The Queer Caribbean Speaks

Interviews with Writers, Artists, and Activists

K. Campbell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137364838
• eBook ISBN: 9781137364845
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

In most Caribbean countries homosexuality is still illegal and many outside of the region are unaware of how difficult life can be for gay men and lesbians. This book collects interviews with queer Caribbean writers, activists, and citizens and challenges the dominance of Euro-American theories in understanding global queerness.

CHAPTER 1

H. Nigel Thomas

H. Nigel Thomas was born on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, the third of four boys. He emigrated to Canada in 1968, where he has worked as a school teacher, a civil servant, a mental health worker, and finally as an English professor at Université Laval, until he retired in 2006 to devote his attention to writing full-time. He is the author of four novels, two collections of short stories, and a book of poetry.

Kofi: Can you speak a bit about the experience of growing up queer in the Caribbean? Was it relatively easy or difficult, safe or dangerous, for you? For other gay men?

HNT: As a youngster of about eight or nine, I realized that the community—adults and my peers—treated me differently. They said I was a girl, mocked my speech, and laughed at me in general. I had forgotten much of this until, at the annual Vincy Picnic in the Thousand Islands in 2009, someone visiting from England praised me for my achievements and afterwards lamented how much he tortured me while I was growing up. Another such case of torture occurred with a different individual when I was hospitalized at age 16. My ward-mate taunted me day in and day out, and the nurses never reprimanded him. Three years later I went to live in his village, and his brother took over. At age 20 I joined the Vincentian civil service and there was open discussion among my colleagues as to whether or not I was a bullerman.¹ By then my vocal range was not the issue. Speaking grammatically correct English was. I was in a heterosexual relationship then. But Vincentians were never fooled by those.

Until I was confronted in a personal way with same-sex desire, around age 16, I never saw myself as being other than heterosexual. Cultivating flowers was the only nonmasculine behavior I engaged in. I tended to prefer reading to playing sports, but I never avoided sports, although I was not good at them and was taunted by my fellow players. Today, I know that the extensive reading I did then made others brand me as being queer. But I wouldn’t have realized that while I was growing up.

There was never any question of my even attempting to engage in homosexuality while I was in St. Vincent. When I left, I was engaged to be married. Jerome’s repressed sexuality, in Spirits in the Dark, is my own speculation of what my life would have been like had I remained in St. Vincent. In my day every village in St. Vincent had its two or three known homosexuals, and no man or boy ever ventured onto their premises. I remember hearing a homosexual recount to a busload of people that he had a boyfriend whom he visited in Carriacou. But no one remembered his ever traveling there. It was all fantasy. He often engaged in the self-denigration that Vincentians required of homosexuals. Women complimented him for the excellent care he took of his bedridden mother.

When I was around 15, a villager, an age-mate, made a date with another teenager one night. The affair was to have been consummated in a banana field. But when the youngster took off his clothes, he was confronted by a gang who chased and beat him throughout the village while calling him bullerman and threatening to kill him. (A few years ago, I attended his mother’s funeral, where he officiated as a Spiritual Baptist pastor, and I wondered how his violent homophobic encounter now affected his life.)

A second case, which I include in the novel I’m currently working on, occurred when I was around 18. This time someone in the village had seen a visitor enter the house of a known homosexual. He alerted others, and soon the house was surrounded. The villagers broke down the door, barred the windows, and beat both men almost to death.

A nonpracticing homosexual friend of mine in St. Vincent refuses to be seen in public with me, because I am an out gay man. He asked me not to write to him as well. Everyone knows that this fellow is a homosexual. But to avoid being persecuted by the community, he must reassure it that he is ashamed of his same-sex desire and contemptuous of fellow homosexuals. Two years ago, my nephew told the villagers he wouldn’t accept anything I brought him from Canada. He added that if he could he’d douse all bullermen with gasoline and set them afire (the minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs in the government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines had said something similar a few months earlier). Needless to say, my nephew’s statement was told to me over and over with relish. I’m sure, too, he enjoyed the sudden importance.

Persons identified as homosexuals, even when they were in heterosexual relationships, were extensively policed. To even hint that one wanted to have sex with someone of the same gender led to violence.

Kofi: To what do you attribute the intense homophobia of Caribbean societies (if you believe that they are, in fact, intensely homophobic)?

HNT: A cursory examination of the beliefs of continental Africans will reveal that they believe that the raison d’être of existence is to produce offspring. Africans brought such beliefs to the New World. Diasporic and continental Africans continue to valorize themselves on the number of offspring they produce. Somehow homosexuality is envisaged as antithetical to this need to reproduce and is persecuted. In fact, there’s more tolerance of homosexuals who are fathers.

