Abstract
This essay explores sexual culture and its legacies around the American military base at Chaguaramas, Trinidad, a base that brought 25,000 US soldiers to a country of half a million people during World War Two. It illuminates the resources and constraints of literary memory of gender and sexuality in that period as represented in texts written in the last 25 years. Against the backdrop of calypsos like “Rum and Coca Cola” and “Jean and Dinah,” and De Boissière’s novel Rum and Coca-Cola, the essay focuses on texts by J.L.F. Waldron, Robert Antoni, David Chariandy, and Tony Hall. It explores how calypso, theater, and fiction (including realism, detective fiction, the carnivalesque, myths of female vampires, and anti-romance) shape and shift the terms of memory, reassessing previous narratives of gender, erotics, family, nation, and empire.
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Notes
- 1.
Neptune, Caliban, 8–9.
- 2.
High, Base Colonies, 107.
- 3.
High, Base Colonies, 190–191.
- 4.
Neptune, Caliban, 9, 162.
- 5.
High, Base Colonies, 183.
- 6.
Neptune, Caliban, 181–184.
- 7.
In a curious parallel to the struggle for Trinidadian control of Chaguaramas’s land, the calypso “Rum and Coca Cola” was the subject of an intellectual property case. It became a hit in 1945 for the American Andrew Sisters, but Invader and Belasco in 1948 won their court case charging copyright infringement and claiming royalties. On other calypso memories of the time, see Rohlehr, Calypso and Society. See also Regis, “Who Going to Guard These Guards?” in this volume.
- 8.
Interestingly, the Yankees may have gone, but in 1957, wartime cultural contact resulted in the formation of a US Navy Steelband. See Skip Poole, “A Not-So-Brief History of the United States Navy Steel Band,” When Steel Talks, 2011, http://www.panonthenet.com/exclusive/2011/navy-poole-4-12-2011.htm.
- 9.
Neptune’s Caliban provides a discerning account of the significance of Chaguaramas in the waning of one empire and the rise of another. His reading of the displacements of leftist and nationalist narratives on Chaguaramas enables a radical reorientation of scholarship. For longer histories of sexual labor by women in Trinidad and the wider Caribbean respectively, see Reddock, Women, Labour, and Politics; and Kempadoo, Sexing the Caribbean.
- 10.
The novel was first published in Australia in 1956. In this essay I discuss the revised version that was published by Alison and Busby in 1984, but the date when the revisions were made is unknown to me. A comparison of the two versions is rich material for another essay; it is beyond the scope of this one. However, it may be worth flagging quickly here that, although the two versions are broadly similar in style and outlook, in the 1984 edition the two women characters play a greater part and the conclusion is more somber.
- 11.
De Boissière, Rum, 246.
- 12.
De Boissière, Rum, 265.
- 13.
De Boissière, Rum, 331.
- 14.
De Boissière, Rum, 332.
- 15.
Francis, Fictions, 3–8.
- 16.
Francis, Fictions, 4–6. For an analysis of a range of texts, including tourist representations, that mask violence through idealized representations of the Caribbean, see Edmondson, Caribbean Romances. On the ambivalences of the romance form across the African diaspora, see Goyal, Romance. For a persuasive case about the role of romances in nation-building discourses, discourses that secured participation of both genders on unequal terms for the nation-state, see Sommer, Foundational Fictions.
- 17.
Francis, Fictions, 10.
- 18.
Francis, Fictions, 8, 11–12.
- 19.
For an account of the functions of detective fiction in postcolonial societies, see Pearson and Singer, Detective Fiction.
- 20.
Waldron, Gypsy, 129.
- 21.
Waldron, Gypsy, 5.
- 22.
For an account of a pornographic postcard being made of a local couple during the US occupation of the Dominican Republic, see Rosario, Song. For a reading of Rosario’s novel, see Francis, Fictions.
- 23.
Waldron, Gypsy, 220.
- 24.
Waldron, Gypsy, 285.
- 25.
Waldron, Gypsy, 131.
- 26.
Waldron, Gypsy, 137. The novel also sketches tensions of rank, temperament, behavior, and motivation within the US military, not least in relation to Ivy and Bethany.
- 27.
Waldron, Gypsy, 15.
- 28.
Waldron, Gypsy, 26.
- 29.
Waldron, Gypsy, 130 (see also 117–118).
- 30.
Waldron, Gypsy, 319.
- 31.
Elements of Antoni’s collection resonate with the historical case of Beatrice Springer, who was put on trial for “immorally” using her beach house for US men to meet with local women. Neptune, Caliban, 158. Elderly women who run boarding houses, nightclubs, or brothels for servicemen are recurrent figures in literature set in that period. However, it is unlikely that such women were the norm. Perhaps the most notorious brothel-owner of the time was Boysie Singh, whose vice empire during this period also spanned drugs, piracy, and multiple murders. Feared as an outlaw and eventually hanged for the murder of his niece, he has not been subjected to the excoriating attacks in popular culture that targeted the prostitutes from whom he profited.
- 32.
