Nicki MinajOur very own Venus

The TV news stories last week about the masqueraders-cum-extras complaining theyd been waiting for hours in costume and hot sun without information, food, water or a bathroom evaporated in the PR flurry surroundingNicki Minajs drop-in for her music video shoot. The photos in the papers the next day showed her and government people with smiles all roundtourism, de cult-yere, good times.

Trinis in Carnival costumes be-ing treated like livestock is hardly new or news. The Carnival enthusiasts were free to leave, but being in a rap video, or just on TV, in a Carnival costume is evidently worth more than food and water, and swallowing much contempt. Or whatever.

But the other side of the equation became a little more interesting since NM was featured in the NY Times on the same weekend of her Trini visit (July 8, Nicki Minaj Crashes Hip Hop Boys Club). The article made mention of her being called, with some justification, the most influential female rapper of all time. Add this to her stated desire to big-up T&T abroad, and youve got a surge of celebrity capital/energy infusing the image of Trinidad Minaj presents and promotes. But what about that image?

Minajs idea of Trinidad seems to agree with the consensus that we is a Carnival people, and this incredible festival, which exists nowhere else in the world, is our contribution to world cult-yere. And looking at her persona in performance, it seems that Minaj is actually as good an embodiment of this carnivalist fantasy as Ive seen. The qualities she materialises in her appearance and her music give a pretty good idea of what the Trini subconscious understands and projects about who and what we are. (When I say we, I dont include me.)

But what we are is not what we think. The first time I saw a NM video (Moment for Life), I was struck by the combination of styles, genres and mythologies, even in an industry which requires an often bizarre distinctiveness.To a large extent, entertainers are the creatures of stylists, design! ers and marketing agendas, but Im assuming NM is the primum mobile of her own unique, yet facile assemblages.

Moment crashed together Egyptian myths, British fairy tales, and American opulence. The lyrics evoked nave religious, romantic and Hollywood fantasy fulfilment (this night reminds me of/everything they deprived me of), with the image of romance provided by the suave, stubbled Drake, romping in baroque decor.Your Love smashed together medieval and contemporary Japanese and Islamic images, and skin-tight leather, around a Kill Bill theme of women and Samurai swords.

This isnt incongruous with the repertoire and style of contemporary rap, African American pop culture and the dictates of the entertainment capitalism. The onlyinteresting thing here is that the Indo-bit of Onika Maraj, who became Nicki Minaj, seems to have disappeareda textbook requirement of carnivalism, if its kind of ironic at a time when US pop culture is fascinated with Bollywood.

But looked at as a persona whose Trini-ness is transmitted via her repertoire, the image assemblages in Minajs videos say something else. The pop-culture-fed pastiche signals the absence of an underlying cultural bedrock of ritual, image and/or script to provide backdrop for her work. The absence is filled in with random pop culture visual tropes. And this is exactly what Carnival society is: a pastiche of incongruous images, music and script not unified by anything.

We all knew that, but theres more here, and a key to it is in the most consistent element of NMs repertoire: the element thats underneath the costumes: her extravagant voluptuousness, crowned by neon red, green and blonde wigs, exploding out of a red two-piece suit in the Starships video(bad bitches like me is hard to come by).

Even in a genre where hyper-sexualisation is the entry requirement, NMs sexuality is much stranger, and I might say even has a primal quality absent from her mainstream peersthe by-the-numbers pop sexuality of Rihanna, or the conservative sexuali! ty of Be yonce and its inversion in her alter ego, Sasha Fierce.

Clearly NMs sexuality is an oddity for mainstream American pop culture (that which is endorsed by the establishment NY Times and on Ellen Degeneres), so where does it come from? NMs sexuality is a product, and the embodiment, of another set of cultural fantasies: old stereotypes of the nature of the colonised world, and the character of the coloured races.

These fantasies were embodied, in the 19th century and before, in various media and specific personalities, like Venus the Hottentot, which is the first thing that came to my mind when I first saw Minaj in flight. Venus was Saarjite Baartman, an African (Khosian) woman whose steatopygia was exhibited as a spectacle in the travelling shows of the 19th century, which entertained the metropole with the grotesqueries of the natives, flora and fauna from the fringes of empire. These shows werent harmless entertainment.

They served to confirm the conventional view that the natives were hyper-sexualised, primitive and grotesque. The primitive nature of the fringe justified the empires and its representatives conquest. The images and beliefs remained in the colonial imagination long after the struggle for freedom was over, and in the absence of a good education, and healthy nurturing of the decolonised imagination, they became a default cultural backdrop. Now, here they are in the 21stcentury in our very own Venus, a one-woman show, telling the same story: the natives are legendary voluptuaries, but otherwise empty.

The twist is that shes telling the story on our behalf, and if she is or becomes the brand ambassador we want, well, the Governments and carnivalists deepest desires will be realised. If they didnt know before, the whole world will know what we are now.