A Transnational Feminist Reading of Two Spoken Word Poets

Home , Dub poetry, Staceyann Chin, Stop Murder Music

Queering the Nation: a Transnational Feminist Reading of two Spoken Word Poets

piKe krpan

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Masters of Arts Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education University of Toronto

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piKe krpan

Master of Arts

Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education University of Toronto

2008 Abstract

This thesis analyzes the performance poetry of diasporic Jamaicans Staceyann Chin and d'bi young to comment on narratives of sexualized citizenship in the United States, Canada and

Jamaica. In contrast to the picture of Jamaica's homophobic violence as hyper(hetero)sexual offered by gay activists, media and travel narratives in the North, Chin and young's work suggests the complexity of Jamaican sexual cultures within a history of slavery and colonialism.

I interpret their art as critical commentary on how queer communities in the North are not always oppositional to heteronormative state practices, but sometimes work to uphold and sustain practices of neoimperialism. Mobilizing concepts of erotic power and autonomy, I suggest that

Chin and young articulate embodied countermemories of desire, self-love and self-in-community that combat the long-term silence imposed on speaking about black women's sexualities, both in

Jamaica and in the North. Acknowledgments

I never thought I could produce a piece of writing of this scope. I think it is because I didn't really do it by myself. I had no idea how much support I would get from the following people: my mom Helen Wright for supporting me no matter what I do; my sister Laurena Newman and my nephews for conversations about waterslides, Kraft Dinner and the weather when schoolwork was too intense; my partner Jay Kiff, who nursed me through late-night panic attacks and gave me the right kinds of drugs; friends AH Sauer, Sarah Kardash, Ariella Meinhard, Cory Legassic,

Christian Durand, Nicole Hopp, Margo St. Amour, EJ Shu, Moheb Soliman, Kate Cairns, Karen

Petkau, David Servos, Lisa Uyede, Suzanne Dietrich, Griffin Epstein, Thea Lim, Darryl Leroux,

Deb Wise-Harris, Tim Groves, Rachel Matlow, Sarah Lamble, Loree Erickson, Jen McMullen,

Chanelle Gallant, Victoria Kannen, Lindsay Shane, Ajamu Nangwaya, and the members of d'bi.young's women's writing group for constant encouragement, distraction, and loving and politicized community; my supervisor Alissa Trotz and my committee member M. Jacqui

Alexander, for relentless critique and for taking on my project in times of transition; other professors Sheryl Nestel, J. Edward Chamberlin, Rinaldo Walcott, Kari Dehli and Heather Sykes who critiqued and praised my work in progress. Thank you all, and no, there's no PhD!

in Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction: How I came to this work 1 Chapter 2: Imagining Jamaican Women in the Queer Diaspora 10 2.1 Queering the Nation, Queering the Diaspora 12 2.2 Respectable Sexualities: Here, There and Everywhere 18 2.3 Performing the Word: Transnational Oral Performance Cultures 28

Chapter 3: The Most Homophobic Country on Earth? Jamaica and the Construction of Hyper(hetero)sexuality 34 3.1 The Racialization of Violence: Global Gay Media on Jamaica's Homophobia.. .38 3.2 Conflating Violence: Danger to Tourists, or Danger to Jamaicans? 43 3.3 Same-Sex Marriage and Sexual Respectability in Canada 49 3.4 The Conditions of Silence: Black Women's Sexuality 50 3.5 Sexual Exceptionalism: Gay Around the World 54 3.6 Homophobia and National Identity in Neocolonial Jamaica 58 3.7 Conclusion 63

Chapter 4: Breaking Silence on Sexuality: Mapping the Erotic in the Poetry of Staceyann Chin 65 4.1 Uses of Erotic Power and Autonomy 70 4.2 Chin's Vision of Transnational Erotic Community 76 4.3 "Chosen" Exile: Naming Homophobia, Naming Racism 79 4.4 The Other Side of Paradise 81 4.5 Accessing Respectable Sexuality: Coming to Gay Marriage 83 4.6 Speaking to Gay Power: Chin's Address at the Games 86

Chapter 5: Embodied Storytelling and Desire: d'bi.young's Countermemories of Loving 90 5.1 A Brief History of Dub: Word, Sound, Powah 94 5.2 From Folk to Dub: Questions of Language, Gender & Performance 99 5.3 blood.claat: Reclaiming an Erotic Vernacular 107 5.4 Approaching Erotic Autonomy via Self-Love 110 5.5 Countermemories: Remembering Alternative Futures via Biomythography 114

Chapter 6: Conclusion 123

Reference List 129

IV 1

Chapter 1: Introduction: How I came to this work

As a middle-class white woman growing up in small-town Canada, the Jamaica most available to me was mysterious and full of peril. This Jamaica was a timeless storybook of colonial adventure: awash with cruel and strange "natives," replete with luscious "natural" beauty, and thick with licentious piracy and possibility. This Jamaica was a faraway place that had little to do with me, except as a source of pleasure and excitement. When I began writing this thesis, colleagues, friends and family would ask me, why Jamaica? It was a profoundly important question because I had to undergo a particular and difficult journey to unpack the Jamaica of my upbringing. At times, I felt this thesis project was an extension of the anthropologist's colonial fascination with places not my own, a fascination often propped up by my undergraduate studies in the field of international development. I felt out of place, inappropriate, and intrusive in asking questions about communities I didn't feel wholly a member of. At other times, the project felt like an important way to unpack the silences around colonialism and racialization that came with coming to know my gender, race, sexuality and politics as a middle-class white queer woman.

During this journey, unraveling this powerful representation of Jamaica meant seeing how its exoticism and supposed distance from me does have something to do with me. This realization, that this project meant both self-confrontation and self-determination, produced a whole new set of feelings; I felt nervous, unsure, guilty, and shameful about my privilege to ask questions as a graduate student without any guaranteed benefit (and perhaps some real risks) to those artists I discuss in this project. These feelings were very different from the feelings of pleasure and self- worth that Jamaica had once promised me as a tourist and as a development worker. This discomfort felt like the right direction if I was serious about making a commitment to anti-racist pedagogy and queer liberation starting from within. Over time, my best answer to the question of 2 why Jamaica? became one that emphasizes the presence of that Jamaica, and many other

Jamaicas, in the North: in the fantasy of adventure and tourism promised to Canadian tourists; in the threat leveraged by reports of homophobic violence in Jamaica, or in the reports of Jamaican gangs here in Toronto; in the lives of migrant women workers exploited to make the Canadian economy function; in the performance work of Jamaicans who make Canada's culture, who are

Canadians, too. In this sense, Jamaica isn't so far from me at all. In fact, I began to see how my self-perception - my achievements, my self-worth, my loves, my dreams - were intensely connected to what kind of Jamaica was allowed to take up space in the Canadian imagination. In this introduction, I use my own story of coming to this awareness as an analytical map to the issues I examine in this thesis.

My Canadian undergraduate education in international development studies and women's studies left me feeling profoundly unsettled by the ways that these particular disciplines had

"disciplined" my learning, particularly in reference to race and racism. In development studies, my critical learning about the path to economic, social and cultural "progress" was often overshadowed by the desire of students in the program to gain the kind of education that would make them employable by state agencies such as the Canadian International Development

Agency. A mostly white faculty encouraged students to see race as a "social construct." But instead of encouraging questions about how a "social construct" held so much power to define where and how different Canadians lived and how the students studied the Global South, a mythologizing of race as somehow "not real" (or not based in empirical fact) allowed other analytic concepts to take precedence over race, such as gender, ethnicity, class or geopolitics. In women's studies, my education was marked by absences that came from a particular Canadian focus. Bent on understanding the legacy of the welfare state, this education interrogated the ways that the Canadian welfare state had regulated women's lives, but rarely encouraged examination 3 of how particular women came to be understood as Canadian in the first place. I graduated without knowing how to leverage or work through my discomfort in these issues. I sensed something was wrong, but how to make it right?

I uneasily began working organizing educational "awareness trips" for upper-middle- class high school students to urban areas of Kingston, Jamaica during their summer vacations. To deal with the profound inequities that working with a group of mostly white, middle-class

Canadian teenagers brought forward each day in Kingston, I insisted on the primacy of

"education exchange" to conveniently efface the privileges that enabled our team of Canadians to travel and to learn. I thought that these trips could be at least a small opening to work against the most common experience of Jamaica that these Canadian teenagers had access to: vacationing on Jamaica's north coast, having their hair braided and buying weed. Would their perception of Jamaica as an island paradise change if they instead spent their summers playing sports, reading and writing in children's homes and garbage dumps in Kingston? Would educational exchange through an ethic of "helping" provide a new path to solidarity with

Jamaicans, one that emphasized their right to self-determination? Soon enough, I realized that my constant insistence on the benefits of an educational approach revealed that I also felt profound discomfort in positioning the work of the NGO as somehow different from other kinds of tourism. Questions starting rising up without easy answers: Why were our trips attracting only a particular kind of high school student? What sort of innocence of power did the volunteers think they had by positioning their travel as "helping others"? What kind of satisfaction, even smugness, in their own self-worth and ability did their travel provide? Was this better or worse than the pleasure they'd get from lying on a beach in Montego Bay? What sort of Jamaica were the students really seeing? Were the images of violence and poverty in urban areas doing a different kind of work than I expected? 4

The idea of "helping Jamaicans help themselves" left little analytical room to suppose that the work the NGO was doing, educational and otherwise, might be contributing to deepening poverty and continuing Jamaica's subordination to richer countries. The language of self-help was obviously attractive to CIDA, who controlled the funding. Part of a general approach to development that relied on notions of independence and self-reliance, this development assistance justified intervention without taking on responsibility for how Canada and other nations had contributed to Jamaica's poverty and violence via the destabilization of its food markets and siphoning off its skilled labourers. The CIDA funding formulas emphasized

"deliverables" and "outcomes," indicative of the slow creep of market-oriented assessments of development work that didn't include freedom, community self-determination, and equity.

Neoliberal policy was here, too, not just in the rollback of state funding, structural adjustment schemes, and trade liberalization, but in the encouragement of individualized self-care and reliance so the state would no longer be expected to provide for its citizens.

The volunteers felt particularly "Canadian" in their desire to help, upholding a notion of

Canada as a primarily benevolent country. It was more difficult than I had imagined to disrupt this feeling of goodness from giving and helping, especially among young people working with

Jamaican children who loved having their attention. The young volunteers were expecting fun, excitement, and satisfaction from their time in Jamaica: not self-doubt, conflict and alienation.

With such an emphasis on their own sacrifice and goodness, I doubted I could begin asking myself and others to consider the admonition of activist group Colors of Resistance: "you will be needed in the movement when you realize that you are not needed in the movement."

My focus on the economic and political inequities of this situation, and their relationship to nationalist desire, was complicated further when on one such educational trip to Jamaica, I 5 became friend and lover to another Canadian trip leader. Her passion for teaching and global education impressed me, especially her commitment to building long-term connections with communities in Jamaica. Some of our primary community partners in Jamaica were very active church members, and our group often lodged in a convent run by Catholic nuns. To protect these community partnerships, we did not disclose our relationship to the Jamaicans we worked with.

A few years later, my lover and I had both moved on to other relationships, and she had found the woman she wished to marry. These two women together continued to lead trips of Canadian high school students to Jamaica. This time, our Canadian students were aware of their impending marriage, and discussed it at our Jamaican lodgings. The Catholic nuns overheard this discussion and decided to stop inviting our groups to stay with them. In response, our Canadian NGO posted the nuns a letter, stating our commitment to human rights for sexual minorities at a time when same-sex marriage had only recently been legalized in Canada.

The incident ended the working relationship between our Jamaican hosts and the

Canadian NGO; both parties felt they couldn't continue working with each other. I was surprised; the development organization had experienced significant racial, cultural, political and economic barriers in operating in Jamaica for 25 years. In this specific instance, the issue of sexuality divided us. Considering all these barriers, how did our organization decide that "their" beliefs about homosexuality were too different from our own? And conversely, how did the

Jamaicans come to the same conclusion about "us"?

While both groups had learned how to talk, at least in part, about the inequities between

"us" and "them" in terms of global economics, we had no common language on sexuality. If we had, I wonder if we could have been tempted to begin breaking down this idea of "us" and

"them" by examining our interdependence in a different and intimate way. The relationship 6 ending had something to do with that image of Jamaica as open for business and pleasure: in part, our inability to talk was due to our non-recognition of the sexualized and racialized aspects of this image. It would be too easy to decide the source of the conflict was Jamaica's reputation as "the most homophobic country on earth." Because of the tenacity of the opinions we held, influenced in no small part by globally circulating characterizations of homophobia in Jamaican dancehall music, reasoned and informed debate had been rendered impossible. The conversations that were possible thus far had already taken place in a context of asymmetrical power and I began to wonder on what common ground we had stood on thus far. This thesis is the most recent step I have taken in a life-long project of seeing how that conversation on homosexuality is structured by a long colonial history of sexual conquest, slavery, claims to respectability, state investment in heteropatriarchy and the growing power of white homonormativity via capitalism, all themes I explore in this thesis.

At the same time, I felt that this supposed "ending" of a relationship with people in

Jamaica presented a critical opportunity to understand how to better build community across borders that acknowledged power in more intimate ways. My experiences in learning about my queer identity led me to understand that my sexuality was not my own possession, but instead a mode of being dispossessed, "a way of being for another or by virtue of another" (Butler 2004a:

24). My dependence and vulnerability comes with personal risk, but also with the ability to manipulate the vulnerability of others. The simultaneous work of intimacy to create deep feelings of belonging and to potentially undo us is what Jackie Robinson calls "the crux of intimacy"

(2007: 126). In terms of power, my understanding of my vulnerability comes with a non- innocent awareness of my access to sexual legitimacy and respectability via my whiteness, class position and citizenship. For example, my ability to transgress women's sexual norms is intimately based on the historical establishment of those norms, when legal, economic, social and 7 political powers denied racialized women access to respectable sexuality. For example, I can choose to not be a good girl while black women, whose sexuality has long been represented as voracious and animalistic, never could be "good girls" to start with. Non-innocently seeing this vulnerable intimacy allowed me to begin moving through my experiences of white shame and guilt, emotions that had mired me in an ineffectual kind of self-examination for a long time in my development work. Through experiencing power and powerlessness in sexual play, through being an actor and acted upon, and experiencing the potential of speaking my own body's needs and desires, verbally and nonverbally, I was able to better understand my own power (and powerlessness) in addressing racism. I began to see how and when I used my claims to respectability - easy claims for me to make about my sexual life because of my race, class and nationality - as a structure of dominance. Noting the absence of racialized people from positions of authority to name and debate queer experience, I felt that the transnational movement to address homophobic violence in Jamaica was wrongheaded. After working in Jamaica, I began to see how the representations I encountered of Jamaican (sexual) cultures were painfully static in their uniform discussions of violence and oppression. In questioning these representations, as well as to understand homophobia and other violences in Jamaica, I have experienced a central dilemma in writing this thesis: how can I use my capacity to speak, nurtured by the conditions of queer visibility in Canada, economic prosperity, and racial privilege, to name the violences that happen as a result of those very conditions of modernity? In other words, how can I use the so- called "sexual freedom" I enjoy to understand its contingencies, its ways of making others

"unfree"? This thesis is a contribution to scholarship and action that critically engages the racialized terms of lesbian, queer and gay liberation and challenges these movements, particularly in the North, to rethink their connections to the violences of the past and present. 8

Chapter Two provides a critical introduction to the concept of queer diaspora, my transnational feminist methodology of envisioning Jamaica as an integral part of the North. I question the relentless colonial construction of black hyper(hetero)sexuality in Jamaica as violent. I instead turn the gaze to Canada and the United States, noting the increasing social and capital power of certain queer subjects to participate as citizens. I suggest that respectable sexualities in the North increasingly include certain homosexualities, and that there is traffic between neocolonial and neoimperial uses of respectable sexualities. I build a case for envisioning queer diaspora as a generative location from which to comment on narratives of

Caribbean sexuality. Last, I introduce embodied community practices such as spoken word, storytelling and theatre as critical sites of power to contest representations of Jamaican sexualities, particularly in their articulation of complex notions of self-determination, erotic autonomy and politicized community. In Chapter Three, I analyze the Stop Murder Music campaign against Jamaican dancehall artists and its accompanying media coverage, troubling the relationship between gay activism and gay tourism in the Caribbean. I ask, how is homophobia made to matter by the Stop Murder Music campaign? I question the supposed "sides" of the debate: gays in the North vs. homophobic Jamaica, instead noting how both nations assume citizenship based on respectable sexuality in order to silence black women's expression of their sexuality in both locations. In Chapters Four and Five, I turn to embodied cultural practices of spoken word, storytelling and theatre in the work of diasporic Jamaicans d'bi young and

Staceyann Chin. These chapters are detailed analyses of how two differently located black women poets reclaim their bodies and express desire, a challenge put forth by Evelynn

Hammonds (1997). Their heterogeneity suggests the presence of multiple narratives on the diversity of gay, lesbian and queer Jamaican cultures, challenging uniform pictures of homophobic violence. Chapter Four begins with a synopsis of Audre Lorde's essay on "Uses of 9

Erotic Power" and then an expansion into what M. Jacqui Alexander might mean by erotic autonomy. I use these concepts to understand Staceyann Chin's spoken word performances, particularly her work that positions Jamaica as "the other side of paradise." I also examine

Chin's challenge to queer communities of the North in her address to the Gay Games in Chicago in 2006. Chapter Five centers on d'bi young's dub poetry and theatre, Jamaican art forms that she has pushed beyond the possibilities imagined by her foremothers to explore sexuality, memory, and community. Beginning with an analysis of the ways in which Louise Bennett set the bar for working class women's embodied cultural performance in Jamaica, I turn to an exploration of d'bi young's use of Jamaican nation-language and her commitment to liberation via self-love in her plays blood.claat and androgyne. Chapter Six provides some conclusions about the necessity of erotic power and autonomy to envision new futures for the North and the

Caribbean. 10

Chapter 2:

Imagining Jamaican Women in the Queer Diaspora

May I begin with a few moments of transnational queer life in our modern times?

October 2007; Jamaican reggae artist Elephant Man's recently scheduled Toronto performance is cancelled due to the lobbying pressure of the Stop the Murder Music Canada campaign, who say his lyrics calling for the murder of gays and lesbians a hate crime. In a few short months, the campaign will suggest a Jamaican tourism boycott until its government produces apian to curb the homophobic violence on the island.

December 1997: When the Cayman Islands refuse docking privileges to a gay cruise, US and

British officials call it a human violation. Island officials claimed that gay vacationers could not be counted on to "uphold standards of appropriate behaviour, " and officials in neighboring

Caribbean countries echo their sentiment (no name, 1998).

September 2007:1 attend a performance ofArthouse Cabaret at Toronto's premiere gay and lesbian theatre, Buddies in Bad Times. The show is a sexy series of song and dance numbers, tracing the historical triumphs of Canadian and US gay and lesbian culture. Every member of the cast is white.

April 2007: Four black lesbians, dubbed the Newark Four, are convicted of assaulting a man who verbally and physically harassed them in New York's gay West Village. The judge brands them a "lesbian wolfpack" (Rubble 2008). Simultaneously, media reports circulate on conservative US media networks, warning of the rise of "gay gangs " in the US. 11

May 2008; Brian Golding, the Prime Minister of Jamaica, appears on the BBC television program Hard Talk. When questioned about the position of gays and lesbians in Jamaica, he suggests that they have no place in his government cabinet.

June 2006: at the Gay Games in Chicago, Jamaican spoken word poet Staceyann Chin delivers a speech-poem at the opening ceremonies, suggesting to her audience of thousands that "for all the landmarks we celebrate we are still niggers and faggots and minstrel references for jokes created on the funny pages of a heterosexual world" (Chin n.d.: 34). Her address is met with thunderous applause.

In providing these snapshot moments, I wish to draw attention to the complexities of queer desires, cultures, and subjects in the current postcolonial moment. What versions of global gay and lesbian culture are allowed to circulate? I suggest that although the conflicts described in these moments may seem recent and indicative of new global gay and lesbian sexual cultures, they are also structured by racialized, gender and sexual ideologies of the past. So often displaced from narratives of modernity, I reposition the Caribbean as a key site in the creation of sexual cultures of meaning, particularly queer culture. This thesis explores the performance work of poets Staceyann Chin and d'bi young to examine the circulation of transnational sexual cultures between the Caribbean and two countries in the North, Canada and the United States. By focusing on the cultural production of two diasporic Jamaican queer women, I invoke the

"spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures" (Pratt 1992: 7). Invoking this copresence suggests that queer bodies have always been part of the Caribbean, and that Caribbean bodies have always been part of the North; that heterosexuality can only exist in the presence of homosexuality, and that they are not necessarily 12 oppositional concepts. In so doing, I call into question any easy conceptual separation of the allegedly queer metropoles of the North and the colonial, homophobic periphery, suggesting that

"the supposedly impermeable borders of each national history no longer hold water and colonial histories always seep through, attached to the bodies and commodities that circulate through imperial systems" (Sheller 2003: 3). Like Grewal and Kaplan, I am interested in how to use the term transnational to make problematic the terms of center and periphery, in favour of seeing the lines that cut across them (1994: 13). How do these transnational queer identities interact with national discourses of freedom-loving, decolonization and liberation? Examining the performance work of d'bi young and Staceyann Chin, I focus on women's embodied knowledge as a conduit to understanding the power relations of desire, migration, and nation, but also as a path to reimagining transnational countermemories of resistance, loving, and self. This thesis understands embodied poetry as a generative site of conflict, pain and violence, but also full of closeness, desire and connection. I see performance poetry as a sipace to explore sites of women's sexual oppression and degradation, and rework those experiences to generate erotic power and autonomy.

2.1 Queering the Nation, Queering the Diaspora

While the poets I study here do consider themselves members of sexual minorities, by using the word "queering" as a verb, I resist fixing a specific sexual identity onto their poetic practice; I am not interested in naming their works as paradigmatically queer or lesbian. Instead,

I want to suggest that queering is a process of becoming, questioning, changing, alluding to the idea that Caribbean sexualities and their interpretations are "on the move" (Wekker 2006).

Rather than use queer as a catch-all substitute for gay and/or lesbian, I draw on the word's discursive power to signal sexualities that are more open-ended, fluid, and constructed than gay 13 and lesbian identities.1 In understanding queer as a verb, I am interested in drawing attention to the historical construction of gay and lesbian identity and how that construction has worked alongside racialized and gendered ideologies, making certain sexualities more respectable than others. I invest queering not just with dissenting, resisting, and alternative power, but with contingent and complicit power to reinforce dominant cultural formations (Jasbir Puar calls this approach "queer assemblage"). I take up queering non-innocently realizing its cultural and political history in order to reinvest it with possibility. More than the colonial and multicultural project of "counting up difference" (a naming project which enriches a still-central white subject), I attempt to make queering refer as much to race as it does to sexuality, since both words represent systems of meaning that inherently define each other.2

How can queering as a process open up our understandings of desire? I suggest that queering can suggest same-sex desire, eroticism and community that conflicts with a Euro-

American neoliberal gay imaginary. I queer my reading of spoken word practices in order to address globalization, race, political economy, migration, and gender as well as sexuality. In this sense, I am addressing Grewal and Kaplan's caution against drawing parallels based on sexuality, which "ignore the power structures, asymmetries, and inequalities that locate a

1 Even as I write this, I know that the word queer is being co-opted as the global, catch-all word for all expressions of sexual alterity. I am making a case here to resist this co-optation, to continue to invest queer with complexity and difference, both among queers and of non-queers, a move which comes from the word's history of political oppositionality. Here, I work with Bernard's assertion that we must "insist that the totality of the meaning of queer will always be more or less than or different from its synonymity with lesbian/gay, and that its force, in fact, resides in the way it can be both conflated with lesbian and/or gay and used to disrupt that conflation or deconstruct lesbianness and/or gayness" (2003: 10).

2 Somerville shows how the first classifications of bodies as homosexual or heterosexual emerged at the same time as the boundary between black and white bodies was being actively policed through practices of governmentality (1994). 14 spectrum of queer subjects" (2001: 671). I suggest that these two poets mobilize understandings of their erotic lives in their own process of self-representation in order to resist silence and cultural assumptions about black women's sexualities. I queer(y) to open a way to the possibility of what M. Jacqui Alexander has called "erotic autonomy" (1997), drawing lines across boundaries of race, culture, gender, race, nation and class, while also acknowledging the effects of the entrenched meanings of these concepts for the sexualized and racialized bodies that form the subject of this work.

This work engages the neoliberal myth that queer life and culture originated with particular gay subjects and politics in the cosmopolitan centres of the North by situating my analysis in "queer diaspora" (Gopinath 2005). Using groundwork laid by transnational feminist theorists, Gopinath's queer diaspora engages linguistic and cultural terms alongside material and economic contexts, inviting a critical juxtaposition of more elusive and slippery cultural terrain with the "hard" territory of geopolitics. A transnational feminist approach addresses the asymmetry of the globalization process, marking certain transnational processes as explicitly neocolonial or neoimperialist. Since the 1950s, members of the much-varied gay and lesbian movement in the North has steadily but unevenly moved towards representing themselves as a particular breed of responsible and productive citizens to gain political power and to win the

In this work, I use Jacqui Alexander's definitions of neoimperial and neocolonial. Neoimperial state formations signal "those advanced capitalist states that are the dominant partners in the global 'order'" - empirically represented here as the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Neocolonial state formations represent "those that emerged from the colonial 'order' as the forfeiters to nationalist claims to sovereignty and autonomy", empirically represented here as Jamaica and sometimes other countries in the Anglophone Caribbean (Alexander 2005:4). Their common prefix of neo- draws attention to the ongoing power of colonial and imperial formations to govern present day relationships between the North and the Caribbean, but also signals new ways that queer globalizations interact with old forms of power. Encouraging the analysis of traffic between these different time periods suggests that a long time frame is necessary to understand the current moment, reaching not only in the past, but into the future. 15 right of recognition from the state in very particular economic, political and social contexts. To achieve this, queers have engaged in culture-making that envisions queer life and politics in the

North as the cradle of modern gay political consciousness for the world. This myth-making has partly fueled Caribbean state refusals to consider the political relevance of Caribbean lesbians, queers and gays, instead viewing their identities, cultures and human rights claims as made "in foreign". The myth of a gay community unified in its origins is likewise invoked by the neoimperial state as it negotiates the allocation of human rights, reinforcing the membership of gay and lesbian communities that most resemble the state's vision of acceptable citizens:

Canadian or US-born, white, monogamous, middle-class men. This fantasized notion of what constitutes the "gay community" often excludes and silences diasporic queers and queers of colour, relegating their cultural production to marginal spaces of specific racialized communities.

