Will Real Jamaican Men Stand Up?

Editor's Note: The beating of a gay student in Jamaica, which was videotaped and posted online, has embroiled the island in discussions about Jamaican masculinity, homophobia, and gender roles. These discussions are long overdue. Yet instead of encouraging diverse points of view, the mainstream newspapers in Jamaica have decided to ignore some of the core issues.

Here is a letter by Yvonne McCalla-Sobers that was rejected. 

Dear Editor:

Straight people should be fighting to end homophobia because of the damage done by beliefs about how a “real man” is expected to behave.

For example, a school youth invites homophobic bullying if he is polite and considerate, respects his parents, attends to his lessons, gets good grades, dresses neatly, shows an interest in arts and culture, and is still a virgin in Grade 8 let alone 10. In particular, he risks being called a sissy if he shows emotion – he is expected to “man up” even under trauma. 

So a savvy youth – straight or gay – will find ways to avoid the bullying. He will be crude and disrespectful, under-perform at school, support the violent and abusive elements in our culture, and sleep with (or pretend to sleep with) a growing list of females. Naturally he shows no emotion; he mostly deals with stress by smoking a ganja spliff or engaging in high-risk behavior such as unsafe sex or fast driving. To protect his macho reputation, he develops only superficial relationships with males. 

For the youth who is in conflict with his same-sex inclination, the disguise is complete when he joins in bullying those alleged to be gay. 

The adult male risks being considered gay if he values books apart from those needed for his faith or his job, and if he speaks as if he is widely read and able to think critically. He can be labelled gay if he is nurturing and considerate (especially to women), seems sexually responsible, and has non-sexual friendships with women. He will know better than to show physical affection to his son, or to have male bonding activities (apart from sports) with male friends or relatives. Too often, he affirms his macho identity in domestic violence, serial infidelity, unplanned fatherhood and other anti-social behaviour. No matter what, the behaviour of the “real man” must be the antithesis of all that is feminine. 

The closeted gay male can divert attention from his sexual orientation by adopting cultural norms for the way a “‘real man” behaves. A straight woman trapped in a marriage with a closeted gay male can expect mixed messages and hidden resentment from someone in denial or unable to disclose his true identity. Sex will be sporadic if at all, and absence of emotional connection can make the wife mentally or physically ill. If the male meets his sexual needs on the “down low”, the wife risks contracting HIV.

The society is in trouble when being intelligent, law-abiding, and able to show appropriate emotion is seen as gay, and where gay men are forced to live a lie for the sake of survival. The distorted image of the “real man” may well be contributing to rising violence against women, increasing alienation of young males from academic pursuits, increasing marital failure, rising use of illegal drugs, and increasing violent death or incarceration of males. The recent mob violence toward a gay man on the UTech campus could well be related to the student mob’s perception of what it means to be a “real man”.

Straight people need to begin to see that their self-interest requires an end to the distortion of masculinity that prevails in a homophobic society. 

Yours truly,
Yvonne McCalla Sobers

About Yvonne McCalla-Sobers

Yvonne McCalla Sobers is a Jamaican author. Her most recent book is Lifelines: The Black Book of Proverbs, published by Random House with a foreword by the Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

She has also written a cookbook - Delicious Jamaica! Vegetarian Cuisine, published by Book Publishing Company in 1996.

She is a former educator and management consultant. 

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Blog Disclosure Policy

Geoffrey Philp’s Blog Spot receives a percentage of the purchase price on anything you buy through links to Amazon, Shambala Books, Hay House, or any of the Google ads or Google Custom Search.


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Disclaimer of Endorsement

The documents posted on this Web site may contain hypertext links or pointers to information created and maintained by other public and private organizations. These links and pointers are provided for visitors' convenience. I do not control or guarantee the accuracy, relevance, timeliness, or completeness of any linked information. Further, the inclusion of links or pointers to other Web sites or agencies is not intended to assign importance to those sites and the information contained therein, nor is it intended to endorse, recommend, or favor any views expressed, or commercial products or services offered on these outside sites, or the organizations sponsoring the sites, by trade name, trademark, manufacture, or otherwise.

Reference in this Web site to any specific commercial products, processes, or services, or the use of any trade, firm or corporation name is for the information and convenience of the site's visitors, and does not constitute endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by this blog.