Antoni, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, 184–190.
- 33.
Antoni, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, 3.
- 34.
Antoni, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, 8.
- 35.
David Rudder’s calypso “Bigger Pimpin’” (2001) critiques the ostentatious display of money by African-American hip-hop artist Jay-Z and some Trinidadians’ enticement by it during Jay-Z’s 2000 performance in Trinidad. Rudder explicitly compares the encounter to the Rum and Coca Cola period. For a reading of the calypso, see Neptune, “Manly Rivalries,” 90–92.
- 36.
Antoni, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, 109.
- 37.
See Alexander, “Erotic Autonomy.”
- 38.
Antoni, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, 108–109.
- 39.
Antoni, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, 111.
- 40.
A white Oklahoman soldier, often subjected to ridicule, appears in all the fiction I discuss in this chapter, highlighting regional inequalities within the US.
- 41.
Antoni, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, 201.
- 42.
Antoni, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, 201.
- 43.
Antoni, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, 154.
- 44.
For María Rosa’s claim that the servicemen are like family, see Antoni, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, 167, 179, 199; for the phrase “tot-tots,” see, for example, Antoni, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, 146.
- 45.
Antoni, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, 85–88, 187–188.
- 46.
Antoni, My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales, 34.
- 47.
Chariandy, Soucouyant, 32.
- 48.
Chariandy, Soucouyant, 194–195.
- 49.
Given the novel’s focus on the elusive, carnivalesque expressive abundance would not serve its purpose. Carnival may also not have been as present a cultural inheritance for Chariandy’s narrator, since his father was an Indo-Caribbean man from rural Trinidad.
- 50.
For a related story from Haiti, which tells of soucouyants being sent to a women’s prison, one that was built by the Americans during their occupation of Haiti, see Danticat, “Nineteen Thirty-Seven.” Danticat’s feminist retelling of the soucouyant myth notes that the soucouyants’s imprisonment is punishment for remembering and that a cross-generational community of women emerges as a result of that memory. For the most comprehensive single account of the soucouyant myth and feminist literary retellings of it, including a discussion of Chariandy’s novel, see Anatol, Things That Fly.
- 51.
Popular Memory Group, “Popular Memory,” 230.
- 52.
Chariandy, Soucouyant, 185.
- 53.
Chariandy, Soucouyant, 192.
- 54.
Chariandy, Soucouyant, 183.
- 55.
Chariandy, Soucouyant, 109.
- 56.
Chariandy, Soucouyant, 186.
- 57.
Chariandy, Soucouyant, 186.
- 58.
Chariandy, Soucouyant, 184.
- 59.
High, Base Colonies, 197; Chariandy, Soucouyant, 177–179.
- 60.
Chariandy, Soucouyant, 66.
- 61.
Chariandy, Soucouyant, 23 (see also 135).
- 62.
Dobson and Chariandy, “Spirits,” 811.
- 63.
Chariandy, Soucouyant, 24.
- 64.
Chariandy, Soucouyant, 94.
- 65.
Chariandy, Soucouyant, 144, 196.
- 66.
Hall, Jean and Dinah, 43.
- 67.
Hall, Jean and Dinah, 36. It is not clear in regard to same-sex relations whether Jean and Dinah share the beliefs of a broadly homophobic dominant imaginary or whether they are registering criticism of a commercial gay-sex economy or both.
- 68.
Hall, Jean and Dinah, 55.
- 69.
Ganase, “Introduction.”
- 70.
Hall, “Jouvay Popular Theatre Process,” 166.
- 71.
Franka Philip, “Jean and Dinah Play Seeks Big Screen Money,” Trinidad and Tobago Guardian Online, November 17, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.tt/entertainment/2012-11-16/jean-and-dinah-play-seeks-big-screen-money.
- 72.
High, Base Colonies, 197.
- 73.
I owe this phrase to Jalaludin Khan.
- 74.
Status of Forces Treaty with Trinidad and Tobago, May 22, 2013, US Department of State, http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/212099.pdf.
- 75.
“Trinidad and Tobago,” World Sex Guide, http://www.worldsexguide.com/guide/Caribbean/Trinidad_and_Tobago/; “Trinidad and Tobago,” WikiSexGuide, http://www.wikisexguide.com/wiki/Trinidad_and_Tobago For the interlocking of dependent capitalism, militarization, and tourism, see Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases. For a pan-Caribbean study of sex work and tourism, see Kempadoo, Sun, Sex, and Gold.
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Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to Nancy Glazener, Jalaludin Khan, Harvey Neptune, Imani Owens, and Lara Putnam for many generative conversations and careful readings. Thanks to the students in my graduate seminar on Interdisciplinary Methods in the Humanities, with whom I talked through many of the ideas in this essay, and thanks to J. D. Wright and John Kennedy for research assistance.
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Puri, S. (2017). Base Impulses: Sex Work and the Military in Trinidadian Literature on World War Two. In: Puri, S., Putnam, L. (eds) Caribbean Military Encounters. New Caribbean Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58014-6_6
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