Thiefing Sugar Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature (review)

According to Caribbean theorists, the lives and history of West Indian people are irremediably linked to a tormented landscape which reflects natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, or more commonly hurricanes. In Thiefing Sugar, Omise’ke Nastasha Tinsley uses the very notion of landscape as she applies it to her analysis of “Women loving Women” in Caribbean Literature. This is quite a daring move since eroticism between women is still considered taboo and vastly unexplored throughout these insular regions. Hence this book undoubtedly adds a valuable contribution to this field of interest and expertise.

The author accurately points out the colorful plethora of terms used to describe Queerness in this multilingual Caribbean panoramic view. She challenges established interpretations by claiming that women use their sexuality as an act of resistance. Women slaves reposition themselves from asexual to objects of desire, a (re)conciliation of sex and body. I must vehemently disagree, however, with Tinsley’s re-reading of Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant’s In Praise of Creoleness, and her erroneous oversight of the French créolité. “La créolité,” a feminine substantive, is not gender neutral in the manifesto; it does not encompass feminine gender. In fact, it does just the opposite since it favors a patriarchal elitist Diaspora that completely overlooks women writers. In recent years, the theorists have recanted this viewpoint, and they have now acknowledged a few women as part of their movement. Women had certainly been excluded from the various manifestoes of the 1980s and 1990s,¹ but the movement has since then expanded to creolization which includes other Francophone regions that do not solely reflect the West Indian experience.

After clearly explaining the significance of her title to open the dialogue with her reader and create a new set of poetics and politics, Tinsley attempts to recover the (lost) voices of Surinamese women by underscoring that lesbianism primarily belonged to a White world. She provides an insightful ethnographic and historical description of women in Paramaribo and their relationships in an urban setting. Tropes of women as tropical flowers imagery were assimilated to the images of slaves and wives. The author indicates that same-sex lovers and maroons (slaves that escaped the plantations) received the same punishment from the Dutch settlers. We learn that birthday parties in Suriname gradually became venues for lesbianism in that they led to religious rites. Her initial chapter constitutes a cunning interpretation of hybrid gender as well as complex contemporaneous stances in Surinam.

Tinsley comfortably weaves historical facts to current reality as she pursues her second chapter on Eliot bliss’s Luminous Isle. She mixes journalistic information with literary examples topped with a flavorful historical touch. According to the author, at the dawn of the twentieth century, white women poets in Jamaica labored to reproduce whiteness in their work, rendering it asexual at times. Furthermore, she points out that interracial relationships started taking place with an anti-colonial undertone. It was the time for black and white women to become accomplices, thereby transcending the Master and servant dialectic which was still in place. Tinsley draws a parallel in Luminous Isle between the main characters, Emma and Rebekkah, and their failures as they are made neither black nor white but mestizas.

The reader continues his/her journey through the Caribbean islands with a stop in Haiti and its look at homosexuality, a practice which is sometimes accepted, sometimes hidden, and as opaque as Glissant’s theory. Tinsley takes us through Ida Faubert’s floral metaphors to describe eroticism between women. This literary effect designates a cercle femina. The participation of Faubert’s poetry at the exposition universelle and the first appearances of women of color in 1889 add valuable historical information. Yet Tinsley’s reading of Faubert’s poetry and her assumption that the poet addresses another female because she uses the French “vous” appears to be an unfounded and results in a particularly bold postmodern reading of this poetry. Faubert seems to address an undetermined gender while she plays...