A post-COVID pipe dream of mine is being in the Caribbean again, maybe feteing at Culturama, except we’re drinking, dancing and moshing on the beach, with alternating hits of dancehall and death metal and soca and black metal. Black black metal. In this dream, I can feel the ground vibrating again with life and music, a mass of bodies pulsating, the smell of the ocean and sweat and rum, and dissolved into the crowd, I can feel like I finally belong where my family does.
Among the million other things that make me stick out like a sore thumb in Nevis besides being the palest pickney to ever come from a Black woman, as well as having bizarre hair and social difficulties, a metal band shirt also does the trick. Without being too personal, it sucks to continually feel like a vexatious outsider in the place you see as a second home, have visited your entire life, and have citizenship to — especially while your more socially gifted sibling with tastes seen as more “normal” than mine manages to form the familial and extrafamilial relationships I so crave. Oh, and not to mention I am now openly queer, which is, like, illegal there. But I digress.
If you can’t tell, I am clearly desperate for some kind of validation here! While I may never see a black metal band come from St Kitts or Nevis, I can at least find enjoyment and validation from knowing there exists in the Caribbean a metal scene with a fought history.
I should probably note here that the Caribbean itself is a diverse place, and there are a lot of non-Black people in the Caribbean. While this article looks at the history of metal in the Caribbean as a geographic region and not a racial entity, bands profiled in the future will have Black members.
In a reddit post, user /u/GuavaTree, a Trinidadian, details some of their firsthand experience as a metalhead there. They talk about how metal music “gets little to no recognition or support from the wider population and is generally looked down upon”, and thus the scene is very small with rare shows. While they say they are most familiar with the more thrash heavy scene of the 90’s, they note that earlier rock and heavy metal bands began to exist in the late 70’s and 80s’.
The Metal Islands: History, Culture, and Politics in Caribbean Heavy Metal Music is a 2016 documentary by Dr. Nelson Varas-Díaz. It explores metal and its history in the Caribbean, specifically Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. According to a description posted by Varas-Díaz, it “examines how each island’s metal scene has been influenced by history, culture, and political context” over the forty-plus years long history of metal in the islands, and more pertinently, “explores issues related to the origins of these scenes, social stigmatization, media persecution, the integration of local culture into the metal scene, the relationship between the state and metal, among other topics”. The work of Dr. Varas-Díaz focuses on small metal scenes in the Caribbean.