Shattering History: An Archive of Queer Jamaica

A fractal is a nature-defying phenomenon. Fractals are marked by recursive sequences that loop, appearing at once continuous and yet marked by rupture. From the Latin frangere, to break, the fractal shatters at its core. In Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica, Matthew Chin shatters a history of Jamaica that cannot account for queer bodies. Homophobia and Jamaica have long witnessed a coupling in the Western imagination. The HIV/AIDS epidemic emerged in Jamaica alongside the golden age of dancehall music in the 1980s and 1990s, marked by lyrics—metaphorically and literally—calling for anti-queer violence. An infamous Time magazine article by Tim Padgett in 2006 racialized the country as an exceptionally homophobic island paradise.Drawing from an ambitious archive that begins in 1494, the year that Columbus arrived on the island during his second voyage to the Americas, Chin theorizes the fractal as a paradigm for considering temporalities of queer Jamaican history. Rather than orient this queer archive toward futurity, a term that indexes the imperial desires of the Caribbean itself, Chin instead attends to sites of fracture and repetition as historical modes of queer repair. The book is divided into two parts: “Archival Continuities” (with chapters “Knowledge” and “The Body”) and “Narrative Ruptures” (with chapters “Performance” and “Politics”). The objects of study in Fractal Repair include sociocultural studies, literary texts, HIV/AIDS education pamphlets, oral history interviews, theatre performances, LGBT community newspapers, and imperial archives. In the first part of the book, Chin considers the post – World War II expansion of tourism across the island alongside the figure of the gay 1960s American tourist, whose presence occupied the imaginations of local newspapers as the import of homosexuality to Jamaica. Reading this visibility of foreign queerness against the unindexed intimacies of Afro-Jamaican lesbian women found in the work of Carol Thames and Makeda Silvera, as well as within the subversive gender formations among the Afro-Jamaican spiritual community of Pocomania/Pukumania, Chin reorients historiography toward sites of working-class, Black subjectivity as queer archive.Turning to the arrival of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, Chin presents the stories of frontline healthcare workers and contact investigators who documented the sexual lives of Jamaicans impacted by the virus. These volunteers were primarily young Jamaican women who, in addition to providing the physical and affective labor of conducting social outreach and staffing hotlines, played a critical role in transforming the stigma surrounding the virus in the midst of national panic. Recognizing the class differences within the surveillance and reporting associated with HIV, Chin notes that the Ministry of Labour—not the Ministry of Health—first tested migrant agricultural workers to comply with the United States government. The archives of the epidemic subsequently surveilled poor and working-class Jamaican men who were subject to greater scrutiny about their sexual practices and often relied on public hospitals as compared to upper-class men who could evade such surveillance by visiting private physicians or traveling abroad for medical treatment.In the second part of the book, Chin traces a history of the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC) formed in the wake of a newly independent Jamaica. The NDTC, cofounded by famed scholar and choreographer Rex Nettleford, was a cultural vector propelling Jamaican culture onto an international stage. Chin reads performance as a site of the fractal—that is, an iteration of repetition with difference—to consider the NDTC as a site of postindependence cultural formation whose members were implicitly viewed as sexual and gender dissidents for their association with the arts. Speculations about the sexualities of NDTC members emerged as a form of queer gossip, eventually prompting Nettleford to publish a letter responding to the charge that “the NDTC is full of homosexuals” (116). In his response, Nettleford contended that stigmas of sexual anti-normativity were not unique to the company but also erupted into the stereotyping of heterosexual Jamaican women as “libertarian in sex habits, having illegitimate children and abortions,” and he demanded an end to moralistic shaming across all sectors of Jamaican society (116).Mapping a vibrant queer culture in Kingston that gained momentum in the 1960s, Chin records a history of numerous gay bars across Kingston and Spanish Town, including The Closet, Key Hole and White Lady, to name a few (122). In the background of this emerging gay scene, the Jamaican Gay Freedom Movement (GFM, 1977 – 1984) was formed. Fractal Repair offers the groundbreaking archive of the GFM, including excerpts from its self-published periodical, the Jamaica Gaily News. GFM members participated in prison visitation programs at the General Penitentiary in Kingston, St. Catherine District Prison, and the women's facility of Fort Augusta Prison in Portmore; international and local pen pal exchanges; and a speakers bureau in schools. In a climate of postindependence Jamaica devastated by International Monetary Fund – driven poverty and lack of opportunities for all Jamaicans, the GFM was also concerned about the economic plight of its members. In a letter written to GFM founding member Laurence (Larry) Chang, one incarcerated man wrote: “Larry, what really cause me to be worried is that when I leave [prison] I don't know where I am going [to live] neither where or how I am going to gain meaningful employment so I am asking you very kindly to see what you can work out between you and [name of GFM Prison Coordinator]” (126).For Chang, who penned letters to the Daily Gleaner using his real name and not a pseudonym, visibility was central to advancing the LGBT movement in Jamaica. In her Jamaica Gaily News column “Girl Talk,” however, GFM member Donna Smith challenged “coming out” as a necessary praxis of the movement, contending, “It is neither fair nor practical to demand of every Jamaican homosexual that he/she come out indiscriminately and participate in such activities as gay demonstrations and marches” (149 – 50). Smith's column itself might be read as representative of the fact that the GFM was an organization overwhelmingly represented by men, despite prominent figures like Smith and Frances Camden. Perhaps this imbalance is best articulated by a woman from Kingston who sent a letter in 1979 asking “if you admit women to your organization” (127).The scope of Fractal Repair concludes with the dissolution of the GFM in the late 1980s; since then, a number of visible queer collectives and organizations have emerged in Jamaica. The GFM inevitably transformed the history of LGBT activism in Jamaica—whether subsequent iterations of queer organizations expanded upon, or organized in response to, its limitations. In the epilogue, Chin concludes with a letter sent to Seville from Diego Alvarez Chanca, physician to Christopher Columbus, in 1494. By including the letter, Chin emphasizes that a genealogy of sexuality and gender deviance in the Caribbean—from 1494 to the 2006 Time article—is inextricable from the racialization of colonized bodies always-already occupying the parameters of racial and sexual difference. Emphasizing that this archive of repair is not one of liberation, Chin is attentive to the fragmentary and recursive moments and moments of queerness that sometimes rupture. He writes, “The future lies in this queer site of indeterminacy, the ruptural space that prevents exact repetition” (157). Fractal Repair ultimately demonstrates that within these spaces of rupture, a queer history of Jamaica is anything but broken.