Geoffrey Philp: Interview With La Estrella de Panama

A few weeks ago, Luis Pulido Ritter interviewed me for La Estrella de Panama. We talked about homophobia, fatherhood, Marcus Garvey, and the influence of Rastafari on my work. Luis also wrote an insightful review of the title story for Who's Your Daddy?  and made some interesting comments about the collection's relevance to the literature and history of the Caribbean.
http://www.laestrella.com.pa/online/impreso/2012/07/08/legado-rastafario.asp

http://www.laestrella.com.pa/online/impreso/2012/07/08/sin-reemplazo-para-un-padre.asp

Here are Google Chrome translations of the interview and review:
No replacement for a parent:http://issuu.com/geoffreyphilp/docs/no_replacement_for_a_parent___news_of_panama___the
Rastafarian Legacy:http://issuu.com/geoffreyphilp/docs/rastafarian_legacy___news_of_panama___the_star_onl***On this rainy Wednesday morning in Miami, I am giving thanks to Luis and La Estrella de Panama for giving me the opportunity to be published in Panama--something which I hope my older cousin, Roy McCatty, whose paternal grandfather James McCatty worked on the Panama Canal, will be proud.
Blog Disclosure Policy


Geoffrey Philp’s Blog Spot receives a percentage of the purchase price on anything you buy through links to Amazon, Shambala Books, Hay House, or any of the Google ads or Google Custom Search.




***

Disclaimer of Endorsement


The documents posted on this Web site may contain hypertext links or pointers to information created and maintained by other public and private organizations. These links and pointers are provided for visitors' convenience. I do not control or guarantee the accuracy, relevance, timeliness, or completeness of any linked information. Further, the inclusion of links or pointers to other Web sites or agencies is not intended to assign importance to those sites and the information contained therein, nor is it intended to endorse, recommend, or favor any views expressed, or commercial products or services offered on these outside sites, or the organizations sponsoring the sites, by trade name, trademark, manufacture, or otherwise.


Reference in this Web site to any specific commercial products, processes, or services, or the use of any trade, firm or corporation name is for the information and convenience of the site's visitors, and does not constitute endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by this blog.

Back in Print: A Morning at the Office by Edgar Mittelholzer

If ever there was a Caribbean classic, A Morning at the Office is surely one of them.


From four minutes to seven, when the aspiring black office-boy, Horace Xavier, opens up the premises of Essential Products Ltd in Port of Spain in 1947 and leaves a love poem in the in-tray of the unattainable, high-brown Nanette Hinckson, to noon when the poetic Miss Jagabir is the last to leave for lunch, the reader is privy to the interactions and inner feelings of the characters who make up the office’s microcosm.


Expatriate English, Coloured Creoles of various shades, Chinese, East Indians and Trinidadian Blacks (and a sympathetically presented gay man), all find ample scope for schemes and fantasies – and wounded feelings when they think their positions on the scale of colour and class are being incorrectly categorised, or when those at the bottom are reminded of their position.


Enlivened by the inventive device of “telescopic objectivity” and a humane comedic touch, Mittelholzer’s classic novel of 1950 challenges the present to declare honestly whether his news is old.


Edgar Mittelholzer was born in British Guiana in 1909. He wrote more than twenty novels. He eventually settled in England, where he lived until his death in 1965, a suicide predicted in several of his novels.

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Book Review: Sections of an Orange by Anton Nimblett

  

By Heather D. Russell, 

Florida International University

Reading Anton Nimblett’s collection of short stories, Sections of an Orange (2009) is exactly like devouring the sweetest, juiciest, richest Trinidadian orange in its entirety -- bitter rind, hard to swallow tough resilient seeds, “mashing pulp” and “sharp-sweet juice,” “tearing pulp from pith” (109), at once gently, at once hungrily swallowing section, by incredible section -- I did not want this sweet orange book to end! Now as a professor in literature who has been reading and teaching novels, short stories, poetry for many many years, I have had to develop my own internal benchmark to evaluate my reading experiences. Not scientific. Purely visceral. My gauge, actually, is whether I am sad as the text draws to a close because I am not yet ready to conclude the journey upon which I have been taken; whether my reading actually slows as I attempt to draw out the last few breathtaking minutes; whether there are literally “wow” moments in the text that render me breathless.

