Caribbean artists discuss ideas of a queer diaspora
by guest blogger, Andre Bagoo

Think of the Caribbean diaspora and you think of people, linked by a common home, history or race, scattered across nations. But is there room to also think of sexuality as another thing that links us across boundaries? Is there a space for the idea of a queer diaspora, a landscape of desire beyond ideas of nationhood? Is there room for all in this home?

These are some of the questions that arise during a roundtable event featuring a group of Caribbean artists and scholars who gathered in November for the Outburst Queer Arts Festival at Belfast, a city in which the LGBTI community has been one of the few threads that have united religious and political factions.

The roundtable was the third installment in an ongoing conversation instigated by Small Axe, the forum for critical thought. With support from the British Council, a ground-breaking exhibition, ‘Caribbean Queer Visualities’, was also staged at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, to open the Festival.

“The theme of our festival is home,” says Ruth McCarthy, festival director of Outburst. “I think that a queer diaspora is really important. So many people leave home in order to find themselves. I think queer people leave home at rates much higher than straight people.”

At the roundtable discussion held at the Black Box on Hill Street in chilly Belfast artists originally from Caribbean countries like Trinidad, Haiti, and Jamaica were asked about the complexities of defining home and also how that might relate to being queer.

David Codling, British Council Regional Arts Director, Americas, poses a question about the gap between the standards that apply to home and to the diaspora.

“One of the things you have to contend with is the tension between home and the diaspora,” Codling says. “If there are things that you do and people at home chose not to love, the people at home will somehow question the authenticity of what happens in the diaspora. Is that a tension that is creative?”

David Scott, founder/editor of Small Axe says, “That tension between the supposed privileges of the diaspora; the supposed authenticity of the region is a tension that we cannot overcome and therefore it is a tension that we have to learn to live with as creatively and as supportively as we can.” He continues, “We have to learn to produce the space in which there is change and support and some conception of family. That is in substance what we are. The Small Axe project has been an attempt to produce that sense of internally complicated community existence around thinking about the Caribbean.” He notes the complicated idea of the diaspora.

 “The Small Axe project itself was initiated as a way to try to think about home and belonging,” Scott says. “We have over the course of 20 years struggled with our personal and intellectual relationship to the question where we belong. There is no place that is home like landing in Jamaica, there is an immediate corporeal, embodied sense of belonging within those rhythms, those aromas, that sunshine, that sea—that is home.”
He continues, “but yes the question of home is a larger cultural/political one. We are always already inauthentic. The Caribbean begins diasporically: there are two diasporas. It is constituted through slavery, indenture, the larger colonial project. It is already constituted by the question of where identity is. That movement out of the Caribbean
only complicates and adds another layer.”

For Canadian/Trinidadian artist and scholar Andil Gosine, questions of belonging – in terms of nationality, race and sexuality – have had a profound impact on his life and practice.

“For me being home is where I get looked at as a full and complex human being,” Gosine says. “There are some ways where that is undermined by questions of class and sexuality. In the Caribbean I get to be a full complex human being in a way that proves evasive in Toronto or New York or in queer communities if you fall out of the landscape of desire. Power is there and power is shaping that relationship to where you belong.”

The Sea, A Democratic Space

Trinidadian artist Nadia Huggins, whose own work crosses liminal spaces between land and sea, notes the psychogeography of the spaces many in the Caribbean call home.

“I am living on the island,” Huggins says. “I am occupying a certain body as well and I have certain experiences. I am still made to feel I am an outsider. The thing to me that makes an island an island is that boundary where the land meets the sea.”

Huggins states, “My work has gone in a direction where the ocean is the thing that brings us all together. It is a democratic space where you can be yourself. You are on a mission to get somewhere when you are in the water. For me home is a quest to find that place where I feel I belong and the place I feel I belong is actually in between the islands.”

Of Huggins’ work, Nijah Cunningham, curator and one of the coordinators of the ‘Caribbean Queer Visualties’ show, adds, “There is also the risk of drowning. You put your body on the line. It comes at a cost. That’s what I love about your work. It is so at once radically possible.”