In taking up Gopinath's concept of queer diaspora, race becomes important to understand not only the hegemony of heteronormativity, but also the growing power of this "homonormativity"

(Duggan 2002) to create silence around the sexuality of particular racialized groups. By invoking the racial politics of queerness, I want to suggest that gay and lesbian projects to "queer the nation" have sometimes mimicked the neoliberal force of globalization. These forces have been distinctly racialized in the ongoing neoimperial pattern of consuming the Caribbean via gay tourism and activism. Hence "queering" is not a move to discover and make all things queer, but a transnational methodology to understand the racialized and gendered underpinnings of sexual citizenship between and within nations.

If "queerness is to heterosexuality as the diaspora is to the nation," as Gopinath suggests, how might queer diaspora work to unseat various nationalisms? First, the concept of diaspora helps us rethink how the nation-state citizenship model often privileges the geographical, political, cultural and subjective spaces of the home-nation as the only authentic spaces of 16 belonging and civic participation. By "dislocating" Jamaica to its queer diaspora, I read the work of two poets to disrupt the queer origin myth also circulated by Jamaican state officials and managers. By positioning homosexuality as foreign to the Caribbean, the state polices the country's cultural, moral, and economic borders from claims for sexual human rights, particularly from vocal diasporic queers. By suggesting that Jamaican gays and lesbians have become so by foreign influence, and that queerness is anathema to Jamaica's majority, state managers have reinforced the idea that queerness is a colonially-inherited problem that must be purged in order for the nation to progress. I will suggest some of the ways that queer diaspora can disrupt this narrative throughout this thesis, working against more conservative notions of diaspora as complicit with the cultural imperatives of the home nation-state. Gopinath suggests that queer desire reorients the nostalgic backwards-looking glance to the home-nation, instead remembering a past time riven with contradictions, bringing clandestine countermemories into the present. In considering the key development of dub poetry and theatre in diasporic Jamaican locations in Chapter Four, I recall Brian Keith Axel's suggestion that "rather than conceiving of the homeland as something that creates the diaspora, it may be more productive to consider the diaspora as something that creates the homeland" (2002: 426).

Diaspora could not be envisioned without travel, hence my focus on bodies and sexualities on the move. What sort of diasporic Jamaica emerges with a transnational queer and feminist lens? From its colonial history of transatlantic slavery and Indian indentureship, to seasonal agricultural worker migrations within the Caribbean itself, to its present-day status as one of the four Caribbean countries with the highest number of out-migrating workers to

Northern countries in the world, Jamaica can be read as a mobile place forged from travel, forced and otherwise. In the present moment, the border crossing that is undertaken is not necessarily liberatory or pleasant for lesbian, gay and queer Jamaicans who live as refugees and in exile. In 17 marking the border as painful, difficult, and dislocating, I attempt to address the power differential and structural limitations of such a crossing (Ahmed 2000, Ong 2006). As cultural traffic is often celebrated as a metaphor of the global reach of black cultural forms, a feminist rejoinder to recall the trafficked labour of Caribbean women can better theorize the spaces of confinement and immobility that often surround these journeys (Sudbury 2004). Paul Gilroy's famous map of black diasporic cultural movement across the Atlantic follows a cartography of globalization between Northern metropoles, discounting the ways that supposed peripheries and colonies critically triangulate that traffic (Sharpe 2003). A more anticolonial diasporic frame reroutes the Gilroy's black Atlantic to address its erasure of the Caribbean.4 Further rerouting the black Atlantic via the Caribbean and Canada, Rinaldo Walcott has questioned how its Caribbean black community has forged a shared sense of black diaspora in the face of Canadian institutionalized racism, at the same time as erasure by black American theorists (2003).

Gopinath suggests that the ongoing value of diaspora lies in this simultaneous critique of dominant nationalisms and globalization. By focusing on queering female desire, she reworks diaspora by "unmasking and undercutting its dependence on a genealogical implicitly heteronormative reproductive logic" (2005: 10). Black women's bodies and sexualities are often the site of nationalist projects: through their recruitment as low-wage workers and as reproducers of the labour force in a heteropatriarchal system; through their ideological mobilization as victims needing protection; through their demonization as sex workers or lesbians; or through their scapegoating as young mothers and welfare queens. Dominant nationalisms have worked together with colonialism and globalization, resulting in the surveillance of female sexuality.

While much important feminist work has been done examining how global processes function

4 For example, studies on the contributions that Caribbean intellectuals Claude McKay, C.L.R. James, Marcus Garvey and Claudia Jones have made on African-American political thought have done just this (Stephens 1998, Boyce-Davies 2003). 18 along gendered and racialized lines, the ways in which discourses of sexuality operate and intersect with globalization is only beginning to be explored (Alexander 2007; Wekker 2006;

Manasalan 2002). Queer diaspora works against the globalization of gay culture, politics, and economies that replicates colonial narratives of modernity and progress. Walcott imagines black queer diaspora as "allow[ing] for multiple and conflicting identification based open a shared sense of sexual practice and the ongoing machinations of racialization, especially anti-black racism" (Walcott 2007: 234). Black queer diaspora thus functions simultaneously as a critique of homophobia in black communities and a critique of white racism in queer communities. Queer needs diaspora in order to make it supple to questions of race, colonialism, migration, and globalization. Queering diaspora thus has unique possibilities, according to Gopinath:

Suturing 'queer' to 'diaspora' thus recuperates those desires, practices, and subjectivities that are rendered impossible and unimaginable within conventional diasporic and nationalist imaginaries. A consideration of queerness, in other words, becomes a way to challenge nationalist ideologies by restoring the impure, inauthentic, nonreproductive potential of the notion of diaspora. Indeed, the urgent need to trouble and denaturalize the close relationship between nationalism and heterosexuality is precisely what makes the notion of a queer diaspora so compelling. (2005: 11)

2.2 Respectable Sexualities: Here, There and Everywhere

Moving constantly between Jamaica, Canada, and the USA, the structure of this account of globalized sexualities is somewhat "dislocated" for a reason. Denying closed and bounded national sexualized histories, I use these multiple sites to build an argument about the transnational construction of gay and lesbian identity, queer capital and politics, and how that construction has worked alongside racialized and gendered ideologies, making certain sexualities more respectable than others. This pursuit of respectability is also the pursuit of dominance through difference, where marginal actors seek a "toehold of respectability" to make their 19 specific experiences of oppression the most central and therefore the most dominant (Fellow and

Razack 1997). In the North, I suggest that respectable sexuality increasingly includes certain homosexualities, showing how queerness is not always oppositional to heteronormative state practices, but sometimes works to uphold and sustain these practices via "homonormativity." In

Jamaica, I suggest that making certain sexualities respectable has meant criminalizing gay and lesbian sex in order to distance the country from its colonial past, assert its national cultural myth, and to deny the ongoing racialized sexual terms of its dependence on tourism.

To begin in the North, as Lisa Duggan describes it, homonormativity emerged as a

"crucial new part of the cultural front of neoliberalism in the United States" in the early 1990s

(2002: 177). While the concept will likely never represent the same degree of hegemony that heteronormativity does, homonormativity powerfully describes the flexibility of categories of

"respectable sexuality" to include certain homosexualities, particularly those that work with the mobility of queer capital. Certain gay and lesbian subjects are enjoying unprecedented positive representation in popular culture and business culture in the US and Canada. Television shows such as "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" portray stylish and savvy gay citizens who are vital to capitalism through gay business innovation, gay consumerism, and especially tourism practices

5 Although neoliberalism is usually used to describe a package of economic policies that have sustained the poverty of the Global South, particularly by deepening their subordination upon "core " nations, it is likewise has a cultural effect in the North. The extension and dissemination of capitalist market values and logic to all institutions and social action (Brown 2003) is at work in gay and lesbian movements and communities. Not simply a state project to support and develop the extension of market values into the public sector, neoliberal rationality is alsoemerging as governmentality, a mode of governance beyond the state that produces subjects, forms of citizenship and behavior, and produces a new organization of the social (Brown 2003). The creep of market values has served to redefine democracy itself as a type of market rationality. However despite widespread acceptance of the closing of the gap between state and corporate interests, contradictory impulses still exist between the interests of nation-states and those of global capitalists indifferent to states and sovereignty. The tension between these interests plays out in the debates on murder music and queer tourism in Jamaica and Caribbean sovereignty to legislate heteropatriarchy. 20

(which has a specific resonance for the Caribbean). Gays and lesbians are rarely imagined in these representations to be those people who clean up the office towers, or who welcome tourists to Jamaica's "friendly" shores. Instead, gays and lesbians are generally envisioned as those who travel, in this case to Jamaica to consume local culture and bodies, circulating particular representations of gay that associate gay identity with a mobile, propertied, white, male subject.

Hence state and capital work together to associate gay identity with travel and consumption while simultaneously structuring silence around how capitalist development influences immigration, women's domestic labour, and tourism, all issues of critical importance to queers of colour. Membership in gay and lesbian communities is predicated on the process of coming out as visible and making spaces queer-positive, a process mediated by capital, even as the racial and economic order renders black queers structurally invisible. This version of homonormativity suggests a depoliticized, or prepolitical, queer subject who does not contest dominant heteronormative institutions but "upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption" (Duggan 2002: 179). Homonormativity recodes the once-radical concept of liberation of anti-assimilationist gay and lesbian politics so that the market is the filter of gay freedom, even as this freedom depends upon the abjection of those who are not free to consume and who have little access to symbolic and material forms of capital. On closer inspection, the disparate enemies of neoliberalism and this retooled gay constituency merge:

what is seemingly a chaotic assemblage of political culprits fuses into the figure of the female and the feminized, the foreigner, the colored, the sexually deviant and the poor (Manalansan IV 2005: 144).

Typified by the outlook espoused by gay critic Andrew Sullivan, this "new neoliberal sexual politics" advocates a narrowing of queer politics to the struggle for equal access to a few institutions: marriage and the military. Once characterized by radical AIDS activism, in the 21

1990s queer politics became increasingly host to a conservative strain of gay moralism that attacked "promiscuity and the gay lifestyle" for spreading the disease (Duggan 2002: 182).

Sullivan's vision of a demobilized gay population corresponds to the neoliberal rhetoric of state rollback with less interference in public life, effecting a privatization of gay politics. As Duggan describes the work of Sullivan and his colleagues:

There is no vision of a collective, democratic public culture or of an ongoing engagement with contentious, cantankerous queer politics. Instead we have been administered a kind of political sedative—we get marriage and the military then we go home and cook dinner, forever (2002: 189).

By way of example, when gays and lesbians fought to legislate same-sex marriage in

Canada, they sought representation in the mainstream media as tolerant, educated, propertied and employed citizens who deserved marriage rights to legitimize their families. This construction, then, establishes what marriage-seeking gays and lesbians are not: lazy, uneducated and promiscuous people who bear children out of wedlock (Thorpe 2005). This representation of gay is simultaneously raced and classed; this construction of the "unsavoury queer" matches the trope of working-class black Caribbean (albeit hetero-) sexuality (as well as the trope of unwed teenage mother and the AIDS-infected body, which was once embodied by gay men, but now increasingly comes to represent African countries and black sexualities). These disrespectable sexualities are considered undesirable for the healthy reproduction of the nation's citizens.

Distancing itself from these racialized and gendered subjects, the gay "marrying kind" was often white, middle-class, and male. By imagining this Canadian gay subject as separate from promiscuity, same-sex marriage lobbyists named hypersexuality, whether hetero or homo, as the practice of Others. As the Canadian state now champions legalized same-sex marriage as evidence of its progressive and tolerant multiculturalism, it likewise "weed[s] out or make[s] less apparent and sometimes even invisible all those members of queer communities who would 22 cause great dissonance for hetero-normativity and its authorizing of post-liberation queer life"

(Walcott 2007: 244). As such, gay and lesbian subjects are produced not just by struggles against the state, but also by state practices that institutionalize gay and lesbian identity.

Duggan's concept of homonormativity has been embraced by an emerging body of scholarship by queers of colour who trouble the close relationship between the white Euro-

American gay constituency and modernity's practices of exclusion and violence (Vaid 1995,

Munoz 1999, Puar 2002, Bernard 2003, Manalansan 2005, Puar 2005, Puar 2006).

Homonormativity has enabled the recentering of white male subjectivity within a gay imaginary that simultaneously fixes the queer, non-white, racialized and/or immigrant subject as insufficiently politicized to achieve sexual rights and thus as insufficiently "modern." For example, this representation is producing new forms of governmentality, as immigrants and refugees are forced to use a narrative that posits their "culture" as traditional and patriarchal, now they are disciplined to also include traditional homophobia in that narrative in order to gain citizenship rights. Much academic work on non-white queer subjects has attempted to excavate the historical existence of gay and lesbian culture in colonial locations such as India and Jamaica.

The gay scholar-traveler has something in common with the imperialist traveler; both catalogue the world "as scientist, historian, storyteller" by investigating Other sexuality (Bernard 2003: 7).

The white traveler thus uses a colonial other to understand his/her sexual identity, making use of colonial bodies, much like colonizers made use of black women's bodies for sex, inscribing them with animalistic and primitive desire. These anthropology-inspired approaches reinforce sexuality, particularly "perverse" and non-respectable sexuality, as an attribute of "primitive" cultures, reinforcing the normative Western body as nonsexual in scholarly discourse and public policy (Grewal and Kaplan 2001: 666). 23

Scholarly accounts and gay travel journalism like these are used to unearth the existence and desires of Other queers, gays and lesbians, including the "traditional" repression of those desires. In this vein, Jamaica has received unprecendented global attention as the "most homophobic country on earth" (as named in Time Magazine in 2006). While little statistical or cross-comparative data exists to confirm this status, it nonetheless carries considerable weight because of its repetition in gay media, legal narratives, and travel advisories. Jamaica's reputation as a sexually intolerant nation contrasts sharply with the covert promotion of sex in

Jamaica's tourism industry. But this culturally defined and driven homophobia does not deflect the allure of an exotic (queer) paradise, instead

it encourages a continuity of colonial constructions of tourism as a travel adventure into uncharted territory laden with the possibility of taboo sexual encounters, illicit seductions, and dangerous liaisons... thus the desire to be free of homophobia comes up against the primitive vision of the tourist imaginary of an unspoiled, undiscovered paradise, while fantasies of sexual fluidity of preidentity, precapitalist, premodern times conjoin nicely with the tourist agenda, leaving intact a queer modern-versus-primitive native binary (Puar 2002: 113).

This conflicted desire and fear become evident in the Stop Murder Music campaign to address homophobia in Jamaica, which often fails to take notice of the ongoing effects of colonization or acknowledge the racial and classed subtexts of their strategies. The conflation of the roles of gay tourist, writer, and activist in discussing homophobic violence in Jamaica will be further addressed in Chapter Three.

Nation-building projects in Jamaica have also sought a toehold of respectability, but to distance the country from the sexualized and racialized legacies of slavery and colonialism.

Suzanne LaFont traces how respectability and rectitude evolved historically as an Afro-Jamaican response to the slave experience, suggesting that "today these values persist as a source of national pride while also functioning to distance Afro-Jamaicans from their colonial past" (2001: 24 paragraph 1). Naming the complexity of respectability involves acknowledging the contradictory representations of sexuality in Jamaica; on one hand, Jamaican popular music, culture, dance and media are engulfed by representations of explicit sexualities. On the other hand, legal, moral and state practices narrowly define acceptable sexualities within a strict paradigm of heteronormal activity. Slavery and colonialism shaped this contradiction. The stereotype of black women's sexual insatiability justified their exploitation; colonizers interpreted their strategies of survival and resistance to this exploitation and configured women "as biologically inherent, animal, grotesque, and unfeminine on the one hand, and as strong and extremely erotic on the other"

(Ford-Smith 2005: 156). Afro-Jamaicans also interpreted the colonizer's behaviour as morally deficient (but of course with considerable less power to represent their interpretations). With the increasing influence of Christian missionaries, they denounced this exploitation and began to suggest sexual prudence as an expression of innate humanity at a time when slaves were not considered human (LaFont 2001). The defence of sexual prudence allowed Jamaica women to resist sexual exploitation and also provided access to abolitionist political narratives, using respectability to move towards emancipation.

Towards the end of the era of slavery in Jamaica, the colonial government undertook the

"civilization" of black women by promoting and supporting the nuclear family, marital sex, monogamy and male breadwinner/female homemaker gender roles. The supposed "problems" of promiscuity, marital instability, "defective" paternity, and high rates of illegitimacy among

Jamaican's working and poor classes were incompatible with ideals of development and progress at the time (Thomas 2004: 5-6). These familial changes were promoted despite a lack of male breadwinners, since many men were absent migrant workers because of perennial low employment, which was a major contributing factor to the high numbers of female-headed households. 25

Peter Wilson's influential study Crab Antics (1973) solidified the pursuit of respectability as women's domain, with far-reaching consequences for analysis of gender relations in the

Caribbean. He suggested that West Indian women were more invested in moral, sexual, and cultural hierarchies of respectability via the domestic space and the church, whereas men were more invested in reputational practices that leveled social hierarchies reinforced by colonialism.

As such, women were positioned as more complicit than men in sustaining colonial hierarchies by the fact of their gender. This approach legitimized women's confinement to the home as their natural place, and did not question how men's political talk in the public sphere depended upon the domination of women in the private sphere. Outside of the domestic sphere, Caribbean women's presence as workers in marketplaces, socializing in rum shops, and other public spaces was ignored in this paradigm. If women did talk about sex and gender relations and dynamics, it was rarely understood as political resistance; instead, their insubordination to men was localized and depoliticized as a "domestic" issue.

The concept of respectability, although greatly contested, retains power today as a strategy to resist Northern hegemony over standards of acceptable sexuality. The continued emergence of these strategies is related to changing nationhood in Jamaica; neocolonial managers work to make the sexualized legacy of slavery invisible within the global capitalist system, where Jamaican tourism exploits women workers in services industries, including sex work. Sexual intolerance of "foreign ways" distances Jamaicans from their colonial past by constructing a mythologized version of pre-slavery sexual mores, creating a chaste and respectable sexuality free from the perceived sexual degradation of the colonists, but which creates its own exclusions and intolerances (LaFont 2001). 26

In the mid-twentieth century, sexuality scholars such as the Herskovits did seek to affirm the uniqueness of Afro-Caribbean sexual culture by challenging these colonial claims of

"looseness" and immorality in the sexual practices of blacks (1947), and also documented the existence of "making zammi" (a term later made popular by Audre Lorde in her reclamation of

Caribbean lesbian identity). However their work is heavily overshadowed by scholarship that suggests that the Caribbean region is naturally heterosexual, informally polygamous, and deeply intolerant not only of homosexuality but also of female agency (Kempadoo 2004). Much of this scholarship is reinforced by studies that have followed Wilson, which have privileged analysis of black women's quest for respectability within the institutions of slavery (via sexual contact with white slave-owners) and the church (via marriage). Much of this academic research still presupposes Caribbean women's sexual aims to be primarily oriented towards serial heterosexual monogamy, fidelity, money and procreation, including work by feminists. However, as Stallings describes the lack of scholarship, "what has mired discussions about black women's sexuality and expressions of sexual desires is the commitment to a particular type of blackness, one that inherently privileges masculinity, heteronormative womanhood and heterosexuality." (2007: 8).

Notable and exceptional scholarship is emerging that investigates the racialized workings of gay and lesbian subjects in popular cultural practices within transnational capitalism. Studies of women's sexual agency in dancehall (1993 & 2000), carnival (Barnes 2000), spiritual practices (Alexander 2005) and chutney soca music (Niranjana 2006) all indicate sexual transgression, and are welcome theoretical attempts to unseat the hegemonic assumptions of respectable heteropatriarchal sex in the Caribbean region.

In reading d'bi young and Staceyann Chin's performance work, I suggest that they mobilize their very bodies in performance to eschew these cultures of respectable sex. How can 27 embodied performance be a way to intervene in certain narratives? As a practice of decolonization, these poets work for erotic autonomy, confronting the legitimacy of the state and global capital to determine the standards of sexualized citizenship. For Alexander, erotic autonomy is "an emancipatory praxis anchored within a desire for decolonization, simultaneously imagined as political, economic, psychic, discursive, and sexual" where "women can love themselves, love women, and transform the nation simultaneously" (2007: 65). The poets embody multiple locations for this work, defying the separation of their sexuality from other erotic labour: in breaking silence on their sex, especially discussion of incest and experiences of lesbian and queer sex and community; in the mothering of children, as young mothers, single mothers and/or lesbian mothers; in the refiguring of the fertile black women's body not as a passive repository of cultural norms, but as a fecund ground for culture-making; in the locating of the immigrant as a key participant and innovator in lesbian and queer and gay communities of the North.

As these poets resist by embodying erotic power and autonomy, they never stand in total opposition to state practices. Their poetic practice is always constituted in part by state and capital's own (in)ability to imagine erotic autonomy as a threat or as invisible. While not easily colonized within the nuclear family or within gay tourism, practices of erotic autonomy critically engage with the sexualized and racialized representations that these constructions present. Their specific terrain of transgression, spoken word, is the site to which I now turn.

2.3 Performing the Word: Transnational Oral Performance

Cultures 28

Since the 1990s, performance-oriented poetry, called spoken word, has exploded in popularity in North America. The term has functioned as an umbrella word for a variety of oral performance practices, such as storytelling, slam poetry, dub poetry, hip hop poetry, performance art, many of these both "traditional" and newly reinvented. Spoken word is often celebrated as a political/cultural movement that "returns language to the people," and "freeing the living word from imprisonment in books" (Battson 1995: xi). Spoken word communities are often premised on storytelling made marginal by mainstream publishing, curricular and educational canons.

They emphasize practices that are accessible to people who have been systemically denied formal and/or literary education. Many poets seek out oral performance cultures as a venue to tell their experiences of marginalization and survival. In particular, black women have long reigned in oral performance, winning recognition in spoken word cultures in ways unseen in rap and hip hop (McDonnell 2000: 255). Present-day women poets often invoke the performance paths carved out by such innovators as Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Lillian Allen, Jean Binta Breeze,

Ntozake Shange, June Jordan, Sarah Jones, and Barbara Smith, extending and shaping an oral tradition by naming and paying tribute to a genealogy of powerful women poets.

Often, spoken word events often take place in accessible community locations such as cafes, bars, and community centres and poets are encouraged to present work that speaks directly to members of their communities (Somers-Willet 2003). Because of this accessibility, many spoken word poets are black, brown, immigrant, young, indigenous, queer and/or working class peoples. Spoken word practices thus produce knowledge as a particular political and discursive practice, often intended to intervene into hegemonic literary and pop cultural discourses. These spaces often allow for more immediate (and less enduring) responses from the audience than the written text permits. Hence performance finds its momentary power in the interaction between performer and audience. Unlike poetry "readings," spoken word events are performances, where 29 poets physically enact poems with their bodies, and audiences are encouraged to respond with cheers, boos, finger-snapping, laughter, heckling and applause. In performance, language is rendered bodily significant. As corporeal performance, spoken word requires "the presence of bodies and the act of showing up to perform or witness," thereby accessing the immediate power of face-to-face communication between different social actors (Dolan 2005: 97). Through this dialectical engagement between performer and audience, spoken word enacts what Paul Gilroy calls a "dialogic ritual" in his discussion of black music; the authority of the text is transformed through communication with the audience, blurring artistic Euro-American boundaries between performer and crowd, life and art, and ethics and aesthetics (Gilroy 1993). Spoken word artists use signifiers of black culture such as call and response, musicality and rhythm to represent the vernacular speech of their communities. Performance poetry is a form of iterative, and thus transformative oral tradition in how it "indents, notches, partly destroys and rebuilds differently these myths/stories in order to adapt them to the concrete situation which is one of exchange.

Myths are not a text... but living matter which allow people in a community to vibrate at the moment of transmission" (Peeters 1999: 15). Somers-Willet argues that many spoken word poetry events are themselves generative sites of social practice where identities are performatively cited, recapitulated, and questioned (2003: 100).

