Erotic Cartographies: Decolonization and the Queer Caribbean Imagination

By Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan

Erotic Cartographies uses subjective mapping, a participatory data collection technique, to demonstrate how Trinidadian same-sex-loving women use their gender performance, erotic autonomy, and space-making practices to reinforce and resist colonial ascriptions on subject bodies. The women strategically embody their sexual identities to challenge imposed subject categories and to contest their invisibility and exclusion from discourses of belonging. Erotic Cartographies refers to the processes of mapping territories of self-knowing and self-expression, both cognitively in the imagination and on paper during the mapping exercise, exploring how meaning is given to space, and how it is transformed. Using the women’s quotes and maps, the book focuses on the false binary of public-private, the practices of home and family, and religious nationalism and spiritual self-seeking, to demonstrate the women’s challenges to the structural, symbolic, and interpersonal violence of colonial discourses and practices related to gender, knowledge, and power in Trinidadian society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Jan 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978821385

Book preview

EROTIC CARTOGRAPHIES

CRITICAL CARIBBEAN STUDIES

Series Editors: Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Carter Mathes, and Kathleen López

Editorial Board: Carlos U. Decena, Rutgers University; Alex Dupuy, Wesleyan University; Aisha Khan, New York University; April J. Mayes, Pomona College; Patricia Mohammed, University of West Indies; Martin Munro, Florida State University; F. Nick Nesbitt, Princeton University; Michelle Stephens, Rutgers University; Deborah Thomas, University of Pennsylvania; and Lanny Thompson, University of Puerto Rico

Focused particularly in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, although attentive to the context of earlier eras, this series encourages interdisciplinary approaches and methods and is open to scholarship in a variety of areas, including anthropology, cultural studies, diaspora and transnational studies, environmental studies, gender and sexuality studies, history, and sociology. The series pays particular attention to the four main research clusters of Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, where the coeditors serve as members of the executive board: Caribbean Critical Studies Theory and the Disciplines; Archipelagic Studies and Creolization; Caribbean Aesthetics, Poetics, and Politics; and Caribbean Colonialities.

For a list of all the titles in the series, please see the last page of the book.

EROTIC CARTOGRAPHIES

Decolonization and the Queer Caribbean Imagination

KRYSTAL NANDINI GHISYAWAN

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ghisyawan, Krystal Nandini, author.

Title: Erotic cartographies: Decolonization and the Queer Caribbean Imagination / Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan.

Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, [2022] | Series: Critical Caribbean studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021016525 | ISBN 9781978821361 (paperback; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978821378 (hardback; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978821385 (epub) | ISBN 9781978821392 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978821408 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Lesbians—Caribbean Area—Social conditions. | Gays—Caribbean Area—Social conditions. | Lesbians—Identity. | Women—Identity. | Women—Sexual behavior—Caribbean Area.

Classification: LCC HQ75.6.C27 G45 2022 | DDC 306.76/6309729—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021016525

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2022 by Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Rutgers University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

For my mother, Celia

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Note on Trinidadian English

Prologue

PART I: INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGY

1 Introduction: Erotic Cartographies and the Decolonial

2 Subjective Mapping: Queer Decolonial Methodology

PART II: CONFRONTING BINARIES: SPACE, GENDER, AND SOCIAL CLASS

3 Being in Public: Queer Transnational Subjectivities

4 Contesting Home: Unsettling Public-Private Boundaries

PART III: STATE, RELIGION, AND PERSONHOOD

5 Religious Nationalism: Its Roots and Fruit

6 Dealing Up with the Spirit: Spiritual Knowledge and Erotic Fulfillment

7 Conclusion

Appendix 1: Analytics Used for Maps

Appendix 2: Bio-Data of Research Participants

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

1. Sandy’s map, October 3, 2013

2. Jane’s first map (of two), August 7, 2013

3. Jane’s second map (of two), October 22, 2013

4. Jean’s first map (of two), October 24, 2012

5. Jean’s second map (of two), October 24, 2012

6. Jaya’s map, May 10, 2013

7. Shannon’s map, October 5, 2013

8. Anna’s map, September 3, 2013

9. Karen’s map, November 13, 2013

10. Emma’s map, March 4, 2013

11. Digital re-creation of Neena’s map, August 29, 2013

12. Kelly’s map, December 13, 2013

13. Stevie’s map, August 24, 2013

14. Ariel’s map, August 28, 2013

15. Teila’s map, October 10, 2013

16. Salina’s map, September 16, 2013

17. Nikita’s map, December 10, 2013

18. Rachel’s map, September 3, 2013

19. Raven’s map, February 23, 2012

20. Reagan’s map, August 29, 2013

21. Alexi’s map, October 10, 2013

22. N’Dare’s map, February 27, 2013

FIGURES

1. Example of annotation using map 1, by Sandy

2. Post on Facebook, from August 21, 2015, captioned Allies for Justice and Diversity Trinidad & Tobago

NOTE ON TRINIDADIAN ENGLISH

This text uses quotations in Trinidadian English, which may be confusing at times for those who are unfamiliar with its vocabulary, rules, grammar, and pronunciation. The following tables detail some of the rules and linguistic practices you will encounter as you read this book.