Breathtaking passages are everywhere in Sections. Take, for instance, the one in which Glen, the son of a privileged family meets a reluctant and suspicious Pedro, the proud working class uncle with captivating hands covered with “skin that looks more like bark than an old man’s flesh;” Pedro the tiò, the guardian of his new love Cecelia:

No smiles, no extended hands. Just three people in a small room looking at each other. The wooden walls are unpainted, decorated chiefly with scattered knot holes. The only accessories are white: bleached cotton hangs from a clothesline at the window; plastic, stamped with a lace pattern, covers the table; and in one corner a trinity of partially burned, milky candles have dripped waxy stalactites. “Well, Mr. Mendoza, sorry, I jus’…” Glen’s apology floats unfinished as he looks at Pedro. For a minute he tries to connect this face to Cecelia’s. But Pedro’s firmly-set mouth, bordered by deep folds of tamarind-pod skin, is too far from Cecelia’s simple smiles – the smiles that made him lose track of time (69, emphasis mine).

We have met Glen earlier in Sections, anchoring, centering, healing and nurturing with his own stories of resistance, resilience and survival, the Trinidadian-American narrator who seeks refuge at home in Trinidad, after enduring a freak car accident involving his “On the Side” (title) lover Leigh, an affair marked by secrets and passion and necessity. Later, we meet Push, the gay computer programmer who decides to grow his hair and is first mistaken for Muslim, then Rastafarian, then an artist, then a teacher, but NEVER seen in his own right, only serving as a blank template upon which everyone projects their imagination, fear and desire.

Trauma, in Nimblett’s imaginative landscape, lives alongside the hope and healing inherent in rituals of love and survival. Evangeline Leonard, a.k.a. Eva, whose story is the first section of the orange we consume, a mother mourning her dead son who has been killed in combat, a mother who ritualistically walks around with her dead son’s ashes in her purse every single day. Eva who remembers “the rain-rain, rain, rain,” the night her son revealed he would “Go Army Strong:”

She should not have let her son make a decision in that rain. She should have remembered that pigeon peas are planted on the feast of Corpus Christi and cassava is never planted during a new moon. And you don’t plan your life on a rainy night…she thought, Why I didn’t listen to the rain? My mother teach me better than that. (21)

Throughout Sections of an Orange, Nimblett signals his deft linguistic prowess, the range of his semantic cadences that hip-hop, calypso, jazz-like from Brooklyn to Trinidad and back in a mere sentence: “Tomorrows and yesterdays crisscross like ribbons on a maypole” (118).




Sections genius is surely to be found in diasporically-inflected analogies like the one describing the reuniting, as they stand outside the F-train on Fulton Street in Brooklyn, of two Trinidadian friends who become lovers (a coming together that is both erotically beautifully and tragically foreclosed): “When he [Brian] smiled, he looked like a ten year old who’d just stoned down a juicy yellow mango and caught it before it hit the ground” (100).

Juicy yellow-mango-memoried smiles shift seamlessly to the hip-hop cadences of African American urban vernacular speech marking the verbal exchanges between Brian and the narrator. Nimblett’s characters are multi-lingual and multi-dimensional. Drawn from an unmistakable diaspora consciousness, his characters live, speak, act, out of the multiple subject positions they simultaneously inhabit and that Nimblett is able to capture the quintessentially diasporic, polyrhythmic, fluidity of characters, places, sensibilities and language, speaks truly to his remarkable talent.

Nimblett’s is a powerfully character-driven collection. In Sections we meet mothers, sons, fathers, aunties, lovers, gay, straight, youthfully exuberant, and agedly sagacious. We enter into their worlds, not voyeuristically, as outsiders gazing upon life’s myriad unexpected and unpredictable unfoldings; rather, we bear witness as intimate kin, while passion, death, sickness, love, alienation, mental illness, loneliness, family, community, are given full expression, at times in the most seemingly simple, yet profoundly powerful and complex human renditions of who and how we are with one another.

