Small Axe Disciplining the Unruly (National) Body in Staceyann Chin’s The Other Side of Paradise Jocelyn Fenton Stitt We turn to literature to help us see the continuities and ruptures between the past and the present. Staceyann Chin’s memoir, The Other Side of Paradise, suggests how the subject positions that largely occupy her in the narrative (mixed-race Jamaican, sexual “deviant,” unwanted child) bear echoes of the treatment of abject and marginalized bodies in Jamaica’s past.1 The Other Side of Paradise chronicles Chin’s coming of age in Jamaica in the 1970s and 1980s, telling the story of an abandoned child who is physically and sexually abused. Chin’s work is also a triumphant bildungsroman of a young woman fighting to find her voice and to get an education. Staceyann’s lesbian identity as a young adult provokes hostility and violence that cannot be separated from the neglect and trauma she experiences as a child because of her outspokenness, her racial identity, and her female body. In other words, her extended family’s mode of disciplining Staceyann as an unruly child are taken up by a wider Jamaican community as she reaches adulthood. This essay makes visible the connections between physical punishments during slavery, the ways legitimate subjects are recognized by the state, and child abuse and homophobic violence in Jamaica. It 1 Staceyann Chin, The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir (New York: Scribner, 2009); hereafter cited in the text. I refer here to “Chin” as the author of The Other Side of Paradise and to “Staceyann” as the narrator of the text. In this text it is especially easy to make this distinction because the main chapters are all narrated from the point of view of Staceyann as a child and then young adult, with no reference to the adult Chin or reflection on events from the point of view of an older self. The voice throughout the memoir, the narrating “I,” is always that of “Staceyann.” small axe 45 • November 2014 • DOI 10.1215/07990537-2826425 © Small Axe, Inc. Published by Duke University Press Small Axe 2 | Disciplining the Unruly (National) Body in Staceyann Chin’s The Other Side of Paradise does so by first contextualizing Chin’s individual experience of violence and marginalization within a larger framework of colonial violence and bodily regulation and then turns to her experience of family violence. Chin’s identity as a lesbian with Chinese and African ancestry calls into question a unitary identity or origin story for Caribbean subjects and asks, to paraphrase Jacqui Alexander, which bodies are allowed to be legitimate citizens of the postindependence Caribbean.2 The main themes of The Other Side of Paradise correspond to those in many notable Caribbean autobiographies and autobiographical novels, while putting a different spin on the coming-of-age story. Canonical Caribbean autobiographies range from depictions of sexual abuse in Jean Rhys’s Smile Please, to the traumas of poverty and colonial education in George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, to Jamaica Kincaid’s portrayal of familial alienation and strained parent-child relationships in My Brother, as well as these authors’ eventual exile because of the legacies of colonialism, economic realities, and difficult family relationships.3 In contrast, The Other Side of Paradise is notably the first book-length piece of life writing to chronicle growing up lesbian in Jamaica. While Claude McKay’s A Long Way from Home and My Green Hills of Jamaica, Audre Lorde’s Zami, Michelle Cliff’s autobiographical novel, Abeng, and the anthology Tongues on Fire: Caribbean Lesbian Lives and Stories provide important precursors of Caribbean queer life writing, no other monograph, to my knowledge, details growing up lesbian in the anglophone Caribbean.4 In distinction to the silence and invisibility associated with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lives generally in Jamaica and with LGBT people of color in particular in the United States, Chin is well known in both places for her defiantly queer poems and raucous spoken-word performances.5 Her appearances in the Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam and on Oprah have been widely viewed on television and YouTube. Chin also has a large following on Twitter and Facebook.6 The Other Side of Paradise and Chin’s many spoken-word performances function as a counterhistory to homophobic beliefs as well as to the silence surrounding child abuse in Jamaica.7 Given the singularity of The Other Side of Paradise as the first lesbian memoir from the Caribbean, it is tempting to read it primarily as lesbian life writing. However, in this essay I explore a vital aspect of The Other Side of Paradise: Chin’s insistence on mapping her multiple identities within 2 3 4 5 6 7 See M. Jacqui Alexander, “Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality, and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas,” in Catherine Hall, ed., Cultures of Empire: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000). Jean Rhys, Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (London: Deutsch, 1979); George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991); Jamaica Kincaid, My Brother (New York: Noonday, 1997). Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), and My Green Hills of Jamaica and Five Jamaican Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1979); Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Berkeley, CA: Crossing, 1982); Michelle Cliff, Abeng (New York: Plume, 1995); Rosamund Elwin, ed., Tongues on Fire: Caribbean Lesbian Lives and Stories (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1997). See Rosamond S. King, “More Notes on the Invisibility of Caribbean Lesbians,” in Thomas Glave, ed., Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 191–96. On 29 April 2014 Chin’s public page on Facebook had 19,726 “likes,” and her personal Facebook page exceeded the maximum “friends” number of 5,000. Between 2012 and 2013, Chin’s Twitter followers almost doubled, from 6,820 in February 2012 to 11,412 by May 2013, and increased to 14,100 by April 2014. Chin’s body of work includes a large number of spoken-word performances (many available online), four chapbooks, and the writing and performing of a one-woman play, Border/Clash. She is currently creating a film on being a single lesbian mother, a subject that she also writes about in the Huffington Post. Chin posts prolifically on Facebook, often debuting poems there. Space considerations preclude me from discussing these other aspects of her work. For more on Chin’s identity and her spoken-word performances, see Kelly Baker Josephs, “Dissonant Desires: Staceyann Chin and the Queer Politics of a Jamaican Accent,” Mosiac 42, no. 2 (2009): 153–70. Published by Duke University Press Small Axe 45 • November 2014 • Jocelyn Fenton Stitt | Jamaican society. Chin’s intersectional identity and her articulation of it in her memoir sound a clarion call about the interconnected nature of the violence experienced by children, women, and LGBT individuals in contemporary Jamaica. As important as Chin’s lesbian identity is to the text, Chin’s coming out is only one facet of the memoir. For a text that has been celebrated as an important LGBT narrative, it contains very little explicitly “queer” material, if by that we mean accounts of sexual desire or identity.8 Unlike Lorde’s Zami, as one example, in which childhood makes up only half of the text, leaving the second half of