Abstract
Marlon James’s John Crow’s Devil (2005) demonstrates the value of speculative fiction for exposing queerness in “normative” worlds and revealing altered states of consciousness in both characters and readers. The novel’s fluid sexual-subjects and magic realist imaginings reveal the world as already unorthodox, as a place in which the sexual body becomes a site of queer desire and a source for shifting conceptions of gender, sexuality, and normality. Mining the trope of madness, the novel’s magic realist genre, and Sarah Ahmed’s notion of “queer phenomenology,” Michael A. Bucknor’s chapter exposes the normativity/alterity binary as establishing the metaphysical limits of sexual expression. By locating queer sexuality in the church and making guilt a source of mental breakdown, James acknowledges the ethical stakes in any attempt to shift the horizons of sexual expression.
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Notes
- 1.
See Wendy Pearson’s assessment in “Science Fiction and Queer Theory,” in which she argues that “it is the ideational content of sf that is its primary characteristic. Sexuality is also an idea. In this sense, one might well expect to find an intrinsic compatibility between sf as a genre and the exploration of human sexuality” (149). Yet, even with “Garber and Lyn Paleo’s annotated bibliography on alternative sexualities in sf, fantasy and horror” and James Riemer’s “serious critical analysis of the treatment of homosexuality in science fiction,” “critical attention to the issue has been close to non-existent” in this genre (151).
- 2.
For further elaboration of the issue of violence and homophobia, see Cecil Gutzmore’s “Casting the First Stone! Policing of Homo/Sexuality in Jamaican Popular Culture.” Also, as Vásquez argues: “In Jamaica, a country generally understood as being virulently opposed to same-sex relationships, homosexuality has also often fallen under the problematic rubric of hypersexuality, enacting yet another level of violence against historically marginalized bodies” (48).
- 3.
My claim that queerness tends to be viewed against the background of normalcy in Knepper’s (excellent) article on Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber is based on the central position she assigns to the concept of the “alternative”: “Through science fiction, Hopkinson reconfigures known relations to peoples, histories, and places, offering alternative configurations of personal and collective identity in a virtualized Caribbean setting” (142, italics added). She continues: “This virtual Caribbean provides an alternative space through which to explore the legacies of empire and discover alternative New World approaches to gender and sexuality” (143, italics added). In my earliest exploration of James’s novel, the concept of the “alternative” was also at the heart of my own argument. The title of my paper at the 2007 West Indian Literature Conference was “Horizons of Desire: Imagining Alternative Worlds in Caribbean Speculative Fiction.”
- 4.
I am privileging the concept of “altered states of consciousness” over “alternative identities” in order to foreground epistemological shifts rather than “other” ontologies, which only reinforce some rigid notion of the norms, against which “alternative” subjectivities are defined. In my argument, a shift or altering of our consciousness will allow us to see the multi-various ways in which our subjectivities are expressed and, consequently, expose normative politics as strategies of disavowing the multiple in reality. Also, by using “altered” states of consciousness, I am also able to recover the metaphysical and meta-conceptual value of tropes of madness, not as abnormality or as an alternative to normality, but as an altering of states of consciousness that allow for a more expansive way of seeing. Instead of the binary that the alternative/normative paradigm invokes, the shift to the paradigm of phenomenology emphasizes multiple ways of conception that are not limited to that binary positioning of subjectivities.
- 5.
The idea that the fantastic elements must be real is not to deny that all fiction, even realistic representation, is fiction. However, it is an emphasis in her definition of magic realism in which the “magic” is not to be read as unreal in fictional representation.
- 6.
My use of “bodies matter” in this sentence is meant to invoke Judith Butler’s book Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.”
- 7.
Earlier key interventions that have questioned the exclusionary strategies of the normative and demanded space for queer desire include Dionne Brand’s lament over the absence of the sexual body from the First Caribbean Women Writers Conference held at Wellesley College in 1988; M. Jacqui Alexander’s 1994 examination of the ways in which legal texts in two Caribbean territories align respectability, black masculinity, and nationalism with “naturalized heterosexuality” (“Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen” 5); and Ian Smith’s exposure of the occlusion of sexuality in Caribbean postcolonial criticism at the 1996 West Indian Literature conference in Miami in his paper later published as “Critics in the Dark.”
- 8.
See, for example, O’Neil Lawrence’s master’s thesis that illustrates, in the early work of Archie Lindo, that there has been a queer engagement, contesting the idea that queerness is antithetical to Jamaicanness or a recent phenomenon imposed from outside the nation. In addition, as Conrad James and I have argued, the work of Ebony G. Patterson “provides further illustration of the hidden (or not so hidden) queerness in some of the most hyper-masculine spaces” such as dancehall (Bucknor and James, “‘Cock Mouth Kill Cock’” 5). See also Nadia Ellis’s essay, “‘Out and Bad’: Toward a Queer Performance Hermeneutic in Jamaican Dancehall.”
- 9.
This conceptualization reminds me of Carolyn Cooper’s notion of popular culture as deviant and improper. Her use of the term “vulgar” might fruitfully be read as a marker of what we now call queer; queer is aligned with strategies that call into question the notions of normalcy, rationality, and naturalness (See Noises in the Blood).
- 10.
This possibility is superbly demonstrated in Wendy Knepper’s article on Nalo Hopkinson’s work, as already mentioned.
- 11.
See, later on, other occurrences of blind violence and Sheri-Marie Harrison’s comments on communal madness.
- 12.
Clinton Hutton makes a similar point in his article “The Gyalification of Man,” in which he traces the “symbolic and physical violence” of contemporary dancehall music and gangster culture to the “disciplinary strategies seen in lynching scenes” from slavery (Bucknor and James 2–3).
- 13.
The queer Clarence, for example, is one of those who police sexual “deviance.”
- 14.
To view Lucinda’s mental health issues conceptually is not to deny the material significance of such issues or that these issues could be analysed psychoanalytically. To a large extent, they also register how guilt about her misdeeds haunts her.
- 15.
One should note that not all the church people accepted this new interpretive method. As a consequence, one of the congregants left the church saying, “him didn’t like them things the Apostle was saying. That did sound like some queer business. Some pervert business” (99).
- 16.
Ironically, Christ’s call to the disciples promised to “make them fishers of men.” See Matthew 4.19 in the King James Version of The Holy Bible with Jesus’s invitation to his disciples: “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (3). This is echoed in the syntax of Apostle’s York’s appeal to Clarence: “Follow me and I can lead you beyond pain, beyond sin, beyond miracles…. Beyond normal, beyond real … [;] No matter how many times you come inside a woman, you will never kill your heart’s desire” (157–58).
- 17.
Christina Sharpe defines “monstrous intimacy” as, among other things, the kind of intimacy that involves “violence and forced submission that are read or reinscribed as consent and affection” (4).
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Bucknor, M.A. (2018). Horizons of Desire in Caribbean Queer Speculative Fiction: Marlon James’s John Crow’s Devil. In: Ledent, B., O'Callaghan, E., Tunca, D. (eds) Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98180-2_8
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