Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Minnesota.

Thiefing Sugar

Eroticism between Women in Caribbean LiteratureBy Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4756-9

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..ixIntroduction: The Spring of Her Look…………………………………………………………………………………………………..11. “Rose is my mama, stanfaste is my papa”: Hybrid Landscapes and Sexualities in Surinamese Women’s Oral Poetry………………………………..292. Darkening the Lily: The Erotics of Self-Making in Eliot Bliss’s Luminous Isle……………………………………………………………683. Blue Countries, Dark Beauty: Opaque Desires in the Poetry of Ida Faubert………………………………………………………………..1024. At the River of Washerwomen: Work, Water, and Sexual Fluidity in Mayotte Capcia’s I Am a Martinican Woman………………………………….1365. Transforming Sugar, Transitioning Revolution: Male Womanhood and Lesbian Eroticism in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven…………………1696. Breaking Hard against Things: Crossing between Sexual and Revolutionary Politics in Dionne Brand’s No Language Is Neutral…………………….201Notes………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………233Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..257Index………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………269

Chapter One

“Rose is my mama, stanfaste is my papa”

Hybrid Landscapes and Sexualities in Surinamese Women’s Oral Poetry

And when, Bible in hand, my grandmother responded to my love by sitting me down, at the age of twenty-seven, to quote Genesis…. When she pointed out that “this was a white people ting” … it was a strong denial of many ordinary Black working-class women she knew.

-Makeda Silvera, “Man Royals and Sodomites: Some Thoughts on the Invisibility of Afro-Caribbean Lesbians”

In 2004, the cinnamon-skinned, wavy-haired Aruban native Charlene Oduber-Lamers moved to Oranjestad with her white Dutch wife, Esther, and their baby daughter, Elisa. When they passed through immigration at Queen Beatrix International Airport, Esther may have looked to the official stamping her passport like one of hundreds of thousands of sunblock-armed European and North American vacationers who flock to this Antillean outpost of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, where tourism dominates the small island to such an extent that the government once put a moratorium on hotel building. And, at first glance, light brown Charlene may have looked much like another arrival in the overwhelming wave of mostly female immigrants who relocate continuously from neighboring countries like the Dominican Republic, Suriname, Venezuela, and Colombia to work in the tourist-driven service industry. By 2004, one third of Aruban residents were born abroad; and this newly transnational “small place” was electrically charged with tensions that pitched native Arubans against others come to take “their” jobs, affordable housing, and potential sexual partners (since foreign women were rumored to have magical powers of seduction). Once Charlene began working for the Aruban government, she went to register her marriage, so that Esther could remain in the country, be covered by her insurance, and have custody of Elisa in the event of her death. When the public registry flatly refused although the couple had wed when the Netherlands legalized same-sex marriage in 2001, the Oduber-Lamers filed a lawsuit for discrimination. Public outrage ensued. Protesters threw rocks at the couple, slashed their tires, and picketed against same-sex unions outside the parliament until the family finally returned to Holland to await the trial’s outcome.

Both the Aruban government and international media framed the event as a culture clash between European liberalism and (invented) Caribbean tradition. The government spokesman Ruben Trapenberg proclaimed: “If we accept gay marriage, would we next have to accept Holland’s marijuana bars and euthanasia? They have their culture, we have ours.” The press repeatedly quoted this statement, and in an article titled “Aruba, Holland Miles Apart on Gay Marriages,” the journalist Peter Prengaman explained Trapenberg’s words this way: “The strong emotions ignited by their legal fight seeking to force Aruba’s government to recognize their marriage has underlined a deep cultural rift between liberal Holland and its conservative former colony.” No print source framed this as a conflict fueled by the contradictions of globalization, the neocolonial cycle that keeps Aruba flooded with tourists from the Global North and workers from the Global South to serve their food and clean their hotel rooms. No one stopped to ask whether the situation would have been different if both women had been Arubans living on the island all their lives, rather than one of many recent arrivals. Nor did anyone attempt to parse out what part of public reaction was fueled by homophobia and what part by anticolonial sentiment-by resentment that Aruba was bound to recognize the Netherlands’ laws despite its autonomous status, and that Dutch travelers and Dutch legislature alike continued to dictate the day-to-day realities of this place, right down to its intimate partnerships. After three years and two major court rulings, the Oduber-Lamers emerged victorious. On 13 April 2007, the Netherlands Supreme Court declared that same-sex marriages registered in the Netherlands or elsewhere carried the “same force of law” in Aruba, making this the first Caribbean territory to legally recognize such unions. The moral of the story, as reported by the international gay press, seemed to be that globalization brings social progress: see how continued colonial presence helped this Caribbean nation modernize not only its infrastructure but also its sexual politics?