Although spoken word is imagined by some artists to be a resurgence of oral performance culture, many poets also link it to indigenous storytelling, most commonly citing griot traditions descended from West Africa.6 Others see its genealogy stretching from West Indian oral traditions and competitions such as tea meetings, toastings, and DJ culture. In this sense, spoken

6 Increasingly poets from indigenous communities of the Americas are melding spoken word practices such rap and hip hop with oral storytelling and knowledge-making. Key and innovative performers in Canada include Kinnie Starr and War Party. 30 word is a transnational cultural form, forged in the massive migrations of modernity; through the transatlantic slave trade, and the ongoing migrations of the late 20 century, storytelling and performance is a practice of resistance integral to survival for many. As a practice of resistance, performance solicits double-readings from diverse audiences because of its use of code- switching in contexts of assymetrical power. Performance poetry provides clues about the complex transformative possibilities of the oral tradition, particularly for colonized people forced to assimilate to European languages through linguistic oppression; performance is knowledge- making of a different sort when access to written culture is denied and when literacy and education are wielded as tools of colonial domination. If we deliberately begin chronologies of performance outside of Europe in this way, we acknowledge how the development of present- day cultural forms like spoken word was produced from the traffic between the supposed metropoles and colonies of modernity. In many ways, the range of spoken word practices today unfolds a cartography of the movement of oral practices of survival. Both poets mobilize different cultural skills to access erotic power, d'bi young uses a working-class, Afro-Jamaican cultural form (namely dub poetry and theatre) in the diaspora to reformulate the origins of homophobia in Jamaica and to resist racisms towards black queers in the North. Staceyann Chin uses slam poetry and access to mainstream gay events and representations to position herself as

"powerfully out of place" as a politicized, multiracial, lesbian immigrant woman. In reading their various works, I suggest that drawing on erotic power is a way we come to know that we harbour the other in self and we can use this multi-selfhood as a path to imagining our erotic autonomy.

Despite claiming embodied performance as an important site for the building of marginal knowledges, I don't want to suggest that it is opposed or totally unlike written culture. While many poets claim orality as a privileged form of marginal knowledge, or more simply put, as a path to more "authentic" and "knowable" human experience of oppression, I read this claim 31 more as a political gesture to reclaim cultural space for marginal experience, and less of a dismissal of written culture per se. Asserting the significance of marginal performance forms has proven a key strategy of decolonization. According to bell hooks, "the act of claiming voice, of asserting both one's right to speak as well as saying what one wants to say, has been a challenge to those forms of colonization that seek to over-determine the speech of those who are exploited and/or oppressed" (hooks 1995: 212). Similarly, asserting one's erotic power and autonomy has proven a way to combat silence and shame in many queer communities and cultures. Lesbian, queer and gay spoken word poets mobilize signifiers of orality to consciously break open the silences that many literary canons depend upon for their cultural authority, silences that include the exploitation of racialized people under global capitalism. While I will discuss some of the consequences of a division between orality and the written word in Chapter 4, the key point I wish to make in this theoretical overview is that most oral performance works in conjunction with written texts and they in fact constitute each other. By choosing to write about oral performance in the "high culture" form of a Masters' thesis, I complicate the supposed binary divide of Western and non-Western cultural production in favour of seeing lines that muddy them, especially in regards to sexuality, and likewise ask questions about how power structures our access to what is named purely aesthetic high culture and to what is labeled static, traditional and backwards culture. The poets examined in this thesis employ performance and writing in their work, using whatever means necessary to reach their audiences, bypassing the ongoing debate in many spoken word communities about their relation to hegemonic institutions of literary culture. They speak complex representations of black women's sexual subjectivity that confront the division of their cultural performance work from economic and political structures; because of their awareness of the embeddedness of their cultural production in the world, I have avoided a simplistic division of pure, marginal cultural production from the exigencies of a 32 capitalist marketplace, instead understanding spoken word as always already embedded in transnational representations of black women's bodies, black identity and performance, and queer sexuality. The global circulation of poetic performance illustrates the vexed relationship between supposedly marginal cultural forms and transnational capital, providing an ambivalent and yet powerful site to build counterhegemonic subjectivity. On this point, Gopinath suggests that

while queer diasporic cultural forms are produced in and through the workings of transnational capitalism, they also provide the means by which to critique the logic of how global capitalism impacts local sites by articulating other forms of subjectivity, culture, affect, kinship, and community that may not be visible or audible within standard mappings of nation, diaspora, or globalization. What emerges within this alternative cartography are subjects, communities, and practices that bear little resemblance to the universalized "gay" identity imagined within a Eurocentric gay imaginary (2005: 12).

Living this "alternative cartography" or borderland creates a multifaceted subjectivity explored by these two spoken word artists; as members of black queer diaspora, Walcott suggests that the paradox of not existing as queers in black community and being considered perpetually behind in queer communities allows space for creativity. As storytellers, these spoken word artists actively reclaim pain and hope at the borderland, mapping the ambivalent and sometimes violent dialectical relationships between these terms: nation/diaspora, center/periphery, home/away, straight/queer, and the us/them division they ultimate presuppose.

In doing this, I want to map how their poetic embodied approach mobilizes their unique transnational perspective to reimagine the pain and violence of these dualisms. Appadurai suggests that the imagination is an "organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labour and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility" (1996: 31). For d'bi.young and

Staceyann Chin, storytelling is crucial to imagining their queer, lesbian, black, and female subjectivity as central to modernity, to the story of its past, present and future. 33 34

Chapter 3: The Most Homophobic Country on Earth?

Jamaica and the Construction of Hyper(hetero)sexuality

More than any other cultural practice, the sounds of Jamaica dancehall form the backdrop to any discussion of homophobia in the Caribbean region. Since Time Magazine suggested that

Jamaica is "the most homophobic place on earth" (Padgett 2006), the severity of homophobia in the Anglo-Caribbean region has received unprecedented attention, particularly from gay and lesbian communities in Britain, the United States, and Canada. A transnational debate has erupted over the traveling of homophobic Jamaican dancehall artistes such as Buju, Elephant

Man, Sizzla and Capleton to diasporic performances in "gay-friendly" countries. Since 2003, members of the Stop Murder Music campaign in Britain, the USA and Canada have protested these performances, transforming concert cancellations into a global debate over sexual citizenship in neocolonial and neoimperial countries and its relationship to human rights and cultural sovereignty.

As multiple readings on the nature and extent of Jamaican homophobia circulate transnationally, in this chapter I ask: how is homophobia in Jamaica made to matter? Stop

Murder Music campaigners have leveraged Jamaica's representation as "most homophobic country" to push for the enforcement of hate speech legislation at dancehall performances in

Canada. They have also pushed for international intervention on gay and lesbian human rights cases in Jamaica, even undertaking a tourism boycott. At the same time, Jamaican gay and lesbian refugees have used this narrative to gain asylum in the UK and Canada. What other ideological scaffolding supports the naming of homophobia in Jamaica as uniquely virulent? I suggest that this representation of perilous, homophobic Jamaica also rests on ideological 35 formations about race, sexuality and gender that are based in the Caribbean experience of slavery and colonialism.

In this chapter, I ask how a particular story about homophobia and its relationship to black hyper(hetero)sexuality has come to carry so much weight in gay media and legal narratives in the North. I suggest that reading Jamaica's violence as primarily homophobic implies the forgetting of the colonizing relationship between "gay-friendly" countries and the Caribbean.

Starting with the premise that the representation of sexualities of certain ethnic and racial groups is centrally connected to the construction of white sexualities (Hammonds 1997), I want to suggest that we can only understand how homophobia is made to matter in the Caribbean by seeing how it is transnationally connected to the sexualities of the North within the logic of neoimperialism. Hence, the story told of violent homophobia in Jamaica is just as much about the sexual mythologies of the Northern countries, which are imagined as places of freedom for gays and lesbians. Their corollary places, like Jamaica, are ones of unfreedom, characterized by representations of Black sexuality as violent, licentious, and hyper(hetero)sexual, occurring apart from the modern, disciplined and respectable sexuality of Northern metropoles. I suggest that the respectable sexuality acknowledged by capital and state increasingly includes certain homosexualities, showing how queerness is not always oppositional to heteronormative state practices, but sometimes works to uphold and sustain these practices through homonormative nationalism (Puar 2006). This is of particular importance as gay and lesbian communities have worked to stabilize representations of their membership in petitioning for rights and recognition from the state and carving out gay-focused capital projects, such as tourism. In other words, these communities are being pushed to answer who is in and who is out vis-a-vis the neoimperial state. The answers are invariably racialized: the exclusion of racialized people from many gay and lesbian campaigns and movements in the North suggests a sexual freedom that is in fact 36 contingent on race and culture, a logic I follow Jasbir Puar in naming "sexual exceptionalism"

(2006). These campaigns often assume assimilationist and neoliberal models of citizenship that ignore gender and racial difference among queers, and divide queer sexualities into respectable and non-respectable ones along racialized fault lines.

Because of the way that the campaign has emphasized certain characteristics of homophobia in Jamaica, Stop Murder Music has contributed to the silencing of Jamaican women. Positioning Jamaican homophobia solely as "black violence" not only erases the existence and active resistance of racialized gays, lesbians and queers in neoimperial locations, but its focus on the violence of Black male hyper(hetero)sexuality makes silent the experiences and voices of Jamaican women, in particular, lesbian and queer women. It contributes to an already operating colonial dynamic that simultaneously overexposes and makes invisible Black women's sexuality. This silencing shapes the understanding of the extent and meaning of homophobia, and its relationship to connected struggles such as violence against women, anti- immigrant sentiment and police brutality faced by lesbians in the diaspora and in Jamaica.

Last, this chapter will address how the neoimperial works to support the position of the neocolonial state in Jamaica, despite the way that the current debate has positioned "gay- friendly" countries against the Jamaican government. I examine how a narrow reading of homophobia in Jamaican cultural practices enables a Jamaican nationalism that continually rearticulates heterosexualized citizenship as the only kind of Jamaican citizenship possible, as particularly evident in Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding's recent comment on the BBC television programme "Hardtalk" that he could not, and would not, envision a future where gays and lesbians could serve in his government Cabinet. Also, I will explore how the "white face" of the Stop Murder Music campaign in the UK has lent credence to the often-repeated Jamaican 37 belief that gays and lesbians are Western incursions in an idyllic heterosexual Jamaica, legitimizing its ongoing denial of indigenous gay and lesbian appeals for recognition and personhood.

To remain "in Jamaica" for a moment, I want to reiterate that this chapter is not meant to downplay the reality of violence in Jamaica by locating my analysis primarily in the North. I do not wish to suggest that homophobic dancehall lyrics do not contribute to an overall climate of hatred. The role of the Jamaican state and police in silencing Jamaican gays and lesbians cannot be underestimated; their refusal to officially acknowledge homosexuality is an acute form of violence. In Jamaica, the "crime" of buggery is still punishable by up to 10 years of hard labour under the Offences Against the Persons Act. State authorities have refused to consider changing this legal precedent and other Anglophone Caribbean states have reinforced this kind of legislation in the past decade, suggesting that these penal codes are not just colonial leftovers, but are continually reforming nationalist institutions on top of colonial capitalist structures.7 This analysis is not an attempt to excuse the severity of the violence, but nor is its goal to build what

Sherene Razack calls a "compensatory framework" for homophobia by naming it a legitimate response to predating colonial or racial violence (2004: 113). This would simply reinforce some of the arguments that Jamaican nationals, and indeed the Jamaican state, have used to excuse homophobia.

Instead, in exposing the ideological scaffolding that underpins some Northern gay and lesbian analyses of Jamaican homophobia, I show how these analyses might contribute to silencing certain voices in the debate, creating a blindspot in relation to the work of the neoimperial state. In doing so, I follow the lead of a number of Caribbean feminist theorists who

7 See Jacqui Alexander's cogent feminist critique (1997) of this type of legislation and state practice. 38 show how compulsory heterosexuality, neoimperialism, neocolonialism, and patriarchy work together to reinforce certain relations of power (Alexander 2005, Wekker 2006, Noble 2000). By taking on a transnational approach to understanding homophobia in Jamaica, I suggest that effective queer mobilization from the North needs to engage the other conditions that have made this violence possible. I thus open a different set of questions: What other violent aspects of the structure of heteropatriarchy, such as immigration laws and tourism development, are elided by a focus on homophobia as a particular kind of violence? How are readings of homophobia related to the positions of power occupied by white gay tourism capital? How did homophobia become so visible in the Caribbean in the past ten years? What does it mean to explain the absence of visible gay movements and sexual minority rights in the Caribbean as a defect in the region's political modernity (Alexander 2007)? What stories of violence against Caribbean and racialized gays, lesbians and queers in Canada, Britain and the USA are erased when we read Jamaican sexuality as 'other' to sexualities of the North? While a transnational lens is certainly necessary to understand a cross-national and cross-sexual alliance between diverse gays and lesbians, here I also employ it to expose the racialized and gendered workings of nation-building projects that deploy or deny sexual citizenship as a basis for national inclusion.

3.1: The Racialization of Violence: Global Gay Media on

Jamaica's Homophobia

In its zeal to shed light on the intensity of homophobia in Jamaica, the Stop Murder

Music campaign has focused media attention specifically on instances of violence against gay men in Jamaica. The campaign has been led by Peter Tatchell and OutRage! in Britain, a well- known gay activist group whose confrontational and theatrical guerilla-style queer interventions 39 have earned Tatchell particular notoriety.8 The Stop Murder Music campaign has focused on telling extremely violent stories of homophobic violence in Jamaica, and then suggesting that these incidents were made possible by a generalized homophobic climate supported by the circulation of what they have termed "murder music," a form of dancehall that advocates for the murder of gays and lesbians. The campaign began in 2003, when the British arm of the Stop

Murder Music coalition began protesting the performances of a number of Jamaican artistes in

Britain, including Capleton, Beenie Man, and Buju Banton. The campaign's goal is ostensibly to assist gay and lesbian Jamaicans in Jamaica, although the British campaign has not materialized on the ground in Jamaica itself, except perhaps to increase the number of violent attacks, according to JFLAG (and Tatchell concurs, although his reasons for this non-materialization are different).

Because of the campaign's distance from on-the-ground reality of gays and lesbians in

Jamaica, many have questioned TatchelPs leadership as well as the depth of the UK campaign's links with JFLAG (Jamaican Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays, Jamaica's most well- known political group for sexual minorities, formed in December 1998). While OutRage! says that its actions are undertaken in solidarity with gay and lesbians in Jamaicans, the group's public face has remained mostly white in a multi-racial Britain. JFLAG does discuss the campaign in neutral terms on their website and blog, indicating a tacit approval for Stop Murder

Music, but they have not produced any wholehearted displays of support for the campaign.

Tatchell maintains that the whiteness of his campaign and the lack of overt solidarity is due to the severity of reprisal for out and political Black gay and lesbians in Jamaica. In the UK,

Tatchell and OutRage! began to work with the Black Gay Men's Advisory Group in 2007 but the

8 Peter Tatchell twice attempted a citizen's arrest of Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe to draw attention to the issue of gay persecution in Zimbabwe, leading Mugabe to claim that the British state hired gay thugs to persecute him (No Author, 1999). 40

campaign has steadfastly denied any allegations of racism and imperialism, suggesting that these

allegations are another form of homophobia coming from Britain's Black community leaders

(Berkeley 2005). Responding to the campaign, Donna Hope wrote in the Jamaica Gleaner that

laws criminalizing homosexuality should be overturned, but not "as a result of pressure from gay

or human rights groups, led by white foreigners who feel that it is time for 'those black people in

Jamaica to get with the programme'; but rather as a part of a Jamaican thrust to provide a level

palying field for all its citizens, regardless of sexual preference" (Hope 2004).

No matter the intentions behind the campaign's initial approach to build solidarity with

gays and lesbians and queers in Jamaica, the gay press in the UK took to sensationalizing the

stories of violence with a distinctly racialized subtext. Media offered spectacularized reports of

the violence, noting the most grisly details of homophobic attacks. In The New Statesman, for

example, Tatchell wrote that a "homophobic mob" with machetes attacked a gay man while

"Jamaican police stood by and allowed the crowd to chop at him like a piece of butcher's meat"

(2004). A widely-quoted report by Human Rights Watch (based in the USA) also characterized

the attacks by their mob-like qualities in order to underscore the severity of the problem, which

also reinforced a stereotype of gang-like behaviour of Jamaicans. Many reports of Brian

Williamson's death in 2004, for example, never memorialize the years of work he did in the

Jamaican gay community and for JFLAG, but instead the fact that an anti-gay contingent

attended his funeral to celebrate his death.9 This narrative denies the possibility of gay and

9 See, for example, Gareth Henry's quote in http://www.xtra.ca/public/viewstory.aspx?AFF_TYPE=3&STORY_ID=4387&PUB_TEMPLAT E_ID=2 and commentary at GBM News http://www,gbmnews.com/categories/Jamaica/. The funeral scene is also mentioned on the Oprah Show episode discussed later in this chapter. In the case of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man who was murdered in Wyoming in 1998, religious right protestors picketed his funeral with signs reading "Matthew Shepard rots in Hell" and "God hates fags" yet the incident is not an indicator of the homophobia of a generalized American culture in the same way that Williamson's death is used to indicate generalized Jamaican culture. 41 lesbian history or community in Jamaica, and instead characterizes queer life as one of only fragmented experiences of violence and instability. Media reports and gay blogs repeatedly paint

Jamaica with the statistic of "highest murder rate per capita" and the three-word dancehall lyric

"Battyman fi dead" with little cultural context or discussion by Jamaicans themselves on their interpretation of this small number of dancehall musicians. In the gay press, only aspects of

Jamaica culture that suggest its religious conservatism are reinforced, ignoring the complexity of its sexual cultures. There is no discussion of the musical roots of dancehall or other dancehall artistes who don't advocate homophobia10, nor discussion of the ambivalent and complex possibilities of women's sexual agency in the dancehall space.11 The journalistic accounts in the gay press have real representational power, considering that not many academic or historical accounts of queer, gay and lesbian lives in the Caribbean have been completed or are circulated.

Partly in response to the UK Stop Murder Music campaign's approach, Canadian activists began pushing for dancehall concert cancellations in the fall of 2007. Started by Akim

Ade Larcher and other diasporic Caribbean gays and lesbians in the fall of 2007,12 with the assistance of Canada's most prominent national gay and lesbian organization, EGALE, the campaign took on new energy to address homophobic performances by Jamaican artists Sizzla,

Elephant Man, and Buju Banton. The group also sent messages to the Canadian immigration minister Diane Finley demanding that the performances be considered a hate crime. The SMM

10 See Christian Lacoste's personal website Murder Inna Dancehall that balances critique of murder music with an in-depth analysis of the development of Jamaican musical genres at http://www.soulrebels.org/dancehall.htm. He also provides a page of quotes from roots reggae music to balance perceptions of Jamaican culture as uniformly homophobic and violent. 11 See Carolyn Cooper (1994) and also Deborah Thomas's work on "ghetto feminism" (2004). 12 The campaign has the support of a number of African diaspora groups such as African Canadian Social Development Council, Africans in Partnership Against AIDS (APAA), Amnesty International LGBT (Canada), Black Coalition for AIDS Prevention (Black CAP), Center for Research-Action on Race Relations (CRARR), Gay and Lesbian Asians of Montreal (GLAM), and Gays and Lesbian of African Descent. 42

campaign in Canada focuses on their partnership with JFLAG, and coalition leader Akim Ade

Larcher consistently states in the press that the Canadian campaign's goal is to raise awareness

and education of the lack of human rights for gay and lesbians in Jamaica. While so far the

Canadian campaign has built a different base of support than the UK campaign, it remains to be

seen what narratives of Jamaican homophobia will play out in the Canadian press and legal

narratives. It is notable, however, that there are no women's groups on the member roster of the

Canadian coalition, and an unfortunate cancellation at their most public forum to date meant that

the speakers were exclusively men (except for the moderator). However, a number of issues were

raised at the forum that addressed rape as encouraged violence against women; however, how

this violence was connected to homophobia in dancehall lyrics was not centrally addressed. Rape

is often considered an acceptable way to "reform" a lesbian into heterosexual activity, and as

such, "women who are or are perceived to be lesbians are at an even greater risk of rape, as they

may be targeted for sexual violence based on both their gender and sexual orientation" (Human

Rights Watch 2004). As the Stop Murder Music campaign gains momentum in Canada, the

Canadian state has not yet responded to their calls for intervention in Jamaica.

3.2: Conflating Violence: Danger to Tourists, or Danger to

Jamaicans?

As the Stop Murder Music campaign gained steam in Britain, many gay writers interpreted the journalistic accounts and human rights reports as a cautionary tale for traveling gay tourists, and not as a call to action to support gay and lesbian Jamaicans. In fact, tourist 43

tropes about the paradisal Caribbean are often used as metaphors to juxtapose the violence, as in

the introductory sentence of this article published in Gay New Zealand: "When it comes to

LGBT equality, Jamaica is an oil slick in the pristine Caribbean. Toxic homophobia even

pervades its popular culture, particularly within the reggae offshoot labelled 'murder music'"

(Young 2008). Even before the Stop Murder Music campaign began, gay travel writers

characterized the encounter between gay tourists and Jamaicans in colonial terms, such as this

article in The Advocate in July 1999; the "Travel Warnings: The Dangers that Gay and Lesbian

Tourists Face on Vacation" which states "a series of... rather ugly incidents involving gay tours

and hostile natives has been reported in Central America and the Caribbean" (as quoted in Puar

2002: 103, emphasis mine). When Stop Murder Music Canada suggested a tourism boycott in

April 2008 as a way to force the Jamaican government out of silence and change their

legislation, the conflation of concerns for gay and lesbians in Jamaica and concerns for the safety

of those queer tourists arriving from the North became even more apparent. These cautionary

tales ply a racialized fear of homophobic violence to a still-central white (albeit gay) tourist, but

they also promise sexualized exoticism, as embodied by black hyper(hetero)sexuality. Tourism materials present representations of black bodies, male and female, as exotic Caribbean flora and

fauna. In the case of Jamaica, the exotic is signaled by discourses of homophobia, thus

"the gay and lesbian tourism industry is indebted to the culturally constructed homophobia of another place, one that is intrinsic to the framework of modernity and that enables rather than deflects, tourist interest as well as fantasies of sexual transgression" (Puar 2002: 104).

In order to push the campaign further than targeting specific dancehall musicians on non-

Jamaican soil, Stop Murder Music Canada proposed a tourism boycott of Jamaica to begin on

May 12, 2008, the International Day Against Homophobia. The proposed boycott sought to end the silence of the Jamaican government on homophobic violence in the country, asking it to 44

immediately denounce that violence and to develop educational campaigns for the country and

for the police, as well as to begin work on repealing laws criminalizing homosexuality, including

sexual orientation in the Charter of Rights (Rau 2008a). In response, JFLAG produced a press release stating their group was against the proposed boycott, noting in particular that the poor disproportionately feel the effects of an economic boycott, including poor gays and lesbians:

In our battle to win hearts and minds, we do not wish to be perceived as taking food off the plate of those who are already impoverished. In fact members of our own community could be disproportionately affected by a worsened economic situation brought about by a tourist ban (as quoted in Rau 2008a).

But Gareth Henry, the former spokesperson for JFLAG (now in Canada), says that

JFLAG can't be seen to publicly support a boycott because of the potential repercussions of violence. After the boycott proposal was announced, the current program coordinator of JFLAG,

Jason MacFarlane (a pseudonym), noted increased reported levels of violence. (Rau 2008c).

Peter Tatchell dealt with this type of criticism at the inception of the SMM Britian campaign by comparing the negative short-term results of to those of the civil rights movement in the US

South: "It provoked a backlash, the number of church burnings and lynchings went up. It was a tragic but necessary process to go through in order to vanquish white racism" (as quoted in

Petridis 2004). In many ways, the increased violence of recent years may be due to increased visibility and public discussions of homosexuality, brought on by the global spotlight on dancehall performances in the diaspora, and whether or not this violence is necessary is a difficult question, one that must be answered by Jamaicans themselves.

Conversely, Gareth Henry says that "the gays, lesbians and queers on the ground are supportive of a boycott" (Rau 2008a). What this points to, of course, is that the Jamaican gay and lesbian community is varied in their political beliefs and class positions, like queer communities anywhere, a diversity that may be denied by global gay readings of its uniform experience of 45

persecution and violence in specific response to their sexual identities. While it's true that the

fear of violent reprisal within Jamaica means that JFLAG and other members of the community

can't openly debate the issues, any statements they might make to the media are read by a gay

community in the North that rarely incorporates the cultural and economic history of this

violence. While boycotts attempt to strike at the very heart of state and capital projects such as

tourism, they also don't acknowledge the ways that local working-class people are often the most

vulnerable part of tourism's nexus of operations. It is not surprising that JFLAG wouldn't

support a boycott. As Michael Griffiths, of Casey House in Toronto, puts it: "They think they can

bring the country to its knees. The country's already on its ankles" (Rau 2008b). While JFLAG

likely welcomes international attention that supports their efforts to overturn the illegality of

certain sex acts in Jamaica, the SMM campaign has recharacterized Jamaica as a violent place,

without any acknowledgement of the North's historical role in contributing to the poverty that perpetuates it. As Owen "Blakka" Ellis astutely observes in The Jamaican Star, "some of the

approaches activate memories of white imperial control. And our people are famously rebellious,

especially against attempts to impose 'foreign' strategies to fix Jamaican problems" (Ellis 2008).

The suggestion of a boycott thus undoubtedly provokes Jamaican sentiments of anticolonial resentment at the attempted control of the North of their economic and political affairs. This resentment, directed in this case against global gay capital, is not, however, aimed at

Jamaica's own tourism industry and state managers, who participate in perpetuating sexualized colonial-era discourses that offer the island as an exotic locale where "taboo" sex is possible and encouraged. As Agostinho Pinnock writes on his blog, "the Western, white, male, intellectual, elitist agenda which is primarily responsible for demonizing Jamaica as 'the most homophobic place on earth', was vested in constructing the debate purely around sex. In so doing, other 46

critical issues which were in need of being ventilated were suppressed such as the importance of

desire in constructing fear of the 'other'" (2008).