Says Huggins, “There is a level of comfort in that space. I grew up by the beach. I never felt restricted by what I can do with it. I am terrified of a shark! A lot of the people on the islands cannot swim. On the north coast of St Vincent, the patios are turned away from the sea. There is such a deep respect. You are terrified by what you think exists in it.”

But in sharp contrast to the sense of freedom in Huggins’ work is the limits imposed within Caribbean rhetoric on persons who identify as LGBT or anyone who does not conform to what is expected of them.

“On the question of the discourse on queer issues there is a strong political messaging around identity which is accusing artists like you of in someway undermining the real identity and culture and being in some ways a new kind of imperialism coming from the north, this gay rights discourse,” Codling states. “A lot of that very homophobic discourse is coming from the United States. I wonder about what that says and how it affects your work?”

For Haitian/German artist, Jean-Ulrick Désert, his response is to provoke.
“In my own work I do try to deploy little landmines,” he says. “That’s one way.”

For Gosine, the problem is part of a range of experiences.

“Some people grow up very religious and there is the overriding legislative culture and the laws that get taken up in the Caribbean,” he says. “Yet it’s full of contradictions.” He describes Trinidad as, “the San Francisco of the Caribbean”.

“There are very well known and celebrated artists who are gay,” Gosine says. “This accusation of being a traitor to your nation is a common one, queers supposedly betray the nation. But I think it’s a very complicated experience and I don’t think it’s that special.”

Huggins notes regional variations in attitudes to persons who are gay or who do not identify as heterosexual.

“The experience varies drastically from island to island,” she says. “For example there is a vast difference between Trinidad and Tobago and St Vincent. In St Vincent you just don’t be gay. It is shut down, people just don’t want to have that conversation. It also boils down a lot to class. Coming from a middle class family I have a different experience than someone from the gullies.”

Scott traces current attitudes to the rise of small churches.

“I grew up in 70s Jamaica there was homophobia but it did not take the form it did in the 80s and 90s and I think that is connected to the rise of certain fundamental Pentecostal churches which come from the United States,” he says. “But certainly in the Jamaica the rastas have trumpeted a certain type of homophobia.”

Scott adds, “One of the enormously productive things in the emergence of Caribbean art is the emergence of a new space in which to think about ourselves that is now providing a different kind of idiom to think about identity; to recalibrate what colonialism was for us and that animates the way in which the question of a revolution is not just a question of equality and justice coming from outside but also within. Therefore, the question of how we imagine and re-imagine our societies.”

This article originally appeared on The British Council's site for Outburst, which can be accessed here. 

Andre Bagoo is a poet and writer from Trinidad. His second book of poems, BURN, was published by Shearsman and longlisted for the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature. His third book, Pitch Lake, is forthcoming from Peepal Tree Press. You can follow him on twitter @pleasureblog.

Ground-breaking exhibition of queer Caribbean art at Belfast
by guest blogger, Andre Bagoo

No matter what country you are from, one thing we all remember is playing with our parents’ stuff as kids. Boys put on their mother’s heels; girls walk in daddy’s big shoes. Jorge Pineda’s installation Giguapa returns us to those early moments of freedom.

Giguapa comprises four pairs of ceramic shoes arranged in binaries – male, female; adult, child; black, red; facing forward, facing back. We are reminded of Dorothy’s ruby shoes in The Wizard of Oz and Cinderella’s solid glass slipper. But here are shoes within shoes. The solidity of these ceramic pieces is at odds with the fluidity of the body of ideas inhabiting them. We think of clothes, fashion, roles. Do we wear them or do they wear us?

This work is a fine encapsulation of ‘Caribbean Queer Visualities’, the ground-breaking and nuanced exhibition of queer art from Caribbean artists at The Golden Thread Gallery which opened Belfast’s Outburst Queer Arts Festival in November. Supported by the British Council, the show was the first gathering of queer art – or art which the organizers say has a “visual aesthetic of dissent” in relation to sex and gender – from the Caribbean.

“I think of Caribbean history as a kind of queer history,” says David Scott, founder/editor of Small Axe, a coordinator of the exhibition – the culmination of a series of collaborative Small Axe forums. “We tend to think of these colonial stories through a kind of normative lens overriding social and individual dimensions… But we all have stories of people who stand out in our family settings. If you tell the story through those lenses, what emerges?”