In Marjory’s Meal, for example, Old Man Moore, who we “meet” in an earlier story and are told dies within a month of his wife Marjory’s passing, in this segment prepares and cooks her favorite meal. She is ill and dying and he has, with “juice of the orange running down his chin, juice suddenly matched by salty tears,” finally accepted her imminent passing. Ritualistically (as with Eva before), he cooks her crab, and pumpkin and brews her orange peel tea and feels, that “for the first time since he has given her a real gift” (86). Marjory’s Meal left me breathless throughout.

Oranges do run through this narrative, but perhaps in no way as powerfully, poignantly, and erotically as in the story from which the book takes its title. I do think it is true, that of Nimbett’s characters, his gay male protagonists are perhaps the most marginalized by, well almost everyone, alienated and lonely, like Push, and Leigh, and Ray, and, of course Brian, who eventually descends into a kind of madness because he’s desperate to recreate “the magic” he has finally found with his fellow Trinidadian friend and lover. But, and it is a critical but, these characters are in no way victims, merely reacting to the heterosexist hegemonic social structures which surround them. Push, for example, the main protagonist in the closing story, “One, Two, Three, Push,” defies, resists, being appropriated by everyone else’s definition of him; invoking and drawing strength from his self-possessed ancestors: his own Tantè Tilda and Trinidadian revolutionary Kwame Tourè, Push literally screams himself into self-definition.


In a similar vein, Brian and Chocolate Man, despite the former’s tragic ending, unite in “Sections of an Orange,” while simultaneously love-making, taking photographs, and eating oranges, they literally pull apart the sections of an orange, piece by piece, traveling deeper to the core of themselves, their “taut, strong,” “raw and real” man selves, finding each other, finding wholeness, creating “new spaces: art and liberation” (111; 124). Such “magic” is both salve and salvation.

The potency of the ancestors, of rituals of resistance, survival and healing, of the knowledge of bush roots, of homeland and home abroad, of beauty, art, poetry, pain, love, love-making, hope, renewal, these are the seeds and pulp and juice and rind and mattering core of Sections. I anxiously await the next instantiation of Anton Nimblett’s fertile, rich, and verdant writerly imagination. The read is truly sweet!

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“You're Not My Son Anymore”: 3 Quarks Daily SemiFinalist

Give thanks to all the readers and Facebook friends who voted for “You're Not My Son Anymore”—a semifinalist in the 3QD Arts & Literature Prize 2010.
 
“You're Not My Son Anymore,” is one of those stories that I felt had to be written, for as James Baldwin in “An Open Letter to Angela Davis” wrote:  “If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own—which it is—and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night.”

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Vote for “You're Not My Son Anymore”

My short story post, “You're Not My Son Anymore,” has been nominated for 2010 3QD Prize in Arts Literature.

Please go to this site, http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/3-quarks-daily-2010-arts-literature-prize-vote-here.html, and vote for “You're Not My Son Anymore.”

Results of the voting round (the top twenty most voted for posts) will be posted on the main page on March 8, 2010. Winners of the contest, as decided by Robert Pinsky, will be announced on March 20, 2010.

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"You're Not My Son Anymore" by Geoffrey Philp

Pausing by the hospital door, I took a deep breath. The last time I’d seen my dad, Harold Sr., I was lying on my back looking up at his fists and twisted face.

"You think you can fight me? You think you are a real man? You'll never be a real man. You and your little friends!"

I pushed the stethoscope deep into the side pocket of my jacket so that I wouldn't be confused with the other doctors who worked at the hospital. Gently opening the door, I braced myself for a sight that I'd seen so many times at the hospice where I’d worked, yet to which I’d never grown accustomed.

"Who's that?"


"It's me, Dad."


"What are you doing here? Didn't I tell you I never wanted to see you again?"

It was as bad as I’d imagined. AIDS had ravaged my father’s body. A stroke had paralyzed his left side and he was now almost blind.

"I wanted to see you, Dad."


"You mean to see what's left of me? Look and leave. I've spent your inheritance. You’re not even in my will."

Dad tried to pull the sheet over his chest, but he couldn't. The tell-tale signs of Kaposi's sarcoma covered his body.

"I don't need your money, Dad."


"Then, what are you doing here? I told you before. You are not my son anymore.


"I don't want to fight anymore.I've come to make peace."


"Peace? What peace? Go and look for that somewhere else. You forgot about the last time? My God, if I could get up out this bed, I'd knock you down again."

He tried to raise his tired arm over his head, but failed.