The boycott attempt showcased what kind of media attention a plan of local economic

disruption by the North can garner. In Jamaica, the debate focused on the lack of local support

for the campaign, and on longstanding Jamaican resistance to neoimperial control of their

economy and political landscape. Even as Larcher suggested the three-day boycott was a victory

because it provoked an official response from the normally silent Jamaican government, this

response did not include mention of the specificity of homophobia, only reiterating the

government's general strategies to confront violence. More importantly, Anne-Marie Bonner, the

Jamaican consul general, did note the campaign's lack of support from JFLAG when she wrote:

"It is to be assumed that, naturally, the views of the persons whose interests are ostensibly being

promoted will be respected" (as quoted in Rau 2008c). While it seems unlikely that the Jamaican

government would respond any more directly to the demands of JFLAG, the lack of an

integrated and publicly "out" collaboration between SMM Canada and JFLAG hurt the

legitimacy of the campaign in Jamaica.

Is it possible to truly

hear what the local gay and lesbian community in Jamaica desires, given the construction of

Caribbean sexual cultures? Given the economy of representation of Jamaican homophobia, how

can the local community speak, and how does it include or exclude those who have fled to the

diaspora? In Queer Times, Queer Assemblages, Jasbir Puar examines the ways that the

organization Al-Fatiha13 was called upon to characterize Muslim sexuality to a Western media

audience after the sexualized violences at the Abu-Ghraib prison. She suggests that there is

Al-Fatiha (www.al-fatiha.org) is an international Muslim lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, and questioning (LGBTIQ) organization based in the United States. 47

almost no way to get media attention unless a representation that resonates with orientalism is

proffered. Any description of "local" sexual behaviours and beliefs must at least partially

confirm the Western gaze of it, particularly in parts of the world seen as exotic locales, where

sexuality is considered more unstable and dangerous; as in the case of Islam, Puar suggests "We

must consider instead how the production of "homosexuality as taboo" is situated within the

history of encounter with the Western gaze" (2005: 125). I wish to draw a parallel here, and

suggest that the story that can be told by local Jamaicans must be one that will at least partially

confirm Northern accounts of local homophobia; thus their account is, as Puar phrases it, "a

performance of a particular allegiance with American sexual exceptionalism [that] is a the result

of a demand, not a suggestion" (2005: 123).

In this simultaneous avoidance of and desire for black hyper(hetero)sexuality, tourism

becomes a significant colonial site where gay tourists bring together processes of sexual

citizenship and, sexual commodification (Alexander 2005: 27). Alexander suggests that a number

of people must be ignored, commodified or silenced in order to produce the gay tourist, an

above-average homosexual consuming citizen. Gay travel advertising codifies gay as white,

able-bodied, and perennially upwardly-mobile; whiteness and masculinity work together to

normalize this kind of gay while simultaneously overshadowing lesbians, working-class gay men

and lesbians and gay men of color of any class (Alexander 2005: 71 & 77). In the tourist account,

the "queer fetishized native" is made to remain static and silent in order to be appropriately

consumed (70) by the gay tourist. Puar notes that increasingly, high-end tourist ventures use

contacts with gay and lesbian NGOs in countries that are travel destination as a selling point, prompting her to ask "what new queer politics are emerging through tourism, and what tourist practices are emerging from global gay and lesbian activism?" (Puar 2002: 123) She suggests that their agendas closely overlap, through the intentions are different: "one seeks 'our world' to 48

enable the modern queer subject to be 'out and about'; the other seeks global queer solidarity to

promote modern notions of queer human rights in order to save queers at the peripheries, who

operate in a vector of sameness within difference" (Puar 2002; 125).

It becomes even more possible for these agendas to overlap when gay tourists and

activists in the North discount the historical and contemporary importance of race and culture in

structuring relationships between the North and the Caribbean. Despite understanding

themselves as subaltern subjects, members of gay Northern communities repeat a familiar

colonial story, where people in the "developed" North lament the ignorant violence and

hopelessness of "development" in the South. This racialized representation links the supposed

essence of Jamaican culture to its propensity for violence and its overflowing hyper(hetero)sexuality; these cultural traits are interpreted as "backwardness" and as the reason

for its social, political and cultural underdevelopment. Here, Jamaica is posed as culturally and unchangingly opposed to homosexuality, while Northern and primarily white cultures stand for progress on issues of equality and human rights for queers. But how have gay and lesbian communities in the North positioned themselves in order to gain equality rights? With what costs have those rights been achieved?

3.3 Same-Sex Marriage and Sexual Respectability in Canada

In pushing for the legislation of gay marriage in Canada, the gay and lesbian lobby depended on establishing what Sherene Razack (1998) calls a "toehold of respectability." Gay and lesbian activists sought representation in the mainstream media as tolerant, educated and 49

employed citizens who want to be married in order to legitimize their families (Thorpe 2005).

This construction, then, establishes what gays and lesbians are not: hateful, lazy, uneducated and

promiscuous people who have children out of wedlock, stereotypes that have long been

associated with black sexuality. In Jamaica, the colonial project to "civilize" working-class Black

Jamaicans addressed these very "problems" of promiscuity, marital instability, "defective"

paternity and high rates of illegitimacy (Thomas 2006: 5-6), particularly through the promotion

of marriage to advance respectable sexuality. These signifiers represent pathological "other"

sexuality and a less advanced culture of sex. As Canadian gays and lesbians work to establish

their sexuality as respectable and modern, the Caribbean is imagined as "behind" due to its

traditional cultural handicaps, one of which is the widespread lack of a culture of marriage, even

as that culture has been actively rejected by many Caribbean women, who saw the institution as

a domestication of violence against women, and as an attempt to make them into the property of

their husbands by denying their workforce participation. This talk of traditional culture

understands homophobia as traditional violence, and never as part of a complicated response to

modern geopolitical struggles against global racism and colonialism.15

The tales of homophobic violence privileged by the Stop Murder Music campaign are

important not only for what they say, but what they do not say. Media accounts focus on the

14 Although here I primarily address the proponents of gay marriage, I don't wish to imply that there hasn't been a significant debate in the gay and lesbian community on the usefulness of agitating for gay marriage. Following Meeks and Stein, I suggest that proponents of gay and lesbian marriage have tended to embrace a "politics of normalization" - a rhetorical strategy that "simultaneously advances the cause of gay civil rights while constructing rigid and regulative definitions of 'normal' gay sexuality" (2006: 137). Meeks and Stein suggest that the politics of normalization and assimilation have become the dominant political discourse of lesbian and gay movements since the 1990s. 151 don't mean to suggest here that homophobia is a legitimate or acceptable response to neoimperialism, but instead I am drawing attention to how Jamaican sexual cultures are framed as traditional and unchanging, when in fact they are in constant contact with the North and Jamaicans actively reinterpret that contact to influence local cultural realities. 50

unjust murder or heroic survival of gay men against male homophobic attackers. Both characters

are colonial ones; homophobic attackers are those lawless black men requiring discipline and

intervention. The gay victims are those black men needing to be rescued with the advanced

human rights knowledge of the North. While some accounts note the prevalence of the rape of

lesbians and suspected lesbians, in these accounts Jamaican women, whatever their sexuality, are

absent and silenced.

3.4 The Conditions of Silence: Black Women's Sexuality

Many scholars have acknowledged that silence and erasure are crucial issues in the

dominant discourses about black female sexuality (Spillers 1989, Omosupe 1991, Morrison

1992, as listed in Hammonds 1997: 140). In the Caribbean specifically, there is a general lack of

knowledge about women's sexual agency, reinforced by scholarship that has historically

privileged black women's quest for respectability within the institutions of slavery (via sexual

contact with white slave-owners) and the church (via marriage). Much scholarship about

sexuality in the Caribbean assumes the region is naturally heterosexual, informally polygamous,

and deeply intolerant not only of homosexuality but also of female sexual agency (Kempadoo

2004). Despite the widespread adoption of gender as a theoretical and policy paradigm in the

study of women in the Caribbean, sexuality is assumed to be unproblematically, and heterosexually, nestled within gender16; women's sexuality and sexual needs are assumed to be oriented towards serial heterosexual monogamy, fidelity, money and procreation (Kempadoo

16 Hammonds also notes that Black women scholars are reluctant to break the silence on discussing sexuality not because their hypervisibility in the academy means they are "already threatened with being sexualized and rendered inauthentic as knowledge producers" (146) and so the avoidance of theorizing about sexuality is a contemporary manifestation of their "structured silence." Some notable exceptions include Cheryl Clarke, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Jewelle Gomez, Makeda Silvera, Jacqui Alexander and Kemala Kempadoo. 51

2004); all of these assumptions suggest that Caribbean women are invested in Eurocentric ideals of femininity, including the male breadwinner family model, despite their historical role in developing informal labour markets (such as higglering) and their bearing of children outside of formal marriage (Green 2006). Green also found that the dependent relationship that results from the property-driven institution of marriage is rejected by many black women, who think it is "too much work" and puts them under too much control of a male partner. Assuming that black women are among the major agents of respectability provides an easy lead into an analysis that accuses women of complicity with white men in the emasculation and humiliation of black men.

This theory, often called the male marginalization theory (Miller 1986), has enjoyed too much explanatory power in willing away women's autonomy and agency in a context where the facts of majority female-headed households and women's labour power have not been easily reconciled with women's supposed commitment to Eurocentric respectability in family, labour, and sexual relations (Reddock 2004).

According to Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, silence emerged as a strategy by Black women reformers in the US to confront sexual and gender oppression (as quoted in Hammonds

1997: 143). In the New World, this oppression originated with slaveowners controlling black sexualities in order to reproduce the labour force for slavery, defining heteropatriarchy as necessary for social mobility and acceptance (Silvera 1992: 530). Alexander suggests that loyalty to the state has been colonized within reproduction and heterosexuality, making women's erotic autonomy outside these structures a danger to the respectability of Black middle-class womanhood (2005: 23). Confronting representations of the sexual immorality of Black women,

Black women reformers advocated silence also promoted the adoption of Victorian morality (as quoted by Hammonds 1997: 143). Reformers worked to debunk the mythology which says black 52

women's sexuality is depraved; but many overcompensated by assimilating Puritan values that

dictated that sex is for procreation, and only valid within the confines of heterosexual marriage.

The super moral Black woman that resulted with this approach excluded the sexuality of many

working-class and lesbian women. In this push to construct heteronormative, nuclear middle-

class families, reformers helped in silencing other forms of sexuality. Because of the racialized

politics supporting silence, any women who expressed sexuality outside these mores could be

construed as "traitors to the race." Silvera suggests that denial and silencing were understandable

coming from straight Black women "because we have no race privilege, and very, very few of us

have class privilege. The one privilege within our group is heterosexual" (1992: 531). Silvera

suggests that her grandmother and mother actively denied the existence of lesbianism among

working-class women in Jamaica in order to protect Silvera, as they intimately knew the risks of

defying heteropatriarchy (1992: 529).

However, while acknowledging the role of black reformer movements in enforcing

heterosexuality is important, here I want to stress how concepts of sexual respectability and

silence are transnationally enforced in tandem with the privileging of white male sexualities.

While Hammonds' article addresses the reasons for silence among Black women, she also

suggests that "public discourse on the sexuality of particular racial and ethnic groups is shaped

by processes that pathologize those groups, which in turn produce the submersion of sexuality

and the attendant silence(s)." (1997: 138) Here Hammond stresses that silence is not, in fact, a

choice; instead the "imposed production of silence and the removal of alternatives to the

production of silence reflect the deployment of power against racialized subjects where those

who wished to speak did not want to and those who did want to speak were prevented from

doing so" (Hammonds 1997: 144). If we consider the Northern readings of Jamaican homophobia discussed above, we can see how global gay campaigns foster the production of 53

silence of Black lesbian sexuality, as well as the erasure of race as a term of difference. As

Silvera states, there is more at risk for Black women than white women in confronting

heteropatriarchy, because "we are the sisters, daughters, mothers of a people enslaved by

colonialists and imperialists" (Silvera 1992: 529).

While I agree in part with Tatchell's suggestion that "the real racism lies not in our

campaign, but in most people's indifference to the persecution of gay Jamaicans" (2004), the

Stop Murder Music campaign in Britain has not been able to articulate its concern for

homophobic violence done to Black male bodies into a strong campaign that includes a

commitment to anti-racism and/or feminism. Of course this is due in part to the gay media's

hunger for sensationalized stories of violence, but Tatchell's interest in exploiting media

attention has not occurred in relationship to building visible and long-term coalitions with a

diversity of community groups that would deepen his analysis of the violence. The weakness of

the Stop Murder Music campaign is evidenced, in part, by its easy translation into a colonialist

tale of caution for white gay tourists. If instead we reconsider that the "queer fetishized native"

does indeed travel, and is actively present in queer communities of the North despite his/her

recolonization by white gay tourism in the Caribbean, we can link a transnational anti-

homophobia campaign to processes of immigration and racialization in the North. By making

this link, an alternative politics of sexuality can emerge that might embody a different kind of

transnational feminist vision.

3.5 Sexual Exceptionalism: Gay Around the World

One possible lens for seeing these links is refocusing the SMM debates on the transnational process of sexual exceptionalism, defined by Puar in the following passage: 54

Forms of U.S. sexual exceptionalism from purportedly progressive spaces have historically surfaced through feminist constructions of "third world" women; what we have now, however, is the production of a sexual exceptionalism through normative as well as nonnormative (queer) bodies. That is, queerness is proffered as a sexually exceptional form of American national sexuality through a rhetoric of sexual modernization that is simultaneously able to castigate the other as homophobic and perverse, and construct the imperialist center as "tolerant" but sexually, racially, and gendered normal (Puar 2005: 122).

While Puar's analysis is focused on the U.S., I envision sexual exceptionalism occurring

within gay and lesbian communities in the US, Europe and Canada, who imagine themselves to

be modern in the expression of their sexualities, simultaneously marking neocolonial countries as

traditionally heteronormative and violent. Despite widespread instances of homophobic violence

in Canada and the USA, when gay rights discourse goes international, this violence is not

imagined as characteristic of the North. Sexual exceptionalism registers First World homophobia

as perpetuated by individual hate-mongerers, or as a problem of multicultural tolerance that can

be "corrected" through the right exposure to human rights education. At the same time,

multicultural discourses of integration suggest that new immigrants must "adjust their values" to

include gay Pride and public displays of homosexual desire, thus incorporating queer into liberal

notions of diversity. Sexual exceptionalism marks national differences in homophobia as

cultural, divorcing the difference from the logics of race, nationalism or gender. Gay and lesbian

human rights become incorporated into a vision of "advanced nationhood," marking cultural and political advancement. As neoimperial states selectively incorporate these rights as markers, the

same queer bodies that claim entitlement to those rights become crucial to nationalist projects in the North. As Jasbir Puar asserts, not only are these bodies crucial to nationalism insofar as they reiterate heterosexuality as the norm, but "also because certain domesticated homosexual bodies provide ammunition to reinforce nationalist projects" (2006: 67). By considering the phenomenon of Northern sexual exceptionalism, we can see the unwitting collusion between the gay and lesbian movement and the heteronormative, neocolonial state. 55

A recent appearance by Jamaican lesbian Staceyann Chin on the Oprah Winfrey Show illustrates the complexity of confronting sexual exceptionalism in the United States. As immigration from the Caribbean to the North continues, racialized women and queers have resisted the boundaries of liberal gay and lesbian inclusion, destabilizing the assumption that sexual freedom is equally available to all gays and lesbians in the North, and that neocolonial

1 O peripheries singularly represent repression. In the episode "Gays Around the World," Oprah stages an intimate yet very public conversation in the epicenter of American pop culture. Oprah introduces Staceyann Chin, Jamaican lesbian poet, Manvendra Singh Gohil, a gay prince from

India, and John Meachi, the first "out" NBA basketball star. Gohil and Chin travel from persecution in faraway places to "come out" to Oprah, enacting the primacy of the coming-out narrative in North American gay culture. According to Grewal and Kaplan, this coming-out reinforces the divide between tradition and modernity by positing a "movement from repression to freedom" (2001: 670). Traveling from dark, colonial places, the guests become visible and can access "true sexual freedom" in the cosmopolitan West. Coming out of obscurity and repression is made possible by making an appearance on Oprah's show; what we can know as sexual freedom from homophobia is made possible or structured by concepts of American freedom.

How does this narrative of sexual freedom mark other places as repressive vis-a-vis the

United States on Oprah's show? Oprah explains that recent comments by Iranian president

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prompted the creation of this particular episode. The president, who spoke at Columbia University in September 2007, purportedly said "We don't have homosexuals like in your country. We do not have this phenomenon." Now while this suggestion that homosexuals do not exist in Iran most definitely speaks to the violent erasure of sexual minorities under his government's rule, Ahmadinejad's comments hint that the very category of

18 This show aired on October 24, 2007. gay and lesbian, the contours of that political and cultural identity, might not be possible in Iran:

here my emphasis is on the phrase "like in your country". Katie King addresses this same

contestation in her article "There are No Lesbians Here" (2002). Her title springs from the idea

that the phrase "there are no lesbians here" might be understood by asking what counts as lesbian

and where here is. She suggests that within global gay human rights activism, naming lesbians

becomes part of producing international laws protecting sexual minorities, which produces a new

global citizen whose claims are not upon single nation-states but upon continually-recreated-as-

stable ideas of the "universal." This "universal" is in fact an unstable category produced with

much legal, military, economic, and scientific effort. She suggests that the signifier lesbian is

powerful as a global gay concept, but that a particular "local" formation of lesbian, the U.S.

1970s feminist version (and I would add white feminist to this local version's qualifiers), may be

uncritically used as the standard, the unmarked category, and that this version is materially and

powerfully produced through processes of globalization. It is this production of American gay

identity that Oprah draws upon with the very title of the show "Gay Around the World." In

signaling this particular hegemonic idea of gay, and I would argue, of gay freedom, Oprah

attempts to find its absence in other places, settling on Iran as the exemplar of unfreedom vis-a

vis the freedom offered by American sexual culture.

What does Oprah's positioning of Iran as a place of evil and unfreedom have to do with

the UK's Stop Murder Music campaign? In responding to the claim that the UK approach to

confronting homophobia may be racist, Tatchell quotes an anonymous Jamaican gay man who

says life in Jamaica is like "living in Afghanistan under the Taliban" in order to give credence to

the severity of the violence (Tatchell, n.d.). Because invoking the Taliban suggests the presence

of an ultimate evil, the language we choose to advance a discourse of human rights claims is deeply implicated in the dangers of neoimperialism, where Northerners are constructed as the 57

potential saviours of Third World "victims," where the complexity of queer life in Iran is

subordinated by global gay and lesbian signifiers of identity and what can be considered

meaningful political action can only be read under those signifiers. Specific and local debates

around strategy for change are erased or silenced, and again sexuality can only be measured

against the human rights paradigm of the North.

However, at the same time, Oprah's show suggests that the USA cannot be conclusively

produced as the home of sexual freedom. Both Chin and Gohil describe their coming-out in

Jamaica and India, and while Chin suggests that her coming-out was marked by violence, she

also names Jamaica as "home" - as a place of belonging for her, suggesting that her sexuality is

not the only, or primary site of her personhood. Gohil continues to live in India; he tells Oprah

that his activist work on HIV/AIDS in India's gay community sustains him. John Meachi speaks

as the first out gay man in the NBA on the same show, suggesting that the "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays in the American military spills over into sporting cultures. Although the show doesn't directly address the marginalization of black queers in the USA, Meachi does

acknowledge the difficulty of being unilaterally read as the "big-black-gay-guy." He also tells how one fan told him she didn't know black people could be gay before she knew of him. Oprah also mentions that gay marriage has only been legislated in one US state, and suggests that anti- gay hate crimes are still prevalent in the USA. But despite this hinting of the invisibility of black queers in the US, the show still doesn't allow for the possibility of how racialization and sexual minority status might interact in ways that might implicate the American state in the violence named as characteristic of certain homophobias.

3.6 Homophobia and National Identity in Neocolonial Jamaica 58

By understanding Jamaican homophobia as a cultural predisposition to

hyper(hetero)sexuality and violence, debates on dancehall music in the North have worked to

reinforce the Jamaican neocolonial state's presentation of Jamaica as naturally heterosexual.

Jamaican politicians and public debate have suggested that sexual minorities are not a part of

Jamaican national identity by actively denying their constituency, coinciding with Alexander's

suggestion that loyalty to the state has been colonized within reproduction and heterosexuality.

Claiming to assert national independence against the queer incursions of Jamaican's former

colonial masters, the Jamaican state has been silent (with the exception of the letter to SMM

Canada) after calls for human rights from international gay and lesbian human rights groups

(Aikenhead 2005 & Berkeley 2005). In her study of the outlawing of lesbian sex in the Bahamas

in 1991, Alexander finds "nostalgia for an idyllic Bahamas, free from Western decadent

incursions, a Bahamas that was not peopled by lesbians and gay men" (1997: 85). At the same

time that the Bahamian state attempted to guard its citizens from sexual contamination by

legislating national heterosexuality, it also made its borders more permeable to multinational

capital through tourism. Likewise in Jamaica, as tourism has reinforced the national economy,

thus strengthening a sense of independence, it has simultaneously reinforced its dependence on

tourist-sending nations like the UK and Canada and on the sexual and gendered division of

labour in the tourism sector.

Denying the indigenous presence of gays and lesbians in the Caribbean depends on

ideologically mooring heterosexualized nationalism. With the fervour that erupted with the unveiling of the statue "Redemption Song", meant to commemorate Emancipation Day in 2003, homophobia haunts discussions of how to properly represent independent Jamaica and commemorate its colonial past. The statue, by artist Laura Facey Cooper, features two nude

African figures emerging from a pool of water in Emancipation Park in Kingston. The male and 59

the female figures face each other, but are looking upwards. The outrage over the meaning and

shame associated with their nakedness strongly reflected class-based concerns over how

sexuality was linked to Jamaica's past. Writing into Jamaican's national newspapers, both in

island as well as the diaspora, many citizens felt the sculpture reinforced stereotypes about

Blacks as hypersexualized beings. Several working-class Afro-Jamaicans felt that the passive

figures did not reflect the fighting spirit of the maroons and other movements that resisted

slavery in Jamaica's past and felt that the absence of clothing suggested the shame of nakedness

in slavery. Others lamented the display of nudity as degrading to Jamaica's moral fibre, echoing

their concerns with the international popularity of dancehall culture with its sexualized fashion

and dance moves. Deborah Thomas (2006) points out that the concern over dancehall culture is

related to the changing economic power of migrating working-class Jamaicans through

remittance culture; economic and cultural power is no longer solely possible via colonial

respectability.

Yet the bulk of the public discussion on the nudity of the figures focused on the male

body, in particular, on the size of the man's penis. Although concerns about reproducing the

colonial hypersexuality of blackness were central to the debate, why was the penis's size and

shape so scrutinized? How could a healthy Black supposedly heterosexual male possess a flaccid

penis when facing a buxom Black woman, no matter what their orientation to emancipation? As

Faith Smith (2004) points out, heterosexuality is the unstated assumption for proponents of both

colonial respectability and racial respect, across class boundaries; this suggestions that the

possibility of silenced queer desire in the statue poses an important challenge to the ideological

anchor of the nation: the nuclear heterosexual family, in more ways that the singular focus on

homophobia in dancehall might suggest. Considering the colonial hypersexuality of black bodies, what sexual cultures do certain countermemories submerge and which do they celebrate? 60

What vision of sexual citizenship provokes loyalty to the nation? Important work, excavating

alternative sexual cultures of both the past and present, on mati work, man royals, zammi, and

others have begun challenging neocolonialist state's cemented relationship to heteropatriarchy as

a grounding ideology.

Well-meaning Northern anti-racist activists seeking to redress the history of colonialism

in the homophobia debate have also reinforced the idea of homosexuality as foreign to Jamaica.

In a letter to the editor in The Guardian, Decca Aikenhead suggests that British colonialism in

Jamaica is "in living memory" and if the British "really believe in postcolonial independence,

don't tell [Jamaica] what to do with it" (2005). More than the failure to accept postcolonial

politics, she suggests that the "vilification of Jamaican homophobia" implies the failure to

recognize 400 years of Jamaican history. She recalls the use of sodomy by white owners as a

means of humiliating slaves, stating that "their homophobia is our fault." And yet while making

this powerful suggestion that past sexual violence has links to present homophobia in Jamaica,

Aikenhead suggests that sexual alterity was forced on its citizens, not including any reference to

indigenous, West African or Jamaican histories of sexual alterity (outside of sodomy used as

domination in slavery), reinforcing a singular idea of the "foreignness" and "unnatural sexual

practice" of gay and lesbian cultures. Again, the possibility of sexual agency is erased for

Jamaican gays and lesbians, who are imagined to have become homosexual by virtue of foreign

influence. This point of view is reinforced by the fact that vocal Caribbean gays and lesbians live

in the diaspora, and their views on Jamaican sexual politics aren't often taken very seriously in

Jamaica (Smith 2006). The structures of silencing that I discuss above suggests that the dynamics

of neoimperialism make speaking out as a queer in Jamaica more difficult for reasons more

complex than just the violence of the neocolonial Jamaican state. As Caribbean gays and lesbians take up residence in the metropoles of the North for multiple and ambivalent reasons, the 61

diaspora becomes a potent space for building the national imagination, not only of Jamaica but of

the diaspora countries. Their citizenship and presence complicates the terms of gay and lesbian

organizing for respectability in the North, for example, destabilizing the gay marriage project so bent on recreating the nuclear heterosexual family form in service of the nation.

