Thomas Glave’s Queer Eco-phenomenology

Abstract

Contrary to the colonial fantasy which sees the ‘new world’ as the reproduction of a utopian garden of Eden, the Caribbean has often represented a sort of wasteland for its own inhabitants, and this not only because of the history of Colonialism and more recently Neo-colonialism, but also because of the enforcement of institutionalised practices like heteronormativity. Drawing on second wave Ecocriticism, particularly on Eco-phenomenology and on Queer Ecology, this paper intends to explore the way in which the contemporary Jamaican writer Thomas Glave articulates an alternative to the violence of heteronormativity in the Caribbean (specifically in Jamaica, where homosexuality is still illegal) by turning to the natural world linked to the Caribbean land- and seascape. Drawing on the aquatic imagery offered by the Caribbean Sea, both in “Whose Caribbean?” (2005) and in “Jamaican, Octopus” (2013) Glave emphasises the creative, (re)productive potential of sexual pleasure and fluidity in order to resist the discourse that does not only link queer existence and (non-reproductive sexual) practices with ‘waste’, but that also ‘justifies’ the violence perpetrated on queer bodies in Jamaica. The exploration of the ‘queer’ figure of the octopus, for example, enables Glave to advance what I term a queer eco- phenomenology through which he finds a language that, by voicing the violence of the queer experience and the ‘unspeakability’ of queer desire in the Caribbean, discloses the empowering potential for militant change.