I swallowed hard and slumped into the visitor's chair. A web of IV drips surrounded his bed.

"Dad, it doesn't have to be this way."

"What way do you want it? Or is that how your confused battyman friends--the ones who spread their disease to real men like me--used to ask you?"

I bit my lip. I wanted to say, "Dad, my friends didn't give you this disease. If you'd just worn a condom when you were having sex with your girlfriend, you wouldn't be dying now. If you'd worn a condom, my mother--the only person who kept you alive by giving you your meds regularly--wouldn't have died three months ago after you infected her.”


But I didn't. Instead, I gazed at the beam of light that lanced across the headboard and gilded the charts that declared his death sentence.

“Battyboy!"

He kept on cursing and I listened and waited until his tirade ended. A nurse poked her head through the door. I told her that everything was all right. From the look on my face, she knew I could be trusted with his care. She left without a word.


Dad was so exhausted from his rants, he collapsed into a deep slumber.


Rising from my chair, I brushed the wisps of hair over his head, so that if anyone saw him, he would still resemble Harry Lewiston, Sr. And not what he had become--a scarecrow in defeat.


I pushed the chair close to the bed and walked toward the door. Although I had said as much as I could, I still felt as if I had left a shadow in the room.


And, somehow, as I closed the door, I couldn't shake the feeling that the next time I’d see my father, I’d be closing the lid of his casket.

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Permission to Speak: Anton Nimblett

I'll start with one word, "permission". As a good West Indian boy, I learned early -- and perhaps too well -- to ask for permission. Before interrupting a "big-people" conversation, before having a piece of coconut fudge. Permission to ask for permission, sometimes!

[More...]

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Anton Nimblett’s stories are about characters driven by desire - for dignity and justice for a dead son, for privacy from a neighbour who collects lives, for sexual fulfilment as a gay man, for an old man’s last assertion of love for a dying wife, for a man on the edge trying to block out the destructive voices of past pains. What is so impressive about the stories, beyond Anton Nimblett’s sharp ear for a wide range of distinctive voices, and the ability to create vividly sensual pictures of place, and particularly of erotic encounters, is their facility in inhabiting contrary tendencies without strain.

There is also an expert cinematographer’s sense of when to cut and when to join, and several stories build to powerful dramatic tension through arresting montage. Within the collection there is both fluidity and sharp definition. Characters migrate between stories (just as they migrate between Trinidad and New York), being sometimes at the fringes, sometimes at the centre - Trinidadian lives seen both in motion and at rest. Writing with equal empathy about the lives of gay men, heterosexuals, young and old, country folk and urbanites, Anton Nimblett is a singularly attractive new voice in Caribbean writing.

Anton Nimblett is a Trinidadian living and writing in Brooklyn.

Photo Credit: Signifyin' Guyana

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Video: Dancehall Music and Jamaican Society: Which Influences the Other?

Here's the video from the discussion on WPBT's new public affairs program, PULSE, which was aired on these dates:

Sunday, July 19 @ 12:00 PM

Thursday, July 23 @ 7:30 PM

From the Pulse web site: Does Jamaican Dancehall Music Incite Violence?

I

Image via Wikipedia

n April, Gay and Lesbian rights groups called for a ban of Jamaican products and travel, claiming the country has had a long history of discrimination without proper repercussions. They cite Jamaican dancehall music as one example--this popular genre is known to have hit songs with lyrics advocating violence against gays. Is dancehall music an accurate reflection of Jamaican perspectives and culture? Did the music influence the culture or the other way around?

Guests:

Howard Duperly, 88.9 FM WDNA
Tim Padgett, TIME Magazine
Geoffrey Philp, Miami Dade College

Click here to follow the link: Does Jamaican Dancehall Music Incite Violence?

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Remix Tonight: Does Jamaican Dancehall Music Incite Violence?

From the PULSE web site:

Thursday, July 23 @ 7:30 PM

In April, Gay and Lesbian rights groups called for a ban of Jamaican products and travel, claiming the country has had a long history of discrimination without proper repercussions. They cite Jamaican dancehall music as one example--this popular genre is known to have hit songs with lyrics advocating violence against gays. Is dancehall music an accurate reflection of Jamaican perspectives and culture? Did the music influence the culture or the other way around?