The Aikenhead letter makes an important contribution to the homophobia debate by

expanding its terms to include British colonialism. Her letter is the only suggestion in the mainstream press that Britian is invested in the structure of heterosexism in Jamaica, noting that

Jamaica spends almost 70% of its national earnings on servicing its foreign debt. She suggests that developing human rights in Jamaica would be better addressed by demanding debt relief, fair trade and investment: "all the boring, complicated features required for a functional and just

society". Here she addresses the spectacularization of the debate on homophobic violence,

suggesting that "of all Jamaica's injustices and deprivations, homophobia cannot be singled out as uniquely intolerable. Although activists are right to campaign about it, it's wrong for public opinion to seize on the issue with no thought for political context." Staceyann Chin has also suggested that a discussion about gay rights can't happen unless it simultaneously occurs with a discussion about the racialized roots of poverty: "You can't talk about gay rights in Jamaica when a black boy does not even have food and clothes. How the hell are you going to tell him to allow somebody to be gay, when he is not even being allowed to eat?" (Chin, as quoted by Trotz

2006).

Because of its potent global circulation, Jamaican popular culture is the terrain on which meanings about Jamaican identity are most hotly debated. This says something about the power of working-class Afro-Jamaican cultural production to shape ideas about Jamaican national identity culture. In the fall of 2007, as the Stop Murder Music campaign reverberated throughout 62 the Caribbean as dancehall artists continued tours to Trinidad and Guyana, citizens wrote in to newspapers to protest the poor reputation that "slack" artists bring to Jamaica internationally by glorifying violent crime, drug dealing and ghetto/yardie life. Jamaicans lamented the country's

"embarrassing" human rights record, one that threatens their international reputation and tourist economy. The trope of working-class black as violent and uncultured (or as backwards culture) disturbs the multiracial upper class of Jamaica intent on proving itself a modern and advanced nation in charge of its own affairs. Although I cannot properly consider the depth of Jamaican debates on the cultural implications of Jamaican dancehall, Carolyn Cooper has argued that attempts to slander dancehall as "slackness" are attempts to denigrate working-class forms of expression. She suggests that homophobic lyrics act as a release valve for pent-up feelings about sexuality, opening a space for debate on sexuality in Jamaica (2004). Cooper's approach is an important and necessary contribution to asserting the importance of Jamaican popular culture forms, particularly in the face of respectability paradigms that denigrate black forms of expression. It is also true that the Stop Murder Music campaign has failed to draw attention to the fact that working-class Jamaicans bear the brunt of the violence. But Cooper's approach doesn't do much in the way of enabling Jamaican gays and lesbians, as her deeply rooted and somewhat unconditional support for local dancehall culture does turn into an apologist account of homophobic black masculinity in her later work (2004) by branding "gay as Western bourgeois decadence" (Sharpe & Pinto 2006: 261). Cooper also conveniently ignores how dancehall upholds a narrow definition of permissible heterosexual acts and how particular dancehall hits like Boom Bye-Bye are not just harmless release valves, but actively chanted during homophobic attacks.

3.6 Conclusion 63

Examining how Jamaican homophobia is made to matter, especially by Northern gay and lesbian activists and media, suggests that SMM campaign strategists have not adequately addressed the legacy of slavery and colonialism on the transnational representation of Caribbean sexuality. The way we choose to name and historicize this violence belies ongoing investments in heterosexualized neoimperialism, even from once-marginal gay and lesbians who imagine themselves to be promoting sexual freedom for others. The history of exclusion of racialized people from gay and lesbian movements in the North suggests a sexual freedom that is not free to all; instead, it is contingent on race, culture and nation. Sexual exceptionalism reads the sexualities of colonial places as traditional and unchanging, and in order to do, it must silence the voices of Jamaican gays and lesbians who suggest it is otherwise. By questioning the discursive planks that Northern readings of Jamaican homophobia rest upon, and questioning in particular the ideological work that silencing Jamaican women does, I suggest that other representations and responses to homophobia are possible. Intersectional and transnational analyses reveal the multiple planks, and thus multiple sites of possible instability, that are required to maintain the authoritative status of the story of homophobia as Black male violence.

Despite the difficulty of speaking against structured silence, some Jamaican women cultural producers are speaking out. Actively working against dominant ideologies and practices that seek to deny their existence, Black lesbian cultural producers are beginning the project described by Hammonds:

disavowing the designation of black female sexualities as inherently abnormal, while acknowledging the material and symbolic effects of the appellation, we could begin the project of understanding how differently located black women engage in reclaiming the body and expressing desire (1997:149). 64

By laying this groundwork on the structure of silence, I have foregrounded the depth and importance of the act of "breaking silence" for the two Black queer women poets explored in the next two chapters. 65

Chapter Four: Breaking Silence on Sexuality: Mapping the

Erotic in the Poetry of Staceyann Chin

Wonder whose pussy I was eatin' when I had a P.O. box there?

-Staceyann Chin, "Haiku on Being the Only Lesbian from Jamaica"

One thing has always kept me going ... is a sense that there are so many ways in which I'm vulnerable...I'm not going to be more vulnerable by putting weapons of silence in my enemies' hands. Being an open lesbian in the Black community is not easy, although being closeted is even harder.

-Audre Lorde

Poet-activist Staceyann Chin breaks the silences of the dominant discourse on Caribbean black women's sexuality by naming her sexual-political practice in Jamaica and in New York

City. Her haiku above suggests the myth of presumed "natural" heterosexuality in the Caribbean, and also defies conventions on "normal" sexual practice in breaking Jamaica's cultural taboo on oral sex (Tafari-Ama, 2006). In this poem Chin powerfully confronts the erasure of Jamaican lesbians by naming the unspoken: the existence and resistance of a Jamaican lesbian community actively creating community via pleasure in ways deemed illegal and dangerous. As detailed in

Chapter Three, this community is actively silenced by a neoliberal gay movement in the North that names Jamaica as "most homophobic country" while at the same time marginalizing communities of racialized gays and lesbians in the North. Expressions of lesbian desire in

Jamaica are also silenced by a neocolonial Jamaican state intent on naming gays and lesbians as foreign, as a way to assert localized cultural hegemony against former colonial masters. Last, this silence is also structured by the involvement of the neoimperial American state, which 66 heterosexualizes a backward and traditional Jamaica as a tourist paradise with the complicity of neocolonial state managers in Jamaica. In naming her existence between, through and within these nations, Chin's haiku evokes the transnational sexual agency and pleasure of Jamaican women. The haiku's overt claiming of erotic power is a form of feminist resistance against the silences imposed on these specific characteristics of black women's sexuality.

While globalized campaigns such as Stop Murder Music focus on the dangers of openly discussing homosexuality in Jamaica, the dangers in NOT speaking are less known. As Audre

Lorde acknowledges above, "being closeted is even harder"; not speaking to define self means that "we will be defined by others - for their use and to our detriment" (Lorde, 1984: 45). While this chapter explores how Chin has broken that silence, she is by no means the first to do so;

Caribbean women have long been speaking out with visions of powerful sexuality in order to actively rewrite dominant narratives of hypersexuality and invisibility. The legend of Jamaican freedom fighter Nanny of the Maroons is that she defended her people by catching the bullets of

British soldiers with her bottom. Her anticolonial bottom power hearkens a long history of women reclaiming already sexualized bodies in resistance. Her mythological status as Jamaica's freedom fighter earns her recognition as a national hero, and yet her sexual militancy is not often acknowledged as a crucial part of her decolonizing power in national narratives. This chapter, along with Chapter Five, addresses Hammonds's challenge to envision how differently located black women reclaim their bodies and express desire (1997). My approach is to consider the ways that Staceyann Chin's poetry mobilizes what M. Jacqui Alexander terms "erotic autonomy" in response to state-led19 and capitalist projects of heterosexualization, projects in which queer theorists and gay and lesbian social movements cannot be found innocent. Erotic autonomy is a

19 In the words of Jacqui Alexander, "we will think of "state" as a set of contradictory and uneven locations, institutions, personnel, managerial practices, and imperatives; and as a gendered, classed, racialized, and sexualized ensemble" (2007: 195). 67 force not easily colonized within the nuclear heterosexual family or within practices of gay tourism; women working for their own erotic autonomy directly confront the legitimacy of state power and global capital to determine sexualized citizenship. But at the same moment, erotic autonomy never stands in total opposition to state practices; it is always constituted, in part, by the state and capital's own (in)ability to imagine women's erotic autonomy as a threat (such as the supposed hypersexuality of black women and/or sex workers, and their attending threat as vectors of disease) or as innocuous (such as when lesbian sex is considered merely as erotic kindling to set fire to men's desire and thus inconsequential and invisibilized). Understanding erotic autonomy demands a critical engagement with these representations.

While in Chapter Three I discussed how homophobia is made to matter in Jamaica through the efforts of Stop the Murder Music campaigners, here I explore how homophobia matters in relation to the transnational women's erotic agency painted by Staceyann Chin's poetry. In doing so, I consider Chin's work as important cultural production, thus centrally positioning racialized immigrant women in the United States as key lesbian culture-makers, not the internal enemies so often suggested by U.S. immigration law and neoliberal gay politics.

Chin's poems engage the colonizing relationship between "gay-friendly" countries and the

Caribbean, especially the movement of migrants, refugees, and workers demanded by globalization. Actively working against the production of silence and erasure, Staceyann Chin's poetry maps an outspoken women's sexuality that is loud, liberatory, conflicted, and painful in its dream of erotic autonomy. Reading her work alongside a narrative of sexual globalization, particularly the circulation of global gay culture, I situate Chin as a "lesbian powerfully out of place" in her challenge to national discourses of sexual, gender and racialized citizenship in

Jamaica and the United States. Speaking to Jamaica, Chin exposes "the other side of paradise" while suggesting the complexity of Caribbean sexual cultures. Speaking to the USA, Chin 68 questions the positioning of certain kinds of subjects, including gay ones, as procreative and patriotic, and others as seditious and dangerous internal enemies. Together, these narratives expose the state and global capital's hold on heterosexualized citizenship while likewise acknowledging the traffic between neoimperialist and neocolonial practices.

Using a transnational feminist perspective, I begin with the assumption that "genders, sexualities, races, classes, nations, and even continents exist not as hermetically sealed entities but rather as part of a permeable interwoven relationality" (Shohat, 2002: 68). I read Chin's poetry as evidence of erotic power and autonomy, visions developed by Audre Lorde and M.

Jacqui Alexander to capture a deeper and more complex understanding of sexuality-in- community that implicate race, nation, gender and class as concurrent ways we understand sex in the world. Using Lorde's essay "Uses of the Erotic," I understand erotic power between women extending beyond the sexual. Adrienne Rich suggests that women's "emotional and erotic energies" must be "wrench[ed] away from other women to serve patriarchy" (as quoted in Chinn

2003: 189), making the loving of women an act of survival against male violence. I explore, what challenge does women's erotic power bring to gay visibility campaigns for recognition from state and capital? I also complicate nation-bound readings of Lorde's work with

Alexander's writing on erotic autonomy, rooting my analysis in a transnational feminist framework that demands the complex negotiation of the politics of location. Beyond petitioning the nation, what challenge does a transnational vision of erotic autonomy bring to these campaigns as they work alongside the neoimperial deployment of homonormativity? As Chin deftly negotiates the politics of location, she changes the way we envision Caribbean sexuality speaking to capital and state power, simultaneously questioning the cultural absolutism of

American sexual exceptionalism, where global gay campaigns as well as tourism narratives converge in reading Jamaica as hyper(hetero)sexually primitive. 69

The bulk of the chapter consists of a transnational feminist close reading of a Chin's poems. As a form of erotic agency and resistance, Staceyann Chin's words map diasporic

Jamaican women's sexuality, economy, and cultural practice through landscapes marked both by neocolonial and neoimperial state and capital interventions. I seek to map Chin's uses of the erotic as intimately raced across, within and against the political boundaries of the nation-state.

In particular, Chin's performances and poems on lesbian sexuality 1) question processes of sexual exceptionalism that discount the importance of gender and race in promises of "sexual freedom" in the United States; 2) reorient Jamaican diasporic citizenship to crack open the cemented relationship between citizenship and heterosexualized nationalism; 3) suggest that much gay and lesbian activism marginalizes racialized sexual dissidents. I suggest that if we are to reconfigure the potential uses of the erotic as Chin proposes, we cannot help but grapple with the colonial discursive production of black sexuality (particularly the idea of black female sex as monstrously other), as well as more contemporary visions of corporate queer sex (which seem emptied of political aim and community). Instead of just responding to violent homophobia without context, as in the case of global gay campaigns, Chin's poems change the way we think about the generative possibilities of erotic power.

4.1 Uses of Erotic Power and Autonomy

Audre Lorde names the erotic as "a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual place, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling"

(Lorde, 1984: 53). Distinguishing eroticism from sexuality, she explains that 70

The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects - born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives" (1984: 55).

The erotic finds power in those elements of ourselves that have been silenced or suppressed, but that also sustain us. Lorde asks, "How do we make necessary power out of negative surroundings?" (as quoted in Rowell 2000: 59) Intimately connecting unrecognized erotic power to its repression, Lorde says "every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change" (1984:

53). Because we have been taught to vilify, suspect, and abuse the erotic as a resource, accessing its power is complex since we have come to a false belief that its suppression will build strength for women. Alexander also suggests that we are "obliged to keep counsel with our inner selves, to come to the point of speaking the unspeakable" (2006: 153). But acknowledging and reclaiming the erotic in all creative aspects of life - in community, language, history, dancing, work - is what will empower women. In this sense, the erotic is not just a sexual force; in fact

"we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex"

(Lorde 1984: 56). For Lorde, this eroticism was equally present in writing poetry, in sharing physical touch, or in moving her body into the sunlight. Erotic power infuses relationships between women as friends, comrades, siblings, mothers and daughters; it comes from deeply sharing any pursuit with another person. Acknowledging its ubiquity allows us to unpack the power of "heterosexual lore that positions women as their own worst erotic enemies and rivals" by outright naming "competitive heterosexuality" and "unnamed homosexual desire between mother and daughter" (Alexander 2006: 65). Lorde names how the sharing of erotic power

"forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference" (1984: 56). A poem that 71 accesses the erotic, then, skillfully acknowledges the politics of difference and of location, but also creates a bridge: "A poem grows out of the poet's experience, in a particular place and a particular time, and the genius of the poem is to use the textures of that place and time without becoming bound by them" (Lorde as quoted by Rowell, 2000: 55).

Lorde suggests that once we begin to recognize the deep feelings that constitute erotic power, we "begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society" (1984: 58).

This opening up is a challenge to heteropatriarchy because as we begin to feel deeply all aspects of life, including those marked by pain and oppression, we begin to demand that they are equally meaningful, each requiring redress and attention, denying their separation. The power to take up action comes from this acknowledgement, which "can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama" (Lorde, 1984: 59). In this vision of the erotic, Lorde radically bypassed early feminist debates that venerated the "sexual freedom" of lesbian sexuality over the "objectification" of heteropatriarchy with her language that represents lesbian bodies as "sacred, communicative, instrumental, textured, difficult" (Chinn 2003: 184). This recognition of lesbian sexual existence was a methodology to "recognize ourselves in relation to others, how to feel our bodies ethically" (Chinn 2003: 197). For Lorde, lesbian sexuality is thus not a morally superior alternative to exploitative heterosexual sex, a common premise of lesbian writing at this time, but instead she proposed accessing the erotic as a conduit to acknowledging our multiple differences.

She suggests that we must redefine and reread difference away from understanding it as deviance. This conduit is not meant to cure difference or make it culturally relative; instead the erotic can intimately recognize the multiple subjectivities that difference brings into being, each 72 with its base of power. Differences do not separate us, rather it is our refusal to recognize them that separates us.

Lorde's analysis of erotic power appears deceptively simple. The depth of her words has often been betrayed by superficial and nation-bound literary readings that divorce her work from the social, political and economic climate of American imperialism and its colonizing relationship to the Caribbean. Lorde's critique of the deep-seated power inequalities that divide women, particularly between racialized and white women, has been brushed over by many feminist and queer thinkers who have used Lorde as "a figure of nonthreatening black and lesbian presence" (Chinn 2003: 183). This denies Lorde's critical work on the use of anger by black feminists to heal themselves and each other; it also denies her direct confrontation of white feminists who tokenized Lorde's participation in academic conferences and other settings. But

Lorde's deep exploration of lesbian sexuality also made impossible the "liberal feminist fantasy of her as dyke mammy" (Chinn 2003: 183). Lorde's insistence on talking the embodiedness of her sex and claiming sexual pleasure for herself confronts the imaginative purpose of servitude that the mammy figure poses. Lorde also questions the falsified image of "natural" black heterosexuality by describing the embodied emotional, political and social features of erotic power between women. Lorde's work "demands a vital reconsideration of love, desire, and sexuality in ways that seek to resist the pornotroping of female bodies" (Stallings, 2007: 80). In dealing with the damage done to black women's sexuality, Lorde makes clear her belief that

"making love, how the body acts, is a counterpart or antidote to what has been done to it"

(Elizabeth Alexander, 1994: 709). By acknowledging the bridging that must happen for us to conceive of difference as a source of strength, Lorde is not proposing cultural relativism as a way to understanding racial and other differences. Instead, not mincing words, Lorde suggests the complexity of difference and power: 73

Being women together was not enough. We were different. Being gay-girls together was not enough. We were different. Being Black together was not enough. We were different. Being Black women together was not enough. We were different. Being Black dykes together was not enough. We were different (Lorde, 1982: 226).

To mobilize the erotic is not simply a feel-good project of multicultural sharing across sexual, racial and national borders, but it "is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe"

(Lorde, 1984: 57). Lorde confronts liberal feminists' production of so-called safe space, which so often includes insulation from discussing race. Instead she suggests that "for Black and white women to face each other's angers without denial or immobility or silence or guilt is in itself a heretical and generative idea" (Lorde 1984: 129).

How is the feminist reception of Lorde's concept of erotic power related to the current moment of international visibility of the violence done to gays and lesbians in Jamaica? The liberal American feminist movement has selectively taken up Audre Lorde's words in terms that often deny race and nation; this has enabled the reinforcement of American neoimperialism. Gay and lesbian movements share the racialized and colonial legacy of this feminism, which requires silence on how a neoimperial US state builds heterosexualization across borders. In response,

Lorde's exploration of erotic power shared among women has long questioned those borders.

Lorde reanimates a new spelling of her name: "zami" - "a Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers" (Lorde 1982: 255). Using the word zami publicly remembers

Carriacou as an erotic community of women, in the Caribbean region where many states have foreclosed any public expressions of lesbian community (Alexander 1997).20 But also, Carricou is Lorde's mother birthplace, one that doesn't exist on any American school world map. Zami is

20 Other Caribbean feminists have also done important work in excavating countermemories of women's community, including Dionne Brand, Makeda Silvera, Gloria Wekker and many others. 74 a home that Lorde must build for herself: "home was still a sweet place somewhere else which they had not managed to capture yet on paper, nor to throttle and bind up between the pages of a school book" (Lorde 1982: 14). Naming and renaming places and selves, acts often based on refuting racialized discourses of white ownership of black bodies, also have a sexual and gendered component that carve out radical black female sexual subjectivity. This elusive bodily and geographical home, transnationally built from the fragmentary memory of Lorde's mother, the disciplining punishments of race and nation, and the erotic power of women working and loving together, hosts Lorde's poetic critique on the terms of state power.

It is from just such a transnational home where the possibility of erotic autonomy might emerge. As Lorde suggests that drawing on erotic power is dangerous because it challenges us to action instead of numbness and guilt, M. Jacqui Alexander names erotic autonomy as a powerful threat to the state processes of heterosexualization. Erotic autonomy is a desire for decolonization that challenges the centrality of nuclear heterosexual families as the cornerstone of the nation. In her book Pedagogies of Crossing, Alexander's critique of the "Sexual Offences and Domestic Violence Act" in the Bahamas provides an analysis of how feminist action and erotic autonomy work with and against the state to produce a normative heterosexuality. To briefly summarize this critique, Alexander shows how feminist pressure on the Bahamian state to criminalize domestic violence also led legislators to criminalize lesbian sex. Alexander theorizes that this feminist pressure undermined heteropatriarchy's use of physical and psychic violence to control women. Faced with this potential loss of power within a major institution of heterosexuality, i.e. marriage, the state sought to criminalize women's relationships outside that institution (Alexander, 2006: 23). At the same time, these lesbians were imagined as failed or disrupted heterosexuals, and not only as threats to marriage, and from the state's perspective their particular autonomy could "only go so far: it could not leave the confines of the 75 matrimonial bed to inhabit a space that could be entirely oppositional to it, entirely unaccountable to it, or even partially imagined outside of it" (Alexander, 2006: 65). Imagining erotic power and autonomy is thus bound up in response to state heterosexualization, but it likewise contains the possibility of subverting it. Lest we imagine, however, that this intense defense of heterosexualization is confined to Caribbean states, Alexander cautions that heterosexualization has no good democratic tradition (imagined to be the benign and modern heterosexualization of the United States) and a corollary bad tradition (imagined to be the violent and "barbaric" force of hyper(hetero)sexualization in the Caribbean).

For Alexander, erotic autonomy is "an emancipatory praxis anchored within a desire for decolonization, simultaneously imagined as political, economic, psychic, discursive, and sexual" where "women can love themselves, love women, and transform the nation simultaneously."

Erotic autonomy is "a meeting place where our deepest yearnings for different kinds of freedom can take shape and find rest" (2007: 65). I see Staceyann Chin using this erotic power to bridge differences in her transnational communities of home/not home, to challenge state power on the incorporation of certain homosexualities in the service of gay capital and neoimperial tourism, and also to give voice to her deep yearning for the possibility of love between women.

4.2 Chin's Vision of Transnational Erotic Community

Chin's poetic commitment to politicized eroticism challenges the division of sexuality from race, class and nation. She builds an erotic politics that caution against aligning with the 76 nation-state, particularly by questioning the difficulty of her immigration to the USA to break silence on lesbianism in Jamaica. Like Lorde, she gathers up the diverse parts of herself to defy easy comfort in privilege, identity politics, or citizenship and to find enduring strength in her difference:

/ want to go down in history in a chapter marked miscellaneous because the writers could find no other way to categorize me (Chin, 2001: 49)

Chin sees poetry as a political tool to name experience and generate action within a context of silence and oppression against racialized women. She writes, "I want to write more than I want to live", hinting at not only the silent desperation of living a life in Jamaica where "a woman could only come in secret for me" (Chin, n.d.: 16) but also of the need to document her life for others in order to break the silence. Her poem "Left of Liberal" lays out the role of poetry in building a transnational feminist movement that acknowledges love across and against borders. Hinting at Lorde's assertion that poetry is not a luxury but a lens onto our experiences of survival in an oppressive world, Chin writes:

everything that occurs is a way of surviving poetry is only a way of seeing what we are when we aren 't so enamored with the rites of passage for those with the privilege to pass pretty words over death and destruction (Chin, n.d.: 32)

Critically examining her own "fascination with enigmatic metaphors" (Chin, n.d.: 32), she reminds herself "don't forget who you are, poet" because "the ordinary man is still listening"

(Chin, n.d.: 32); she sees poetry has power and responsibility beyond immortalizing the individual poet to be a "process of finding a way forward" (Chin, Vol. 2: 32). 77

If poetry is a way to survival, it's not surprising that many of her poems are love poems.

The poems are addressed not just to lovers, but also to diverse women in Chin's community of listeners and supporters: women survivors of violence, straight women, and racialized women.

The love she expresses is not only sexual, but draws on erotic power because it critically examines loving relationships between women as a meaningful starting point to explore political engagement. In the poem "For Charles" (Chin 2001: 19), Chin responds to a man who claims that he doesn't write love poems "because they are too easy." Chin wonders, then, for whom he chooses to not write, or "for whom his pen tolls." She finds "nothing easy about the way I sit now," suggesting that her loving relationships have had material consequences in her life. The poem suggests that love, in fact, is the central dilemma of her life; her desire to live and speak openly about her erotic commitments has led her to a complex decision to live in exile, far from her family, friends and culture. "For Charles" then moves from an awareness of the difficulty and importance of naming lesbian love to examining the dynamics between women, and not just between two women lovers. Chin also recognizes her jealousy of other loving women in her lover's life; she acknowledges importance of the women who support both her and her lover in their community by granting that "they make us supple so we can bend for each other in a society that refuses to bend for us" (Chin 2001: 19). This poem critically establishes the importance of erotic autonomy for Chin. She creates a difficult home-place for racialized lesbian women to gather in community. Considering the marginalization and silencing of the experiences of black women loving, this step is a crucial one, naming the difficult tensions that arise when speaking a taboo love and support between women.

In one poem, Chin situates her erotic power as a place from which to question military neoimperialism. In her poem "War Games," Chin describes landmark moments in her sexual life in contrast to American military interventions in the Middle East, connecting her bodily 78

experiences of sexual pain and pleasure with the political implications of a war fought on terrain

far from her. First, she describes the loss of her virginity as a young girl to a man in Kingston,

Jamaica, wondering how this highly personal event might be connected to the Gulf War, or how

"heterosexuality animates militarism" (Alexander 2006: 197):

In the fall of 1990 I let go of my virginity The Desert Storm blasting loud from his 13 inch TV of course it was summer there Kingston sweltering sweat collecting in my navel trembling in the face of the unknown

I wondered then if the explosions were for me or the little people on the blue screen far away from my pleasure they were pictured small boys with metal rods pointing to where they suspect America might be

In wondering "if the explosions were for me," Chin asks for whose right to pleasure the Gulf

War was undertaken. In alluding to the boys' phallic symbols, she suggests that their budding

masculinity will manifest in global conflict, conflating sex and militarism in one particular

version of masculinitiy. Later in the poem, when the next Gulf War starts and Chin is living in

the USA, she reflects on her older lesbian self and the different risks involved:

today I make love to a young girl the sound of this New War everywhere wonder what we will lose this time

This last line's collective "we" evokes a greater loss than Chin's own virginity, suggesting a prior loss of sexual innocence under colonialism. The poem shows Chin's changing relationship

to American neoimperial foreign policy through her transnational experience. While there is a

sense of hopelessness in not knowing what war will bring, Chin knows that she "will never be 79 that girl again / slow turning beneath his hands." This imparts melancholy for the innocence of her girlhood in Jamaica, but the confidence of the last line of the poem that follows it - "I am a woman now" - points to a different sureness in her erotic agency to address the American military involvement in Iraq.