To arrive at so simple a moral, commentators had to turn a blind eye to the complexities of globalization in contemporary Aruba. They also had to remain ignorant of the rich history of sexuality-and particularly female same-sex sexuality-that marks (former) Dutch Caribbean colonies. Cachapera, kambrada, mati: Papiamentu (the Creole of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaao) and Sranan (Surinamese Creole) contain many words for women who love women, vocabulary that speaks to long traditions of female relationships that are perhaps stronger in these territories than in any other in the region. Kambrada and mati relationships were common for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but no one thought to register these partnerships by law. As the Surinamese writer Astrid Roemer puts it: “In the community from which I come, there is not so much talk about the phenomenon of women having relations with other women. There are, after all, things which aren’t to be given names-giving them names kills them. But we do have age-old rituals originating from Africa by which women can make quite clear that special relations exist between them. For instance, birthday rituals can be recognized by anyone and are quite obvious…. Why then is it necessary to declare oneself a lesbian? It is usual there.” Perhaps, then, the problem with the Oduber-Lamers’ union was partly a culture clash of a different kind: their self-naming as lesbian rather than as kambrada, their recourse to Dutch law rather than Afro-Caribbean ritual to formalize partnership. In fact, the advent of gay rights politics in the style of the Global North in no way represents a “step forward” from the early twentieth century, perverse modernity of Dutch Caribbean women’s once prevalent relationships. The poet-activist Guillermo Rosario, born in Curaao at the turn of the twentieth century, remarks: “Things have changed for the homosexual or the lesbian here in Curaao…. In the old times, you could hear people say: Talitha and Malita are kambradas…. There were a lot in our society, out in the open.” These memories of kambrada tell another, countercolonial story of globalization: a history of sexual formations that circulate throughout the African diaspora, providing alternatives to heterosexuality and official partnerships of all kinds. Far from standing outside a “real Aruban” lifestyle, these same-sex relationships could also be called on as historically specific Creole formations exemplifying the cultural complexity and transculturating inventiveness of Caribbeanness. What if the Aruban government and the gay press were challenged by the memory of these Creole traditions?

This chapter calls on this complex, buried history through a reading of the rituals evoked by Roemer. Here I engage the performance poetry produced by Surinamese mati at the turn of the twentieth century as an active theorizing of African diaspora sexuality, one that predates discussions of both gay rights and crolit by a century. Linguistically and conceptually, these texts are Creole. Sung at parties and in town squares, they deploy Creole poetics and Caribbean metaphoric systems to theorize gender and sexuality, making serious (and playful) business of telling their stories in a public setting very different from a courtroom. Through the rhythms of repeating and shifting constellations of Sranan vocabulary and imagery-moving through words that carry layered memories of forced transport, enslavement, emancipation, colonialism, and resistance-these working-class women speak their history of sexuality between the global and the local, between legacies of dislocation and reinvention. They call listeners to take seriously Makeda Silvera’s statement that silencing same-sex eroticism means denying the reality of black working-class women, and they chart paths for a different kind of arrival for women lovers in a Dutch Caribbean capital.