Guests:

Howard Duperly, 88.9 FM WDNA
Tim Padgett, TIME Magazine: "The Most Homophobic Place on Earth?"
Geoffrey Philp, Miami Dade College

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More on Dancehall: Caribbean Beat: http://www.meppublishers.com/online/caribbean-beat/current_issue/index.php?pid=1000&id=cb98-2-50

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Today on PULSE: Does Jamaican Dancehall Music Incite Violence?

Sizzla:"Nah Aplogize"

N.B. This video contains lyrics that some may deem objectionable.

South Florida' s PBS affiliate, WPBT2, will be broadcasting today on PULSE, a new public affairs program, a discussion that Howard Duperly, Tim Padgett, and I had about the topic: Does Jamaican Dancehall Music Incite Violence?

Sunday, July 19 @ 12:00 PM

From the PULSE web site:

In April, Gay and Lesbian rights groups called for a ban of Jamaican products and travel, claiming the country has had a long history of discrimination without proper repercussions. They cite Jamaican dancehall music as one example--this popular genre is known to have hit songs with lyrics advocating violence against gays. Is dancehall music an accurate reflection of Jamaican perspectives and culture? Did the music influence the culture or the other way around?

Guests:
Howard Duperly, 88.9 FM WDNA
Tim Padgett, TIME Magazine
Geoffrey Philp, Miami Dade College

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Related Posts: Homophobia in Jamaican Culture & Music

"Jamaican Gays Live and Die in Fear" by Stacey-Ann Chin

Homophobia in Jamaican Culture & Music on WPBT2

I’m heading off today to our local PBS affiliate, WPBT2, to tape a segment on a new public affairs program, PULSE. Along with Howard Duperly, 88.9 FM WDNA, Tim Padgett, author of “The Most Homophobic Place on Earth?” and the host, Jessy Schuster, we will be discussing the topic of homophobia in Jamaican culture and music.

I hope I will be able to explore some of the causes for homophobia in Jamaican culture and music:

1. Jamaica is a conservative, religious nation. According to the CIA Factbook:

Protestant 62.5% (Seventh-Day Adventist 10.8%, Pentecostal 9.5%, Other Church of God 8.3%, Baptist 7.2%, New Testament Church of God 6.3%, Church of God in Jamaica 4.8%, Church of God of Prophecy 4.3%, Anglican 3.6%, other Christian 7.7%), Roman Catholic 2.6%, other or unspecified 14.2%, none 20.9%, (2001 census).

Most of these churches use Bible texts, which they view as the “inerrant Word of God,” to condemn homosexuality as a sin.

2. Music as a form of popular culture is the most recognized and trusted form of social commentary in the Caribbean. This goes as far back as “Dan is the Man” by the Mighty Sparrow, through “Wild Gilbert” by Lovindeer, and most recently, “Nah Apologize” by Sizzla.

3. Limited definition of what it means to be a “man.” The basic definition of man in Jamaican culture: “a male who is able to procreate.” This, of course, does not include, "holding one’s liquor," being a "baller," and playing dominos and cricket.

4. The lack of a vibrant, literary culture in which ideas can be discussed freely without censorship or retaliation. For example, I wonder how many people would think of homosexuality as “unnatural” if they knew about the Helen Fisher’s research and this finding that was stated rather blandly in Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love:

Age, gender, sexual orientation, religious affiliation ethnic group: none of these human variables made much difference in the responses… People over the age of forty-five reported being just as passionate about their loved one as those under twenty-five. Heterosexuals and homosexuals gave similar responses on 86 percent of the questions (5).

As the situation stands, without a lively, intelligent debate about the most troubling issues such as homophobia in Jamaica and the Caribbean, it is left to the dancehall artists to articulate social policy on a 3.30 minute song.

For South Florida viewers, the program will air on WPBT 2 Sunday, July 19th at 12:00 p.m and again on Thursday, July 23rd at 7:30 p.m.

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Who's Your Daddy?: Gender Issues

Every Jamaican man lives in fear of a lie. It was a lie that was born in slavery, nurtured by Victorian prudishness and hypocrisy, and grew into maturity under the tutelage of fundamentalist Christianity. It’s a lie that continues to wreak havoc on both sides of the racial and gender divide and is a frequent topic of pornography: the Black, male stud.