4.3 "Chosen" Exile: Naming Homophobia, Naming Racism

With the establishment of the erotic as her poetic practice, Chin foregrounds her sexuality in a way that does not categorically deny a homophobic Jamaica nor unconditionally celebrate her sexual and economic survival in an neoimperialist America. She reminds herself that her poetry "is the tale of the country you moved to in search of freedom / and found racism" (Chin, n.d.: 32). Her immigration was not a voyage to "sexual freedom," but a dance around its possibility:

Eight years ago, I left Jamaica because it was dangerous to be an out lesbian there. When I got here, I realized that in the Greater USA, it can be almost as dangerous to be Black. I write poetry to survive the dance of being home and not home, of being freer but not free. I spend my life making room for the discourse around being gay and Asian, Black and immigrant, woman and writer, US resident and Jamaican citizen (Chin, n.d.: 37).

Chin names the difficulty of her flight from Jamaica, calling her decision to leave

"Chosen Exile" in the poem of the same name (Chin, n.d.: 14-16). In doing so, she does not deny the possibility of lesbian existence in Jamaica, but she instead names the violence of that experience in both countries. Perhaps the relative security of Chin's immigration status as US resident (vs. a more precarious status such as refugee or undocumented person) allows her latitude to not solely rely on language that marks the severity of homophobic violence; if she was struggling for refugee status based on persecution, for example, she might be forced to rely on that language in order to convince a Northern legal audience of the immobility of Jamaican 80 homophobia (Razack 1998b). Instead, her textured but curt language suggests her negotiation of a limited choice: "Political exile. Self imposed. Necessary. Difficult" (Chin, n.d.: 36). "Chosen

Exile" begins with the smell of "rice and peas" and family laughter; Chin feels gratefulness at being "replanted" in Jamaica. This reverie is punctured by the sound of Chin's "telephone shrill and modern" and the loving intensity of this dream makes her question her decision to leave

Jamaica. Within "the white-washed silence" of New York life she yearns "for the quiet of

Montego Hills / the quiet with my grandmother calling my name" (Chin, n.d.: 15), suggesting a crucial difference between silence and quiet; one is marred by the imposition of silence by systemic racialization, and the other is the peace of being wholly loved by family. But at the same moment, her thick feather-filled bedcovers represent the isolation she feels from both the cold New York world outside as well as the intangible and unreal memory of a safe Jamaica.

She questions the representation of Jamaica as paradise, instead calling the country of her birth

"my green haven paradox":

/ am here dreaming of a paradisal home where if memory were my only reminder I would convince you that it isn 't really illegal to be a lesbian in Jamaica in my dreams I would write that a dozen boys didn 't drag me into a bathroom to show me what a real dick feels like

4.4 The Other Side of Paradise

Wanting but distrusting memory, many of Chin's poems complicate idyllic portraits of

Jamaica by naming her experiences as "the other side of paradise". At first glance, her approach resembles that of global gay media. As discussed in the previous chapter, this media paint

Jamaica as a tropical paradise marred by the homophobic violence of its inhabitants. She opens 81 the poem "Jamaica" by stating "My love affair with Jamaica / has always been double edged"

(Chin 2001: 40). However, she does not present a space where boundless tourist adventure and sexual fantasy can unproblematically exist unrelated to each other. Instead she haerkens

Jamaica's colonial past in writing "on this island / there has never been safe ground" (Chin 2001:

40), alluding not only to her own experiences of homophobic violence, but also to her erotic connection to other women surviving:

women with wide cassava hips and full star-apple lips women with strong hands reaching beyond their own fears to give their children courage teaching them to stand straight-backed in the absence of fathers who visit with the smell of white rum in their words (Chin 2001: 41)

The difficulty of choosing exile is apparent, as Chin's loneliness for community continues in exile; Chin says that "Jamaica has always given me / crosses I will have to bear alone" (Chin

2001: 41). There is great difficulty in representing this complex Jamaica, especially from the diaspora:

Jamaica has always been able to find me a thorn among the bloody hibiscus blooms my Jamaica has always been the hardest poem to write (Chin 2001: 41)

More than suggesting white gay pleasure spaces as marred by black violence, Chin presents the invasion of "carnivorous hotels / inviting white people to come feed / on the blackened flesh of the natives / have them serve it to you" (Chin, n.d.: 15). She reverses colonial metaphors of cannibalistic natives by suggesting that tourists consume the locals (Sheller 2003).

However, she does not present Jamaica as a hapless victim of imperial plunder; she also marks 82 the complicity of neocolonial state managers, writing that "this time [some natives] are willing"

(Chin, n.d.: 15) to participate in the tourism fantasy.

The complex Jamaica that Chin paints not only questions the sun, sand and sex image of both neoimperial and neocolonial state formations. She calls Jamaica "a place of contradiction and beauty" that "spawned in me a brash spirit of survival" (Chin, n.d.: 48), showing the complexity of Jamaican culture to an international audience bent on only seeing its violence.

Instead of uniformly violent or homophobic, Chin's work hearkens the transnational legacy of many Jamaican freedom-fighters, suggesting resistance and agency as critical dimensions of

Jamaican identity; she claims that "Garvey and Marley only lit the flame, Morrison and we steady pushing wood" (Chin n.d.: 38). In the prose piece "Falling for Bob Marley", Chin meditates on the irony of finding solace in reggae despite "anything Beenie Man or Elephant

Man or Bounty Killer could ever say in the attempt to render me a second class citizen in the country of my birth" (Chin, n.d.: 36). Chin's own reception in Jamaica reflects the complexity of

Jamaica's cultural scene and attitudes towards homosexuality, where "one performance there can yield a standing ovation" and "another, my very own mini riot" (Chin, Vol. 1: 37). Never consistent, this Jamaica betrays the static image of an unchanging and violent culture, typical of neoimperial accounts of the colonized. And yet holding this complexity of Jamaica in her work is difficult, as every day in the United States brings on the barrage of anti-immigrant sentiment.

Chin rages against the comments of "Scott, or Brett, or Todd" who ask where Chin "learned to speak English so good" (emphasis Chin, Chin, Vol. 1: 37); in this poem, she then retreats to her earphones full of Bob Marley, disappointed that the complexity of her immigrant experience is lost. 83

4.5 Accessing Respectable Sexuality: Coming to Gay Marriage

As Chin comes to the US to partner openly with another woman (Chin, interview, 2007), giving her eroticism a legitimacy and visibility denied in Jamaica, it is not without difficulty in negotiating her changing access to respectable sexuality. In finding space to speak and participate in the changing gay and lesbian community of the North, Chin questions a gay and lesbian political preoccupation with gaining access to the institution of marriage, an institution which has often functioned to privatize women's poverty. In her journal entry/poem "Popping the Lesbian Question: Dykes and Marriage," Chin, reviews the history of access to the institution of marriage:

the institution of marriage has long offered privilege and power to one class while holding another at arm's length

the strength and respect given over to any union is more often than not legitimized by one's social shift up or down or across the ladder of social belonging

poor people who marry non-American immigrants cannot file for the non-resident partner until they strike it rich enough to promise the INS (now homeland security) that they can and will absorb the cost of any unforeseen illness or homelessness of said partner

marriage has long provided wealth and voice to one sex

the merry institution in question has been fucking the traditionally frocked spouse for centuries for money and housing and the freedom to raise her own children 84

if some shit goes down with her man she is likely to be victim to the parting experience

her resume will read used spoiled broken vessel

undesired

But although Chin is critical of marriage's treatment, she questions "should dykes marry or not? / should we partake in a process so antithetical to equality / to make our fragile lives less bitter / dare we assimilate? / or commit to breaking the existing mold?" It is clear that Chin feels the pull of legitimacy that respectability promises, showing that sexual subjects are not "purely oppositional or resistant to dominant institutions that produce heteronormativity" (Grewal and

Kaplan 2001: 671):

the wagons move purposeful and I am caught in the tracks of a hypothetical toddler needing the state sanctioned protection

of both mommies

in the absence of one I want to make sure my child will be cared for by the other

brash and unwilling to concede to conservatism

I sway indecisive

Despite this moment of doubt, by the end of the poem, Chin returns to pointed questions about the political efficacy of queers aligning with a patriarchal state for the right to gay marriage. She references moves to represent a gay and lesbian mainstream as educated and employed citizens

This poem comes from Staceyann's cyber journal. 85 who want to be married in order to "legitimize" their families. This construct establishes what gays and lesbians are not: lazy, uneducated and promiscuous people who have children out of wedlock. This is the same project of respectability that colonial and postcolonial state managers in Jamaica advanced to deny the race and class dimensions of post-independence rule. In North

America, this approach additionally replicates a center-periphery divide that locates deviant sexuality in other, colonial places. Based on Chin's commitment to remapping an erotic self, it is not surprising that she later asks if there is

something owed to the bodies who remain least represented most disenfranchised farthest removed from our computers

our clocks our matching bands of vows?

Suggesting that others exist outside the preoccupations with gaining respectability via the institution of marriage, I now turn to how Chin takes a powerful opportunity outside the narrow confines of her cyberjournal to address a more mainstream audience of gay, lesbians and queers.

4.6 Speaking to Gay Power: Chin's Address at the Games

More than any other poem, Chin's "Speech at the Gay Games" captures her sorrow, anger and disappointment at the changing LGBT community in a very public forum. Very different from the smaller performance spaces that Chin usually addresses, this poem-speech was a critical opportunity to suggest her vision of erotic autonomy to a large international audience estimated at 12,500 people in Chicago in 2006. The Gay Games are a key site of the production 86

of global solidarity between sexual minorities, at the same time as they suggest competition

between the participants. In this poem, Chin is signaling the inclusion of the productive gay

citizen into discourses of capitalism. By suggesting that gay and lesbian middle and upper

classes are singularly focused on assimilation into the structures of straight society, in this poem

Chin draws attention to how GLBT communities are becoming less politically organized in

favour of corporate advertising and charity fundraising, instead of on the ground grassroots

mobilization of its diverse community members. Generally frustrated by the political inertia of

gays and lesbians with access to wealth, who "accumulate our mountains of things / rubber dicks

/ electric razors / houses / offspring", Chin wonders what political struggles certain North

American queers abandon as they climb the ladder of respectability. She addresses the ongoing

disappearance of black and/or lesbian spaces and the absence of public dialogue on the

implications of this disappearance for the direction of the LGBT political movement (Chin, n.d.:

45). She suggests the absence of a racialized consciousness in the LGBT movement with its

opening lines:

Being queer has no bearing on race my white publicist said true love is never affected by color (Chin, n.d.: 41)

She debunks the "new-age claims that sexual and racial freedom / has finally come for all" (Chin, n.d.: 41) suggesting that if freedom has come in this way for some, it is thus similar to the "powers that have always been have already come / for the Jew, the communist and the trade unionist" (Chin, n.d.: 44). Here, freedom cannot come like a thief in the night.The speech calls for political action within the rejoicing that has become characteristic of the LGBT community.

She also draws attention to the "neo-conservatism breeding malicious amongst us" (Chin, n.d.: 87

41), suggesting that just being queer, or having sex, is not basis enough for community and

political action, but that queer sex has long been used against vulnerable bodies:

the faces that now represent us have begun to look like the ones who used to burn crosses and beat bulldaggers and fuck faggots up the ass with loaded guns (Chin, n.d.: 43)

In this direct confrontation, to such a large audience, Chin explicitly marks the word

"queer" as a word embraced primarily by young, white people. For Chin, queer identifiers work

to disconnect current struggles for sexual citizenship from a legacy of feminist organizing on

sexuality. She suggests that lesbian is still a word invested with political power and

confrontation, and that queer has become a watered down marker of sexual alterity. She says that

a space that was once open to discuss black women's sexuality is closing again:

everyday I become more and more afraid to say black or lesbian or woman-everyday under the pretense of unity I swallow something I should have said about the epidemic of AIDS in Africa or the violence against teenage-girls in East New York or the mortality rate of young boys on the south-side of Chicago (Chin, n.d.: 42)

She laments the normalizing force of queer that marginalizes racialized women in

particular. Instead, the spaces available to radical and critical thinkers with the LGBT

community are shrinking "in the face of our centering political agenda" (Chin, Vol. 2: 47).22

22 Another poem "Pride in the City" describes the spaces of New York City in the late 1990s. At the Crazy Nanny's bar and other "small political spaces," she remembers "being a black, biracial, immigrant lesbian was not something to mourn or cover up. All of me was cause for poetry and protest. Fist in the air and anger in my mouth, I found a place where I could articulate Chin sees that spaces to talk about racism in LGBT communities are narrowing in the context of

the emergence of a powerful middle class that ignores the concerns of poor LGBT community

members. This differs from how she once witnessed how the "plight of poor black people in

America could be held in tandem with concerns about gay marriage" (Chin, Vol. 1:45-46). She

sees queer as a politically marginalizing force, as she sees how the division of sexuality from

other issues can only weaken our commitment to erotic power. She suggests that women too, are

marginalized in queer community, and that her fear of being labeled hysterical woman has often

kept her from saying anything (Chin, Vol. 2: 47).

Despite the lessening spaces from which to speak, Chin notes that the positive response

to the Gay Games poem was overwhelming. Its rallying call for action doesn't have the nuance

of other conversations that Chin sees as crucial to building erotic community; but it builds on

those conversations that Chin has "been whispering with my partner and the over-sixty lesbians

who are old enough to remember that this community was once on a trajectory to change the

world—not just for ourselves—but for everyone" (Chin, Vol. 2: 45).

Chin's poetry builds the power of speaking sexual agency and pleasure, creating erotic

community as a political force. Her speaking continues a long legacy of Caribbean women

speaking against the silencing of their sexuality. Although I name her as "out of place" because

of her exile from homophobic Jamaica and anti-immigrant sentiment in the US, what she writes

is not an experience of placelessness. Chin instead speaks within the crevices of home/not-home

that she navigates between and through nations, cracking opening new spaces of belonging where none are guaranteed by nation-states or even the white-dominated gay and lesbian nation.

the pain of my self-imposed exile. It was also an opportunity for me to give voice to the silence of the racism I had experienced in the LGBT community" (Chin, Vol. 1: 45). 89

Her words name and build a community of racialized lesbian culture makers in the US and

Jamaica, embodying erotic autonomy that exists within, against, between and through nations. 90

Chapter Five: Embodied Storytelling and Desire: d'bi.young's Countermemories of Loving

Telling stories about our lives allows us to name and politicize experience as well as resist the hegemonic narratives that rob our power. This chapter centers dub storytelling as a feminist and oral practice of survival: telling stories is a practice that requires both teller and listener, self and Other. Working-class dub storytelling, in poetry and theatre, is a way to name and resist homophobia in the Caribbean as well as racisms towards black queers, gays and lesbians in the North. I examine blood.claat and androgyne^ two plays by Afro-Jamaican-

Canadian storyteller d'bi.young. Like the previous chapter on Staceyann Chin, my reading suggests that we must look at the cultural production of Jamaicans themselves to undo the hegemonic narratives of homophobia. Such a reading reveals the transnational dynamism of

Jamaican cultural production, a dynamism denied by the common narrative on dancehall, which presents Jamaica as culturally unchanging and violently homophobic. In the case of d'bi.young, the very limits of these narratives are questioned by her use of dub storytelling. Locating her biomythographical "herstory" in Jamaica and Canada, d'bi's work shows how the Jamaican diaspora is a potent cultural space to comment on homophobia. Using nation-language,24 she critically links the legacies of slavery, anti-black racism, working-class poverty and violence

23 These two plays form part of d'bi.young's trilogy the three faces ofmudgu. The third play is not yet complete.

24 Kamau Braithwaite coined the term nation-language (1984), renaming what is variously called patois/patwa, Creole, or Jamaican. Louise Bennett exemplified the language's politicization in public performance, reclaiming it from a low-status categorization as a dialect, "bastardization" or low variant of English. I use this term because 1) d'bi uses it to signal the importance of nation in her work; 2) because I want to rework nation according to d'bi's feminist, erotic and diasporic reformulation of nation-language; her creative language use corresponds with the iterative possibilities of embodied performance. 91 against women to the violence done to gay and lesbian bodies in Jamaica and in the diaspora.

This engagement works to confront any nationalist rendering of Jamaica as heteronormative, whether by Jamaica's cultural sovereigntists who imagine queerness as a form of postcolonial imperialism, or by human rights advocates in the North who uncritically name Jamaica as hyper(hetero)sexual. As dancehall gains notoriety as a working-class Jamaican cultural form, d'bi's queering of dub also confronts the stereotype that homophobia is a problem of violence specifically among Jamaica's Black working-class majority.

Unlike Staceyann Chin, d'bi's work does not directly comment on the changing face of lesbian and gay activism and community, d'bi orients her work to excavating self via biomythography, using storytelling and performance to come to "self in community." Her use of

Of dub poetry and theatre, cultural forms she inherited from her family and community, differs from the force of Staceyann Chin's "out-of-place" spoken word poetry, d'bi builds this rooted belonging in the transnational dub poetry community, but also pushes its boundaries. Dub poetry territory has been traditionally occupied by male practitioners focused on questions of race and class, but through young's efforts and those of many of her dub foremothers, dub poetry as a cultural form has proved flexible to differences of race, class, sexuality, and gender within diasporic Caribbean communities.

In addition to dub poetry, d'bi.young has also integrated biomythography to her dub theatre approach. A form first named by Audre Lorde with her book Zami: A New Spelling of My

While others might disagree with my characterization of d'bi's theatre works as dub theatre, particularly because they are not performed in dub verse/musicality, I am working from d'bi's assertion that there is no leap between poetry and theatre: "If you are a storyteller in a Jamaican context, at least when I was being raised, being a storyteller necessarily meant that you worked in a number of media that told stories. For example, the medium of dub poetry is an extremely performative medium, and in fact the distance between dub poetry and theatre is minimal" (as quoted in Varty, 2008). 92

Name, biomythography has allowed d'bi to unearth countermemories of same-sex loving in

Jamaica, also inviting the consideration of spirituality and gender ambiguity in questions of sexual desire. Biomythography is a combination of biography, history and myth-making in a genre-busting prose form, allowing for the recreation of self through exploring the links that bind women to each other. Much like Lorde's approach to naming and celebrating difference, d'bi's approach is one of seeking wholeness. Eschewing binaries of here vs. there, homophobic vs. queer, body vs. mind, oral vs. written, and self vs. other, d'bi's work names and celebrates difference in her diverse audiences, communities she names her village. Less activist and more

"excavatist," d'bi goes deeper and deeper into excavating her own self and its herstory, examining pain and oppression in new places in order to see how others are housed within her own self instead of applying the signposts of her own journey towards liberation directly onto others. This includes imagining mythologies and stories outside the historical record not given permanence through formal documents, d'bi's biomythographical dub storytelling unearths an alternative past and future. Via dub theatre, d'bi.young has imagined the possibility of women's erotic autonomy and self-liberation that are responsive to the heteropatriarchal nation-states of

Jamaica and Canada, but not hinged on recognition from them.

In considering dub performance as a practice of resistance, I echo Honor Ford-Smith's question: "how can performance be a productive counter-hegemonic force, serving both as episteme and political intervention?" (2005: ii) Her question hinges on questioning the role of the body in women's performance. As Ford-Smith notes, the body is a critical site for knowledge production in Jamaica specifically because of the historical and political reality of chattel slavery and its ongoing legacy: creating nation was therefore often about reconstituting the abused but knowing body in the context of anti-colonial struggle and decolonization" (2005: ii). young's interventions in queering nation occur within hegemonic narratives not only about homophobia, 93 but about heteropatriarchy, middle-class respectability and sexual rigidity. They are strategic interventions into discourses that position working-class Jamaican women's performance as

"authentic culture" and as folk speakers of patois/patwa, positioning their bodies as natural and passively feminine. While the politics of silence has operated according to these representations, d'bi's plays break silence by actively reclaiming the abused, sexual and sacred body. Reading d'bi. young's biomythographical tale of nation, I position her storytelling within these relationships of power in both neocolonial and neoimperial locations.

First, I will provide a brief transnational history of dub poetry to show the form's changing possibilities to address women's erotic autonomy. Next, I briefly examine questions of embodied performance and the maternal in the work of Louise Bennett, Jamaica's most beloved storyteller, to see how women's bodies have been mobilized in nation-building, and how young has used feminist performance to extend, not reject, mythologies of nation. The bulk of the chapter then examines key themes in the biomythographical dub plays blood.claat and androgyne: 1) the use of nation-language to confront respectability; 2) the construction of self- love as a way to erotic power; 3) the recalling of bodily memories of same-sex loving to counter misogyny and racism; and 4) acknowledging self-in-other and other embodied binaries in order to begin the process of healing from violence.

5.1 A Brief History of Dub: Word, Sound, Powah 94

What is dub poetry?26 From its beginnings, dub has been a transnational art form,

connecting the lived experience of working-class Jamaicans and other Caribbean people

throughout the diaspora. Rooted in the oral traditions of Jamaican storytelling, dub poets fuse

"words, sound and powah" (a dub motto) to speak about social and political issues within their

communities. Dub poetry was first named by Oku Onuora in the 1970s, when working-class

poets responded to the false promises of anticolonial nationalism, particularly the effects of

increasingly globalized labour practices, which systematically failed the black working-class in a

newly independent Jamaica. The emergence of dub poetry followed a major nation-building

period in Jamaica, one that had mobilized oral and folk culture performances in nation-language

in order to build a national mythology of what Deborah Thomas calls "creolized multiracial

nationalism." In that period, local state managers pushed a revival in all things culturally

Caribbean, particularly those rituals, foods, music, speech, and dances associated with rural folk.

This project of "creole multiracial nationalism" espoused a Jamaican "folk" history and culture

that obscured relationships between class and race in Jamaica, perennially locating culture in an

idealized and static rural past (Thomas 2004: 55) that drew attention away from the poverty of

the urban black and migrant working class. Dub poets talk back to these creolized multiracial

mythologies, using the political resources of Rastafarian nation-language to talk back to

Jamaica's neocolonial state managers who had facilitated the transformation of the country's

independence into economic servitude. Kingston dub performers such as Oku Onuora, Mikey

Smith and Jean Binta Breeze spat poems that were fiercely urban and black-centred; these poets

centrally positioned the experiences of migrant Jamaicans in commodity good production in

26 Any attempt at definition of dub poetry will necessarily reflect the writer's goal in relating its practice to a particular goal/aim and I will be no different. Instead of an exhaustive rendering of dub poetry, I am providing here an always incomplete genealogy in order to understand dub poetry in relation to transnational questions of gender and eroticism in language and performance. 95 export-processing zones and globalized markets of labour, both in Jamaica and abroad.

Simultaneously born on the streets of Kingston and London, dub poetry grew out of working- class DJ soundsystem culture in Jamaica, but it also named the experiences of political and economic exclusion by West Indian peoples in the diaspora, particularly against anti-black racism in the demographically changing post-war period. Dub poetry also builds on other oral performance practices such as tea meetings, toasting, storytelling and other verbal competitions that encouraged political commentary. Many dub practitioners see their work as another chapter in a long history of griots, critically naming the practice in reference to West African cultures and traditions shaped by the transatlantic slave trade.

Early studies of oral performance in the Caribbean cemented the idea that men were the primary players in these verbal competitions that encouraged "political talk" in public spaces.

Roger Abrahams, in The Man-of-Words in the West Indies (1983), suggested that men engage in stylized public displays of verbal skill, whereas women were more committed to domestic activities such as child-rearing and were therefore less likely to produce political speech in those locations. The idea of women's commitment to the domestic followed the anthropological approach of Peter Wilson, whose hugely influential study Crab Antics (1973) suggested that

West Indian women were more invested in moral, sexual, and cultural respectability via the domestic space and the church. This approach legitimized women's confinement to the home as their natural place, and did not question how men's political talk in the public sphere depended upon the domination of women in the private sphere. It denied the presence of Caribbean women working in marketplaces, socializing in rum shops, and other public spaces, and suggested that women were more complicit than men by the fact of their gender in sustaining colonial hierarchies. 96

Abrahams also showed how the establishment of a male performer's sexual prowess was a key element of "winning" a performance. In his investigation of Trinidadian calypsos, women and their sexuality were often the object of an orator's critique or praise, but always symbols in relation to the sexual agency of men. Women's talk about sex and gender relations and dynamics was rarely understood as political resistance; instead, their insubordination to men was localized and depoliticized as a "domestic" issue. Although Abrahams' study did consider political speech by women, he did not integrate analysis of their gender as an influencing factor in understanding oral practices of resistance. While Abraham's study gave important attention to oral practices erased in colonial accounts of the West Indies, the construction of man as word warrior "ignores the gendered implications of such a focus and simultaneously romanticizes verbal resistance as an exclusively male phenomenon" (Narain, 2002: 79, emphasis in original).

