: the Caribbean is also
only second to the poorest part of Africa in the
prevalence of HIV.
“There is a new thing where girls lie flat on
their backs, they open their legs and a boy
comes and jumps on them,” said 17-year-old
Myia Cruickshank, a student of Trinity College
Moka. “That is very vulgar and I do not agree
with that. That is overdoing it.”
“Plenty people does do them thing now,” said
Kevon Gibbons of the more extreme forms of
wining. “I don’t like that. I don’t find that ap-
propriate.”
Myia doesn’t think “traditional” wining –
which usually involves a woman moving her
derriere against the front of a man’s pants in
time to music – is overtly sexual, but the new
forms of it are. Traditional wining carried the
risk of leading to unprotected sex, but with the
new forms that risk is much higher, she says.
“They should ban it,” she said. “I get upset
when I go a party and I see that.”
Readers might be surprised by the origin of
the hip gyrations we now call wining.
“What is happening now is that most persons don’t know their traditions, and they don’t
know the reason for the wining in Carnival,”
said Dr. Hollis Liverpool, a cultural historian
you might better know as Chalkdust, eight-time
winner of the Calypso Monarch competition.
Wining serves a very special purpose in Africa, where some of our ancestors come from.
“It’s an African dance of praise, of giving
thanks to the creator for the gift of sex,” said
Liverpool. He added quickly: “Africans thank
God for everything.”
The movement became an integral part of the
revelry of Carnival and now ….
“Trinidadians emphasise the debauchery and
not the thankfulness,” said Liverpool.
The movement has become more explicit as
“winers” in the different Caribbean countries try
to one-up each other.
“ [The late calypsonian] Duke used to say
they have different levels of wining now,” said
Liverpool. “The Bajans try to outdo the Trinidadians. Barbados have a thing called wuk up.”
You wouldn’t find Dr. Liverpool “wukking up”
any time soon. He doesn’t like what wining has
become. He calls it “an abuse of the person” and
“just a prelim to sex”.
“I believe wining is a form of sexual expression,” said spoken word poet Jean-Claude
Cournand. “People don’t like to talk about sex,
so they don’t want to brand it as suc