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  • The Operations of the Closet and the Discourse of Unspeakable Contents in Black Fauns and My Brother
  • Jennifer Rahim (bio)

This paper examines the operations of the closet in two historically distant texts from the English-speaking Caribbean: Alfred Mendes's Black Fauns (1935) and Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother (1997).1 These books are more than sixty years apart and are very different in terms of their plots and styles. Yet they intersect in their thematic explorations of sexual identities that do not conform to the heterosexual norm. Mendes's novel is a representative of the Trinidadian "anti-establishment" fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, dubbed barrack-yard literature.2 The novel is quite radical for its time, having a lesbian or bisexual relationship as central to the complications of the plot. Kincaid's memoir chronicles the death of her brother Devon from AIDS-associated complications in homophobic Antigua. My Brother belongs in the new generation of Caribbean literature that has brought to the table the turbulent geography of sexuality, and openly challenges myths of normative heterosexuality.3 Not surprisingly, both [End Page 1] texts represent same-sex desire as repressed social content and therefore function as fertile discursive fields for a reading of the socio-psychic mechanisms that reproduce the ontological displacement of homosexual persons as legitimate human subjects.

The phenomenon of the closet is of particular interest in this regard. In the context of this essay, it is approached as a social structure engendered and maintained by the stigma attached to same-sex orientation as a mark of deviant or subhuman "nature." While for some the concealment of sexual identity functions as a necessary space of survival against the fear of discrimination and rejection, the closet is primarily understood as a prison house of privacy or a disciplinary apparatus, ideologically and legally enforced by a heterosexist culture to justify the exclusion of same-sex orientation from "real" or legitimate human experience. This is not to say that coming out is the remedy against discrimination and exclusion. While it is a proactive insistence on presence, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that visibility can become the impetus for the recovery of the ideological effects of prejudicial binaries that make the closet a resilient "shaping presence" in social life. The decision to reenter to whatever degree remains a necessary option given the "deadly elasticity of heterosexist presumption" that requires "new draughts and requisitions of secrecy or disclosure."4

Debates on social equity and sexual orientation have been more intense and accessible to a wider world audience than ever before. Further, the AIDS pandemic has forced a global confrontation with the issue of sexual identity and practice given that it is now appropriate to say that every human being can be categorised as "living" with the virus. It is no news that the Caribbean is second to sub-Saharan Africa in the prevalence of the disease. This, coupled with a traditional reticence about engaging the truths of human sexual life, is certainly a recipe for disaster. The region and the world at large cannot afford to ignore the matter. Neither the reproduction of heterosexism nor silence proves a productive response to this crisis that offers opportunity for serious consideration of the ways in which the human condition has been understood. By exploring the authors' treatment of issues relevant to persons of nonheterosexual orientations, this paper seeks to invite dialogue on the question of sexual identities and the nature of being human on the one hand, and the more difficult issue of discerning the boundaries of acceptable, responsible sexual practice on the other.

Even today, discussing sexuality in the Caribbean proves to be a most difficult undertaking that is more often than not policed by a host of insecurities and prejudices. The region has neither a very long nor a very secure tradition in the cultural and literary discourses that treat nonheterosexual matters in particular. This general absence of public representation on issues [End Page 2] concerning sexuality is not at all surprising in light of the politics of disinterest and suspicion that marks the Caribbean's track record on sexism battles, beginning with feminist activism. For instance in the 1990 preface to...

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