The Politics of Queer Belonging in the Caribbean

Nikoli A. Attai’s Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean is a welcome addition to the vibrant body of contemporary literature detailing the experiences of queer people in the Caribbean. For those unfamiliar with the nuances of queer politics organizing in the Caribbean, the book is a fast-paced introduction to the public figures, advocacy organizations, and key events that have defined the movement for queer liberation in recent years. For those who are already working within and across the fields it covers, Attai’s debut monograph is a critical intervention we have been waiting for. For years, global North discourses have represented queer people in the Caribbean largely through deficit narratives. Researchers, international aid organizations, and their junior partners have committed to reading the lives of queer Caribbean people largely through their experiences of, and proximity to, poverty, HIV infection, housing precarity, homophobia, and transphobia.¹ Attai argues that yes, these are threads in the fabric of peoples’ lives, but there is more to their lives than these narratives will allow.

Defiant Bodies honors the work of scholars, colleagues, mentors, and personal friends who have made Attai’s work possible (among them M. Jacqui Alexander, Angelique V. Nixon, Rosamond S. King, D. Alissa Trotz, Amar Wahab, Rinaldo Walcott, David Murray, Andil Gosine, Lyndon K. Gill, and Kamala Kempadoo). But Attai’s contribution in Defiant Bodies is singular. His work draws on ethnographic research, including interviews conducted across several countries with some people whom he concedes he would have not likely have had access to were it not for the contours of his network at that point in time. This product of chance allowed him to gather nuanced narratives about what it is like to live in Trinidad, to do advocacy work in Jamaica, and to have sex in Barbados. He positions himself as a Trinidadian scholar who works and resides in the United States and Canada. Even so, his political commitments are clear—he seeks to fracture the neocolonialist gaze that so often has obscured the colorful and complex environments in which queer people carve out lives every day. Unrelentingly, he disrupts the often taken-for-granted assumptions that folks living in the global North (including members of Caribbean diasporas) make about queer life in the Caribbean.

Like Roderick Ferguson in Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique, Attai opens his monograph with a figure who effectively undermines the fantasies a nation wants to believe about itself.² For Ferguson, she is a Black drag queen prostitute; in Defiant Bodies her name is Sandy, a forty-something Dougla, working-class trans woman from East Trinidad. Unlike Ferguson, however, Attai renders his figure as more than just a subject, one whose body is offered up as an example to highlight what happens to people who do not adhere to the rules prescribed by an island-nation committed to upholding the trappings of cisheteronormativity. Attai demonstrates care in rendering Sandy as kin. There is a familiarity to the stories that she shares about her life in Trinidad. I admire Attai’s commitment to also capturing the local inflections of his interlocutors. I can hear Sandy’s Trinidadian lilt in the text, which I imagine to be not unlike Attai’s own. Detailing one exchange, he writes,

NA: In terms of living around here, how is it?
SANDY: It good . . . Cool . . . It have the fellas around here. Everybody, from the littlest child . . . all my neighbours know. I could go on the block and smoke. I does go on the block with them boys and bun a weed. All dem block . . . any block. They know bout me and is a norms. I gain a respect in [name of neighborhood omitted]. (142)

In his introduction, Attai invites relevant stakeholders (community organizers, researchers, activists) in Trinidad and Tobago to think deeply and seriously about their ethical and political commitments to the communities they claim to serve. His request is relevant not just to those in Trinidad and Tobago but also to those of us broadly concerned with the lives of queer folks in the region. He argues that we need to be “more directly connected to ‘other’ communities, that are not urban, not educated, and not ‘attractive’ (based on their physical appeal, their activities, and their lifestyles” (4). His provocation about communities that are considered “not ‘attractive’” also gives me pause. It reminds me of Da’Shaun Harrison’s description of “ugliness” as a politic where they assert that notions of beauty are grounded in White supremacy.³ In their argument, beauty—or to use Attai’s wording, attractiveness—is unavailable to the Black body. Although the people we meet in Defiant Bodies may not have access to what Harrison frames as (capital-B) “Beauty,” Attai documents the kind of beauty that Saidiya Hartman describes as a “way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given.”⁴

Attai is clearheaded in his attempts to unsettle binary narratives of the homophobic Caribbean and the benevolent global North. He takes care not to downplay the kinds of homophobic and transphobic violence queer people in the Caribbean are exposed to, and, importantly, he argues that their lives are not overdetermined by homophobia and transphobia. He insists that there are other ways to be queer and that there are other ways to be in the world. For example, Maurice Tomlinson, an organizer for Montego Bay Pride, dreams of a march or a public demonstration with police in tow. Attai, echoing debates in Black queer diasporic communities in Toronto and elsewhere, suggests that we expand our imagination to picture the possibility of a queer gathering that does not require or demand that police be a central part of the activities.

I appreciate Attai’s commitment to naming in his text. He ensures that his readers—and more specifically, those of us who consider ourselves a part of the queer Caribbean community—are aware of, and do not forget, the important contributions of activists and organizers on the ground. Some names are familiar, such as the Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination, CAISO: Sex and Gender Justice, and the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians All Sexuals and Gays. Others might be easy to forget, like Quality of Citizenship Jamaica, which was eventually shut down in 2018 owing to a lack of funds. Attai’s work helps to ensure that we celebrate the multiple efforts of Caribbean organizers fighting for a different world: the late Colin Robinson; the activist Jason Jones. The identities of others are made anonymous, presumably out of concern for their privacy or safety; we know them only as “activist” in the text. Nonetheless, readers will come to appreciate the difficult and necessary work undertaken across the Caribbean by queer people who love their communities and their countries fiercely.

Finally, Defiant Bodies is one of few texts that treat the lives of Caribbean trans people as worthy of study. (Their lives, not just their health status.) Trans folks in Defiant Bodies are not made an afterthought or conjured up momentarily to elicit sympathy by describing an act of spectacular violence. The reader is invited to see them as full, complex beings. The value of Attai’s work here cannot be understated in an environment where queer politics or debates about LGBTQ+ rights almost exclusively focus on the sexual practices and desires of cisgender gay men. The arguments in the text lend themselves to a range of fields. Caribbean studies scholars will appreciate the rich examination of queer life in the region. Scholars of critical legal studies, I hope, will reflect on the varied ways advocacy organizations turn to and away from the law to articulate models of sexual citizenship. And I hope the geographers appreciate where and how Black queer gathering is created and sustained.

It feels apt that Attai’s ethnographic exercise in the Caribbean ends in a rumshop. I particularly appreciate the cultural specificity of the space. It is not a club, not a bar. It is a rumshop. As an exercise in Black queer geographies, Attai’s work situates the queer Caribbean within a grounded network of relations. The rumshop is both political and pleasurable in its capacity to hold space for debates about local issues, while serving as a place of much-needed respite and laughter for members of the community. Queer folks are a part of that story too, and Attai makes a compelling argument about the important ways queer Caribbean people tell that story on their own terms.

Cornel Grey is an assistant professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at Western University, London, Ontario. His research considers the ways Black queer men mobilize skin-to-skin contact as a practice of care. His current projects include a qualitative study examining Black queer men’s desires for physical contact and an archival study examining Black queer diasporic networks during the 1980s/1990s HIV epidemic.

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[1] See Kevin Lewis O’Neill, with Rinaldo Walcott, “The End of Diversity,” Between, Across, and Through (podcast), 1 February 2020, https://audioboom.com/posts/7491310-the-end-of-diversity.
[2] See Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
[3] See Da’Shaun L. Harrison, Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2021).
[4] Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 33.