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  • Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature
  • Danielle Carlotti-Smith
Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley . Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010. 288 pp.

"Brown Sugar," the opening track from the Rolling Stones album "Sticky Fingers," became an instant success on the music charts in Britain and the U.S. in 1971, despite an unsavory concoction of controversial themes such as the rape of African women slaves by their white masters, sadomasochism, cunnilingus, pedophilia, and drug use. Mick Jagger would later regret the "raw[ness]" of those lyrics, stating that he would "never write that song now." In Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley moves beyond the traditional cadre of such violent, exotic, heteropatriarchal New World narratives in order to recuperate the stories of Caribbean women who love women, showing how through solidarity and seduction, women work, write, and woo each other in the Caribbean.

Colonial narratives have the tendency to feminize landscape, as Annette Kolodny, most notably, demonstrated in terms of the North American continent in her pioneering study, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (1975). Portrayed in postures of "feminized passivity" (16), these foreign landscapes and the women who inhabit them become objects of conquest and normative heterosexual colonial desire, their contours overlapping and blurring so that the two become conflated. A woman who is part of the landscape does not engage with her environment or shape it (it really is not hers); she, like the land, is explored, exploited, penetrated, and "revealed" by and for the implicitly male colonial gaze. Rather than merely denouncing the manifold ways in which the Caribbean [End Page 399] woman is objectified and exoticized in colonial literary and visual culture, Tinsley examines how Caribbean women poets and novelists reclaim their subjectivity by re-imagining traditional landscape metaphors, thus rearticulating their relationship to each other and their natural environment.

Thiefing Sugar might best be described as an exercise in reconfiguration: of representation and perception; of eroticism, sexuality, and gender; and of the relationships between Caribbean women of color and their environment. In her ambitious and wide-ranging introduction, Tinsley draws the reader's attention to a painting by the Spanish artist Agostino Brunias, "Three Caribbean Washerwomen by a River" (circa 1770-1780), which serves as the ideal visual evocation for her multipronged inquiry into the confluence of the natural landscape, labor, and sexuality in the communal life of women in the Caribbean. (The image also appears on the book's cover.) Treating the image as a type of palimpsest upon which are inscribed shifting layers of meaning, she succeeds in providing historical, cultural, racial, and economic contexts for decoding colonial representations of Caribbean women's sexuality and its ties to manual work (the legacy of slavery) while also suggesting discursive strategies for re-envisioning an alternative and more fluid poetics of both space and eroticism for the postcolonial era. Fully absorbed in each other's presence yet blissfully unaware of their observer (the artist? the white patron who commissioned the painting?), Brunias's washerwomen entice Tinsley into acts of poetic license and creative inquiry that ultimately lead to the effacement of the presumed white male viewer altogether. Once the scene has been reclaimed for the washerwomen in the painting, Tinsley sets out to re-imagine how these women might both view and interact with each other and their natural surroundings to capture what the Haitian writer Jacques Roumain called "the spring of [a woman's] look," an expression that conveys the inextricable relationship between a feminized landscape (in anthropomorphic terms) and a woman whose attributes in turn invite comparison to nature. Tinsley argues, however, that when deployed by women writers who love women, metaphors of landscape and sexuality shed the oppressive qualities of colonial and masculinist discourses, and serve instead as instruments of women's "erotic decolonization" (23).

Inspired by the novel In Another Place, Not Here (1997) by the Trinidadian writer Dionne Brand, the title Thiefing Sugar refers simultaneously to an illicit act in which cane cutters steal sugarcane from the plantations where they work—and thus, break the...

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