This stereotype drives straight men to have sex with as many woman as they can (or to lie about it) and to have irrational fears about gay/queer men—as if gay men represented a diminishment of their sexuality. It is an idea that the African-American writer, James Baldwin, explored in “Going to Meet the Man,” where the protagonist’s sense of virility depends upon the debasement of another man—a black man who is lynched because of another man’s penis envy.

It’s an image that allows for gay bashing and murder in Jamaica, and has led some gay men to commit suicide. It’s an issue that many straight writers in the Caribbean continue to dodge, but one which I felt compelled to address in “First Love” and “How Do You Tell” from Who’s Your Daddy?: And Other Stories.

These two stories approach the issue of gender identity from different perspectives, yet the characters share a common apprehension: the fear of being discovered. This connects to a larger fear in the Jamaican psyche—that somehow being different is a mortal sin from which there is no salvation.

I hope “First Love” and “How Do You Tell” will continue a conversation that is long overdue in Caribbean fiction. For although Thomas Glaves's, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, was a great beginning, unless Caribbean, heterosexual male writers begin to examine our collective attitudes towards gender identity, the issue will remain in a fiction ghetto—an interesting if peculiar development that can only diminish us.

And we will all be the losers.

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"The Torturer's Wife" by Thomas Glave

Author of the acclaimed story collection Whose Song?, award-winning Thomas Glave is known for his stylistic brio and courageous explorations into the heavily mined territories of race and sexuality. Here he expands and deepens his lyrical experimentation in stories that focus—explicitly and allegorically—on the horrors of dictatorships, war, anti-gay violence, the weight of traumatized memory, secret fetishes, erotic longing, desire, and intimacy.

Thomas Glave is an O. Henry award-winning author and was named a Village Voice Writer on the Verge in 2001. He is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories, Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent (winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Nonfiction), and editor of Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles. He is the 2008-2009 Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Praise for The Torturer's Wife:


"The Torturer's Wife is one of the most interesting American books I [have] read in the last years. It is not the usual publisher's product, but a literary text that incites the reader to become a conscious and seduced re-reader."

—Juan Goytisolo, author of State of Siege and A Cock-Eyed Comedy



Praise for Thomas Glave:

"Glave's disruption of form is a powerful metaphor for sexual, racial, and geopolitical disjunctions. Glave is a gifted stylist . . . blessed with ambition, his own voice and an impressive willingness to dissect how individuals actually think and behave."

—New York Times Book Review


"Thomas Glave walks the path of such greats in American literature as Richard Wright and James Baldwin . . . He cuts to the bone of what it means to be black in America, white in America, gay in America, and human in the world at large."

—Gloria Naylor, author of The Women of Brewster Place


"What a writer! What a book! Glave is a brilliant writer of startlingly fresh prose . . . His stories are intricate tapestries of life rendered through a triumphant act of the imagination.”

—Clarence Major, author of One Flesh

Publisher City Lights Publishers

ISBN-10 0872864669

Publication Date December 2008

List Price $15.95

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Two New Books from Peepal Tree Press

Crossing the space between novel and short fiction, A Permanent Freedom weaves nine individual stories about love, sex, death, and migration into a single compelling narrative that seizes our imagination with the profound courage, integrity and folly of which the human spirit is capable. Each story surrounds migrant or migrating characters seeking to negotiate life on margins, within silences, in in-between spaces. Through the memory or immediate experience of sexual encounters or love that drives or haunts their journeys, these characters are taken out of the safe places of conventional behaviour and belief, to the farthest reaches of themselves, both the heart of darkness and the quest for a larger meaning. In almost all cases the encounter involves a confrontation with death and the spiritual.

In the title story, a man, his gay lover and his wife are drawn into a ‘strange’ alliance as they struggle to deal with his impending death from AIDS. ‘Say’ and ‘Nocturne in Blue’ recount the story of a rape and its retribution from the point of view of the rapist, his victim, and her healer, in a competition of narratives leading to a shocking dénouement. In ‘For Ishmael’ the lines in the palms of a man’s hands keep changing without explanation, as he becomes embroiled in the lives and stories of others. Characters cross over into each other’s stories in uncanny networks of meeting orchestrated by a dark angel who also bears witness to these tales and the nature of stories as a form of haunting.

