E3W Literature | University of Texas

Thomas Glave, Ed.

Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing From the Antilles

Duke University Press, 2008

416 pages

$24.95

Reviewed by Alix Chapman

Our Caribbean is a gathering of essays, poems, and cultural critiques on same-gender desire from the Antilles and its di­aspora. These pieces embody a range of work taking root in the Caribbean and extending to various geographies and historical moments going back to the 1950s. Thomas Glave, a Jamaican writer and professor, has assembled an anthol­ogy primarily concerned with issues of desire and liberation. In his introduction, he expresses his own desire, wonder, and hope for the book, asking what might potentially come out of these many conversations that some have had and others need to have. The voices in this anthology attend to the longing, silence, and invisibility of Caribbean sexual and gender minorities, offering incisive critiques to coun­ter the dominant narratives that normalize heterosexuality, Western ideology, and racial and economic exploitation.

These thirty-eight pieces, including Glave’s introduction, assume their unity through his excellent editing. Glave has not organized these texts in any particular order; they follow one another, with a notation indicating the year in which the piece was written, the contributor’s name, and the person’s country or multiple sites of origin. Glave has also provided a glossary of terms and a list of the contrib­utors with brief descriptions of their broader literary and other political contributions. A continuous pattern of ex­perience and meaning regarding sex and sexual alterity emerges from this apparently arbitrary arrangement, re­vealing genealogies and ruptures specific to the communal imaginaries and material lives of same-gender-loving people in the Caribbean. The work varies between autobiogra­phy and fictionalized narratives, poems, public investiga­tion and explanation, as well as ethnography. Most of the contributors, along with some of these works, have been published elsewhere, yet this anthology is unique in that it includes well-known writers such as Dionne Brand, Au­dre Lorde, and Reinaldo Arenas together with lesser known academics, activists, and artists from a range of disciplines.

The anthology as a whole suggests the need for an “indige­nous” critique that accounts for the specificity of Caribbean same-gendered desire but also its diversity. Individual pieces make interventions as they trace systems of kinship among non-heterosexual, non-gender-normative bodies, Zami, Mati, and All-Sexuals to name a few. These indigenous iden­tities constitute alternate histories and geographies. Critical essays by Lawson Williams, Timothy S. Chin, and Mabel Cuesta offer but a few of the critical analyses on structural and ideological violence against same-gender-loving people. Their work explores the post-independent Caribbean state’s sexist and homophobic motives, twin processes that serve as mechanisms by which neocolonial power is maintained. In his essay, “On Homophobia and Gay Rights Activism in Ja­maica,” Williams speaks to the pervasiveness of compulsory heterosexuality in the nation, its power and irrationality, and suggests it is time that debates concerning homosexual­ity in the Caribbean take center stage. He argues that pub­licly discussing the human and civil rights of same-gender-desiring people challenges common assumptions about the political legitimacy of these issues in the “national arena.”

Homosexuality is continually treated as tangential and irrel­evant to the work of the state, never gaining full status within the national body. He goes on to state that gay activism is seen as antithetical to the Jamaican community and in some instances unsettles those gay people complicit with the exist­ing social order. This critique shows the global concerns of a community mediating the status quo and the character of their particular struggle. Moreover, Williams and others pro­vide critical perspectives on the connections between sexual alterity in relationship to (trans)national ideals of a produc­tive citizenry and notions of domestic and foreign otherness.

Our Caribbean brings into conversation a range of sexual sub­jectivities and meanings but also Caribbean bodies as they live out their transnational flows through differing expres­sive forms. While some of these pieces are brief, they pro­vide readers with an introduction to larger bodies of work they may seek out. Readers will hear about the quotidian life experiences of Trinidadian poet and activist Colin Robinson in “The Mechanic,” a poem that engages same-gender desire in the Caribbean during his studies in the US. Robinson’s work unveils longing memories of home and the unique relationships forged there. Readers may glean the contra­dictions between identity and place as writers discuss their experiences of migration and (dis)location in pieces such as Juanita Ramos’s autobiographical essay “Bayamos, Brook­lyn y yo.” Ramos describes her development as a Puerto Rican immigrant negotiating ethnicity, race, and sexual­ity between two places. The readings illuminate the ways in which notions of sexuality, kinship, and gender are con­structed in relation to place, memory and (re)imagining, as well as through the self-making processes of language. These texts each in their own way question what the Caribbean means to those who have left and those who stay, the ones who have returned and the ones who long for other vistas.