EROTIC CARTOGRAPHIES

PROLOGUE

The evening sun hit the dark waters of the harbor with such intensity that my room at the Hyatt Regency seemed as though lit by the large lamps used during night games at the stadium a stone’s throw away. Sandy had been in Town that day for a conference hosted at the same hotel. We chatted in the lobby for a few minutes before coming to the quiet privacy of the room. I shut the blinds and sat with my back to the large window, giving my attention to Sandy across the small white desk between us.

It’s still a struggle to accept it? I asked as I laid out paper and pencils on the table.

Yes, it is. It’s a horrible struggle, she said without hesitation. The other day I was in tears. I don’t want to be gay. The thing is, I’m not attracted to women. I’m attracted to a woman.

A ‘particular’ woman? I offered.

Yes. And I can’t seem to get over that woman. You know my religious thing. I told you about that …

She elaborated on her inability to stay away from this woman, reflecting on tactics they each employ to push the other away when they felt overwhelmed by the relationship or the circumstances of their lives that constrained their ability to fully enjoy their relationship. She continued:

Up ’til last night, I saw her. She knows I’m here. We were sitting on the waterfront and she was saying that she knows we can be friends but she doesn’t want to go back to being that way. And I’m like let’s just meet up and cuddle. And she’s like no, she doesn’t want to touch me. She feels like she can’t control herself, either, and after the sex, is what next? I mean, I want some sex and I want to bond with her like that but it is too much aftermath to deal with. She falls in love and I get scared and it’s a cycle, and we’ve been through it a million times. This is the third year and I have to ask myself what I really want.

Wrestling with her same-sex desires, Sandy turned to religion for answers. She described her encounters with a spiritual counselor as follows:

I have a lecturer who counsels me. Apparently, I need counseling ’cause I’m spiritually sick. This woman named [name excluded] and she is a real, real devout Catholic. And I get the impression that she was a lesbian once, ’cause she knows too much. She understands it too well and she told me that I have to understand that it is not real love. That nothing could come of it. It’s a dead-end road, and I have to give it time. And I have strong sexual tendencies. She knows all my sexual issues, all my history. So, she is like stay away from her. But it’s a real paradox, you know. How do you stay away from somebody who in your heart you feel you really love and you could be with, you enjoy being with? You know, some people who you could like, but you never bond with? I am united with this individual in that particular way. And yes, there is a lot of sex involved, but it’s more than sex. If it was just about sex, I would have lost interest already ’cause I am not sexually driven, but I have a strong needing to be with her all the time, and it’s f-ck up, rell f-ck up. Because it is frustrating. Very, very frustrating.

My body tingled all over, listening to the longing Sandy described. I imagined these women, the silhouettes of their embrace almost silent beneath the darkness. Their brown skin sticking together slightly in the warmth of the night. They traveled the terrain of each other’s bodies with all their senses so as to experience every aspect of each other and of their togetherness. The lovers, then wrenched apart, curse each second it takes to reunite. I imagined it hurt all over just to breathe without that person close enough to be sensed … to be seen, smelled, heard, touched, and tasted.…

It’s frustrating because when you 26 years old, people my age have a man and want to have a family and all my friends getting married or were married, and people having children. And even my parents are like how come you never bring home a boy?

And I have always been this kinda role model kinda person. It’s this pressure, that everybody feels like [refers to self by name] have it all together, she accomplished, and how could I be involved in such a trivial lifestyle? It feels like that, yuh know? How could you be so low and dutty¹ when people look up to you? And it’s a two-person thing—like in private I want to hug up a woman and rub nanny² whole night but in the public space …

Earlier this same day, Sandy was attending a conference in one of the hotel’s large meeting rooms. She reflected:

Like I have to be in the conference and listen to them talk about lesbianism. And Trinidadians can be so merciless in their commentary and may not even assume that there are people in the room who are like that. They get up, like, oh they doing the lesbian thing in prison, and they will talk about it nasty. And a woman who was on my table said, they does be passing notes between the little girls and they does be talkin’ about who sucking who breast and thing, and I’m like … I have to sit there and literally take it in and like it’s HARD! It’s hard and hard. So, imagine if I were to really be like that and to come out and say, I wanna be gay and have to live that lifestyle. I dunno if I can do it, just dealing with people and their reactions. So, this is an interesting exercise, maybe nowhere will be my response, but I will draw something for you. I could draw different things, right?

