How sweet it is

By Ronald Cummings

Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature, by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (Duke University Press, ISBN 978-0-8223-4777-4, 288 pp)

Thiefing Sugar is full of deliciously rich metaphors, or what Omese’eke Natasha Tinsley calls “the syrup of figurative language.” In this highly engaging and insightful book, Tinsley discusses the foremost tropes and metaphors in Caribbean women’s writing about desire between women. The syrup of language to be enjoyed here is not only that which abounds in the texts she discusses, but also in the suggestiveness of Tinsley’s own writing, which is sometimes dense but always rich and allusive.

While Tinsley’s metaphors are largely drawn from the texts she explores, they are also at the same time made more resonant by her thoughtful elaboration and discussion. Previously encountered tropes take on pleasurable new echoes and meanings. The book takes its title from the opening sentences of the Trinidadian writer Dionne Brand’s novel In Another Place, Not Here (1997), which describes the desire between two women, the cane-cutter Elizete and the political activist Verlia, as an act of “thiefing sugar” — a sweet transgression that defies the social policing of desire. In discussing her choice of this title, Tinsley argues that “the pleasure of sweetness colonised in the Caribbean since the advent of the plantation system is now linked to black women taking themselves for themselves.” But Tinsley also extends Brand’s “image of the thief,” invoking not just the sweetness of woman-loving, but also the sweet transgressions that writers indulge in their appropriation of established tropes to narrate desire between women. According to Tinsley, “the sugar they reclaim for their own use is the syrup of figurative language — the long-standing colonial tropes of Caribbean women as sugar, water, and flowers.”

Tinsley’s book focuses on these acts of appropriation. She describes her project as one which stops to

look where texts take tropes like women-as-flowers, women-as-water, women-as-sugar cane, invented to justify keeping Caribbean women in someone else’s control, and redeploy these same tropes to imagine a landscape belonging to Caribbean women and Caribbean women belonging to each other.

But if, in earlier colonial and male imaginings, these Caribbean “landscapes of work” and “landscapes of desire” (as she terms them) associated with women’s bodies were represented as “natural,” Tinsley works to show their social constructedness and their resulting malleability. She notes that the “colonial invention called Caribbean landscape . . . which is not trees, rivers, or flowers, but an imaginary way of organising these into a whole — in fact appears not as a pre-existing entity but as a continual practice: one that, like the invention of womanhood, proves subject to constant disruption and rerouting.”

This awareness of the socially and contextually constructed nature of Caribbean womanhood, and the landscape from which its metaphors are drawn, informs Tinsley’s foregrounding of specific Caribbean social contexts throughout. For instance, she constantly returns to the Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff’s provocative question, “What would it mean for a woman to love another woman in the Caribbean?”, invoking its insistence on cultural location. Tinsley does not offer any firm answers to Cliff’s question, but rather reminds us that “when a woman loves a woman in the Caribbean, none of these words will mean the same as they do in the Global North.”

Tinsley reminds us of some of these differences. She contrasts the metaphors of Caribbean women’s desiring with the trope of the closet, which now largely dominates academic discussions. Tinsley notes:

Inspired by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s landmark study The Epistemology of the Closet, too many northern studies of same-sex sexuality stay out of springs or swamps and close to bedrooms. Their cartographies often rely on standard metaphors of interior and exterior space, of the closet and of “coming out” . . . In fact, “the closet” seems to work not (only) as the space that confines queers but also as the space that confines queer studies.

If Tinsley rightfully insists on the acknowledgement of cultural location, of differing landscapes and spatial logics, there are moments when her attention to difference is outlined in somewhat more literal than metaphorical terms — such as when she asks: “for how many Caribbeans is a closet a standard feature of houses?” Yet part of what makes her book important is its constant willingness to challenge naturalised tropes, and its appropriation of the ground offered by images of springs, swamps, rivers, mangroves, and mountains as spaces to imaginatively map other logics of being with and belonging to each other in Caribbean women’s narratives and poetry.

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Thiefing Sugar is divided into six main chapters, which focus on key landscape metaphors. Each is an imaginative and insightful discussion, but not all are equally convincing or carefully constructed. In the second chapter, for instance, which discusses the early-twentieth-century Jamaican writer Eliot Bliss’s novel Luminous Isle (1934), Tinsley examines the desire expressed by Em, a Euro-Creole woman (and the novel’s main character), to be like and to be with Rebekkah, an Afro-Creole woman. The mountain is the space that holds Tinsley’s gaze throughout this chapter. In the earliest section, it is associated with Rebekkah, who “becomes the mountain lily always beyond Em’s reach.” However, in a section titled “Mountain Hearts: White Creole Women and the Erotics of Self-Making”, Tinsley reads the mountains as “an apt metaphor for the white woman’s ‘place’ . . . it spatialises the social structure . . . inherited from slavery in which white women occupy the tiny privileged position at the pyramid’s tip, the mountain’s summit.”