However, Caribbean men are more vicious than Caribbean women in their persecution of homosexuals. (The market scene in my novel Sprits in the Dark would be different if the players were men.) I think the reason is that West Indian men have very few possibilities for self-valorization, and one way of doing so is to appoint themselves members of an informal anti-homosexual squad. The attention Buju Banton and others got for advocating killing gays is instructive in this regard. Even prime ministers ride in the homophobic bandwagon, in Jamaica and in St. Vincent.

Fundamentalist Christianity and Rastafarianism feed the flames as well by arguing that homophobia is righteous. They take seriously the passage in Leviticus that advocates killing homosexuals and ignore pretty much everything else.

Kofi: Do you feel more empowered in the diaspora, more able to speak out, to make a difference? Are you optimistic about the future of queers in the region?

HNT: In December 1994, when I informed Vincentians, in The News and The Vincentian,² that I’m homosexual, it was to respond to some vitriolic homophobic comments in the Vincentian press, something homosexual Vincentians would not have dared to do, unless they did so anonymously. Until then no even-handed discussion of same-sex realities had taken place in the Vincentian media. I said then that it needed to be undertaken. In subsequent pieces I challenged the homophobia of the then Anglican bishop, some fundamentalist pastors, a Vincentian magistrate, and a few columnists.

Predictably, my relatives have been angry with me for doing so. I understand the opprobrium they suffer as a result of my pieces (which the press eventually stopped publishing as a result of pressure from their advertisers).

Here too (in Montreal) I have been able to challenge the homophobic views proffered by the various groups speaking on behalf of the Black community. The difference here is that I’m not alone; I receive support from several Black community leaders. That would not have been forthcoming in St. Vincent. I should say, however, that one of the Vincentian columnists I scolded back in the nineties has recently written a piece in which he was critical of the media’s and the police handling of a same-sex case.

I have something of a muted optimism regarding the future of same-sex persons in the West Indies. Given the inability of Caribbean media to suppress the news about the gains in rights for same-sex persons worldwide, the relatives of same-sex persons are no longer limited to anti-gay propaganda. Those who are inclined to be brutal would no doubt choose to persecute; those predisposed to being generous would choose acceptance.

Kofi: Rosamund Elwin’s anthology, Tongues on Fire, offers us a picture of Caribbean lesbians who, in contradiction to their portrayal in many Western activist discourses, find ways to live happy, fulfilled lives with long-term partners, openly. Further, they offer us stories of queers who have done the same, since at least the time of their grandmothers. What is your own experience in this regard? Did you grow up knowing, or knowing of, other queer persons in your community? Were you told stories of such by relatives?

HNT: Elwin’s views in this regard are also to be found in Audre Lorde’s commentary on what the women of Carriacou did during the long absences of their husbands/partners. There’s no doubt that lesbian relationships were never as threatening to the social order. I remember one in my birth village. One of the women was an ex-mistress of my father; the other’s husband had emigrated and abandoned her. I was present when people teased them. It was gentle teasing to which they responded with smiles and giggles. The teasers too, men and women, were usually smiling. I don’t think that with the vitriol that has come to Vincentians via fundamentalist Christianity and Jamaican dancehall music, theirs would now be such a welcome relationship. I am reminded that Trinidad expanded its anti-homosexual legislation in the nineties to criminalize lesbianism.

Kofi: Another important aspect of Elwin’s anthology is that it works to normalize queer life in the region. Patricia Powell’s novel A Small Gathering of Bones does much the same thing—we see gay characters living normal lives, holding down normal jobs, engaging in loving and long-term relationships. Yet we know that living in an openly queer manner in the Caribbean, or even secretly, can be a magnet for incredible violence. How can we explain this dichotomy? Why do you think that some queers are able to live openly, and others not? What is it that triggers the violence, and moves an individual or a community from acceptance to violent exclusion?

HNT: As a writer of fiction I am well aware of how reality, when incorporated into fiction, must respond to the exigencies of fiction. This is undoubtedly the case with A Small Gathering of Bones. A huge component of this novel is the social relationships among the characters, as Powell’s fictional imagination envisaged it. It’s no more empirical than my rendering of the plantocracy in Return to Arcadia.

But it is plausible. Caribbean gays do attempt to create safe places to socialize. Jamaica Kincaid’s account of this—it’s almost like an afterword in My Brother—is an excellent reflection of how it happens in the smaller islands. A Vincentian cousin of mine attempted to live with his partner back in the eighties. His wealth and status shielded his home from the mob, but his partner broke under the weight of public harassment and fled the island. Thereafter my cousin’s relationship was with someone who wore the mask of heterosexuality, and who only visited him in the wee hours of the morning and left right after sex was over.

Kofi: Those involved in Caribbean queer activism, of course, tend to stress the worst conditions that Caribbean queers experience, as a means of spurring others to action. Do you think queer literatures from the region have the same responsibility? Or do you think they serve the community better by offering examples of positive queer living in the region? Or neither?