Curdella Forbes is Jamaican. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of English at Howard University.

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Drama critic Lance Yardley is only 30 but is already a seedy wreck of a man, spending his nights in the back streets of Coventry looking for prostitutes. A working-class boy brought up in a broken home on a council estate, he has sought escape in literature and through his marriage to an actress, the great-granddaughter of a 19th-century Englishman who made his fortune from the sugar plantations in Guyana.

At first Elizabeth attracts Yardley, but their differences of class exacerbate the mutual hatred that grows between them. Later he is drawn to a mysterious Indian girl, Rohini. She seems shy, but sells her body to customers when her boss goes out of town. When she dies suddenly, the victim of a strange and violent assassin, Yardley decides to decamp abroad for a while. He goes to Guyana, not least because he wants to learn more about an Irish priest who as an old man has been a priest in Coventry, but as a young man had worked as a missionary in Guyana. The priest’s fragmented journals seem to offer Yardley some possible answers to his own spiritual malaise, but the Guyana he discovers provokes more questions than answers.

David Dabydeen was born in Guyana. He has published six acclaimed novels and three collections of poetry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

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Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles

“Our Caribbean is a superb anthology. Thomas Glave does not exaggerate when he writes that this is ‘a book that I and others have been waiting for and have wanted for all our lives.’ Here we have a book that makes literal the ongoing necessity to write ‘against silence.’”—Elizabeth Alexander, author of American Blue: Selected Poems.

The first book of its kind, Our Caribbean is an anthology of lesbian and gay writing from across the Antilles. The author and activist Thomas Glave has gathered outstanding fiction,nonfiction, memoir, and poetry by little-known writers along with selections by internationally celebrated figures such as Reinaldo Arenas, Audre Lorde, Achy Obejas, Assotto Saint, José Alcántara Almánzar, Michelle Cliff, and Dionne Brand. The result is an unprecedented literary conversation on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered experiences throughout the Caribbean and its far-flung diaspora. Many selections were originally published in Spanish, Dutch, or creole languages; some are translated into English here for the first time.

The thirty-seven authors hail from the Bahamas, Barbados, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Panama, Puerto Rico, St. Vincent, St. Kitts, Suriname, and Trinidad. Many have lived outside the Caribbean, and their writing depicts histories of voluntary migration as well as exile from repressive governments, communities, and families. Many pieces have a political urgency and reflects their authors’ work as activists, teachers, community organizers, and performers. Desire commingles with ostracism and alienation throughout; in the evocative portrayals of same-sex love and longing, and in the selections addressing religion, family, race, and class. From the poem “Saturday Night in San Juan with the Right Sailors” to the poignant narrative “We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?” to an eloquent call for the embrace of difference that appeared in the Nassau Daily Tribune on the eve of an anti-gay protest, Our Caribbean is a brave and necessary book.

Contributors: José Alcántara Almánzar, Aldo Alvarez, Reinaldo Arenas, Rane Arroyo, Jesús J. Barquet, Marilyn Bobes, Dionne Brand, Timothy S. Chin, Michelle Cliff, Wesley E. A. Crichlow, Ochy Curiel, Faizal Deen, Pedro de Jesús, R. Erica Doyle, Thomas Glave, Rosamond S. King, Helen Klonaris, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Audre Lorde, Shani Mootoo, Anton Nimblett, Achy Obejas, Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Virgilio Piñera, Patricia Powell, Kevin Everod Quashie, Juanita Ramos, Colin Robinson, Mabel Rodríguez Cuesta, Assotto Saint, Andrew Salkey, Lawrence Scott, Makeda Silvera, H. Nigel Thomas, Rinaldo Walcott, Gloria Wekker, and Lawson Williams.

Thomas Glave is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories; the essay collection Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent, winner of a Lambda collection, The Torturer’s Wife. Born to Jamaican parents in the Bronx and raised there and in Jamaica, Glave is a founding member of the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals and Gays (J-flag). He teaches in the English department at the State University of New York, Binghamton.

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Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles
Thomas Glave, editor

Available May 2008

May 2008. 416 pages

978-0-8223-4226-7. paper $24.95 / $18.70

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For more information or to pre-order, please follow this link: Our Caribbean