the narrative to explore Lorde’s many love affairs and her involvement in lesbian communities, Chin’s memoir devotes only the last few chapters to her coming-out story and relationships with women. What is the story, then, that Chin tells in her narrative? She makes explicit the terrible violence she suffered at the hands of her family, especially those of her mother, her aunt, and her great-aunt. Violence haunts this memoir as both cause and effect of Staceyann’s racial, class, and sexual ambiguity and marginalization. Queering Jamaican Space Abandoned by her mother, who leaves Staceyann with her grandmother and emigrates to Canada, and denied by her father, a well-off Chinese furniture storeowner, Staceyann is passed from relative to relative. Her abandonment by her parents, coupled with her grandmother’s illiteracy and powerlessness, make her vulnerable to abuse by adults in her community, particularly by the relatives who allow Staceyann, her brother, and her grandmother to live with them. Much of the memoir is taken up with Staceyann’s attempt to understand her Chinese identity as well as her sexual orientation—a “half-Chinese lesbian poet”—highlighting the complexity of issues of race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary Jamaica.9 Sandra Paquet finds that, within the Caribbean context, “the study of autobiography and self-representation acquires an archaeological value beyond genealogical fable and personal history” because autobiography “illuminates the regenerative lineaments of the multilingual, multiethnic, many-ancestored communities of the Caribbean.”10 The Other Side of Paradise, I argue, is part of a lineage of Caribbean life narratives Paquet identifies as explicating cultural issues and national identity through the prism of an individual life narrative. However, while many of the autobiographies in Paquet’s study work to integrate individual identity into community, Chin’s writing is defiantly oppositional, seeking to offer critique rather than conciliation. 8 For a sampling of interviews and reviews of The Other Side of Paradise foregrounding Chin’s sexuality, see Jamaican bookstore Bookophilia’s promotional public event description on Facebook, “An Evening with Staceyann Chin, Author of The Other Side of Paradise,” Facebook, 9 June 2011, www.facebook.com/events/199158140130143/; Jen Sabella, “Staceyann Chin Tells All,” AfterEllen, 9 April 2009, www.afterellen.com/blog/jensabella/staceyann-chin-tells-all-in-the-other-side-of -paradise; Courtney Zehnder, “Defying Labels with Fearlessness,” On the Issues, 14 April 2009, www.ontheissuesmagazine .com/2009fall/2009fall_zehnder.php; and Ellen Papazian, “Six Questions for Staceyann Chin,” Bitch, 19 July 2009, www .bitchmagazine.org/post/bibliotalk-with-writer-and-activist-staceyann-chin. 9 Staceyann Chin, “Crossfire,” LGBTQ Programs at Vassar College, 19 February 2009, vassarlgbtq.blogspot.com/2009/02 /celebrating-queer-people-of-color_19.html. 10 Sandra Pouchet Paquet, Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 5. Published by Duke University Press 3 Small Axe 4 | Disciplining the Unruly (National) Body in Staceyann Chin’s The Other Side of Paradise The Other Side of Paradise should also be understood as part of Chinese Caribbean literature, not so much in reference to Chin’s “authenticity” as a Chinese Jamaican but rather through her struggle to understand the meaning of this identity both for herself and for her community.11 These multiple identifications are further complicated because Chin begins her memoir with more questions about her origins than answers. Her genealogical search, of necessity, links the origins of Staceyann’s heritage (African and Chinese) with the origins of her embodied lesbian identity. The memoir begins with a retelling of Staceyann’s conception from the point of view of her mother, Hazel. “The front of the car was not designed for having sex. And Hazel did not want to think about the wet that would be left on the smooth leather seats afterward. What kind of man would bring her here for an intimate evening?” (1). The narrative quickly shifts over to an apologetic gesture toward the fragility of that story, with reference to the memories of her mother as well as of the man who confirms the encounter but denies paternity, Junior Chin. “Both of them recall an interaction in a parked car. An unspecified number of months later, my mother gives birth to me, half black, half Chinese. This is the loose skeleton upon which I have to hang the beginning of my own life.” Chin writes of gleaning facts from a variety of sources: her mother and her parents’ friends “who frequented the bar” her parents liked. The multiple variations of the conception story and the nature of her parents’ relationship suggest a larger ontological uncertainty: “My mother, the man she swears is my father, and the people who knew them then have very different accounts of what happened or didn’t happen between them” (2). This opening prologue suggests that Staceyann was unplanned and unwanted. Further, her grandmother Bernice believes that Staceyann was born prematurely through her mother’s practice of binding her belly with cloths to disguise her pregnancy. Chin’s telling of her origin story as one of rejection and precarity foreshadows her later displacement in her family and in Jamaican society as a mixed-race and same-sex-desiring girl. “There are days,” Chin writes, “when I yearn to know exactly what happened to spark the very beginning of me. But in the absence of the most basic facts, I have had to create my own story and, in many ways, set my own course” (4). Just as there is no fixed story explaining Chin’s origins, there is no clear way for Staceyann to make sense of her mixed-race identity, or, later, her sexual orientation. The first memory Chin writes about is overhearing a neighbor complimenting her mother’s choice in fathers for her children: “The color them have is only because them mother have sense. Hazel have enough sense to make sure to give them fathers with clean white skin,” and calling the other children in the village “tar-black pickney them who born here and going to dead right in Lottery” (15). Hazel’s choice of two different Chinese men as partners seems to be less about personal attraction and more about these particular men having resources and the advantages her children might experience from having light skin. The father of Staceyann’s half-brother Delano provides food from his grocery store and also money as needed for Delano’s school supplies. Delano breaks down the politics of race for 11 Anne-Marie Lee-Loy argues for an inclusive definition of Chinese-Caribbean literature based not on the ancestry of the author but rather on the presence of themes and issues relevant to this population, such as resentment over their property ownership or orientalist anxieties over the (im)possibilities of their assimilation into Caribbean nations. “Identifying a Caribbean Literature: Pitfalls and Possibilities,” sx salon 15 (February 2014), smallaxe.net/wordpress3/discussions/2014/02/28 /identifying-a-chinese-caribbean-literature/. Published by Duke University Press Small Axe 45 • November 2014 • Jocelyn Fenton Stitt | Stacey: “We are not white like real white people. But we father is Chiney, so we not black. . . . We Chiney Royal, but my hair is nicer and me skin is whiter, so me more Chiney Royal than you” (16). As Staceyann’s cousin tells her later in the narrative, she is disliked by her great-aunt Miss John and other