Kunapipi XXVII:1

ROBERTO STRONGMAN
Development and Same-Sex Desire in Caribbean Allegorical Autobiography: Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John and Lucy

The representation of gay and lesbian sexualities in the Caribbean began receiving much attention in US popular culture when, on May 24, 1998, a New York Times article cited The Cayman Islands’ Minister of Tourism as having said he had denied docking rights to a Norwegian Cruise Line ship that was chartered as a gay cruise because ‘a ship chartered by gay tourists came to the Cayman Islands in 1987, and the visitors’ public displays of affection offended many residents’ (McDowell 3). The exclusion of these gay and lesbian tourists from the Cayman Islands illustrates a certain theoretical representation of the Caribbean as devoid of a space for alternative sexualities. This has been remarked by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé who, in his reading of Peau noire, masques blancs, points out how Fanon ‘banish(es) all discussion of Martinican homosexuality to the footnotes of his text’ (139).

In response to Fanon’s brief footnote on ‘l’absence de l’Oedipe aux Antilles’ (146) and the general marginalisation of the topic of Caribbean same-sex desire, in ‘Not Just (Any)Body Can be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas’, M. Jacqui Alexander studies the interconnectedness between West Indian nationalism and homophobia by examining how, after the achievement of political independence in the Bahamas and Trinidad and Tobago, West Indian ‘Black nationalist masculinity needed to demonstrate that it was now capable of ruling, which is to say, it needed to demonstrate moral rectitude’ (9) and, in so doing, naturalise heterosexuality through legislation. This naturalisation of heterosexuality has resulted in the coding of same-sex desire as a foreign element and as an invader from the first world — the turning away of gay cruises re-enacting Carib and Arawakan arrows against European battleships.

These exclusions necessitate an investigation of discourses of local Caribbean homosexualities and the ways in which they intersect with the moral Caribbean state and the globalisation of gay and lesbian identities. The coming-of-age narrative appears to be a pertinent place within which to examine these competing discourses as it contains aspects of sexual maturation in relation to larger social structures and allegiances. Unlike white Euro-North American coming-of-age/coming-out narratives such as those in Bennet Singer’s anthology Growing up Gay and Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, coming-of-age narratives by queer people of colour from outside the industrialised first world are multiply modulated by discourses other than those of sexuality. As Gayatri Gopinath notes in her comparison of Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story — a gay coming-of-age story in the US in the fifties — and Sri Lankan-Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai’s novel Funny Boy:

Unlike White’s text, where sexuality is privileged as the singular site of radical difference and the narrator’s sole claim to alterity, sexuality in Funny Boy is not one but many discourses — such as those of ethnic identity and forced migration — all of which speak to multiple displacements and exiles (134).