Words to Our Now: Imagination and Dissent
by Thomas Glave
University of Minnesota Press
280 pages (illustrated), $25.95
THOMAS GLAVE describes himself as “a Jamerican” to reflect both his Jamaican and his American heritage. Indeed, he often has difficulty reconciling these two identities: traveling back and forth between the two countries, he often wonders “which passport to use on this trip or that one, Jamaican or U.S.—which citizen will I be this time (re-)entering ‘my’ country?”
The seventeen essays in Words to Our Now, many of which were previously published in literary journals like Callaloo, address this identity problem from the standpoint of race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Glave, who teaches at the State University of New York at Binghamton, offers many disturbing examples of attacks upon individuals and groups based on these identities, citing instances of torture, rape, lynching, and homophobic murder.
The book’s lead essay, “Baychester: A Memory,” is partly a remembrance of the author’s Bronx childhood. Here he discusses his quiet, reflective Jamaican-born father, who lovingly tended to his vegetable garden. Glave reveals his love and even reverence for the older man, but unfortunately he does not explore their relationship in depth. His father sounds like a fascinating person who deserves more attention than he receives here. I wanted to know more about the roots of his tolerance of his son’s sexuality, whether he had developed friendships with any gay men in his early life, and how he came to live in the United States. Instead, Glave digresses to a discussion of black gay literature and a trip to Latin America.
The author’s academic background shows up in his sometimes ornate, sometimes convoluted prose. The notes at the back of the book are more straightforward and reader-friendly than the main text. Two essays about gay murder victims, one written for a newspaper audience, are more readable, if a bit too graphic for the squeamish. In his tribute to his friend Brian Williamson, a Jamaican activist and a founding member of j-flag, a local gay group, Glave describes him “as a laughing man: a man with ‘a head of silver coins’ as I sometimes joked with him about his head of curly silver-gray hair.”
Among the most thought-provoking and possibly controversial essays is the one entitled “Regarding a Black Male Monica Lewinsky, Anal Penetration, and Bill Clinton’s Sacred White Anus,” in which Glave offers this hypothesis from a gay perspective: “[H]ow would the U.S. public feel about the possibility of a black penis entering President Clinton’s (or president George W. Bush’s, or any president’s) white, presumably exclusively heterosexual anus?” What if the White House intern had been a black gay man instead of a white heterosexual female? In Glave’s view, it would have undermined the popular notion of the U.S. presidency as “icon/symbol of white heterosexual maleness ‘unpolluted’ by either blackness (or any other color darker than whiteness) or homosexuality/queerness.”
Throughout Words to Our Now, Glave hammers at the insanity of homophobia in Jamaica and elsewhere, which he sees as fueling gay self-hatred. To persecute and kill gays and lesbians is to attack the people who “serve your food in restaurants, clean your streets, fix your cars, and bury your dead.” Some time in the future, he predicts, the “world will rightly view Jamaica’s hatred of homosexuals as the equivalent of Nazis’ hatred of Jews.”
He also doesn’t mince words when critiquing American foreign policy, which he sees as representing “the vicious neoimperialistic militarism of ‘president’ George W. Bush, a successful election thief and warmongering, would-be despot.” I share this disdain for the Bush administration and the war in Iraq, but Glave would have been better off focusing on the lives and concerns of gays and lesbians in Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean region. There is a dearth of material about this population. And Glave, who’s also a fiction writer, could have provided us with a book of creative nonfiction, illuminating the lives of gays and lesbians using fictional techniques. That would have made the book much more valuable to general readers and scholars alike.
With that said, the most impressive and memorable essay in this Lammy-nominated collection is “Again, the Sea,” which depicts African slaves throwing themselves overboard rather than be in captivity: “they knew once they jumped they would awaken back there, over there again from whence they had been taken/ the sea provided them the chance. … We will not live forever in chains” [Glave’s italics]. The Caribbean Sea “speaks” as the bodies splash into its waters: “One of you bobbed upon me with the strokes of a cruel whip upon your naked back, the scars of manacles on your wrists, and did I not slowly pull you into the nothingness that is utter calmness, the complete tranquility of nonbeing?” If there were ever an anthology celebrating the Caribbean Sea, I believe this would be one of the selections, revealing Glave’s love and fascination for this part of the world.
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Charles Michael Smith, a freelance writer living in New York, is a frequent contributor to the G&LR.
