Ayiti pa lakay ankò: Assotto Saint’s Search for Home

Abstract

The Caribbean, rich in culture, languages, and identities, has been hesitant to embrace alternative sexualities, particularly same-sex desire. While literary representations of same-sex love remain scarce, homophobia runs rampant. DanyLaferriere, Ernest Pepin, and Kettly Mars count among the few Francophone Caribbean authors who have portrayed same-sex relations in their works. Alongside the characters’ homoeroticism, such fictional representations have tackled issues of gender, sexuality, and performance within the Caribbean context. These works constitute an important foundation in outing closeted sexualities and destabilizing deeply embedded heteropatriarchy. However, their protagonists negotiate desire and control subtly, often in enclosed spaces, without claiming homosexual or queer identities. In contrast, the Haitian American poet, playwright, and activist Assotto Saint (Yves Francois Lubin), a leading figure of the Black gay cultural arts movement in the United States, demarcated himself as both author and protagonist in the way he endeavored “to present the gay black gay experience as [he], an ‘openly’ gay black man, lived it.” For Saint, literature was a vital complement to political, social, spiritual, and economic revolutions, and his writings sought to empower and render visible the unspoken, the shameful, and the closeted. Here, I examine the ways in which Saint uses his identities as a Haitian, immigrant, Black, and gay man to interrogate structures of domination and oppression around him. His gay and seropositive body, a marginalized entity, enables a disidentificatory practice that dismantles heteropatriarchal and repressive ideologies.