Queering the Line: Challenging Gender in Myriam Chancy's Spirit of Haiti

Abstract

Myriam Chancy's Spirit of Haiti1 is set against the backdrop of the coup which would oust Jean-Bertrand Aristide from the presidency of the country in 1991. novel is not only a story about Haiti's continuing political struggles (the end of the Duvalier dictatorship; the transition to a democratically elected Aristide; the military coup which would drive him out of the country), but the story of four Haitian nationals who must cope with personal tragedies precipitated, in part, by this period of political upheaval. novel is the result of the intersecting narratives of four main characters: Philippe, the groundsman of the northern hills and keeper of the Citadelle, alert to the voices lost to history still haunting Haiti's peaks and valleys;2 Alexis, Phillippe's close childhood friend, who flees the island to escape retribution for his family's connection to the Duvalier regime; Leah, guardian of the ancestral traditions, who rises from the sea like a siren one morning off the coast of Cap Haitien and lives in an open same-sex relationship with her Dominican companion^ also a spirimal healer; and Carmen, soon to be a mother, who returns to from the Canadian diaspora as if called by the ancient spirits as much for herself as for her daughter.In this novel, Chancy writes a story of queer subjects - a focus which remains silenced, suppressed or often rendered invisible in Francophone Caribbean and Haitian discourses. In the Anglophone Caribbean, recent creative fiction from Patricia Powell, Shani Mootoo, Dionne Brand and Kei Miller among others has contributed much to the establishment of queer lives as part of the Caribbean lived experience. And the recent scholarship on masculinity, citizenship, sexuality and erotic subjectivities from such critics as Faith Smith, Jacqui Alexander, Tracy L. Robinson, Timothy Chin, Thomas Glave, Rhoda Reddock, Mimi Sheller and Rinaldo Walcott, has done much to chal- lenge the silence and around queerness. Francophone Caribbean and Haitian contexts, however, contrast sharply. In fact, Regine Michelle Jean-Charless essay The Sway of Stigma: Politics and Poetics of AIDS Representation in president a-t-il le SLDA and Spirit of Haiti shows how discourses of stigma around AIDS in marginalise carriers of the virus and their attendant lived realities. Citing Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley, Jean-Charles states further that, in the Haitian imaginary, histories of sexuality often weave complexly between visibility and invisibility where samesex desiring identities remain routinely unnamed.4 Jana Evans Braziel's Artists, Performers and Black Masculinity in the Haitian Diaspora* and Pierre Orelus's Agony of Masculinity: Race, Gender and Education in the Age of New Racism and Patriarchy 6 extend the discourses of masculinity in the Haitian imaginary to the diasporic communities particularly in the United States and Canada. Both texts, however, privilege diasporic transnational spaces as the condition of possibility for troubling and even naming and accounting for disempowered queer presences. In the Francophone Caribbean, Jarrod Hayes's La Creolite's Queer Mangrove7 shows how the figure of the makoume (Creole for faggot) is systematically excluded from the negritude, antillanite and creolite movements in the French Antilles. Vanessa Agard-Jones's essay Le jeu de qui? Sexual Politics at Play in the French Caribbean8 warns us to be aware of the possibility that projects which seek to 'liberate' queer Antillians and local (queer) resistance to them are often underwritten by the residual effects of France's imperial mission civilatrice, thus forcing an acknowledgement of limits of political imaginations. As this brief survey makes clear, intra-Caribbean queer discourses, cultural formations and even political activism are varied, nuanced and highly contoured.Against this background of a lack of critical attention to queer Francophone Caribbean representation, I would like to offer a queer reading of Chancy's novel. …