cousins because of her race: “White, Chinese, Syrian—is the same thing. You not black like we. You can get ahead in life. The rest of we just have to stay right here til we dead” (184–85).12 Staceyann is thus placed in contradictory position: economically underprivileged but above her black and brown relatives by virtue of her Chinese ancestry. Staceyann’s uncertain positionality echoes Anne-Marie Lee-Loy’s theorization of the ambivalent belonging of Chinese West Indians in the national imaginary, where they are simultaneously culturally alien and highly familiar.13 Indeed, Staceyann’s and Delano’s fathers are both Chinese shopkeepers, placing Chin’s depiction of these men within a long line of literary representations focused around the shop as a central space of articulating West Indian Chinese identity.14 Although Staceyann’s father won’t claim her as a daughter, telling her “there are a hundred Chinese gentlemen in Montego bay” who might be her father, he does pay for her education (136). This leads to a bifurcated existence for Chin, where she lives in relative poverty while attending a middle-class high school and eventually the University of the West Indies, Mona. To be “Chiney Royal,” then, is to occupy a liminal space. Staceyann knows few Chinese people, echoing her isolation from other queer-identified people later on in the narrative. Not black, brown, red, or white on an island that largely uses these terms as racial classification, to be mixed-race Chinese-Jamaican is a kind of racial no-man’s-land.15 In one instance, Staceyann is mocked at school for the way she talks: “‘Listen to my China Royal voice. I should be on JBC TV! Look at my mongoose skin! Listen to my red mongoose voice!’” (114). She later finds racist comments on her notebook: “Someone has written in pen, Chinese people eat dead cat and dog with mange” (114). Thus, Staceyann’s experience of being “Chiney Royal” is one in which she has some light-skinned privilege but is also taunted and bullied. Racialized sexual violence escalates against Staceyann as she grows older. The male cousins Staceyann lives with use her Chinese ancestry as an excuse to make fun of her poverty and appearance, telling her that she should get money from her father and that “white people smell like raw meat” (115). They also sexually violate her at night, secure in the knowledge that as a mixedrace child who does not fit into their family and who is disowned by her father, Staceyann has few 12 This comment eliding differences between whites, Syrians, and Chinese is perhaps included ironically by Chin. Since arriving in Jamaica as indentured workers in the 1850s, Chinese Jamaicans have been more likely to intermarry with AfroJamaicans than the other groups have. They have also been targets of organized violence, such as anti-Chinese riots in 1918 and 1938 and mob violence in 1965. 13 Anne-Marie Lee-Loy, Searching for Mr. Chin: Constructions of Nation and the Chinese in West Indian Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010). 14 For more on the central role of the shop within Chinese Jamaican literature, see Timothy Chin, “Behind the Counter: Teaching Chinese Jamaican Texts in the Caribbean Literature Course,” in Supriya M. Nair, ed., Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2012), 85. 15 Carolyn Cooper notes that although mixed-race Jamaicans are always labeled, for example, as “half-Indian or halfChinese,” which might denote a recognition of having African heritage as the norm, the addition of royal in “Chiney Royal” or “coolie Royal” denotes a privileging of non-African heritage. Carolyn Cooper, “African Diaspora Studies in the CreoleAnglophone Caribbean: A Perspective from the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica,” in Tejumola Olaniyan and James H. Sweet, eds., The African Diaspora and the Disciplines (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 282. Published by Duke University Press 5 Small Axe 6 | Disciplining the Unruly (National) Body in Staceyann Chin’s The Other Side of Paradise resources for protection. Her mentally ill cousin Shappy sexually assaults her, beats her, and then conflates her presence in his home with nationalist fears about the Chinese in Jamaica: “You tell that to the Chinese government fi me. Tell them that is what we do to traitors when them infiltrate our ranks” (147). The family and the nation become the same space in Shappy’s “mad” imagination, vulnerable to subversion by orientalist outsiders. Chiney Royal, indeed, but man royal as well. In Jamaican patois, man royal is a term for a woman who performs masculinity or a woman who is suspected to be or is same-sex loving. Race, class, and sexuality are inescapable in Chin’s genealogical project, since her societal dislocation comes about through her poverty, her mixed-race identity, and her refusal to be more normatively feminine. I read The Other Side of Paradise as queer in its presentation of Staceyann’s disaffection from everyday life. Staceyann’s inability to “fit” anywhere makes her life story ironically fit into a narrative of queerness as Christopher Nealon defines it: “an experience of constant inarticulate frustration about core life experience.”16 Staceyann struggles to understand her place in Jamaican society, since as a child she is made to feel that “everything” she does is “wrong,” and everybody just wants to “take advantage” of her (194). Her great-aunt Miss John refuses to see her sons’ sexual predation toward Staceyann, and calls her a “bull-buck and duppy conqueror” when she fights back against them (121). Staceyann challenges the gender norms expected for young girls: silence, obedience, and not questioning her elders. Chin’s narrative is groundbreaking in her insistence on putting details about her sexuality from her childhood and adolescence in the public sphere, making them equally everyday and a spectacle. Chin writes humorously of her first experiences with pornography and menstruation. The sight of “a series of blondes wearing very small brassieres over their very large breasts” who look “happy and sad at the same time, as if they were eating an ice-cream cone that is really not their favorite flavor” (123), excites Staceyann. She rushes to the pit-latrine, which is filthy but the one place she can be alone. Looking at the pictures of women “rubbing their coco-breads” makes her want to look at her own. While touching herself and experiencing sexual pleasure, Staceyann predictably, comically, falls into the pit-latrine. Same-sex desire and adolescent bodily exploration are tied here to dirt and excrement, representing the outsider status of Staceyann’s desires. The Other Side of Paradise carefully contrasts how Staceyann’s identity as a lesbian is seen as “monstrous” by some, while at the same time she has “monsters” of her own who abuse her, as Chin describes in the poem “Monster”: “If I am a monster / then you better run from me / wounded animal striking at other bleeding beings.”17 Staceyann keeps both identities, as a vilified figure and as the victim of abuse, secret from her teachers and friends at school and, later, university. Lawson Williams, former legal/advocacy director for the Jamaica Forum of Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-FLAG), argues that an unspoken agreement about LGBT issues exists in Jamaica: “It is a common understanding that the issue of gayness must never enter the ‘national arena,’ or 16 Christopher Nealon, Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 97. 