Notes Introduction 1. Most critical material on Columbus’s “Matinino” concerns itself with studying the possible sources for Columbus’s claim about its inhabitants. Those who exam- ine the Amerindian sources include Astrid Steverlynck, who studies, from an anthropological, archeological perspective, the “reality” of all-female societies in the Americas prior to Columbus’s arrival, and William F. Keegan, who turns to Taino mythology to understand the symbolism of “Matinino.” Julius Olson and Edward Bourne’s annotations of Columbus’s letters cite both Marco Polo and Arawak myths recorded by later explorers as sources for Columbus’s “Matinino.” A few critics such as Peter Mason consider Columbus’s description of the women of “Matinino” in the context of his view of native bodies and gender roles in the New World. 2. Albrecht Rosenthal cites the myth of all-female Amazon societies from classi- cal Greek literature in support of his argument that “many of the merveilles encountered by Marco Polo, Mandeville, Columbus, and other travelers reveal themselves ...as being conscious or unconscious reminiscences of stories related in the romances and chronicles which shaped the medieval conception of distant lands” (257). 3. As might be expected, the most well-known Caribbean theories, such as those of Glissant, Fanon, James, Walcott, and Benítez-Rojo, either do not mention desire between women at all or else do so primarily to dismiss it. The work of Patricia Mohammed, Evelyn O’Callaghan, Gloria Wekker, and M. Jacqui Alexander, although at times limited by identitarian discourses to poles of unification and marginalization, initiated critical recognition of desire between women in the Caribbean. While more recent studies attend to gender and sexuality in more sub- tle ways, they still overwhelmingly treat desire between women as an embattled other opposed to a heterosexual norm. Caribbean sexuality receives a new kind of treatment in a series of publications in the second decade of the twenty-first century, including books by Thomas Glave, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Faith Smith, Mimi Sheller, Donette Francis, and Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley. Tinsley’s book and this one, as well as a special issue of Contemporary Women’s Writing on 158 ● Notes Caribbean queer, are the first to take as the primary focus desire between women in Caribbean literature. 4. Activism and scholarship overlap and intersect in this area, as O’Callaghan makes clear when she observes that “there has been an increase in the number of locally informed academics, teachers, LBGT activists, health and social workers, lawyers, artists, and students who recognize that engaging with queer theory and writing makes possible difficult but important discussions” (“Sex,” 233). See also Denise deCaires Narain and Emily Taylor for incisive articulations of the intersections of Caribbean and queer studies. 5. In one of the most recent and exhaustive biological studies, The Biology of Mangroves and Seagrasses, Peter Hogarth explains, At the level of the individual tree, mangroves show complex adaptive struc- tural and physiological responses to the immediate environment, particularly to physical factors such as salinity ...At a larger scale, local variations in these physical factors help to determine the overall structure of the mangrove forest. Such local variations, and the structure of the forest, are profoundly affected by the environmental setting in which it grows. Finally, the species present are a subset of those available in the geographical region, so over-riding biogeographical factors must be taken into account. (49) 6. I did not learn of Tinsley’s work until 2009, when I was already well into this book project; the difference in the texts I selected for study develops not out of a wish to cover things she did not but out of a coincidental turn to other texts. In the one novel that we, coincidentally, both consider, Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis martiniquaise, the difference in our readings of that text—Tinsley’s focus is on the anticolonial qualities of the story and on the biographical and historical questions surrounding the author and text, while I focus on the imaginative and idealizing qualities of the first half of the story and on the intertextual and critical contexts of the book—shows that not only are there a wealth of texts to be read with attention to their representations of desire between women, but each of these can be understood through a wealth of readings. 7. Similarly, when Denis deCaires Narain explores the valences of queer and the pos- sibilities of other terms, she suggests “that a creolizing interpretive practice might be more historically and culturally attuned to the particular proliferation and intersection of differences in the Caribbean than a queering one” and that termi- nology such as “creolizing” “might also avoid the anxiety attendant on inclusion that causes Donnell to hesitate over ‘queer’ as an ‘imported’ category and take us further toward the more ‘affirmative term’ she seeks” (196, emphases in original). 