Where journalists reporting on the Oduber-Lamers repeatedly cited the same few sources and/as facts, this chapter looks to multiply the kind of texts that can be brought together to tell the always necessarily partial stories of Afro-Caribbean sexualities. Patching together narratives from natural histories, garden books, folklore collections, bureaucrats’ reports, proverbs, ethnographies, and novels, I want to pressure and expand what (literary) intertextuality can comprise and enable in reading the complexity of “love in the Third World.” In particular, my discussion of mati oral poetry builds interdisciplinarily on close literary readings of songs recorded in, and as, renowned anthropological texts. I turn to ethnographies by Melville and Frances Herskovits and Gloria Wekker as both literary narratives and literary archives, embedding Surinamese women’s imaginative texts-descriptions of their dancing bodies, transcripts of their singing words-in anthropological accounts. And I approach these palimpsestic texts not as documenting “realities” of Caribbean women’s sexual “culture,” but as examples of how Creole bodies and sexualities emerge as complex artifacts continually constructed, deconstructed, and contested through language and other meaningful expressions. The English- and Dutch-language anthropological texts are inlaid with fragments of mati languages-both Afro-Surinamese Creole and Afro-Surinamese grammars of gender and sexuality-but they do not contain these languages, and my interest lies as much with what makes such writings diffrents as what they report. At the same time (as my unmarked reference to Jacques Derrida prefigures), this chapter’s intertextuality is also intentional in the texts it backgrounds-namely, canonical literary, Caribbean, and queer theories. Instead of reifying such theory, my work on mati work attempts to do theorizing-that is, to analyze a set of narratives in relation to each other-in conversation with many unconventional ways of knowledge production. Or, as Roemer says of how Surinamese women love each other, the point of this look at mati work is not to post a well-known name or a theory on Caribbean erotic doings, but to follow along with their performance, with their song and dance.

Pleinen, Dyari, and the Capital of Women

The reporters on the Oduber-Lamers case were not the first generation of arrivals to mistakenly take the Caribbean as a simple extension of Dutch space, or to miss the Afro-Creole women’s history present behind the scenes. Traveling in “Netherlands America” in the early twentieth century, Philip H. Hiss described the street scene in Paramaribo as “recognizably Dutch in its character.” Alongside canals, he cited as evidence of Dutchness well-ordered flowering trees lining streets and landscaped public squares that government officials enjoyed on the way to their offices, “always at the same hour … their white suits freshly starched and gleaming in the sunlight.” These were city spaces in which the colonial government and its white (suited) male officials had visibly rationalized nature’s excess: tropical trees manicured out of improper fullness, time consistently measured, clothing untouched by dirt underfoot, even the sun “gleaming” rather than blazing. Contrast this to the anthropologists Melville and Frances Herskovits, doing fieldwork in Paramaribo in the 1920s, who color and gender the urban landscape differently. Backgrounding Dutch influence, their Suriname Folk-Lore of 1936 records a recognizably Afro-American city and locates the center of Creole culture in the yards of its working-class, colorfully kerchiefed women, where “such Africanisms as have been retained are almost wholly in the custody of women, and through the women are passed on to the succeeding generations.” This Afro-Surinamese culture was passed on in the backgrounded, circular, female spaces behind Paramaribo’s white, linear, landscaped, and “recognizably Dutch” streets: in lots in which in the eighteenth century slaves and free people of color began grouping houses to open into common dyari (yards). By 1821 the number of yard dwellings was three times that of Dutch-style houses, and after the 1863 abolition of slavery, these numbers increased steeply as Afro-Surinamese migrated away from cane fields to Paramaribo to become four-fifths of the city’s population.

When the Herskovitses arrived in 1928, dyari typically included several female-headed households in which mothers lived with biological and adopted children. These female heads of house were market women, washerwomen, and domestics whose pay often did not suffice to provide for their families. Consequently, yard dwellers made architectural and social connections that pooled resources. Dyari acted as crossroads of networks formed and contested, where neighbors crossed from individual dwellings into communal space to cook, gossip, tell stories, fight, sing, and hold religious ceremonies. Lucky dyari were marked by the growth of a flowering tree that served as a carrier of the Afro-Atlantic spirit Leba who, in Surinamese cosmology, shifts from her/his male African counterpart to most often appear-like the yard’s inhabitants-as female. Indeed, the yard maps the quintessential space of this spirit of the crossroads: a pathfinder who bridges inside and outside, here and there, self and other, Leba represents the divine principle of transversal connection-a meeting of many roads, realities, and possibilities.

