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MAN ROYALS AND SODOMITES: SOME THOUGHTS ON THE INVISIBILITY OF AFRO-CARIBBEAN LESBIANS
I will begin with some personal images and voices about woman loving. These have provided a ground for my search for cultural reflections of my identity as a Black woman artist within the Afro-Caribbean community of Toronto. Although I focus here on my own experience (specifially, Jamaican), I am aware of similarities with the experience of other Third World women of color whose history and culture has been subjected to colonization and imperialism.
I spent the first thirteen years of my life in Jamaica among strong women. My great-grandmother, my grandmother, and grand-aunts were major influences in my life. There are also men whom I remember with fondness -- my grandmother's "man friend" G., my Uncle Bertie, his friend Paul, Mr. Minott, Uncle B., and Uncle Freddy. And there were men like Mr. Eden who terrified me because of stories about his "walking" fingers and his liking for girls under age fourteen.
I lived in a four-bedroom house with my grandmother, Uncle Bertie, and two female tenants. On the same piece of land, my grandmother had other tenants, mostly women and lots and lots of children. The big veranda of our house played a vital role in the social life of this community. It was on that veranda that I received my first education on "Black women's strength" -- not only from their strength but also from the daily humiliations they bore at work and in relationships. European experience coined the term "feminism," but the term "Black women's strength" reaches beyond Eurocentric definitions to describe what is the cultural continuity of my own struggles.
The veranda. My grandmother sat on the veranda in the evenings after all the chores were done to read the newspaper. People-mostly women -- gathered there to discuss "life." Life covered every conceivable topic -- economic, local, political, social, and sexual: the high price of salt-fish, the scarcity of flour, the nice piece of yellow yam bought at Coronation market, Mr. Lain, the shopkeeper who was taking "liberty" with Miss Inez, the fights women had with their menfolk, work, suspicions of Miss Iris and Punsie carrying on something between them, the cost of school books....
My grandmother usually had...