HNT: I disagree with your statement “Those involved in Caribbean queer activism, of course, tend to stress the worst conditions that Caribbean queers experience.” I think that if one lives in a society where his or her life is in danger because he or she identifies as homosexual, that fact must be emphasized. Carolyn Cooper’s apologies for homophobes³ were of no help to the people attacked at a funeral a few years ago because many of the mourners were thought to be gay. The so-called closeted gays (like [Rex] Nettleford) reify the larger community’s beliefs that to be homosexual is to be subnormal, and, as a columnist in The Jamaica Observer noted, Jamaicans expect them to be ashamed and to stay in the closet, “preferably a broom closet.”

In 1997 I was accosted by a homophobe in my birth village in St. Vincent. My half-brother, who was visiting from England, and I were coming from the nearby town and we stopped in at a shop at the entrance to the village to have something liquid, when this fellow came up to me and began pointing his fingers in my face while calling me fag and bullerman. To their credit the rum-drinkers in the shop asked him to leave me alone. He desisted when my brother grabbed him by the collar and showed him his balled fist. In this instance the rum-drinkers’ telling the aggressor to curb his behavior is not what needs to be stressed when recounting the danger affecting the lives of Caribbean homosexuals, but rather why this fellow felt he should assault me for my being gay.

Kofi: How do you see the relationship between Caribbean queer activism and Western queer activism?

HNT: First, it is very evident that “queer activism” in the “developed world” is undergirded by a profound understanding of democratic rights and values. It’s on this basis that gays can argue—sometimes successfully—that they are discriminated against. Democracy in the West Indies means nothing beyond the holding of elections every five years. The West Indian nations operate as if they are theocracies. When Britain ordered its Caribbean overseas departments to change their laws regarding homosexuality and capital punishment, they protested on the basis that they were Christian nations. Of course, they pick and choose what they wish to be Christian about, but laws, even when ecclesiastically enforced, have usually exempted the powerful. Who would have dared to stone King David to death for committing adultery? Instead rationalizations were concocted to shield it.

In the Caribbean there’s little attention paid to rights unless they are backed by power. It’s why the physical and verbal abuse of children, for example, is so rampant, and few West Indians see anything wrong with it. With what they claim is biblical justification, they sometimes beat children to the point of maiming them. When I was around ten my father told me I was lucky he did not kill me, that the Bible gave him the right to do so if he wished. That a person’s body is his/hers and is inviolate is an unknown concept in the West Indies. The magistrates in St. Vincent and the Grenadines frequently sentence youngsters to be flogged. In other words, our understanding of human rights is poor, and until that’s remedied, serious change will not take place.

Kofi: Do you, as a gay Caribbean, feel accepted in Western queer spaces? Are you able to be yourself, or do you often feel the need to perform your Caribbean-ness? Or the need to perform your queerness in a more visible way (for example, one of Elwin’s contributors writes “if I go into a bar in a dress, high-heels, and make-up, there is an assumption I am heterosexual, bisexual, or a fag hag. If a white woman goes in the bar in a dress and make-up, she is called a ‘lipstick lesbian’ ”)?

HNT: In the atmosphere of white supremacy in which Europeans and Euro-Americans (I interpret Western to mean this) are socialized, it’s inevitable that they have set functions for non-Whites. This is no different in LGBT communities. There Black males embody the role of Priapus. For the first 19 years I lived in Montreal (1968– 1988), I refused to be sexually involved with White men. I modified my stance during the 18 years I lived in Quebec City, since it was impossible to encounter Black gay men there. For the last five years—my years back in Montreal—my partner has been Haitian.

My philosophy as regards such decisions is simple: I won’t carry any more burdens than I need to. One of the two serious relationships I had in Quebec was especially painful in this regard. Among other things, this partner asked me to forget that I was/am Black, at a time when I was enraged over the police shooting of a psychiatrically ill man. His father constantly made racist comments. He termed them jokes. “Sais-tu ce que c’est un plan nègre? Une affaire qui ne fonctionne pas.”⁴ His sister was always complaining of working like a nigger and earning the wages of a nigger.

That said, my closest Black friend has been in a relationship with a White man for over 30 years, and it is a relationship that seems free of the racist piffle that so many of us find annoying. I have also watched another friend, White, outgrow his own unconscious racism. He is now in what seems to be a mutually respectful relationship with a West African.

Kofi: One of the major points of contention between Western queer activists and Caribbean queers is the question of the origin of sexual preference. Western activists insist that sexuality is innate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgment
• Introduction
• 1. H. Nigel Thomas
• 2. Thomas Glave
• 3. Faizal Deen Forrester
• 4. Korey Anthony Chisholm
• 5. Patricia Powell (1)
• 6. Patricia Powell (2) A Search for Caribbean Masculinities
• 7. Helen Klonaris
• 8. Shani Mootoo
• 9. Mista Majah P
• 10. Rosamond S. King
• 11. Nalo Hopkinson
• 12. Erin Greene
• 13. Joel Simpson
• 14. Ryon Rawlins
• Notes
• Index