Like Pineda, who is from the Dominican Republic, Surinamese artist Charl Landvreugd asks us to pay attention to spaces. Landvreugd’s Movt nr. 8: The quality of 21, gives us a room within a room. In this video installation, a dapper male figure sits astride a sofa – that ubiquitous symbol of home – and tells a story about his grandmother’s 70th birthday party. But is that the story? Things happen, the video is disrupted, audio overlapped, the man stripped and masked. Flowers sprout from beneath the sofa. Or is the furniture squashing them? A taxidermist seems to have forgotten a bird. Nothing here is black and white.

“When you are on stage voguing or doing drag, doing a performance, you have to reach the people all the way in the back,” Landvreugd says of his work in the show’s catalog. “You need big eye-brows, big feathers, and big mimics and gestures….So this aesthetic or sensibility kind of moved over into my visual art practice.”

And the little things are big things too, the artist argues with this piece. Gestures in everyday life reflect larger positions. The choice to wear or not wear a dress or a suit is really part of a bigger performance. You may think you have little in common with Landvrreugd’s drag, but he shows us the drag we all enact in the club or seated on a sofa.

“Queer provided a much more capacious term compared with other kinds of categories, ” notes Scott, who coordinated the show alongside Nijah Cunningham and Erica Moiah James. The exhibition also addresses anxieties surrounding the term queer and the limits of labels on art.

“There is a way in which we use the term queer to apply to anything that unsettles or disrupts,” says Trinidadian/Canadian artist Richard Fung. “I’d say a place like Trinidad is already quite a queer space right?”

The photographs in Fung’s First Generation ask us to see queer afresh. There is nothing exotic or fetishized. Just people, posing for pictures at Caribana, the Toronto carnival parade.

“Here are ordinary folk looking back at you,” Scott says of the photographs. “What is queer in this is a question that should be asked.” 

The complex realities of what the label queer means in small island states is also something that looms behind each artist’s decision to be associated with the show.

For instance, in Trinidad and Tobago, while politicians have prioritized the equality of all citizens before the law in platform rhetoric, they have left homophobic laws in place. In Jamaica, instances of violence against LGBTI persons is documented, and its homophobic dancehall culture persists. The title of Jamaican painter Leasho Johnson’s Promised Land alludes to this with sardonic irony.

“I got inspired by the boys in New Kingston who lived in the gutter,” Johnson says. “For me it’s interesting how tragic it was, and in another way, symbolic, as it relates to young men growing up in Kingston—and Jamaica, generally.”

In Promised Land, the canvas is segmented. The individual pieces, if taken on their own terms, do not give the full story. A coconut tree on a beach; a man with an erect penis – both tell us different stories about pleasure when isolated. But when combined we think of the stereotyping of the Caribbean as a tourist destination, as well as the objectification of the black body. The fish in the work perhaps references the gully, but also alludes to the use of fish as a symbol of the feminine, literally embodying another form of objectification. The artist suggests that if we stick to only labels and narrow segments of our personalities, we are in for trouble. The red is a warning.

A similar sense of danger pervades Ebony Patterson’s work.

“I decided to use florals and lace—materials and archetypes normally associated with the female form but, instead, employed on the male body,” she says. “When I make these kinds of material decisions, I’m thinking about the transformation of materials on the male body that read slightly differently on the female body.” But do they? What, truly, is the difference?

Between the Leaves and in the Bed, presents a presumably male figure who falls, Ophelia-like, among dense foliage. Violence and swooning are simultaneously suggested, raising questions about death and love that transcend sexualities and gender identities. We think of the line flores para los muertos in Tennessee William’s play A Streetcar Named Desire. Something of the artificiality of the beautiful flora and the anonymity of the figure in repose suggest disembodiment, how we can be seen yet not seen; simplified, hidden.

If Patterson challenges the politics of desire, Andil Gosine troubles the story of migration. In particular, he challenges the common assumption that a gay man from the Caribbean will find a better life outside of the region.

In Coolie Colors we are made to consider the relationship between two sets of objects. One is a series of pictures of the artist as a child in playful poses, perhaps like the little boy or girl we might picture playing with Pineda’s shoes; another a clump of jhandi flags cut short and placed in a bucket as they are in Caribbean communities across North America. Stunted growth is suggested. Something large has been curtailed and forced into a smaller place.