I nodded in the affirmative and asked: ‘Be dutty’ meant ‘be lesbian’?

Sandy had started drawing a rectangle in the center of her sheet of paper. She nodded slowly as she drew. I added, That’s the point, the heteronormativity. It’s that no one assumes there is a person in the room who does that. There is a face and an image of who the lesbian is. What a lesbian is. You can’t be a successful, brilliant woman and be a lesbian. Sandy jumped in:

… and be a Christian. You can’t be a Christian, period. And that refusal to let me be, you know, Krystal, it is so hypocritical. We say we love God and we all for God and thing but we can’t let people live their lives and figure out what God is for ourselves. We all want to impose what we feel is right. That made me lose faith in the whole Christian faith, yuh know, to a large extent, because I felt it was as if Christian people want people to believe what they believe so they could not feel afraid and alone in this existence and without a God. I don’t know if that makes sense to you. People feel the need to have other people involved and towing the same rope as them.

This conversation led Sandy to share several encounters with religious persons and their influence on her at different moments in her life. She shared an event that occurred just days before the interview. Sandy and her girlfriend had a verbal confrontation with a Pentecostal woman at the waterfront in Port of Spain, a story I tell fully in chapter 4. Throughout her story, Sandy seemed to struggle most with reconciling her religiosity and spirituality with her same-sex desires. We chatted at length about the various versions of herself that she portrayed in different arenas: the devout Catholic, the good student, the well-disciplined daughter, the role model, the public relations professional who always needed to appear proper and ideal. By the end of Sandy’s reflections on her encounter with the woman on the waterfront, she had completed a section of her map. She abruptly put aside her discussion of religious paths to show me her bedroom, the first safe space her map reflected.

In the following extract from her interview,³ Sandy elaborates on each safe space as she continues to draw and color the features she added to her map (map 1):

MAP 1. Sandy’s map, October 3, 2013

SANDY: Yea, so that’s one place. I like a lil apartment, and this door must be locked at all times. This is my room. My lil window here. [pause] You don’t want to be lesbian, Krystal. You might as well kill yourself. It very f-ck up, especially in the Caribbean. Maybe I don’t want to be in the Caribbean, period. I should draw that. [pause] Safe space, around other lesbian people. We supposed to be gay together, right? [awkward laugh] And oh, maybe I should draw Idle Talk ’cause that’s where they go and it’s cool to hang out.

KG: That’s where you go, too?

SANDY: Yes, I go sometimes, but not to meet anyone. I go really so I could hug up my gyul in peace. I don’t want to have to deal with people watchin’ me in a certain way. That’s the lil balcony there na, and the door, and this is the front here, and the fire [she draws these elements as she remembers and lists them]. What is a next place? Believe it or not, we have a lil group of artsy-fartsy people in lil segments across the country. They move a lot. It’s a movement, I call it; spoken word. And they meet in places like, uuumm, what it is? In Barataria? The Arte Gallery and there is another place that I go to in Port of Spain … Canary. [She adds each of these places as she speaks.] The spoken-word people need to be in these places. I used to feel safe in Eagle Bar long time but they close down Eagle Bar.

KG: With your girl?

SANDY: Where do we go? To Idle Talk. We home a lot.… We go to the beach, because there is a level of nakedness that happens at the beach so no one seems to care, and we will sit on these chairs—you know, the nice chairs. She will come and lie down on top of me and no one will take it on ’cause we look like we can’t afford to buy two. [She draws the beach chairs, then the waves.] So this is Maracas [Bay], and aamm.… She did something to me and I get so vex the other day. I had now come back to Trinidad, and it was outside Parliament—no, not outside Parliament, it was [the movie theater]. And my girl now come from the bank, she jump out, she excited to see me, ’cause she eh see me in so long. And she comes up behind me and grabs me from the back. I jump na, ’cause she grab me like a man na, from the back, and I spin around like, [name omitted], not in f-ckin public! And I look around to see who was watching. And umm, she doh care, yuh know. She very out there with herself, but she is aware of how I feel, so she tries to hide it. But I was like oh my God, why you do that? and I pull away and try to bonks⁴ her like aye yea, wha goin on, padna?’cause I din like how she do it.

KG: Who would be those people that you didn’t want to see you?