17 Staceyann Chin, “Monster,” Facebook, 10 October 2010, www.facebook.com/notes/staceyann-chin/monster /447622651623. Published by Duke University Press Small Axe 45 • November 2014 • Jocelyn Fenton Stitt | at least not in any way that gives the issue any political legitimacy. Homosexuality must always be dealt with conjecturally or in abstraction, but never in any tangible form.”18 Importantly, the narrative represents the violence Chin experienced as a child to be as shocking as the homophobia she experiences as a young adult. If, as Jacqui Alexander has written, “women’s sexual agency [and their] sexual and erotic autonomy have always been troublesome for the state,” then Chin’s narrative enacts not just getting into trouble but staying there: “trouble-staying,” as Sara Puotinen puts it.19 The Other Side of Paradise places Staceyann’s sexuality as part of a public and political identity, grounded in her experiences as a mixed-race and poor child living in rural Jamaica. Categorizing just who belongs to the Caribbean national body is, in Faith Smith’s words, “tied . . . insistently to the sexed bodies, practices, and identities of the region’s people.”20 In order to understand the full extent of the counterhistorical work performed by the narrative, the context of Chin’s personal experience amid larger issues such as national and gender identity, we must first outline the roots of the connections between violence, citizenship, and sexuality. The policing of sexualities in Jamaica can take the form of violent homophobic acts, as documented in Human Rights Watch’s 2004 report Hated to Death.21 All twelve anglophone Caribbean nations in the British Commonwealth have laws on the books criminalizing same-sex behaviors, in some cases with penalties such as flogging and incarceration. Even so, clear differences exist in the English-speaking Caribbean, ranging from Trinidad and Tobago’s prohibition against LGBT visitors to the criminalization of gay sex in Jamaica. Although I reject the vilification of the anglophone Caribbean as more homophobic than other places, it is worth asking about the particular manifestations of homophobia within the region. Gloria Careaga, cosecretary general of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association, notes that while the manifestations of homophobia show great diversity, “the English-speaking Caribbean seems to be unable to shake off the influence of Victorian morality, and not only maintains laws that criminalise gays and lesbians, but also argues the case for homophobia, for instance, in Jamaica.”22 Why should this be so? The policing of gender norms and sexual expression in Jamaica stems, at least in part, from a history in which the definitions of man and woman, and who was eligible to be recognized as worthy of freedom, independence, and citizenship, were derived from nineteenth-century colonial discourses about correct sexual behavior and the enactment in the twentieth century of policies 18 Lawson Williams (pseud.), “On Homophobia and Gay Rights Activism in Jamaica,” in Glave, Our Caribbean, 384. Williams’s view, no doubt, stems in part from the contested nature of LGBT rights in the Caribbean during the period surrounding the publication of The Other Side of Paradise. In 2012, a candidate for prime minister of Jamaica, Portia Simpson, expressed the position that LGBT people should not be discriminated against in employment and was subsequently elected. Groups such as J-FLAG, Code Red, and CatchAFyah Caribbean Feminist Network have gained visibility and respectful media coverage of their pro–LGBT rights positions. 19 M. Jacqui Alexander, “Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization: An Anatomy of Feminist and State Practice in the Bahamas Tourist Economy,” in M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds., Feminist Geneologies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (New York: Routledge, 1997), 64; Sara Puotinen, “Who Cares? I Do,” Trouble Room, 1 August 2011, trouble.room34.com/archives/3599. 20 Faith Smith, “Introduction: Sex and the Citizen,” in Faith Smith, ed., Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 1. 21 Human Rights Watch, Hated to Death: Homophobia, Violence, and Jamaica’s HIV/AIDS Epidemic (New York: Human Rights Watch, November 2004). 22 Dalia Acosta, “Homophobia in the Caribbean Varies Widely,” Caribbean 360, 17 May 2011, www.caribbean360.com/index .php/news/cuba_news/429422.html#axzz1jqfVfTZ1. Published by Duke University Press 7 Small Axe 8 | Disciplining the Unruly (National) Body in Staceyann Chin’s The Other Side of Paradise to encourage heterosexual marriage. Recent scholarship by Jill Briggs demonstrates how colonial elites used racist ideas about the proper family in conjunction with fears about overpopulation hindering Jamaica’s economic growth to gain funding to provide birth control to unwed mothers in Jamaica in the late 1930s and early 1940s.23 Fears about Afro-Jamaican fecundity were also used to justify continued colonial control over this unruly population. Colonial somatophobia concerning Afro-Caribbean reproduction led to sexual behaviors’ being linked to raced and classed groups, which were monitored to ensure a progressive and “healthy” colony. Jacqui Alexander makes a connection between the simultaneous criminalization of lesbian and gay sex and the creation of anti-domestic-violence legal codes in the Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, and elsewhere. The criminalization and marginalization of the lesbian and gay subject is necessary, she argues, to shore up an anxious and undermined sense of national authority and masculinity, first, during nationalist movements and, subsequently, in the wake of US imperialism. Black Caribbean middle-class respectability, including legal marriage, control of women’s sexuality, and paternity, became a marker of suitability for self-rule.24 Ideologies of “natural” sexual behavior imposed by the British under colonialism came to be adopted by Black Nationalists as a method of establishing the new nation: “Thus we can identify a certain trajectory in the establishment of nationalism which is grounded in notions of respectability which like eighteenth-century European nationalism came to rely heavily upon sexual gestures that involved the symbolic triumph of the nuclear family over the extended family and other family forms.”25 Homosexuality is frequently figured as a Western/American import into the previously virtuous and exclusively heterosexual Christian Caribbean body politic. Alexander’s work makes clear that gay and lesbian lives in the Caribbean are often circumscribed by cultural homophobia, lack of police protection from violence, and legalized discrimination. The queer body is thus made hypervisible through parliamentary debate, newspaper articles, and legislation designed to remove the “threat” of homosexuality from the nation, while at the same time establishing men’s authority over the nuclear family. As a university student, Staceyann is attacked by six male students in a bathroom on the University of the West Indies campus. She is told by one of her attackers, “All Sodomite fi dead. Nuff fire fi burn dem, yes” (258). They threaten her with “corrective rape,” telling her that being raped will allow her to repent for “the worst sin . . . against God” (258). Corrective rape is a form of homophobic violence used as a means of punishment or to “convert” lesbians to heterosexuality in many regions of the world. The language of conversion and transgressions against God echoes the many beatings and punishments Staceyann suffered as a child, when she was labeled sinful and in need of violent punishment. At the university, she is taunted by one of the attackers: “Why you ’fraid o’ the rod of correction, eh, baby?” Interrupted by a male student who is an acquaintance of Staceyann’s, her attackers explain to him that they are planning on raping her not for sexual pleasure but because “something have to be done ’bout this way of thinking that creeping on this 23 Jill Briggs, “‘As Fool-Proof as Possible’: Overpopulation, Colonial Demography, and the Jamaica Birth Control League,” Global South 4, no. 2 (2010): 157–77. 