This week’s blog post includes a linked audio file. Just click on the link below if you would like to hear the post read aloud. Scroll down to read the text.
Our guest blogger this week, Linzey Corridon, is a poet, Vanier Canada Scholar, and PhD Candidate in the department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. His critical and creative works can be found in Canada and Beyond, SX Salon, Wasafiri, The Puritan and more. A born and raised Queeribbean man from the polymorphic island nations of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, he now resides in Ontario, Canada. You can read his previous BILD guest post here.
Quotidians
The night is cool, some fifteen minutes past nine. I’m dressed in all blue, navy shorts and a Euro-fit polo shirt. I slip a classic pair of white leather Converses onto my feet. A Sleek and inviting look for yet another evening out on the town. I am heading to dinner in Baie Orientale, Saint Martin, by car. With me is my fiancé and Vincentian partner of fourteen years, Kevin. Accompanying Kevin is his friend of twenty-six years, Michael, a man also born and raised in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, who is visiting Saint Martin from the neighbouring Caribbean island-nation of Guadeloupe. Michael has taken a particular liking to Shay, a first-generation Jamaican Canadian, one of my closest friends and confidants since I left Saint Vincent for Canada. Michael and Shay are wrapped up in each other over conversation. Driving the car is Davis, a French-Caribbean local and close friend of Shay’s, now my acquaintance of some ten months. In the passenger seat, opposite Davis, sits his partner, Joshua. Joshua is Anguillan, visiting from the neighbouring island-nation just a fifteen-minute ferry ride away from SXM. The two have been dating for approximately eight months. They are madly infatuated with one another, and the duo steal every opportunity they can find to recite their desires for one another to those sitting behind them.
In Orient Bay, the sea breeze is gentle. The smell of salt blankets us as we make our way across cobble-stoned pathways. People are everywhere. The sound of banter clashes with soca, reggae, pop, and faint instances of violin strings. As we arrive at the steps of our restaurant for the evening, the smell of roast pork and BBQ shrimp mingle with vanilla-scented candles. We have reservations at a popular restaurant known for its celebration of locally sourced red meats and seafood. For this latest outing, we make it a point to support local Queeribbean businesses. The Executive Chef and co-owner of the restaurant is a queer woman. She curates the four-course culinary experience while her partner, the hostess and the director of customer service, ensures that our conversation remains light, and that our glasses remain filled with Ti’Punch, a French Caribbean sociocultural artifact—in more ways than we initially understand. Dinner conversation is easy. Friends renew lasting bonds, acquaintances tend to flowering friendships, and partners remember what it is like to desire and to be desired.
Light conversation turns to talk of previous erotic-emotional relationships. Joshua confesses to recently ending a four-year relationship with his now ex-girlfriend. Davis shares with everyone that his last courtship was of a female co-worker. The story of their relationship ends where Davis’s history with Joshua begins. Kevin ruminates on his time being erotically and emotionally entwined with women in high school. Michael hesitates to share with everyone that he is currently dating a woman. In fact, they live together back in Guadeloupe. They share a one-year-old son together. His newest child brings Michael’s total number of children to three. Shay immediately voices concerns about the number of children Michael has fathered. He would prefer for his potential love interest to have no more than two children. His role as stepmother will be most challenging with just two. Three is simply absurd. Soft chuckling ensues, which turns to unending laughter. The conversation then transitions to parenting.
Free and easy vibes resonate from our table and from the surrounding tables filled with colorful patrons scattered across the restaurant’s patio. The other guests are polite enough. Everyone thrives in their temporary but richly nourishing microworlds. This night is special for much of the West’s inhabitants. It is June 1st, the beginning of pride month festivities in multiple North American and European cities. Pride brings celebrations of otherness. June is a time of conversations. Conversations about difference, about the past and the future, and about joy and care. It is pride month in North America, but not in the Caribbean, a region begrudgingly annexed to the West. It is pride month everywhere but here, because at our table, there are no parades, only ritual. There is only our quotidian.
Destabilizing Caribbean Sexuality
Popular takes on Caribbean sex and sexuality are rooted in the research and writing of previous authors and thinkers who remain focused on the logics of one crucial, and equally exhausted, binary, detailing Caribbean sexual expression: the heterosexual versus the homosexual. This divide fuels both past and present conceptions and discourses on how Caribbean people embody sexuality. While this tradition of exploring the divide may hold some legitimacy, such a study and its family of debates continue to limit our understanding of the complex nature of Queeribbean life.
In a region and culture that remains drawn to ideas of liberation and self-determination, it is crucial that Caribbean nation-states continue to actively challenge their understandings of how queer sex and sexuality function amongst its peoples. M. Jacqui Alexander (1994) so poignantly writes that “sexualization and internationalization have been linked in the strategies of domination, [so] we must link them in our strategies for liberation, although admittedly along different registers” (p. 21). If we consider the language and registers in which regional writing commonly addresses the issue of sexuality, we observe the existence of similar kinds of limits by which island nation-states have also entrapped themselves. For example, scenes depicting male, heterosexual and hypermasculine characters are abundant across the Caribbean literary tradition, from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day. On one side of the binary, there exist retellings of heterosexual men in sexual scenes with women whom they love, but sometimes may abuse and misuse. These same men are portrayed as dominating forces in the woman’s quotidian (day-to-day life). On the other side of this literary binary is a more recent, but increasingly popular, narrative of the Caribbean gay man or the lesbian woman. Works centred on such characters traditionally focus on the same-sex dynamics at play. As importantly, these same-sex dynamics mix effortlessly with the complicated variable of nonnormative regional sexual identity. In each of these instances of Caribbean sexuality on the page, what is depicted is communicated with some accuracy and always with authority: “Sex and sexuality appear and reappear in the literature as tools of pleasure and politics, oppression and liberation” (King, 2002, p. 24). What is continuously being ideologically prescribed for readers is a world in which, publicly, there are divides and polarities that dominate discussions on the nature of Queeribbean sex and sexuality.