SANDY: Well … you see, I rell know people. It have nobody in Trinidad who don’t know me. It have no strangers. Because of my job. See, I am a PR [public relations] officer. I think I am more scared of coworkers, ’cause it will affect my professional, yuh know? I more dead scared of those people from church, those religious groups. [Reflects a second.] I could even handle the church people but more so afraid of the coworkers,⁵ even though I working with rell homosexual man and stuff, eh, and they seem to be normal about it. But the female homosexual cannot feel safe in the government work office, for several reasons.

Firstly, my boss has lesbian tendencies and she [is] like a man, very bullying kinda way and I am afraid that one day she will tell me bend over and suck this. Like today. I know I did a good job today, so she stays over to tell me good job, and she gonna give me two days next week, and I’m, like Thanks,[name excluded], that’s cool, but you know with the touching, and when women touching yuh does get that impression that they into yuh. I’m, like, Oh, here she goes again. And she wants me to pay her compliments, like How you think my makeup look today? No, it look good and she blush a lil bit. You know she tries to build friendly conversation without giving herself away. But I think if she knew about my tendencies, she will be even more demanding in terms of my reactions to her, and it may bring sexual tension into our work relationship that I won’t want to have to deal with.

Another thing: because I am in PR, it is about image. And there is a lot of fear about homosexuality in general. If somebody knew that [name omitted] is a lesbian and she working with them [job-sensitive group of people] she must be does take them, and them is female too.

She had finished drawing by then and was slowly coloring in her image. Red pencil in hand, she colored in the dots on the sheet, saying, And then … [laughs] a polka dot bed. Do you actually have a polka dot bed? I asked. She did. I do, I do. And [girlfriend’s name excluded] does not like the sheet. She calls it the chicken pox sheet. She’s be, like, ‘Two clown goin’ an’ sleep here,’ and she smiled as she said it.

And just like that, we were back in that dimly lit room, the women laying themselves down beneath the polka dot sheets. I imagine them seeking the warmth of their lover’s body, to be engulfed in the fortress of their scent, to be seen and known in their shared desire. Sandy’s expression, which had become distraught earlier, softened into a smile. She too was imagining what would be happening beneath those sheets.

PART 1 INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGY

1 • INTRODUCTION

Erotic Cartographies and the Decolonial

When you hear the word map, what do you imagine? Do you recall the large pages of an atlas, with the beautifully colored pictures of the blue oceans, the green plains, with mountains rising in yellow and brown tones? Or the political and land-use maps in gradients of bright colors separated by bold, black squiggly lines? As a child, I loved flipping through atlases and admiring the drawings, even though I did not necessarily understand them. They showed me the world, its cities and beaches, its farms and industry, its islands and continents. My curious eyes searched for the tiniest font I could find, the most hidden and obscure places they represented. Unbeknownst to me at the time, there were more details and nuances that were not shown, not depicted, not rendered, including the mapmaker. I knew the atlas by the name of its publisher, but did not spare a thought about who made the maps or what they chose to depict. In this book, there are twenty-one maps created by same-sex-loving women, few resembling the objects of my childhood musings. The maps take different forms, but share similar places and features, including their purpose: to highlight the mapmakers’ subjective experiences and relationships to space as same-sex-desiring women. What would maps made from the women’s perspectives depict?

Maps are depictions of space, composited through the impressions, interpretations, and meanings given to that space through one’s own or another’s experiences of it. In the Prologue, Sandy’s narration of her map highlights how personal experiences are processed, interpreted, organized, and arranged to make sense of space; these mental pictures are then organized into a map. Thus, maps are images that combine memory, vision, experience, and imagination. In her book, Imaging the Caribbean, Patricia Mohammed reflects on a painting hung on a wall in her childhood home, depicting men in the forest chatting, watching, and gathering around a fire. It reminded Mohammed of the hunts her father and uncles went on—excursions to which women were not invited and of which she had heard very little. Yet, the painting filled in the gaps in my imagination of what these hunts were like (Mohammed 2009, 2), a lingering memory from her childhood when other memories had faded. The image connects imagination and memory as ways of seeing, of representing, and of rendering something—some place, object, or person that may be real or imagined, desired, or projected. Mohammed draws attention to how the image works as a device for the imagination that positions truth as slippery and the image as having both a concrete existence and one that can be imagined (2009, 14). Image and imagination are thus entwined; both are matters of perception, and the images created from seeing are never devoid of imagination. Imaging and imagining are both forms of visioning and envisioning, visioning referring to how one perceives the subject of study, with envisioning having more connotations of hopes or desires of how one wishes the subject to be perceived or known. Same-sex-loving women, like Sandy, employ memory, visioning, and envisioning to create the subjective maps discussed in this book.