24 Alexander, “Not Just (Any) Body,” 13. 25 Ibid. Published by Duke University Press Small Axe 45 • November 2014 • Jocelyn Fenton Stitt | island!” (264). Queer sexuality is framed here as a way of thinking, an ideology that is incompatible with Jamaican culture. My argument complicates the idea that homophobia in Jamaica is solely a product of religious teachings or a “relic” of the Victorian era, and it suggests instead that powerful histories of physical control and discipline influence contemporary beliefs about the “threat” LGBT individuals present to the nation. This is a provocative claim, to be sure. However, several events on the heels of the publication of The Other Side of Paradise put this idea of erotic autonomy to the test. Tensions over Jamaican laws and attitudes toward LGBT rights were heightened when in November 2011 Great Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, announced that governments found in violation of human rights, including LGBT rights, would not be given budgetary aid. A month later, US president Barack Obama came out against violence and other forms of discrimination toward LGBT people globally and promised to provide asylum to those persecuted for their sexual orientation. He also threatened to withhold foreign aid from countries not in compliance. US secretary of state Hillary Clinton argued in a speech before the Human Rights Council that gay rights are human rights and that supporting LGBT rights would now be a part of US foreign policy.26 Editorial cartoon by Clovis Brown, featuring Jamaican prime minister Andrew Holness, US president Barack Obama, and British prime minister David Cameron. Jamaica Observer, 9 December 2011. The anger and shock in the Caribbean widely, and in Jamaica specifically, was framed as a response to Cameron and Obama stepping on national sovereignty. A Jamaica Observer editorial portrayed the prime minister of Great Britain and the US president as unwelcome visitors in the Jamaican national bedroom, with then prime minister Andrew Holness asking, “What unoo doing in my bedroom?!!”27 In an interview with the Jamaica Gleaner, Holness acknowledged that while his government had more work to do on human rights issues, such as “protecting children,” LGBT equality under the law would not be part of that work. Holness stated that while the government “should not interfere in what two consenting adults choose to do within their own protected privacy,” he would “not accept that homosexuality must be accepted as a legitimate form of behaviour or the equivalent of marriage.”28 The Jamaican state, as Holness recognizes, has the power to define 26 Steven Lee Meyers and Helene Cooper, “US to Aid Gay Rights Abroad, Obama and Clinton Say,” New York Times, 6 December 2011. 27 Clovis Brown, “What Unoo Doing in My Bedroom?!!,” Jamaica Observer, 9 December 2011, www.dloc.com/AA00008616 /00001/2j?search=editorial+%3dcartoon. 28 Andrew Holness, quoted in Daraine Luton, “Not Ready for Gays,” Jamaica Gleaner, 6 November 2011. Published by Duke University Press 9 Small Axe 10 | Disciplining the Unruly (National) Body in Staceyann Chin’s The Other Side of Paradise which citizens are deserving of protection and human rights and which are not. This queering of the Caribbean quite literally turns the Caribbean queer, discursively transforming it from a space rebounding with hybridity, known for the fluidity of boundaries and identities with no single national or ethnic origin/destination story, to a place of rigid and violently drawn lines about just which bodies can be citizens. Sexuality, race, and gender norms, as well as expectations for youth behavior and punishment, cannot be disconnected from the nation; remember Jacqui Alexander’s signal phrase, “Not just (any) body can be a citizen.”29 The representation of reactions to Staceyann’s Chinese identity as one of exclusion, resentment, and fear parallels reactions to her lesbian identity. Citizenship, an ability to be recognized as having a legitimate claim to the resources of the state, including protection from violence, has a relationship to the violence visited on LGBT people’s bodies, or on those bodies perceived to be queer or of an ethnic minority, such as Chinese Jamaicans. Ideas of rights and belonging, as I explore in the next section, also have an impact on what is done to children’s bodies in the name of discipline. I situate the child abuse Staceyann experienced as connected to the same ideologies of power and gender that leave her vulnerable to homophobic and racialized sexualized violence as a young adult. Child Abuse and Disciplining the (Unruly) National Body Jamaica Kincaid writes that in her homeland of Antigua, children are “one of the definitions of vulnerability and powerlessness.”30 The abuse Staceyann experiences is part of the power her mother has to dispose of her as she wishes and of her extended family’s right to punish her as they see fit. Another manifestation of the history of violence stemming from the colonial period is the high rates of violence against children, which the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) calls “one of the biggest challenges” for Jamaica. UNICEF cites high rates of child murder, with over nineteen thousand cases of youth and children under age nineteen treated in emergency rooms for gunshot and stab wounds, blunt force trauma, and sexual violence between January and October 2010, with girls between the ages of ten and nineteen accounting for 68 percent of all sexual assault cases that are reported.31 Indeed, this larger public health crisis frames Chin’s personal stories, just as much as they are linked to a larger global history of what Diana Paton calls “methods of pain-related power,” such as enslavement, indentured labor, colonialism, and modern prisons.32 The frequency of the use of corporal punishment of West Indian children has been the subject of several studies and has been linked to methods of ensuring obedience during slavery.33 The severity and harshness of physical punishment received by Jamaican children has also been 29 30 31 32 See Alexander, “Not Just (Any) Body,” 359–76. Kincaid, My Brother, 32. UNICEF, “Jamaica: Child Protection,” www.unicef.org/jamaica/violence.html (accessed 8 August 2014). Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 31. 