Gosine says, saying he wanted, “to challenge the dominant narrative of the Caribbean as an oppressive space for people who don’t conform to heteronormativity.” He recalls a childhood in Trinidad where none of the experimentation of those formative years was policed.

“I moved to Canada,” Gosine says. “That was the place that was, for me, less free.” Later, he explains, “You won’t see me claim gay pride because my experience of gay culture has been really race-invected.”

Also not afraid to question the way stories about being gay are told is Jean-Ulrick Désert.

“This idea of gay marriage has been instrumentalised,” he says, countering that he tries to avoid letting politics enter his art. “I object to legitimating through respectability politics.”

In Neque mittatis margaritas Vestras ante porcos (Do Not Cast Pearls Before Swine) we are immersed in what might be a celebratory setting. There are balloons, rainbow garlands. But the warm intimacy of these contrasts with the severity of the Biblical edict the garlands spell out. The command is then replicated, multiplied across languages, oppressively. Discipline is translated, but value judgments lost in translation. What are the pearls and who are the swine? The pearl-white balloons are sensual, if not seminal; the artist has also hung chains in the room suggesting bondage and sexual fetishes. The room seems to escalate. It warns away with its Bible-thumping, yet entices with promises of extreme, taboo pleasure. This reflects the universal contradictions of desire and shame about sex.

A similar snowball effect occurs with Nadia Huggin’s profound piece Is That a Buoy?

“Everyone from the region knows that there are a lot of different dynamics that you have to move through—race, class, and then queerness, in my case,” Huggins says. “I always feel I occupy a body of being other, and the queerness intersects with that.”

Her photographic diptych mirrors the process of seeing yet not seeing that happens when persons do not conform to the norm. In one panel, a human figure haunts the surface of the sea, reduced to nothing but the shape of her skull, the suggestion of eyebrows, eyelashes. In another figure, a buoy floats. Both could not be more different, yet in the blink of an eye they can be mistaken, the human being mis-read and objectified. At sea, her mouth is not visible, her voice inaudible. The world is a brutal black and white.

“Women are expected to have hair, expected to behave a certain way,” Huggins says. “People look at you and make certain assumptions.” She adds, “I found that through self portraits, I was able to move outside of these expectations and reaffirm myself as a woman. This was who I was. I didn’t have to prove anything and be what people stereotyped me to be through these images. It became a performance in that way.” 
 
Bahamian Kareem Mortimer’s Witness is also concerned with mirrors and seeing. We follow a group transgender women getting ready to go out into the night. They have a frank conversation about the range of transactions they will embark on, and we see them transform before our eyes.

“I am gay—I’ve always been gay—but I didn’t know I was gay,” Mortimer says. “It took me a really long time to face the work, even though it’s just seven minutes, even though it’s less complicated than my other work. It was just a hard one for me.”

Seeing through barriers is also central to Barbadian Ewan Atkinson’s Select Pages from the Fieldnotes of Dr. Tobias Boz, Anthrozoologist. The title alone satirises the idea of the queer as an exotic, alien species. In this series of collages and drawings, there is a spirit of cheekiness, a sense of joy, in subverting a dehumanizing gaze through dogged play.

“This is world class work,” says Ruth McCarthy, festival director of Outburst. “This is an important exhibition. It is saying something important. There needs to be some way to have more conversations like these.”

This article originally appeared on The British Council's site for Outburst, which can be accessed here. 

Andre Bagoo is a poet and writer from Trinidad. His second book of poems, BURN, was published by Shearsman and longlisted for the 2016 OCM Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature. His third book, Pitch Lake, is forthcoming from Peepal Tree Press. You can follow him on twitter @pleasureblog

Please join us in congratulating David Scott whose editing of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism has been recognized by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals as the winner of its Distinguished Editor prize. There will be an award ceremony at the upcoming Modern Language Association convention in Philadelphia this week. You can read more about the prize here. 