As an elicitation tool during semistructured interviews about sexual identity and space, I used a participatory mapping exercise, which I now call subjective mapping, as the maps are derived from the unique subjective experiences and perspectives of the mapmakers. Forty Trinidadian same-sex-loving women were invited to draw maps of the spaces where they felt safe to express themselves and their sexuality; twenty of them ultimately did. The excerpts in the Prologue give a brief introduction to the process of map creation and how it can be used to reveal both the intricate and personal subjective details of a person’s life and their influence on the women’s space-making, self-making, and community-making practices. Sandy shows how same-sex desire is positioned as peripheral, or not belonging, to certain discourses and spaces, such as in the conference where lesbianism was discussed with scorn, and without regard for anyone in the room who might be same-sex-loving. As a conference pertaining to government, the conference venue is assumed to be an extension of the heteropatriarchal political space.

Sandy’s own same-sex desire pulls her away from people’s expectations of her, as a daughter, a sister, a role model, a Christian, and a public servant. Her family expected her to bring home a boy, get married, and have a family; her Christian mentors expected her to condemn her same-sex desires as not real love, to put her feelings and her partner aside. Although having been a devout Catholic throughout her life, Sandy struggled most with what she felt was the religious community’s refusal to let me be (Sandy). These experiences and unsettled feelings drove her to declare, It very f-ck up, especially in the Caribbean. Maybe I don’t want to be in the Caribbean, period. I should draw that. She didn’t, though (see map 1). She drew her safe spaces—the places where she felt safe to be herself or with her partner. Sandy’s map (1) showed the places she felt safest and wherein she had positive experiences, except for the Boardwalk, which held positive as well as negative memories. The double meaning is not clear in the image itself, but is revealed in the accompanying narrative. As such, maps are biased and incomplete; they are mediated representations, reflecting the mapmaker’s knowledge and biases, but they do not depict every aspect of a space, as the mapmaker selects what information they would like to convey. Thus, maps produced by same-sex-loving women offer insight into their lived experience of space. How does this gaze influence how and what is depicted in the image, and what is left out? The partiality of perspective means that images and maps are not complete representations of space, so do not represent a place as it truly exists.

Although maps are thought of as scientific documents, as being true and objective, and are assumed to present objective truths, they instead create truth through their representations of space as fact. Denis Wood (2007) argues that maps possess three object characteristics: maps are themselves objects (possessing object-ness); they are meant to serve a particular purpose (having an objective); and they are typically accepted as possessing objectivity. According to him, objectivity is established through validation, which occurs when others agree that the knowledge or information being presented is true. This affirmation or acceptance, coupled with the utility of maps for depicting territorial relations, grants them legitimacy as objective truths which, once accepted and internalized, sustain illusions about how spaces can and should function. In this way, maps are complicit in the social construction of spaces and power. The maps in this book are not objective; rather, they are constructed from the women’s experiential and subjective knowledge. They overlap where they share meaning, and thus corroborate and validate each other’s experiences. Individual experiences are still valid even when others did not share that experience. The maps hold subjective truths, providing insight into each woman’s perceived reality as a Trinidadian same-sex-loving woman.

In a 2006 Time Magazine article, Tim Padgett questioned whether the Caribbean was the most homophobic place on earth. He cited Jamaica’s murder rate, rampant violence against gays and lesbians, the anti-gay rhetoric in reggae and dancehall music, and the homophobia reflected in politics. This type of rhetoric constructs the Caribbean as a space that gay people must escape from, in order to survive. The naturalized discourses of reproductive heterosexuality and the collapsing of sex into gender result in the linking of binary gender constructions to biological binaries, on which public policy, health care, education, and scholarship are made. These discourses obscure persons whose social identities, sexual practices or physical bodies do not adhere or conform to these categories (Kempadoo, 2009, 9). This creates the false impression that sexual and gender diversity do not exist there. The persistent narrative, then, becomes one of erasure or exile.

The Caribbean IRN’s Theorizing Homophobias in the Caribbean is a digital collection of activist reports, creative writing, academic essays, film, music, and performance and visual art, edited by Angelique V. Nixon and Rosamond S. King (2013). The collection sought to address the stereotype of the Caribbean as being one of the most homophobic and intolerant places on earth, by representing the different forms homophobia takes across the region, and by highlighting queer survival, resistance, and excellence. Across the region, scholars have worked to expand these notions of the homophobic Caribbean and to represent the region’s sexual and gender diversity from various disciplinary perspectives (although literary texts and critiques have been the most prevalent). Anthologies, such as Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the