33 See E. Arnold, “The Use of Corporal Punishment in Child-Rearing in the West Indies,” Child Abuse and Neglect 6, no. 2 (1982): 141–45; and Mindie Lazarus-Black, “Vanishing Complainants: The Place of Violence, Gender, Work, and Law,” Caribbean Studies 36, no. 1 (2008): 25–51. Published by Duke University Press Small Axe 45 • November 2014 • Jocelyn Fenton Stitt | documented.34 The Jamaican government recognized the national confusion over just what constitutes child abuse and who should be responsible to report it when it passed the 2004 Child Care and Protection Act. This important legislation made clear to the public the legal definitions of abuse, neglect, and sexual abuse. However, state accountability for the legacies of slavery, the state’s right to decide which bodies are worthy of protection, and contemporary child abuse is difficult to establish, in part because violence against children is so normalized. More broadly, Deborah A. Thomas argues that although violence is clearly a major concern in the Caribbean region, mechanisms for defining and gaining justice remain elusive.35 Thomas, in her book on violence and citizenship in Jamaica, challenges us to be attentive to the histories of violence that inform present practices: “While many scholars have dealt with the socioeconomic legacies of slavery, taking different positions on how conditions during slavery have shaped contemporary patterns of socio-racial stratification, family formation, and economic dependence, few have chosen to think through how slavery—and more specifically, the practices of discipline and punishment during slavery—might provide insight into contemporary patterns and forms of violence.”36 The most traumatic scenes of violence depicted in The Other Side of Paradise bear a resemblance to forms of torture, humiliation, and pain documented in slave narratives. Two of these instances involve Staceyann being whipped. The whippings are perhaps the easiest to link to slavery, given their obvious connection to punishment for slaves. In her study of punishment in Jamaica from 1780 to 1870, Diana Paton argues that physical violence was inherent to the definition of slavery but that it did not disappear with emancipation—the right to physically discipline was transferred to the state postemancipation: “Because part of the legal meaning of slavery is that slaveholders have the right to inflict physical violence on their slaves, part of the legal meaning of slavery’s abolition is that this right is withdrawn from slaveholders. In practice, because no emancipation process led to the complete liberation of enslaved people from coercion, these rights were always taken over by the state.”37 The state’s right to whip convicted felons with a tamarind switch emerged as a legal battle in Jamaica in the mid-1990s, when judges sought to revive the practice after a twenty-five-year gap. When the Jamaica Court of Appeal abolished flogging in 1998, its ruling was described in the language of emancipation. Attorney Dennis Daily commented, “The retention of whipping and flogging has been like a sore on our backs all these years. It’s like a yoke has been lifted from the psychology of the Jamaican people.”38 How does the “lash” manifest itself in the present? How is the “psychology of the Jamaican people” still under the influence of punishments rooted in enslavement? Studying the experience of Jamaican children is instructive. M. G. Smith described 71 percent of rural parents and 51 percent 34 See Delores E. Smith and Gail Mosby, “Jamaican Child-Rearing Practices: The Role of Corporal Punishment,” Adolescents 38, no. 150 (2003): 369–81. “In Jamaica,” Smith and Mosby state, “cultural beliefs have given rise to a parenting style that has been shown to negatively affect children’s psychosocial outcomes” (369). 35 Deborah A. Thomas, “Caribbean Studies, Archive Building, and the Problem of Violence,” Small Axe, no. 41 (July 2013): 36. 36 Deborah A. Thomas, Exceptional Violence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 89. 37 Paton, No Bond but the Law, 18–19. 38 “Jamaican Court Abolishes Flogging,” World Corporal Punishment Research, 18 December 1998, www.corpun.com /jmju9812.htm. Published by Duke University Press 11 Small Axe 12 | Disciplining the Unruly (National) Body in Staceyann Chin’s The Other Side of Paradise of urban parents in Jamaica as flogging their children, while only 3 percent gave their children spankings, characterized by the researchers as a milder form of punishment.39 The prevalence and preference of parents for flogging (with an object such as a whip) in contrast to hitting or spanking (with the hand) is suggestive of a possible connection to disciplinary practices during slavery. Delores E. Smith and Gail Mosby note that the “extreme authoritarian style” of Jamaican parenting possibly has its roots in the “brutality of slavery.”40 We can see all of these elements of authoritarianism and brutality when Staceyann is punished for lying at school. After being teased for her light skin and for being of mixed race, Staceyann tries to regain social ground by saying that her mother is coming back soon from Canada and that she might have North American things to give to the other children. In this early part of the memoir, Staceyann, her brother, and grandmother are staying with her aunt June and uncle Harold, who resent their presence. Complicating the situation further, June is a teacher at Staceyann’s school and reacts furiously to the lie: [Aunt June] sends me for Uncle Harold’s police belt. The strip of plastic is cool and hard against my palm. Without the detachable buckle, both ends of the belt are flat and smooth. My hand shakes when she takes the belt from me. Before she begins she grabs my arm and tells me that what she is going to do is only for my own good. I am so frightened I feel like I am going to wet my panties. I am not quite sure what she is going to do with the belt. She pulls me to her and says that only the Word of God can save me from a lying tongue. Then she raises the belt and warns me not to make a sound. Whack! “Lying lips are an abomination unto the Lord.” Whack! “Train up the child in the way he should grow.” Whack! “And when he is old he will not depart from it.” Whack! “Spare the rod and spoil the child!” (40) Whipping Staceyann with her uncle’s police belt symbolizes the connections between state authority and adult authority in the home. The right to police and discipline belongs to the adults in her family in both the public and private sphere through their roles as policeman and government schoolteacher. Throughout the memoir, physical punishments echo those from slavery and the colonial period, such as whippings and beatings with an object or being confined in a small space. Importantly, adults (as represented in the memoir) mostly do not discuss Staceyann’s transgressions with her or establish an emotional intimacy that would allow for a child to make mistakes and be gently corrected. When Staceyann commits a seemingly small wrong, such as lying about her mother, her relatives’ reactions seem completely out of proportion. As in many such instances in 39 M. G. Smith, Poverty in Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1989). 40 Smith and Mosby, “Jamaican Child-Rearing,” 373. Published by Duke University Press Small Axe 45 • November 2014 • Jocelyn Fenton Stitt | The Other Side, adults are unable or unwilling to see why a small child who has been abandoned by both parents might understandably act the way Staceyann does. Staceyann receives many beatings in the narrative. Her homelife gets worse when she is removed from Aunt June and Uncle Harold’s house, separated from her grandmother, and left with her great-aunt, Miss John. At Miss John’s house, as I described in the previous section, Staceyann is sexually assaulted by her older male cousins. Provoking more family violence, Staceyann revels in how a bathing suit given to her by a friend shows off her body. When Miss John catches sight of her in it, she becomes enraged and beats Staceyann for accepting the bathing suit and for looking like “a old Jezebel whore” (186). “‘Me tired fi tell you!’ Whack! ‘You is not a big woman!’ Whack! ‘You is a child!’ Whack!” Staceyann’s agency in displaying her body enrages her aunt, while the actions of her male cousins are ignored. Not satisfied with administering a beating, Miss John requires that Staceyann beg for mercy, threatening to tie her up with a rope under the house if she does not. Hearing herself scream and moan, Staceyann observes, “I am not aware that the sounds are coming out of me. I only start to make sense of them when I hear them circling above me” (188). This beating foregrounds one of the hallmarks of trauma—the dissociation of mind from body, where Staceyann doesn’t have control over what she is screaming. This is one of many moments in the narrative in which Staceyann is not merely being physically punished; she is being abused. Calling a child wearing a bathing suit a Jezebel or labeling lying at school as violation of God’s word, marshals a selective view of the Bible to reinforce existing power structures, in this case the extended family’s authority. As we know from Caribbean history, justifications, reinforced by biblical passages, for physical discipline and slavery itself were used by slave owners and European colonial powers to reinforce and maintain control. Orlando Patterson suggests that whipping was a means of psychological control that worked in conjunction with religion to control enslaved populations.41 Religion, as I am arguing, cannot be separated from ideologies of power in the Caribbean family and nation, but it is only one factor. The Other Side of Paradise documents that the contemporary deployment of religion as justification for control of certain populations, whether it is LGBT people or children, is not simply about religion—it is also about legacies from the colonial period. In reading the violence Staceyann experiences as having ties to the past of slavery, I am taking Deborah Thomas’s suggestion that the links between past and present violence in Jamaica do not have to be direct, and that they can be read through their shared performativity, the repetition and improvisation of “spectacular violence.” In the case of The Other Side of Paradise, my reading extends Thomas’s focus on the spectacle of bodily violence, to the circulation of oral and discursive memories of violence, as when Chin recreates this experience in her memoir. There is often a tension between individual and collective memories in the Caribbean, where history (whether personal or collective) can only be remembered if someone else has carried it forward from the past and told it to the next generation. This is complicated by slavery and colonialism’s hold on both the past and the present, so that even if memories seem “individual” or singular, as Mary Chamberlain writes, “African Caribbean memories are the echoes of collective trauma and 41 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 3, 66. Published by Duke University Press 13 Small Axe 14 | Disciplining the Unruly (National) Body in Staceyann Chin’s The Other Side of Paradise the persistence of shame which present themselves in compulsive and often compelling ways.”42 Chin’s depictions of abuse carry many such echoes of trauma from the past, as they (re)enact punishments such as whipping, scarring, and tying up a person in a confined space. In making this connection between contemporary child abuse in Jamaica and its people’s history as both the enslaved and as slave owners, it is important to remember that a large proportion of the enslaved were children. Historians of the Middle Passage agree that the average age of those taken from Africa was quite young—ranging from infants to young adults.43 The life expectancy of a slave in the West Indies was short, with the result that slaves were usually young people. When we are talking about slavery in the Caribbean context, we are often talking a society in which children and young adults were property and could be disposed of as their adult owners wished. “The History of Mary Prince,” the only known life narrative by an enslaved West Indian woman, testifies to the power of owners to embody the law as it concerned their slaves. After being sold away from her mother—a traumatic event that has an echo in Staceyann’s separation from her grandmother—Prince finds herself with new owners who are extremely brutal to her, and to the other children in the household: [The mistress] taught me (how can I ever forget it!) more things than these; she caused me to know the exact difference between the smart of the rope, the cart-whip, and the cow-skin, when applied to my naked body by her own cruel hand. And there was scarcely any punishment more dreadful than the blows received on my face and head from her hard heavy fist. She was a fearful woman, and a savage mistress to her slaves. There were two little slave boys in the house, on whom she vented her bad temper in a special manner. One of these children was a mulatto, called Cyrus, who had been bought while an infant in his mother’s arms; the other, Jack, was an African from the coast of Guinea, whom a sailor had given or sold to my master. Seldom a day passed without these boys receiving the most severe treatment, and often for no fault at all. Both my master and mistress seemed to think that they had a right to ill-use them at their pleasure; and very often accompanied their commands with blows, whether the children were behaving well or ill. I have seen their flesh ragged and raw with licks.—Lick—lick—they were never secure one moment from a blow, and their lives were passed in continual fear. My mistress was not contented with using the whip, but often pinched their cheeks and arms in the most cruel manner.44 “Lick—lick” connects with “Whack! Whack!” across the distance of two hundred years. In making a connection between the violence of Staceyann’s family and that of Prince’s owners, I am not implying that to be a child in contemporary Jamaica is to be a slave. Instead, I draw attention to 42 Mary Chamberlain, “Diasporic Memories: Community, Individuality, and Creativity: A Life Stories Perspective,” Oral History Review 36, no. 2 (2009): 180. 43 David Galenson’s empirical research on the demographics of the Royal African Company shows that on company-owned ships, “it was less costly to transport children than adult slaves, for children required less space and fewer provisions during the voyage.” While children made up about 15 percent of those transported to the Americas during the years 1673–1725, Galenson notes that by the end of that period, in 1725, one-third of all slaves carried to Jamaica by the Royal African Company were children. David W. Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 103, 93. 