Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature

Perverse Modernities

by Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley

In Thiefing Sugar, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley explores the poetry and prose of Caribbean women writers, revealing in their imagery a rich tradition of erotic relations between women. She takes the book’s title from Dionne Brand’s novel In Another Place, Not Here, where eroticism between women is likened to the sweet and subversive act of cane cutters stealing sugar. The natural world is repeatedly reclaimed and reinterpreted to express love between women in the poetry and prose that Tinsley analyzes. She not only recuperates stories of Caribbean women loving women, stories that have been ignored or passed over by postcolonial and queer scholarship until now, she also shows how those erotic relations and their literary evocations form a poetics and politics of decolonization. Tinsley’s interpretations of twentieth-century literature by Dutch-, English-, and French-speaking women from the Caribbean take into account colonialism, migration, labor history, violence, and revolutionary politics. Throughout Thiefing Sugar, Tinsley connects her readings to contemporary matters such as neoimperialism and international LGBT and human-rights discourses. She explains too how the texts that she examines intervene in black feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies, particularly when she highlights the cultural limitations of the metaphors that dominate queer theory in North America and Europe, including those of the closet and “coming out.”

Genres: History, Queer, Race, Nonfiction, Gender, Gender Studies, Sexuality

290 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley is Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Motivated by love for boundless black femme creativity, her research focuses on queer and feminist, Caribbean and African American performance and literature. She recently completed a manuscript entitled The Color Pynk: Black Femme-inist Love and Criticism, which explores black femme aesthetics of resistance in the Trump era. Earlier monographs include Beyoncé in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism (2018); Ezili’s Mirrors: Black Queer Genders and the Work of the Imagination (2018), winner of the 2019 Barbara Christian Prize in Caribbean Studies; and Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature (2010). She has published articles in journals including GLQ, Feminist Studies, Yale French Studies, and Small Axe and is a contributor to Time, Ebony, The Advocate, and Huffington Post.

Reviews

[Brianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fell in love with this text after the chapter on Mati songs.

[caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this mainly for the insights into racialized gender and sexuality, and it did not disappoint on that front. However, the rest of it was difficult to get through despite the author’s skill. This probably would have been higher if I had read the works in question beforehand—which I’ll probably go on to do!

[Bill Brydon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Natasha has pulled together a broad collection in most of the languages which is remarkable enough but with both a sense of history and a sense of humour. She admits harshness in her first chapter but her reading of Dionne Brand in the last is eloquent. "“No Language not only imagines a sexual politics as West Indian as the Caribbean Sea but also charts complex relationships between eroticism, colonialism, militarism, resistance, revolution, poverty, despair, fullness, and hope that explore the pliability necessary to imagine Caribbean same-sex loving politics differently, postcolonially. Myriam Chancy, in the first study of Brand’s poetry, writes her artistic vision as a rescripting of traditional poetics into poelitics: “A fusion of politics and poetry that recalls Lorde, who once wrote of the transformative power of poetry as ‘a revelatory distillation of experience’ and as an act of fusion between ‘true knowledge’ and ‘lasting action.’ ”8 Brand vocalizes quite lucidly the threat that this infusion of politics into poetics poses to both revolutionary and neocolonial Caribbean thinkers: “To dream about a Black woman, even an old Black woman, is dangerous even in a Black dream, an old dream, a Black woman’s dream, even in a dream where you are the dreamer,” she writes of reactions to her black lesbian feminist revolutionary artistic work by Marxists and conservatives alike. “Even in a Black dream, where I, too, am a dreamer, a lesbian is suspect; a woman is suspect even to other women, especially if she dreams of women.”

[Shivanee Ramlochan]

Brought to my attention by the incandescent magpie, Almah! <3