My Sister's Voice & Other Short Stories

By Martin Boyce

[Previously published as "My Sister's Voice: Short Stories by a Bajan Buller Man Volume 1"]
Despite the fact that many countries are legalizing same sex marriages, Barbados still has on the statute books Chapter 154, Section 9 of its Sexual Offences Act which criminalises buggery. Members of the Gender and Sexual Minority (GSM) community, have been objects of derision, verbal and physical attacks and discrimination. One place where the GSM community can find some solace and reprieve is in literature that is accessible to a variety of readers.

In this debut collection of short stories, award-winning writer, Martin Boyce, explores the struggle between private and public selves, writing as a sexual minority from the Caribbean island of Barbados. Bold, brooding and humorous are these often lyrical soliloquies which extend past superficial musings into the realm of honest revelations, including urgent, universal social commentaries about fighting approval addiction to find peace through self-acceptance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Martin Boyce
• Release date: Sep 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005475314

Martin Boyce

Martin Boyce was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up in Barbados. He received his B.Sc. in Business Administration from the University of Brasilia, Brazil in 2004.Traveling extensively as an English teacher, he has lived in Japan, Spain, Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica.Martin has been writing since 2005 and has won several literary awards, including the Carolle Bourne Award for Literary Innovation. His short stories have been published in Arts Etc. NIFCA Winning Words Anthologies.He became a vegan in 2017 and currently resides in Barbados where he ponders the Anthropocene and Sixth Extinction when he is not attempting to write, meditate, grow food, find off-grid communities or play Capoeira.

Book preview

My Sister's Voice

&

Other Short stories

by

Martin Boyce

Copyright 2017 Martin Boyce

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite eBook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and situations within its pages and places or persons, living or dead, is unintentional and co-incidental.

Smashwords Edition

Author Photo by: Khalil Goodman

Cover by: Viergacht

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Fear

Tricky

Silent Passenger

Price of a Good Haircut

The Bajan who Made a Mountain out of a Molehill

Shitsurei

These Days are Strange Nights

Shadow of the Love Vine

My Sister's Voice

Dumplings for Daddy

Mother Sally

Heart Man

Unsafe to Walk this Street at Night

Glossary

About the Author

Connect with Martin Boyce

Books by this Author

Role is something people play. Model is something people make. Both of those things are fake.

Tupac Shakur

Introduction

Despite the fact that many countries are legalizing same sex marriages, Barbados still has on the statute books Chapter 154, Section 9 of its Sexual Offences Act which criminalises buggery. Members of the Gender and Sexual Minority (GSM) community, are often objects of derision, verbal and physical attacks and discrimination. One place where the GSM community can find some solace and reprieve is in literature that is accessible to a variety of readers.

My writing aims to address the absence of Barbadian GSM voices in literature and promote empathy, as one role of fiction is to foster understanding through compassion by putting the reader in the mind-space of characters who may be different from themselves. I also seek to encourage other writers to lend their voices to topics considered taboo, since societal judgment can place obstacles in the way of creative expression, which might remain untapped as a result.

Of course, an important role of my writing is to enlighten, because it is through the sharing of advanced perspectives that narrow-mindedness and repression can be defeated. While wide-scale societal change may be beyond the scope of my books, their contribution is in the exemplification of how being conspicuously proud of who you are can overcome bigotry fuelled by ignorance based partly on the invisibility of the objects of hate. Setting aside GSM themes, I want to engage and entertain: a good story is a good story.

In these stories, I try to explore the struggle between the conscious and unconscious selves. Bold, brooding and humorous are these often lyrical soliloquies which extend past superficial musings into the realm of honest revelations, including urgent, universal social commentaries about fighting approval addiction to find peace through self-acceptance.

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Underground

The Fear

Before I knew what scars were, that they, like the roots of the bougainvillea tree, could reach down and crack the foundation upon which everything stands, before this, I did not like the ones on my face. They said too much without having been asked, and like small children, who despite having learnt from wrinkled-brow elders to be seen and not heard, were quick to let strangers know my business.

Without an introduction, it was clear I was damaged. People would ask the details with their eyes, lingering on the diagonal train track across my nose bridge.

I would respond in memories of a boy running through a closed door that looked open because it was made of glass. With a glance, they could also see that the boy had attempted to become a man, and that the small eruptions accompanying the process had wounded me in a way that could not be kept secret.

You too soft—the description of a soufflé that had not yet set because it needed to be left in the cold longer. These were also words my mother used to show me affection, words that, I’d made up my mind in an attempt to forgive her, were not hers but belonged to her mother who’d accepted them like the Gospels from her mother and so on, barbs of women called mothers in a heritage reaching back before ways of showing affection existed.

Her solution was that I should grow a thicker skin because it was obvious the one I had was not able to bear the tongue-lashings she continued to belt out well into my adulthood. Surely she knew that my present skin was the only one I would ever have because it was taken from her womb. And with such a beginning why should there be any reason my wounds wouldn’t scar as they healed? There was, indeed, no good reason. And then, one day, they stopped healing.

It was night time, not a natural night caused by the dance of the planets, but a night created by thick curtains through which no light can shine being closed across a window well into a day meant to expose deeds concealed by the darkness, like a cave whose entrance is hidden someplace no one is likely to find it. Through a dark veil into a dark day, I saw a naked adolescent who looked like he had been cut out of the absence of light in the shape of an almost man. On that day, I knew I had grown up and stood tall on the outside, but had diminished inside. How had this come to be?

If someone had asked about that day, I’d have confidently said the sun had come out of the Atlantic Ocean, although I hadn’t seen a sunrise in donkey years. I had slept until my bladder needed emptying. I had made myself breakfast for lunch, and watched a movie everyone was talking about. These are the things I would have said.

What I would have kept to myself was this: believing fully in the interchangeability of this Saturday with most of the others before it, I’d absently reached my arm behind me to scratch my back with my thumb. What I felt did not belong to a day I’d taken for granted would be just another Saturday; what I felt did not belong to the skin I knew to be mine. What I saw with my fingers was a coin polished smooth, the edge raised. What I saw with my eyes in a twisted self-embrace was a black hole. The act of seeing it may have brought it to life, because it drained me, a feeling like traveling in a vehicle that falls quickly in and out of a descent in the road. It had begun.

The thing that would come to take every part of me away leaving flies in various stages of their life cycles in my place, had left an undeniable mark, its signature fingerprint. This mark was different from the others, for they had not started out as holes. The ones before had appeared within weeks of the other, forming three in all: two, a palm’s span apart on my inner thighs; the other, above the twist of skin indicating my old attachment to the one who squeezed until I fell out into this world. They formed a triangle of blemishes in the centre of which was the Devil himself.

I pulled up my pants, went on to the veranda and lit a cigarette so I could pollute the vacant spaces inside me. I wanted to vomit a flood of tar and drown everything that was meant to live a complete life full of good and bad. I would have to go see My Doctor again.

* * *

The last time I’d been to My Doctor, he tapped me on the back twice, and told me I was in great health and had nothing to worry about. He was, of course, being politely dismissive, like anyone who has had to repeatedly answer the same question asked by different people; this, after everything we’d been through together; this, after years of speaking to him things I would not say to anyone else.

I had told him that thick white pus began to leak from my penis seven days after I’d backed out of a sexual encounter because neither of us had protection from the other. I had told him that the rate at which my appetite increased was directly proportional to the rate at which I lost weight and that I’d started wearing