Voyages across Indenture: From Ship Sister to Mannish Woman

CARIBBEAN LESBIANS DO NOT EXIST. So we are told. . . . Of course, Caribbean lesbians do exist. As soon as I write this—as soon as I say it—I am attacked and dismissed: not my existence, but my authenticity as a Caribbean person and whether or not I have a legitimate claim on that identity. . . . How does a living, breathing, loving person prove her existence? And why should she have to?

—Rosamond King

In much of the Anglophone Caribbean, homosexuality is both legislatively illegal and viewed by the general public and government officials as a product of “colonial influence”—an antisocial import allegedly propagated by white tourists and foreign media—even as antigay colonial Anglican religiosity, imported US evangelical values, and British Victorian constitutional laws became naturalized postcolonially as “Caribbean.” Many vociferous Caribbean cultural purists also conveniently forget that they and the Caribbean itself are in and of the West. In a typical Guyanese Stabroek News letter to the editor, one significantly named “Abu Bakr,” speaking on behalf of Muslim Indo-Guyanese and by extension the whole country, wrote in 2010:

We are assured that in India and Africa our folks were, before the Westerners imposed their alien laws, happily sodomising each other without let or hindrance. We are therefore to be persuaded of the liberating virtues of deviation from the natural order. The argumentation is false, the ethnology contrived. If anything at all the current advocates of gay rights are examples of a neo-colonialist tendency to mimic every fad and fashion that is born in the former metropoles. Gays soldered themselves onto the human rights wagon in the West. . . . We have got to ensure that we live in a clean world.¹

As is necessary for the aspiring second coming of the caliph, Bakr is well versed in the rhetoric of imperial metropole and periphery. Homophobia in the Caribbean is rather more about citizenship and national belonging than it is about ignorance or even religiosity. Frantz Fanon (2008: 157–58n44) himself argued in 1967 that while male transvestites existed in Martinique and the Caribbean, “in Europe, on the other hand, I have known several Martinicans who became homosexuals, always passive.” Colonialism and the inferiority complex of the colonized in Europe—Fanon says it is there that Martinicans are exposed to the Oedipus complex—thus create Caribbean homosexuals, who repeat history as “passive” partners to white men (ibid.). Nadia Ellis (2015: 896) shows that in this Fanonian moment at the end of colonialism, “any intersection in the analysis between race and homosexuality left the black queer figure shadowy, unformed, at just the moment when the white ‘homosexual,’ as a clearly defined subject, was coming into view.” Afro-Caribbean men who migrated to postwar Britain were viewed as either heterosexual predators of white women or “vulnerable prey” who could be “swept away by the city streets and corrupted by decrepit, malingering English men” (ibid.: 896). The Caribbean’s insistent transnationalism and paradoxical rooting in migrancy was a sexual and political danger for the colonial man aspiring to postcoloniality: if travel to the European metropole made one a homosexual, symbolically and bodily disciplined by yet another dominant white man, one had better stay put and focus on building a new nation an ocean away. Eudine Barriteau (2003: 11) rightly argues that the resulting “male marginalization thesis,” which paints Caribbean men as eternal victims whose masculinity must be restored by the postcolonial state, is a particular stumbling block for Caribbean feminism and does a general disservice to the complexity of gender roles in the global south. The discursive weakness of positioning Caribbean male sexuality as dependent on European victimization is exploited on the conservative side of the political spectrum by Bakr and his bigoted cohorts, who echo the belief in the colonial creation of homosexuality but have also cottoned on to a fundamental truth of Joseph Massad’s classic analysis of the insidiousness of the “Gay International”: that LGBTQ issues are framed globally in terms of Western neoliberal human rights discourse, to the detriment of indigenous forms of self-expression and activism. Indo-Guyanese and Indo-Caribbean culture...