In view of this tree and its network of branches, many dyari women engaged in the sexual and social networking they called matiwroko (mati work). Well before 1900 this sociocentric tradition of women’s erotic relationships had been integrated into working-class Paramaribo. While Creole women often had sexual relationships with men, they also engaged in societally recognized relationships with women. Wekker’s ongoing, multidecade study of this practice highlights that in working-class Suriname, both female and male relationships gathered material resources for women who gained access to shared income by forging kinship networks. But same-sex relationships served the additional purpose of shoring up emotional resources, as female partners ensured companionship, moral support, and help with household management that men were not always expected to provide. Women called their female partners by a broad, metaphorical lexicon of nouns including mi skin (my body), mi sma (my someone), mi spiri (my neighbor), mi eygi gebruik (my own use), and mi kompe (my companion). But the most common name for a same-sex lover was mati, a creolization of Dutch maatje or maat meaning “mate,” “helpmate,” “friend.” As discussed in the introduction, this term dates to the Middle Passage. Mati is a mate as in “shipmate,” she who survived forced transport and enslavement with me. Shipmate relationships were in fact a widespread response to this first venture in European globalization, the triangle trade. “In various parts of the Diaspora relationships between people who came over to the ‘New World’ on the same ship had been and remained a special one,” Sidney Mintz and Richard Price explain in The Birth of Afro-American Culture. “Brazilian malungo [‘shipmate’], Trinidadian malongue, Haitian batiment [the word for a large sailing vessel], and Surinamese sippi [from ‘ship’] and mati are all examples of this special, non biological, symbolical connection between two people of the same gender.” Unlike males, females were often packed onto slave ships unchained, a state that left them more vulnerable to systematic rapes. However, this unchaining also left them more mobility to interact in the holds and so to form feeling connections to each other-when, as chained property, they were not supposed to feel at all-as a resource for survival. In his Caribbean Discourse, douard Glissant muses that sexual assault by Europeans gave the enslaved female an “incalculable advantage” over her male counterpart: “When she disembarks in this new land, she already knows the master.” But the mati‘s story suggests that when enslaved women arrived on the Other American shores, their advantage was already knowing each other.

Maroon oral histories date mati back to the seventeenth century, and the word maatje (used to mean “friend”) appeared in Surinamese writings throughout the nineteenth century. In a letter written by the Moravian missionary Sister Hartmann around 1850, Wekker notes a “tantalizingly short” reference to mati relationships that suggests they were ruffling colonial feathers just after emancipation. Reporting the many complaints that converted men have about their too sexually liberal female partners, Hartmann writes: “The wife of Gottlieb is a mati (female friend) of another woman. Gottlieb does not want it, but he cannot do anything about it.” But despite pregnant comments like these, colonial accounts did not explicitly register mati-speak as sexual language until after the turn of the twentieth century. In 1900 Paramaribo, police temporarily stopped all lobisingi (songs women performed for female lovers, discussed in depth later in the chapter) in public squares, citing them as neighborhood disruptions. In 1912, mati‘s erotic relationships entered written colonial records as a social ill needing immediate redress in the high-ranking official A. J. Schimmelpennick’s memorandum to his report on urban poverty. Deploring the conditions of the working class, he listed as causes of local women’s physical weakness unhealthy food and “sexual communion [gemeenschap] between women (mati play).” The following year, J. G. Spalburg’s popular novel Bruine Mina depicted this “play” as a fashion that the heroine eschews out of loyalty to her absent male lover. Both Schimmelpennick and Bruine Mina explain matisma‘s prevalence by the predominance of women in Paramaribo. In the 1890s rubber and gold mining drew city-dwelling Afro-Surinamese men back to the interior to bleed trees and to mine, leaving women the overwhelming majority of the black population of Paramaribo. Paramaribo suddenly was, as the Herskovits noted, a city of women.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Thiefing Sugarby Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.