44 Mary Prince, “The History of Mary Prince, Related by Herself,” in Alan Richardson and Debbie Lee, eds., Early Black British Writing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 245. Published by Duke University Press Small Axe 45 • November 2014 • Jocelyn Fenton Stitt | the ways power over children exercised through violence is a defining characteristic of adulthood and authority in both of these narratives. In the same passage, Prince recounts her master’s abuse toward both his daughter and herself. This narrative strategy makes Mr. D’s actions part of a continuum of violent behavior toward young women. Violence toward a daughter and a slave are related actions: “My old master often got drunk, and then he would get in a fury with his daughter, and beat her till she was not fit to be seen.”45 In the next paragraph Prince relates an episode that has been widely commented on by contemporary critics, given that it is one of the few times the narrative gestures toward what we know now was the widespread sexual abuse of enslaved women.46 “He had an ugly fashion of stripping himself quite naked, and ordering me then to wash him in a tub of water. This was worse to me than all the licks. Sometimes when he called me to wash him I would not come, my eyes were so full of shame. He would then come to beat me. One time I had plates and knives in my hand, and I dropped both plates and knives, and some of the plates were broken. He struck me . . . severely for this.”47 Prince highlights here the psychological component of sexual abuse, asserting that Mr. D’s sadistic pleasure in forcing her to bathe him was “worse than all the licks,” although clearly the physical abuse she experienced was terrifying. One of Staceyann’s earliest memories of violence is also connected to washing dishes. Staceyann helps her grandmother wash the dishes at her aunt’s house. Her aunt June, very much like the masters and mistresses in Prince’s narrative, becomes enraged over a seemingly small thing: food left on one of the table knives. Aunt June’s reaction is completely out of proportion to this event and seems to correspond to a memory of a previous punishment, perhaps one given to her as a girl. “Again I try to pull away from her, but she tightens her grip and forces my arm out to expose the inside of my elbow. She then wipes the serrated edge back and forth across the soft skin there and slaps my arm with the handle, over and over.” The adult preying on the vulnerable flesh of a child echoes Prince’s memory of the slave boys being pinched on their arms. Staceyann, not knowing that this “punishment” requires a response from her, looks directly at her aunt and doesn’t cry or talk. This failure to play her part in the spectacle frustrates Aunt June, who stops what she is doing and just throws the knife at Staceyann, telling her, “You have the Devil himself inside you!” Aunt June’s actions don’t terrorize just Staceyann; her grandmother Bernice has seen the entire thing and stands “wiping away tears,” but because of their economic dependence she is powerless to stop the abuse (47). The powerlessness of enslaved parents to protect their children is a theme in slave narratives. Once, after running away, Prince is returned to her owners by her father, a free man: “When we got home, my poor father said to Capt. I——, ‘Sir, I am sorry that my child should be forced to run away from her owner; but the treatment she has received is enough to break her heart. The sight of 45 Ibid., 253. 46 See the chapter “Seduction and the Ruses of Power” for more on the silences about sexual trauma in slave women’s narratives. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 47 Prince, “History of Mary Prince,” 253. Published by Duke University Press 15 Small Axe 16 | Disciplining the Unruly (National) Body in Staceyann Chin’s The Other Side of Paradise her wounds has nearly broke mine.’”48 Notably, Staceyann and Prince each feel empathy that their family had to witness the violence done to them. For both Staceyann and Prince, the experience of violence is compounded by their positionality. The adults who love them are powerless to protect them. Their trauma is not recognized as such, since their abusers are thought to have the legal right to discipline them. What The Other Side of Paradise and “The History of Mary Prince” have in common is that they both depict a female subject who cannot make claims to protection and civil rights, because of youth (in Staceyann’s case) or enslavement (in Prince’s case). This legal status of being outside of claims of protection from the state (although the Child Care Protection Act is a step in the right direction) has a relationship to the marginal status of LGBT people in the Caribbean. Again, I am not making the claim that being an abused child is like being a slave is like being a lesbian in Jamaica. Rather, I want us to be attentive to the connections between these identities and their status as subjects outside of hegemonic citizenship. Conclusion: Been Caught Stealing When Mary Prince runs away from her owner, she enacts one of the most profound means of resistance to slavery: the “stealing” of a self considered to be the property of another. Saidya Hartman links running away with a primal act of rebellion: “Stealing away was synonymous with defiance because it necessarily involved seizing the master’s property and asserting the self in transgression of the law.”49 After the pivotal account where Staceyann is beaten for daring to assert a sexual identity by wearing a bathing suit, she muses, “I go close the chicken coops. It is night already and all the fowls are inside their cages. I shut each cage and wonder why the stupid chickens come back to their coops every night” (189). This is obviously a metaphor for Staceyann’s own entrapment in her great-aunt’s house, as well as within Jamaican society. Staceyann does leave; The Other Side of Paradise concludes with Staceyann’s difficult decision to choose the greater sexual freedoms available in New York. Jacqui Alexander reminds us, “[Under heteropatriarchy,] erotic autonomy signals danger to the heterosexual family and to the nation. And because loyalty to the nation as a citizen is perennially colonized within reproduction and heterosexuality, erotic autonomy brings with it the potential of undoing the nation entirely, a possible charge of irresponsible citizenship or no citizenship at all.”50 In this same essay, Alexander explains how the antiviolence campaign by the Caribbean Development Activists and Women’s Network (Caribbean DAWN) demanding an end to domestic violence resulted in reactionary laws that further marginalized women’s legal position and, in conjunction, criminalized lesbian and gay sexuality. We might understand, then, that for people occupying the subject position of child, slave, lesbian, or woman, asserting autonomy defies their social position. 48 Ibid., 248. 49 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 68. 50 Alexander, “Erotic Autonomy,” 64. Published by Duke University Press Small Axe 45 • November 2014 • Jocelyn Fenton Stitt | Is it possible that claiming autonomy, whether as a child, an ethnic minority, or an LGBT person, is seen as undermining control over the Jamaican national body in a similar way that running away undermined control over labor during slavery? These textual connections between the Caribbean past and present open up new ways to understand violent practices and homophobic beliefs as stemming not solely from religion but from juridical and social colonial legacies as well. Staceyann’s claiming of the self, in defiance of national definitions of the correct heterosexual citizen, work to defy exclusionary Jamaican national rhetorics. The Other Side of Paradise suggests that the violent disciplining of Staceyann during her quest to understand her Chinese heritage, her sexual desires, and her childhood demonstrates a larger interconnected system of power and control over the most vulnerable in Jamaican society, where not just anyone can claim her or his rights as a citizen. Acknowledgments I thank Rosamund S. King for her insightful reading of an early draft of this essay. Published by Duke University Press 17