Other attempts to revalue Afro-Jamaican oral performance as anti-colonial also ignored or neglected to interrogate women's relationship to cultural production and authenticity. In one of the few full-length academic books on dub poetry, Christian Habekost (1993) positions dub poetry as poetry by defining dub as a non-European literary form. His approach was important in creating an academic space to assess Afro-Jamaican language and performance. In many ways,

Habekost's study was directed towards elite poetry critics in Jamaica and Europe who dismissed dub poetry as didactic local protest and thus unworthy of critical literary analysis. However, in his celebration of dub poetry, Habekost romanticized the figure of the poet as "angry Black man" to authorize the performance, largely missing the difference that gender might make to the voicing of poetic identity. Habekost does not consider the tendency of men to "heroic self- identification" which would raise questions about where and how dub and other performative 97 modes are used differently by women.27 In celebrating Caribbean cultural forms that challenged the dominance of 'elite Western culture' by an undifferentiated mass of black (male) cultural producers, early critics made apparent the structural ways in which women were made peripheral to reading for oral and performative modes in the Caribbean (Narain, 2002: 99).

Despite these academic studies that reinforced the domain of oral performance as male space, dub poetry communities were consistently challenged by women poets. In Toronto, poets like Lillian Allen, Afua Cooper and ahdri zhina mandiela developed the form beyond its initial themes of race and class-based oppression. These Toronto artists produced dub that confronted earlier dub artists' anticolonial nationalist rhetoric, which often promoted masculinity and heterosexuality as symbols of cultural freedom and stressed working-class solidarity to the detriment of other forms of difference. In an interview with Jenny Sharpe, early dub pioneer and

London-based Jean Binta Breeze also described how American companies didn't want to record her work when it became "too personal":

I think it was just the woman's voice they did not like, because my early works like "Aid Travels with a Bomb" and "To Plant or Not to Plant" and so on were overtly political and not talking about women doing the laundry and bringing up the children. So once I started writing women's domestic dub, it was considered too personal, (as quoted in Sharpe, 2003: 611)

Habekost argued that Breeze chose to leave Jamaica because of the constraints of patriarchal culture there (1993: 203). And yet Breeze's ongoing performance of dub and her constant questioning of its limits in Britain showed how the dub poetry community was the fabric that stretched concepts of nationalist belonging between Caribbean and black experience,

27 Habekost's book does have a specific chapter on women's dub poetry, but it is quite limited in scope, positioning "male oppression" as secondary to "white racism and neoimperialism" in terms of its thematic content (1993, p. 201). The Toronto scene quickly became known as "the hub of the dub" with migrant poets from many parts of the Caribbean. 98 feminist organizing, and economic migration. The existence of dub hotspots in London and

Toronto not only challenged the cultural nationalist goals of neocolonial Jamaica, but also built transnational cultural space that challenged the British and Canadian marginalization of racialized peoples. Women dub artists' well-developed critique of male cultural domination, neoimperial racism, and the poverty experienced by migrant workers was foundational to the

Toronto dub scene. This is the scene upon which Jamaican d'bi.young arrived in the early 1990s.

While women dub practitioners opened a certain set of gendered questions in dub, particularly around women's mothering work in migration, and domestic violence against women in West Indian contexts, questions of women's sexuality were not as easily addressed.

Breeze describes how other dub artists appraised her eroticism on stage:

I was told by many people that a radical dub poet should not be 'wining up her waist' on the stage as it presented a sexual image rather than a radical one. This led me into an era of wearing military khaki uniforms for performing, but I soon realized that even if I wore sackcloth it would not reduce the sexual energy I carry normally as an individual and which becomes the source of creative energy on stage (as quoted in Narain,2002: 112).

Male poets have linked their masculinity and sexuality to their poetic affirmations of identity and political power. Breeze's description above shows how that same link was considered inappropriate for women performers, particularly when working and performing in

Jamaica. In a discussion about her collection The Arrival ofBrighteye and Other Poems, Jean

Binta Breeze says that living far from Jamaica in England has allowed her space to explore new terrain; she says "I don't think I would have written about women's sexuality so explicitly if I had been living in Jamaica" (as quoted in Sharpe 2003: 612). With d'bi.young's arrival on scene, the dub poetry community's treatment of women's sexuality, and particularly its presumed heterosexual nature, was challenged in a more systematic way. 99

5.2 From Folk to Dub: Questions of Language, Gender &

Performance

In d'bi's words, dub is "nation language / performance / poetry / politrix / roots / reggae" integrating the four elements of language, performance, political content and musicality.29 In the first two elements, language and performance, Louise Bennett pioneered women's involvement with her public poetry representing working-class Black women. And while many associate

Louise Bennett with a nation-building process that denied a more politicized class and racial politic, I instead read her path-breaking work as an intervention in already existing narratives of women's bodies in performance, and as a precursor to d'bi's exploration of erotic autonomy in dub storytelling. I begin with the element of language.

Based in a tradition of so-called illiterate storytellers, dub poetry draws on the oral and performative tradition of the historians or community chroniclers called griots. Dub poetry is told in the language of the community to which it speaks. Traditionally this has been nation-language, which Braithwaite names as

the submerged area of that dialect which is much more closely related to the African aspect of experience in the Caribbean. It may be in English: but often it is an English which is like a howl or a snort or a machine gun or the wind or a wave. It is also like the blues. And sometimes it is in English and African at the same time (1984: 13).

d'bi writes that the language is "a survival tongue that comes out of the belly of west afrika, dressed up in english vocabulary, grammar, and syntax with splinterings of awarak and

29 A rich literature documenting the role of musicality in dub and also in a number of Black American performance cultures exists however its examination is beyond the scope of my approach. Another project that could easily complement this chapter is a geneology of the gendered and sexed rhythms of dub poetry. 100

carib, french and dutch talk" (young, 2007: 141). Using nation-language in public, culture-

making settings signifies an Afro-Jamaican spirit of survivalism, as well as a celebration of the

cross-pollinating nature of Caribbean culture and society through the transnational experience of

the slave trade. Publicly making art and promoting culture in nation-language is an act that

confronts colonization. As d'bi.young puts it, "I speak the language in my work because it is my

language. It's where I can express the depth and range of my humanity. I also have an incredible

amount of admiration for the language because imbedded in the language is the struggle and the

tenacity of the people (...) My choice to speak the nation language is an act of resistance"

(interview, 2007). An active reclamation of language that is often perceived as uneducated and

without worth, for d'bi.young it was also ".. .the language I was told stories in" (interview,

2007).

The story of public performance in nation-language in Jamaica cannot be told without

poet-performer Louise Bennett. Bennett was one of the first to begin recording and writing

working-class stories in nation-language in the 1940s, confronting the supremacy of British

English in colonial Jamaica by giving nation-language social, cultural and linguistic value. She

brought working-class culture, particularly the speech of working-class women, to attention in a

crucial time of nation-building. As Carol Boyce Davies points out, women have functioned as

vocal and public users of this speech as shown in the proverb "Woman is a Nation Grumble Too

Much". In Abrahams' account, the "woman-of-words" was not often recognized as a public

figure of verbal prowess, and although Bennett is recognized for her skill as a storyteller, her

stories are not always recognized as politicized speech. This is particularly due to the nature of her storytelling self, which mobilized an apparently non-threatening maternal figure who instead used humour and double-talk to indirectly suggest politically charged ideas. 101

Bennett used the physical and linguistic largesse of the market woman in "spreading herself out," bringing an embodied approach to storytelling. Actively repossessing the bodies of marketwomen, higglers, and other mobile and vocal black working-class women, her characters were never reticent, passive, or waiting, except as a strategy of deception (Ford-Smith, 2005:

177). Her telling stories in nation-language challenged the recitation of formal poems from the

(often English) literary canon, introducing an expressiveness and expansiveness in bodily expression versus the upright tightness associated with mimicking the sounds of British language and cadence. Ford-Smith suggests that Bennett's Mammy persona was a performance strategy to reach a wide Jamaican audience in a time when only a few representations of black women held political and cultural currency. Bennett's ironic critique of pretension, racism and "foreign- mindedness" made "the large body of the working class black woman central to notions of home in a context in which masculinity and nationalism were seen as coterminous" (Ford-Smith 2005:

148). But her characters were not women confined to a static domestic nation-space; instead they

"were continually on the move between buses, markets, yard, streets and countries" (Ford-Smith

2005: 255).

However, the glorification of rural people's culture involved a certain gendered timelessness in the nation-building period of the 1940s-1960s (Thomas 2005: 13). As Narain

(2002) points out, Braithwaite's romanticization of nation-language and folk-poetics made women speakers into symbols of the language's timelessness. For example, he describes performer Miss Queenie's body language and rhythm as "fundamental nation," suggesting an inherent naturalness in how women "birth nation" and host culture within their bodies. For him,

Louise Bennett and Miss Queenie are "associated with a kind of unruly, natural bodily excess or fecundity" while calypsonians and dub poets are "perceived as the revolutionary shaping consciousness positioned between oppressive white power structures on the one hand and the 102

feminized raw materials of black folk culture on the other" (Narain 2002: 93). In this discourse,

women's involvement in culture-making was ineffectually maternal; women nourished and held

authenticity but were not perceived as active participants in reformulating and innovating

culture.

Because of this representation of women's relationship to "folk-poetics," many of Louise

Bennett's performances of national identity, especially those of the national pantomime, were

less threatening than other forms of literary protest (Narain 2002: 57). This attention to rural

culture enabled national myth-making that was in tension with racialized and politicized visions

of nationhood linked to Africa (Thomas 2004: 6). Bennett herself supported the development of

"creolized multiracialism" (as epitomized in the Jamaican national motto of "Out of Many, One

People"), which Thomas argues pathologized blackness with its selective revaluing of previously

disparaged Afro-Jamaican cultural practices to foster belonging. This selective recuperation of

rituals, speech, foods, music, and dances did little to alter the structural position of Afro-

Jamaicans, and completely elided any discussion of urban people's cultural-making practices that

emerged as resistance to economic exploitation and marginalization.

Louise Bennett's poetry rarely referred to women's sexuality despite the eroticism

associated with the physicality of the large "fat" woman. Her performances signaled an asexual

maternal Mammy, rather than sexual largesse. She eschewed envy, vulgarity and

"badmindedness." Bennett said "Nobody could ever say I was vulgar. I never was" (as quoted by

Ford-Smith 2004: 159). Bennett embodied a respectable morality that was not only indicative of her middle-class background, but also reflected the fact that few weapons were available to

working-class black women to explicitly counter degrading images of their sexuality; as such, discussions on sexuality were better avoided and kept silent. While she brought the body of working-class women to the nation-building process, it was a body devoid of sexuality (Ford-

Smith 2005); a void that d'bi young has attempted to understand and inhabit in her work that builds upon that of Bennett.

In reading Bennett's double-coded embodied performance of the Mammy figure, I don't want to underestimate the role that Bennett's use of nation-language had in opening avenues for other, more confrontational uses of language. Despite the structural limitations to national culture-making institutions, she inspired generations of poets to use nation-language, such as dub poetry. Building on Bennett's use of local knowledge embodied in local expressions, dub poets also the deconstructive aesthetic developed by Rastafarians as a powerful form of ideological critique (Dawson 2007: 86). And while early dub poets rejected the multiracial vision promoted by nation-building cultural practices that Bennett participated in (a vision that proved to completely fail the working class by the 1970s), Bennett's advocacy for the use of nation- language contributed to its widespread acceptance as a language of complexity.

Continuing the expansion of language use by these poet-predecessors, d'bi uses nation- language in transnational performance spaces. She actively recasts language to make it a spoken blueprint of her experiences as an Afro-Jamaican-Canadian, d'bi.young uses nation-language in contexts where her audience might not speak or use this language, and so also relies on symbols, live presence and music to communicate with her audience. She has revalued and reflected the experience of black working-class women not only to diasporic Afro-Jamaican women, but also to diverse Canadian audiences, including multiracial queer audiences, confronting the hegemonic use of English in Canadian theatre spaces and Canadian culture.

Pushing dub from poetry to theatre, d'bi makes the form responsive to the sexuality and gender of poetic identity. Her multiple characters use a range of nation-language vocabularies, 104 and are inspired by their performing foremothers, producing a complex commentary on the heritage and herstory of feminist storytelling. As a mothering black woman dub storyteller, d'bi inhabits and explores many social locations thought of as timeless cultural repositories of blackness and fecundity; but by celebrating language's transformative capabilities, she recasts women cultural producers as active participants in reformulating and innovating culture, especially in her engagement of issues of women's eroticism.

d'bi achieves her storytelling not only through her words, but through her body, showing how "bodies have all the explanatory power of minds" (Grosz 1994: vii). As young performs for a variety of speakers and non-speakers of this language, her nation-language speaks through the body; d'bi's highly theatrical and stylized body performances inhabit nation-language, transforming it into a communicative tool that also defies language. In her words, this performance is

bigger than just the sound coming out - the recognizable sounds coming out of the voice - because not everybody speaks. Not everybody has the ability to speak so that storytelling and orality is also about how the body moves, it is about what the eyes do... the soul puts all of that together in performance and I'm still saying that because sometimes I perform to people who have no idea what I am talking about. They have no idea what the hell I'm saying because I'm speaking a different language. And they get it, that human connection is bigger than language. It defies language. Like music. It becomes music. Rhythm. The heartbeat, (interview, 2007)

This is in direct contradiction to the way that certain homophobic lyrics of dancehall music are translated word-for-word for an international audience without any context; d'bi's performances contain no caveats on how to approach difference as she presents her work without translation. But not surprisingly, the texture of her work flourishes in this "lack" of translation for different audiences. She grounds her performance in the bodily pleasure of speaking the language, saying this political choice is related to her unwillingness to "let other negotiate the 105 texture of my happiness" (interview, 2007). As such, she makes herself the active agent of using nation-language and performance, feeling that sensation denied by many representations of respectability-seeking working-class black women: pleasure. In making pleasure central to her characters in performance, d'bi accesses the resources of the erotic, skillfully acknowledging the politics of location by grounding her work in Jamaica but also creating a bridge to Canadian audiences, d'bi thus achieves what Lorde called genius: "to use the textures of that place and time without becoming bound by them" (Lorde, as quoted by Rowell, 2000: 55).

In exploring these questions of language, performance and gender in poetic practice, I have attempted to avoid a number of debates on Caribbean literature and culture that have been rehearsed (too) many times.30 The debates often centre on proving the existence of hierarchical binaries that attempt to locate local Caribbean culture-making, and women's role in it, as a purely oppositional practice, denying the complexity of taking up erotic autonomy in performance. For example, a longstanding debate about oral performance vs. written texts informs discussions about dub poetry and performance poetry more generally. In examining d'bi.young's work, I suggest that the body cannot be read separately from the text. And while d'bi herself once argued for a purely performative space to generate the kinds of dynamic and immediate interactions between herself and her village, a perspective that was also advocated by many dub poets, she now sees how "the urgency of performance also resides in the written word" (interview, 2007). Having recently published a number of her performance works in book form, she suggests that documenting social realities in text is an important way to record

While here I only explore one of those hierarchical binaries, written text vs. oral performance, many others inform the debate which deserve at least a mention here: Eurocentric vs. Africentric culture; Standard English vs. Creole language; sterile, asexual and uptight bodies vs. physical, sexual and laid-back bodies; slackness vs. decency; individual vs. community, global vs. local, artifice vs. natural, and last, male aesthetic vs. female aesthetic. histories of resistance that don't make their way into more official written accounts. On not choosing to prioritize oral over written, or vice versa, she suggests that as artists, "we need to do what we do best" and noting the complexity of acknowledging difference and intersectional oppressions, she notes that "anything that is complex will need to have a complex application"

(interview, 2007). d'bi.young's approach towards wholeness through the exploration of self suggests that binaries are contained within each of us, and that only through a reparative self- loving process can homophobia and violence be addressed and healed.

d'bi's innovative use of nation-language has resulted in "a much more ambivalently inflected range of meanings to proliferate under the sign "Creole"' (Narain, 2002: 143), and, I would also argue, under the sign of nation, d'bi.young has developed new politicized orthographies using words such as herstory, black bush ooman, and womben 's rites, creating newly inflected and often spiritual meanings of sexualized and racialized citizenship. In blood, claat, she has infused her use of nation-language with countermemories of women warriors, reformulating vulgar concepts into those celebrating women's erotic power. With her play androgyne, she has reopened the debate on homophobia in Jamaica and its diasporic communities from a new perspective, telling the story of two queer women who explore the roots of their homophobia in the context of sexualized violence against racialized women in Canada. It is to a detailed analysis of these two works that I now turn.

5.3 blood.claat Reclaiming an Erotic Vernacular

we guh fight, our blood is our life! Queen Nanny, in blood.claat 107

In her play blood.claat, d'bi.young confronts paradigms of sexual respectability using a vernacular that tramples established codes of morality, gender, race and sexuality, blood.claat is the journey of 15-year-old mudgu sankofa, a young girl living in Whitfield Town, Kingston,

Jamaica. Through the common motif of blood and with the help of foremothers, mudgu learns her power as a "womban." mudgu's experience of the power of her menstrual life blood intersects with that of the death blood shed when her neighbor and boyfriend njoni is killed, mudgu also negotiates relationships with her overprotective grandmother and religious aunt, who both worry about mudgu's growing sexuality, particularly in the absence of her mother, who has immigrated to Canada. Because it is intertwined with the "herstorical" tale of queen nanny and her sister sekesu, the dub play invokes a cultural bloodline between mudgu's story and those of freedom-fighting maroons separated by 300 years of history.

d'bi.young calls her play blood.claat: a Jamaican cuss word that literally means the cloth that women use for their menstrual blood. Directly addressing the stigma associated with women's bodies and their sexual development, her use of the word blood.claat dismisses the culture of dissemblance and the politics of silence that surround black women's sexuality. By signaling blood.claat as a taboo and vilified word, she suggests the erotic power inherent in those aspects of self that have been silenced or suppressed. As mugdu's mother explains to her:

but what you are talking about is blood-claat... yes now i swear, but that word didn't always mean that you know, back in your great grandmother's time, miss thomas. you remember her? well she was a maroon, come from the west part of afrika, the maroon women would use pieces of old towels, or fabric, or piece a claat as we say, when they had their periods, they would bleed into these claats and wash them and reuse them... hence blood-claat. yuh know I even heard that that same blood-claat could use to do obeah.. .magic, if the maroon womben thought they were in danger, they would do things with the blood to protect themselves and di whole community up in di blue mountain top (...) I don't know how it turn into a curse word..." (38- 39). 108

As mugdu's mother explains, the same aspects of blood that shame us have also sustained us; asking her village to embrace the multiple social dimensions of blood, d'bi.young connects the substance to birth, growth, violence and death. When explaining blood, mudgu's mother gives her an ancient piece of cloth given to her by her great grandmother, remembering that "she say it older than when god was a ooman" to which young mudgu replies, "god was a ooman!?"

(39) The exchange shows how d'bi.young roots the present in the past "so that it provides a complex understanding of how slavery informs the present day condition of African-Jamaicans"

(Walker 2005: 3). Blurring the line between sacred and the profane, she uses the blood, claat word to reclaim its spiritual and healing properties. Paralleling reggae superstar Peter Tosh, who

"was adamant that certain curse words possess spiritual and healing characteristics" (Walker

2005: 3) with his song "o bumbo claat" (literally meaning bum or pubic cloth), d'bi.young renames menstruation as a bodily experience of political resistance. In a countermemorative scene, Queen Nanny prepares a blood stew for her warriors for battle and chants:

blood soaked claat make raging rivers of this stew to fill each redcoats lungs and heart with fire from nanny's bloodclaat brew (p. 43)

While relying on blood as a metaphor might suggest a biological essentialism about the procreative capabilities of women's bodies, d'bi.young locates blood's power in its sociality, not in its biology, transforming blood into a weapon of liberation, d'bi instead sees the denigration and taboo of menstruation as socially constructed, and refigures women's cultural and spiritual uses of their bodies to defy any biological determinism. While teenage pregnancy is often conceived as a epidemic problem (for black youth), d'bi.young refigures the Caribbean reality of early motherhood. In blood.claat, mudgu's mother explains the legacy of nanny's sister sekesu who lived and died in slavery. In escaping the plantation, sekesu ran with a newborn baby who 109 cried with hunger and gave away her hiding place to the bakra's dogs. Instead of making sekesu's story indicate the perils of pregnancy (particularly as compared to the freedom enjoyed by her sister warrior queen nanny), mudgu's mother focuses on the story of sekesu's child:

the child grew up with a thirst for freedom, fattened on the warrior stories, the child vowed to break the cycle of bondage, soon after sekesu died, the child poisoned bakra massa and his entire household with an old taino Indian recipe that corrodes the blood; then ran away to the mountains to be reunited with kin.

that child was called mudgu (p. 46-7).

When mudgu herself becomes pregnant at 15, her granny laments that "all of whitfield town know mi shame" (47), and recalls that mudgu's mother gave birth at 15, and that she herself birthed mudgu's mother's sister at age 15. But just as she is about to cast mudgu out of her house and send her to her aunt's home, mudgu confesses the incest she has experienced at the hands of her uncle. While at first granny calls mudgu a "wicked lying evil pickney," she then softens and believes mudgu's story, relating it to the incest she experienced at the hands of her mother's boyfriend, mudgu's role in the cycle of women's experiences of life and death are embodied in blood; this role is made potent in the following scene when queen nanny exclaims

"when one fall, a new warrior is born" (49). As d'bi excavates and acknowledges these experiences of incest and violence in blood.claat, mudgu continues her journey towards self- love, a self that embodies both self and others in the social bonds of blood. This journey mirrors that which d'bi explains she herself has taken:

Growing up in Jamaica was challenging. But I would do it just the same if I were to do it again, including the elements of my life that were 'fucked-up.' Why? Because who I am becoming is someone who I really like. I really like her because she is so invested in reclaiming all of her experiences, (as quoted in Wright, 2006: 27) 110

I now turn to this recognition of self-love and its potential for ethically responding to homophobia in others.

5.4 Approaching Erotic Autonomy via Self-Love

While d'bi's biomythographical approach to poetry and playwriting is self-reflective, this does not mean that it is individualistic or detached from community. Instead, using biomythography presents an opportunity to tell our stories, or to imagine a different story that the one in which we have become trapped because of violence and oppression. As d'bi describes it:

"my process is learning how to love myself, i like it as a project. (...) i think if you are loving yourself and working on loving yourself, maybe you also love people" (interview, 2007). d'bi names women's pleasure and agency, or what she calls "the texture of her happiness," as a guiding principle of her artistic work. Making self-knowledge central means, that a very different story of homophobia emerges.

d'bi's play androgyne presents an alternative storytelling of homophobia, androgyne explores the possibility of desire, violence and community between women as the two principal women characters debate the terms of their sexual and racial identity within and through the nations that deny their inclusion. Splitting the first and last name of the principal character in blood.claat into two characters, androgyne tells the story of mudgu and sankofa, two friends in their twenties whose life-long friendship spans childhood in Jamaica and immigration to Canada.

The character listing describes both women as queer and homophobic; embodying division on sexuality within their very bodies, the women struggle throughout the play against ingrained cultural norms that deny their loving relationship to each other. While mudgu is presented as the

"more" homophobic woman throughout the play by refusing to acknowledge her own queer Ill experiences, sankofa also has difficulty at the end of the play in telling her family about the family that she and mudgu are starting together. The names of the characters also suggest that mudgu and sankofa represent self-in-other, again acknowledging that a journey via self is necessary.

Like blood, claat, the name of this second play androgyne provides clues to the playwright's cultural "excavatist" strategy. An androgyne may be defined as a person who does not fit into gender norms of masculine and feminine. The two characters explore concepts of gender and sexual autonomy in their own relationship that defy the logic of what Judith Butler calls intelligible genders: "those which in some sense institute and maintain relations of coherence and continuity among sex, gender, sexual practice, and desire" (Butler 1990: 23). In discussion about sexual acts themselves, the quality of love they have for each other, or the relationship of homophobia to racism, d'bi characters work from the knowledge of their bodies' desires as a "territory of cultural and political maneuvering" rather than specific gender ideologies (Stallings, 2007: 23). The play accomplishes this primarily by flashing back to their childhood at moments of crisis and difficulty, suggesting that their common herstory comes through their bodies, and that these memories allow for common acknowledgement and healing.

The two characters defy preconceived gender roles by eventually choosing to parent a child together. By questioning the characters' gender ideologies through naming the play androgyne, d'bi weaves questions of erotic autonomy beyond sexual identity, questioning the binary of heterosexual vs. homosexual, but also the biological binary of male vs. female.

From the opening tableau, androgyne names the traffic between patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality. To the sounds of homophobic dancehall music, two women lie sleeping together in a condo apartment in Scarborough, Ontario. As the play begins, the two 112

women awake and build to "passionate love-making" as a radio news station spouts the

following report:

.. .one college report claims that date rape has quadrupled since the beginning of the year.. .x-stripper alleges that she was sexually assaulted by law-abiding fifty two year old judge.. .gays in Canada now have a right to marry.. .rape victim will spend two years in jail awaiting trial, it was discovered that she is an illegal immigrant, after the case she will be deported back to where she came from.. .a new law proclaiming that women of the sex trade industry cannot press charges for rape, has just been passed.. .five more prostitutes were found dismembered and thrown in a dumpster in the down town area.. .patrons of local restaurant were disgusted by breastfeeding mother, both mother and baby were quietly asked to leave the establishment.. .in order to combat welfare fraud the amount of money to single mothers will be cut in half.. .no means yes in certain countries and in certain situations.. .when questioned on why he did it, the man said she was asking for it,. .and in the battle for baby eli, father claims he deserves custody because mother is a lesbian... (young, n.d.: 8-9)

While the music provides recognition of the power of dancehall in shaping discussions

about homosexuality in Jamaica, there is no discussion of dancehall in the play.31 Instead, as the new report fades, the dancehall music turns up again, and "atop the music a womban moans from

ecstasy / we see her writhing in bed from orgasm / as her cum fades so does the dancehall"

(young, n.d.: 9). The reality of a racist Canadian immigration system, sexual violence against women and increasing visibility of the gay and lesbian community form the backdrop to the development of the two women's relationship in the play.