Praise for Small Axe:

“The journal distills the finest of Caribbean intellectualism, so that it may be related to predecessors such as Tropiques or Bim, but it surpasses them too, not just in longevity, but in setting and observing new currents in Caribbean thought, literature, social studies, and visual art.” --Martin Munro, Florida State University 

“Small Axe edited and published under Scott’s vision has become one of most relevant intellectual and creative publications for our current political, social and cultural climate. Small Axe continues to reflect the ‘problem space’ of the contemporary global moment.” --Roshini Kempadoo, University of Westminster 

“It remains a moment of pure joy for me to receive and unwrap Small Axe editions that I have come to expect to be visual as well as visually theoretical feasts; to be anglophone, francophone, hispanophone, as well as thoroughly regional in orientation; and to be interdisciplinary.” --Faith Smith, Brandeis University  

“What Scott did since the 90s was to create an intellectual space that would absorb the Caribbean wherever it existed in pockets, drawing Caribbean thinkers, academics, intellectual workers or artists in the United States, Britain or Europe, linking these with scholars and practitioners who continued to live and work in the Caribbean region and thus cross fertilizing a dialogue that has been bountiful and unending.” --Patricia Mohammed, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine 

Program arranged by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals

Book Review Session Thursday, 5 January, 3:30–4:45 p.m., 110A, Pennsylvania Convention Center. Award Ceremony will begin at4:15pm

The Small Axe Project held the third installment of its Caribbean Digital event on Friday, 2 December 2016 at Columbia University’s Maison Française.  Conceptualized and organized by Alex Gil, Kaiama L. Glover, and Kelly Baker Josephs, The Caribbean Digital began convening annually in 2014 to focus on the digital sphere as praxis—exploring the exciting innovations and opportunities as well as the challenges the digital presents in the field of Caribbean Studies.

The symposium brought together curators, graduate students, faculty, librarians, and archivists – a continuation of the Small Axe Project’s commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration and to highlighting the vibrant futures of more accessible research across the so-called Global South. The event’s five multiform panels – “Digital Diasporic Religion,” “Mapping Caribbean Concepts,” “Tales from the Archive,” “Multimedia Melting Pots,” and “Caribbean Digital Praxis” – considered the affordances and limitations of the digital across a wide variety of intellectual perspectives and research methodologies. The closing reception, also held at the Maison Française, featured Bahamian documentarian and visual artist Tamika Galanis’s work, “The Human-Coral Hybrids: Embodying Past, Present, and Future,” and Miami-Trinidadian visual artist Kearra Amaya Gopee’s work “Coup.” You can read more about these artists here.

Glover said of the event: "The fact that folks have consistently responded to our conference call with ever-greater enthusiasm over the years is heartening. It makes it very clear that the conversations we think are important to be having about the Caribbean digital are equally important to our community. If crowds are indeed of any value as a source, the feedback we've gotten during and since the event suggests that the work people presented is as inspired and inspiring as we ​anticipated when we put together the program. We look forward to TCDIV in December of next year"

Discussions over the course of the day-long conference picked up themes addressed in the wide-ranging 2014 inaugural event and during the focused conversations of the 2015 colloquium. The organizers look forward to featuring more fully developed  versions of several presentations in sx archipelagos, the peer-reviewed Small Axe Project publishing platform dedicated to Caribbean digital scholarship and scholarship of the Caribbean digital.

Additional information on this year’s event, as well as past iterations of The Caribbean Digital can be found on the website, here.

Winners, runners-up and shortlist

It is our pleasure to announce the 2016 Small Axe Literary Competition winners and runners-up in the short fiction and poetry categories. The works of these artists will be published in Small Axe 53, July 2017.

Since its inauguration in 2009, the Small Axe Literary Competition has been at the vanguard of spotting emerging Caribbean writers. Many of our carefully selected winners during the last six years have moved on to sign contracts with esteemed publishing houses. This is not a coincidence. The Small Axe Literary Competition's changing panel of judges is continuously represented by some of the best creative writers working within the Caribbean region and its diaspora. These judges excel in identifying extraordinary literary achievements. This year’s judges include Diana McCaulay, Monique Roffey, and Sasenarine Persaud in the short fiction category, and James Christopher Aboud, Honor Ford-Smith, and Tanya Shirley in the poetry competition. You can find the judges’ bios on our website here. Take a look into our Literary Competition archive to learn about past judges and winners.