8. Evelyn O’Callaghan explores what I am calling the betweenness of desire between women in “Sex, Secrets, and Shani Mootoo’s Queer Families,” where she analyzes desire as transforming the individual subject into a relational subject, and desiring as always being in relation to others. 9. Donnell (2012: 224) exemplifies thinking outside of sexuality as identity in her analysis of Shani Mootoo’s Valmiki’s Daughter as she argues that Notes ● 159 by focusing on lives that are so clearly messy, compromised, and incomplete, yet vibrant, pleasurable and rewarding, Valmiki’s Daughter reaches beyond an imagined extension of sexual normalization (in which homosexual subjects enter into marriage, child rearing, and so on) to provoke an acknowledgment of pervasive queerness and to question the identity-making. 10. Other terms include zamiez in St Lucia, malnomme in Dominica, jamette in Trinidad, man royal in Jamaica, wicca in Barbados, kambrada in Curaçao, and tuerca, parcha, bombero, capitán,andgeneral in Cuba. 11. Smith (2011: 9) also points out that it is important to maintain “a suspicion about the liberatory capacity of Creole speech” for “while it has been used to draw the line between fluent insiders and clueless outsiders, ...Creole speech is a repository for sexual slurs and sexual violence.” 12. O’Callaghan importantly notes that although “The ‘ideal’ nuclear, the extended, or the noncoresidential kinship network models appear to maintain a relatively unremarked coexistence” both in regular practice and in literary figurations, “Caribbean discourses on the preferred forms of sexual relationships and family life ...tend to be strongly prescriptive and endorse traditional [heteronormative] notions of what is ‘natural’ ” (2012: 236). 13. Derek Walcott offers the image of the Caribbean as broken or cut apart and glued or pasted back together in Fragments of Epic Memory. Glissant argues for opacity and a relation as integral to Caribbean poetics throughout his writings, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo develops a theory of The Repeating Island. 14. This work is becoming so widespread that I cannot list it all here, but it includes the novels of Gisèle Pineau, Shani Mootoo, Nalo Hopkinson, Magali García Ramis, Mayra Santos-Febres, and many of the contributors to Thomas Glave’s anthology Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles. 15. In a section of Black Skin, White Masks that compares the treatment of blacks to the treatment of Jews, Fanon cites Henri Baruk’s descriptions of “anti-Semitic psychoses.” In one of Baruk’s cases, a man accuses Jews of homosexuality. The following is what Fanon annotates it with: Let me observe at once that I had no opportunity to establish the overt presence of homosexuality in Martinique. This must be viewed as the result of the absence of the Oedipus Complex in the Antilles. The schema of homosexuality is well enough known. We should not overlook, however, the existence of what are called there “men dressed like women” or “godmoth- ers.” Generally they wear shirts and skirts. But I am convinced that they lead normal sex lives. They can punch like any “he-man” and they are not imper- vious to the allures of women—fish and vegetable merchants. In Europe, on the other hand, I have known several Martinicans who became homosexuals, always passive. But this was by no means a neurotic homosexuality: for them it was a livelihood, as pimping is for others. (180) 160 ● Notes 16. Sommer describes as one of her underlying concerns the ways in which naturalized heterosexual romance is a figure for nation formation in mid- nineteenth-century Latin America. As Sommer develops this analysis in her book Foundational Fictions, she also reveals the assumption of singularly heterosexual romance in the theorists with whom she engages, notably Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm. René Girard’s analysis of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel sim- ilarly offers a key reading of romance plots but that insists on an assumption of heterosexuality. 17. For critiques of the hetero-patriarchy of the créolistes, see A. James Arnold’s “The Gendering of Créolité” and Price and Price’s “Shadowboxing in the Mangrove.” Even Chamoiseau, in his reading of Condé’s Traversée de la mangrove, acknowl- edges that the Caribbean literary figuration of desire and sexuality ought to not to be hetero-patriarchal, writing, “we have a literature to build on love, and ...we have to build it in unprecedented terms, far from French/Western patterns” (391). 18. Mangroves are considered native throughout the tropical zone. The original distribution of mangroves dates back to the Paleocene through the Miocene epochs, at which point tectonic distribution was different than it is now; current mangrove distribution is the result of tectonic shifts and the increasing cooling of the earth throughout the Pleistocene epoch, which limited a once much larger distribution to the Tropics.