The play begins with sankofa performing her newest spoken word poem, the kiss, which narrates her first experience kissing another woman, mudgu is uncomfortable with the content of the poem, and so interrupts sankofa by noting the poem's stylistic similarity with Louise

Bennett's poem "pass fi white." The two women move from the difficult territory of sankofa's

The music and the running media report serve to situate the play's discussion of homophobia and identity within the environment of political and economic realities facing black women in Canada. When the characters do debate "politics," the dialogue suggests their fluency with topics such as difficulty of gaining meaningful employment, the cutback of daycare and the severity of youth violence in the community. 113 poem to simultaneously performing the Bennett poem. The moment shows the women's cultural common ground despite sankofa's attempts to engage mudgu to address the desire between them.

The moment also serves to ground their relationship in a Jamaican childhood, and the play moves into a flashback of their childhood rhyming games. Throughout the play, these flashbacks function to ground the women's exploration of eroticism in their girlhood, connected via memories of women's oral performance, much like the work that Makeda Silvera has done in remembering women who loved women from her childhood (1992). Rooting their love for each other and their sexual exploration in childhood in Jamaica, the play suggests that lesbian culture is likewise of Jamaica, not just of the North. As the play moves back to the present, sankofa newly sees Bennett's poem in the present: "that's a political poem you know. I nevah noticed that growing up. miss lou, revolutionary" (young, n.d.: 18).

In androgyne, developing the practice of loving others is a political one that must address the colonial legacy of slavery. When mudgu is raped by her boyfriend, sankofa calls out to her although she is not physically present during the rape. She asks

who carries the sage secrets of loving.. .what elders and children.. .walk with the old-time knowledge.. .of a courageous love.. .unapologetic love.. .an uncompromising love.. .an integritous love.. .a healing love.. .and I will sit studently (sic) by the rivers of their feet washing away all the unknowing that I have come to know.. .relearning a language of honesty / scribed on our tongues and hearts / by the ancients whom I have forgotten.. .somewhere between a dream and a timelessness.. .across the ocean waters.. .black sons and dawtahs.. .black moddahs and fadahs.. .black auntie uncle sistah - and breddah.. .stretch love fabric.. .thick and thin.. .we trodding.. .trying to heal the scars.. .of broken fibre.. .that stick up inna we.. .like macka.. .(young, n.d.:43-47)

The narrative suggests that present-day homophobia is related to the "unknowing" and forgetting produced by slavery. As the rape occurs, sankofa pays homage to family members and ancients, remembering "stretch love fabric" across oceans, noting that the resources to recognize and know love come from remembering colonial histories of slavery and the lived resistance to them. 114

After the rape, when mudgu attempts to phone sankofa, sankofa isn't available to take her call, suggesting distance between the friends because of this forgetting of women's erotic connection to each other. When jealousy finally erupts into sankofa's declaration of love for mudgu, the two women are finally able to return to the performance of sankofa's poem the kiss which mudgu had initially interrupted. But now, sankofa's style is less performative and she has found a comfortable place in acknowledging her love for mudgu. The poem becomes an honest offering to mudgu:

when mi kiss dat black girl I could see her and she could see me bright me and mudgu inna di middle a di light a di first time mi feel sexuality wid some real equality (young, n.d.: 68)

5.5 Countermemories: Remembering Alternative Futures via

Biomythography

/ am tomorrow's forgotten yesterday. -d'bi.young (Introduction to blood.claat)

While the two plays discussed here are about mugdu (and sankofa), d'bi names them as biomythography, pointing to her own story of arriving in Canada but needing to return to her childhood:

by that time i had distanced myself from writing and dub poetry because i thought that's home, that's what i know, i wanted to know what else is out there, i got really attracted to "activism" and realized that that circuit took me full circle because i got involved in activism, and then i got into black nationalism, as a first route to my politicization, and then i became a feminist, and then somewhere during that i was able to negotiate being queer to my mother and to my friends and it all led me right back to Jamaica (interview, 2007). 115

d'bi's storytelling shows how we become subjects through time: we experience the world

simultaneously (not progressively) within the violence and melancholia of the past, the ever- unstable present moment, and the generative possibilities of the future. Storytelling suggests that we can provisionally empower ourselves by building intersubjectivity between tellers and listeners, self and other, d'bi.young's dub storytelling is haunted by desire and loss, pointing to how we are both constituted and unmade by others in the stories we tell about ourselves. Thus storytelling is an act of remembering an alternative future fueled by our acts of pleasure and liberation; d'bi's storytelling is the possibility of erotic autonomy through seeing other-in-self.

This hints towards a self that is not independent and complete, but who is creatively fragmented by different experiences of subjectivization in relation to Others: the violence of past colonialisms; the moment-in-time power of performance; and the emancipatory hope we have for the future combine to make us provisionally whole.

Venn (2002) addresses three modes of temporality in the construction of subjectivity.

First, there is historical time, which is the time of the community, where nation and race can symbolize authenticity in history. Next, there is memory time and biographical time, where subjective experiences reign. Last, and important to consider in my reading of embodied dub storytelling, is the body's function as "the living and material repository of the time of one's life"

(Venn 2002: 60). Echoing Venn, Valerie Walkerdine asks "when the colonized subject attempts to exist as both gazed at and as retaining ways of being from the past, where are these held? Are they not held simultaneously in two places at once: in the social world through cultural and social practices, rituals, ways of relating, but also in the bodymind?" (2006: 14)

Remembering and thus recuperating past experiences, especially those that don't exist in the discernible register of formal documents, expresses the nature of power. If power both acts 116

upon us and produces us as subjects (Butler, 1997), it is crucial to consider not only the

repressive elements of this subjection, but also how artists like d'bi young rework power to

generate the possibility of connection, hope and freedom. In this last section, by focusing on the

generative capabilities of power, I hope to show that the storytelling process is one of recycling

different forms of power that we did not create in order to differently generate countermemories

and thus subjecthood for ourselves.

Who are we in the present? asks much of d'bi's storytelling in her exploration of self, d'bi

looks for answers to this question by overlapping time in narrative to produce a relational black

subject grounded within community. She describes what she does: "plain and simple storytelling.

It is Grandma calling all a di lickle pickney dem in a di yard fi sit down roun har and to hear

stories about the ancestors. It's what a keeps community together; it is so very simple" (Flynn &

Marrast 2004: 37). As such, d'bi names storytelling as a dialogue between herself and her

community of audiences, who she calls her village, d'bi names storytelling as "a loving critique,

a loving resistance" that signals an exploration of the self in relation to the Other: "dub asks that

the storyteller be in a consistent process of honest and integritous (sic) self-analysis and critique

in order to do the same as a storyteller within the community" (young, 2007: 137). Self-making through storytelling is a relational moment, where the teller's meaning is made by the audience; the self is not being "discovered" at such a moment, but becoming elaborated, through speaking, in a new way:

When we recognize another, or when we ask for recognition for ourselves, we are not asking for an Other to see us as we are, as we already are, as we have always been, as we were constituted prior to the encounter itself. (...) It is to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the future always in relation to the Other (Butler 2004a: 44).

Butler points towards the passionate attachments that subjects enact on those on whom they are fundamentally dependent. As human beings, we believe in a myth of our own 117

independent power while at the same time being vulnerable to others. Grief (and before it,

desire) shows this vulnerability in sharp relief; when we grieve we show

the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways that we cannot always recount or explain, in ways that often interrupt the self-conscious account of ourselves we might try to provide, in ways that challenge the very notion of ourselves as autonomous and in control (Butler 2004a: 21).

Other emotions often show that we do not possess ourselves, but are in a mode of being

dispossessed, or "a way of being for another or by virtue of another" (Butler 2004a: 24). So if

this storytelling encounter is structured by this vulnerable interpellation of self and Other, then it

is our primary sociality that makes possible a sense of self-in-community.

While d'bi speaks in the voices of different characters in her biomythography, she also

speaks as a "dub poet" - as a multitudinous d'bi. Since every self is a storied self, every story is

mixed with the stories of other selves, "so that each one of us is entangled in the stories we tell

about ourselves and that are told about us" (Venn 2002: 57). This makes the stories iterative: with each telling, their meaning shifts according to the village that can hear them and reflect them. As she recounts the homophobia she has encountered when storytelling, d'bi sees spaces

for creative community-building in storytelling:

People will accept the parts of you that they can. What they choose to hear is indicative of where they're at. Hopefully, later on down the road, because you've gained their trust and love, they will allow you to talk to them about other things (Wright, 2006: 27).

For d'bi, her multiple selves are an ever-present moment of imagining that aspect of time that Venn calls the yet-becoming:

For me, nothing is static, including yourself. Every moment is an opportunity to grow and to love and to change. Self-empowerment is believing and knowing that things don't always have to be the way they are now. Even when things are beautiful and healthy, they can always become more so. (Wright 2006: 27) 118

The value of d'bi storytelling is predicated on the dynamics of the time and place of its telling. Here, understanding self within the primacy of the relation to the Other recognizes that

"temporality is a fundamental category of the social" (Alexander 2005: 8). The self in relation to the Other is simultaneously a self in time; We experience loss, desire, and hope according to "the echo of what has been" and the "the imagination of the to-come as a time of emancipation and redemption" (Venn 2002: 56). So to access generative power, subjects psychically petition the future for emancipation. According to Venn, "we live the 'now' as a movement from a becoming-past to a coming-towards, so that the consciousness of the present always leaches in the memory of the having-been and the anticipation of a to-come "(2002: 56). The Other is a figure in the work of healing and rememorializing the past to create a viable future. As such, our psychic well-being depends on being able or ready to harbour the Other within the self.

Many of d'bi's storytelling selves are young girls who have experienced incest. In her role as Staceyanne in the play 'da kink in my hair, she tells the story of sexual abuse she underwent by her mother's partner after moving to Canada from Jamaica. She tells the story to

Novelette, who is the first to believe her story. Another character, Mugdu, in her play blood, claat, fends off sexual advances from her uncle, ultimately channeling the warrior spirit of

Queen Nanny, a free-willed slave who led uprisings in rural Jamaica in the early 1700s, by taking up a machete and amputating her uncle's hand. In both cases, the character is also d'bi, who candidly revisits the wounds she nurtures because of her own childhood incest. As different characters, d'bi tells this story to her village to make it truth:

i have told staceyanne's story to young black womben, to old white womben, to men and womben of colour from all walks, to academics, to all kinds of working class people, in each scenario the humanity of the story takes precedence over the differences among the people witnessing it. in every telling stacyanne changes, grows, regresses and progresses, as an incest surviving storyteller—within the spirit of her— i do the same, we are both held by the village; allowing them to pour, like water, into us; finding catharsis and 119

healing, throughout this process i wade, watching the magic of reciprocity in full effect, storytelling in full effect (young, 2007: 143).

As Walkerdine elaborates, the objectified subject lives at a border. That border can be a

creative one where pain can be worked through and allowed to create something anew (2006:

13). d'bi actively undergoes this process as a storyteller whose creative muse lies in the

reclamation of pain and hope. She names her multiple experiences as a Jamaican and also a

Canadian as indicative of a fragmented self that can be worked over to reclaim the pain of that border.

While d'bi enacts a complex subjectivity through time by storytelling as her little girl

self, she also tells stories in the voices of women from a historical past erased by colonialism. As

Nanny of the Maroons, d'bi locates the courage to work through fear; the past rises up in Mugdu, who takes up her own machete to face her abusive uncle. To deal with the pain of her mother's absence who has gone to Canada, 15-year-old Mugdu/d'bi enacts her own mother's storytelling from the past to bring her to life. Mugdu's grandmother and aunt also live within her, even as they chastise her to behave "respectably" and physically punish her for her sexual behaviour.

The selves that d'bi plays are thus embodied parts of a whole series of possible selves, brought to light through the interaction with the audience. If we consider the three modes of temporality of

Venn's account, d'bi moves through these registers in order to convey truth and meaning through storytelling. First, she challenges the officially managed state narrative of women's resistance by creating a new embodied narrative of a feminist past that includes menstruation in the slave uprising led by Nanny of the Maroons. Second, the biographical time of d'bi's life is taken up through the presentation of characters that are both like and unlike d'bi in the choices they make to deal with adversity. In this way, she reworks a difficult past by envisioning an overlap of generative power; she remakes events from her past in the present through storytelling. Last, her 120 physical body is a repository of her life's experiences; as she moves through the characters, she physically assumes their subjectivities to produce compassion and anger. These characters make up a multiple self that d'bi empowers through storytelling:

my body and mind and spirit, a crossroads of realities, divisions, disjunctures. intersections, we all live contradictions, none of us is really any one thing, storytelling helps me move towards better integration of these multi-selves; allowing me to find freedom in the spaces in-between, story telling from this place of multiplicity is my most valuable tool, it allows me to talk with people instead of at them, it allows me to implicate myself in the problems and also to suggest solutions (young, 2007: 139).

As embodied performance, d'bi's storytelling bring the emotional experience of language closer to the body. The body has a capacity, perhaps even a need, to interrupt the logic of the

social; following Venn's assertion that it is not enough to develop counter-hegemonic discourse to confront injustice, body countermemories must be recathected in order to enable hope for the to-come. In other words, there is a "need for works which not only refigure the experiential in a register which 'derealises' the seeming fixity of the world, but equally, give voice to the yearning which derives the ethical and the aesthetic" (Venn 2002: 66). d'bi meets this desire for connection and completion, however partially it might be achieved, through the narrative economy of storytelling. She imagines anger as an important tool in her storytelling, as

it is important in the healing process, it shows us which parts hurt; which parts of ourselves need to be reclaimed, from this place of righteous anger, we claim our body (the most intimate space of oppression) as a site of expression, pleasure and resistance, watching the dub poets while growing up, i learnt that one of the greatest tools of storytelling is allowing the body to feel (2007: 145).

Her storytelling approaches affect as a relational and connected mode of power and community.

While the recognition of anger and loss always marks an inassimilable remainder that cannot be recuperated through storytelling, or, as Lorde suggests, represents the erotic well of unrecognizable feeling, it also provides a iterable moment of freedom that can be taken up in 121 naming anger as a legitimate response to subjection, d'bi sees answer as a potent source of

energy "when channeled from a place of love, is a powerful motivational tool for social change"

(2007,147). d'bi's storytelling is a cultivation a love of blackness that has been denied historically: by the state-managers of colonial racism, classism and shadeism, but also by family members who were able to abuse her denied self-worth as a "flat nosed, thick-lipped, dark

skinned" woman (d'bi.young, as quoted in Flynn & Marrast 2004). She commits to "loving the little girl up" (personal communication, 2006) in recuperating a sense of time that has not been colonized in a corporate world: "we have to recultivate the discipline, the love of ourselves, to do revolutionary work of loving ourselves - it is a rebellion against the way time itself is structured"

(personal communication, 2006). This self-love is a commitment to fallible personhood, not a cementing of an authentic self.

In conclusion, how does d'bi's version of dub storytelling provoke belonging in nationhood where erotic autonomy is possible? d'bi names the role of dub poets as "to provoke, politicize and ultimately to exorcise and heal" (young, 2007: 137). Her use of dub poetry and theatre shows the flexibility of a Jamaican cultural form even as others, such as dancehall, are marked as increasingly and singularly violent. In so doing, she proves the diaspora a fertile transnational space for developing Jamaican identity, culture and politics. Her use of nation- language challenges the territorial use of the language, and provokes its changing use and development, wresting it away from those who mark it as timeless and unchanging. Her work opens up readings of homophobia via performances that undermine heteropatriarchy, sexual respectability and subordinate black femininity.

d'bi has become the face of a new generation of dub poets; she has stretched the form across time to incorporate not only the pain of difference and racism in Canada, but to also address countermemories of queerness in Jamaica through her biomythographical dub theatre approach. Storytelling narratives such as d'bi's show us how we become subjects through time: we experience the world within the violence and melancholia of the past, the ever-unstable present moment, and the generative possibilities of the future. Via dub theatre, young has developed possibilities of women's erotic autonomy and self-liberation not exclusively hinged on nation-building, but on cultivating self-love, love for other women, and the nation simultaneously. 123

Chapter Six: Conclusion

The current moment of intense debate on homophobia in Jamaica provides a key opportunity to open up conversation on the role of sexuality in citizenship and belonging. Global gay media and national media in the Caribbean construct the debate as a powerful gay lobby from the North vs. obstinate Jamaican dancehall artistes and repressive Caribbean governments.

However, this positioning creates a blindspot with regards to the work that neoimperial and neocolonial states do together to distance themselves of the ongoing effects of a colonial past and to reinforce respectable sexuality as a critical foundation of citizenship. In this debate, homophobic violence in Jamaica and the difficulty of exile in the North are taken up in very limited ways in order to reinscribe neoimperial dominance and the North's exclusive claim to human rights and equality. In their characterization of violence, gay media relegates homophobia to a problem of backward cultures, and divorces it from other violences in which countries in the

North are implicated in perpetuating. In suggesting that homophobia is solely a "cultural" problem in Jamaica, it becomes difficult to question the North's position as the home of justice and freedom, even "in the midst of the daily escalation of racist and homophobic violence that the state itself legitimates" (Alexander 2006: 28). Exposing ideological traffic between different state formations shows their common hold on heterosexualized citizenship while likewise acknowledging the endorsement of a homonormative nationalism that limits gay politics to a neoliberal version of freedom via consumption.

In asking how homophobia is made to matter by the global campaign to address violence in Jamaica, I suggest that what is at stake is the power to define and name the critical elements of queer existence and how they will be acknowledged by capital and the states involved. By 124 invoking the concept of homonormativity, I suggest gay community has been increasingly depoliticized into practices of domesticity and consumption, rather than building politicized challenges to the exclusions of global capitalism that speak out about the marginalization of racialized and working class lesbians, queers and gays, d'bi young and Staceyann Chin's cultural work is a critical intervention to makes the lives of Jamaican women in queer diaspora central to conversations about postcolonial sexual citizenship. Storytelling their lives, Chin and young claim power to name experience and to repossess representations so often used against them.

These poets speak a complex transnational landscape of emotional commitment to a cultural politics that denies the easy separation of their sexuality from other aspects of self.

These poets affirm that the Caribbean is indeed a complex place. Jamaica embodies a number of contradictions in their work: as a place where sexual minorities have a strong history, but who also face invisibility due to racialized and classed violence; as a country characterized by overt sexual expression in popular culture and music, but also by sexual conservatism and respectability in the institutions of church and state; a country rich in political thought, cultural production, and natural resources, but also poor because of the siphoning off of its resources via exploitative colonialism; as a place known for the tenacity of its Black women, and yet that same strength has been used to justify their exploitation and denigration; as an country that fiercely defends its independence while struggling with the untenable demands of the IMF, World Bank, and multinational corporations; and as a place alive with political talk and performance that also silences expressions of Black women's agency and autonomy. Their work responds to static understandings of violent homophobia by engaging with boundaries of nation, race, class, gender, and sexuality. Their response narrates a possibility of erotic autonomy and self-liberation

321 must thank Andil Gosine for making this simple but powerful statement in a presentation at York University in the spring of 2008; "The Caribbean is a complex place." 125 by reconceptualizing the erotic as an intersectional tool for meaningful social and political change. Staceyann Chin and d'bi.young use art as a weapon, by recycling oppressive discourses as part of "strategies of iteration and reiteration" in "performative acts of conjuring that deform and re-form the world" (Mufioz, 1999: 196). The performative acts of Staceyann Chin and d'bi young are critically important, as they have chosen the risk of misrepresentation over the risk of not speaking at all; they have heeded Audre Lorde's clarion call of "your silence will not protect you" (Lorde, 1984). In a gesture that acknowledges this vulnerability, these poets have created countermemories to build the possibility of alternative futures that do not respect national and sexual borders established by the hegemonic power of state and capital. Staceyann Chin and d'bi young reject the use of toeholds of respectability in favour of seeing their own vulnerability in relationship to others, challenging themselves and their audiences to see the Other within.

Storytelling belies a primary need to "work together as friends and lovers" (the process of making zami, as described by Audre Lorde) to build erotic communities of resistance that acknowledge difference. In the age of neoliberalism, the concept of liberation is too easily co- opted to mean the freedom of the individual, denying the importance of collective resistance and allowing us to "forget" that it has been via collective action that we have won civil rights and some semblance of democracy.

What are the promises of erotic power and autonomy imagined by these poets? By acknowledging that the source of their deepest oppression is also the source of their greatest power, they build an elusive but powerful transnational geography of desire and belonging; they give voice to erotic communities of women across national boundaries, defying the separation that officially managed national histories and myths have created. Audre Lorde states that the sharing of erotic power across boundaries can begin the difficult task of acknowledging differences that make us unequal in the present moment. Their performance builds a base of 126 erotic power in this acknowledgement, a place from which to launch poetic critique on the heterosexualized basis of citizenship. Chin and young seek out ground that challenge virtuous models of black womanhood "who must be properly educated and acculturated in order to take their place as symbols of national progress" as well as representations of their sexuality as backwards and perverse seen in images of "the antiwoman, pathological and lascivious viragos who undermine the nationalist project" (Edmondson 2003: 2).

Staceyann Chin has worked in a variety of performance spaces to bring meaning to her experiences as a lesbian in exile from Jamaica and to speak for those who cannot yet speak

(Chin, personal interview, 2007). Although I suggest that Chin is "out of place" because neither

Jamaica nor New York are easy sites of belonging for her, her work does not succumb to

"placelessness": instead her partial belonging gives her a insider-outsider status to question, negotiate and create contingent spaces from which to speak. Chin's performance and written narratives question a range of state practices of heterosexualized citizenship, both in Jamaica and the USA, indicting capitalist globalization as the false plank in emptied promises of gay liberation. Speaking to the USA, Chin questions the positioning of certain kinds of subjects, including gay ones, as procreative and patriotic, and others as seditious and dangerous internal enemies. Her poetry complicates promises of "sexual freedom" for queer refugees in the North, highlighting its contingency on race and class by asking about the exclusion of immigrant racialized workers in the USA.

Chin refigures a colonial and contemporary travel narrative of exotic sexualized Jamaica by invoking the other side of paradise. This other side is not hell, paradise's binary opposite; instead, she mobilizes her position in queer diaspora to denaturalize the relationship between heterosexuality and nation by insisting on the complexity of Jamaican sexual cultures. She 127 allows Jamaica to exist, uneasily, as a place of contradiction, denying a queer reading of Jamaica as uniformly hyper(hetero)sexual.

In her dub poetry and theatre work, young engages the bodily experience of speaking nation-language to redirect its anti-colonial power towards woman-centred eroticism. Continuing the legacy of Louise Bennett and many dub foremothers, d'bi young inhabits a multitude of working-class bodies in her performance work, bringing Afro-Jamaican lived experience to a range of audiences. She confronts paradigms of sexual respectability using a vernacular that upsets established codes of morality, gender, race and sexuality. Locating one of her narratives in the bodily experience of menstruation, she invokes the multiple cultural and social dimensions of blood to acknowledge pain, violence, death and rebirth. Her dub storytelling engages multiple registers of time to regenerate the body as a site of long-term vision and possibility, young's long and overlapping narratives of time make it possible to countermemorialize experiences of the transatlantic slave trade, making the script of colonial relations appear on the body of herself/her characters (who are often one and the same); however, this does not position them as passive victims in a long history of oppression. Instead, the shedding of blood is an experience of political resistance. She creates a new embodied narrative of an anti-racist feminist past. Thus her storytelling is an act of remembering an alternative future that isn't just enshrined in counter- hegemonic political and public discourses, but her stories are generated through the body itself to enable hope, emotion and connection to our deepest sources of erotic power.

In suggesting possibility in these poets' use of erotic power and autonomy, I don't mean to suggest that they are simply "resisting" dominant norms of sexuality. Instead, their mobilization of erotic autonomy includes understanding that their ability to assume power is crafted in conditions not purely of their own making. Michel Foucault's expansive suggestion 128 that power is everywhere invites us to recognize power as an ambiguous force not easily divisible into "bad power" vs. "good resistance." Foucault's tagline "where there is power, there is resistance..." (1978: 95) is often quoted in ways that reinforce this division and with good reason, too; the simple phrase enables hope that power can be negotiated, redirected, and changed. And yet Foucault asks us to cultivate suspicion in the continuation of the phrase:

".. .and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power". I understand the power of erotic autonomy as operating in this generative sense; these poets use erotic power to negotiate, redirect, and change dominant narratives, not always uniformly saying no. As such, sexual subjectivization involves both subordination and becoming of the subject, where "the subject is neither fully determined by power nor fully determining of power" (Butler, 1997: 17). If power both acts upon us and produces us as subjects, it is crucial to consider not only the repressive elements of this subjection, but also how artists like Chin and young rework erotic power to generate the possibility of connection, hope and freedom.

The autonomy of erotic autonomy "does not imply a bounded, independent or self- sufficient subject. Its starting point is human dignity, the intrinsic value of each person and their potential "to lead a life that is their own" (Robinson 2007: 125). Our well-being depends on the work of healing the past violences of difference to create a viable future. Instead of resorting to respectability as a structure to ensure dominance, and thereby compete with Others to make their particular marginality the most important, these two poets suggest seeing ourselves as both victims and oppressors, generating agency to petition the future. In remembering and hearing their stories, ones that we have been encouraged to forget, we come closer to that nexus of acts that Alexander sees as crucial to erotic autonomy: women loving themselves, loving other women, and transforming the nation simultaneously (2005). 129

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