This year we received a record number of submissions in both the poetry and short fiction categories. Outstanding entries from across the region and its diaspora have each been thoroughly evaluated and ranked in a blind review process. While the high quality of each submission challenges the selection process, two submissions in each category were particularly noticeable.

Short Fiction

First Place: “Mango Feast” by Portia Subran, of Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago

Portia Subran is a Trinidadian artist and writer. Her artwork has been featured in Arc magazine, children’s novels and has been displayed at the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago end of year exhibitions. In 2013, she was announced the winner of the Potbake Productions 2011-2013 Caribbean Short Story Competition with her work, “Unclipped Wings.” This work was later published in the short story collection Jewels of the Caribbean. Her short story “A New Life in a New Time” was published in the 2016 speculative fiction anthology New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean. 

You can learn more about Subran’s art and writing and connect with her on social media on Facebook and Instagram

Second Place: “Public Notice” by Ayanna Gillian Lloyd, of Diego Martin, Trinidad and Tobago

Ayanna Gillian Lloyd is a fiction and creative non-fiction writer from Trinidad and Tobago.  Her work has been published in The Caribbean Writer and shortlisted for the Small Axe Literary Competition and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize. She has also been featured in the Bocas Lit Fest “Who's Next?” segment in 2014 and 2015. She is a Consulting Fiction Editor of Moko magazine and a 2016 Callaloo Writing Workshop Fellow.

Poetry

First Place: “Learning to Swim” by Soyini Ayanna Forde, of Trinidad and Tobago

Soyini Ayanna Forde grew up and spent the majority of her life in Trinidad and Tobago. Her poetry and creative nonfiction can be found in Apogee, Cleaver, Moko, sx salon, the Caribbean Writer and and Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire. Taste of Hibiscus, her poetry chapbook, is available from Dancing Girl Press. Her fiction appears inside Akashic Books’ Duppy Thursday series and St. Somewhere Journal. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her writing was listed as a notable essay of 2016 in The Best American Essays. A graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program, she resides in Florida, pines for fresh Julie mango and blogs about race, feminism and West Indian pop culture while working on her first full-length collection of poems.

Second Place: “Extra Lessons” by Chenee Daley, originally from Savanna-la-mar now living in Kingston, Jamaica

Chenee Daley notes: I’m a Westmoreland transplant, who found myself, some years ago, in Kingston. I try to live my life exhaustingly but I also don’t do anything I don’t love anymore. At the moment I’m completing a degree in Literature with a minor in music at the UWI Mona. I write very vulnerable poetry but also dabble in other short-form writing like songs.

Congratulations to our winners!

The Shortlist
Below is the shortlist compiled by our judges. These are writers to look out for in the future. We are delighted to share their names and the titles of their entries with our readers below.

Short Fiction

“The Mango Tree” by Lisa J. Latouche, of Roseau, Dominica

“African Burial Ground” by Heather Barker, of St. Thomas, Barbados

“Ma Diablesse” by Brandon Mc Ivor, of Trinidad who now lives in Yawatahama, Japan

“Purgatorium” by Rae-ann Smith, of San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago

“The Seascape” by Hazel McShine, of Maraval, Trinidad and Tobago

Poetry

“Lajablesse in Oakland” by Rosamond S. King, of Brooklyn, New York, USA

“Message from Nur Al-Masri” by Sharif El Gammal-Ortiz, of Carolina, Puerto Rico

“Darkening/Freeport” by Richard Georges, of Tortola, British Virgin Islands

“Afterbirth” by Summer Edward, of Realspring Valsayn, Trinidad, now lives in Philadelphia, USA

“The Best Medicine” by Juleus Ghunta, of Jamaica, now lives in Tottori-ken, Japan

“The Dog Breeders House” by Ioney Smallhorne, of Nottingham, England

“Eureka!” by Jannine T. Horsford, of Glencoe, Trinidad and Tobago 

If you are an emerging writer in the Caribbean, you should already be starting to think about your contribution to our 2017 Literary Competition. Please check our website in March when the competition will open for submissions. The deadline for new submissions will be April 2017. Keep in mind that from 2017 we will accept submissions in English, French, and Spanish.

We look forward to hearing from you!