Many of the contributors express the importance of literacy in their erotic lives and suggest the potential strength that poetic and imaginative license afforded them in their self-making and communal imaginaries. In his autobiographical piece “Eroti­cism,” Reinaldo Arenas speaks to “the rhythm” of his literary work when he writes, “That rhythm has always been part of me, even during periods of the most intense lovemaking or of the greatest police persecution. Writing crowned or comple­mented all other pleasure as well as all other calamities.” And, in conversation with Arenas, Rane Arroyo writes in this ex­cerpt from his poem “Almost a Revolution for Two in Bed:”

You Leave, I stay. We fall off

the bed, this time as ghosts.

In the mirror, I see verbs,

Read Arenas’ Arenas, discover

Love letters inside my irises,

Rediscover Homer’s honesty:

We return to our leaving.

Together both writers speak to rhythms found and kept, words of love and communication sought for and em­braced once found. Arenas finds the right words between lovers and those who would do him harm, while Arroyo wanders among the lost in a different time and a different place, looking for a kindred spirit who might deliver him back where he belongs. For both writers, literary produc­tion parallels their internal struggles for love and community.

Among this gathering of writers, readers find many references to those who have passed away but continue to live in our communal memory, walking among us and working through us. The figure of the homosexual in some communities has become as vilified and intangible as the ghosts, jumpies, and soucayants that emerge from myth. But it is exactly the mythical that many come to call on in memoirs like Wes­ley E.A. Crichlow’s “History, (Re)Memory, Testimony, and Biomythography: Charting a Buller Man’s Trinidadian Past.” He articulates his own lived experience through Audre Lorde’s method of biomythography in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, part of which is also in this collection. Biomythography suggests an inherently subjective view of self and life history, more so than an “objective” critique of the past, which allows Crichlow to “translate [his] experiences of heterosexist oppres­sion into this project” and “enables the move from the singular (I) to the collective (we).” Crichlow points to the constructed­ness of history: “hence partial; it will never be virtual, will nev­er fully reproduce ‘reality.’” The power of (re)memory and tes­timony are thus privileged so that these particular experiences can be used as a larger framework for other Bullers and Zami.

Whether we speak of Lesbians, Gays, Bullers, Zami, Mati, Trannies, Heteros, Homos, Queers, etc., how we represent our sexual and gendered selves and our communities is a re­occurring debate throughout these texts. Whereas the book’s title settles on the dominant Western categories of lesbian and gay, these serve in part as a catchall for a range of identi­ties and social formations represented in the reading. Glave problematizes this choice in his introduction, although some may take issue as it relates to an ongoing debate concerning representation. Gloria Wekker speaks to these issues in her article “Mati-ism and Black Lesbianism” when she states:

There are strong indications that the Western categories of ‘homo’, ‘bi’, and ‘hetero’ have insufficient justification in some black situations. The concept of ‘homosexuality’ introduces an etic [objective and culturally relative] category that is alien to the indigenous, emic [personally meaningful and culturally-specific] system which exists in some sections of black communities.

Given this critique, it is quite possible that there is no single representation or politics for the many struggles we find ex­pressed in Our Caribbean, and as Glave posits, “none of us can afford to indulge in single-focus politics irrespective of how we name ourselves or are named by those who have the  power to do so.” One might also say that the variety of dif­ference and meaning regarding representation that unfolds in these pages is its greatest strength and that the essential­izing logic and binary-dependant cosmologies of the West are one of the greatest obstacles to our political imagina­tions. How can we ever afford to dream of a different world if we are unable to risk the ambiguous and contradictory waters we must wade through? What courage does it take to venture out into those depths, not knowing…yet hopeful?

These voices speak at once to the continuous erasure of Ca­ribbean same-gender desire by processes of heterosexism and the reinforcing of gender binaries, while at the same time they suggest the fulfillment found in contesting those era­sures through the power of language. There is a range of sub­jects explored throughout Our Caribbean that readers might engage, including investigations of migration and transna­tional studies as they apply to identity and cultural practice on the move. This book is an excellent contribution to Third World and Black Feminist studies, Black and Queer of Col­or critique, and complements anthologies like Voices Rising (2007), Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (2007), and Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (2005) in its critique of social formations that intersect across lines of race, sexuality, class, and gender, especially those forma­tions relating to cultural ideals and migration. The gather­ing that is Our Caribbean presents a new challenge to the processes of silence and invisibility facing same-gender-de­siring peoples of the Caribbean and its diaspora. These nar­ratives are tangible and proof of life, pointing to and provid­ing a means with which we may sustain an interrogation of material, symbolic, and structural oppression, thus usher­ing in new voices and new futures in Caribbean literature.