Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination

5. One Love? Caribbean Men and White Women

161 5 One Love? Caribbean Men and White Women Caribbean men of color are largely portrayed in the Caribglobal imagination as heteronormative, patriarchal heroes. This is true in historical narratives of Great Men who fought or defeated slavery (for example, Toussaint L’OuvertureandCuffy),colonialism(EricWilliams,FrantzFanon,andJosé Martí), or imperialism (Che Guevera and Maurice Bishop). It is also true in themostlyhypermasculinemusictraditionsdiscussedinthepreviouschapter and in Caribbean literary texts, especially those written before around 1975, when significantly more literature by Caribbean women began to be published along with a more diverse range of Caribbean men’s literature. This reification of the Caribbean man is a relatively recent phenomenon, since it is directly connected to Caribbean people having some political self-determination and some control over the region’s cultural narratives and products. During the hundreds of years after Christopher Columbus became fabulously lost and before the era of flag independence, Europeans dominated the portrayals of Caribbean people—and those depictions were rarely positive. Those portrayals helped create the stereotypes of the “Latin Lover,” the “Docile Indian,” and the “Black Stud” that persist to this day. The reification of the Caribbean male hero coexists uneasily with the politicalandsocioeconomicrealitiesthesemenhelpedtoshape.Inrelationshiptotheserealities ,RaphaelDalleodocumentsseveralcontemporaneous events as follows: “Cuba’s epic failure in 1970 to produce a large enough sugar harvest to break free of international economic hierarchies, the Central Intelligence Agency-funded opponents of Michael Manley’s ‘We Are 162 · I s l a n d B o d i e s Not for Sale’ campaign launching a virtual civil war in Jamaica leading to his electoral defeat in 1980, and finally the overturning of Grenada’s revolutionary government by U.S. Marines in 1983 appeared to mark the futility of a truly independent Caribbean.”1 To this we can add the U.S. American troops sent to “stabilize” Haiti in 1994, as well as the failure of several Dutch territoriestoobtainincreasedsovereigntyuntilthetwenty-firstcentury,and the persistent political dependence of other Caribbean entities, including the French Antilles and Puerto Rico. Dalleo is correct to read these events as the failure of “true” Caribbean independence. But they can also be seen as a spectacular failure of male leadership, if not of Caribbean masculinity , especially as the 1970s and ’80s also saw the bourgeoning of Caribbean feminism and the beginning of the perceived “decline” of Caribbean men’s dominance. The texts examined here take place just before and just after the time period Dalleo delineates, reflecting the optimism of the independence eraandthecynicismand povertythatfollowedit,andinbothcasesportraying sex with white women as a way to reinforce Caribbean masculinity. Interracial relationships between Caribbean men of color and white women appear regularly in Caribbean history, film, and literature. Rhoda Reddock writes that “interethnic relations in these societies are often expressed as a contest among men, where control of political power and the state serves to legitimize claims of citizenship and becomes a symbol of ‘manhood.’”2 This is also true in the diaspora, where a man of color’s hombr ía (manhood) may be questioned due to economics, racism, and/or xenophobiaandwherewhitewomencanthemselvesbephysicallydominated while also serving as a metaphorical if temporary conquest of white men. This chapter focuses on the racialized erotic affairs between Caribbean men of color and white women, recognizing that an “absence of interrogating white female sexual desire in the Caribbean renders invisible the workings of white female power.”3 It begins with an introduction to stereotypes of both white women and men of color, and then examines how those stereotypes are imbricated in male sex work with female tourists in two very different feature films, The Lunatic (1991, directed by Lol Crème) and Vers le sud/Heading South (2005, directed by Lauren Cantet), set in Haiti and Jamaica , respectively. Scholar Donette Francis has written that “such interracial intimacies [between white women and black men] have been central to many twentieth-century, anticolonial narratives of male writers,” and three texts portraying interracial relationships—The Mimic Men (1967), “How to Caribbean Men and White Women · 163 Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl or Halfie” (1995), and Comment faire l’amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer/How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired (1985/1987/2010)—will be discussed in the following section. Finally, the chapter describes three Caribbean men and their relationships with white women: icons of Caribbean masculinity Porfirio Rubirosa and Bob Marley, as well as the lesser-known Surinamese World War II resistor Waldemar Nods. The title...