The presence of fluid Queeribbean characters in Caribbean literature has continued to circulate as anything but meaningful conversations about the presence of sexually fluid Queeribbean residents. These liminal figures are just that, liminal. We acknowledge that these figures sometimes transgress the hetero-homo binary, but ultimately and ideologically, we banish these peoples and instances of another way of island life to the fantasy of the binary. In fact, and in a move that continues to defy what many island governments perceive to be evidence of “European stereotypes and morality” (King, 2002, p. 25), popular Caribbean debates continue to neglect the quiet histories of sexual expression beyond the scope of the accepted heterosexual-homosexual divide. Our obsession with the hetero-homo binary remains a distraction. I, therefore, reaffirm the case for something other than heterosexual and homosexual peoples occupying the Caribbean:
- There exist other ongoing sociocultural and political (mate)realities that we can attribute to the many who identify as queer and as Caribbean.
- Other than gay or lesbian, there exist other modes by which Queeribbean people actively associate themselves with embodiments of the sexual, transforming current debates on Caribbean queerness and Queeribbean writing.
- In doing away with the distraction that is the hetero-homo binary, we will generatively expand both legal (the public) and sociopolitical (the private) discourses on the possibilities of queer quotidian life across the archipelago.
In asserting these tenets, we recognize and accept that the quotidian of a sexually fluid Queeribbean peoples is an already viable one. We can also meaningfully broaden our discourses and comprehension of how Queeribbean peoples relate to one another by describing a few of the conditions which inform queer life beyond the binary. In doing so, we address Kamala Kempadoo’s (2009) critique that “the specifications of sexual identity groups often elide the very varied sexual arrangements in the region, and can work to hinder the broader understandings of how Caribbean peoples relate sexually” (p. 2). Acknowledging this shifting space and place of a sexually fluid Queeribbean resident might not be unique to the region, but the evidence and the persistence of such peoples remains pivotal in transforming current and publicly accepted debates on how sex and sexuality unfurl across Caribbean life.
Inheritances
It is the penultimate day of my 2022 spring-summer trip to the Caribbean. I am standing atop the wall that separates our villa’s backyard from the Caribbean Sea. Watching the tide ebb and flow with little care for me and my stresses back in North America, I gently release affirmations upon the breeze.
You are already enough. This world you are from is everything and more. There is terror in your everyday. There is magic in your everyday. You come from a legacy venerated by few. A legacy, nonetheless.
For the first time, in a very long time, this chain of islands governed by binaries of love and hate, of laws and norms, of suspicion and certainty, of the heterosexual versus the homosexual, to be seen or to not be seen, falters; these dichotomies are all fading away.
Every so often I now listen for stories about the great love my second mother shared with a mystery Trinidadian woman. The former would leave her husband at home every few months to meet up with the mystery woman in a different quotidian. More and more I make it a point to ask an old friend in Saint Vincent to mail me their groundnuts sugar cakes and toolum.
I devour these goodies and remember him and his roommates back home, how they are running a small confectionery business out of their kitchen to make ends meet. I imagine the sweet smell of melting sugar permeating every corner of the house and every intersection of their little love for one another. It is a love sometimes sweet, sometimes bitter black. More and more I walk into my closet, and I pass my palm over the fabric of a now tattered tee that an old secondary school friend and confidant crafted for me. They were a fledgling designer at the time. The now cracked and fading acrylic logo spells _ _ _ _ _ _. I recall conversations with them about their yearning for a different life. I witness them making home in the life they currently call their own. Their clothing now makes the rounds on the bodies of many locals. They still talk about making a different life, and I always listen with humility. I open my email and I see messages from an old bestie in Saint Vincent, an educator and closet writer. She has written two new pieces, so she wants me to look them over. One piece is about a broken Caribbean vase. The vase is a metaphor for her sexuality. Attracted to both men and women, she has retreated into celibacy. She has chosen what she describes not as a brokenness, but rather hers is a different way of remaining whole. She still writes, she still teaches, we still make conversation about love and about longing.
In trying to make sense of the paths of a select few who have come before me, I look to the legacies of my people, and to the mundane that make up the traces of our everyday, to investigate what is both clear and unclear. I point to what has always been present in the ever elusive there of the Queeribbean quotidian. Right now, clarity is what conversations about the Queeribbean need most. We need lucidity and ideological compassion. I write not only to cultivate further a culture unafraid to question the sociocultural and political conditions that be, but also to ask that we consider that these conditions are not the only sets already in play. This much is clear when I eat toolum, when I listen for my second mother’s (hi)stories, when I share dinner with new and old friends, and when I read for shards of broken vase scattered across the stanzas of my friend’s poem.
References
Alexander, M. J. (1994). Not just (any)body can be a citizen: The politics of law, sexuality and postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas. Feminist Review,48(1), 5-23.
Kempadoo, Kamala. (2009). Caribbean Sexuality: Mapping the Field. Caribbean Review of Gender Studies,3, 1-24.
King, Rosamond S. (2002). Sex and sexuality in the English Caribbean novel – A survey. Journal of West Indian Literature,11(1), 24-38.