But the aptness of this metaphor as a means of representing white womanhood is seriously called into question by the spatial politics of plantation and post-emancipation Jamaican society, in which the mountains were appropriated by runaway slaves (fleeing the lowland plantations) as spaces of maroonage. Here they constructed communal spaces where they could belong to themselves, rather than to plantation owners. In many ways, within the logic of plantation society, the mountains are a contrasting rather than an apt spatial metaphor for imagining white women’s social locations. This history of maroonage is referenced by Tinsley later in her discussion, when she argues that “the proud mountain-dwelling, Afro-Spanish Rebekkah looks and lives like these historic maroons inhabiting a twentieth century maroonage in which she thrives independent of both plantation and patriarchy.” Yet Tinsley never acknowledges or resolves the implicit challenge that this reference offers to the imagining of the mountain as a symbol of white women’s (social) space.

Tinsley’s chapters focusing on poetry offer perhaps her most careful and exciting readings. Her discussions of the “tender and beautiful nights” and marvellous gardens of the Haitian writer Ida Faubert’s poems (chapter three) and the contrasting tough geography and embattled shorelines of Dionne Brand’s work (chapter six) benefit from Tinsley’s reading strategy, which she describes as based on “what orisha devotees call ofo ashe,” which acknowledges “the power of every word uttered or traced to reshape the ‘real’ world.” This critical attention to “every word” produces some fine close readings, where she demonstrates her skill for reading poetry “intimately, in my way, taking time with . . . nouns, verbs, metaphors and images.” Her readings of narrative prose demonstrate this same care, but in some instances, such as her reading of Luminous Isle, close readings of particular passages are rendered at the expense of a clearer focus on the wider narrative context.

This attention to linguistic detail evident throughout the book is further layered with attention to performance contexts in Tinsley’s discussion of flower imagery in mati oral poetry performed by Surinamese women. Tinsley uses historical and anthropological accounts of performances of rhymes “sung at parties and in the town squares” to trace a “complex, buried history” and a rich creole vocabulary of female same-sex sexuality “that predates discussions of both gay rights and creolité by a century.” While Tinsley’s reference to these texts as “oral poetry” foregrounds her attention to their linguistic and literary effects, her discussion draws on ethnographic details by anthropologists Melville and Frances Herskovits and Gloria Wekker, as well as accounts from her own field research, in order to trace what these words mean and what they evoke in these performance contexts.

This willingness to refer to a diverse range of sources is evident throughout the book. Thiefing Sugar draws on “natural histories, garden books, folklore collections, bureaucrats’ reports, proverbs, ethnographies,” as well as visual sources such as photographs and paintings. Tinsley also offers close readings of a number of now obscure Caribbean literary texts. In this regard, her work can be linked to recent Caribbean criticism, particularly in the past decade, which has sought to reassess the significance of often overlooked texts, inviting us to consider more closely what they offer to our understanding and to the narration of Caribbean literary historiography.

Although this is by no means her primary concern, Tinsley’s discussion of minor texts such as Bliss’s Luminous Isle and her re-evaluation of Mayotte Capécia’s I Am a Martinican Woman (1948) — and particularly her focus on representations of fluid sexualities in these novels — potentially situates these texts as alternate spaces through which we can map Caribbean literature’s exploration of gender and sexual possibilities, beyond the flourishing of gay and lesbian writing in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Tinsley’s attention to these infrequently discussed works and what they offer to contemporary discussions of Caribbean sexual politics seems likely to provoke what the scholar Denise de Caires Narain terms “more generous and promiscuous readings of Caribbean writings” by queer Caribbean scholars, and a wider critical focus beyond the growing body of work on more recent narratives of eroticism and desiring.

Another key aspect of Tinsley’s work is its articulation of what we might describe as an “Antillean” perspective. Tinsley notably reads across the linguistic divisions that have served as means of categorising Caribbean literatures, and which have over time been reinforced by our critical traditions. In Thiefing Sugar she offers discussions of Capécia’s narratives of rivers and washerwomen alongside the images of water and narratives of fluid gender and sexual identities in Michelle Cliff’s writing. Much like Thomas Glave’s important 2008 anthology Our Caribbean, Tinsley’s work brings together texts from various Caribbean spaces and from different historical moments to construct a more inclusive vision of regional sexual politics. This process of “gathering” evident in both Glave’s and Tinsley’s work offers strong foundations on which future Caribbean scholarship on questions of gender and sexuality will no doubt continue to build.

But may I be allowed one final quibble with this book? For academic readers like myself, the index may prove rather thin, and thus less than adequate for efficiently referencing the wide range of topics discussed by the author. Even so, this lack only serves to mask the richness of the discussion to be found between these pages.

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The Caribbean Review of Books, January 2011

Ronald Cummings is a Jamaican PhD student in the School of English at the University of Leeds. His work focuses on queer Caribbean literature and culture, and discourses of maroonage.